Bad Boy From Rosebud (17 page)

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Authors: Gary M. Lavergne

Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #General, #Law, #True Crime, #Murder, #test

BOOK: Bad Boy From Rosebud
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Page 59
about a case a day. According to Hank, he did this while employed as a truck driver. He quit truck driving "cause it was dangerous" and returned to construction. Hank was also a petty thief. He had prior arrests and convictions for larceny and evading arrest.
12
Another of Lonnie's employees was a man named Larry. At the age of eighteen, he had been arrested on a charge of murder with malice, but the count was later reduced to aggravated assault. He received a sentence of two years in the Bell County Jail. He worked for Lonnie for four or five years until he quit over conflicts with him.
13
Lonnie never had the reputation Kenneth had in criminal circles; some law enforcement officers say it was because he had a better criminal mind. No record exists of his ever engaging in a violent crime, but investigators did suspect him of gun running and drug trafficking. However, his criminal activity caught up to him on November 22, 1985, when he was arrested and charged with theft of more than $750 (a felony) and released on a $2,500 bond two days later. The next month, on December 14, he was charged with possession of methamphetamines and released on a $10,000 bond on December 16. Legally or illegally, Lonnie had access to big money. Posting bonds did not seem to be problematic, and when he was arrested on December 14, he had $975 in cash on his person.
14
At about 8:30
P.M.
, on January 5, 1986, Lonnie and a girlfriend named Michelle arrived at the home of Larry's estranged wife, Doris. The home, a duplex in a poor section of Rogers, Texas, was owned by the Belton Housing Authority. It was a small, three bedroom, one bath, single-family dwelling inhabited by Doris and four children. Lonnie immediately poured everyone a drink from a bottle of Jack Daniels whiskey he brought along. Michelle sat on a sofa in the living room and polished the fingernails of one of the little girls in the apartment. As Doris washed dishes in the kitchen sink, Lonnie walked up to her and made an inappropriate pass. According to statements, Michelle got angry and slammed the kitchen door as she left the house. Lonnie followed her out to his truck and they argued over whether he would immediately take her back to Temple.
About that time, Doris's cousin Tim arrived and agreed to bring Michelle back to Temple in Lonnie's truck. According to Doris's statement, as she was asking Tim to take Michelle back to Temple, she was really shaking her head to indicate that she did not want to be left alone
 
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with Lonnie. But Lonnie handed him the keys and Tim left with Michelle in Lonnie's truck. This left Lonnie and Doris alone in the home (along with the children).
15
Shortly after Tim and Michelle left the duplex, Doris went into the back bedroom to change the diaper of one of the children. When Larry arrived at 10:15
P.M.
, he took a Ruger 6 shot .22 magnum revolver out of his truck and placed it in his waistband. In his statement, Larry indicated that he did not know Lonnie was there and that it was routine for him to carry the gun into the house and place it on top of the refrigerator. When Lonnie answered the door Larry became enraged.
Immediately, Larry and Lonnie argued. Larry went down the hallway to his wife and shouted directly, "Are you fucking him?" She insisted that nothing happened. The enraged husband then returned to the kitchen and argued with Lonnie again. Doris remembered hearing Lonnie say, "No! No!" before hearing shots. Larry's statement read:
I went back down the hall and he said something smart to me again and I told him I didn't want to hear any of his bullshit. I walked to get a drink of water and he got off of the couch and came in the kitchen after me like he was going to whoop my ass. I don't remember what I said but I told him something when I pulled out the pistol I had and shot him. He was standing near the kitchen table and I shot him in the head. He grabbed his head and stumbled back and I shot him again, which I think also hit him in the head. He fell on the floor across the hallway.
16
Immediately, Larry's wife put her baby down and entered the hallway in time to see the other children hop over Lonnie's body, running towards her in a panic. Larry followed with the gun in his hand. She screamed and cried, "See, I knew it was going to happen." Larry told her he loved her and was tired of Lonnie making passes at her. Then he told her he was going to call the law.
17
The duplex had no phone so Larry had to drive to the Rogers Inn to call the police. An employee witnessed the call and remembers Larry saying: "My name is [Larry] and I have just shot a man in my wife's apartment. Send an ambulance. I know he's dead. I will be waiting in the
 
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road when you get here." The Bell County dispatcher who received the call also recalled that Larry identified Lonnie and advised them that they should know Lonnie, as he had been in jail there recently. Larry assured the dispatcher that he had "no where to go" and would be waiting for the deputies to arrive.
18
The first to arrive at the scene was patrolman Mike Brackman. Larry met him outside the duplex and said, "Mike, I shot a man." Without being instructed to do so, Larry turned around and placed his hands on a wall to be frisked. Brackman then handcuffed Larry and they re-entered the house.
Shortly afterwards, Bill Miller of the Bell County Sheriff's Office arrived. By 11:15
P.M.
, Texas Ranger John Aycock had been contacted as well. They found Lonnie lying on his back in a narrow hallway leading to the small bedrooms of the home. Nearby, on top of a television set that was still playing, right where Larry had put it, was the gun he had used to kill Lonnie. Lonnie's head lay in a large pool of blood, and some of his teeth were on the floor next to his body.
19
Four Smurf glasses filled with coke and Jack Daniels whiskey sat on the kitchen table as the officers processed the crime scene and arranged for Larry to be taken to the Rogers Police Department. Doris removed the children from the home through a window, placed them in a patrol car, and went to the Rogers Police Department as well. When Officer W. J. Bryan advised Larry of his rights, Larry responded, "I killed the man; what else do you want?" He added to Mike Brackman that he had done something he would probably always regret, "but that man was a sorry son-of-a-bitch, and deserved it." Larry was placed in the Bell County Jail under a bond of $15,000. He posted it and was released less than twenty-four hours after he had killed Lonnie.
20
On the floor of a low-income project, in a pool of blood, lay the only person Kenneth Allen McDuff might have ever cared about. After finishing their work at the crime scene, the officers wrapped Lonnie in a bed sheet and placed him in a garbage bag.
21
The autopsy revealed that the first shot entered Lonnie's head through his upper lip. The .22 round exploded in his mouth, destroying his upper teeth on the left side. The second shot entered his left temple and moved through his brain in a left-to-right direction. Lonnie had died almost instantly.
22
 
Page 62
Image not available.
Lonnie McDuff. Many considered Lonnie to be the only person
his brother Kenneth might have ever cared about.
Courtesy Temple Police Department.
IV
In October 1976, not long after Kenneth became eligible for parole, Addie retained an attorney from Dallas named Gary Jackson. Jackson and his wife Gloria, also an attorney, steadfastly believed in Kenneth's innocence. In an interview with federal agents, the couple insisted that there was no way Kenneth could have committed the crimes for which he had been accused and convicted. According to a confidential report, the Jacksons believed in a rather large conspiracy between the judiciary and several
 
Page 63
law enforcement agencies to wrongly convict Kenneth of murder. Gary Jackson appears to be among very few people who believed Kenneth's testimony during the Broomstick Murders trial. Jackson maintained that Kenneth lent his car to Roy Dale to commit robbery and murder while he slept in a burnt out shopping center in Everman, just as Kenneth had testified.
23
To bolster the argument of Kenneth's innocence, Jackson commissioned the firm of Leavelle-Hilliard and Johnston, a polygraph service, to administer him a polygraph. During the session on September 6, 1977, Kenneth showed no deception on any of the questions asked of him.
24
While polygraph results are not admissible in a court of law, they are, nonetheless, used often in investigations as a tool to filter out questionable sources of information. Jackson apparently accepted the results as definitive. One week later, he successfully filed a motion to dismiss pending charges against Kenneth for the rape and murder of Louise Sullivan. The granting of the motion, however, was based on the denial of a speedy trial and not on the arguments connected to the polygraph results. Still, the victory must have bolstered the hopes the Jacksons and the McDuffs had for getting Kenneth out of prison.
So convinced were the lawyers of Kenneth's innocence, that, as Gary Cartwright in
Texas Monthly
chronicled, they started a long and expensive campaign to expose the ''true" Broomstick MurdererRoy Dale Green. In his motion to dismiss, Jackson correctly argued that Roy Dale was the only person who had ever admitted to being present when the murders took place.
25
Gary Jackson's allegiance to Kenneth McDuff went beyond a traditional attorney-client relationship into a business venture. Kenneth was marketed as a victim, unjustly convicted of murder, and wrongly sentenced to death and sent to prison. Talk of a book and movie deal led in 1989 to the incorporation of a business called "Justice for McDuff, Inc."
26
But the first priority was to get Kenneth out.
V
On January 7, 1988, board members Ken Casner and Chris Mealy voted in favor of Kenneth's parole. He appeared to be headed for freedom until additional information was presented to the board, reportedly including
 
Page 64
letters of protest from a host of local officials from Falls County. The approval was almost immediately rescinded. Only four months later, the board reviewed the case again. Ken Casner voted again for approval, but his was the only affirmative vote. In July and September 1988, Kenneth's case received separate administrative reviews. So in one year1988four actions on a petition for the parole of Kenneth McDuff were taken.
27
Political pressure from Judge Justice's rulings began to build and a crisis came to fruition. In 1988, 28,090 of 49,126 requests (fifty-seven percent) for paroles were approved; in 1989, 34,536 of 61,221 requests (fifty-six percent) were approved; in 1990, 56,442 of 71,074 requests (seventy-nine percent) were approved.
28
During the late eighties and early nineties almost everyone was being released after only an initial review. Through good time credits, an inmate could serve less than six percent of his sentence. A prisoner who behaved himself could conceivably get credit for serving a full year in just twenty-two days. It was not uncommon to see petitioners with twenty-year sentences being released after serving only fourteen months.
29
Addie McDuff added to efforts to secure Kenneth's release by contacting the office of an attorney named Bill Habern, who at the time employed a parole consultant named Helen Copitka. Copitka was a former member of the parole board and had voted on McDuff's parole requests on at least four occasions during the late 1970s and early 1980s. On at least one of those occasions, she voted for his release. In 1992, when McDuff's successful efforts to secure parole came under an intense review, Habern released a statement: "We did an initial evaluation. And we gave them [McDuff's family] the report and that was the termination of the relationship." But during an exhaustive series of investigative reports by television station WFAA-TV in Dallas, a gifted journalist named Robert Riggs reported that Helen Copitka had gone beyond providing a report to the McDuff family. She contacted and made attempts to influence the board. Citing phone messages in McDuff's confidential file, Riggs reported that Copitka talked to at least two parole board members. A phone log written by Cora Mosely, who voted on McDuff's release later the same year, stated: "Ms. Copitka pointed out some of the improprieties which occurred during the trial concerning the trial officials. She also referred to the continued instability of the inmate's co-defendant [Roy Dale Green] who was the prosecution's key witness."
30

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