Bad Boy From Rosebud (25 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 83
cially when "all you can see are their eyes and teeth."
7
According to a statement by an acquaintance of both Chester and McDuff, Chester claimed to be McDuff's "main man." Like McDuff he spent time talking about ripping off dope dealers, although like his mentor, he probably spent far more time talking about it than doing it. Chester could be particularly irritating to other members of the subculture because he "bummed" cigarettes from everyone. Often, Chester, McDuff, and any one of a number of prostitutes, like Little Run or someone else from the Cut, could be seen riding in a red pickup truck with McDuff. After returning from an over-indulgence of sex and drugs, Chester would be driving.
8
McDuff soon discovered that Chester was not very trustworthy. In February of 1992, at the Bar X Hotel on South Loop, McDuff was in the company of Michael and a prostitute named Bonnie. McDuff gave Michael his car keys and $70 and told him to go out and get three rocks (crack cocaine). He warned Michael that "he had better come back." When Michael got to the dope house, Chester emerged and said that McDuff was looking for him. Michael replied that that could not be true as he had just left McDuff at the Bar X Hotel. While in the dope house, Michael left McDuff's car unattended and running. Chester hopped into the car and drove away. After that, Michael hid in dope houses and never saw McDuff again.
9
On February 12, 1992, McDuff reported the theft of his car to the Waco Police Department. It did not take the detective long to determine that drugs and prostitution were involved. The Texas State Technical Institute (TSTI) Police recovered the car, but not before what must have seemed like a bizarre demonstration. Late that night, Chester showed up at McDuff's, and according to a Waco Police Department report, McDuff immediately became suspicious of Chester's attempts to get him out of the apartment. Chester suggested that McDuff's car had been impounded and that they should go and get it right away. McDuff reportedly told Chester that he had no money and would have to get the car in a few days. Chester then admitted that McDuff's car was in the parking lot. McDuff looked outside and saw his car; he also saw Chester run back to the car and begin driving around the parking lot. McDuff, on foot, chased Chester and his car in the parking lot as Chester drove in circles, refusing to return McDuff's car. A short time later the TSTI police arrived and told Chester to get out and put his hands up. Chester got out of the car,
 
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put up his hands, and ran away. The campus police never caught up to him.
10
When McDuff said that he was in a hurry, and that all he wanted was his car back, the officers of the Waco Police Department concluded that he had engaged in soliciting prostitution, had lent his car to someone he did not know, and attempted to use the Waco Police Department to find it. WPD concluded: "Therefore, this case is unfounded."
11
McDuff often bragged to his associates on the Cut that he could easily outsmart the Waco cops. But then, McDuff felt superior to all of the people of the Cut as well. "I was operating at a level higher than them, but these people are so loaded that they'll kill your ass," McDuff said. ATF Agent Charles Meyer agrees with the second half of that quote: "The Cut is kind of like the hyenas you see on the Discovery Channel; once they get something they turn on each other."
12
Chester introduced McDuff to a woman named Linda. Shortly before the incident with McDuff's car, Chester and McDuff showed up at Linda's house. She remembers that they met on January 6, 1992, because on that day she got into an argument with her husband about whether she was having an affair with the mailman. During the argument, her husband ended up being arrested by the Bellmead Police for an outstanding warrant. Chester and Kenneth were interested in meeting Linda's husband. "I told them [my husband] was in jail and I could sure use a beer."
"We can fix that," said Chester, as McDuff removed a twelve-pack from the trunk of the car. Linda was uncomfortable around Chester. She knew that he spoke to McDuff about raping her. "He would always look at me like he was un-dressing me with his eyes," she said in a statement to the Austin Police Department. On the day she met McDuff, she alleges that Chester intentionally moved curtains in her trailer in order to see her undressed.
13
Linda remembers that McDuff was constantly interested in getting a gun. But he did not want to get it himself. He wanted someone else to get it for him.
14
Since he had no problem securing illicit drugs, knew all sorts of ex-cons and felons, and had money, he could have gotten one easily if he had spent as much energy getting a gun as talking about it. In any case, some of his acquaintances saw that he carried a gun while continuing to talk about getting one to rob drug dealers.
Soon, even the inhabitants of the subculture began to tire of his lies.
 
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He claimed to have been sent to prison for having beat a man to death with a baseball bat. He bragged that he was the "big guy" in the pen and "ran" things wherever he was. Some, every bit as tough as he was, had no use for him and did not want him around. McDuff was careful around some of the street people. "They'd kill me for the money I have in my wallet," he asserted. When Linda took McDuff to a biker bar called Runts, the owner made it clear to her that he did not want to see Kenneth around his club. They never returned. McDuff was so volatile, especially after smoking crack, that no one ever stayed with him for very long. Every time he drank he got "louder and louder and had a goofy laugh." Yet some did continue to run around with him when he had money. Such was life in the subculture.
15
"At first he was just full of shit. The more I got to know him, he was just scary," said someone who knew McDuff. But while he spoke often about getting guns, he was not a lover of firearms. Moreover, while he very often hired prostitutes, no one who knew him ever stated that he had an interest in pornography, and sexually explicit materials have never been inventoried among his possessions.
16
McDuff never tired of talking about getting guns and robbing drug dealers. His friend Linda claimed that they did "rip off" a crack dealer from Waco after an unsuccessful attempt to locate another pusher in Fort Worth. McDuff drove up to crack dealers and handed them rolled up one-dollar bills. He would slap the pusher's hand so that the crack spilled into the car, then drive off quickly. He also suggested to Linda that she could pose as a prostitute to lure johns for him to rob. At that idea, she told McDuff to "go to hell."
17
Once, while riding with McDuff, Linda asked for a cigarette and McDuff told her that she could find some in his glove compartment. She opened it and noticed the driver's license of a white female with blonde, curly hair. When she asked him who that was he answered, "Just a dope whore and a good fuck." At the time, she thought nothing of the remark.
18
McDuff did not limit his talk of robbery and murder to dope dealers and johns. He spoke of robbing legitimate businesses and his thievery included shoplifting in grocery stores. He stole food, even perishables like meat, by placing them in his boots and walking out. After he and Linda visited her husband's grandparents in Bellmead, the elderly couple made clear to her that they "did not like his looks" and that he was "bad
 
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news." They were right; that day McDuff suggested to Linda that they could rob and murder the grandparents because they had money and guns. Linda replied that "it wasn't no fucking way he was going to do that."
19
To characterize his sexual behavior as bizarre is a gross understatement. He took a childish pride in his private parts: "Have you ever seen a set of balls like this on anybody," he would say as he grabbed his crotch. He "dated" a number of prostitutes on the Cut. Their dates often included highs from crack cocaine. He seldom got violent with prostitutes who got assertive with him or showed no fear of his grandiose lies. For example, he never assaulted Black Jennifer, who stated, "I was not afraid of him and I told him so." His own descriptions of his sexual behavior before going to prison, and of course, what he did to Louise Sullivan, powerfully evidences that he had always been perverse. Twenty-three years of prison could only have pushed his urges further into an already depraved state. His sex was beneath the animalistic; mammals do not intend to inflict pain during procreation. It excluded any trace of emotion. None of the statements of the women who admitted to having sex with him includes the slightest hint of tenderness, much less love. "Duckie," a prostitute from the Cut, told others of a date she had with McDuff in which he forced her to have every conceivable type of sex with him for three hours. (He called it "going around the world.'') When offered a chance to file sexual assault charges against McDuff, she declinedshe was a prostitute. While McDuff lived in a dorm, other residents remembered a steady stream of prostitutes in and out of his room.
20
In July of 1992, Linda gave a description of Kenneth McDuff's dysfunctional sex life in a statement to the Austin Police Department. The disturbing statement gives keen insights into the behavioral elements of a sexual predator. She indicated that McDuff never got completely naked for sex and often kept his boots on during the sex act. There was very little touching. He enjoyed her pain, and assured her that "it won't hurt very long and it will feel better in a little bit." He knew nothing or cared less about what his partner might enjoy. She suspected that he often faked orgasms, and that maybe he could not have one unless he was having anal sex.
21
Oddly, the worst thing a partner could do while having sex with McDuff was to appear to enjoy it; he did not want that. Linda's vivid
 
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descriptions of Kenneth McDuff supported a consistent theory among all law enforcement officers involved in the Kenneth McDuff murder cases: He was a predator first. He did not enjoy sex; it was an occasion to inflict pain, and that was what he enjoyed.
Eventually, Linda returned to her husband. Reports were that they were long-haul truck drivers. But before going back to her marriage, she did experience McDuff's violence, and is lucky to be alive. After making a court appearance with McDuff, she and a friend named Jimmy were riding in McDuff's car with him. Jimmy was a thug with a long list of prior arrests for violent crimes and felony convictions. He was considered one of the most dangerous ex-cons in all of Bell County. Jimmy sat in the back seat on the passenger side. The threesome drove to Waco and approached a crack dealer. As the man placed three rocks into Linda's hand McDuff sped away, hitting a curb, causing beer to spill all over himself. When he asked Linda to hold on to the beer, she said it was his beer spilling all over. McDuff went into a rage over being "disrespected and dishonored." While still driving the car McDuff began slapping and beating her by slamming her head into the passenger-side window. "What the fuck you did that for?" she asked.
"Don't ever disrespect me in front of my friends again," he screamed. His anger and ferocity terrified her. In her statement, Linda indicated that she tried to get out of the car, but from the back seat, almost as if it had been choreographed, Jimmy reached over and locked the door to keep her trapped. Almost as quickly, and most uncharacteristically, McDuff apologized. A few minutes later Jimmy assured Linda that McDuff was sincere. He said that he had never seen McDuff treat a woman that way. "He must love you," Jimmy said.
22
The occasion of the end of the relationship between Linda and McDuff came while smoking crack at the home of someone named Jewel. Another of the drug abusers was a prostitute named Natalie. When McDuff admitted that he had "fucked" Natalie, Linda came to a decision: "I knew [Natalie] to be a
whore of bad reputation
so I cut McDuff off from having sex with me. When I told him it seemed like he didn't care."
23
[Emphasis added.]
Indeed, Kenneth McDuff did not care, because he did not like womenor sex.
 
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II
The Austin Police Department case file on Kenneth McDuff contains a white paper entitled
Investigations of Sexually Sadistic Offenses
by Robert R. Hazelwood, Park E. Dietz, and Janet Warren. Without meaning to, the paper magnificently illustrates a quandary over a basic question now facing criminal justice: Does evil exist? In the first paragraph, the authors assert that "Human cruelty reveals itself in many kinds of offenses, but rarely more starkly than in the crimes of sexual sadists."
24
In their paper, the authors define sexual sadism as "a condition in which an individual is sexually excited by the suffering of others." A distinction is drawn between normal discomforts commonly felt by a sexual partner, and a consistent and enduring pattern of sexual response to the suffering of others. The paper tends to discount free will. "Antisocial personality disorder is the current name for what in the past has been known as sociopathy, psychopathy, moral insanity,
or in pre-psychiatric days, evil
."
25
[Emphasis added.] The suggestion, however subtle, that evil may not exist, can only lead to the transformation of criminals into patients, and crimes into disorders. Conversely, to what extent are we, as humans, thinking individuals with a free will to do good or evil?
Kenneth McDuff provides a case in point and far more questions than answers. Was what he did to Louise Sullivan an evil act, or was it the result of a sexually sadistic, anti-social personality disorder? The American system of criminal justice has never really defined the difference in a clear and consistent manner. Furthermore, if Kenneth McDuff suffers from such a disorder, should the diagnosis be an absolute: Is he
completely
controlled by his urges, or does he have some measure of control over himself, rendering him at least partially responsible for what he did? If Kenneth McDuff suffers from a psychiatric malady, where did this condition come from? His upbringing? His genetic makeup? If it is genetic, what should be done with people carrying those genes? As F. Lee Bailey asks: "What should be done about such creatures?"
There is no reasonable doubt that Kenneth Allen McDuff was a sexual predator. He prowled as long as he did because he lived in a subculture where the normative behavior made him only slightly deviant. As an ATF agent asserted, the people of the Cut, and the subculture in general, lived in a world where survival methods consisted of dope and prostitution. Each member was a depraved rugged individualist in an extraordinarily

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