Read Bad Boy From Rosebud Online

Authors: Gary M. Lavergne

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

Bad Boy From Rosebud (72 page)

BOOK: Bad Boy From Rosebud
5.98Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
 
Page 266
For weeks Parnell had confronted "slugs" from the subculture in attempts to find McDuff. In doing so, he exuded strength and displayed his usual face of stone. But on the way home to Waco, at about 3:30 in the morning, driving his truck became more and more difficult as thoughts of what happened to Colleen Reed overwhelmed him. He drove faster. The "spiritual descendant of an unforgiving school of lawmen" could not help but fear for the women at home he worshipped more than life itself. And the man of stone began to weep.
There are some things you just don't do to a woman.
II
After the field trip Hank gave another statement, which began at 3:55
A.M.
, to add to and clarify points in his previous statements. At 7:00
A.M.
, Hank signed a "consent to search" form for the officers to look through his Bloom's Motel room. Hank gave Chuck the pocket knife he had in his possession the night Colleen was abducted, but no other items were taken from the room.
7
Don and J. W. raced back to Austin to secure a warrant for Hank Worley's arrest. They met with Sonya Urubek and Travis County Assistant D.A. Marianne Powers to draft a probable cause affidavit. Another Assistant D.A., Buddy Meyer, signed a state's motion to seal the affidavit. Powers and Don Martin then brought the sealed affidavit to Judge Wil Flowers, who signed the order and sealed the papers. Don returned to APD and faxed the arrest warrant to Tim, who served them personally on Hank at 4:33
P.M.
8
Hank's confession set off a flurry of attempts to locate Colleen. The search centered on the abandoned road near J. A. and Addie McDuff's house. On April 21, the Bell County Sheriff's Department conducted a search of the area. Later, the Austin Police Department organized another massive sweep. Mounted policemen rode through vast tracts of farmland. APD even used a class of police academy cadets to help in the search. Helicopters with special infrared detection devices scanned the area, hoping to detect decomposition gases. Colleen was not there, and Hank Worley did not know where she was.
9
After the search near the murder site ended, Hank was asked if he had any ideas where McDuff might have buried Colleen. He answered
 
Page 267
that he would not be surprised if McDuff put her near the S&S Mobile Home Park so as to implicate him in the murder. Immediately afterwards, a massive search took place there.
10
On April 22, Tim, Chuck, J. W. and another APD officer named Mark Thompson took Worley on another "field trip." Using a camera mounted on a tripod, and pointing out through the front windshield, the men videotaped the route McDuff took the night he took Colleen. The long drive was an occasion for Tim, Chuck and J. W. to question Hank under relaxed conditions. In many ways Hank became even more of a mystery. (It was also an occasion to poke fun at Tim, who kept falling asleep during the trip. He had not had any sleep for nearly three days.)
During the trip, and on several more occasions over the next two years, officials dealing with Hank Worley were baffled. Alternately, Hank could be perceived as repentant or opportunistic, a victim or a predator, truthful or lying. But that he lacked social graces and functioned on a different moral plane was never in doubt. He never understood how ridiculous some of his statements sounded to officers, statements including:
"I was as nice to that girl as I could be."
"I don't consider what I did as sex with her."
"I don't believe in seeing anybody get hurt. I just can't handle that."
"The girl didn'tshe didn't cry too much."
Such statements seemed normal to Alva Hank Worley. More than a year later, during the days just before the beginning of his trial, Travis County District Attorney Investigator Alan Sanderson, who had gotten to know Hank pretty well, asked him how he managed to get himself into so much trouble. "It was a real bad night," Hank said. And he was serious.
11
During the field trip of April 22, while at the murder site, Hank calmly said that when McDuff struck Colleen, it sounded like a tree limb breaking. J. W. casually asked Hank if he helped put Colleen in the trunk of McDuff's car. Enraged, Hank walked towards J. W. shouting "I ain't never touched no dead body!"
"Don't go ballistic on me, Hank. I was just asking a question," J. W. said. He had just talked about how Colleen's death sounded like a tree limb breaking, and given the graphic, horrid statements he made during the previous day, why would he care if others thought he had touched a dead body? That question puzzles Tim Steglich to this day.
12
 
Page 268
During the same field trip, Chuck, Tim and J. W. let Hank smoke, got him drinks and fed him a hamburger. J. W. watched him eat that hamburger in seconds. He covered the burger with both hands. He exhaled as he took the first bite, so that it sounded like he was forcing the air out of the burger itself. He did it two more times and the burger was gone. J. W.'s wife remembers a phone call she got from J. W. that day. She recalls him saying, "God, you should see him eat. It's gross. He eats like a pig."
But Hank's eating habits were not the most memorable event of the day for J. W. They had stopped at a Salado convenience store to get soft drinks. While seated in the mini-van, Hank looked towards J. W.
"You know, I been cooperating."
"Yes, Hank, you have," replied J. W.
"I been giving ya'll some good information, huh."
"Yes, Hank, you have. It has been real good information."
"Do you think maybe I can get probation?" Hank asked.
J. W. looked at him carefully and concluded that he was serious. "Hank, I never lied to you before. And I'm not going to lie to you now. Probation is pretty much out of the question."
13
Hank had a similar conversation with Chuck. Incredulous that the conversation was even taking place, Chuck said bluntly, "What on Earth made you believe that you could walk away from this?"
14
Hank reminded Tim of the many suspects he had dealt with in child sexual assault cases. With each successive statement, Hank characterized McDuff as more brutal and heartless, and himself as braver and more heroic. So much so that he began to hint that Colleen
wanted
to have sex with him. "People who assault children say that all the time. Even people who assault a ten-year-old child, they will say, 'she wanted it.' And this was just as ridiculous."
15
On the night of December 29, 1991, Kenneth Allen McDuff kidnapped, raped, tortured, and murdered Colleen Reed. Hank Worley was with him, and at the very best, he did nothing to stop it.
III
The arrest warrant that Tim served on Hank on April 21 resulted from a probable cause affidavit that had been carefully crafted by a number of
 
Page 269
persons. J. W. and Don returned from Belton armed with Hank's gruesome sworn statement. At 5:30
A.M.
, J. W. called Travis County Assistant District Attorney Marianne Powers and asked her to meet with him at APD immediately. She presented the affidavit to her supervisors at the D.A.'s office who agreed that the document needed to be sealed.
The PC affidavit needed to be sealed for three reasons. First, Colleen's familyLori in particularhad not been told of the horrible treatment Colleen had suffered. Victim's services and counselors needed to be organized to help Lori deal with the details of the statement. Second, by that time the Marshal's Service had undercover agents throughout Central Texas infiltrating McDuff's favorite haunts. Third, none of the detectives in any of the many agencies investigating McDuff wanted him to know that Worley was in custody and that he had confessed.
16
A number of people from APD, the Travis County District Attorney's office, and the ATF (Chuck), assembled in a meeting room on the fifth floor of the APD on the afternoon of April 22 to put together a very vague announcement of Worley's arrest. Worley's name was not even mentioned. They all knew that the affair had to be handled very carefully There would be a 5:00
P.M.
press conference at APD and the Press Office would handle it. (It would be handled by an individual who could not have given out too much information.)
What happened between 4:30
P.M.
and 5:00
P.M.
on April 22 is still being quietly debated by the dozens of men and women who brought McDuff to justice. At about 4:50
P.M.
, the First Assistant District Attorney Steve McLeery made the call to have Judge Wil Flowers unseal the affidavit and thus make it public. He did so without notifying anyone at the Austin Police Department, including two of his own assistant district attorneys. Additionally, no one from McLeery's office attempted to contact anyone from Colleen's family. McLeery's supporters argue that there was no legal basis upon which to seal the document. Every investigator from every jurisdiction investigating McDuff flatly rejects that defense. (Most of them firmly believe, with great bitterness, that McLeery buckled under pressure from the press.)
17
At the Austin Police Department, someone walked into Don Martin's office and said, "You are not going to believe what happened. Judge Flowers unsealed the affidavit and it is being read on television right now." Some of the persons organizing the press conference, (including two assistant district attorneys), were horrified when Austin news anchors read the
 
Page 270
probable cause affidavit, including details of rape, oral and anal sex, torture and murder, on live television.
18
Don raced to victim's services and said that Lori needed to be contacted immediately and told not to watch the news. In fact, Lori had already been contacted and told that the affidavit had been sealed and they could not give her any more information. By 4:45
P.M.
, she was told that it had been unsealed and that the CBS affiliate was going with the story at 5:00
P.M.
Lori dropped the phone. She figured she had fifteen minutes to shelter her children. After putting her boys in their room, she could not help but watch the news to see what had happened to her sister. She sat on her bed and turned on the television.
19
Meanwhile, counselors from the APD tried desperately to reach Lori where she lived in Round Rock, but Austin's legendary 5:00 traffic slowed them down considerably. Alone in her bedroom, Lori heard the details of her sister's brutal treatment at the hands of Kenneth Allen McDuff. She gagged and ran to her bathroom to vomit. In such a condition, Lori had to make calls to her family to tell them not to watch the newsit was beyond their worst nightmare.
20
At J. W.'s desk, the phone rang. He answered it to hear an enraged Inspector Dan Stoltz of the U.S. Marshal's Service. "What the [hell] are you people doing out there? I've got some agents out and some of them don't have any cover!" For several minutes, Stoltz royally chewed out J. W., who could only sit and listen, because he agreed with every word that Stoltz had to say. "He had a right to be mad," J. W. remembered with bitterness.
Don Martin called the marshal's office in Waco. The unsealing of the affidavit, coupled with the incident involving Don and his approach to interrogating Hank Worley, were too much for the marshals to handle. "Don't you ever walk into this office again! And if you need to go to Dallas, go through Houston!"
Today, Don admits to compounding his problems. After it became evident that the name Alva Hank Worley would be made public, APD decided to have him appear at the news conference at 5:00
P.M.
He forgot to thank and failed to mention other police organizations.
21
The next day Lori Bible demanded an appointment with Ronnie Earle, District Attorney of Travis County, and Steve McLeery, his First Assistant D.A. After some haggling, her 1:00
P.M.
appointment was confirmed when she threatened to show up anyway with CBS News. Lori "ripped
 
Page 271
him up one side to another." All Earle could do was sit and take it. "Ronnie understood," Lori remembered.
22
The word was out. The name Kenneth Allen McDuff made the news all over the country, and the front pages of nearly every newspaper in Texas. "Armed, dangerous, desperate" splashed the news everywhere. Reporters spanned the Blackland Prairie for information on McDuff. At Bloom's Motel, a resident said, "We used to drink beer with [Hank]. When we saw him on TV. we said 'I know that guy.' " The publicity focused attention on the search for Colleen near the McDuff homestead.
All of a sudden, the name Roy Dale Green resurfaced in newsprintbig time. Roy Dale had been living quietly in Marlin and after reporters had time to look into McDuff's past, especially the Broomstick Murders, Roy Dale became the object of a great deal of curiosity. Marlin residents knew that Roy Dale still lived in the same old dilapidated house, and that he spent much of his time at his sister's beer joint. When a
Waco Tribune-Herald
reporter tried to talk to him at the bar, Roy Dale ran out through the back door. Angered, his sister asked the reporter, "He did his time. Why can't he be left alone?"
23
Within a week, the
Rosebud News
published a headline: "How Many Rapes and Murders Has He Committed This Time?" In Alvarado, the Brand family and Louise Sullivan's survivors had to relive the horror of what Kenneth McDuff had done to their children. "I'm going to pin me on a badge and go after him, and I won't bring him back alive," threatened Jack Brand, Robert's father.
24
The media blitz brought about a flood of McDuff tips. On April 30, the McLennan County Sheriff's Office logged four positive McDuff sightings at one time. In a two-week period, the U.S. Marshal's Office received more than 500 calls. Many of the calls were a waste of time. In Bell County, a frustrated dispatcher named Judy Greenway related one incident: "A little old lady called and said there's someone banging on her back door, and she's sure it's McDuff. The deputies get there, and it's her Labrador Retriever hitting the door with his tail." The dispatcher in Lampasas County, Theresa Holliman, marveled at how worked up callers could get: "You'd think it was Elvis, the way they get excited."
25
The flood of McDuff-related stories also caught the attention of Texas Governor Ann Richards, who announced that "McDuff must be found" and that Texas Crime Stoppers was offering a reward. Within a few weeks the Governor received a full briefing of the McDuff Affair. She was horri-
BOOK: Bad Boy From Rosebud
5.98Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Fin & Lady: A Novel by Cathleen Schine
A Taste of Merlot by Heather Heyford
Alas negras by Laura Gallego García
Colour Bar by Susan Williams
If Looks Could Kill by Eileen Dreyer
Softly at Sunrise by Maya Banks
Hue and Cry by Shirley McKay
Bondmaiden by B.A. Bradbury