Bad Boy From Rosebud: The Murderous Life of Kenneth Allen McDuff
by Gary M. Lavergne
University of North Texas Press, $29.95 hard
Gary Lavergne has written the indispensable book on mass murderer Kenneth Allen McDuff but not one that takes full advantage of its subject. Here we are given the traditional structure of the true crime genre, with criminal bio, crimes, and chase. He gives us most of the facts in the abduction and murder of McDuff’s victims, from Colleen Reed, here in Austin, to Melissa Northrup, the convenience store clerk outside of Waco, to the three prostitutes, Valencia Kay Joshua, Brenda Kay Thompson, and Regina Deann Moore. The McDuff case, however, has important political and cultural overtones, with which Lavergne does not deal, or deals with inadequately. We need some treatment of the case which would use it the way Fox Butterfield used the case of Willie Bosket, the 15-year-old who murdered two strangers on the subway in New York City in the Seventies, in All God’s Children. That case prompted the overhaul of the entire juvenile crime system. Butterfield describes the applicable vector between law, violence, and race, so that we derive more from his book than the usual morbid titillation.
In McDuff’s case, the vectors are different, certainly. This book really doesn’t explore them in the necessary depth. It does demonstrate, unconsciously, a level of systematic dysfunction in police attitudes. Lavergne’s account shows a wholesale contempt on the part of the police for the “low-life” in poor, high-crime areas like the “Cut,” in Waco. Lavergne’s language about the “Cut” (which he claims is a subculture with “an absence of pride of any type and the complete lack of social graces and any moral base upon which to gauge appropriate behavior,” without pondering where the customers for the prostitutes and the drug dealers come from — those good middle-class consumers of illicit drugs and services) indicates that he shares the law enforcement prejudice, here, but his account, particularly of the kidnapping, rape, and murder of Brenda Thompson, is nonetheless valuable for demonstrating why McDuff thought he had “immunity.” When McDuff had Brenda Thompson in his truck, visibly bound, he was stopped at a police checkpoint. He drove through the checkpoint, while Thompson was visibly trying to escape his truck. Incredibly, when the police found McDuff two days later, in his room, they did not even ticket him. I can’t but connect this with a comment Lavergne cites about the “Cut”: “You look out the window and you wonder and say: “Somebody ought to neuter all these people.'” That wasn’t McDuff speaking, but an Austin police officer. Many scholars trace the American murder rate, the highest in the developed world, back to slavery, which was premised on treating a sector of the population as lesser lives. There’s an obvious repetition of this attitude in the case of prostitutes.
Clearly, McDuff’s career crystallized an underlying panic about the corruption and deficiency of the system, but only on the level of punishment. One of the most startling sentences in Lavergne’s book is this: “During the 1991 legislative session, fewer than sixty bills were filed creating new crimes and felonies.” Fewer? A more politically informed observer would ask why, during a conservative epoch, the intensified regulation of individual behavior (in tandem with the deregulation of corporate behavior) was received with such little resistance. Eventually, this is going to happen again, as the burden of expenditures for prisons strains the system. Maybe then we will start distinguishing those offenses (like murder) which should be punished by prison with those (like drug usage) which shouldn’t.
This article appears in September 3 • 1999.