Bad Boy From Rosebud (57 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 201
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Flyers for missing victims of Kenneth Allen McDuff.
Author's Collection.
 
Page 202
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Flyers for missing victims of Kenneth Allen McDuff.
Courtesy Texas Department of Public Safety Missing Persons Clearinghouse.
 
Page 203
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Flyers for missing victims of Kenneth Allen McDuff.
Courtesy Texas Department of Public Safety Missing Persons Clearinghouse.
 
Page 204
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ATF Special Agent Jeffery Brzozowski.
Author's Collection.
III
After Richard Stroup and Tim Steglich agreed that Tim should contact Addie McDuff in response to her filing a missing persons report on Kenneth, Tim drove over to Addie's house. Immediately, Addie reiterated her belief that someone killed her son. Tim convinced Addie to sign a Consent to Search Form, and she directed him to the bedroom Kenneth used when he stayed there. Inside the room, Tim found various papers, mostly related to McDuff's matriculation at TSTI. Only two days earlier, one of McDuff's sisters had cleaned out his dorm room and brought the items to Addie. McDuff had a briefcase with a broken latch that contained documents and other things like over-the-counter sinus medication, Preparation H, three cigarette lighters, a can opener, two El Chico Margarita Garters, and four cassette tapes. Steglich also found the title to the 1985 Thunderbird and a W-2 Tax Form showing employment at Quik Pak
 
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Stores, Inc. Tim was able to determine that Addie had purchased the Thunderbird for Kenneth after he had returned J. A.'s pickup truck with a badly broken windshield. The significance of the windshield meant nothing to Tim at the time. In a few days he would be told about the missing persons' cases of Brenda Thompson and Regenia Moore; his first thoughts were "we are dealing with a serial killer." Tim now fully understood the enormity of his missing person case. In talking with Addie, Tim never detected any body language to indicate that Kenneth was there or nearby.
11
Bill Miller picked up the phone and called Texas Ranger John Aycock and told him that McDuff's missing person's report was likely connected to the Melissa Northrup disappearance. Now, the Texas Rangers were involved. Aycock alerted officials in Milam County, where two of McDuff's sisters lived, to be on the lookout for McDuff and Melissa's Buick.
12
Meanwhile, Mike, Parnell and Bill went to the Quik Pak for clues. They searched not only the Quik Pak, but the large fields and pastures surrounding the store and the New Road Inn. Bill came upon a number of abandoned mobile homes, and had the unsettling feeling that Melissa could be in one. The Boys had to contend with a vicious German Shepherd, but they looked inside each trailer and found nothing but trash. The next day they searched the fields on both sides of New Road, from the Quik Pak to the Veterans Hospital, where Bannister said he saw McDuff pushing his car. Then they went to an area behind TSTI and searched every brush, old shack, water well, pump house, gully, drainage ditch, pond, storm sewer, and any other place where a body could possibly be hidden. They even spent some Saturdays roaming the area. The heavily wooded, undeveloped tracts were littered with bones and the carcasses of dead animals, some of which were partially buried. The Boys had a very anxious day. "Where is she? Where is she?" Bill could not get Melissa out of his mind.
13
Shortly, they would find out that they had come very close to one of McDuff's victimsbut it was not Melissa.
14
On March 8, Tim Steglich received a note from the Bell County Sheriff's Office dispatcher that Addie McDuff had called for him. Tim returned the call, and Addie told him she had received an anonymous call at about 10:00
A.M.
that morning from a man who said he was calling from Victoria. According to Addie, the caller told her that McDuff was having trouble with his parole officer and that is why he left the Temple area. The caller told her that Kenneth's vehicle had been recov-
 
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ered in Waco, and that he was last seen getting into another car, which had been recovered in Dallas. The information meant little to Tim, who did not know that Melissa's car had been found in Dallas County. "Are you sure the po'lice hadn't picked up the car?" Addie asked. Tim found out the next day, March 9, during a phone conversation with Richard Stroup, that Melissa's car had, indeed, been recovered, but nothing in the car provided clues as to where she could be or what could have happened to her. Stroup stressed that no statement had been issued announcing the discovery of Melissa' car. How could Addie have known? Tim's belief that Addie was being told what to say was mightily reinforced.
15
Later in the day, Parnell called Tim and told him that McDuff was a federal fugitive. Tim filled him in on his missing person investigation and his agreement with Richard Stroup that Tim should continue to contact Addie.
16
Also on March 9, parole officers issued an Emergency Arrest Warrant for Kenneth McDuff. He was wanted for violating his parole.
17
IV
"Someone has to crack sooner or later. Somebody's going to talk," insisted Lori Bible. She spearheaded a massive attempt to distribute English and Spanish versions of fliers within a 100-mile radius of Austin. Attached to many of the posters were pink ribbons, placed there because that was Colleen's favorite color. Different versions of the fliers showed different pictures. The hope was that someone might recognize her from one of the photos. Family and friends purchased advertisements in the Austin and San Antonio media outlets offering a $5,000 reward for information leading to Colleen's recovery. They also offered to pay APD overtime for extra work. LCRA contributed much to the effort. Its print shop cranked out thousands of the fliers, and employees posted notices asking for help. While working in Round Rock, Alva Hank Worley saw one of those fliers and recognized Colleen's picture. He later told a psychologist that he "figured McDuff must have killed that girl cause she never showed up."
One week after the abduction, the Austin Police Department assigned additional detectives to the case.
 
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Lori spoke to hundreds of groups, stood out on the streets of Austin handing out information, and appeared on every television station as many times as she could. She was determined not to let others forget her sister. During sworn testimony, Lori described her relationship with the Austin Police Department: ''Sometimes it was really good. They were nice and kind and, you know, truly, I believe, interested in finding her. And sometimes they were sick of me and I was sick of them, and I was frustrated with them and I was frustrated with the system. And it was avery much a roller coaster kind of relationship due to the circumstances, I think."
18
By the end of February, Lori had to clean out Colleen's apartment; it was a devastating process complicated by an inability to use Colleen's assets to pay bills. She was a missing person and at that time there was no hard evidence that she had been killed. As Lori said later, it was a legal nightmare.
But the efforts to find Colleen accelerated when nationally syndicated true crime shows aired reenactments of her abduction.
America's Most Wanted
and
Unsolved Mysteries
(which McDuff later referred to as "Mysterious Mysteries") aired segments filmed at the car wash.
19
The break for the Austin Police Department came on March 10, 1992. Lieutenant Truman Simons of the McLennan County Sheriff's Department had made numerous attempts to alert APD about the discovery of Kenneth McDuff's Thunderbird. He noticed the description of the vehicle used in the Colleen Reed abduction in a flier sent to his office. He thought that APD might want to pursue McDuff as a lead. He spoke to Detective Sonya Urubek of the Assault Unit.
As the Colleen Reed Case "grew," APD Detective Don Martin had requested Sonya's assignment. She was new to the pool of detectives and approached her assignment with vigor and enthusiasm. One of few detectives who could claim Austin roots, she had grown up in a tough East Austin neighborhood and characterized herself as a "street kid" who never got into trouble but observed an awful lot. A graduate of Travis High School, she joined an insurance firm but quickly saw that she had gone about as far as she would go in the insurance business. At the time her brother was an Austin Police officer, and she had come to know many of his colleagues. She joined the force in the mid-1980s, and loved patrolling her old neighborhoods. In 1992, she dealt mostly with instances of domestic violence.
20
 
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Part of the reason Sonya was assigned to the case was to deal with Lori. They first met on Valentine's Day of 1992 and became fast friends. From the time they met to this day, the two young women have promised each other that they would go out for a margarita.
21
They never have; it is almost as if the promise bonded them. But Sonya did more than deal with Lori. On March 2, 1992, more than two months after Colleen's abduction, she was the first APD officer (at least according to the APD Case File) to canvas the businesses around the car wash.
Sonya was also the first at the Austin Police Department to hear of Kenneth Allen McDuff. "The more he [Simons] told me the more excited I got," she remembered. Simons immediately faxed information on McDuff, and as Sonya read it she became more convinced that it was a solid lead. Simons also told her that the ATF had a probable cause search warrant for McDuff's car, which was securely housed in a shed at Big Boy's Wrecker Service in Robinson. The search was to take place on March 12, and Jeff Brzozowski was to execute it. He added that APD was welcomed to attend.
She immediately took the information to Don Martin and the head of the Assault Unit. Don readily admits that, initially, he did not share Sonya's enthusiasm. His experience taught him that "nothing is 100 percent sure or 100 percent false." He had many local leads at the time that he thought had to be followed, one of which was the owner of a tan Ford Thunderbird who lived in a trailer park in southeast Austin. The suspect had a criminal record. Eventually, Don conducted a two-hour interview with the suspect and was able to rule him out. After some discussion, Don and Sonya agreed to attend the ATF search.
22
Two years later, one of McDuff's defense attorneys lamented: "Everybody and their mother was at that search."
23
He had a point, but each of the participants had a perfectly legal right to be there. The probable cause warrant allowed for the search for firearms and documents relating to the ownership of firearms. The Thunderbird's trunk had been locked, and someone from Big Boy's crawled into the trunk from the back seat to try to open it up, but Jeff decided to pry it open. The trunk was "full of stuff." Jeff spread a tarp over the floor to take the items out of the trunkone at a time. The trunk had an array of items: books, TSTI papers, a gray gym bag, clothing and grooming items, two maps, a Victoria newspaper, a light blue blanket, bed sheets, underwear, and assorted trash. The mat in the trunk showed evidence of
 
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stains. Sonya wanted to go through it all, but it was not her search and she would have to wait.
McLennan County Deputies Richard Stroup and Ronnie Turnbough. were standing near the back bumper watching as Jeff carefully removed each item. Turnbough saw hairs fall out of the trunk onto the back bumper of the car. Immediately, he seized them, walked over to his car, and placed them in evidence containers. When asked why he never told the ATF about the evidence he had seized, he answered that he did not pick up the hair as part of the ATF search warrant. He felt that he had a right to take it because he was there legally, they were in his view, and thus he had the authority to take the evidence. His supervisor, Truman Simons, supported Turnbough's decision. The alternative, Simons argued, was to ignore and possibly lose the evidence.
24
Texas Ranger John Aycock took McDuff's cowboy hat and field-tested it for blood. The results were positive. Sonya made note of that, and she watched carefully as Jeff slowly and methodically removed every item from McDuff's trunk. She noticed that some of the items on the tarp had hair on them and she wanted to be able to secure it at a later date. She also noticed that the beige cloth on the back seat had stains. In her report she indicated that she thought they looked like stains made from secretions, not spills.
When Jeff finished his search, Sonya asked that the car be secured for a future evidentiary search. Jeff and other officers took the tarp and placed the whole thing back into the trunk. Immediately, the car was "taped." Don Martin stood quietly. In an interview in 1998, he asserted that he thought the car was a pretty good lead, and that McDuff was, indeed, a suspect, but that since the occasion was an ATF search involving guns only, it would be best to stay out of the way. He was clearly not as enthused as Sonya. Nearly a week later, Martin was still skeptical. The April 7 issue of the
Austin American-Statesman
quoted him as saying, "It is one of several cars we have been told to look at." The newspaper further reported that Martin had discounted any connection between the Northrup and Reed Cases.
25
The ATF search recovered no evidence of a gun. But from the moment she saw it Sonya Urubek felt that the Thunderbird was used in the abduction of Colleen Reed. She felt something else that she admits she cannot explain. When she arrived, and as the garage door first opened, she felt as if Kenneth McDuff was there with his car. She and Don went

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