Original subtitles

When two young women,

Colleen Reed and Melissa Northrup,

go missing in eerily odd, similar circumstances,

all signs point to a death row inmate

who's on parole and on the run.

Nobody can find that convicted killer

and a massive manhunt ensues.

The way he killed people, the way he tortured them,

the pleasure he took in it is on a whole different level.

And in the aftermath of his trial,

the corruption involved with the parole system

is exposed for all the world to see.

I've prosecuted a lot of really horrible people,

but Kenneth McDuff is in a world of his own.

The evidence shows that this defendant

is every person's nightmare.

No comment.

Melissa Northrup is a petite mother

of two children and pregnant.

She's working these pre-dawn hours

at a convenience store to make ends meet.

Melissa Northrup's husband phones his wife

just to check up on her.

Becomes alarmed that she's not answering her phone,

so he drives down there and goes in.

There's no sign of his wife.

Melissa's husband, Aaron Northrup,

when he found out that she was missing,

he immediately called the Waco Police Department.

We have a missing attendant at the Quik-Pak.

Her name is Melissa Ann Northrup,

white female, 22 years of age.

Her vehicle was also missing.

There was some money missing from the store,

and right now we're treating this

as a robbery, kidnapping.

We have no suspects at this time.

Her husband, he has no idea where she's at either.

Of course, he's worried, their whole family is worried.

We just want to locate this young lady.

I talked to my wife five minutes before this happens.

All of a sudden, she's just gone.

I don't know if you can imagine how that feels.

Investigators found

a tan, two-door Thunderbird

abandoned on the parking lot of a motel

located just a few hundred feet from the convenience store

where Melissa Northrup has disappeared.

The police then runs the registration and finds that

it's registered to Kenneth Allen McDuff.

Kenneth McDuff is a death row inmate in Texas

who was surprisingly paroled out off of a life sentence

two and a half years before Melissa Northrup went missing.

He was convicted of a triple homicide

of some teenagers back in 1966.

In 1966, Kenneth McDuff and his accomplice,

Roy Dale Green,

set out on a mission.

They went cruising for women.

And they found three vulnerable teenagers,

Edna Sullivan, Robert Brand,

and his cousin, Mark Dunnam,

parked at a local high school

on the baseball field playing music.

And they're just laughing and having fun.

Little do they know,

McDuff and Roy Dale Green

are creeping, crawling, before the car.

Roy Dale Green has

a broken handle of a broomstick with him,

and McDuff, he's got a revolver.

He jumps up to the car window with his gun drawn.

Then the nightmare starts.

McDuff forced the two boys into the trunk of his car.

He then took Edna Sullivan in Robert Brand's car...

and drove it down these country roads

with Roy Dale Green following in McDuff's car.

Finally, they came to a desolate place.

He opens the trunk,

and there's Robert Brand and his cousin.

And he tells his accomplice, Roy Dale Green,

"They've seen us, I've got to kill them."

And he shoots them.

Then, drags Edna Sullivan to the back of the car

and assaults her

with the broken handle of a broomstick.

He straddled Edna Sullivan

and placed the broomstick across her throat.

And he crushed her larynx.

McDuff and Roy Dale Green drove back

to the Rosebud area where they lived.

And then, several days later,

Roy Dale Green felt terribly guilty

about what happened and spoke to the sheriff there

and confessed what they had done.

It was an absolutely terrible crime,

absolutely brutal in every way.

And so, the sheriff and other deputies

began looking for McDuff.

They were able to find him.

He tried to get away.

There was some shooting.

And then, he was captured.

The trial drew a lot of publicity.

The first time I heard the name Kenneth McDuff

was in 1966.

My father was U.S. Marshal at the time.

He was talking to the sheriff of Falls County.

He was a tough guy,

but he was visibly shaken up.

And he was telling my dad about McDuff,

and it made me sick.

He was known as The Broomstick Killer,

because that's what he used to kill Edna Sullivan with

after he tortured her with it.

Roy Dale Green pleaded guilty

to one of the murders and some of the circumstances,

so he got a five-year sentence and a 25-year sentence.

And he turned state's evidence

to testify against Kenneth McDuff.

The jury found Kenneth McDuff guilty,

and he was assessed the death penalty.

Six years after Kenneth McDuff had killed

the three high school teenagers,

Furman v. Georgia

came down from the United States Supreme Court.

In that landmark case,

the Supreme Court said that

the death penalty was unconstitutional

because it was applied arbitrarily

all across the country.

That meant that every death row inmate in the country,

including Kenneth McDuff,

had their death sentence commuted to life.

Texas prisons had become very crowded.

So, although he had originally gotten a death penalty,

Kenneth McDuff was released from prison on parole.

When Kenneth McDuff had his sentence commuted to life,

you want to believe,

"Okay, we're still okay, we're still safe,

"because he would never be released

"to free society again,"

but he was.

Everybody in the criminal justice system

was wondering, how can this happen?

The Waco area, central Texas area,

certainly had its share of crime,

but abductions, missing persons,

that would have been pretty unusual,

and then the circumstances of it were odd.

So, you suspect the worst.

The investigators didn't have a lot to go on.

And when they came up with this license plate,

they came back to McDuff, that was something to work on,

but that wasn't enough to find

and to arrest Kenneth McDuff.

You still have to have evidence,

and you still have to investigate the case.

We knew we had to do something to try to find Melissa.

If she was kidnapped by McDuff,

the urgency was paramount.

All of a sudden, we learned about a case

that sounds a whole lot like Melissa's.

Then the police told me,

we believe she's been abducted.

Yeah, this is a nightmare.

We felt like McDuff probably got her.

And by the way, he's a killer.

I think that everyone wanted to believe that

Melissa Northrup was out there still alive.

Everybody was focused on trying to find her

and track down her kidnapper.

Melissa's car was discovered by a fisherman

near the gravel pit outside of Dallas.

He contacted the local authorities.

No fingerprints were found in Melissa's car,

but the seat was pushed all the way back.

Melissa was like 4'10", 4'11".

Kenneth McDuff was a big guy,

he was 6'3", 6'4",

weighed probably 270 pounds,

so it indicated that a very large person,

somewhat of McDuff's size, had been driving that car.

An extensive search was conducted in that area,

but she was not found.

One day after the car had been located,

I received a missing persons report

for Kenneth Allen McDuff.

This was reported by his mother, Addie McDuff.

She said she had not heard from him in days.

She was concerned about him.

Kenneth McDuff had

a parole violation warrant at that time.

This is the oldest scam going.

When a parolee has jumped parole

and taken off,

often a family member will say they're missing,

just as a cover story.

With McDuff missing about the same time that

Melissa Northrup was missing,

and with McDuff's car within 100 feet or so

of the convenience store,

we thought that ought to give rise

to some pretty quick action by the state

to try to at least find the guy.

Unfortunately, the D.A. says there's no probable cause.

We're not getting a warrant to get McDuff,

even though the woman's missing.

Circumstantially, he's connected to it,

and by the way, he's a killer.

This is just the way you follow the law,

and that's what they were doing here,

and they didn't have enough evidence

to connect anybody

to the disappearance of Melissa Northrup.

So at that point, Bill Johnston

came up with a novel approach to try and figure out

where Kenneth McDuff was and get him in custody.

One of the deputies said,

"We have a bail bond clerk

"whose boyfriend might have run around with McDuff."

And I talk to the boyfriend, and I ask him,

"What did you do with him?"

He said, "Well, he bought

"two tabs of LSD and gave me one."

That's federal drug distribution.

I called the U.S. magistrate judge

and said, "Your Honor, I'd like to send over

a complaint and warrant alleging a violation

of 21 United States Code Section 841A1,

distribution of a controlled substance, namely LSD."

The judge signed the warrant,

and so, a nationwide manhunt for Kenneth McDuff

took place on the distribution of a single tab of LSD.

It went through a huge effort

by many agencies and many people.

The Central Texas Task Force,

as we called it at the time,

was the McLennan County Sheriff's Office,

Waco Police, of course, U.S. Marshals.

We had officers from ATF.

It was an unbelievable effort

on everybody's part

to catch this guy as quickly as we could.

They did a search warrant at McDuff's parents' house,

during which the mother declared,

"Don't frame little Junior."

The father, he was in the garage of their house

during the search, and I heard him say,

"Oh, that boy's cost me a lot of money.

"You can kill him

"when you find him if you want to."

I mean, it was a real loving family.

While the task force is looking

for Melissa Northrup and Kenneth McDuff,

they hear of the disappearance of someone from Austin, Texas

that happened just a few months before.

It sounds eerily similar

to what happened to Melissa Northrup.

Colleen Reed and I were seriously dating.

The 29th of December, 1991,

she had errands to run,

and she mentioned she had to go wash her car.

Then probably about 9:30,

I got the first call from the police department

asking to speak to Colleen, and I said,

"Well, she's not here, what's going on?"

And they said, "Well, we found her car

abandoned at the car wash,

and we believe she's been abducted."

I was surprised and obviously worried.

Colleen Reed was a gift from God.

She was a blessing to me.

She was 28 at the time,

and we talked about getting married

and having children and having a life together.

She was very beautiful inside and out.

She was just always looking to help people,

and she cared about her community.

She just volunteered for everything,

and I think that was her passion,

to do right things.

We loved each other, no doubt about it.

The Colleen Reed case.

Witnesses observed two males forcing a female

into a Thunderbird.

We knew McDuff drove a tan Thunderbird.

It's possible it could have been the same car.

So now, we felt like

McDuff was the one that probably got her.

And so, we were trying so hard

to find out if she was still alive

and maybe rescue her, along with Melissa Northrup.

Back then, there wasn't quite the technology

today we might have gained from surveillance cameras.

And so, the approach that we took was,

let's find everybody that knows McDuff

and talk to them.

I was brought in

as the liaison investigator.

Since McDuff had spent so much time on death row,

my job was interviewing ex-cons

and guys out on parole

that he knew from the penitentiary.

He wasn't a very popular guy in the penitentiary.

He was running with really bad outlaws,

scumbags of all kinds.

Finally, we developed an acquaintance

named Hank Worley.

Worley was a paroled ex-con.

It was told to us he was an associate of McDuff's,

and he drove around with McDuff.

I started doing research on Worley,

and I determined that he had a civil hearing.

I walked over to the courthouse on the day of the hearing,

and I caught Worley as he was walking out.

I asked him if I could talk to him.

Worley said he would.

Took him to the Bell County Sheriff's Office

Criminal Investigation Division and started questioning Worley

about the Reed and Northrup disappearance.

Worley was extremely nervous, trying not to make eye contact.

I wasn't sure what he knew,

but I didn't want to put a whole lot of pressure on him,

and I didn't want to lose him,

so I told him "I'll be back in touch."

Hank Worley was living

at Bloom Motel with his daughter.

It's a run-down, low-rent motel.

I went to visit Hank several times.

One evening, about six o'clock,

I received a phone call from Hank Worley.

He said, "I need to talk to you now."

So I drive over, and he was waiting outside for me.

He walks over to the passenger side door,

and he says, "I was with McDuff

when he took that girl in Austin."

He said, "I got to ask you a favor.

"Can I go talk to my daughter one last time,

"because I'm probably not coming back."

I said, "Yes."

He said goodbye to his daughter,

he came back, got in the car,

and we went to the Sheriff's Office.

Tim Steglich got Worley to tell

what was probably 90% of the truth.

And it was the worst thing I'd ever heard.

And it remains the worst thing I'd ever heard.

When investigators interview Hank Worley,

not only does he talk about his own involvement,

he gives them even more details

about exactly what Kenneth McDuff did to Colleen Reed.

Worley started by saying

he and McDuff went to Austin to get bent,

which is to get high.

And while they were driving on Fifth Street,

they see a female at a car wash.

And McDuff made some statement that

"we're going to take that girl."

He tells us that Colleen Reed

is washing her sports car at this car wash,

and then McDuff pulls into the bay next to her,

gets out, grabs her by the throat...

brings her to the car, throws her in the backseat.

McDuff gets in the backseat with her,

Worley drives off.

And then the torture begins.

Colleen Reed's hands were bound with shoelaces

while they were in transit.

They drove around Austin,

and then drove north on Interstate 35.

Worley told us,

McDuff is in the backseat torturing Colleen Reed

with a cigarette over and over.

Worley drove a vehicle for two hours

with a woman screaming.

He's visibly shaken up when he is remembering

how loud her screams are.

He said, "Her screams are so loud

"they're hurting my ears."

He had his head down and he was shaking.

And then he went down on his knees.

We're just in disbelief.

And she begged Worley for help.

Worley says, "I was afraid of McDuff myself."

There were all kind of ways

Worley could have jumped out of the car

and waved people down and got them involved

and McDuff would have been caught,

but he was a lowlife coward.

Colleen was taken to a field

about 200 to 300 yards

from Kenneth McDuff's parents' residence in Bell County.

McDuff drug her out of the car...

and reared back and hit her so hard in the face

that Worley described it

like a tree limb breaking.

And so, then he drags her over and threw her in the trunk.

Afterwards, he took Worley by his house.

McDuff let Worley out of the car,

and McDuff drives off into the night

with Colleen Reed in the truck.

The level of brutality

was shocking.

I was speechless.

I was so angry.

I can't even tell you what I wanted to do

to Worley at the time.

What happened to her was everything we feared...

and even worse, it's coming true.

It all came to fruition,

it's like, yeah, this is a nightmare.

Sorry.

Although he didn't have any knowledge

of Melissa Northrup's disappearance,

the statement from Hank Worley is pretty hard to listen to,

and it had to have gotten those investigators

super fired up to try and find Kenneth McDuff.

Worley led us to believe that

McDuff would have murdered Colleen Reed

and buried her somewhere in that area of Bell County.

The next day, there was a helicopter

with an infrared unit on it.

They had the entire Austin Police Cadet Academy

come up and walk the fields.

An enormous effort was made to try to find a grave...

and none was ever found.

With Hank Worley's confession that he and Kenneth McDuff

were the ones who abducted

Colleen Reed, and Melissa Northrup

going missing just two months

after that in similar circumstances,

the investigators knew they were on the right track.

Kenneth McDuff was no longer just a person of interest.

He is the sole suspect

in the disappearance of Melissa Northrup.

We know about Kenneth Allen McDuff.

He's a violent, dangerous human being.

And like the captain says, he needs to be off the streets.

Central Texas were on edge.

People were scared to death that this creature

would catch them or their wives or their daughters.

Almost two months after Melissa Northrup goes missing,

a resident of South Dallas makes a grisly discovery.

Melissa Northrup's body is found

in a deserted gravel pit that's filled with water

in Dallas county, about a hundred mile drive from Waco.

Her remains are found by a fisherman,

about a quarter mile away

from where her car was found stuck in the mud.

We do have a positive identification on the body.

It is that of Melissa Ann Northrup.

The one clue that this is the work of Kenneth McDuff

is that her ankles and hands

were bound with shoelaces.

McDuff had certain traits and certain patterns,

and one of them was he liked to bind

his victim's hands and feet if he could.

And he often used their shoestrings.

He would literally get their shoes off,

pull the string out and use it.

It was a great sense of relief that we finally found her.

We finally knew what happened, and gave us more evidence

to use against McDuff if and when we could catch him.

At this point, you have the detailed statement

of Hank Worley.

You have the body of Melissa Northrup.

You have her car, and you have Kenneth McDuff's car.

And they know that both victims

have been tied up with shoelaces.

But you're still missing two big pieces.

You're missing the body of Colleen Reed,

and you're missing Kenneth McDuff.

The truth is, we didn't have a clue where he was.

And the Marshals Service had a notion

to put it on national television.

I contacted America's Most Wanted.

The families of those murder victims

pray for the capture of McDuff.

Tonight, your call could end the manhunt.

America's Most Wanted aired that Friday.

We got a call Monday...

...from Kansas City police

that they think McDuff may be in that area.

The Kansas City Police Department

had gotten information from a viewer

that had watched the "America's Most Wanted" show.

"Hey, this is the guy that's wanted out of Texas

"for these killings."

The witness who called said he thought

he was working with McDuff in Kansas City.

McDuff had gotten arrested up there

on a prostitution sting,

but they didn't take him into custody.

They just wrote him a bench ticket

and put his thumbprint on the ticket.

I had the prints from the prison and we compared them.

It was obvious that it was him.

We couldn't believe it, after all this manhunt,

finally going to get this low down scum off the street.

The Kansas City police find out

that he was working on a garbage truck.

So they set up a sting operation involving a checkpoint,

and stopped the truck under the pretense

that they were doing a safety inspection on the vehicle.

And that's when they identified and arrested him.

McDuff denied everything

and then finally said, "I want to talk to an attorney."

After he was caught, the federal judge ordered him

removed to Waco, Texas.

And the U.S. Marshals provided their fastest jet.

So McDuff was handcuffed, and he was placed in the jet

opposite from me and a couple seats back.

I think about being on the airplane with that guy...

God.

He probably should have been duct taped to the seat.

We got back to the airport here, Waco,

put him in sheriff's unit,

and we bust every red light coming through town.

We get to the federal courthouse

and this big crowd of family and loved ones

and people that had been his victims.

The word had gotten out.

There was a groundswell of outrage.

By this time, everybody in Texas knew

what a monster this guy was.

And they're screaming and cursing him.

They're good people that have lost loved ones.

And here we are having to protect this serial killer.

After finding Melissa Northrup's body

and then arresting Kenneth McDuff,

he is charged with the capital murder of Colleen Reed

and the capital murder of Melissa Northrup.

But Colleen Reed's body still has not been found,

and Kenneth McDuff is not talking.

Prosecuting a murder without a body is difficult,

because you have to prove that they're dead.

And you'd like to be able to prove the cause of death too.

And you can't do that when you don't have a body.

For all those reasons,

the state decided to move forward with the prosecution

of Melissa Northrup's case first.

No comment.

McDuff had escaped the death penalty before

because the Supreme Court threw it out.

By this time, Texas had reinstated the death penalty.

We felt that we needed to get him the death penalty,

so that he could never commit any more crimes like this.

It was going to be difficult. It was not a slam dunk.

We didn't have anybody that was an actual

eyewitness to the murder of Melissa Northrup.

The prosecution case was

the definition of circumstantial.

I mean, they had to take a bunch of unrelated facts

and put them all together and there just really wasn't,

in our mind, any conclusive evidence

that he committed the murder.

I think they were relying more on his past

and his history than facts.

To say it was a high-profile case

is probably an understatement.

Have they put a charge against you?

There was just so much publicity

that I don't think you would ever found 12 people

who could have impartially judged it.

So the judge decided it would be better

to have a change of venue,

and decided to send the case to Houston.

And Judge Bob Burdette was assigned to oversee the case.

And I'm very familiar with how he controls his courtroom.

He doesn't put up with any nonsense.

You better make sure your T's are crossed and

your I's are dotted if you're trying a case in front of him.

When you have a crime,

and you don't have any witnesses

to prove that the person did the crime,

the law allows the state to present

other very similar offenses,

extraneous offenses, as they're called.

Typically, you don't try one murder

by bringing in another murder,

but when you're trying to establish

that the same person committed the crime,

sometimes it can be allowed in for limited purposes only.

There was a hearing in this trial

where Judge Bob Burdette had to rule on

whether or not he was going to allow

into evidence the extraneous other murder of Colleen Reed

in the trial of Melissa Northrup.

It's only in pretty limited situations

that they're allowed to go into facts of another case.

And this was one of them.

It was basically two murder cases wrapped up into one.

Hank Worley was the key to breaking the case.

Worley's testimony showed how McDuff

had accomplished the murder of Colleen Reed,

and the similarities between her kidnapping and murder

and the Northrup kidnapping and murder.

Our cross-examination of Worley was really focused on,

he was just as potentially liable and as guilty as McDuff

and could be facing the same charge and the same punishment.

So he had every reason in the world

to paint things in a light that got him out of a jam.

I didn't think Worley was even close to a credible witness.

I think the testimony

was extremely unsettling to the jury.

It was definitely against our advice to take the stand,

but it was something that he wanted to do.

Why would Kenneth McDuff take the stand

when he hasn't, at that point,

talked to law enforcement about anything?

I think that McDuff thought

that he could go sell a story to the jury

and convince them that he was innocent.

During the trial of Melissa Northrup,

Kenneth McDuff says he wants to take the witness stand.

His lawyers advise him not to do that, of course,

because if he testifies,

then he is going to be cross-examined on anything

the prosecutors want to ask him about.

He does not take the advice of his lawyers,

and he takes the witness stand.

From the prosecutor's point of view,

I'm sure they were very excited

that Kenneth McDuff didn't listen to his lawyers.

McDuff testified that he was not in Waco

when Melissa Northrup was killed.

He said he decided to leave Waco behind

to try to shed his past and get a new life,

and gave all these details of his journey.

And I'm sure he thought with that long story

that he had impressed the jury,

but I didn't think he'd accomplished what he intended.

When Kenneth McDuff takes the witness stand,

not only can the prosecutors cross-examine him

about Melissa Northrup, the victim he's being tried for,

they can ask him about Colleen Reed and other crimes

that the jury would not have known about

when they were just deliberating his guilt.

John Siegrist did the cross examination, and he, of course,

questioned McDuff about the murder in 1966.

The jury had not heard anything about that murder previously.

And also our evidence about the murder of Colleen Reed,

that was something that obviously was helpful to us.

The evidence shows that this defendant

is every person's nightmare.

The jury was out about three hours.

We the jury find the defendant,

Kenneth Allen McDuff, guilty of capital murder

as charged in the indictment.

Kenneth McDuff is found guilty of murdering Melissa Northrup,

and he is sentenced to die by lethal injection.

The whole time the judge was talking,

I was crying, and it was just...

really a load lifted.

Kenneth Allen McDuff is the only person

that's been on death row twice in Texas.

Can you tell me how you're feeling?

Any thoughts on what's next?

Will today's decision bring your family closure?

There's never be a closure.

To me, my daughter's not resting in peace until this man is dead,

because I don't want him to be able to do this ever again.

One year later, the case against McDuff

for the murder of Colleen Reed was tried without a body.

The jury found him guilty,

and then also assessed a death penalty.

It's a relief, yeah.

She died a horrible death, but she lived a good life.

It was like another nail in the coffin.

He's not getting out of this one.

He's gonna pay now.

And there's some pieces of me

that I didn't know exist.

The hate that I had for that guy,

and the things that I dreamed that I could do to that guy.

It's just like, uh... but God help me.

The last chapter will always be reserved

for bringing Colleen home.

Sorry, guys.

Kenneth McDuff is finally convicted

for the capital murder of Colleen Reed

and the capital murder of Melissa Northrup.

But people still had a lot of questions.

Where's Colleen Reed's body?

Has he killed anybody else anywhere else in the country?

And how in the world did he get released from prison

in the first place?

After he had been found guilty of capital murder

of Melissa Northrup and Colleen Reed,

I started investigating the parole board.

The state was under pressure

for prison crowding by a federal judge.

So in 1989, the parole board are told,

start releasing 150 inmates a day,

seven days a week.

It started off with your hot check,

rioters and property crimes.

But before long, they were at the bottom of the barrel.

James Granberry, his parole board chairman,

was finding inmates' families who had money.

The investigation revealed

that he would actually shake them down.

They love their kids, they, you know,

they don't want them in prison

and they'll do anything to get them out.

Kenneth McDuff walked out of a maximum security prison

on parole, under a cloud of corruption

that no one realized at the time.

There was no way to know how many violent criminals

got out this way. I was appalled.

Texas is supposed to be this tough place

with all these death penalties.

Well, heck, they were letting everybody out.

It was a travesty,

and it was an embarrassment, and it was wrong.

And people were dying in the streets because of it.

You sure don't think that a serial killer

is going to be one of the ones that slips through the cracks.

But that's what happened.

And look what happened in the free world,

where he got to continue to prey on women,

and he killed two more people.

And that's all the fault of the system.

With McDuff, the justice system did its work.

They put him back on death row.

But to close those cases for the families,

recovering the victims is the priority.

So as he was getting close to the execution set date,

I started going down to death row.

I would spend four or five hours with him, talking to him.

Most chilling thing that he said to me

was about Colleen Reed.

He said, "I took her out of the vehicle,

"and she got away from me, and she ran and fell down."

He said, "If she had just gotten up and ran away,

"I could have never caught her.

But she didn't. She just laid there and cried."

I mean, you talk about...

the hair standing up on the back of your neck.

I needed to know where Colleen Reed was,

And I needed him to tell me the truth.

But he had no motivation to do so.

And we had good information

that he was going to be executed in just two or three weeks.

Time was running out.

Seven years after Colleen Reed goes missing,

they still can't find her body.

Her family is in pain, and Kenneth McDuff

is sitting on death row, not saying a word.

A few weeks before his execution date,

a window of opportunity cracks open.

McDuff comes in, and he's complaining about a toothache.

I say to him, "Look, you're a man of your word.

"I'm a man of my word. Here's what's gonna happen.

"The dentist'll be here tomorrow.

"I'll put you first on that list.

"You'll be going in, getting that tooth fixed.

"And once you get that tooth fixed,

"you come in and you sit in that chair,

"and you give us what we need."

And that's what he did.

He drew out the map for Colleen's location,

where he buried her.

This is where McDuff brought Colleen Reed

after he tortured her and beat her to death.

Brings back so many bad memories and feelings,

just knowing what happened to Colleen.

Went right out there about where that third tree is.

Had a tractor with a blade,

then we had a bulldozer with the blade.

Still couldn't find her.

When the blade went by the bulldozer and scraped,

I saw something.

And I moved away some dirt...

...and there was Colleen's skull.

We found her.

Representatives of the medical examiner's office

put her in the backseat of their car

and took her back to Austin.

They weren't going to put her in a trunk.

She was going to ride with them in the car.

We had information that thankfully

led us to some remains a while ago.

They would be the remains of Colleen.

What we heard was done to her

was etched in our minds, and I cannot--

you know, you just don't understand that.

We've done this for years.

We don't understand how one human being

could do that to another human being.

This case, McDuff, coupled with the corruption side of it,

changed the way

the criminal justice system operated in Texas.

It was a huge scandal.

It led to the largest expenditure of taxpayer money

for prison construction in history.

There was the first overhaul

of the criminal justice code

in over a quarter of a century.

Now we have what's called a series of the McDuff laws.

He became the poster boy

for change in the criminal justice system.

McDuff was executed tonight by the state of Texas.

He was pronounced dead at 6:26.

I know that I never have to walk

into another courtroom and look at him again.

This part is over.

Colleen's memory has lived on.

There are people that still love her and miss her.

There's an endowment at LSU, her school,

Colleen Reed Opportunity Fund.

And so her name will be carried on

with that scholarship, so.

It's nice for us to say

that ultimately they got justice.

You know what, if I was Colleen Reed

and Melissa Northrup's family,

I would tell you I don't want to hear any talk

about justice, because all I feel is pain,

because a monster like Kenneth McDuff

roamed the streets of Texas.

And a lot of that roaming happened

because the system failed Colleen and Melissa

and it failed all of us.

And that is a horrible tragedy that should never have happened.