No question about it: Kenneth McDuff was back in town.

A man who had once prevented McDuff from crushing the throat of a young woman with a broomstick-a dress rehearsal for what McDuff would do to a teenage girl in southern Tarrant County some months later-pushed the button on his telephone answering machine and was greeted with the sound of three gunshots. Tommy Sammon, who had humiliated McDuff in a playground fight in the eighth grade, worried about his teenage children.

McDuff’s return has scared the hell out of this town.” At Festival Days in the Falls County seat of Marlin, word spread like wildfire that McDuff had sworn to show up and kill one person for every day he spent in prison. “This is a walking town,” said John Killgore, the editor of the Rosebud News, “but these days you see very few people on the streets. In the small Central Texas community of Rosebud, where McDuff grew up, people pumped shells into shotguns and shoved heavy pieces of furniture in front of double- and triple-locked doors. Twenty-one years after he should have died in the electric chair for the savage murder of three teenagers, Kenneth McDuff was back on the streets, as cocky and mean and dangerous as ever. We have left it as it was originally published, without updating, to maintain a clear historical record. This story is from Texas Monthly ’s archives.

Broomstick murders