Bad Boy from Rosebud: The Murderous Life of Kenneth Allen McDuff by Gary M. Lavergne (review)

Texas has become famous, or, rather, infamous, for its high number of state executions. Opponents of capital punishment have pointed repeatedly to Texas as a state that severely overuses the death penalty. In Bad Boy from Rosebud, Gary Lavergne provides a detailed account of how and why these more strict policies came about through a vivid account of the crimes of serial killer and rapist Kenneth Allen McDuff. While not as strange as John Wayne Gacy or Jeffrey Dahmer or as charismatic as Charles Manson or Ted Bundy, McDuff’s murders are all the more horrible when one takes into consideration that many of them should have never happened. A weak and underfunded Texas penal system provided multiple opportunities for McDuff to be freed and released into a populace to repeatedly commit more gruesome crimes.

Lavergne set out to provide a detailed account of not only the life of his subject but also a window into the broken Texas criminal justice system that allowed him to murder at least six (four of whom he also raped) and as many as fourteen individuals. In doing so, McDuff proved to be a major contributing factor in the dramatic increase in the number of prisons built in Texas beginning in the mid-1990s and the much stricter system for deciding paroles and enforcing sentences. While the focus on the book is the life of McDuff, his lifelong run-ins with law enforcement, and his repeated escapes from justice due to the overtaxed Texas penal system, Bad Boy of Rosebud is just as much about the dedicated members of law enforcement like J. W. Thompson of the Austin Police Department and Special Agent Chuck Meyer of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, not to mention other local authorities and Texas Rangers who spent years ensuring sure that McDuff was brought to justice and that the families of his victims received closure.

Lavergne utilizes thousands of primary sources from official police records, interviews, newspaper accounts, photographs, and judicial records. Due to the fact that these are relatively recent events and many of the individuals involved are still alive, some key primary sources are, by the author’s own admission kept confidential, unnamed, and uncited. While these actions are understandable, they make it difficult to verify the sources. However, the diligence of Lavergne’s research and attention to detail provide adequate provenance for the author’s claims.

Since originally publishing Bad Boy in 1999, the author has published a more detailed—and graphic—book on McDuff, Bad Boy: The True Story of Kenneth Allen McDuff, the Most Notorious Serial Killer in Texas History (2006), which was aimed at a more popular audience. The original work, reviewed here in a recently released paperback edition, appears to employ a more scholarly approach. Despite the gruesome subject matter, Bad Boy of Rosebud is an excellent study of the motivations behind the transformation of the Texas criminal justice system. For those who consider Texas too harsh, the story of Kenneth McDuff goes far in explaining the thinking of Texas politicians and law enforcement.