Cynthia Gonzalez Part Two: Dead End

A couple years into the investigation of the murder of 25-year-old Cynthia Gonzalez, Arlington Police Homicide Detective Jim Ford considered whether she might have crossed paths with one of the most dangerous killers then operating in Texas.

In 1993, Kenneth Allen McDuff was convicted of murdering a woman in Waco.

His name and face suddenly became well-known to law enforcement all over the state, and Detective Ford was no exception.

By the time Cynthia disappeared in September 1991, McDuff was 45 years old and already had a criminal history that should have made the idea of him living freely in Texas impossible to comprehend.

His most infamous crimes dated back 25 years.

On the night of April 6, 1966, McDuff and an accomplice, Roy Dale Green, encountered three teenagers near a baseball field in Everman, a small suburb city south of Fort Worth.

They were 17-year-old Robert Brand, 16-year-old Edna Sullivan, and Brand's 15-year-old cousin, Mark Dunham.

McDuff was armed with a .38 caliber revolver.

The three teenagers were forced into the trunk of their car and driven away.

According to the account later given by Green, McDuff eventually separated Edna from the two boys, placing her in the trunk of his car, while Robert and Mark remained trapped in the other vehicle.

McDuff then shot the two boys to death.

Edna was brutally raped and murdered.

McDuff strangled her using a three-foot section of broomstick, earning him the nickname the Broomstick Killer.

He was arrested within days.

His accomplice cooperated with authorities, and by November 1966, McDuff was convicted of murder and sentenced to execution.

He remained on death row for years.

Then the law changed.

In 1972, the United States Supreme Court decided Furman v. Georgia, effectively invalidating the death penalty statutes then being used across the country.

Existing death sentences could no longer simply be carried out under those laws.

McDuff was among the Texas prisoners whose sentences were converted to life imprisonment.

But that change alone didn't mean he would walk out of prison.

He remained incarcerated for years after.

But life imprisonment under Texas law at the time didn't necessarily mean that a prisoner would remain behind bars until they died, nor does it today.

By the 1980s, Texas had developed an entirely different problem.

Its prison system was running out of room, a crisis that had been building for years.