Robert Riggs
speaker
55 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Robert Riggs’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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McDuff has a history of trying to bribe his way out of prison. Eleven years ago, during an interview with a parole commissioner, McDuff said, if you can help me make this parole and get me out of TDC, I can guarantee that you will find $10,000 in the glove compartment of your car. I can guarantee you the $10,000 because my dad promised me I could have that much just for that purpose.
He's pretty well off. But the parole commissioner turned McDuff in. A Brazoria County jury convicted McDuff of the bribery charge in 1982. Just seven years after the bribery conviction, and after having been denied parole 14 times, McDuff was released from prison on October 11, 1989. Law enforcement officers suspect McDuff raped and killed again just four days later. The U.S.
Attorney's Office in Waco says it is investigating the bribery allegations. Tomorrow, we'll tell the story of how members of the parole board changed their minds about Kenneth McDuff.
Robert Riggs, Channel 8 News, Austin. A former parole board member involved in the McDuff case is one of four targets of a new investigation called for today by Governor Richards. Richards wants to know if former members of the parole board sold their services to get inmates out of jail early.
Richards refused to name the four former board members under investigation. A similar probe in 1989 found no wrongdoing.
Tracy, Kenneth McDuff, 46-year-old Kenneth McDuff, a parole killer, has been convicted of capital murder in the kidnapping of 22-year-old Melissa Northrup from a Waco convenience store last March. McDuff gave a somber expression as the jury delivered its guilty verdict. Melissa Northrup's family cried and hugged one another.
Northrup's brother said he couldn't stop the tears knowing what his sister suffered.
Good evening and thank you for joining us. The Texas Board of Criminal Justice tried to fire Leinau in July, but backed off under heavy political pressure from House lawmakers. Well, today it was revealed Leinau will leave the post he's held for six years to take a job at the University of Texas Medical Branch.
In our News 8 investigation, we have learned the FBI has questioned at least one former warden about Lionel's running of the prison system. Channel 8's Robert Riggs has this exclusive report.
Texas prisons under the administration of James Lionel secretly released its most violent inmates to make room for more prisoners. Gang members and the worst prison troublemakers returned to the streets early only to commit new brutal crimes against innocent victims. Cell blocks like this one hold the shocking story that the prison system once kept secret.
It's a prison within a maximum security prison called Administrative Segregation, or in prison slang, Ad Seg. The most dangerous and vicious of the inmates are kept caged here for 23 hours out of the day. They can't even be trusted to leave their cells to eat. Yet the Texas Department of Criminal Justice turned 1,700 of them loose on the public.
Many should not have gotten out because they had lost good time credit off their sentences because of disciplinary problems. Lionel, in an interview before his resignation, admits the prison system freed inmates who couldn't get along in the prison world, much less the free world, just to prevent overcrowding.
How could you turn people loose that are the worst of the worst on society that hadn't had their good time restored for violating the rules and assaulting guards and other inmates in the prison?
Why didn't you stop it?
The parole board says that this was just a paper sham, that you wanted them out the door, that you wanted new space in the prison, more space, that some of these people were even released at midnight in Huntsville.
Wardens and guards who complained about releases from Ad Seg were threatened with their jobs. We obtained this exclusive video from prison sources. The prison system refused us access to Ad Seg units and refused to provide a list of inmates who were free. State Controller John Sharp obtained a partial list of inmates set free from Ad Seg.
The prison system destroyed two years' worth of documents in an apparent violation of the Records Retention Act.
Our review of Sharp's records found that 87 inmates freed from Ad Seg are now fugitives wanted for new violent crimes, including four murders, four attempted murders, 12 rapes, seven child molestations, five child abuse cases, and 29 armed robberies. Countless more inmates released from Ad Seg are back in prison serving new sentences.
One of them is Servando Pachicano, convicted of killing one of two women that he kidnapped from a Fort Worth optical store in 1990. Pachacano left 41-year-old Cruz Torres bound and gagged in an abandoned building. Torres, a mother of four children, suffocated.
Pachacano went on a violent crime spree in Fort Worth just eight months after he was released from a prison cell block reserved for the meanest of the mean. Ronnell will leave the prison system under a cloud of controversy just as controller Sharpe launches a massive audit.
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