Sex, Lies, Murder, and Memphis
- Richard Friend
- Jul 10
- 5 min read
Laurel Noir is a series focused on historic crimes and the darker underside of our hometown.
By all accounts, Danny Wayne Ward was a quiet, well-liked young man. The 30-year-old U.S. Army veteran had been drafted right out of high school and served in Vietnam from 1970–71, and later re-enlisted in the U.S. Army Reserve. He was also a skilled bulldozer operator, honing his craft at Contee Sand and Gravel, where his late father, Millard, had also worked.
In the summer of 1981, Ward had a job with F.O. Day Company and had been part of the excavating team that prepared the site for the new United Parcel Service facility on Sweitzer Lane in West Laurel. It was a short commute for Ward, who lived at 909 Park Hill Road—just off Ninth Street and a stone’s throw from the Laurel Municipal Pool.
On Sunday, August 23, 1981, Ward was awakened at 2:30 am by a knock at the front door. Kenneth and Catherine Annack, a married couple from Baltimore, were waiting for him on the porch. Kenneth, who had just celebrated his 37th birthday earlier that month, asked, “Are you Danny Ward?” When Ward acknowledged that he was, Annack fired a shotgun blast into his stomach from close range.
Witnesses reported seeing a man and woman flee, and despite a quick response from the Laurel Rescue Squad, Ward was pronounced dead at the scene. One of 16 siblings, he was sadly the first to die. Funeral services with full military honors were held at Donaldson’s Funeral Home, and Ward was buried at the Maryland Veterans Cemetery in Crownsville. His mother, Nora, lived with Danny at the house on Park Hill Road, and was mercifully away visiting relatives in West Virginia that weekend. But she had the unimaginable task of returning home to the crime scene. While she spent some time in seclusion the next day in an effort to cope, other members of the large Ward family gathered in lawn chairs on the corner of Park Hill Road and Ninth Street, meeting with reporters and trying to make sense of what seemed like the very definition of a senseless killing. They had no answers, and neither did police.
That would soon change, though, as tips began to come in. Someone had reportedly seen Danny on Saturday with a woman—a woman they determined was 32-year-old Catherine Annack. Police paid a visit to the Annack home at 5606 Queen Anne Street in Baltimore, but learned that Catherine and her husband of 17 years had left rather hurriedly on Kenneth’s motorcycle. Wherever they had gone, it seemed to involve camping, as a witness noted that the bike was packed with a rolled tent.
Under then-Laurel Police Lieutenant (and future Chief) Archie Cook’s lead, detectives embarked on what would become a massive effort to locate the Annacks, who were quickly named the lone suspects in the murder. Working around the clock and with authorities in jurisdictions around the country, the search stretched to 18 days before a reliable tip came in placing the suspects in Memphis, Tennessee. The Annacks had traversed at least four states, sleeping in the tent wherever they could.
Laurel police notified authorities in Memphis, and the Annacks were located and arrested without incident on September 9—in front of Elvis Presley’s Graceland mansion, of all places.
Booked into the Shelby County jail on charges of first degree murder, they awaited the arrival of Laurel Police Lt. Cook and Cpl. Raymond Boone, who flew to Memphis to take them into custody.
After a delayed flight to National Airport, they arrived back in Maryland on September 14, where the handcuffed Annacks were photographed trying to hide their faces while exiting the Laurel Police Department’s paddy wagon. They were formally charged with first degree murder and held without bond at the Prince George’s County Detention Center.
He Said, She Said
Details of the motive for killing Danny Ward started to emerge as the Annacks’ separate trials began in November 1982. Prosecutors alleged that Catherine had willingly spent the night before the murder with Ward, but told her husband that Ward had raped her. She then directed and accompanied an enraged Kenneth Annack to Ward’s home, where, according to Kenneth, he “just wanted to talk to the man and see what the story was.”
As to how the shooting unfolded, Kenneth claimed that it was Catherine who pulled the trigger. He testified that Ward provoked her by calling her “a whore,” and stated that “the next thing I know, there was a shot, and he fell backwards.” He further explained, “I did not fire the shot at all. Cathy was shaking. I took the gun from her.” Annack was trying to suggest that, in a chivalrous gesture, he had agreed to take the blame for her “because I loved my wife.”
A witness for the prosecution, however, contradicted his story. This person had seen—and heard—Kenneth Annack on the doorstep of 909 Park Hall Road, ask “Are you Danny Ward?” before firing the shotgun himself.
Annack later revealed that after several weeks, his wife actually admitted to him that she had gone to bed willingly with Ward “at first”—still trying desperately to cling to the fatal lie that Ward had somehow sexually assaulted her.
It didn’t take the jury long to convict Kenneth of first degree murder and carrying a dangerous weapon. It also didn’t take long for Catherine to make a deal. Literally within hours of the conviction, she pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of assisting her husband’s flight from Maryland and got off with three years probation, along with credit for 60 days she had already spent in jail.
On January 20, 1983, Judge Audrey E. Melbourne sentenced Kenneth Annack to life in prison, but with the possibility of parole in 12 1/2 years. And indeed, he was released in April 1996. There would be no reunion with Catherine, who had already remarried and settled in South Carolina back in 1983—the same year that Kenneth began his “life” sentence. But her life in the ensuing decades has been tumultuous at best.
Now 77 and residing in Pennsylvania, Catherine remarried multiple times and lost several loved ones. In a particularly tragic twist, an adult daughter went missing in 2015 and was later found dead—the daughter’s husband convicted of murdering her.
Kenneth Annack lived in Columbia for a few years after his release. In 1998, he was arrested there for solicitation of prostitution in what appears to have been his only subsequent run-in with the law.
He eventually remarried and relocated to Delaware, where he operated a handyman business for as long as he was physically able to. In later years, relying on an electric wheelchair, he and his wife were yard and garage sale pickers, finding items to resell for profit from their own garage sales each weekend.
While there was probably little talk of his troubled past, or of the light sentence he served for brutally killing Danny Ward at his front door in Laurel that morning 40 years earlier, one has to believe that Kenneth Annack was never fully able to outrun constant reminders of the horrific act that surely haunted him. The name of the small Delaware town where he died on April 14, 2021 at the age of 76? Laurel.
Richard Friend is a founding member of The Laurel History Boys, and creator of LostLaurel.com.
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