The DNA evidence that had been carefully preserved for nearly half a century finally spoke, and it led authorities directly to Glenn Samuel McCurley Jr. , a 78-year-old former truck driver who had been living quietly in Fort Worth for decades. On July 4, 2020, a genealogical breakthrough connected McCurley’s genetic profile to the bodily fluid found on Carla Walker’s bra strap, a piece of evidence that had remained untouched in a police evidence lab since 1974.
The case, which had haunted the Fort Worth community and the Walker family for 48 years, was about to reach its stunning conclusion.
Carla Walker was just 17 years old, a junior at Western Hills High School, when she vanished on the night of February 16, 1974. She had attended the school’s Valentine’s Day dance with her boyfriend Rodney McCoy, the football team’s quarterback, and the couple had stopped at a bowling alley after the event. As they sat in Rodney’s car in the parking lot of Brunswick Ridgely Bowl, a tall man with short brown hair wrenched open the passenger door and began bludgeoning Rodney over the head with the butt of a pistol.
The attacker grabbed Carla, and Rodney, barely conscious, heard the man say, “You’re coming with me, aren’t you sweetie?” Carla screamed for Rodney to get her father, and Rodney sped to the Walker home, blood streaming down his face.
Four days later, on February 20, 1974, two police officers searching for Carla spotted a culvert near Benbrook Lake, about five miles southwest of the bowling alley. Inside the concrete tunnel, they found Carla lying on her back, her face and neck covered with scratches and deep bruises. She had been strangled, and investigators believed the killer had used his hands, as there were no ligature marks around her neck.
The news of her death covered almost the entire front page of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, and more than 1,250 mourners attended her funeral at the Western Hills Church of Christ, far exceeding the capacity of the small sanctuary.
The initial investigation formed a task force of detectives from the Fort Worth Police Department, but they had little to work with. No fingerprints were found on Carla’s body or clothing, and the blood on her dress came from Rodney’s head wounds. Traces of bodily fluid were present, but the technology to identify a person from their DNA did not yet exist.
In that era, there were no surveillance cameras in parking lots and no license plate readers on highways. The task force set up a 24-hour telephone tip line, and officers listened to citizens pass on names of men they believed were responsible, including a pair of marijuana dealers, a carnival worker, and a quiet young man who often bowled alone at the alley where Carla was kidnapped.
One lead emerged when detectives learned that the magazine clip found in the bowling alley parking lot belonged to a newer model . 22 Ruger handgun. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms provided a list of a couple dozen people in Fort Worth who had purchased that model, and among them was 31-year-old truck driver Glenn McCurley.
When two detectives arrived at McCurley’s home in early March 1974 to interview him, he said the gun had been stolen six weeks earlier from his pickup truck while he was fishing. He agreed to take a polygraph test, which he passed, and the task force promptly eliminated him as a potential suspect.
The case went cold, but Carla’s family never gave up. Her father, Leighton Walker, a retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel, took notes from every anonymous caller and kept them in a metal box. He drew circles on maps where he had been told the culprit lived, and he vowed not to rest until the man responsible was behind bars.
When Carla’s younger brother Jim turned 16 and got his driver’s license, he began spending his free time helping his father hunt for the perpetrator. Jim took boxing lessons, joined the high school wrestling and football teams, and went on long runs through his neighborhood, preparing himself to overpower the killer if he ever found him.
Over the years, other young women in Fort Worth were found strangled and left in similar circumstances, raising fears of a serial offender. In 1977, the body of 25-year-old June Ward was found near a curb in South Fort Worth, strangled and beaten. In 1980, 19-year-old Denise Hogue was found near a creek bridge, also strangled.
In 1983, the body of Christy Tower, a waitress at Billy Bob’s Texas, was discovered in a field north of the city, her hands bound with electrical wire. The tragedies continued through 1984 and 1985, with at least seven more young women found strangled in similar circumstances, but the task force could never identify a single suspect.
Jim Walker eventually applied to become a police officer with the Fort Worth Police Department, hoping to get his hands on Carla’s files and find the man responsible. However, a congenital eye condition forced him to drop out of the police academy. He went to work in security at a local defense contractor, but he continued hunting for the killer.
After his father passed away in 1987 and his mother in 2015, Jim purchased his parents’ home and moved into it with his wife, hoping that someone might show up to confess at three in the morning.
In January 2019, detectives Leah Wagner and Officer Jeff Bennett decided to take another look at Carla’s case after Jim made a request. They re-interviewed Rodney McCoy, who had moved to Alaska after graduating high school to work on an oil rig, needing to get as far away from Fort Worth as possible. They posted a message on the police department’s Facebook page and received dozens of responses, but none led to a viable suspect.
What they needed was physical evidence, and fortunately, Carla’s dress and other clothing had been carefully packed away in paper bags in the police department’s evidence lab.
The cost of DNA testing could be as high as $20,000, money that was more likely to go towards active cases. But then Vincent Strange, a Fort Worth aerospace technician and true crime buff, created a podcast about Carla’s case in 2017. One listener was Diane Keikendahl, who had gone to school with Carla and remembered her always smiling in the hallway.
Diane decided to attend Crime Con, an annual true crime convention, and brought 80 copies of a pamphlet she had written about Carla’s case. She handed them out to journalists and investigators, including Paul Holes, a retired investigator who works for the Oxygen Network.
Paul Holes was intrigued and convinced Oxygen to pay $18,000 to cover the cost of DNA testing on Carla’s clothes. At a lab in California, technicians found intact, untainted bodily fluid, and from that fluid, they developed a full DNA profile. They uploaded it to CODIS, a nationwide law enforcement database, but there was no match.
Holes and his producers contacted a Texas lab that specialized in genealogical mapping, but technicians there had no luck either. Then David Middleman, CEO of Othram, got in touch with Holes, saying he was optimistic that his sophisticated genome sequencing technology could find a match.
On the morning of July 4, 2020, David Middleman called Officer Bennett with stunning news. “We’ve connected the DNA to a particular family tree,” he said. “The last name is McCurley.”
After further testing and police work, Middleman and Bennett landed on Glenn Samuel McCurley Jr. , the same truck driver who had told police in 1974 that his Ruger . 22 had been stolen.
Wagner and Bennett did a background check and found that McCurley had no violent criminal record other than a 1961 conviction for stealing a car when he was 18. He was no longer driving trucks full time, taking on handyman jobs and doing part-time maintenance work at a fitness club.
Wagner and Bennett arrived unannounced at McCurley’s home, and he and his wife Judy politely invited them into the living room. They chatted amiably about McCurley’s old truck driving gigs and Judy’s 32 years at the Ridgely West Baptist Daycare program. Judy mentioned that her husband suffered from diabetes and had recently had surgery to remove a tumor on his liver.
“We’re not ready for this,” Judy said, “especially with his cancer.” Finally, McCurley asked the detectives, his voice raspy, “What do y’all want to talk about?” Wagner said they were taking him way back to 1974, to the kidnapping of Carla Walker from a bowling alley.
Judy immediately remembered the case, saying she could recall where the Walker family lived on Williams Road. “They kept her room the same way it was,” she said. “They kept her car still parked in the driveway for years and years.
You’d drive by and see that car parked in the driveway, and it was just absolutely heartbreaking.” Detective Wagner explained that they had reopened the investigation and were contacting those who had been interviewed by police in 1974. She asked McCurley if she could take a DNA sample to eliminate him as a suspect.
McCurley hesitated, then signed a consent form and opened his mouth so Wagner could dab the inside of his cheek with a Q-tip.
Eleven days later, lab techs verified that the DNA from McCurley’s cheek perfectly matched the DNA found on Carla’s bra strap. Members of the U. S.
Marshals North Texas Fugitive Task Force arrived at his house to arrest him. He was driven downtown to the police department, where he waived his right to have a lawyer present during interrogation. For several minutes, he sat alone in an interview room, at first denying any involvement.
He claimed he had never seen Carla Walker before. Finally, with tears swelling in his eyes, he said, “Okay, I did do it.”
McCurley told detectives that on the afternoon of February 16, 1974, he had drunk whiskey and beer for several hours. He said he began driving around and parked in some parking lots, eventually driving to the bowling alley. But instead of confessing to the kidnapping and murder, he claimed he had heard a girl screaming in a nearby car and went to help.
He said he opened the front passenger door, got into a tussle with the boy, pushed him off Carla, and led her back to his car. He claimed that everything that happened between him and Carla was consensual and that he did not know what had happened to her after that.
After speaking to his court-appointed attorneys, McCurley pleaded not guilty. His attorneys argued that Othram’s DNA test was flawed and that Wagner and Bennett had coerced McCurley into a false confession. They portrayed McCurley as feeble, saying he posed no threat to anyone and had led an utterly uneventful life.
But on June 16, 2021, at the first pre-trial hearing, McCurley was pushed into the courtroom in a wheelchair, wearing a green jail-issue jumpsuit. When the trial got underway, Rodney McCoy testified about the night Carla vanished, and retired detective Jim Minter talked about the original investigation.
Prosecutors de Avignon and Emily Dixon unfolded the powder blue dress Carla had been wearing the night she was abducted and presented it to the jury. They played three hours of the videotaped interview that Wagner and Bennett had conducted with McCurley after his arrest. Then they revealed a surprise piece of evidence: McCurley’s .
22 Ruger, which he claimed had been stolen, was discovered during a search of his home, hidden away in a compartment above a door. On the third day of the trial, McCurley changed his plea to guilty, and the judge quickly sentenced him to life in prison.
In the aftermath of the trial, many questions remain. Why would Glenn McCurley, a man with no violent criminal record, have committed such a sadistic crime? Was it an impulsive drunken act, or was McCurley a depraved serial offender responsible for taking the lives of other young Fort Worth women?
And if he was a serial offender, why did he suddenly stop in the mid-1980s? Investigators believe McCurley is responsible for many other crimes, and the investigations are currently ongoing. For the Walker family, the conviction brought a measure of closure, but the pain of losing Carla, a 17-year-old girl with honey blonde hair and dreams of marrying her high school sweetheart, will never fully fade.
