Murder of Carla Walker

On the evening of February 17, 1974, Carla Jan Walker, a 17-year-old Western Hills High School student and cheerleader from Fort Worth, Texas, was sitting with her boyfriend, Rodney McCoy, in his car in the parking lot of Brunswick Ridglea Bowl after a school dance. An unknown man opened the car door and attacked them, pistol-whipping McCoy unconscious and dragging Walker away as she screamed for help. The attacker dropped the magazine from his gun during the assault. When McCoy regained consciousness, Walker was gone, and he went immediately to her parents' home to report the incident.

Police searched the abduction site and recovered Walker's purse and the dropped magazine, but no other leads. On February 20, 1974, her body was found in a culvert at Lake Benbrook, about 30 minutes south of Fort Worth. An autopsy determined she had been alive for two days following her abduction and had been beaten, tortured, raped, and strangled to death; toxicology reports showed she had also been injected with morphine. Investigators collected bodily fluid samples from the crime scene and preserved Walker's dress and other clothing, but the forensic technology of the era could not identify a suspect from this evidence. Police pursued several suspects at the time, and a letter from an unidentified person claiming knowledge of the killer was among the limited evidence received.

The case remained unsolved for 46 years. In September 2020, DNA evidence recovered from Walker's clothing was sent to Othram Inc., a laboratory specializing in degraded DNA samples, with testing funded by the Oxygen network. Leads generated by Othram, combined with follow-up work by Detectives Wagner and Bennett, identified Glen Samuel McCurley, then 77, as a suspect. McCurley had been interviewed by police shortly after the 1974 murder because he had purchased a .22 Ruger pistol using the same type of magazine found at the scene; he claimed the gun had been stolen from his truck and passed a polygraph test, leading investigators at the time to eliminate him as a suspect.

In 2020, investigators obtained a DNA sample from a trash receptacle outside McCurley's home. After the sample matched the suspect profile, detectives interviewed McCurley, who provided a cheek swab confirming the match. He was subsequently arrested and charged with Walker's murder. McCurley's trial began in August 2021, with prosecutors presenting the .22 Ruger pistol he had claimed was stolen in 1974, which had been found hidden inside his home. On the third day of trial, McCurley changed his plea to guilty and was sentenced to life in prison without parole. He did not admit to killing Walker until 2022, later telling a reporter he pleaded guilty because "I'd had enough hounding." Investigators believe McCurley may have been involved in other rapes and murders of young women in the Fort Worth area during the 1970s and 1980s, though he was never charged with additional crimes. McCurley was imprisoned at the Gib Lewis Unit and would have been eligible for parole in March 2029, but he died on July 15, 2023.