On a February night in 1974, seventeen-year-old Carla Walker and her boyfriend Rodney McCoy were parked outside a bowling alley in Fort Worth, Texas, after leaving a Valentine’s dance. They were doing what high school couples did, kissing in the front seat of Rodney’s car, when the door was ripped open. A man grabbed Carla with one hand and tried to shoot Rodney with the other. The gun malfunctioned.
The attacker pistol-whipped Rodney until he lost consciousness, and when Rodney came to, Carla was gone. Rodney drove frantically to the Walker family home, bloodied and screaming for help. Carla’s father searched the streets for half an hour and found nothing. Law enforcement arrived, and an intensive investigation began.
On February 20, officers checking culverts along Benbrook Lake found Carla’s body. She had been raped, beaten, and strangled. The medical evidence showed torn clothing, bruising, and scratches. A promise ring Rodney had given her lay in the dirt near her body.
The abduction shattered the community. Parents who had never locked their doors began locking them. Teenagers stopped going out alone. The Walker family lived in constant fear, wondering whether the man who took Carla was someone they knew, someone walking among them at football games or in grocery store lines.
Carla’s younger brother Jim remembered sleeping in his parents’ bed with his father keeping a gun nearby. Police pursued every lead. Rodney was an early suspect because of a gap in his timeline, but investigators ruled him out after multiple interviews. A magazine from a Ruger 22 Mark I found at the crime scene pointed to a list of local gun owners.
Every owner could produce his weapon except one man, who claimed his gun had been stolen weeks before the murder. He was arrested, polygraphed, and passed, then released for lack of evidence. That man was Glenn Samuel McCurley. In 1974, another suspect, Tommy Neland, was identified by Rodney in a lineup after abducting and assaulting another woman, but an alibi cleared him.
In 1977, a man named Jimmy Dean Sasser confessed to the murder while in a Tennessee jail, but his story conflicted with case details and charges were dropped; investigators believed he simply wanted to be returned to Texas. The case went cold. For decades, the Walker family lived with the uncertainty. Carla’s portrait hung in her grandparents’ home.
Her brother sat inside the culvert where her body was found with a hammer and flashlight, hoping the killer would return. Nothing happened. The first real breakthrough came around 2009 and 2010, when DNA was found on Carla’s dress. A partial profile was developed, allowing detectives to exclude some suspects, but it produced no hits in the system.
The case stalled again. In 2017, Jim Walker contacted Fort Worth Police Detective Leah Wagner, asking her to take a fresh look at his sister’s case. In 2019, she was partnered with Detective Jeff Bennett, who read every page of the massive case file and developed a suspect list of 85 names. The unknown male DNA remained the central puzzle.
Bennett suspected Rodney McCoy, as many had over the years, but the DNA proved another man existed. That year, Paul Holes, the detective known for his work on the Golden State Killer case, reached out. He offered to help with a television show and, crucially, to help finance advanced DNA testing. Items of Carla’s clothing were sent to a California lab.
A full male profile was recovered from her bra. Uploaded into the national DNA database, it produced no hits. Genetic genealogy attempts at one company consumed the available DNA and returned nothing. The detectives were devastated.
Only a few nanograms of DNA remained, an amount most labs deemed unusable. Then Holes suggested a new company called Othram. Detective Bennett was skeptical, but he and Wagner visited the lab to verify its protocols. Othram’s team, led by Dr.
Kristen Mittelman, took the degraded, minute sample and ran it through their forensic-grade genome sequencing. Instead of a week, it took longer, and the analysis revealed a family unit. The genealogy led to Glenn Samuel McCurley Sr. , who had died in 1972.
But he had three sons, and one of them, Glenn Samuel McCurley Jr. , had been living in Fort Worth in 1974. McCurley Jr. had been interviewed by police in April 1974 after the abduction, one of the Ruger owners on the list.
He had claimed his gun was stolen six weeks earlier, said he was an ex-con who could not legally own a firearm, and had passed a polygraph. He had been a suspect on paper but nothing more. Now, with a DNA match from a McDonald’s straw recovered from the McCurley family’s trash, the detectives had conclusive proof. They conducted an out-of-custody interview.
McCurley initially denied involvement, then claimed Rodney and Carla were arguing and that he had approached the car to help her. After an hour and a half, he admitted he had strangled and raped Carla. He insisted he had not had the gun. When pressed, he told them it was hidden in a small room in the ceiling of his home.
A search warrant recovered the weapon, wrapped in a towel, in a hidden compartment he had created. He had moved it multiple times over 46 years. McCurley was arrested in September 2020. He had lived less than a mile from the Walker family for decades.
His wife had run a church daycare. Neighbors and acquaintances described him as a wonderful man. His son had died in a car wreck and was buried within sight of Carla’s grave. The next day, McCurley recanted his confession and pleaded not guilty.
The trial began in August 2021. It was the first time forensic genetic genealogy was used in a Texas courtroom. The defense filed numerous motions to suppress the DNA evidence, and for three days prosecutors worked to establish the science as valid and reliable. On the third day, the judge ruled the DNA admissible.
As proceedings were about to resume, the defense attorney approached the prosecution and said McCurley wanted to plead guilty. He was sentenced to life in prison. At the victim impact statement, Jim Walker told McCurley that through his faith, he forgave him, though he would never forget. The detectives later returned Carla’s promise ring to Rodney McCoy.
When asked how he felt, Rodney paused and said, “Healed. ”
McCurley spent only two years in prison before he died. Investigators believe there were other victims. In 1973, a young woman named Becky Martin had been found murdered in a culvert nearly identical to the one where Carla’s body was discovered, about fifteen minutes away.
McCurley, a long-haul truck driver who regularly drove from Fort Worth to California, refused to admit involvement in any other case. He died before the detectives could interview him again. Carla’s case became the catalyst for the Carla Walker Act, a pilot program funding forensic genetic genealogy for the first time at the federal level. The technology that broke the 47-year-old case is now being used to investigate other cold cases across the country.
Carla’s family never gave up, and the man who took her lived among them for nearly half a century before being held accountable.