On the night of February 16th, 1974, 17-year-old Carla Walker attended her high school’s Valentine’s dance in Fort Worth, Texas. By morning, she was gone. Police found her purse and a small metal piece from a gun in a bowling alley parking lot, but the trail quickly went cold. Forty-six years later, a tiny DNA sample broke the case wide open.
It led investigators to a man who had been living about a mile away the entire time—a man who had once been questioned and cleared. Carla Jan Walker was born on January 31st, 1957, to Leighton and Doris Walker. Her father was a retired Lieutenant Colonel in the Air Force. The family lived in Benbrook, west of Fort Worth, in a close-knit neighborhood where residents rarely locked their doors.
Standing just 4’11” with long honey-blonde hair, Carla was known for her constant smile. A former schoolmate later recalled that Carla greeted everyone in the halls, not just her friends. One woman said Carla smiled at her when she felt invisible, and she carried that moment for nearly 50 years. Carla was a junior and a cheerleader at Western Hills High School.
She was in love with Rodney McCoy, the football team’s quarterback. They planned to attend Texas Tech together after graduation, and Rodney had given her a promise ring. The dance was held in the school cafeteria with the theme “Love Is a Kaleidoscope. ” When it ended around 11:30, Rodney, Carla, and another couple cruised around town before stopping for food.
After dropping their friends off, Rodney and Carla drove to Brunswick Ridgely Bowl so she could use the restroom. As they sat in the car in the quiet parking lot, the passenger door suddenly flew open. A man struck Rodney over the head with a pistol butt. In the struggle, the gun’s magazine fell onto the pavement.
That small metal piece would become a critical clue decades later. The man grabbed Carla. Rodney, barely conscious, heard her say, “Rodney, go get my dad. Go get my dad.
” Then he blacked out. Rodney came to around 1:00 a. m. with blood running into his eyes.
He raced to the Walker home less than a mile away and slammed through the front lawn. “Mr. Walker, they’ve got her. They’re going to hurt her bad,” he shouted.
Officers found Carla’s purse and the magazine in the parking lot, but nothing else. No witnesses. No note. Helicopters circled the city as daylight came.
On Wednesday, February 20th, two officers checked a concrete culvert near Benbrook Lake, about 5 miles from the bowling alley. They found Carla. She had been strangled. Her parents were called to identify her body, and her brother Jim later described the sound their mother made as something he had never heard before and never would again.
More than 1,200 people attended Carla’s funeral. The city was shaken. Students stopped cruising the main boulevard, and some refused to leave their homes at night. One prosecutor later said Fort Worth was never the same after Carla.
Investigators were frustrated. In 1974, forensic science was limited. The biological evidence found on Carla’s clothing was preserved in paper bags, but no lab could turn it into a name. The only solid clue was the magazine, which fit a newer model .
22 caliber Ruger handgun. A federal agency provided a list of everyone in Fort Worth who had bought that model. About two dozen names came back. One belonged to Glenn McCurley, a 31-year-old truck driver.
He told detectives his Ruger had been stolen from his pickup truck weeks earlier while he was out fishing. He said he never reported it because he had a prior record for stealing a car. He agreed to take a polygraph test, and he passed. The task force crossed him off the list.
Detective Jim Minter later told Texas Monthly, “As much as it pains me to say this, we didn’t think about McCurley again. ”
In 1977, another man, Jimmy Dean Sasser, confessed to killing Carla. He was indicted but released about 7 months later after admitting he had lied. Rodney McCoy carried his own burden for decades.
Though never formally accused, he lived under a cloud of suspicion. He moved to Alaska to work on an oil rig, telling his family he needed to get as far from Fort Worth as possible. Carla’s father, Leighton, never gave up. He kept a metal box filled with notes from anonymous calls, names, and maps with circled locations.
He told his son Jim he wouldn’t rest until the man was behind bars. Leighton died of a heart attack in 1987. Jim tried to join the Fort Worth police to get access to Carla’s files, but a congenital eye condition ended that dream. Still, he called the cold case unit year after year.
The answer was always the same: nothing new. While the Walker family waited, the man they sought was living about a mile away. Glenn McCurley had grown up in West Texas and had one prior conviction for car theft in 1961. He married Judy Watson on February 16th, 1963—exactly 11 years to the day before Carla’s dance.
They had two sons and moved to west Fort Worth in 1972. McCurley kept a clean public reputation. He mowed the church lawn, made repairs, fixed neighbors’ cars, and was once praised in a letter to a local newspaper for returning a lost wallet. His older son, Craig, was killed by a drunk driver in 1988 at age 24.
But police later said McCurley lived about a mile from the bowling alley where Carla was abducted. The system had his name, his story, and his passing polygraph on record. A lie detector isn’t proof, and a stolen gun that couldn’t be found wasn’t a confession. For 46 years, the truth stayed hidden in plain sight.
In January 2018, Jim Walker, now 56 and using a guide dog due to failing eyesight, left another voicemail for the Fort Worth Cold Case Unit. Detective Leah Wagner called back. When Jim explained the case, he said something she never forgot: “If the person who killed her is still alive, he’s got to be getting on in years. Please, we’re running out of daylight.
”
Wagner found two boxes of evidence on a bottom shelf, but she was pulled onto other cases for a year. When she returned in January 2019, she was joined by reserve officer Jeff Bennett, who worked in construction by day and volunteered with the department at night. Bennett read Carla’s file through the night and produced a list of about 80 people to re-interview. The department couldn’t afford DNA testing.
Then a true crime fan named Diane Quickendall, who had gone to Western Hills High School and remembered Carla’s smile, took up the cause. She flew to a convention and handed a pamphlet about the case to Paul Holes, the retired investigator who helped catch the Golden State Killer. His producers at Oxygen agreed to pay for the testing. A lab in California built a full DNA profile from a tiny stain on Carla’s clothing.
There was no match in the national offender database, and genetic genealogy searches initially found nothing. The last remaining sample was sent to a lab near Houston called Aram, which specialized in tiny, damaged samples. On the morning of July 4th, 2020, CEO David Middleman called Bennett. The DNA had been connected to a family tree with the last name McCurley.
Bennett asked if anyone in that family was named Glenn Samuel McCurley. There was, and in 1974, he lived in Fort Worth. Investigators collected trash from outside McCurley’s home in July 2020. On September 4th, they received confirmation that the DNA matched.
Six days later, Wagner and Bennett knocked on McCurley’s door. When Wagner brought up 1974, his wife Judy said, “I know exactly which one you’re talking about. Carla Walker. ”
McCurley initially hesitated but agreed to provide a DNA sample.
On September 16th, the lab confirmed the match. On September 21st, 2020, officers arrested the 77-year-old McCurley at his home. At police headquarters, McCurley waived his right to a lawyer. For over an hour, he denied knowing Carla Walker.
Then Wagner shifted her approach, speaking about his wife and the secret he had kept from her. McCurley asked who would take care of Judy. Then he lowered his head and said, “Okay, I did do it, I guess. ”
He was booked on a charge of capital murder.
At a news conference the next day, Jim Walker said, “Finally. After 46 years, 5 months, and 3 days, we have a name and a face. ”
The trial began in August 2021. Prosecutors sought life in prison, not the death penalty.
McCurley pleaded not guilty, and his defense questioned the DNA testing, noted the lack of gloves in old crime scene film suggesting possible contamination, and argued his confession was a tired old man saying what police wanted to hear. The prosecution relied on the forensic genealogy—among the first such cases at trial—McCurley’s confession, and a surprise: police had found a . 22 caliber Ruger pistol hidden in a compartment above a door in his home, the same kind of gun he swore was stolen in 1974. On August 24th, 2021, McCurley entered the courtroom in a wheelchair.
He signed a document confessing to Carla’s abduction and murder and was sentenced to life in prison without parole. He later told Texas Monthly he confessed because “I’d had enough hounding,” suggesting exhaustion rather than guilt. At the sentencing, Carla’s sister Cindy Stone addressed him directly: “You had choices. Lots of choices that night.
” She asked if he had harmed anyone else. Jim Walker told reporters it was “a time of healing” after nearly 50 years. In a hallway during an earlier hearing, Jim Walker met McCurley’s son Roddy. “I’m Carla Walker’s little brother,” he said.
Roddy broke into sobs and said he was sorry. Jim embraced him: “You are not responsible for the sins of your dad. ”
In December 2021, McCurley gave an interview from prison where he denied harming Carla at all, contradicting his guilt plea. Detectives looked into other unsolved murders but never charged him with any other crime.
On July 15th, 2023, Glenn McCurley died in prison of natural causes at age 80. Carla Walker’s memory has endured. Her classmates raised money for a plaque at Western Hills High School, roped off so no one would step on it.
Jim Walker plans to sell the family home and give some of the proceeds to a nonprofit that raises money to send old evidence to labs, so other families don’t wait 50 years for answers.