Carla Walker

Carla Jan Walker was a popular 17-year-old junior at Western Hills High School in Fort Worth, Texas, remembered as a cheerful teenager with a wide circle of friends. On the night of February 16-17, 1974, she attended a Valentine's dance with her boyfriend, Rodney McCoy. In the early hours of February 17, the couple stopped at the Ridglea Bowl bowling alley parking lot. As they sat in McCoy's car, an armed man forced his way inside, pistol-whipped McCoy unconscious, and abducted Carla. McCoy revived and raised the alarm, but the girl was gone.

Three days later, on February 20, 1974, Carla's body was discovered in a drainage culvert near Lake Benbrook, southwest of the city. An autopsy revealed she had been beaten, sexually assaulted and strangled, and that she had been injected with morphine before her death. Investigators recovered forensic evidence, including material from her clothing, but 1970s technology could not link it to a suspect. The brutal killing terrified Fort Worth and became one of Tarrant County's most notorious cold cases, generating hundreds of leads over the decades while her family waited for answers that never came.

The breakthrough came in 2020. Fort Worth cold-case detective Jeff Bennett sent the decades-old evidence to Othram, a Texas laboratory specializing in extracting usable DNA from tiny, degraded samples. Using forensic genetic genealogy, building a genetic profile from the crime-scene DNA and comparing it against public genealogy databases, Othram's scientists developed investigative leads that pointed to Glen Samuel McCurley Jr. McCurley, then in his late seventies, had actually been questioned in 1974 and was known to have owned a .22-caliber pistol, but he had passed a polygraph and was cleared at the time. A fresh DNA sample confirmed the match, and McCurley was arrested in September 2020 and charged with capital murder.

The prosecution marked one of the first times DNA evidence developed through forensic genetic genealogy was set to be presented at a criminal trial. In August 2021, three days into his trial, McCurley changed his plea to guilty, admitting that he had abducted and killed Carla Walker. He was sentenced to life in prison without parole and acknowledged the crime in a recorded statement. McCurley died in prison on July 15, 2023. Carla's case became a landmark in the field: in 2025, U.S. Senator John Cornyn introduced the 'Carla Walker Act,' legislation named in her memory to fund forensic genetic genealogy for solving cold cases nationwide. After 46 years, the genetic evidence that had sat on a shelf finally delivered justice for a teenager whose killing had gone unpunished for nearly half a century.