She Was Kidnapped Right Out Of Her Boyfriend’s Car Then Murdered 3 Days Later But It Took 46 Years To Catch Her Killer And He Finally Admitted What He Did
Fort Worth, Texas. Carla Walker was a 17-year-old cheerleader and high school student living in Fort Worth.
On February 17th, 1974, Carla got dressed up and ready to go to her school’s Valentine’s Day dance along with her boyfriend, Rodney McCoy.
Rodney was a year older than Carla and the two of them were the definition of high school sweethearts.
What should have been a safe and fun evening for the young couple turned into a terrifying time that ended in Carla’s murder 3 days later.
Facebook; Carla smiles in the photo above
Rodney had picked Carla up in his car that night, and the two decided to head over to the parking lot of the Ridglea Bowl, a bowling alley that was quite popular with their peers.
While Carla was sitting there next to Rodney in his car, a man approached them with a gun and ripped Carla right out of the passenger seat.
The man beat Rodney up, threatened to kill him, then whipped him with the pistol he had been carrying. Rodney lost consciousness and the man whisked Carla away into the dark.
T.Yokoyama – stock.adobe.com
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When Rodney came-to on the blacktop of the parking lot, he had blood gushing out of a wound to his head.
Even though he was injured, he rushed over to Carla’s house to tell her family about what had happened.
The police were called, and when they arrived at the bowling alley’s parking lot, they discovered Carla’s purse lying on the ground, along with a magazine for a Ruger .22.
Carla, however, was nowhere to be found, but the police worked to make a list of suspects. A man by the name of Glen Samuel McCurley was of particular interest to authorities, since he lived approximately a mile away from the bowling alley, and he owned a Ruger .22.
When police questioned Glen about Carla’s kidnapping, he told them that someone had stolen his gun from him while he had been out fishing, but he didn’t report it as such because he did time 13 years earlier for stealing a car.
3 days after Carla vanished, her body was found discarded close to Benbrook Lake. Her kidnapping case had escalated into a murder case.
She was lying in a culvert. She had been sexually assaulted and given morphine. She had been strangled and tortured.
After an autopsy was performed on her, it was clear that someone had kept Carla alive in the days between her kidnapping and murder.
It took 46 years to catch her killer, and here’s how the police did it.
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Digital Visual Library; pictured above is Benbrook Lake
As authorities began to investigate Carla’s murder, they continued looking into Glen, the man who lived close to the bowling alley parking lot that Carla had been kidnapped out of and who owned the same kind of gun that had been used in her kidnapping.
Glen never went to work on the night that Carla was taken out of her boyfriend’s car. He never went to work the following day.
Additionally, Glen’s wife had not been home those days, since she was out of town. Glen insisted he did not know Carla and he insisted he had nothing to do with what happened to her.
Still, authorities kept looking into Glen and other possible suspects. The years ticked on by. All of a sudden it was 2019 and Carla’s case had long gone cold.
It came to light that someone had written and mailed a letter to the detective working Carla’s case way back in 1974. The detective passed away right after he got this letter from a stranger, and so he never ended up telling anyone about it.
On April 19th, 2019, the Fort Worth Police Department shared this letter on social media, hoping it would help bring new leads.
Fort Worth Police Department; pictured above is the letter
The person who wrote the letter admits to killing Carla, before adding, “It is hard to say but it is true.”
This piece of paper definitely led to renewed interest in Carla’s case, and while the media was talking about it police were quietly working on new ways to hunt down her killer.
Carla’s clothes that she had been wearing were collected into evidence back in 1974, and they were still in the possession of the police department after all those years.
Her clothing hadn’t been lost or damaged, which is sadly the situation sometimes with evidence pertaining to older cases.
The Fort Worth Police Department sent Carla’s clothes to a lab that was able to use innovative techniques to build an entire DNA profile for Carla’s killer.
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Now, it was a matter of figuring out who the DNA belonged to. Police proceeded to run this DNA profile through a few different genealogy databases in the hopes of finding a match.
They ended up getting one…the match was connected back to the McCurley family. Remember Glen, one of the suspects police had on their radar from the get-go? His last name was McCurley.
Glen had a wife and two children. He was a quiet family man, well-liked in his neighborhood.
He lived an absolutely average life in the 46 years after Carla’s life was ended, but on September 22nd, 2020, the Fort Worth Police Department announced they arrested Glen and charged him with Carla’s murder.
In July of 2020, detectives had dug through Glen’s trash in order to obtain his DNA to test against the profile of Carla’s killer. It was a match.
They went to speak with Glen, who again denied knowing anything about what happened to Carla. He denied doing it.
He gave detectives a sample of his DNA of his own free will, and after it was tested, it again came up as a match to the DNA from Carla’s clothes.
Weirdly enough, police have mentioned that the letter written and sent to detectives has no connection to Glen, but there’s no denying the DNA does.
Glen was arrested and charged with Carla’s murder. Carla’s parents are sadly no longer alive to witness her killer being brought to justice, but her younger brother Jim is.
At a news conference, Jim said, “46 years, 7 months, and 5 days. Or 17,053 days since Carla was abducted.”
“When I was notified, the word that came across my mind was ‘finally.’ Finally. After 46 years, finally.”
Glen went on trial for Carla’s murder, and a few days ago on August 24th, Glen changed his plea after insisting all along that he was nothing but innocent.
“Glen Samuel McCurley pleaded guilty in the middle of his trial Tuesday to the capital murder of Carla Walker, 17,” the Tarrant County District Attorney said in a statement.
“Judge Elizabeth Beach sentenced him to life in prison.”
Facebook; pictured above is Jim at the news conference
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