On February 16th, 1974, 17-year-old Carla Walker and her 18-year-old boyfriend, Rodney McCoy, left their school’s Valentine’s Day dance and went to cruise around town in Rodney’s mom’s car. They stopped at a nearby bowling alley so Carla could use the bathroom. Afterwards, as the two young lovebirds fooled around in the parking lot, a man yanked open the car door and pulled Carla out. He beat Rodney unconscious, and when Rodney awoke, his girlfriend was gone. Several days later, the high school cheerleader was found dead in a culvert, a victim of rape and strangulation. Police only had one suspect in mind: Rodney, the high school quarterback. But Carla’s family was adamant that Rodney would never hurt their daughter. Were they right? Was Carla a victim of opportunity by a stranger or was their daughter brutally attacked and murdered by her high school sweetheart?
Who was Carla?
Carla Jan Walker was born on January 31st, 1957 in Fort Worth, Texas to father Leighton and mother Doris. Carla was one of several siblings, but was closest to her older sister Cindy. Cindy said that she and Carla weren’t only sisters, but best friends. The two shared a bedroom and, when there was a photo of one of the girls, the other one was usually right next to her. Cindy said that despite Carla being only 4’11 and 100 pounds, her sister was a spitfire. She described her as funny, sweet, but tough and stubborn. She didn’t give up easily. When Carla was turning 16, she told her family that she really wanted a brand new Monte Carlo to drive with her new driver’s license. She said that if she couldn’t get that car, she didn’t really want anything then. Cindy was shocked when she came home one day and saw that her parents had gotten her the Monte Carlo. Her younger brother Jim said that Carla was always popular and had a lot of girlfriends. He thought she’d go to college after high school and that she’d eventually end up becoming a veterinarian.
Carla attended Western Hills High School in nearby Benbrook, Texas. She was a cheerleader and was dating one of the most popular boys at Western Hills. Rodney McCoy was a senior and the quarterback of the Western Hills Cougars’ football team. They were referred to as one of the high school’s “it” couples. They spent their weekends cruising Camp Bowie Boulevard. Carla’s girlfriends said that they would usually drive to one location, hang out with friends, then drive to another, where there’d be more of their classmates hanging out. One of her classmates described her as “the kind of girl who smiled and said hello to just about everyone she saw in the hallways.” The same classmate said that it really seemed like everyone at school liked Carla. She was popular and beautiful, with blonde hair and blue eyes, and probably the target of a lot of envy, but Carla seemed much too nice to have anyone dislike her for it. Carla had it all. She was well-liked, making good grades in school, had a boyfriend who loved her, and friends and family who thought the world of her. Carla had even confided in some of her friends that she knew she and Rodney would end up getting married and having children together one day. The two even talked about attending Texas Tech University together, Rodney that fall, and Carla next year. Everything was falling into place for Carla.
The Day of the Abduction
On Saturday, February 16th, 1974, 18-year-old Rodney, Carla’s boyfriend, arrived at the Walker’s home to pick her up. He was running late because he’d forgotten her corsage, but he said that there was no way he would’ve shown up to her house without it. He was taking her to the Valentine’s Day Dance at school and he knew she’d be irritated that he was late, but he forgot all about it when he saw his beautiful date. Carla, 17, was wearing a powder blue dress and had soft curls in her blonde hair. She was wearing the promise ring that Rodney had given her a few months earlier. The couple left the home and Rodney drove them to the high school in his mom’s 1969 Ford LTD.
The theme for the dance was “Love is a Kaleidoscope” and the school’s cafeteria was covered in red and pink decorations. Carla and Rodney danced with friends and everyone looked like they were having a wonderful time. Around 11:30PM, the dance ended, but nobody was quite ready to go home. Rodney and Carla invited another couple to join them, cruising around Camp Bowie Boulevard. One of the top hangouts on a weekend night for high-schoolers was the local Taco Bell. They also stopped by a few other places to hang out with friends. Around 12:30PM, Rodney dropped the other couple off, so it was just him and Carla. She needed to use the bathroom so they stopped at the nearby bowling alley, Brunswick Ridglea Bowl.
Back in the parking lot of the bowling alley, Rodney and Carla began fooling around in his car. While they were kissing, Carla leaned back against the passenger’s door. She put her purse behind her head as a makeshift pillow. All of the sudden, the passenger’s side door burst open. Both Carla and Rodney’s heads fell out of the door and looked up to see a man standing there with a gun. The man began hitting Rodney, over and over, in the head with the butt of the gun. He then stuck the gun inside of the car, holding it about 3-4 inches from Rodney’s face. Rodney said that he heard the man pull the trigger and heard the gun “click” 3-4 times, but it never fired. When Rodney looked up, he was trying to wipe blood away from his eyes, but saw that the man had Carla by the arm and was pulling her out of the car. He continued swinging the pistol at Rodney and striking him. Finally Carla yelled at the man to stop hitting Rodney, that she’d go with him. Rodney said that he was trying to stay awake and keep the blood out of his eyes. As the man pulled Carla away, she told Rodney to go get her dad. Then she was gone. Rodney said that he blacked out, and when he woke back up, he wasn’t sure how long he’d been out. His first thought was to go get Mr. Walker, so he put his car in drive and headed to the Walker’s house.
It was around 1AM and the Walkers were still awake. Carla’s brother and sister, Jim, 12, and Cindy, 18, were watching TV and Carla’s mom and dad had been playing dominoes with relatives. Jim heard a car hitting the curb outside, then Rodney yelling for his dad. He pounded on the front door until Jim opened it. Rodney had blood all over his face and shirt, with a huge cut underneath his eye. Jim and Cindy didn’t see Carla. Rodney kept repeating, “they’ve got her,” “they’ve got her”. Jim called the police and Mr. Walker got in his car and sped up to the bowling alley, which was less than a mile away, to look for his daughter, but she was nowhere to be found. Rodney went to the hospital where he was treated for his injuries and discharged.
The Investigation
The next few days were hectic. Cindy said that she slept on the couch in the living room, convinced that whoever took her sister would just drop her off. She listened for cars and looked through the window every time she heard one, hoping that Carla was there. The local police department, the FBI, and the Texas Rangers flooded the Walker’s home, asking questions and looking for Carla. Rodney slept upstairs in Carla’s room, waiting with the rest of her family. He told the story of what happened that night, over and over, telling police that he didn’t recognize the man and it didn’t seem like Carla did either. Rodney was terrified and still in shock. He couldn’t believe what had happened.
Four days after Carla was taken, investigators and police from across the state of Texas continued looking everywhere for the teenager. Two officers were driving down a remote road about nine miles from the bowling alley, when they saw a concrete culvert. It ran underneath the road for about 30 feet and water flowed through it to keep the road from flooding. It was tall enough to stand in. The officers got out of their vehicle and looked down in the culvert. What they saw made their stomachs drop.
Lying face-up in the mud and debris was a young female. The officers immediately knew that it was Carla Walker. She was covered in scratches and bruises. Her blue dress was ripped and covered in blood, with her bra pushed up over her breasts. Her underwear and pantyhose had been removed and were balled up nearby the entrance to the culvert. She was obviously dead.
The culvert was not on a road that was well-traveled. Most of the traffic that traveled the road was going to and from the nearby lake, however, not many people went to the lake in February. This didn’t appear to be a place that someone had just happened upon, they would likely have had previous knowledge of the location. Investigators did an absolutely AMAZING job of securing all of Carla’s clothing and samples taken from her body. They took photos of every single piece of debris or trash that was found in the culvert or nearby area. The Fort Worth Police Department was one of the few departments in the country that had their own crime lab; they were the most advanced department in Texas. They had even just acquired a brand spankin’ new high tech Kodak movie video camera, so they were able to film the entire scene. Carla’s body was transported to the morgue.
Officers went to the Walker home to inform the family of what they’d found. They asked Mr. and Mrs. Walker to come to the morgue to identify their daughter. Jim, who went with them, said that when his parents went into the room to identify his sister, he heard his mother scream. He said, “I had never heard anyone make a sound like that. It was like an animal sound. That will stay with me for as long as I live.”
The medical examiner determined that Carla had been sexually assaulted and that her cause of death was strangulation. They didn’t see any obvious ligature marks and believed that she’d been strangled manually. Investigators sealed Carla’s clothing in hopes that future DNA technology may help. There were no fingerprints found on Carla’s body or her clothing. The blood on her dress had come from Rodney. There was bodily fluid found on her and her clothing, but technology was not advanced enough to identify who the DNA belonged to. Unfortunately, investigators didn’t have much to go on.
Carla’s funeral was held shortly after her body was discovered. The church was packed full, with people standing in the back and outside. The community was heartbroken, but they were also terrified. Nobody wanted to go out or even live in the town anymore. Carla’s girlfriends said that they even asked their parents if they could move. Having to live in a town where their friend had been so brutally raped and murdered was unimaginable.
The Only Suspect
With no other avenues to go down, investigators were left focusing on the last person to see Carla alive: her boyfriend Rodney. Hoping to get more information from him, officers suggested he meet with a hypnotist. While under, Rodney was able to describe the man he saw well enough for a police artist to make a sketch. He said that the man talked like a cowboy. The officers who sat in during Rodney’s hypnosis session said that Rodney continued to get more and more upset, crying and sobbing, until the hypnotist brought him out of it. One of the detectives described him as “a scared kid, all torn up inside, tormented that he didn’t do enough to save his girlfriend.”
With the mention of the man speaking like a cowboy, police set their sights on the traveling annual rodeo that came into town during January and February. Investigators interviewed everyone involved with the rodeo and carnival, but unfortunately came up empty. They remained heavily focused on Rodney and picked through every detail of his account from the night of Carla’s abduction. They questioned him over and over. They spoke to classmates of Carla and Rodney, specifically those who had seen them and been around them on the night of the dance. Everyone said that Carla and Rodney seemed happy and were having fun with their friends. The couple that went riding around with them after the dance said the same; Carla and Rodney weren’t arguing at all, they seemed to be having a great night.
Rodney had passed two lie detector tests and the Walker family was adamant that they trusted him and didn’t think he had anything to do with Carla’s murder. Investigators had searched the parking lot of the bowling alley and found Carla’s purse and a magazine from a Ruger pistol. Police believed that if the murderer had indeed used the pistol to hit Rodney, the magazine could’ve easily fallen out, which would explain why it wouldn’t have fired when he held it up to Rodney’s head. With the assistance of the FBI, police were able to locate and speak with the approximately 40 people in the area who owned a Ruger pistol. Some were given lie detector tests, however nobody stood out to them.
Case Goes Cold
Unfortunately, investigators seemed to have hit a dead end. They initially had hundreds of tips coming in, but eventually, they stopped. They ran everything down, but came up empty. Carla’s family tried to keep moving with their lives, but it was difficult. Cindy had planned her wedding prior to her sister’s murder. She didn’t want to go on with it, but she was talked into it. Carla was going to be her maid of honor. Mr. And Mrs. Walker tried to continue making good experiences and memories for their other children, but Jim said that he could hear his mother crying inside of her bedroom.
In 1977, a man by the name of Jimmy Dean Sasser walked into a police station in Tennessee and admitted to murdering Carla. He was quickly indicted for her murder, but one of the detectives thought that his confession was off. Sasser’s mother said that her son often got drunk and confessed to crimes. (I MEAN, who doesn’t) The detective felt that Sasser could’ve gotten all of the information he had from the newspaper. Finally, Sasser recanted, giving no reason for why he chose Carla’s murder to falsely confess to, and was released.
DNA
In 2017, a podcast was created about unsolved murders in Texas called Gone Cold Podcast-Texas True Crime. The first case was Carla’s. One of the listeners happened to have gone to school with Carla. Still wishing that she could do something to help the case, she attended CrimeCon and brought along 80 copies of a pamphlet she’d made about Carla’s case. She handed these pamphlets out to anybody and everybody who could possibly help, including Paul Holes. Holes is a retired homicide detective who assisted in solving the Golden State Killer Case. He also hosts a true crime show. Holes found himself extremely interested in Carla’s case and, in 2019, the network that his TV show aired on offered to pay to cover the cost of DNA testing on Carla’s clothing.
Thank GOD the investigators in the 70’s had been so diligent about how they sealed and stored evidence. The crime scene techs were able to find intact sperm on Carla’s bra strap. They were able to develop a full DNA profile, but unfortunately there was no match in CODIS. After airing an episode about Carla’s case, Holes was contacted by David Mittelman, the CEO of Othram, a forensic DNA testing lab. His lab used a different type of technology to identify a profile and use genealogical mapping to find a match. There was very little DNA left to use, but in July of 2020, Mittleman contacted the Fort Worth detectives to let them know that they found a match and they had a name: Glen Samuel McCurley. The problem? He’d died in 1972. Fortunately, investigators found that he had three sons. Two of them had not been living in Texas at the time of Carla’s murder. One of them had. His name was Glen Samuel McCurley Jr.
This name was not new to investigators. McCurley had actually been one of the men interviewed back in the 70’s when police spoke to everyone in the area who owned a Ruger pistol. McCurley was cleared because he told police that his pistol had been stolen. He passed a lie detector test and was crossed off the list.
McCurley
McCurley was still living in Fort Worth, just a few miles from the bowling alley. An officer went out to his residence to get a feel for him and who was living there. The officer had his bodycam on and pretended to be conducting a welfare check. He was speaking to McCurley’s wife when McCurley and a friend came up the front steps. When he saw the officer, McCurley jokingly threw his hands in the air and said “I didn’t do a dang thing.” He told the officer that he’d lived there since the 70’s and was a long haul trucker. He didn’t seem nervous or concerned.
After dark, police returned and grabbed several items from McCurley’s trash can, hoping to find DNA. They sent it to a lab and were soon notified that they had a match. It came from a McDonald’s drinking straw.
On September 10, 2020, detectives went to his home with an audio recorder and mentioned Carla. They asked McCurley if he would volunteer a sample of his DNA so they could eliminate him. He said, oh I think they already did that back then and cleared me. His wife piped up and said no, they didn’t, they didn’t have DNA back then. HAHA. Detectives asked McCurley what he was doing the week of Carla’s murder. He said that his wife didn’t drive so he was likely driving her to work. His wife again piped up and said NOPE, I wasn’t with him that week, I was out of town visiting my parents. With no more excuses, McCurley gave detectives a DNA sample. It matched the DNA found on Carla’s bra strap.
On September 21st, 2020 they arrest Glen Samuel McCurley Jr. for the murder of Carla Walker. After more than an hour of questioning, McCurley admitted to the murder. He was 31-years-old at the time. He said that he’d been drunk that night, looking for a victim. He admitted that he’d hit Rodney and taken Carla. He wouldn’t admit to raping her, just saying that they’d had sex. He admitted to choking her to death. He cried during the entire confession. He told police exactly where he had the Ruger pistol hidden in his home, just a mile and a half away from Carla’s home. Detectives asked him why he’d picked that specific spot to leave her body. McCurley recalled it as being against a building. Detectives said, no it wasn’t by a building, and asked him again. He repeated the same thing about a building. Detectives asked him multiple times if he’d ever done this to anyone else, but he denied that, saying that it was only one night, one person.
The Trial
McCurley initially pleaded not guilty, but prosecutors felt VERY good about taking him to trial. Rodney was their first witness, who brought the court to tears with his account of Carla, the dance, and how she’d been abducted. The prosecution called the rest of their witnesses, played the video of McCurley’s confession, and, when it was time for the defense to start their case, they informed the judge that their client had changed his mind. On day 3 of the trial, McCurley, now 78-years-old, pleaded guilty to capital murder and was sentenced to life in prison. The courtroom was full of emotion. Jim, Carla’s younger brother, hugged McCurley’s son, comforting him. He said that McCurley’s son was absolutely heartbroken when he found out what his father had done.
Though both of Carla’s parents passed away, both Jim, Cindy, and Rodney were able to see the man who killed Carla be brought to justice. Cindy had several children, one of whom she laughed as she described her as stubborn, with short legs, just like Carla. Investigators have considered McCurley as possibly being responsible for several other murders, where young women were abducted from cars or parking lots, raped, and strangled to death, including Becky Martin in 1973, Christy Tower in 1983, and June Ward in 1984. His connection to these murders has not been proven.
sources for this episode
https://thecinemaholic.com/where-is-cindy-walker-now/
https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/glen-mccurley-carla-walker-murder/
