Highway 79 Revisited: For years, Alma’s family thought she’d died in a fatal car wreck. One overlooked piece of evidence changes everything.
Family Secrets: A teenager is found strangled to death in her bedroom. The police assume that a burglar did it. They should be looking closer to home.
On The Beach: Angry with her husband after an argument, a young woman decides to walk home from a party. That turns out to be a fatal mistake.
A Man Called X: A series of shocking murders rocks a small New Zealand town. Eighty years later, a police detective finally unravels the mystery.
On The Run: A missing woman, an abandoned car, a body found in the desert. Tying the strands together takes time. By then, the killer is long gone.
The Promise: Detective John Dawes had made a pledge to the victim’s family. He was going to find the person who did this. Dawes was a man of his word.
Closer To Home: Weldon said that he returned from work to find his children brutally murdered. He’s lying. The truth is far more sinister than that.
Cold Cases: Solved! Volume 15
Gone in the Night
On Saturday, February 16, 1974, Western Hills High School in Bedford, Texas, hosted a Valentine-themed dance for its senior class. Most of that year’s students attended, but the undoubted stars of the event were Rodney McCoy and his girlfriend, Carla Walker. This was a couple straight out of central casting for a high school movie. Rodney was 18, tall and handsome, the star quarterback on the football team. Carla was a year younger, blonde, petite, and pretty. She was a popular, outgoing girl who was on the cheerleading squad.
The Valentine’s Ball wound down at around 11:00 that night. Rodney had a car, and so he and Carla, and a couple of friends decided to go driving around. It was midnight when Rodney dropped the others back at the school. Then he and Carla set off again, headed for the nearby Brunswick Ridglea Bowling Alley. Carla needed to use the bathroom, and they knew that the place would still be open. Rodney found an open space in the parking lot and pulled in. He then escorted Carla to the entrance, waiting at the door while she went inside. Five minutes later, she re-emerged, and they walked back to the car. They were sitting there talking when their pleasant evening turned into a nightmare.
Suddenly, there was a man at Carla’s door, a tall man wearing a green sleeveless vest and an off-white cowboy hat. Without saying a word, he threw the door open, grabbed Carla, and started dragging her from the vehicle. Rodney was caught by surprise, but he reacted quickly, grabbing his girlfriend’s legs and holding on for dear life. But the attacker had a gun, which he now reversed and brought crashing down on Rodney’s head.
Several meaty blows were landed, opening a gash on Rodney’s forehead. Still he clung on, even as Carla was screaming at the man not to hurt him. Then the man raised the weapon, pointed it at Rodney, and pulled the trigger. The distance was point-blank, the sights trained on the spot between his eyes. Had the gun fired, Rodney would surely have died. But the gun clicked on an empty chamber. Rodney was losing consciousness from the terrible battering he’d taken. The last thing he heard was Carla’s screams, fading into the distance. Then, everything went black.
When Rodney came to, a few minutes later, the parking lot was empty. For the briefest of moments, he was disoriented, unable to fathom what had just happened. Then it hit him like a sledgehammer. Carla! The man had taken Carla. Rodney started his car and floored the gas, burning rubber out of the lot. He raced the few miles to Carla’s house, where he staggered onto the porch and leaned on the doorbell. Lights went on inside. Carla’s dad opened the door and was confronted by a terrible sight: Rodney, covered in blood that seeped from a significant head wound. “They got her!” the teen was screaming. “They got her! They took her!”
The police were immediately alerted and launched a search for Carla and her abductor right away. Meanwhile, Leighton Walker, a former Lt. Colonel in the US Air Force, raced back to the bowling alley to carry out his own search. But Carla wasn’t there. Colonel Walker would spend the rest of that night driving the streets of Bedford in an ultimately futile search. His daughter was gone, vanished without trace. She would remain among the missing over the next three days.
One important piece of evidence emerged as the search continued. When the police scoured the site of the abduction, they found the fully loaded clip of a 22-caliber Ruger semi-automatic, lying on the ground. That explained why the gun had misfired when the abductor pointed it at Rodney. The blows he’d inflicted on the teenager had loosened the magazine, and it had fallen out. But for that, Rodney would be dead. As it was, he was inconsolable.
And so too was the Walker family. As days passed, they prayed against hope that Carla would be returned to them, that the abductor would drop her somewhere. Who knows what depravity the teenager would have suffered in the interim, but anything was preferable to the alternative. Then, on February 19, the alternative became reality.
Northern Texas was hit by a particularly cold snap that day. For the officers out of patrol, still searching for Carla, that made conditions challenging. For one unit, working a grid in the area of Benbrook Lake, it meant limiting exposure to the elements. One officer would remain in the car while the other searched. Then, after a time, they’d swap roles. They were working this routine along a farm road, searching culverts and ditches, when one of them spotted a swatch of blue on the snow-covered ground. The missing girl had been wearing a light blue dress when she was taken. That was how they knew they’d found her.
And if this case were not traumatic enough already, the autopsy would uncover details that were almost too difficult to take. Carla Walker had not been killed on the night she was taken. She had been kept alive for at least two days. During that time, her abductor had beaten her, tortured her, inflicted sexual perversions. He’d also injected her with morphine. Finally, having used up this innocent, young girl, he’d snuffed out her life with his hands around her throat. Then he’d tossed her body into a culvert like garbage. Whoever had done this was an incredibly cruel, incredibly dangerous psychopath.
The investigation had now stepped up a gear. As motivated as the police had been to find Carla, they were now determined to catch her killer and send him to death row. The man they were looking for was about 5’11, clean cut, with a lean build, and short, wavy hair, according to the description given by Rodney McCoy. He was late 20s to early 30s and spoke with a Texas drawl. The police also thought that he might have some connection to the medical or veterinary professions, given the presence of morphine in Carla’s system. Additionally, they believed that he must have a record. A crime this extreme did not look like something a first offender would commit.
Supporting this profile of the perpetrator, the police also had physical evidence. The magazine found in the parking lot could be matched to the killer’s gun. There was also biological evidence, including a semen stain on Carla Walker’s dress. This wasn’t much use in 1974, but it could at least be used to determine the killer’s blood type. That would be an identifying factor once he was caught.
And the Bedford police firmly believed that they would get their man. Given the evidence they had, given the profile they’d developed, given the recklessness of the perpetrator, it seemed only a matter of time before they snapped the cuffs on him.
Unfortunately, that optimism would prove unfounded. The investigation got bogged down and never recovered. The case went cold. It was briefly revived in the late 70s when a man named Jimmy Dean Sasser confessed that he was the killer. However, Sasser’s confession turned out to be false. He was just a heartless attention-seeker, heaping more grief on an already traumatized family.
At least a dozen Bedford detectives tried to solve the murder over the years, all of them coming up short. Both Leighton and Doris Walker went to their graves without seeing justice done for their beloved Carla. Then, in 2019, 45 years after the murder, a popular true crime podcast decided to cover the case, reviving interest in the story. That prompted Bedford PD to take another look at it.
The department started by releasing a piece of evidence that had never been made public. It was a handwritten note, presumably from the killer, that investigators had received decades earlier. It read simply, “K-i-l-d Carla Walker,” and was signed “10-100.” It did not escape police attention that “10-100” is police code for a body. It is also CB radio code for a bathroom break. Both of these things suggested that the note was genuine.
So why were the police releasing this note now? They were hoping that someone might recognize the handwriting and call it in. Unfortunately, the leads this generated all turned out to be dead ends.
The other avenue of investigation looked equally unpromising. It was the semen stain that had been retrieved from the victim’s dress. In the age of DNA, this would normally be a case breaker. However, the sample was small and somewhat degraded. It was unclear whether a profile could be pulled from it. In September 2020, investigators decided to give it a try, calling on the assistance of the specialized genetic lab Othram Inc., based in The Woodlands, Texas.
Othram has achieved some notable successes over the years, closing cases that many had considered unsolvable. Yet, even for them, this was a challenge. The DNA they had to work with amounted to a mere 1 nanogram. For reference, a cheek swab typically delivers 750 to 1000 nanograms. Still, the lab was prepared to try, using a recently developed technology. The result was a profile that was then submitted to a genealogy database. From there, a genetic genealogist took over, tracking numerous family trees and eventually narrowing it down to a single suspect. It was a name that those familiar with the case recognized right away.
Glenn Samuel McCurley had been questioned before. Back in 1974, within months of the murder, police had contacted him about a .22 Ruger. This was the gun that matched the magazine they’d found in the parking lot. McCurley was brought in for questioning but claimed that the weapon actually belonged to his wife and had been stolen six weeks before the murder. He hadn’t reported it, he said, because he was an ex-con and did not want to be sent back to prison on a parole violation. He also offered an alibi for the time of Carla Walker’s abduction. When that checked out, he was removed from the suspect list.
But now, Glenn McCurley was right back in the frame. Investigators learned that he was still alive, living with his wife in Fort Worth, the father of two children and grandfather of several. At 77, he was long retired from his career as a truck driver. He attended church and seemed to be on good terms with his neighbors. Just a regular old guy, enjoying the fruits of his retirement after many years on the road. Except, this old guy harbored a dark secret.
That was confirmed in September 2020, when officers retrieved items from his trash and sent them to the lab for the extraction of a DNA profile. This was compared to the one they had from the crime scene and delivered a match. On September 10, 2020, McCurley heard a knock on his door and opened it to two detectives. After explaining the purpose of their visit, the officers asked him to submit to a cheek swab. McCurley could hardly refuse. The resultant test produced another match. McCurley was arrested soon after. A search of his house turned up a .22 Ruger, the same gun he had claimed was stolen in 1974.
Glenn McCurley went on trial in August 2021. He initially entered a not guilty plea but changed that to guilty after three days of testimony. He was subsequently sentenced to life in prison and sent to the Gib Lewis Unit in Woodville, Texas. There, he protested his innocence, claiming in an interview that he’d only pleaded guilty because he was “tired of being hounded.” It wasn’t until 2022 that he finally came clean and admitted that it was him. He was the one who’d dragged Carla Walker from her boyfriend’s car, who’d held her prisoner for two days, drugging and raping her, who’d ended her life with his strangling hands. He was the destroyer of an innocent life, the tormentor of all who loved Carla Walker.
Which begs the question: was Carla his only victim? Given what we know about this type of killer, it seems unlikely. Men like Glenn McCurley do not simply stop killing on a whim. There are likely other murders yet to be linked to him. The Texas authorities currently have several investigations ongoing. But McCurley will not face punishment for any of them. He died in prison on July 15, 2023, making the world a better place by his passing.
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