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For decades, Fort Worth police in the US had been searching in the right places to find the person they suspected of killing Carla Walker – they had found men related to the purchase of .22 Rugers, the gun involved in Walker’s kidnapping from a Ridglea avenue. bowling alley parking. They had tested her clothes for DNA several times. They had even interviewed the man arrested this week for Walker’s capital murder, Glen McCurley, less than two months after her death.
However, none of that information had brought the police department close enough to make an arrest. How did they finally make a breakthrough in the grisly murder case of a 17-year-old that has plagued Walker’s family and Fort Worth since 1974? These are advances in DNA testing. An analyzed DNA extraction from Walker’s bra this year revealed more data than police have ever recovered.
“When we test before, you don’t always get a full profile. This time we got a full profile,” Detective Leah Wagner said. “And that allowed us more options to find who it could be.”
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Carla Walker was 17 when she was murdered.
Wagner and Detective Jay Bennett reopened the Walker case for an active investigation in February. They began by examining what Wagner called “a lot of paperwork” and conducting interviews with previous witnesses and suspects.
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The person who killed Walker had left several details for police to follow: Walker had morphine in his system when he died, and a Ruger .22 magazine was found next to his purse in the bowling alley parking lot. Her boyfriend, Rodney McCoy, who was in the car with Walker when she was abducted, said the killer was a white male who was 5 to 10 years old and weighed about 79 kilograms. He said the killer had brown hair, cut in a military style and was wearing a brown cowboy hat. He may have been driving a light-colored Camaro.
Throughout 1974, during the initial investigation, the police interviewed witnesses and persons of concern. A detective at the time commented that there were more people working on the case than anyone he had ever seen.
SCREEN CAPTURE / FOX 4
Glen McCurley was arrested and charged with the 1974 murder of a Texas teenager, Carla Walker.
McCurley was one of the first suspects, according to the arrest affidavit filed this week. Police identified him as someone who had recently purchased a new magazine for a .22 Ruger, and three detectives interviewed him on April 3. They found out he was a trucker who had served time in prison for auto theft. For two years, he had been living in the 7100 block of Willis Avenue, which was less than a mile from the bowling alley. Interviewers reported that McCurley said he was not working the night of the abduction or the following day and that his wife had been out of town in West Texas. As for the Ruger, he told police that it had been stolen six weeks earlier, around the same time that Walker was killed, while fishing. He said he did not report the robbery because he was an ex-con, according to the affidavit.
After the interview, the police did not look at him again for the next 46 years.
“I was suspicious because of the gun he had and the proximity of where he lived,” Wagner said. “They just didn’t have enough.”
The missing component ended up being DNA. As part of their investigation, Bennett and Wagner sent Walker’s clothes in for a DNA test. According to the arrest affidavit, a male DNA profile was found on his bra. Wagner noted that the tests have been around since the 1980s, but continued advancements in extraction and testing methods yielded better information this time. “It was newer processes that led us to be able to extract a complete profile,” Wagner said.
In March, the police uploaded the DNA to a database called CODIS and no matches were returned. They also submitted the DNA to an open access genealogical database known as GEDmatch, the same tool that California police used to identify the Golden State Killer. On GEDmatch, Fort Worth police got a match: Detectives reported that they narrowed down the suspects to a family of three brothers with the last name McCurley.
SCREEN CAPTURE / FOX 4
Carla Walker had morphine in her system when she died, and a .22 Ruger magazine was found next to her bag in the bowling alley parking lot.
From there, the McCurley investigation began. In July, according to the affidavit, police officers collected trash from a container on the street in front of his home; Wagner received confirmation that the DNA from the trash matched the DNA from Walker’s bra on September 4.
She and Bennett interviewed him about a week later. They reported that during the interview McCurley said again that her Ruger had been stolen. She also told them, they reported, that she did not kill anyone and that she did not know Walker. She agreed to provide a DNA sample through two buccal swabs. On Sept. 16, according to the affidavit, Wagner discovered that the DNA from McCurley’s mouth also matched the DNA from the bra.
Seeing the DNA matches, Wagner recalled feeling “a little shock, excitement, a little fear because ‘wow, this is really happening here.’ goal. It was a great victory for us and the Walker family. “
Jim Walker, Carla’s brother, felt similar emotions. He had spent decades praying and waiting for this breakthrough.
“I feel like God,” he said, “put the two right detectives on the case.”
– Fort Worth Star Telegram
