Arrest recalls a time of fear

This report was originally published May 26, 2005.

FORT WORTH -- It seemed that the killings would never stop.

A waitress, bludgeoned and raped and left in a field in east Fort Worth.

A popular radio station employee, vanishing after buying gas at a southwest Fort Worth convenience store.

A middle-school teacher, strangled inside her apartment near Ridgmar mall.

A teen-ager. A restaurant hostess. An aspiring model.

By May 1985 -- 21 months after the killings began -- more than a dozen young women were dead, and Fort Worth was terrified, convinced that a serial killer was on the loose.

Terece Gregory, 29, was among the last to die. She was last seen leaving the Caravan of Dreams in downtown Fort Worth a couple of hours before daybreak. The next day, a fisherman found her body in the Trinity River. She’d been shot in the face.

Twenty years later, most of the cases remain unsolved. But police said Wednesday that they have linked a convicted murderer with a history of terrorizing women to DNA evidence found on Gregory’s body.

And it’s possible, they say, that the discovery is only the beginning.

Curtis Don Brown, 46, is serving a life sentence for the 1986 murder of Jewel Woods, a 51-year-old Fort Worth nurse. Brown, who was transported to Fort Worth on Tuesday, now faces a capital murder charge in Gregory’s death.

He declined to be interviewed Wednesday.

Since linking Brown to Gregory through the DNA database in February, investigators have re-examined 25 unsolved slayings of women that occurred while Brown lived in Tarrant County.

At least 18 deserve a closer look, they say.

“The DNA hit caused us to look at several other cases to determine whether Brown may be possibly involved in those,” said Sgt. J.D. Thornton, who heads the Fort Worth Police Department’s homicide unit.

“Whether he is or not, the evidence available in those cases will be processed to determine whether we can make a link to any suspect.”

Watching and waiting

By 1986, the killings had slowed, and young women had returned to their routines.

On the night of May 28 — almost a year to the day after Gregory’s death — Woods cracked open a window in her apartment to enjoy the mild spring weather.

With her two children grown, she lived alone and was working as a nurse while studying for her master’s degree in gerontology.

She chatted with a close friend about attending the horse races, then later ran a bath.

Outside, Curtis Brown was watching — and waiting.

According to Woods’ son, Gregg, Brown later said he removed the window screen, reached in and unlocked the door. Woods found him crouching in the kitchen, and he chased her into the bathroom, Gregg Woods said.

Brown also said he was high on cocaine at the time, Gregg Woods said.

A neighbor told police that she had heard a disturbance about 11:30 p.m. inside Woods’ apartment and then what could have been moaning.

About a half-hour later, Brown attracted the attention of undercover officers working a special detail. He was walking along a private drive south of Brentwood Stair Road, breathless and sweating, carrying two purses wrapped in a towel.

Woods’ identification was inside one of them.

Officers went to Woods’ apartment and found that it had been ransacked. Her bathroom door had been kicked in.

But she was nowhere to be found.

The next morning, officers on horseback discovered Woods’ body, nude from the waist down, in tall weeds east of her apartment.

She had been raped and beaten to death with a rock.

A series of arrests

Brown was in his mid-20s when he moved to Fort Worth, where his mother lived. He had been paroled in 1983 in his native California after serving time for armed robbery.

He was married in July 1984 and had a daughter about a year later. He worked sporadically as a laborer and a machinist and lived near Meacham Airport on the north side, and in the Hulen area of southwest Fort Worth.

When he killed Woods, he was free on bond after terrorizing two other women in Tarrant County.