Bond for suspect in teen’s 1974 killing upped to $500K due to crime’s ‘heinous nature’
The bond set for the 77-year-old man accused of the brutal 1974 murder of Carla Walker was raised from $100,000 to $500,000 on Wednesday during a hearing held over Zoom with officials and the jailed suspect.
Glen Samuel McCurley sat in a wheelchair in a red jumpsuit with a mask covering his face as his attorney, Steven Miears, argued that factors like his decades living in the same Fort Worth home and his liver cancer mean he’s not a flight risk. But Kim D’avignon, an assistant district attorney for Tarrant County, pointed to the disturbing details of the murder of the 17-year-old Walker as reason for a higher bond. The “heinous nature of it in 1974 was unfathomable” to city residents, D’avignon said.
Semen collected from Walker’s bra led Fort Worth police to arrest McCurley on Sept. 21, after technology and DNA databases advanced enough for the detectives still working the case to find a match. McCurley is accused of abducting Walker while she was on a date with her boyfriend the week of Valentine’s Day, before raping and torturing her. He was identified as a suspect following the crime because he owned a .22 Ruger pistol matching a magazine recovered from the scene.
The fact that McCurley, in the 46 years since the killing, lived in his home with a wife and kids and didn’t have a criminal record other than decades-old auto theft charges is a moot point, D’avignon argued on Wednesday. For those years, she said, no one knew of his connection to the crime, and his arrest reveals he was a “different person” than he had appeared to be.
D’avignon also brought up statements McCurley had made to Det. Leah Wagner, of the Fort Worth Police Department, that he would rather be killed or kill himself than go to jail. “That is someone who has nothing left to lose,” she said.
“To just look and say he’s sick, or he is old, or he hasn’t had a criminal history isn’t the proper analysis in this case,” D’avignon said. “This case, for the family and friends and everyone else, we have to consider the heinousness of this crime like we would have on Sept. 20, 1974, not Sept. 20, 2020. Because that’s the crime he committed, and that’s what he’s here for.”
McCurley is being held in the Lon Evans Correction Center in downtown Fort Worth, jail records show.
Miears, McCurley’s attorney, requested the bond remain the same, at $100,000, and noted his client had been unable to pay that. He referenced his “significant contact with the community,” including a wife, children and friends, and his mostly spotless record. He acknowledged his one previous arrest from “many years ago,” in 1961, when he was accused of stealing a Pontiac.
In explaining her decision to raise the bond, Judge Elizabeth Beach said the court wanted to highlight McCurley’s statements to Wagner, the detective.
When questioned by D’avignon during the Zoom call, Wagner explained that during an interview with McCurley he told her “he can’t go to prison, and that he’d just as soon — if it’d make everybody happier — just go ahead and kill me now. That if we sent him to prison that he would.” D’avignon asked her, “Did he say, ‘I will, I’ll just kill myself, I’m not gonna do this?’” Wagner responded yes.
These comments contributed to Beach’s ruling, the judge explained, as well as the nature of the crime.
“The nature of the offense and the circumstances under which it was committed are egregious, and the court is also taking into account the future safety of the community,” Beach said during the Zoom call.
The meeting on Wednesday morning, which was live-streamed over YouTube, was moved online due to the coronavirus pandemic. But it was nonetheless a chance for investigators, attorneys and the suspect to have the first formal hearing in the case that had gone unsolved for almost 50 years.
As McCurley sat in an empty prison hallway, with white walls and rows of green cell doors behind him, he often looked down, his eyes hidden. He would look up for only a few moments.
Though he didn’t say anything during the hearing, he said in an interview with the radio station KRLD in late September, “I didn’t mean to do it.”
His arrest came as a shock to neighbors who knew him as a quiet, church-going man, and a relief to Carla Walker’s family and friends who feared they might never learn the identity of a suspect. Her brother, Jim Walker, told the Star-Telegram an entire community of people had been waiting for this day since 1974.
On the night of Feb. 17 of that year, the 17-year-old Walker and her boyfriend, Rodney McCoy, were attacked outside of a bowling alley before she went missing, her body found three days later. McCoy had been pistol-whipped during the incident and lost consciousness.
D’avignon said during the Zoom call the only reason McCurley isn’t facing an aggravated assault charge in connection to the beating of McCoy is that “he outlived the statute of limitations on that.”
The incident, she said, has been “in the hearts and minds of so many in our community for 46 years.”
“For 46 years, what happened to Carla Walker went unanswered,” D’avignon said. “To say that he doesn’t have any kind of criminal history since 1974 and so therefore wouldn’t be a flight risk is not really a valid assessment of what’s going on here.”
This story was originally published October 14, 2020 at 3:58 PM.
