Victim’s family prepares for ‘day of reckoning’ in 47-year-old Fort Worth cold case
For 47 years, six months and two days, friends and family of a 17-year-old girl who was killed in west Fort Worth have waited for justice, and some sort of closure.
Carla Walker, known by loved ones as a beautiful, spirited high schooler waiting for her life to begin, was kidnapped, tortured and strangled in 1974. On Thursday, the murder trial of Glen McCurley marks the possible beginning of the end for the cold case that has hung over a Fort Worth community for decades. Jury selection starts Thursday, and opening statements will take place Friday morning.
Jim Walker, Carla’s younger brother, and Cindy Stone, Carla’s older sister, have mixed feelings going into the trial. Stone is anxious and, while she has no doubt McCurley is guilty, hesitant to feel hopeful after years of disappointment. She is fighting the feeling that the rug could still be pulled out from under them. Walker is excited, but not glib. This trial, he said, is about justice for his sister, but it’s also about McCurley’s soul.
“We all have a day of reckoning,” he said.
Carla’s death
Carla’s friends and family described her as bubbly, personable and popular at Western Hills High School in Benbrook. She and her boyfriend, Rodney McCoy, had plans for the future that she never doubted they would be able to pursue.
On Feb. 16, 1974, Rodney, who was the captain of the football team, picked Carla up at her house for the Valentine’s Dance at their high school. On the chilly Saturday evening, Carla wore a powder blue dress with white ruffles, and Western Hills’ cafeteria was covered with pink streamers and paper hearts.
The innocence of the night ended swiftly.
The couple hit a few popular teen hangout spots after the dance. As Saturday night crept into early Sunday morning on Feb. 17, they stopped at Ridglea Bowl — a bowling alley by the Benbrook Traffic Circle — to use the restroom. As they sat in the car, Carla leaning against the passenger-side door and Rodney in the driver’s seat, someone ripped the passenger door open.
A man grabbed Carla as she fell out of the car. Jim Walker said Rodney later recounted that the man looked at Carla and said, “You’re going to come with me, aren’t you, sweetie?”
Rodney leapt across the seat to grab Carla, but the man pistol whipped him in the face with a .22 Ruger. After several hits, Rodney fell unconscious. When he woke up, bleeding in the front seat of his mother’s car, Carla and the man were gone. The only evidence he had been there was a magazine clip that had been dropped from the Ruger.
Four days later, Fort Worth police found her body. Carla had been abducted, tortured, raped, strangled and dumped in a culvert near Benbrook Lake.
McCurley, now 78, was arrested and charged with Carla’s murder on Sept. 21, 2020. New DNA technology — and a legion of people who never gave up on solving Carla’s case — led to police matching the DNA found on Carla’s bra with DNA collected from McCurley. They also found the same type of pistol used in Carla’s abduction at McCurley’s home.
McCurley was married and had two sons. He was embedded within the very community he is accused of shattering. Two years before Carla’s death, McCurley and his wife moved to west Fort Worth. At the time of his arrest in 2020, McCurley lived a mile-and-a-half from Carla’s childhood friend Konnie Myers. His children attended the same school as Carla, with his oldest starting at Western Hills four years after Carla’s death.
Anxious for trial
The Walker family, Rodney McCoy and much of the quiet west Fort Worth community were never the same.
Stone’s kids were never allowed to play in the front yard by themselves. Jim said he spent most of his life angry and aggressive. Rodney had planned to go to Texas Tech, but instead, wracked with guilt, moved to Alaska and started working on pipelines, Jim said. (Rodney is a key witness in McCurley’s trial and is not able to conduct interviews).
Myers, Carla’s childhood friend, said the question of ‘who killed Carla?’ followed her throughout her life.
“I’m just glad that the person who did it did not get away with it his whole life,” Myers said. “But that’s where the anger comes in, too. He got to live a whole life. He got to live all these years and she did not.”
Family and friends are nervous to potentially hear new details about the terror Carla experienced that night. They’ve had no answers for 47 years, but now Stone and Myers are afraid what they will learn.
“Just having to know what she went through, and how unfair it was — that’s going to be my hard part,” Stone said. “We don’t know the whole story. We don’t know where she was taken, where he killed her at.”
Stone said she requested to be warned before graphic pictures are shown during the trial so she can leave the room. Myers does not think she will be able to be inside the courtroom at all.
Jim plans on being inside the courtroom for every moment. He wants answers, and he wants McCurley to see that he did not break his family.
He is ready to see McCurley’s reckoning, but not in the way people might think. Jim spent years filled with rage and hurt, but now has a relationship with God that led him to ultimately forgive McCurley. He wants justice for his sister, he demands accountability — but he has released himself from the burden of his anger and hurt.
“I am anticipating and expecting a guilty verdict,” he said. “McCurley is who he is. He has victimized his family, he has victimized his community. My intention is to ensure he never takes another breath of free man’s air.”
Jim and Stone both wish their parents — who suffered silently after Carla’s death for decades — were alive to see their daughter’s case go to trial. After his mother died in 2015, Jim found a box in his parents’ house filled with paperwork and notes about his sister’s death.
“Four generations have been impacted by this,” he said. “After this, it will be time to change the next chapter.”
Stone has been let down by leads and possible answers over the years enough times that ever since McCurley’s arrest, she’s been waiting for the other shoe to drop. As the trial looms, she tries to steady herself for the reality that this may really be the end.
“It is closure, but it’s really not,” she said. “It will never be closure because she isn’t here. I want to know what happened and if we’ll be able to get the truth out of (McCurley). It does put an end to it, but for me, it brings back the pain of what she went through.”
Jim, 60, still lives in the house that he and his siblings grew up in — he walks through the same front door Rodney pounded on the night Carla was taken, he lives in the same rooms his mother cried in after her daughter’s death. All these years, he has held onto the possibility that someone might knock on his door at 3 a.m. and have a confession or a story to tell about his sister’s death.
After the trial, he plans on selling the house.
McCurley’s not-guilty plea
McCurley, who was 31 at the time of Carla’s killing, was one of the hundreds of people questioned immediately after Carla’s disappearance because he owned a Ruger, the gun that had been used in Carla’s abduction. McCurley told police at the time that he and his wife had been in West Texas, and that his gun was stolen six weeks earlier, according to an arrest warrant affidavit.
He didn’t report the stolen gun, he said, because he was an ex-convict, according to the document. He was accused of stealing a 1955 Pontiac from Henson Bowling Lanes in Abilene, according to an article published in The Abilene Reporter-News at the time of his arrest. The article also said he had been accused of stealing a car from Colorado City (70 miles west of Abilene) and was arrested after a police chase.
McCurley wasn’t questioned again until a DNA profile matching him was recently found, police said.
During a police interview after his arrest in September, McCurley was at first adamant he had not committed a crime, according to portions of a four-hour recording of the interview played at the pretrial hearing in June.
Nearly an hour into the conversation, detective Leah Wagner told him they used DNA evidence to identify him. About 30 minutes later, according to Wagner’s testimony from the pretrial hearing, McCurley confessed. That portion of the recording was not played during the pretrial hearing.
In another interview of McCurley from September, McCurley told KRLD journalist Andrew Greenstein he had seen Carla and her boyfriend in their car on that February night in 1974. He told Greenstein that Rodney and Carla were arguing, and he broke in on her behalf and took her away.
In the interview, McCurley said, “She just gave me a hug. I gave her a kiss. I mistook her for something else. I didn’t mean to do it.”
McCurley entered a not guilty plea during the pretrial hearing.
He is charged with capital murder, but prosecutors have said they intend to seek life in prison, not the death penalty, if he is convicted.
This story contains information from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram archives.
This story was originally published August 18, 2021 at 2:26 PM.
