Jury selection underway for man accused in 2017 killing of Fort Worth woman he had dated
Jury selection is underway in the capital murder trial of a Plano man accused of killing a 22-year-old Fort Worth woman in her apartment near the Texas Christian University campus.
Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty against 28-year-old Reginald Kimbro, who Fort Worth detectives believe strangled Molly Jane Matheson, a young woman who Kimbro had dated.
Kimbro also is accused of another murder in Plano and several sexual assaults in North Texas.
Jury selection in the Fort Worth case will take several days because prosecutors and defense attorneys are interviewing potential jurors on an individual basis as allowed by law, court officials said..
The trial date is scheduled for March 22 in Criminal District Court No. 213 in Fort Worth.
A mistrial was previously declared during the jury selection process in August 2020. Restrictions meant to stop the spread of the COVID-19 virus ended the jury selection process for Kimbro’s trial in 2020.
Kimbro was arrested April 24, 2017, by Fort Worth police in connection with Matheson’s death. Her body was found April 10, 2017, by her mother in the shower of her Fort Worth apartment near TCU.
Police allege Kimbro, who had previously dated Matheson, raped and strangled the young woman, then washed her body, clothes and bedding in an attempt to destroy evidence.
Matheson grew up in Winter Park, Florida, before moving to Fort Worth with her family in 2010. After graduating from high school, she attended the University of Arkansas. She left the school in 2015 and returned to Fort Worth.
At the time of her death in 2017, she was working as a sales manager at a women’s clothing store in the University Park Village shopping center. Matheson’s mother learned that she had not arrived for a scheduled shift and found her body when she went to check on her.
Matheson’s death led the Texas legislature in 2019 to approve Molly Jane’s Law, which requires law enforcement officers investigating a sexual assault to input information into a national database which is maintained by the FBI.
Kimbro has also been accused of attacking 36-year-old Megan Leigh Getrum of Plano as she hiked at the Arbor Hills Nature Preserve.
Getrum’s body was found in Lake Ray Hubbard, about 30 miles away in Dallas, on April 19, 2017. Kimbro has been linked to the sexual assaults and murders of Matheson and Getrum through DNA, officials have said.
Court records show that Kimbro was also indicted by a Collin County grand jury on two counts of sexual assault stemming from the rape of a woman at a party in Allen on Jan. 19, 2014. The victim was found in the a yard lying by a fence.
