79-year-old murder suspect charged with 1981 strangulation of North Texas woman
A Colorado man has been indicted on a murder charge in the 1981 cold-case strangulation death of Beverly Bruneau in Grapevine.
Larry Dean Brown, 79, was booked into the Tarrant County Jail on Tuesday after he was extradited from Colorado to North Texas, according to court records.
Brown’s wife was Bruneau’s best friend at the time of the victim’s death, and both women worked as flight attendants for Braniff Airlines, a Grapevine police detective wrote in an arrest warrant affidavit filed in June. Brown was arrested last month, more than 45 years after the crime.
Bruneau, 35, was found dead on the living room floor of her Grapevine apartment with an electrical cord wrapped around her neck and blood on her face and nightgown on Feb. 13, 1981. Bruneau’s boyfriend told police that she was asleep in the bedroom when he left for work at the airline that morning, according to the affidavit. She didn’t answer his phone calls that afternoon, and he found her dead when he returned home from work about 3 p.m., he told police. The front door was closed but unlocked.
A search of the apartment revealed evidence that Bruneau had tried to fight off her attacker, the detective wrote in the affidavit.
After interviewing her boyfriend on the day of the killing, investigators learned that Bruneau’s best friend also lived in Grapevine and they went to her home to try to interview her. That’s when police first made contact with Larry Brown, the affidavit states.
Suspect first interviewed on day of killing
Brown, whose wife was away on an international flight, spoke to two detectives at that time. He told them that his wife and Bruneau co-owned a home in Dallas that was badly damaged in an arson in November 1980, according to the affidavit.
“Detective Wilkins described Larry as evasive in his answering of questions related to Beverly and noted that Larry continually repeated himself,” the affidavit states. “The interview was short, but most notably detectives notated that Larry had a fresh wound to his right thumb, just below the thumbnail where the top layer of skin had been torn/ripped off.”
In the autopsy, the medical examiner determined that Bruneau was strangled sometime during the midmorning.
DNA evidence and review of investigation
In December 2010, evidence including Bruneau’s blood-stained nightgown was sent to a University of North Texas lab for further testing, which found DNA belonging to an unknown male profile, the affidavit states. The profile was uploaded to the national Combined DNA Index System, but no matches were found at that time.
Grapevine police Detective Johnson, who wrote the affidavit, took over the investigation and began reviewing the evidence in 2025. Johnson learned that Bruneau and Brown’s wife shared responsibility for a mortgage on their Dallas home which included credit life insurance, meaning “in the event of either one’s death, a percentage of the loan would be paid,” the affidavit states.
Larry Brown had been laid off from Braniff Airlines, where he had been a pilot and flight engineer, and he held partial ownership interest in a construction company.
“Early in the investigation, it was alleged that Larry lived beyond his financial means,” Detective Johnson wrote. After their marriage, “the couple purchased a home in Grapevine, creating financial strain and prompting them to pressure Beverly to obtain a different roommate, sell the Dallas residence, or release (Brown’s wife) from her payment obligations on the property.”
Bruneau refused those requests, which increased tensions, and then when she was out of town on a flight, the Dallas home caught fire, the detective wrote. After firefighters put out the first blaze, Larry Brown called about a second fire the same night, according to the affidavit, and investigators believed it was arson.
After the fire, Brown began dealing with the insurance company on behalf of Bruneau and his wife, and he obtained repair estimates through a company of which he was part owner, exceeding the insurance company’s appraisals, the affidavit states.
Bruneau moved in with her boyfriend and told her family that Larry Brown was pressuring her to sign fraudulent insurance documents with inflated repair costs, according to the affidavit. After the homicide, investigators learned that Brown’s wife forged Bruneau’s signature on the paperwork, the affidavit states.
Three days before Bruneau was killed, Larry Brown went to the victim’s apartment and got into a heated argument with her about the insurance check, Bruneau’s mother told police. Bruneau told her mother that she was afraid of Larry.
According to police, Brown corroborated that account in a May 7, 1981, interview when he admitted going to Bruneau’s apartment on Feb. 10 to try to get her to sign the insurance documents. When questioned about his whereabouts on the day of the killing, Brown told Detective Wilkins that he met with contractors at the Dallas house between 9 and 11 a.m. and that he went to his construction company’s office that afternoon.
When asked about the injury to his thumb, Brown initially “seemed reluctant” to answer but later told Detective Wilkins he had hurt his thumb on the job. “This did not make sense to Detective Wilkins as the wound to his thumb did not align with the claimed explanation of injury,” the affidavit states.
Detectives described Brown as cooperative in the early stages of the investigation but said that after they began asking him directly about his involvement, he refused or revoked consent to further questioning, fingerprinting, polygraph testing and a request to photograph him for injuries.
‘Covert DNA sample’ collected from trash
This year, Detective Johnson contacted the Larimer County Sheriff’s Office in Colorado for help to obtain “a covert DNA sample” from Brown. Investigators took swabs from two soda bottles collected from Brown’s trash, and sent the samples to the UNT lab for testing, according to the affidavit.
On May 28, Johnson received results finding that the DNA profile sampled from one of Brown’s soda bottles could not be excluded as the contributor of the male blood from the victim’s nightgown, the detective wrote.
Brown was arrested on June 8, and a Tarrant County grand jury indicted him June 29 on a murder charge, according to court records.
Defense says evidence is circumstantial, seeks lower bond
Brown’s attorney, Bryan Hoeller, filed a motion on Tuesday seeking to reduce his bond, which had been set at $2 million. Brown, who will turn 80 next week, has been in custody for over a month since his arrest, the motion states. He waived any objections to extradition after he was indicted, but he was still held in a Colorado jail for two more weeks before being brought back to Texas, according to the motion.
Brown served as a Navy pilot with more than 100 combat missions in Vietnam, and he was recently diagnosed with a debilitating disease for which the Department of Veterans Affairs has approved benefits, his defense attorney wrote.
Brown has no criminal record, and he practiced as an attorney in Colorado from 1988 until his retirement at the age of 73, the motion states.
Hoeller argues in the motion that most of the evidence in the arrest warrant is circumstantial and relies on unknown sources or statements from witnesses who are now deceased and “one stain which allegedly matches” his DNA.
The defense attorney questioned why an attempt was not made earlier to match the DNA to his client and argued that even if it does match, it could be explained by the defendant and victim spending time together.
According to an order filed on Wednesday, bail has been denied at this time.
