Texas 1974 Cold Case Solved — Her Last Words Were, "Rodney, Go Get My Dad"

Finally, the family of a teenage girl killed in Texas gets closure. It was Valentine's Day. She had just been to a dance with her boyfriend. She was 17 years old, 4 feet 11, 100 pounds a cheerleader and tennis player from the south side of Fort Worth who had her whole life still in front of her. The parking lot was dark, the car was quiet and then a man jerked the passenger door open and said four words that Carla Walker would never be able to forget because she did not live long enough to. You're coming with me, aren't you, sweetie? Her boyfriend was beaten unconscious before he could do anything. Her last words spoken while he was still trying to stay upright with blood pouring into his eyes were, Rodney, go get my dad. She believed in that moment that her father could still reach her, that if Rodney just got up fast enough, got there fast enough, she could be found. Her father never found her in time and the man who took her from that parking lot lived one mile away, passed a polygraph and walked free for 46 years. He kept the murder weapon hidden inside his house the entire time. This is the story of Carla Walker. Before we go any further, if you found this video and you've never heard Carla's name before, I need you to stay because this case is going to stay with you. Drop a comment right now, tell me where you're watching from and tell me what you're already feeling. The emotion in this one builds and I want to know when it hits you. Hit subscribe so you don't miss what comes next. And now Fort Worth, Texas, February 1974. Fort Worth in 1974 was a city that still felt like a collection of tight-knit neighborhoods rather than one big place. The south side working families, tree-lined streets, Friday night football games was the kind of area where teenagers knew each other's names and parents knew each other's faces. Carla Jan Walker grew up in the middle of all of it. She was a junior at Western Hills High School, 4 feet 11 inches tall, 100 pounds, brown hair, blue eyes. Her sister Cindy would later describe her simply as a little spitfire. She was a cheerleader. She played on the tennis team. She was the kind of person who animated a room without trying to, who made people feel like the version of themselves they actually wanted to be. Her parents, Lupe and his wife, had built a life on the south side that revolved around their kids. Carla was one of the things at the center of it. On the evening of February 16th, 1974, a Thursday, Valentine's Day, Carla went to a dance at Western Hills High School with her boyfriend, Rodney McCoy. It was the kind of night that is supposed to be ordinary in the best way. Music, friends, a date, the easy happiness of being 17 and having nowhere more important to be. After the dance, Rodney drove to the Brunswick Ridgelia Bowl on South Hewlin Street. They needed to use the restrooms. He parked behind the building. Carla leaned back against the passenger door. They had no reason to hurry. They were parked in a dark lot a little after midnight, in the middle of what was supposed to be a perfect Valentine's night, and then the passenger door swung open. The door was jerked open from outside. Carla partially fell out of the car from the force of it. A man was standing there, white, roughly five feet ten, somebody neither of them had ever seen before. He had a gun. What happened in the next few seconds, Rodney McCoy has had to carry in his memory for more than 50 years. The man brought the butt of the pistol down on McCoy's head once, maybe more than once. McCoy would later tell a courtroom, it was such an intense ringing, I was totally stunned. I couldn't move. I pushed myself up. Blood was flowing. I was staring straight ahead. He heard Carla scream at the man to stop hitting him. Even in that moment, her boyfriend being beaten, a stranger with a gun, her instinct was to protect Rodney. The man looked at her and said, you're coming with me, aren't you, sweetie? And then, in the last seconds before McCoy lost consciousness, Carla Walker said the last words he would ever hear from her. Rodney, go get my dad. She believed her father could reach her. That was the last thing she believed. McCoy blacked out. When he regained consciousness, the lot was empty. Carla was gone. The man was gone. On the ground nearby was the magazine from a .22 caliber Ruger pistol. It had come loose from the grip during the attack and dropped. Carla's purse was there, nothing else. McCoy drove to the Walker home. It was around one in the morning. Lupe Walker opened the door and found his daughter's boyfriend on the doorstep with blood running down his face. McCoy looked at him and said, Mr. Walker, they've got her. They're going to hurt her bad. Three days later, on February 20, 1974, her body was discovered in a drainage culvert near Lake Benbrook, about 30 minutes south of Fort Worth. She had been beaten. She had been sexually assaulted. She had been tortured, cuts to her thighs and legs documented in the post-mortem, and she had been strangled. The ligature used was her own bra strap. Forensic examination suggested she had been kept alive for approximately two days after being taken from that parking lot. Two days between the moment McCoy lost consciousness in that parking lot and the moment she died, 48 hours passed. What happened to Carla Walker in those 48 hours is something only one person ever fully knew, and he spent 46 years making sure nobody else found out. Fort Worth detectives worked the case hard from the beginning. The dropped pistol magazine was their most promising lead. It was matched to a specific type of weapon, a two-to-two caliber Ruger pistol. Investigators cross-referenced gun purchase records in the area and came up with a name almost immediately. Glenn Samuel McCurley. He lived approximately one mile from the Brunswick Ridgely Bowl. He had recently purchased a two-to-two caliber Ruger, the exact model whose magazine now sat in an evidence bag. He was interviewed. He told police the gun had been stolen from his truck. He agreed to take a polygraph test. He passed it under the forensic and procedural standards of 1974. A passed polygraph was enough to move a person off the active suspect list. McCurley walked away from that interview and back into his life on the south side of Fort Worth. The investigation moved on. Detectives worked other angles. In 1976, a bowling alley employee picked a different man, a convicted criminal named Will Hoyt, out of a lineup, placing him at Brunswick Ridgely Bowl the night of Carla's abduction. Investigators drove to Huntsville prison to administer a polygraph. Will Hoyt failed it. In the conversation that followed, he implied he had failed because the questions reminded him of a different crime, an attack on a TCU student for which he felt he couldn't be prosecuted. That lead produced nothing that connected to Carla. It did, however, produce one of the darker footnotes to this case. A man named Kenneth Leslie Miller had been wrongfully convicted in the TCU student's attack, escaped the courthouse before sentencing, and disappeared. One case tangled inside another. None of them clean. None of them resolved cleanly. Other leads surfaced over the years. False confessions, psychic tips, anonymous letters, phone calls with no clear origin. Every thread was pulled. Every thread came apart. The Fort Worth Police Department never closed Carla Walker's case. Detectives rotated through it over the decades, each one inheriting a file that had outlasted the investigators before them. Meanwhile, the Brunswick Ridgely Bowl, the building where Carla's life changed, became an ice rink, then a wedding venue, then a mortgage company. The city kept moving. The case did not. Lupe Walker spent the rest of his life without an answer. The father who had opened his door at one in the morning and taken in what Rodney McCoy told him, who had spent the following days, weeks, months, years, hoping for a name, never received one. He died without it. Carla's mother died without it too. Both of her parents went to their graves not knowing who had taken their daughter from that parking lot. That is not an abstraction. That is the weight of 46 years placed on two people who deserve better and didn't get it. Carla's sister Cindy kept pushing. Her brother Jim kept pushing. They contacted law enforcement. They showed up. They made sure Carla's name stayed in conversations that could have let it fade. Jim Walker would say years later, I've never met one law enforcement officer in the city of Fort Worth working on my sister's case who did not want to solve not only her case but all the other cases. That wasn't consolation. It was the honest truth about what a decades-long cold case looks like from the family's side, not indifference, not negligence, but a system doing what it could with what it had and the technology simply not existing yet to get there. The biological evidence had been preserved. Clothing, a bra strap, samples from the original examination, standard DNA testing was attempted as the technology became available in the early 2000s. The results came back degraded, not enough genetic material in readable form to produce a workable profile. The evidence was real. The science just wasn't there yet. We're about halfway through this story and the second half is where everything turns. If you've been watching without subscribing, right now is when you'll want to. Because what happens next, the way this case breaks open, and who breaks it, is one of the more remarkable things I've covered on this channel. Hit subscribe, drop a comment if this is hitting you, and let's keep going. In April of 2020, Carla Walker's case was featured in an episode of an Oxygen Network series called The DNA of Murder with Paul Holes. Holes was one of the investigators who had worked on the Golden State Killer case, the case that had demonstrated just two years earlier what forensic genetic genealogy could do for cold cases that traditional DNA testing had failed to crack. The production team behind the episode agreed to fund DNA testing on the preserved evidence from Carla's 1974 case. The cost, $15,000. The evidence was sent to Othram Inc., a forensic genomics laboratory based in the Woodlands, Texas, that specializes specifically in degraded and limited DNA samples. Standard testing had failed because the genetic material was too compromised for conventional methods. Othram's sequencing technology was built for exactly that problem. Their team generated a comprehensive DNA profile from material that had been sitting in storage since 1974. They then used forensic genetic genealogy, the same methodology that had identified Joseph James DeAngelo as the Golden State Killer, to trace the genetic markers through publicly available databases. The results pointed to a family in the Fort Worth area. Three brothers emerged as potential matches. Further analysis narrowed it to one. On the morning of July 4th, 2020, Independence Day, Detective Jeff Bennett was at home when his phone rang. It was David Middleman, CEO of Othram. Bennett would later describe the call. They told me they had developed a full profile, genealogical, working. They had a family name. Middleman told him the name was McCurley. Bennett said it was one of the most emotional moments he had experienced in 46 years of wanting to hear exactly that. McCurley was by then 77 years old, retired, living on the south side of Fort Worth, the same city, the same side of town, the same community where he had taken a 17-year-old girl from a Valentine's Day parking lot. Investigators didn't approach him directly. On July 7th, 2020, they quietly collected discarded items from the trash receptacle outside his home. That material was sent for testing. The DNA matched the profile from Carla's clothing. A cheek swab was then collected from McCurley directly. That matched too. On September 21st, 2020, 46 years and seven months after Carla Walker was taken from that parking lot, Glenn Samuel McCurley was arrested and charged with capital murder. He initially denied ever having seen her. He maintained his innocence. He did not maintain it for long. When investigators searched Glenn McCurley's home, they found something that needs a moment to sit with properly. In 1974, McCurley had told police his .22 caliber Ruger pistol, the weapon whose magazine had fallen to the parking lot of the bowling alley the night Carla was taken, had been stolen from his truck. That was his explanation. That was the reason, along with the past polygraph, that police moved on. The pistol was found inside McCurley's home. He had it. He had kept it. For 46 years, the weapon he used to pistol whip Rodney McCoy and abduct Carla Walker from a parking lot on Valentine's Day had been sitting inside his house. He had carried the lie for nearly half a century, and the evidence that could have shattered it had been within arm's reach the entire time. The capital murder trial of Glenn Samuel McCurley began on August 19, 2021, in a Tarrant County courtroom before Judge Elizabeth Beach. McCurley was 78 years old. Rodney McCoy, now 65, took the stand on the first day of testimony. He told the jury what he had lived with since 1974. He described the moment the door swung open, the pistol coming down on his head, the blood filling his eyes. He said he remembered pushing himself up, trying to stay conscious, trying to do something and not being able to. He told the court he felt he had let Carla's father down for not protecting her, that he had done everything he could to protect her, that it hadn't been enough. McCurley's recorded interview with investigators was played to the jury. In it, detectives asked him directly, how did you kill her? The jury heard his answer. On the third day of the trial, August 24, 2021, Judge Beach told the courtroom she had received a document in which McCurley had confessed to the kidnapping and murder. She asked if he understood that he had a right to continue with the jury trial and that by signing the agreement he was waiving that right. McCurley changed his plea to guilty. He was immediately sentenced to life in prison. He had maintained his innocence for 46 years. It took three days of sitting in a courtroom with the evidence, with the DNA, with the gun, with Rodney McCoy on the stand for him to stop. After the sentence was handed down, Carla's family gave their impact statements. Her brother Jim spoke first. He said he had managed to find something he hadn't expected to find at this stage of his life. Forgiveness, not for McCurley's sake, for his own. This is a time of healing, he said. It's funny to say that after almost 50 years, isn't it? What we witnessed is a lot of feelings in that courtroom, and now it's time to move forward and hopefully be able to help other families. And then Carla's sister, Cindy Stone, stood up. She looked at McCurley, the man who had shared a city with her, who had lived one mile from the place where he took her sister, who had passed a polygraph and walked free and gone about his life for 46 years, and she said what she had been waiting to say. I spent 17 years in the same bedroom with my sister. I knew her. She was 4 feet 11 inches, 100 pounds. You had choices, lots of choices that night. You went out to kill somebody. You had your gun, you had your alcohol, you had your whiskey, and you're still not telling the truth about everything you did. I want to know if you've done this to anybody else. You need to bring that out because those families need to know too. You have nothing to lose at this point because it's been hell. Cindy Stone spent 17 years sleeping in the same room as her little sister. 17 years of ordinary mornings and ordinary nights and ordinary arguments about nothing that now, in the long light of what came after, feel like the most precious thing imaginable. And then one Valentine's Day, a man with a gun and a bottle of whiskey in him decided to drive to a parking lot, and Carla was there, and he decided to use that. Her parents never knew his name. They died, carrying a question that Cindy and Jim were still alive to finally hear answered. That is the particular cruelty of a 46-year cold case. The people most owe the answer are sometimes the ones who run out of time before it arrives. Glenn McCurley didn't escape detection for 46 years because he was sophisticated. He didn't construct a brilliant alibi or carefully eliminate evidence. He got away with it because of a sequence of gaps, each one individually explainable, together forming a wall that took five decades to break through. He passed a polygraph in 1974, a test we now know has significant reliability problems and is not admissible in most modern courts. That one result was enough, under the investigative standards of the time, to redirect attention elsewhere. He kept the murder weapon in his house not because he was careless, but because after the polygraph cleared him, nobody came back to look. He lived one mile from the bowling alley, in the same city, on the same side of town, for nearly five decades. The walkers were nearby, the detectives were nearby, and he was right there the entire time. The biological evidence on Carla's clothing was real and intact. It had been carefully preserved, but the DNA technology that existed through the 1990s and early 2000s couldn't extract a workable profile from degraded material. The science that would have caught McCurley in 2005, had it existed in its current form, simply didn't. He had done nothing to destroy the evidence. The evidence just couldn't reach him yet. And then a television production paid $15,000 to a private laboratory in Texas, and the gap closed on a July 4th morning. McCurley exploited the limitations of a polygraph system, the state of 1974 forensic science, and 46 years of technological lag. He didn't create those gaps, he just understood, consciously or not, that they existed. He answered one set of questions, passed one test, and trusted that the gap would hold. It held for longer than it should have, but it didn't hold forever. He was arrested at 77. He pleaded guilty at 78. He died in prison in 2023 at the age of 80. He served less than two years of his life sentence. He had lived 46 years of ordinary life that Carla Walker, 4 feet 11, 100 pounds, 17 years old, on a Valentine's night, never got the chance to have. The Tarrant County prosecutor on this case said she couldn't rule out that McCurley had been responsible for other crimes. There are boxes of unsolved murder cases from Fort Worth in the 1970s that have never been DNA tested because the funding doesn't exist to do it. She said, if he did others, or if some of those cases are just related to each other, if we could get the money to test those things, we might find out. That question has never been answered. It may never be. Cindy Stone and Jim Walker have committed to using Carla's case to help other families fund DNA testing for cold cases. Jim put it plainly, our hope is that this case can help spur more testing, especially this new DNA testing, and maybe we can solve some cold cases and bring some closure to other families. In the end, a case that started with a $15,000 investment from a television network, less than the cost of a secondhand car, became one of the first capital murder prosecutions in American history to use forensic genealogy. The science is there, the funding often isn't. That gap is one of the most solvable problems standing between cold case families and the answers they deserve. The parking lot at 3900 South Hewlin Street is no longer a bowling alley. The building that was there on Valentine's Night 1974 has been other things since an ice rink, a wedding venue, a mortgage office. The city has moved around it the way cities do. But the question Rodney McCoy has carried since the night he woke up alone in his car and the lot was empty, that question found its answer. It took five decades, a television network, a private laboratory, a holiday morning phone call, and a detective who wouldn't let the file close. Carla Walker was four feet eleven. She weighed a hundred pounds. She went to a Valentine's dance with a boy she liked and asked him to stop hitting her boyfriend before she asked for anything for herself. Her last words were for her father. She was 17 years old. Drop a comment below. I want to know what part of this hit you hardest. Cindy's statement, Rodney McCoy at 65 on that stand, the gun hidden in the house, the 46 years. Tell me where you're watching from. Tell me if you knew Carla's name before today. And if this is the kind of story you want to keep following, subscribe. There are more of these. There are always more of these. And every single one of them has a family still waiting. See you in the next one.