FORT WORTH, Texas — The suspect in a 1974 Fort Worth strangling who was arrested this week said in a radio station interview that he did not kidnap the teenage victim more than four decades ago, but rather saved her from a boyfriend’s assault.
Glen McCurley, who was arrested Monday and charged Thursday with capital murder after police said DNA connected him to the cold-case homicide, said he drank heavily before he encountered Carla Walker.
“I was driving around, parking, drinking,” McCurley told KRLD at a downtown Fort Worth jail.
McCurley said he stopped in a Ridglea Bowl parking lot and found Walker, 17, who, with her boyfriend, had attended a Valentine’s dance on Feb. 17, 1974.
“He was hitting on her, and I was drinking beer in the parking lot,” McCurley told KRLD, apparently alleging that he witnessed an assault. “And I saw him. He was screaming. And I went over there and opened the door, and knocked him off of her.”
McCurley said he “pulled” Walker to his car.
“We talked for a while, and she calmed down,” McCurley told the radio station. “And she said she was thankful for me getting him away from her.”
McCurley, 77, discussed his intention and what happened in the moments before Walker was killed, but it is not clear in the station’s report on the interview whether the suspect explicitly said what act he was referencing.
“She just gave me a hug. I gave her a kiss. I mistook her for something else,” McCurley said. “I didn’t mean to do it.”
Walker was beaten, tortured, raped and strangled by her killer, law enforcement authorities have said. Her body was found in a ditch near Lake Benbrook three days after the dance. Her boyfriend was pistol whipped and lost consciousness when he attempted to stop the kidnapping, the authorities have said.
Walker’s boyfriend, Rodney McCoy, said in an interview earlier this year with Oxygen’s “The DNA of Murder with Paul Holes” that he and Walker were kissing in his car when the kidnapper opened the door and started hitting him.
“Carla was screaming, ‘Quit hitting him,’ so my assumption, he hit me several times,” McCoy said in “The DNA of Murder” interview. “Blood was just flowing down in my eyes and my face and everything, and it was like I was paralyzed.”
McCoy told police the attacker also pointed a gun at his face and pulled the trigger repeatedly, but the gun didn’t go off, according to “The DNA of Murder.” McCoy said Walker screamed, “Go get my dad.” When he regained consciousness, he went to the Walker family’s home, and police were called, he said.
McCurley has been held since his arrest in jail on bond set at $100,000.
When speaking to detectives, McCurley indicated “that he was as good as dead if he told them what he did. He referenced self-harm if he were to be incarcerated on this offense,” a Tarrant County assistant criminal district attorney wrote Friday in a motion seeking a higher bond amount.
Police arrested McCurley after a DNA test offered a clear link. A male DNA profile was found on Walker’s bra, according to an affidavit supporting McCurley’s arrest.
In March, police uploaded the DNA to a database called CODIS, and no matches were returned. They also sent the DNA to a genealogical database known as GEDmatch. Detectives reported that they narrowed the suspects to a family of three brothers with the last name McCurley.
In July, according to the affidavit, police officers collected trash from a bin on the street outside Glen McCurley’s house, and DNA from the trash matched the DNA from Walker’s bra.
Glen McCurley consented to providing a DNA sample through two mouth swabs. The DNA from McCurley’s mouth was also a match for the DNA from the bra.
Police said they then obtained a confession from McCurley during an interview.
———
©2020 Fort Worth Star-Telegram
Visit the Fort Worth Star-Telegram at www.star-telegram.com
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.