![]() He drove up over the curb onto the front lawn and slammed on the brakes.Ĭarla’s parents, Leighton and Doris, were still awake, playing dominoes in the dining room with relatives. He sped to the Walkers’ home, which was less than a mile away. Rodney came to in the driver’s seat sometime around 1 a.m. Rodney, barely conscious, heard him say, “You’re coming with me, aren’t you, sweetie?” At some point, the gun’s magazine clip dislodged and fell to the parking lot. He began bludgeoning Rodney over the head with the butt of a pistol. Rodney would later say that he caught a glimpse of a tall man with short brown hair. Carla leaned back against the passenger door, using her purse as a pillow. When she climbed back into the car, they started kissing. ![]() Later, after dropping off the others, Rodney and Carla drove to a nearby bowling alley, Brunswick Ridglea Bowl, so that she could use the bathroom. They stopped at a couple of teen hangouts, Mr. When the event ended, around 11:30, Rodney invited another couple to cruise Camp Bowie Boulevard and the Benbrook traffic circle with him and Carla. The evening’s theme was “Love Is a Kaleidoscope,” and throughout the night students danced to a live band called Hydra. He pinned a corsage to her powder-blue dress, then drove her in his mother’s car, a 1969 Ford LTD, to the school cafeteria, which had been decorated with pink streamers and paper hearts. When Carla walked down the stairs from her bedroom, she was proudly wearing the promise ring he’d given her. The evening of February 16, Rodney arrived at the Walkers’ cozy home in Benbrook, in far west Fort Worth, to take Carla to the school’s Valentine’s Day dance. She told her closest friends that she had no doubt she and Rodney would someday marry and start a family. Rodney and Carla talked about enrolling together at Texas Tech University. Kid who was quarterback of the football team. She was dating Rodney McCoy, a wiry, good-natured Just four foot eleven, Carla had a thick mane of honey-blond hair that fell below her shoulders. She was almost irrepressibly convivial, “the kind of girl who smiled and said hello to just about everyone she saw in the hallways,” a former schoolmate told me. In 1974 Carla Walker was a seventeen-year-old junior at Fort Worth’s Western Hills High School. They considered him a “person of interest” in at least three other killings of young women during the seventies and eighties. And they suspected that wasn’t McCurley’s only heinous crime. They had compelling evidence that he was responsible for the notorious unsolved murder of a teenage girl in 1974. “The world needs more folks like this,” she wrote.īut detectives had developed an entirely different perspective on McCurley. ![]() One woman had even sent a letter to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram praising him and Judy for returning her lost wallet. He seemed to be a good man leading a quiet life. ![]() His thinning hair, white with strands of gray, was brushed back over his head, and his brown eyes were sunken into his face. Although he was six feet three inches tall and weighed 240 pounds, he appeared frail. A 77-year-old man opened the door wearing a gray polo shirt, blue jeans, and black dress shoes with white socks. The officer in charge of the operation, a 22-year police veteran named Travis Eddleman, stepped onto the front porch and rang the doorbell. It was the afternoon of September 21, 2020. Two of the officers circled to the backyard to capture anyone who tried to flee. One carried a metal battering ram in case they needed to bash in the front door. Approaching the house, they unholstered their Glocks. Marshals North Texas Fugitive Task Force, a unit specially trained to arrest high-risk criminals. The officers were members of the elite Delta Team of the U.S. Police officers wearing bulletproof vests piled out of unmarked cars and fanned out around a small, one-story, tan-colored home in a working-class neighborhood of far west Fort Worth.
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