Where were you when you found out that they had made an arrest.

I was in the house here, actually the same house that you know carl was last seen in, because I bought our house, my wife and I did, because we wanted to make sure a Walker was here in case somebody had an end of life's story to tell confession.

It was kind of cod and wet outside, and I got a call from Jeff Bennet and said we've got him.

He's confessed.

I cried, mm hmmm, I got teary eyed.

You know, it's like finally right.

A forty six years after Carla Walker was murdered after her high school Valentine's Day dance, police in Fort Worth, Texas make an arrest.

For decades, Carla's brother Jim, had desperately hoped for an answer, encouraging law enforcement to keep the case alive.

The only thing I would ever accept is something that was introduced through a witness stand to twelve jurors in a court of law, not just to hang this on somebody, right and too many times as has happened, we wanted a right person.

I want the truth, the truth of what happened to seventeen year old Carla Walker had been hiding in plain sight?

Was it someone who knew Carla or a complete stranger?

At one point police even jailed someone for the crime, but the case always went cold.

Now detectives had their first big break in years.

This is America's crime Lab.

I'm Alan Lance Lesser.

This is the final chapter of the Carla Walker case.

If you missed the previous episodes, please go back and listen.

Producer Katherine Finalosa is here with me.

Hey, Katherine, Hi, Ayleen.

So Catherine, where we were at?

There's new DNA testing of the dress Carlo was wearing the night she was attacked, and it's pointing to a local father of two.

Yeah, his name is Glenn McCurley junior.

Right, And Detective Jeff Bennett and his partner go to question Glenn because they want a DNA swab of his mouth.

Exactly, so they need to confirm his identity and compare it to the DNA that was found at the crime scene.

And initially Glenn's like, I'm not into giving over my DNA, but he he does.

He gives him a sample.

And what did it show?

Well, it shows that Glenn mccurley's DNA matches the DNA that was found on Carla's dress back in nineteen seventy four.

Oh my god, that's a big deal because that suggests, I mean, that points to him to potentially being the killer.

If his semen as on her dress mixed with Carla's DNA.

That pretty much confirms that Glenn was likely the person who raped Carla.

But it doesn't mean that he's the person who killed her.

M If you're going to believe Rodney, Carla's boyfriend at the time, he wasn't sure if there was one guy who pulled Carla out of the car or two.

Right, And I remember that Paul Holds, the investigator, said Rodney gave conflicting statements about what happened that night.

Yeah, and Glenn's in trouble here because his alibi doesn't shake out right, because his wife, Judy was out of town, so there's no way he could have been driving her around.

But I mean, does that make him a killer?

That alone does not make him a killer.

So what happens now?

So at this point, the police they have enough evidence to arrest him.

Which came to quite a shock to his wife.

Unfortunately, she was present when he was being arrested and he was brought to us for us to interview him.

And there is video that I've watched of the interrogation in the police department, and I have to say, Allen, it is so wild.

He's in his late seventies at this point.

He is a very large man.

He's tall, broad shoulders.

This is a guy who looks like he's been working with his hands his whole life.

And watching the video of him in this small interrogation room with Jeff Bennett and his partner, and maybe I've seen too many TV crime shows where there's good cop, bad cop, and you know there's some cop leaning over the table with his finger in the face of the suspect.

This was not that.

They're actually sitting very close to Glenn, to the point of where like their knees are almost touching.

Wow.

They're very gently asking him questions.

Do you remember Carla?

He starts out by saying, I don't know Carla.

I've never seen her.

Showed her a picture of Carla to Glenn said he didn't recognize her.

After some more questioning, he starts to say, you know, I did go to the Bowling Alley parking lot that night and I had been out having a few drinks.

And now remember the night that it happened.

Rodney and Carla gone to the dance, cruised around town with some friends.

They dropped the friends off.

They went to the Bowling Alley so that Carla could use the bathroom.

And the Bowling Alley parking lot is pretty empty.

It is very dark.

Glenn says, yep, I do actually remember pulling into the parking lot and I parked my car and I heard a woman screaming for help, and I realized she was being attacked by this guy in a car next to me, and so yes, I did open the door and I rescued her.

Wait what and I pulled her out of the car and saved her from an attack from this guy.

And left my semen on her address.

What he knows that he's being arrested because there was his DNA on Carla's dress, and so Detective Bennett asked him that, well, how did your semen get onto her clothing?

And Glenn says, oh, well, I was going to give her a ride home and save her from this guy who was attacking her, and she was so thankful, and you know, frankly, we hit it off and we had sex and it was totally consensual and I did not attack her.

She was just so thankful that I had saved her.

Also, is he saying then that it was Rodney attacking her or somebody else came.

He was saying that Rodney was the one attacking her in the car, which is not totally far fetched.

Rodney was on the suspect list.

There were lots of people who thought Rodney was the one who killed Carla.

Okay, Carla was being attacked and then you had some kind of sexual interaction with her, and then she was found murdered.

So she was attacked by two separate people that night or two separate times.

That just makes no sense.

So he initially doesn't have an answer as to what happened to Carla after they had sex.

So Jeff and his partner keep questioning Glenn.

In the video of their interrogation, he's at this point sort of slumped over and he starts crying.

He eventually did admit to killing Carla and that he had choked her, confess to that.

It took him quite a while to confess to raping her.

He admits it.

He admits it.

Why, I mean, how did they get him to do that?

Was?

He just resigned, like what?

How did that happen?

He looks broken down and it looks like he's just kind of run out of explanations and he starts to cry.

And at this point in the video, you see Jeff Bennett and his partner Leah slide their chairs even closer to Glenn, and Leah has her hand on Glenn's arm.

Jeff sort of taps Glenn's knee, oh my gosh, and they're almost comforting him.

Jeff is very careful not to prompt Glenn with any details of where Carla was found.

They just keep.

Very gently asking him more questions.

And Jeff asks him about the location where Carlo's body was found that evening, which, if you remember, she was found on the outskirts of Fort Worth, down a fairly rural road, and her body was then placed half hidden inside a cattle culvert.

I said, mister McCurley, I said, why did you select the spot you did to place Carlo's body?

Because I knew that it took a lot of work to get her down into that calvert and over that barbed wire, and there's no street lights out there.

It's completely dark.

It's file lake.

I didn't want to describe the area for him, but I wanted him to tell me.

So, why did you select the spot you did?

And he goes, well, you drive down this road, Granbury Road, and you go off to the right and there's this building there and I placed it up against this building in this bush.

I said, no, mister McCurley, that's not where Carla's body was placed.

Why did you select the spot you did to place Carla's body?

And this is another goosebump moment.

I said, mister McCurley, are you sure you're not getting this confused with somebody else you've done this too.

And he pauses and he looks up and he goes, I don't think so.

Which I knew at that moment that this was not the only person that Glenn McCurley has murdered.

You might remember that the year before Carlo's murder, another young woman was attacked.

There was a victim, Becky Martin.

Becky was abducted from her vehicle as she was leaving school getting into her car.

She was murdered in February and she was also found in a calvert almost identical to.

Carla's detective Jeff Bennett says there were a few other cases of young women who were also abducted from their cars and their bodies were dumped in rural areas outside of Fort Worth.

Two of those their purses were found within a mile of mccurley's home.

Oh my god.

A couple of them had been very similar to Carla, strangled with their bras.

Another thing that struck Jeff Bennett was now we know Carla was wearing a powdered blue dress the night she was murdered, but when police were questioning Glenn, he said, nah, uh, she was wearing pedal pushers and saddle shoes.

What.

All of this led detectives to feel that Carla was not Glenn's only victim.

We have a strong suspicion that Glenn's responsible for not just several murders in our city, but he was also a truck driver.

He had a route from Fort Worth out to California and back, so we have a strong feeling that he could be responsible for other murders.

Now, the DNA match off of Carla's dress is what's giving detectives confidence that Glenn's confession is real.

So they've uncovered a serial killer.

They've literally stumbled across this guy who it sounds like, committed a variety of murders.

Oh my god, I mean, what did Jeff Bennett think in that moment?

You don't start off abducting a young lady out of her car with her boyfriend being willing to assault the boyfriend.

You've built up to this, and you've got a high level of confidence to commit this kind of crime.

And that was further evidence for me that when he responded with I don't think so that this was not his only offense like this.

Do they ask him about his gun?

They do.

I said, Glenn, I know that you had this gun.

Your gun wasn't stolen.

I know you have it.

And he just dropped his head and he looked up and he goes, I've still got it.

And I said, Glenn, where's the gun?

I said, is it in your house?

And he said yes?

And I said, tell me where in your.

House it is.

And Glenn says, yeah, I added a room to my house.

And if you go to my house, go into that room and there's a ceiling panel, and if you push up on the ceiling panel, you'll find the gun.

And it's wrapped in a towel.

Oh my god, Jeff goes.

He finds the gun exactly where Glenn said it was.

So he'd just been hiding the gun for almost fifty years in his house in a room that he built with the secret little spot.

Not only that, Glenn and his wife, Judy, they had two boys.

Glenn's two sons went to the same high school where Carla, her older sister Cindy, and her younger brother Jim went, and they were in high school at the same time when Carlo's brother Jim was in high school.

So pretty much every day after Carla was killed, Glenn drove his sons to high school and drove by the Walker house.

Oh my god.

So let me get this straight.

We've got the DNA on Carla's dress that matches Glenn McCurley.

He's also confessed to the murder.

Ultimately, it needs to go to trial because unless someone is convicted of Carlo's crime, it's still not solved.

That is so true, even if you have a confession or you have a ton of evidence.

It's also a matter of exactly what is permissible in court, how a jury interprets the information, The arguments the lawyers.

Make and Alan, you can't forget about Rodney, Carla's boyfriend at the time.

I mean, remember there was so much suspicion swirling around him that he moved from Fort Worth up to Alaska.

So either you believe him and he's also a victim in all of this, or you think he's just telling a really great story.

So it's not just about finding out who did this to Carla, but it could also prove someone else's innocence.

Yeah, it does feel like the implications of this trial are huge, and that this does go beyond just finding the truth, which is so important, but it's also it's about everyone's perspective and perception and therefore how people continue to live with what happened and cope exactly.

And there's another thing that is pretty groundbreaking about the upcoming trial of Glenn mccurly.

It will be the first time that this new DNA technology that authorm has developed will be tested in a court case.

So we don't even know for sure if this DNA evidence will be accepted by the jury or permitted in court, or exactly how this will all go down.

We don't, So it goes to trial and even though Glenn mccurly confessed at the police station in front of detective Jeff Bennett and his partner Leah to strangling and raping Carla, he pleads not guilty.

That's surprising given the whole confession.

I know, and maybe I'm naive, but I just assumed that it wouldn't even go to trial because he.

Confessed and they would just have some sort of deal.

Yeah, but he pleads not guilty, so he must have maybe been thinking there was a chance he'd be acquitted.

And who knows, since this is new DNA technology, maybe it won't be admissible, or even if it is admissible, it's not compelling to the jury.

So maybe if you're Glenn, you're really rolling the dice right.

Because he has been living in the community, married to the same woman for fifty plus years.

A lot of people at his church have stories about him, you know, helping fix their car when it broke down, giving them rights places.

It's not like this is the guy that everybody's like, Oh, we always knew something creepy, you know, something was off with him.

I will say, though, the more I consume media about true crime, the more it does blow my mind, how so often it is someone that you don't suspect, or, as they say in the office, the person you most medium suspect.

It's not necessarily the person in the room who's behaving in a really wild way or is extremely creepy.

I mean, maybe sometimes it is, but so often it's someone embedded in the community who is seen as dependable.

And as you can imagine, the courtroom is packed, Yeah, absolutely packed, and Carlo's family's there, Rodney's there, her boyfriend at the time, and the Cowtown Chicks the four women who bonded over Carla's case and investigated it on their own, and then Glenn mccurley's family is there.

Detective Jeff Bennett testifies, and they a lot of Glenn mccurley's taped confession from the police station during the trial.

Interesting, So, wait, how does the gun play into all this?

Was that brought up in court, because that's also another very compelling piece of evidence against Glenn.

Yeah, they do bring the gun out and they show it to the jury.

The next morning, everyone arrives at the courthouse.

I think it's day three of the trial, and it's kind of off to a slow start.

There's some delay for some reason, and Kathleen Barnett, one of the Cowtown chicks, she notices something.

I saw mccurly.

He was kind of shuffling in his wheelchair, you know, like people do, and he stopped at the clerk's disk and he raised his hand and I was like, oh my god, he's plaiting.

He's plating us, telling everybody around he's plaiting.

They're like pleading to what.

I was like, get the order.

So after all that, Glenn decides to plead guilty.

Why do you think he did that?

I have no idea, but Detective Jeff Bennett has a theory.

I think he didn't want the jurors making the decision for him.

I think he still wanted to maintain control, and so he pled guilty.

There's a stunned silence from everyone at the courthouse, and Kathleen Barnett looks over at Glenn's family, at his wife and.

Son, and there was Judy and Roddy mccurly sitting there and I recognized them from all the flew thing.

We of course done once the announcement, but I walked up to Roddy and I said, I'm sorry for what your family's going through.

How does that impact Glenn mccurley's children, who you know are adults now, but defined out that your dad committed this horrible murder and here he's your dad.

I could just see how that would really impact your identity, how you see yourself, your whole childhood, who you are.

Oh my god, you have to be like rethinking everything, Like my entire life is like a lie.

Yeah, like this person that I have spent you know, the most time with of your parents and I didn't even know this person.

Like living with a monster and having absolutely no idea.

I mean, you must be questioning yourself everything.

Yeah.

So Kathleen's talking to Roddy, Glenn's son, and.

He stood up to talk to me, and I said, I know Jim will want to meet you.

Kathleen can see that Jim, Carla's brother is kind of stuck going through security, but once he makes it through, she calls him over to where she and Roddy are standing.

And Jim just started talking to him and they both started crying.

And Jim Walker hugged Lemo Curly's son, and when he was embracing Roddy, he just he told Roddy you're as much of a victim as my family in this.

Roddy had no idea that his father was a murderer, and this was all just a shock to him and rocked his world.

And Roddy absolutely, I mean, he's a victim like so many other people in this.

So for Jim to make that gesture of approaching him and kind of acknowledging how painful this must be for the person who is the son of Glenn mccurly and to face him and say that, I mean, that is truly powerful.

And like such a sign of compassion.

Like I don't know if I'd be able to do that.

I mean, I know it's not Roddy's fault Glenn's son that his dad did this, But that's a really open heart to have, because it's easy.

You could just direct more of the anger that you have about your sister's brutal murder toward one of Glenn's family members and to literally embrace him.

I mean, that's it's courageous and it's compassionate.

I don't know, I don't know how many people could do that.

Yeah, Yeah, God works, God has a sense of unior.

Jim told me that since the trial, He and Roddy have actually gotten to know each other.

He's a personal friend.

We've had dinner together, Thanksgiving dinner together.

He's welcome at my house anytime.

He's a good man.

And he was devastated as well.

His dad committed a vicious crime on him as well, meaning all that his dad had done had victimized his family.

Yeah, it's funny how God works good come out of evil.

Jim has spent a lot of time reflecting about what all of this Carlo's murder and his obsession with finding her killer has done to him personally.

I spent so many years hating, right, raging.

I mean, it was the dream of mine.

I would talk to God a whole lot, just nor let me know who it is, and he'll disappear and I'll take care of it.

The things I thought that I knew I wanted to do would were sadistic and horrible.

I had lost my mom, lost my dad.

Uh took care of my mom for a long time.

I used to kiss her before she went to sleep at nighttime and tell her, Hey, we're going to catch the guy.

We're gonna get him.

We're gonna get him.

Everything changed, Everything changed in my life.

I can see how his anger was probably tearing him apart.

So what changed, Yeah, it was.

I mean, Jim's anger was always there, just right under the surface, and it got to the point where he was starting to become worried about what he might do.

So he said he was pretty desperate and the last thing he could think of was to turn to his faith.

Had to give it all to God or I wouldn't have been here.

I'm a believer, and because of that, I was required to forgive.

Right.

Forgiving doesn't mean forgetting.

You don't have to forget.

But when somebody has done you, you know, calls such pain, such wrong, we all need to forgive the person.

Doesn't mean anything the bad guy did was right.

But what happens is when you forgive somebody for doing horrificly harmful things to you or your family or loved ones, is you take the power away from that person, from them controlling you.

Right.

And I learned quickly that forgiveness is not necessarily for the person who hurts you.

It's kind of for you because you're taking control back.

You're not letting some boogeyman control your life.

Right.

Glenn McCurley is sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

He ends up dying in twenty twenty three of natural causes.

But Detective Jeff Bennett is still investigating the murders of the other young women fort Worth because he thinks they could be more of Glenn's victims.

And what about Rodney, Carla's boyfriend.

I mean, he was a suspect for almost fifty years.

How did he react all this?

I know?

I mean this case is really as much about convicting who killed Carla as exonerating Rodney.

I mean, he had lost his relationship with the Walker family when Carla died.

He distanced himself from friends and moved up to Alaska.

I mean, he really moved away from every everything he knew.

And Kathleen, the cowtown Chick, I think she explains it best when she spoke to Rodney after Glenn's guilty plea.

It was just like the whole weight of the world.

You could just hear it in his voice.

His life was changed.

So after court that day, Carla's family and friends decide to walk across the street to a restaurant and they invite the Cowtown Chicks, Kathleen and Diane and Detective Bennett and his partner, Detective Leah Wagner, and they all just sort of want to get together and process what's just happened.

And remember the promise ring.

Yeah, the one that Rodney so many years earlier had given to Carla that they found by Carla's body.

Some people saw it as a sign of Rodney's guilt.

We still had the promise ring in evidence.

My partner, Leah, she asked me, She goes, how do you feel about us giving that ring back to Rodney?

And I said, you know what, I think that's a great.

Idea, Diane said.

While everyone's gathering in the back room of this restaurant, it turns out that detectives Bennett and Wagner actually head back to the police station to pick up the promise ring.

She opened up this little box that she had taken out of her pocket, and it was the promise ring that Rodney had given Harla, and it had been in evidence all that time, and she went and gave it to him, and of course we were all in tears then, you know, and clapping and cheering for because I guess that was kind of her way of saying she was sorry.

This case went unsolved for forty six years, and it makes you wonder how much longer it would have just sat there without forensic genetic genealogy.

And that got Kristin Middelman from authoram thinking.

She met Jim Walker and listening to what this whole ordeal did to him and his family, It literally left her in tears and she was like, wait a second, why doesn't every single victim and family have access to this technology.

He knew exactly the number of days to the day that his sister was taken.

I think he said nineteen two hundred and ninety eight days ago.

He was counting the days, and it was just one of those extremely overwhelming moments where you can see the impact that one DNA test has on the world.

And it showed me why every case should get the best chance of being solved.

And I'm pretty sure it's out of her wheelhouse, but she was like a woman on a mission, and she met with lawmakers to introduce a bill in Congress and it's called the Carla Walker Act.

What we realized is there needed to be a dedicated plot of funding that law enforcement could go to when their case had reached a DNA dead end, and there was no answer through traditional DNA testing whether it was a victim that was unidentified or a perpetrator that was unidentified that they could go to and say, look, I have DNA, it's suitable for this technology.

Can I please have some funding to run this more advanced DNA testing.

The Carla Walker Act would also funnel money to state crime labs so they could do this type of forensic genetic genealogy in health, and it would regulate the industry, so right now labs don't have to share how successful they are at testing DNA from crime scenes.

When you go to a doctor, they're using a treatment on you that they have metrics for, that they have put through clinical trials, and they know that kind of treatment has helped others with your disorder in the past and is effective.

You wouldn't want a doctor to use a treatment that worked one percent of the time when there's a treatment out there that could work ninety five percent of the time.

In fact, it would be called medical malpractice.

Why don't we have that concept in forensics?

And in Carla's case, they almost ran out of DNA when the initial lab destroyed so much of it but had no results.

So if you're a detective, that's incredibly confusing because you're not a scientist, but you have to rely on a lab to test the evidence.

So yeah, I would want to have a way to make sure the lab can prove that it's effective.

There's a lot in stake.

There's even more than that in stake if the perpetrator is still living and hasn't aged out of crime.

Identifying a perpetrator in seven years versus seven days prevents how many victims along the way.

Next time on America's Crime Lab.

And man, this guy burned alive in this boat, not as heinous right like there was.

There's no if fans or busts.

He burned up alive.

I don't think people understand the magnitude of the problem.

People don't realize that there are literally tens of thousands of bodies that are not identified and will probably never get identified.

They told me that he had a daughter, and so that's when I immediately just started thinking, my banda, she know where her dad's been this whole time.

America's Crime Lab is produced by Rococo Punch for Kaleidoscope.

Erica Lance is our story editor, and sound design is by David Woji.

Our producing team is Catherine Fedalosa and Jessica Albert.

Our executive producers are Kate Osborne, Mangesh Hadi Gadour and David and Kristin Middleman and from iHeart Katrina Norvell and Ali Perry.

Special thanks to Connell Byrne, Will Pearson, Kerry Lieberman, Nikki Etoor, Nathan Etowski, John Burbank, and the entire team at Authorm.

I'm Alan Lance Lesser, thanks for listening.

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