Carla Walker was just 17 years old at the time of her death in 1974. Now, proposed bipartisan legislation named in her honor will provide federal funding to law enforcement to help utilize the technology that was instrumental in solving her murder.
“The technology is going to be a game changer and there's going to be so many moms, dads, husband, wives, brothers, sisters, grandparents that are going to have answers. And the most important thing is we're going to be getting bad men and women,” Jim Walker tells Inside Edition Digital about the high-tech DNA technology that helped crack his sister Carla’s cold case murder and rape 50 years ago.
Carla Walker was just 17 years old at the time of her death in 1974. Police in Fort Worth, Texas, and her family never gave up hope in capturing her killer.
Now, Jim is spearheading the charge to help get the word out about the DNA technology that can help so many cold case victims like his family.
Proposed bipartisan legislation known as “The Carla Walker Act,” will provide federal funding to law enforcement to help utilize the technology that was instrumental in solving Carla’s case in 2020.
“I missed out on seeing my sister go through college. She wanted to be a veterinarian. She loved animals. She's one of those gentle spirits with animals. She wanted to be a veterinarian. Academically, she could have achieved that. I didn't get to see her graduate high school or college. I didn't get to see her get married. I didn't get to be at the hospital with our family as she's having her first child. But those things I know are for another time in another life, I'll get to see her again, and I'm excited about that,” Jim says.
The Valentine's Day Tragedy of Carla Walker
For 50 years the Walker family lived on pins and needles to learn what happened to their loved one.
The tragedy of the Texas teenager occurred just days after Valentine's Day in 1974 as Carla, who had just turned 17, and her boyfriend, Rodney, were out after a school dance celebrating the holiday of love.
Jim Walker remembers the night vividly and describes in detail how Rodney was late getting to his home because he forgot to bring the corsage he bought for his sister and how family from West Texas came over for the weekend to watch Carla and her love take pictures before jetting off to the dance.
The dance took place on Saturday night, Feb. 16, 1974. Carla’s parents extended her curfew, and she was allowed to come home later because it was a special event.
Following the dance, Rodney and Carla went to the nearby bowling alley and that is when things took a turn.
Jim recalls just before 2 a.m., “I heard a sound that now that I know is a tire hitting a curb straight-on, very hard. I heard that, and then I heard my parents say, ‘What was that?’ And then I heard Rodney's door open on his car. As he opened up the driver's side door, there was a little screech as if a hinge had not been lubricated. So, it made a little bit of a screech noise. And then I heard Rodney yelling, ‘Mr. Walker, Mr. Walker, help me. They've got her, they're going to hurt her bad. I know they are!’ And then pounding on the door.”
Rodney had arrived at the Walker home bloody and beaten.
Jim recalls “Rodney saying, ‘Mr. Walker, they've got her. We were in the parking lot behind a bowling alley. And a man came up in the dark.’ Rodney also said, ‘I'm shot. I think I'm shot.’”
While the family took care of Rodney, Jim’s father, a military vet who served in World War II and Korea, notified law enforcement, and he went out looking for his daughter.
“Neither my mom nor dad showed a lot of emotion, but they showed a lot of urgency. I don't know if that makes sense. There was no breaking down on your knees crying,” Jim recalls. “So, they were very stoic but methodical. I tell people all the time, they came from an era where you never let the other guy see you hurt me.”
Two days after the attack on Carla and Rodney, the teenager’s lifeless body was found.
Carla was kidnapped, raped, strangled and dumped in a ditch, authorities said.
Questions arose in the Fort Worth community if Rodney had done it despite the Walker family assuring folks that there was no way that Carla’s boyfriend had betrayed their trust or their daughter’s as well.
“We never thought Rodney did it. As the timeline developed over days, months, years, decades, there started to be some questions,” Jim says. “I never thought Rodney did it. But if keeping law enforcement looking at Rodney kept Carla's case alive, then that's what had to be done.
“Rodney lived with guilt for decades,” Jim says. “He would tell me, ‘I felt like I let Colonel Walker down.’ I've been able to reassure Rodney, ‘You were an 18-year-old boy who had never experienced anything like this, kissing your girlfriend in a dark parking lot. You are a victim, and you're also a victor because you survived and because of you and your wherewithal, we've identified the perpetrator. You're a part of resolving Carla's crime, and things are going to be better because you never gave up either.’”
Jim says that Rodney eventually moved to a remote part of the country and kept a low profile.
“Rodney has suffered greatly,” Jim says. “My dad showed much kindness and mercy, and my mom did too, and Rodney was still welcomed in this house anytime.”
Jim declares that Rodney “was and still is a member of the Walker family.”
The youngest of six Walker kids, Jim recalls how his parents kept things together for the family despite suffering another tragedy before Carla’s death.
Jim had an older sister that was killed in a car crash before he was born and that weighed heavily on the family, but his parents carried on.
Yet, what happened to Carla took a toll on his mother, who he says secretly battled depression.
“She was clinically, chronically depressed. But every day she got up. Every day she did what she had to do, but she got depressed as she got mad, never saw her cry,” he says.
The only time he says he saw his mother in hysterics was when his parents had to identify Carla’s body at the coroner’s office.
As for the family patriarch, Jim says his father “was a silent warrior. He still did and took care of everybody and everything, but it was a lot of silence. We really didn't ever talk about it.”
The family continued to pursue all leads and work with law enforcement about what happened to Carla. However, days turned into weeks and eventually months then years and decades and her case remained cold.
How Science Shined a Light in the Dark
“I've never met one law enforcement officer in the city of Fort Worth working on my sister's case that did not want to solve not only her case, but all the other cases. By definition, they're determined to be cold because there's nothing else to follow up on. At that point, we'd never heard of DNA, but DNA started coming on the scene and having conversations with people that were in that world, I knew there would be a time that the DNA would catch up with the evidence,” Jim Walker says.
As science and technology developed around crime-solving, including sophistication in DNA technology, the Walker family kept their hopes alive as the Fort Worth Police Department continued trying to solve Carla’s case.
“Everything they did in Carla's case should be studied in current law enforcement classes, training schools. They did such a great job, and we knew that technology would catch up. I was not educated in that world enough, but I knew God had people out there and working with Paul Holes, who is a wonderful man,” Jim says.
Paul Holes, the legendary investigator who helped break the Golden State Killer case through DNA and genealogy, came on board to look at Carla Walker’s cold case.
Despite being retired from law enforcement and not from Texas, Holes had met with the Walker family around 2019 and heard their story. Something inside him made him want to solve this for them and for Carla.
“This is a case, I mean, to this day it breaks my heart,” Holes tells Inside Edition Digital.
Holes, who says he was working for a television show at the time where they looked at cold cases, recalls “there was a communication with Fort Worth PD and they agreed that yes, they would allow me to come in and help them with the Carla Walker case, as long as we paid for the DNA testing.”
Once the pieces were set in place, the ball started rolling in how they could solve the mystery of who did this to Carla Walker.
“Part of what I did working with Fort Worth is that we need to revisit every single item of evidence in this case, and most notably Carla's clothing,” Holes says.
Holes had Carla’s clothing sent to a lab in the Bay Area of California that he had previously worked with in the Golden State Killer case. He says they did “an amazingly thorough job at looking at Carla's clothing and found some male DNA, one spot off of her bra strap and another spot off of her dress that previous examinations had just completely missed.”
Once the DNA sample came back from the lab, they sent it to a genealogy lab that Holes had previously worked with in the Golden State Killer case as well, but it was a bust.
“The sample went to that laboratory and then the lab came back. They had consumed the entire sample and didn't get a result that we could do genealogy on,” Holes recalls.
He felt distraught by what had happened. He took another DNA sample from Carla’s bra strap, which could have also had the male DNA on it, and sent to a lab in Texas called Othram.
Othram was founded by Kristen and David Mittelmen and was the first lab in the world that was built to use the most advanced genomics techniques to identify victims and perpetrators from crime scenes.
“That's all we do. We identify DNA that was found at a crime scene, whether it belongs to the perpetrator or the victim,” Dr. Kristen Mittelmen, co-founder of Othram, tells Inside Edition Digital. “So our mission was to be able to make every case tractable. We truly don't believe it's justice unless every case can come to resolution and get an answer.”
In the past, Othram had been able to solve cases with even less samples than Carla's, as well as samples that dated back to the 1800s.
Even the most seasoned crime fighters like Holes said he too was skeptical about what Othram could uncover from a DNA sample off a bra strap.
“I was skeptical and quite frankly, I did not stay on top of the technology as I should have,” Holes says.
“This case tore me up and I so related to Jim Walker. It was like, the empathy was just absolutely there and I just wanted to see something done on this case,” he says.
Holes even visited the area where Carla’s body was found as well as the bowling alley parking lot and made a vow to the victim to solve what happened to her.
“With all the cases I've worked, this is a very, very special case to me,” he says.
For the Walker family, anything and everything was worth trying.
Carla’s parents had passed away before any of the sophisticated DNA and geological sciences could be available to help their daughter's case, but Jim never gave up.
There were nights where Jim says he would stay in the bowling alley parking lot awaiting someone to try an attack another couple in hopes to find the man who did this to his sister. Jim and his wife even purchased his family’s home, the same house that Carla last lived, in hopes that someone would just knock on the door and confess to the crime or come forward as a witness.
“When you're a survivor of a cold case murder, you become a member of a club you don't want to have anything to do with. This technology is going to let members of this club know that you're not alone now, nor have you ever been. It just took science time to catch up,” Jim says.
Then in 2020, as the world was struggling with the COVID-19 pandemic, good news came through as the man who kidnapped, killed and raped Carla Walker had been found.
Catching Carla Walker’s Killer
The sample sent to Othram turned out to be a success and it led police and Holes to a man in Fort Worth named Glen McCurley.
“What this technology did and what Othram did is, it gave the Walker family an answer who abducted and killed Carla Walker. It cleared the boyfriend Rodney, who for 50 years was under suspicion,” Holes says. “He got his life back. In some ways I'm proud of my role in the Carla Walker case, and I'm going to forever be connected to Jim Walker and his family, just because this case meant so much to me.”
Glen McCurley lived less than a mile from the Walker house and while Jim says his family didn’t know him personally, they knew of him and he has always lived in his residence before and after Carla’s attack.
Jim says that the night of Carla’s murder was McCurley’s 11th wedding anniversary. He says that McCurley’s wife and their two kids were out of town taking care of a family matter on her mother’s side.
“Was he mad? Was he pissed off because his wife and kids were gone? He's a narcissistic psychopath. It's always about him. He learned to control it after the heat started getting on him better. But I have to think he got off work, per his testimony or his statement, and he started drinking. He started hunting for somebody to do this to on his 11th anniversary,” Jim says.
The bowling alley where McCurley found Carla and Rodney was less than a mile from his home.
“He had been drinking all evening, whiskey and beer, and he just saw the opportunity and was trying to get his courage up most of the night. Guys like that, they are not brave. They're very weak. They're very cowardly,” Jim says.
In August of 2021, Glen McCurley was convicted of Walker’s murder.
In 2023, he died of natural causes while serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole at the Telford state prison in Bowie County. He was 80 years old.
“He died in prison. So, God's good. We lost Carla. But because of what happened to Carla, we're going to be able to take a lot of bad people off the streets. God's brought a whole coalition of people together who have a common goal,” Jim says.
Now, the common goal is to help bring the DNA resources that Othram used in Carla Walker’s case to the masses.
A Bill Worth Fighting For
In December 2022, a new bill known as HR 9568, better known as “Carla Walker Act,” was introduced to Congress by North Dakota Senator Kelly Armstrong.
“The Carla Walker Act is twofold. One, it's federal grant money in order to use scientific data to essentially solve cold cases. But it's twofold in that it helps deal with emerging technology and not just existing technology and how we go about testing old DNA, old genomes,” he tells Inside Edition Digital.
“The amount of technology we have now versus what we had in 1980 is exponentially different. But at the same time, when you're dealing with these processes, we get caught in government inertia,” he adds. “This is using new and emerging technology in order to help local law enforcement solve what we call cold cases.”
Texas Senator John Cornyn, who authored the bill, tells Inside Edition Digital in a statement, “This can bring closure to families who know finally what the true story is with regard to their loved one who had been lost to them many years ago and give hope where hope is pretty much exhausted – that closure would occur and the perpetrator would finally be identified, and if possible, brought to justice, as we heard in Carla Walker’s case many, many, many years after the assault and murder occurred.”
The Carla Walker Act has bipartisan support and as of July 2024 it is awaiting congressional approval.
“I don't know of anything better we can do that helps put bad guys in jail, helps give victims closure on cases, and also provides real scientific evidence as to guilt or innocence. Because the other side effect of this is there are people who have been convicted in the past that will be found to be not guilty or innocent of the charges they were convicted with. But also, it's a good way to help stimulate the government to try and keep up with the technological advances that are existing in the field,” Rep. Armstrong says.
Rep. Armstrong, a former prosecutor, says that passing the bill “is giving closure to victims. This is making sure bad people get put behind bars and making sure innocent people don't.”
About $40 million in federal funding will be delivered to law enforcement who apply for the grant to help them in solving cold cases, as well as making sure the correct criminal gets arrested and the innocent don’t get locked up for crimes they didn’t do.
Dr. Kristen Mittelmen of Othram is one of the key lobbyists for the bill and explains, “what this technology allows investigators to do is to not wait.”
“The Carla Walker Act allows for funding for testing for law enforcement agencies. It allows for funding for state labs to adopt the technology. And the third part of the Carla Walker Act, and maybe the most important, is that it allows for metrics: If you take money and you take someone's DNA evidence, what technology are you using? Are you solving the case? And how long is that taking you? And why is that important? Because if we want law enforcement to use this as a tool every single day in their investigations, they're going to have to trust that this tool works, that it's predictable,” she says. “You wouldn't go to a doctor if the doctor was just going to give you random treatments he didn't know whether it would work or not. You go to a doctor because you know that doctors are ethically bound to give you treatments that have gone through clinical trials and have helped people like you in the past.”
She maintains that this is not a way for Othram to capitalize on this as it would allow other services to do the same.
“We only work with law enforcement because they are the custodians of the evidence,” she says. “Unfortunately, the only thing that prevents law enforcement from using this technology is funding.”
For example, it costs law enforcement anywhere between $7,500 to $8,500 to utilize Othram’s services from beginning to end. For some law enforcement agencies that is a lot of money but for the victims and their families, it is a small price to pay.
“You can ask any criminal justice system, any law enforcement agency, any prosecutor, any defense attorney, any judge, is $8,000 a worthy price to pay to hold somebody who committed a heinous crime accountable? They'll all say yes. You can ask any defense attorney who thinks he's got a client sitting in prison that didn't commit the crime he was convicted of. If you ask them, would $10,000 be an appropriate price to pay to make sure that you actually have biological evidence that proves he's guilty or innocence, they would all say yes,” Rep. Armstrong says. “Those cases exist in every jurisdiction all across the country, oftentimes for no fault of anybody within the system. It's just the technology didn't exist then and it exists now. And this also allows us to use it and make sure that it gets proven up so we can keep using it in the future.”
During the last week of July 2024, Othram’s website displayed how they are proving skeptics wrong.
Using a honeycomb graphic, the company shows that in the last seven days, two cold cases were solved by their labs, 13 were solved in the last 30 days, and 45 cases solved in the last 90 days.
These solved cases showcase the lives cut short but also the families that have now gotten closure.
Rep. Armstrong adds, “This is smart criminal justice policy, which is where we want to be, particularly from the federal level. And it's how the federal government can actually help the locals without coming in and forcing too many requirements on different people. It's allowing them the resources to go back into their files and utilize the one thing they don't have, which is necessarily the technology or the funding to do it.”
For Jim Walker and his family, having a bill named after his sister, who died in the most heinous way, allows her case to not be forgotten.
He says that had his parents been alive, it would have made them proud to see such a criminal justice bill named after their daughter and that the money will help other families like theirs get answers.
“There's so many other Carla Walker cases. Every one of them are equally sad in their own way. I think my parents would've been thankful that the Carla Walker Act is being discussed and debated in the halls of Congress,” he says. “I know they would've been thrilled knowing that money is going to be provided to law enforcement agencies across this country that's going to help other moms and dads and get questions answered and bring people who have harmed them so greatly to justice. But I know that my parents now are... I know they're happy that they're holding Carla.”
