FORT WORTH, Texas — Prosecutors in Texas said Thursday that they wouldn’t seek the death penalty for a 78-year-old man arrested last year and accused of the 1974 abduction and slaying of a teen girl.
The Tarrant County district attorney’s office has submitted documents seeking life imprisonment for Glen McCurley, arrested in September on a capital murder charge in the slaying of 17-year-old Carla Walker.
District Attorney Sharen Wilson said they determined “justice would best be served” by a sentence ensuring McCurley “will spend the rest of his days in prison.”
Walker’s family supported the decision, she said.
Police had said the Fort Worth high school student was with her boyfriend in a car outside a bowling alley after a Valentine’s Day dance on Feb. 17, 1974, when a man pistol-whipped the boy and abducted her. Searchers found her sexually assaulted and strangled to death three days later near a lake near where she had been abducted, prosecutors said.
McCurley’s attorney, Steve Miears, told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram: “We are continuing our investigation of the case.”
The case had gone unsolved for 46 years before investigators reopened it in 2019. Police linked it to McCurley through advancements in DNA technology.
McCurley is jailed on a $500,000 bond while awaiting trial.
