Solved cold cases in Texas
4 documented cases.
Carla Jan Walker
Carla Jan Walker, 17, was abducted on February 17, 1974 from a bowling alley parking lot in Fort Worth, Texas, and her body was found in a culvert near Benbrook Lake three days later. The case stayed cold for 46 years until DNA from her clothing was analyzed by the forensic lab Othram, which used forensic-grade genome sequencing and genetic genealogy to identify Glen Samuel McCurley. McCurley was charged in September 2020, pleaded guilty in August 2021, was sentenced to life without parole, and died in a Texas prison in July 2023.
Diane Maxwell
Diane Maxwell, a 25-year-old Southwestern Bell telephone operator and single mother, was abducted on December 14, 1969, as she arrived for work in Houston, Texas. She was forced into a nearby shack, raped, strangled, and stabbed to death; her killer fled in her Ford Mustang, which was abandoned about a mile away with the keys still in the ignition. Houston police lifted several latent fingerprints from the car but never matched them, and the case went cold for more than three decades. The victim's brother, David Maxwell, who became a Texas Ranger, pushed for the file to be reopened. On July 23, 2003, Texas Department of Public Safety latent print technician Jill Kinkade submitted the prints to the FBI's national IAFIS database; within five hours the system returned 20 candidates, and Kinkade identified the number-one candidate, James Ray Davis, a career criminal who had been released from prison just days before the murder. Confronted with the fingerprint evidence and crime-scene photographs, Davis confessed; DNA testing later confirmed he had also raped her. He was convicted of murder with malice and sentenced to life in prison on November 24, 2003, and died behind bars on June 14, 2007. The FBI later honored the investigators with its 2011 Latent Hit of the Year Award.
Irene Garza
Irene Garza, a 25-year-old second-grade schoolteacher and former beauty queen, was last seen alive on the night of April 16, 1960, when she went to confession at Sacred Heart Church in McAllen, Texas, on the eve of Easter. Her beaten and suffocated body was found in a McAllen irrigation canal on April 21, 1960; an autopsy concluded she had been sexually assaulted. The visiting priest who heard her last confession, John Bernard Feit, then 27, was the chief suspect from the start, but he was never charged at the time and the case went cold for decades. It was broken not by forensic technology but by witnesses: in 2002 two clergymen, former monk Dale Tacheny and priest Joseph O'Brien, came forward to say Feit had confessed the killing to them in the early 1960s. After a 2004 grand jury declined to indict, a new district attorney revived the case, Feit was arrested in Arizona in 2016, and on December 7, 2017, a Hidalgo County jury convicted him of murder. He was sentenced to life in prison and died there on February 12, 2020, at age 87, while appealing.
Krystal Jean Baker
Krystal Jean Baker, a 13-year-old from Texas City, Texas, left her grandmother's home on the afternoon of March 5, 1996, after an argument and was abducted as she looked for a way to a friend's house. She was sexually assaulted, beaten and strangled, and her body was found that same afternoon under the Trinity River Bridge on Interstate 10 in Chambers County, roughly two hours away near the Louisiana border; she remained a Jane Doe for about two weeks before being identified. DNA from a stain on her dress could not be analyzed with 1996 technology, and the case went cold for 14 years. A Chambers County evidence officer resubmitted the dress for testing in 2009, and a usable male profile was developed. On January 14, 2010, Kevin Edison Smith was arrested on a drug charge in Livonia, Louisiana, and a DNA sample was taken under that state's collection statute and entered into CODIS; on September 15, 2010, investigators were notified that Smith's profile matched the crime-scene DNA. He was arrested for the murder on September 22, 2010, and on April 26, 2012, a Chambers County jury convicted him of capital murder in less than 40 minutes; he was sentenced to 40 years, the equivalent of life without parole under 1996 Texas law. The case inspired the Krystal Jean Baker Act, allowing DNA collection from certain felony arrestees.