It was supposed to be a night to remember — but it ended up being 17-year-old Carla Walker’s last. 

The Fort Worth, Texas, teen and her boyfriend, Rodney McCoy, a handsome high school quarterback, went to their school’s Valentine’s dance together.

They spent the night of the February, 1974 event dancing, laughing with friends, and then cruising along a popular boulevard in a Ford LTD that McCoy borrowed from his mom, according to the “After the Dance” episode of Dateline: Unforgettable.

“I was having such a good time, I didn’t even care what time it was,” McCoy told Dateline of the unforgettable night.

But just hours later, a blood-soaked McCoy would rush to Carla’s family’s door with a haunting message: she was gone.

Discovering the truth of what happened that harrowing night would take more than four decades and reveal a chilling killer with a cold-blooded motive.

“This story took me and everyone I sat down with deep into the distant past,” Dateline correspondent Josh Mankiewicz said in the episode. “Of all the stories I’ve covered, this one may be the best example of how the truth can be both devastating and liberating.”

Carla Walker’s last night alive

The Valentine’s dance was meant to be just another chapter in their epic teenage love story.

As McCoy told Mankiewicz, on the night of the dance, he arrived to pick Carla up in his mother’s Ford LTD. 

“When she dressed up, she did it right,” he said of his beautiful date that night.

The giddy couple went off to the event, where they danced all night and mingled with friends. When the dance wrapped up, some of the attendees agreed to meet up at a Taco Bell, the hotspot for local teens on Friday and Saturday nights at the time.

McCoy invited another couple to join them and the two couples spent the night driving up and down the popular boulevard.

“We just kinda cruised around and was talking and just having a good ol’ time,” McCoy remembered. 

At around 12:30 a.m., McCoy dropped the other couple off at their car and he and Carla continued to drive around. When she had to go to the bathroom, McCoy said they stopped at a bowling alley not far from Carla’s home. Once they were back in the car, the couple began to make out in the vehicle.

“We starting kissing, making out and doing what teenagers do and her head was pretty much on the arm rest, but she had taken her purse and put it behind her head in kind of a, you know, a pillow,” he explained.

According to McCoy, the couple was stunned when a stranger suddenly ripped open the passenger door and began beating McCoy with the butt of a pistol.

“He nailed me pretty good on the first shot with the butt of the pistol,” McCoy said of the mystery man. “He had put his hand inside the car and stuck the pistol about three or four inches from my face and started pulling the trigger. I do remember clicks, three clicks.” 

The gun never went off, but by then the armed stranger had pulled Carla out of the car as he continued to beat McCoy with the gun.

“Finally she said, ‘Stop hitting him, stop hitting him, I’ll go with you,’” McCoy told Dateline.

In their final moments together, McCoy said he recalled seeing Carla being dragged away by the attacker. 

“I see Carla’s face and she—she screams ‘Rodney, go get my dad’ and that’s the last word I heard her say,” he said. “That’s the last time I saw her. I just—I went out face first in the seat.” 

McCoy regained consciousness sometime later and rushed to the Walker’s home. 

Carla’s older sister Cindy Stone remembered hearing McCoy pounding on the family’s door sometime after 1 a.m. 

“He…was bleeding from his head down his face, had blood all over his shirt too, just screaming,” she said. 

McCoy kept repeating “they’ve got her” and told the family someone had attacked the couple in the bowling lot parking lot.

The family called 911, but Carla’s dad was unable to wait for the police and grabbed his gun and headed to the bowling alley. By then there was no sign of Carla or the assailant.

Carla Walker’s body discovered

The next few days went by in an agonizing haze as the frantic family tried to find their missing daughter. McCoy stayed at the Walker’s home as they waited for any news in the case.

Four days after Carla disappeared, her body was discovered by a patrol officer in a rural culvert under the road about nine miles from the abduction site. She had been sexually assaulted, strangled and had large gashes on her thighs and legs.

“She was on her back and her clothes were torn,” one Fort Worth Police crime scene investigator recalled. “She had some bruises on her neck.”  

The Fort Worth Police Department was one of the few police departments at the time to have its own crime lab and authorities meticulously gathered evidence from the scene. Although there was no DNA technology at the time, they also carefully preserved Carla’s clothes from that night.

McCoy was with Carla’s sister when he got the news that his girlfriend was dead. 

“Cindy was holding onto me and we were both crying and you feel your heart just drop and that’s when it’s over,” he said.

Carla Walker case goes cold

Although there weren’t many clues to go on, the remote culvert where the body was discovered wasn’t visible from the road, leading investigators to conclude that whoever killed Carla was familiar with the area and had planned the attack.

McCoy told police he couldn’t remember much about his attacker, but the teen was willing to undergo hypnosis to try to recall more details from that night. It may have been an unconventional tactic, but it helped police create a sketch of the kidnapper. He described a man with short hair and a  “skinny nose,” who was wearing a green sleeveless jacket and a cowboy hat.

In the bowling alley parking lot, they found Carla’s purse and a magazine from a Ruger pistol, seemingly backing up McCoy’s account.

Yet, investigators still had to consider the possibility that McCoy had been the killer himself, crafting the elaborate kidnapping story to cover his tracks. 

To delve deeper into his story, police questioned the other couple who had been in the car about the mood that night, but there were no obvious red flags.

“The short time that we were together, everything was very light-hearted,” Brenda Wells recalled of the car ride. “We just had a good time.”

Carla’s friends, and even her family, continued to support McCoy and insisted that he would have never harmed her.

“My parents loved him, trusted him,” Jim said.

McCoy also passed two polygraph tests and continued to proclaim his innocence.

As they widened their search, authorities got a list from federal authorities of everyone in the area who had a registered Ruger pistol and interviewed each one, yet they were never able to identify the killer.

Investigators take new look at Carla Walker case 

Decades passed with no answers, until Jim reached out to the Fort Worth Police in 2018 to ask them to take a fresh look at his sister’s case. By then, authorities had been able to get a partial DNA profile of an unknown male who had left a semen stain on Carla’s dress, but the sample was so small they weren’t able to get a complete profile. 

Two new detectives tackled the case and created a list of more than 80 possible suspects, including McCoy. 

They also re-examined the possible physical evidence in the case and with the help of Othram Labs were able to build out a full DNA profile using a sample found on Carla’s bra strap and identified the family surname of the killer using genetic genealogy.