A woman found strangled on a Fort Worth curb in February 1986 finally has her name back, and with it, an active homicide investigation nearly 40 years old. Brenda Darnell McLerran, known to her family before her disappearance simply as Brenda, was discovered lying near Hillside Park just one day after her 36th birthday, clad only in a bra and covered with a brown blanket.
According to CBS News Texas, the Tarrant County Medical Examiner's Office has now confirmed the victim's identity, closing a nearly 40-year gap between the discovery of her body and knowing who she was. McLerran was found in the 1300 block of Kuroki Street, and investigators determined she died from manual strangulation, according to DNASolves. For nearly four decades, her case sat in the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System under record number UP4476, per DNASolves, the national repository built specifically for cases like hers.
A DNA Trail Two Decades in the Making
Fort Worth investigators had biological evidence from the scene tested in the mid-2000s, generating a Short Tandem Repeat DNA profile, but the case stalled for nearly 20 years because no matching profile existed in any law enforcement database, the same DNASolves report notes. That changed only after the preserved evidence was sent to forensic lab Othram, Inc. for advanced genetic genealogy analysis in 2025, allowing investigators to trace a family lead they could never have found through standard DNA searches alone.
That lead pointed to the McLerran family, and the University of North Texas Center for Human Identification confirmed a biological sibling match in July 2026, per CBS Texas. Floyd Ray McLerran, Brenda's brother, provided a DNA sample that helped seal the identification. The sibling match, confirmed on July 29 according to the Tarrant County Medical Examiner's Office, gave the medical examiner's office the conclusive scientific basis it needed to close the identity question once and for all.
A Brother's Account of a Hitchhiking Trip
Floyd Ray McLerran told authorities that his sister went missing in the mid-1980s after she left home intending to hitchhike to Dallas, according to CBS Texas. Investigators have not said where she went or who she may have encountered along the way in the days before she was killed, and that gap in her timeline is now central to the reopened case. Tracing that route, and re-interviewing anyone who may have crossed paths with her, is expected to be as important to solving her murder as the DNA breakthrough that gave her back her name.
The advanced testing that identified McLerran was funded through the federal Bureau of Justice Assistance Missing and Unidentified Human Remains Program, the medical examiner's office said. Her homicide remains unsolved and is now under active investigation by the Fort Worth Police Department. Anyone with information is asked to contact the department's homicide unit at (817) 392-4330.
Part of a Broader Tarrant County Push
McLerran's case is not an isolated success. In January, Tarrant County District Attorney Phil Sorrells launched a dedicated Cold Case Task Force pairing prosecutors, police agencies, and forensic labs to use DNA and digital forensics on long-unsolved violent crimes, according to KERA News, which noted the effort was inspired in part by the resolution of the 1974 Carla Walker murder. Just months earlier, in May, Tarrant County authorities and Othram used the same genetic genealogy approach to identify 1984 landfill victim Joyce Ann Hinson, a case Hoodline covered after 42 years of anonymity.
Othram says McLerran's identification marks the private lab's 30th publicly announced case resolution, according to a report from Forensic Magazine, underscoring how routine these once-impossible identifications have become for cold case units nationwide. Separately, in August, the Tarrant County Medical Examiner's Office announced two more long-unidentified victims from 1986 and 2000 had been identified through routine fingerprint database resubmissions, a reminder that genetic genealogy is only one of several tools now chipping away at the county's backlog of unnamed dead.
For now, Brenda Darnell McLerran has her name restored, but the person responsible for her death has not been identified. Fort Worth police are asking anyone with information about her final days, or about who she may have encountered on her way toward Dallas in the mid-1980s, to come forward.
