DNA testing has confirmed that human remains pulled from a Montague County creek bank belong to Rana Soluri, the 47-year-old Fort Worth flight attendant who vanished in March 2025 and whose disappearance led to a murder indictment against a man she once called a longtime friend, according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. A fisherman discovered the remains June 13 on the bank of Brushy Creek near FM 1749, more than a year after Soluri was last heard from.
A Discovery Investigators Had Already Searched For
The confirmation closes out a search that had stalled for months, according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Dennis Day, the man accused of killing Soluri, had directed detectives to bridges and areas near Bowie, but her body was not found until the fisherman stumbled upon it. The remains, found in the Brushy Creek area north of Poss Dyer Lane on Farm-to-Market 1749, were recovered the next day, June 14, by staff from the University of North Texas Forensic Anthropology Center, according to the Bowie News. The body may have had mud over it when detectives searched the discovery location a year earlier, the Star-Telegram report notes.
As reported by the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Soluri worked as a flight attendant for Irving-based Envoy Air, an American Airlines regional carrier, for about five years; a colleague reported her missing on June 11, 2025, after she had not been in contact with others since mid-March of that year; and a relative wrote on social media that Soluri had been on medical leave at the time she disappeared.
Day Told Detectives He Strangled Her on the Kitchen Floor
Day told Fort Worth police Detective Tom O'Brien, a homicide unit investigator, that he strangled Soluri with his hands on a night in late March 2025 after she threatened to call police. According to the arrest warrant, as reported by CBS News Texas, Day admitted to strangling Soluri on the kitchen floor until she died. The station reports that Soluri had been video-recording Day when the attack began, and that footage appears to have revealed him as the assailant.
Police reviewed video surveillance footage from the home, which included a March 21 clip showing Day dragging what appeared to be a lifeless body from the home into the backyard at 10:11 p.m., the same CBS News Texas report states. Day then disconnected his video surveillance equipment, the station notes. He and Soluri had been longtime friends who lived together for about a year before her death.
A 65-Mile Trip to Dump the Body
Day told investigators he loaded Soluri's body head first into a black trash bin and drove it roughly 65 miles from the 1600 block of Grantland Circle to an area near Bowie, where he dumped it over a bridge, according to the earlier CBS News Texas account. Police allege that Joanne Walters, who also goes by Joni Thomas, helped Day dump the body. Walters has been indicted on a charge of tampering with evidence with intent to impair a human corpse, while Day was indicted on a murder charge; both cases remain pending, per the Star-Telegram.
Day and his brother initially denied knowledge of Soluri's disappearance and consented to a search of their home, the Star-Telegram reports. Day later bragged to people in jail that he could not be convicted if no one ever found the victim's body, according to the same report. The Tarrant County Criminal District Attorney's Office had filed a notice in the case before the DNA identification report was complete, the outlet notes, and the body was sent to the University of North Texas Center for Human Identification for testing that ultimately confirmed the remains belonged to Soluri.
