Megan Curl was a kind, outgoing, twenty-six-year-old woman, the kind of person who never let her mild mental disability get in the way of living her life. Though she had been bullied by classmates as a child, and had suffered through an abusive marriage, she retained her sunny outlook and natural openness and trust of others.
By March of 2000, Megan had divorced her husband and returned to Texas from Arkansas; she was living on her own in an apartment in Lufkin, Texas, and working at a chicken processing plant. She was fond of the nightlife in town, and was a regular at some of the clubs and bars in Lufkin, where many of the other patrons and employees knew her well.
On the night of Saturday, March 25th, 2000, Megan was doing as she usually did on weekends: spending time at a Lufkin bar called The Electric Cowboy and mingling with friends and acquaintances. Later witness statements claimed that Megan had been talking to an unidentified man at the bar, a man who none of the regulars seemed to recognize. Apparently, this man bought her one or two drinks.
What happened next isn’t entirely clear. According to a few sources, Megan was dancing too provocatively at The Electric Cowboy and was asked to leave, which she did, evidently accompanied by either the first unidentified man she had been talking to, or a second, different man. However, most other sources assert that Megan simply left the bar alone of her own volition. Whatever the case, witnesses later placed her at a second bar only a few blocks from the first, called The Sports Shack. Megan apparently spent some time enjoying herself at The Sports Shack before getting a lift home from a friend of hers, who was a bouncer there.
Megan arrived home to the Fox Run Apartments at approximately one-thirty a.m. Another friend of hers who also lived in the apartment building—referred to pseudonymously as Tonia when the case was featured on Unsolved Mysteries in December of 2001—was also still up, and the two women spent a bit of time on the outside balcony, Megan recounting to Tonia what had happened over the course of the evening.
While the two women stood there talking, a car suddenly veered into the apartment building’s parking lot and screeched to a halt. Megan looked down at the vehicle and indicated to Tonia that she thought this was a man she had met earlier at the bar. She reportedly then went down to the parking lot and got into the car with this man, though at this point Tonia could not see him, and subsequently went back into her apartment.
Something was bothering her, though, and not long afterwards, Tonia went back outside and peered down into the parking lot. The car was still there, but now neither Megan nor the man was in it. Still uneasy, Tonia knocked on Megan’s apartment door at around two-thirty a.m. Megan answered promptly, and didn’t seem distressed; she told Tonia that the man had indeed been a friend from the bar. Tonia saw the man sitting in the room behind Megan, and noted that the man simply nodded slowly at her without speaking. Tonia asked Megan once again if she was sure everything was all right, and Megan said that it was, so Tonia went off to bed.
Less than two hours later, neighbors noticed smoke emerging from the building, and alerted the fire department, who arrived shortly afterward. Inside Megan’s apartment, it was discovered that the flames were confined to only one area: the bedroom, and specifically the bed itself. To their horror, once the fire was extinguished, firefighters found the charred remains of a young woman who had been tied to the bedposts.
Dental records confirmed that these were the remains of Megan Curl. She had been bound to the bed with pantyhose, her head covered with a plastic bag, and her throat slashed twice, once on each side. Her body had then been callously set on fire. It was a crime that investigator Lieutenant David Young called, “absolutely the meanest thing I’ve ever seen one person do to another.”
Because Megan was found wearing a partly burned nightgown—a garment that former boyfriends asserted she only wore when expecting a romantic rendezvous—it was assumed that the killer had either been someone she knew previously, or someone she had met at the bar and planned to have intimate relations with. Megan’s mother Sherry has gone on record as lamenting that Megan’s naïveté, loneliness, and eagerness to please may have made her a target for predatory men.
A composite sketch was produced of the individual seen in Megan’s apartment. The man was described as a baby-faced white male with a small build, with blond hair and moustache, and wearing gold, wire-rimmed glasses. Another composite sketch, of the dark-haired, white or Hispanic man with the cowboy hat who Megan had been talking to at the bar and who had bought her drinks, was also released to the public, though authorities specified that this man was not a suspect, but was being sought because he might have information pertaining to the case.
One promising lead pursued by the police early on in the investigation was the possibility that Megan had been murdered by an ex-boyfriend named Tim Purvis. Purvis had also allegedly been abusive to Megan, and in fact her testimony to his abusiveness had resulted in Purvis’s parole being revoked. Perhaps coincidentally, Purvis had been released from prison only a week before Megan was slain.
Tim Purvis was questioned extensively, but his alibi checked out, and he was cleared of suspicion. He passed away in an accident three years later. In like fashion, all of Megan’s former boyfriends were interrogated and released; all of them also had solid alibis for the time of Megan’s murder.
Long after the case had gone cold, in 2012, a Lufkin police officer who had worked on the case and was nearing retirement told the media that he knew who had killed Megan Curl, but sadly did not have enough evidence to charge him. The gruesome murder of the fun-loving twenty-six-year-old, therefore, remains an open investigation.
Crime Immemorial 