A newly released Fort Worth police report obtained by The Dallas Express sheds rare light on one of the city’s oldest unsolved homicides, as an outside artificial intelligence system offered a theory linking a 1971 killing.
The Fort Worth Police Department disclosed the documents, which detail the death of 25-year-old Brandy Marie St. Romain, whose body was found in a drainage ditch at 5100 Randol Mill Road on August 27, 1971. The case is the second-oldest cold case listed in the department’s public archive.
According to the handwritten police reports, a gravel truck driver discovered the body of a “w/f [white/female]” lying in a ditch near a construction site before dawn and alerted officers. A crime scene unit photographed the area, and the victim was later transported to a funeral home.
The medical examiner listed on the documents is Dr. Feliks S. Gwozdz, who, according to a biographical entry from the University of North Texas, served as Tarrant County’s medical examiner for a decade and “performed the autopsies for the high-profile victims at Stonegate Mansion.”
The police files reviewed by The Dallas Express did not include the autopsy findings.
Dr. Feliks S. Gwozdz
The Fort Worth cold case website states, “On August 27, 1971, a construction worker found the body of Brandy St Romain lying in a drainage ditch at 5100 Randol Mill. It was later determined that she died as a result of stab wounds.”
Despite the violent nature of the killing, no archived news reports from the first year after St. Romain’s death appear in the Nexis database, which reaches through the mid-1960s, indicating either that the case received little contemporary coverage or that local reporting has since been lost.
The police report shows wide swaths of the supplemental investigative notes redacted. The detective narratives describe the victim possibly killed elsewhere and left near the gates of a construction site. No suspects or witnesses were recorded. The victim was reportedly identified by her fingerprints.
Interestingly, the report gives a different cause of death than the city’s cold case website. The report lists the cause of death as “skull fracture.”
The disclosure of the St. Romain records comes as unconventional investigative approaches have gained local attention. Earlier this month, University of Texas at Arlington criminology students helped police identify a suspect in a 1991 cold case, an arrest that officers said followed direct student questioning, according to reporting by The Dallas Express.
In that context, The Dallas Express fed the newly released St. Romain documents into Grok, an artificial intelligence system, and asked for its theory on the killing.
Grok responded: “Based on the redacted case file and extensive cross-referenced public records, there’s no conclusive evidence identifying Brandy Marie St. Romain’s killer—it’s remained unsolved since 1971. However, patterns in the case align with a cluster of unsolved murders of young women in the Fort Worth area during the 1970s, many involving stabbing, strangulation, or blunt force, with bodies dumped in remote or watery locations like ditches, fields, gravel pits, or culverts.”
Grok continued that its “theory is that the perpetrator was a local serial offender operating in Fort Worth, potentially Glen Samuel McCurley,” a truck driver convicted in 2021 in the 1974 killing of Carla Walker. It added an opinion that two other killers active in Texas should be re-examined, including Kenneth Granviel and Henry Lee Lucas.
All three men named by Grok are now deceased.
Grok said that without preserved DNA, “this remains speculative” and that modern forensic testing could confirm or disprove potential links.
St. Romain’s case, now more than half a century old, remains open on the Fort Worth cold case roster.
DX reached out to Fort Worth PD for an explanation of the apparent discrepancy on the causes of death and for more information about whether FWPD has looked into possible connections between St Romain’s and famous killers from the period. FWPD did not respond to the request for comment.