Brenda Darnell McLerran Smith

For nearly four decades, the family of Brenda Darnell McLerran Smith lived in a state of agonizing uncertainty. Her younger brother, Floyd McLerran, remembered his sister disappearing after leaving their parents' home in the mid-1980s. Brenda, a 36-year-old female, had planned to hitchhike to Dallas, a trip she had made safely before. "She'd done that before and always come back. But she didn't come back that time," her brother recalled. "We were just kind of in limbo. We didn't know what happened to her." As the years stretched into decades, hope faded. "When somebody's gone that long you assume the worst," he said. "And it turned out to be the worst."

On the morning of February 24, 1986, the body of a woman was discovered in the 1300 block of Kuroki Street, near Hillside Park in Fort Worth, Texas. An autopsy determined she had been manually strangled to death. With no identification and no leads to her identity, investigators were at a dead end. The unknown woman, who was just one day past her 36th birthday, was entered into the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System as UP4476. After the initial investigation stalled, she was laid to rest in an unmarked pauper's grave in the Serenity Section of Cedar Hill Memorial Park in Arlington.

For decades, the case grew cold. DNA profiles were developed from stored evidence in the mid-2000s, but they yielded no matches in existing databases. The break the case needed would not come until the advent of advanced forensic technology. In July 2025, the Tarrant County Medical Examiner’s Office submitted preserved biological evidence to Othram, a private lab in The Woodlands, Texas, specializing in forensic genetic genealogy. Scientists at Othram successfully built a comprehensive DNA profile from the degraded evidence.

The Othram in-house genealogy team then went to work, searching public databases to build a family tree. Their research pointed toward potential relatives in the McLerran family. Investigators contacted Floyd McLerran, who learned that the long-unidentified woman could be his missing sister. He voluntarily provided a DNA sample to the University of North Texas Center for Human Identification for comparison. The results brought a painful resolution. On July 29, 2026, the university confirmed a biological sibling relationship. After 40 years, the Jane Doe of Kuroki Street finally had her name back: Brenda Darnell McLerran Smith.

"She disappeared off the face of the earth but now we know somebody murdered her," Floyd McLerran said upon receiving the news. Tarrant County investigators took him to the cemetery to show him where his sister had been buried all those years ago. He began working to get a proper marker for her grave. "At least I know where she's at now," he said. Investigators also learned that Brenda had a daughter and began efforts to locate her and deliver the news.

As of August 2026, while Brenda Smith's identity has been restored to her, justice remains elusive. The Fort Worth Police Department continues to treat her death as an active homicide investigation. Now that they know who she was, detectives hope to retrace her final days and develop new leads that could point to her killer. "If they ever catch him I want know because I want to go to court," her brother stated. "I want to ask him why. Because it was a senseless murder. There's no point to it." Police are asking for the public's help to solve this decades-old crime.

The identification was made possible through funding from the Bureau of Justice Assistance's Missing and Unidentified Human Remains Program, a federal initiative designed to help resolve cases just like this one. The Tarrant County Medical Examiner’s Office publicly extended its gratitude to Othram, the University of North Texas Center for Human Identification, and the Fort Worth Police Department for their collaborative efforts. Anyone with information related to the 1986 homicide of Brenda Darnell McLerran Smith is encouraged to contact the Fort Worth Police Department’s Homicide Unit at 817-392-4330.