Suspect in 1997 murder of Fort Worth woman arrested again after DNA testing, police say
A Texas man whose case was dismissed weeks before his trial in the 1997 killing of a Fort Worth woman is back in jail and faces a capital murder charge in her death, according to police.
Michael Puryear, 46, of Houston, was arrested by Fort Worth police in connection with the cold case killing of Verna Dennis. He was booked into the city jail on Monday afternoon.
The Fort Worth Police Department announced in a news release Tuesday that they reopened the cold case and were able to build on work done by previous detectives. “Recent advancements in DNA technology allowed for testing that was not previously available,” the release said.
Fort Worth police also said that they pursued all available leads when Dennis was killed, but the initial case ultimately was not prosecuted.
Puryear was first arrested in connection with Dennis’ death in 2006. Prosecutors dismissed the case in 2009, saying at the time that the evidence wasn’t strong enough to proceed to trial.
A Tarrant County Criminal District Attorney’s Office spokesperson said on Tuesday the new case has not yet been filed by the DA’s office and referred questions to the police department.
Dennis, the 56-year-old co-owner of a beauty salon, was found dead in her home on Aug. 10, 1997. She had been struck 23 times in the head with a steel pry bar police found in the kitchen sink of her Ridglea Hills home and her throat was cut with a butcher knife, according to an autopsy report.
Dennis’ body was found by her friends when they arrived at her house for Bible study.
Tens of thousands of dollars worth of jewelry and Dennis’ 1993 Acura were missing from her home. Her car was found about a month later in the parking lot of a Kmart in San Antonio, police have said.
In the fall of 2005, an informant told police that Puryear had made a detailed confession to killing Dennis, who was the mother of Puryear’s college roommate.
Police wrote in a 2006 arrest warrant affidavit that Puryear allegedly told the informant that he had abandoned Dennis’ vehicle and was lucky because the parking lot surveillance video had recycled a day before police found the car, preventing him from being identified.
Although homicide detectives said that DNA linked Puryear to the crime scene, the Tarrant County Criminal District Attorney’s Office said in 2009 that the DNA evidence was not strong.
A spokesman with the district attorney’s office also said at the time of dismissal that an investigation determined the informant’s story was not credible. Puryear’s defense attorney said that a polygraph test given to the informant was inconclusive but the examiner who made the report believed the man was untruthful.
Evidence in the investigation also seemed to support Puryear’s alibi that he was at a party in Austin the night investigators believed Dennis was killed, the district attorney’s office said in 2009.
Puryear spent a year in jail after his 2006 arrest, but had been free on bail since June 2007.
His charges were dropped in June 2009 by the district attorney’s office, just two weeks before the capital murder case was set to go to trial.
When asked in 2009 if investigators still considered Puryear a suspect in Dennis’ murder, Fort Worth Homicide Sgt. J.D. Thornton said, “There has been no evidence presented to us that would change or alter the direction that brought us to the brink of this trial.”
Puryear was being held Tuesday in the Tarrant County Jail with bond set at $500,000. A current attorney representing Puryear is not listed in court records.
This article includes information from the Star-Telegram’s archives.
