A 79-year-old Colorado man has been indicted in the 1981 strangulation death of a Texas flight attendant after investigators compared DNA recovered from his trash with blood found on the victim’s clothing.
Larry Dean Brown was arrested June 8 in Colorado and indicted June 29 by a Tarrant County grand jury on a murder charge. He was later extradited to North Texas and booked into the Tarrant County Jail.
Brown is accused of killing Beverly "Casey" Bruneau, a 35-year-old Braniff Airlines flight attendant who was found dead in her Grapevine apartment on Feb. 13, 1981.
According to an arrest warrant affidavit obtained by the bloodstained nightgown and other preserved evidence to a University of North Texas laboratory for additional testing. The examination produced the DNA profile of an unidentified man, according to the affidavit. The profile was entered into the national Combined DNA Index System, known as CODIS, but did not produce a match.
A Grapevine detective began reviewing the investigation again in 2025.
In 2026, Grapevine police asked the Larimer County Sheriff’s Office in Colorado to help collect what the affidavit called a "covert DNA sample" from Brown.
Investigators retrieved two discarded soda bottles from trash placed outside Brown’s home and sent swabs from the bottles to the University of North Texas laboratory, the Star-Telegram reported.
On May 28, investigators received results indicating that the DNA profile recovered from one bottle could not exclude Brown as the contributor of male blood found on Bruneau’s nightgown, according to the affidavit.
Grapevine police said in a statement that additional forensic testing, including confirmatory DNA analysis, remained pending.