A 79-year-old Colorado man has been indicted in the 1981 strangulation death of a Texas flight attendant, with investigators linking him to the crime through DNA recovered from trash outside his home.
Larry Dean Brown was arrested on June 8 in Colorado and subsequently indicted by a Tarrant County grand jury on June 29. He was extradited to North Texas and booked into the Tarrant County Jail, where he faces a murder charge.
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 February 13, 1981. Bruneau’s boyfriend discovered her body after she failed to answer his calls. An electrical cord was found around her neck, and blood was present on her face and nightgown. The apartment showed signs of a struggle, and the Tarrant County medical examiner determined she had been strangled mid-morning.
Investigators initially focused on Brown on the day of the murder when they attempted to speak with his wife, who was Bruneau’s best friend and former roommate. Both women were flight attendants for Braniff and jointly owned a home in Dallas. Brown's wife was on an international flight at the time, so detectives spoke with him instead. A detective noted that Brown appeared evasive and provided repetitive answers. The detective also observed a fresh injury under Brown’s right thumbnail that appeared to be a torn layer of skin, which Brown attributed to a work-related injury. The detective reportedly found his explanation inconsistent with the wound.
Financial disputes involving the Dallas property also drew investigators' attention. The house had sustained fire damage in November 1980, with investigators suspecting arson. Brown, who had been laid off from his job as a Braniff pilot and flight engineer, held a partial interest in a construction company. Authorities allege he obtained inflated repair estimates through this company after the fires and pressured Bruneau to sign fraudulent insurance documents.
The case remained unsolved for decades. In 2010, investigators submitted Bruneau’s bloodstained nightgown and other evidence to a University of North Texas laboratory for DNA testing, which yielded a profile of an unidentified male. This profile was entered into the national Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) but did not generate a match.
In 2025, a Grapevine detective began a renewed review of the investigation. The following year, police sought assistance from the Larimer County Sheriff’s Office in Colorado to obtain a covert DNA sample from Brown. Investigators collected discarded soda bottles from trash outside Brown's residence. Swabs from these bottles were sent to the University of North Texas laboratory.
On May 28, results indicated that the DNA profile from one of the bottles could not exclude Brown as the source of the male blood found on Bruneau's nightgown. Grapevine police stated that additional forensic testing, including confirmatory DNA analysis, is pending.