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DNA Leads to Murder Charges Against Roy Dabney in Two Houston Cold Cases

Dabney, imprisoned for raping an 11-year-old girl, was charged with killing Hattie McFarland in 2007 and Lavenia Glover in 2010 in the Fifth Ward after new DNA tests.

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Illustration: old evidence items with blank paper tags in an archive box

Hattie McFarland was 43 when she was found dead inside an abandoned house on Davis Street in Houston's Fifth Ward at about 8:30 on the morning of February 28, 2007. She had been beaten to death, and a bloody brick lay beside her body. No witnesses came forward, police had no suspect, and according to court documents none of the physical evidence was ever tested. Seventeen years later, prosecutors charged a man already in prison for raping a child with her murder, and with the murder of a second woman killed half a mile away.

That man is Roy Dabney, who has been serving a 25-year sentence at a state prison in Fort Stockton. He was brought back to Houston in late October 2024 and arraigned on two murder charges, for McFarland's death and for the July 2010 killing of Lavenia Glover, 28. He said nothing in court. The judge set his bond at $2 million for the two cases, which means that if he is paroled from his current sentence, as he will be eligible to be in 2025, he will go straight to the Harris County jail.

Glover was found face down on a mattress in a brick house on Newhoff Street. Her skull, too, had been crushed, police said. Investigators found a man's DNA on her body but had no one to match it to. A woman told them she had seen Glover walking with a man in a blue and white striped shirt and black shorts, and detectives found video of him at a nearby convenience store, but they could not put a name to the face. "All we had was a face on a camera," said Houston police Sgt. Mike Burrow.

The name came in 2012. When Dabney was convicted of cocaine possession, his DNA went into CODIS, the FBI's national database, and it matched the DNA on Glover, police said. It also matched an older case: in 2006, an 11-year-old girl had been picked up, sexually assaulted and left on the side of Polly Street. In 2013, Dabney was convicted of aggravated sexual assault and sentenced to 25 years. Glover's murder, despite the match, was never closed.

Burrow took a second look at it in 2024 and found McFarland's killing, so similar in its details, still unsolved beside it. He sent the bloody brick from the Davis Street house to be tested for the first time, along with more items from Glover's sexual assault kit. Investigators say Dabney's DNA was overwhelmingly present. They also compared the old convenience store video with Dabney's booking photos and concluded he was the man in the striped shirt. "It's hard to call families out of the blue," Burrow said. "It kind of brings back a flood of emotions for them. But it does feel good to bring justice to those cases."

Dabney's court-appointed lawyer, Jason Marquez, dismissed the evidence. "Color me unimpressed by saying DNA is going to tie him to these cases," he said. "It's faulty science." Sepi Zimmer, a Harris County prosecutor who works cold cases, said the state was ready to take him to trial. "I think there's a lot of people out there that think they've gotten away with these crimes, and I want to tell them they have not," she said. Investigators believe Dabney may have other victims. He has not been convicted of either killing.

Sources