On the morning of February 28, 2007, Houston police found a woman inside an abandoned house at 2109 Davis, in the city's Fifth Ward. She was Hattie Marie McFarland, and she was 43. On July 8, 2010, officers were sent to another abandoned house about half a mile away, at 3200 Newhoff, on a report that a woman was inside. She was Lavenia Yvette Glover, 28. Both women had died of head injuries. Each police release ended with the same line: there were no known witnesses and no known suspects.
In the fall of 2024 a Harris County prosecutor told a court that the state had DNA tying both deaths to one man, Roy Dabney, who was already in prison for the aggravated sexual assault of a child. By April 2026 Dabney had been convicted of murder in Hattie McFarland's death and sentenced to 20 years. No outcome of the charge in Lavenia Glover's death has been made public. In that case he is accused, not convicted.
Very little about Roy Dabney's life outside his criminal record has been published. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice lists him as Roy Earl Dabney, a Black man, aged 46 on the record read on October 14, 2026. ABC13 Houston, the only news outlet known to have reported on the murder charges, described him in November 2024 as serving a 25-year sentence in Fort Stockton. He did not respond to the station's requests for an interview. No account of his family, schooling, work or life in the Fifth Ward has been published.
His prison record gives the outline of his convictions. On September 14, 2010, he was sentenced in Harris County to 210 days in each of two cases of possession of less than a gram of cocaine, for offenses dated April 6, 2009, and August 31, 2010. On August 13, 2013, he was sentenced to 25 years for aggravated sexual assault of a child under 14. On April 29, 2026, he was sentenced to 20 years for murder, for an offense dated February 28, 2007, the day Hattie McFarland was found.
The child in the 2013 case has never been publicly identified.
Hattie Marie McFarland was 43 when she died. The public record says almost nothing else about her life: no obituary, photograph or family statement has been published. Houston police sergeant Mike Burrow, who reopened her case in 2024, told ABC13 that he had been in touch with her family after the new charges were filed.
The Houston Police Department's release, dated the same day, said she was found about 8:30 that morning inside an abandoned house at 2109 Davis. The cause of death was left pending an autopsy by the Harris County Medical Examiner's office. Homicide Division Sergeant S. Kennedy and Officer T. Miller were named as the reporting officers. "There are no known witnesses or suspects at this time," the release said, and it asked anyone with information to call the Homicide Division or Crime Stoppers.
ABC13, drawing on police and court documents, later filled in what the 2007 release did not say. She had been beaten to death in a white abandoned house on Davis Street, and a bloody brick lay next to her body. No eyewitnesses came forward. According to the station, none of the physical evidence from the scene was tested at the time. The case went unsolved.
Lavenia Yvette Glover was 28. In its appeal for help, Crime Stoppers of Houston described her as well known in the area around Liberty Road and Gregg Street. People in the neighborhood were used to seeing her there. That familiarity is what led to her being found. On July 8, 2010, several people who normally saw her in the area became worried when they did not, and they called the police.
The appeal sets out her last known movements. On July 7, 2010, she was seen walking with a Black man whom witnesses did not recognize. The two were in the 3200 block of Newhoff Road, near some abandoned houses. Later the man was seen again, without her. Earlier that day the same man had been recorded by a surveillance camera inside a convenience store on Liberty Road. Crime Stoppers published two still photos of him with the appeal.
The Houston Police Department's release, issued July 9, 2010, under incident number 098256910, said officers were dispatched to an abandoned house at 3200 Newhoff about 3:30 p.m. on Thursday, July 8, on a report that a woman was inside. They found her dead with visible head injuries. Her identity was still being verified by the Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences, and an autopsy was pending. Homicide Division Sergeant W. Elsbury and Officer B. Oxspring were named as the reporting investigators. As in the McFarland case, the release said there were no known witnesses or suspects.
ABC13's 2024 account adds detail from the investigation file. She was found face down on a mattress in a brick house on Newhoff Street, and police said her skull had been crushed. Investigators recovered a man's DNA from her body but had no one to compare it with. A woman told police she had seen Glover walking with a man in a blue and white striped shirt and black shorts, and detectives found the store video of him. They could not identify him. "All we had was a face on a camera," Burrow told the station.
Burrow said he had contacted Glover's family as well as McFarland's. No statement from either family has been published.
Police later stressed how much the two cases had in common. Both women were found in abandoned houses in the same part of the Fifth Ward, about half a mile apart. Both had died of blows to the head. Burrow told ABC13 that both women were sex workers, that both weighed exactly 125 pounds and that both were of short stature. Those are the sergeant's descriptions; no other published source describes the women's work or circumstances.
Nothing in the record shows that anyone linked the two deaths when they happened. The 2007 and 2010 police releases each describe a single death investigation, name different investigators and do not refer to each other. The link was drawn only when the files were reopened in 2024.
ABC13 reported that after a cocaine possession conviction, Dabney's DNA profile was entered into CODIS, the FBI's national DNA database. "Then, in 2012, they got a name," the station wrote: the profile matched the DNA recovered from Lavenia Glover's body. Investigators also identified him, the station said, as the man in the store video.
The dates in the two main records do not line up exactly. Dabney's prison record shows his two cocaine sentences on September 14, 2010, two months after Glover's death. ABC13 gives 2012 as the year of the database match but does not say when the conviction that put his profile into the system took place. No published source explains the interval.
The same database work led to his 2013 conviction for the aggravated sexual assault of a child, which ABC13 also traced to a DNA match. He was sentenced to 25 years.
Despite the 2012 match, no murder charge was filed in Lavenia Glover's death, and her case was never closed. ABC13 did not report why, and the Houston Police Department has given no public explanation. Dabney went to prison on the sexual assault conviction, and both killings stayed open for more than a decade.
In 2024 Sergeant Burrow took a second look at Glover's case. While doing so he noticed that McFarland's killing, so similar in its details and so close by, was also unsolved. "We thought that there were opportunities to test items of evidence that had never been tested before," he told ABC13.
He had the bloody brick from the Davis Street house tested for the first time, along with further items from Glover's sexual assault kit. Investigators told the station that Dabney's DNA was "overwhelmingly present." Police also compared the 2010 store video with Dabney's booking photos and said they confirmed that he was the man seen in it.
Burrow then called the two families. "It's hard to call families out of the blue," he said. "It kind of brings back a flood of emotions for them. But it does feel good to bring justice to those cases."
In the week before ABC13's report of November 2, 2024, Dabney was brought back to Houston from prison and arraigned on two charges of murder, one for each woman. He said nothing in court. The state said at the hearing that DNA evidence linked him to both deaths. The judge set his bond at $2 million for the two cases together. ABC13 explained the practical effect: Dabney was eligible for parole on his sexual assault sentence in 2025, and if he were released from prison he would go straight to the Harris County jail.
His court-appointed lawyer, Jason Marquez, disputed the evidence. "Color me unimpressed by saying DNA is going to tie him to these cases," he told the station. "It's faulty science. (DNA) in and of itself is not enough."
Sepi Zimmer, a Harris County assistant district attorney who works on cold cases, answered the other way. "DNA helps us solve (cold) cases more than anything," she said. "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. We are working these cold cases. We are trying to solve them. And we are going to prosecute them." Prosecutors said that if they did not offer Dabney a plea deal, they were ready to take him to trial.
Investigators told ABC13 they believed Dabney might have other victims. They named none.
Neither the Houston Police Department nor the Harris County District Attorney's Office issued a public release about the charges. The department's published news releases for September, October and November 2024 contain no item about the case, and the district attorney's online newsroom lists none.
The Texas Department of Criminal Justice's public inmate record, as read on October 14, 2026, lists a murder conviction from Harris County, case number 196119501010, with an offense date of February 28, 2007, and a sentence date of April 29, 2026. The sentence is 20 years. The offense date is the day Hattie McFarland was found, and the case fits the McFarland charge described by ABC13. On that record he stands convicted of her murder.
The record does not say whether Dabney pleaded guilty or was found guilty at trial. No news report of the hearing has been published, the district attorney's newsroom has no release about it, and the Houston Police Department's April 2026 releases do not mention it. ABC13 had reported in 2024 that prosecutors were ready to go to trial if no plea deal was offered; whether a deal was offered is not known. No appeal was found.
As of the prison record read on October 19, 2026, Roy Dabney was held at the Stiles Unit of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, a men's prison about four miles southeast of Beaumont, in Jefferson County. He was serving the 25-year sentence from 2013 for aggravated sexual assault of a child and the 20-year sentence from April 2026 for the murder of Hattie McFarland. The record listed a parole eligibility date of February 19, 2034, and a maximum sentence date and projected release date of February 20, 2044.
The charge in Lavenia Glover's death is the open question. It was filed in 2024, according to ABC13's report of November 2, 2024. It does not appear on Dabney's prison record as a conviction. That could mean the case is still pending, that it was dismissed, or that it was resolved in some other way alongside the McFarland case; no published source confirms any of those. The Crime Stoppers appeal for information in her death was still posted, with no update, on October 19, 2026. In the Glover case Dabney stands charged, not convicted, as of the latest report found, dated November 2, 2024.
Several things said about this case rest on the word of one side and have not been tested in a public trial, so far as any source shows.
In the McFarland case the state's evidence, including the DNA on the brick, ended in a conviction. How the court reached that result, and what evidence was presented, is not on the public record.
In the Glover case no court has made any finding. The DNA match reported in 2012 and the further testing in 2024 are investigators' accounts as given to ABC13. The identification of Dabney as the man in the 2010 store video is a police conclusion drawn from comparing the footage with booking photos. His lawyer called the DNA case "faulty science" in 2024; whether that argument was ever put to a judge or jury is not known.
Sergeant Burrow's statements that both women were sex workers and of the same weight and build come from a police interview, not from a court record.
Investigators said in 2024 that Dabney could have other victims. No other case has been publicly linked to him and no further charge has been reported. That remains a suspicion only.
ABC13 reported that police had a database match to Glover's case in 2012 and still left the case open. No explanation from the department has been published.
In the McFarland case the key evidence, the brick found beside her body, had been kept since 2007 and never tested. In the Glover case a database match had been made years earlier and not acted on. Both files moved only after one sergeant reread them in 2024.
No public statement from the families of Hattie McFarland or Lavenia Glover was found. Burrow said he had spoken with both, and that the calls brought back "a flood of emotions."
February 28, 2007: Hattie Marie McFarland, 43, is found about 8:30 a.m. in an abandoned house at 2109 Davis in the Fifth Ward. A bloody brick lies beside her. The evidence is not tested.
April 6, 2009: Offense date of Dabney's first cocaine possession case.
July 7, 2010: Lavenia Yvette Glover, 28, is seen walking with a man in the 3200 block of Newhoff near abandoned houses; earlier that day the man is recorded in a store on Liberty Road.
July 8, 2010: People who usually see her call police; she is found about 3:30 p.m. in an abandoned house at 3200 Newhoff with head injuries.
July 9, 2010: Houston police announce the investigation; Crime Stoppers later posts an appeal with two photos of the man.
August 31, 2010: Offense date of Dabney's second cocaine possession case.
September 14, 2010: Dabney is sentenced to 210 days in each cocaine case.
2012: According to ABC13, Dabney's DNA profile in CODIS matches DNA from Glover's body. No murder charge is filed.
August 13, 2013: Dabney is sentenced to 25 years for aggravated sexual assault of a child.
2024: Sgt. Mike Burrow reopens Glover's case, finds McFarland's, and has the brick and further kit items tested. Investigators say Dabney's DNA is present.
Week before November 2, 2024: Dabney is arraigned in Houston on two murder charges; bond is set at $2 million.
April 29, 2026: Dabney is sentenced to 20 years for murder in the McFarland case (prison record).
October 14, 2026: Prison record shows him at the Stiles Unit, with no conviction in the Glover case.
October 19, 2026: Crime Stoppers appeal in Glover's death still posted without an update.