‘She Deserves Justice’: Texas Teenager Found Murdered After Working Overnight Shift

Investigators in East Texas made an arrest in the cold case murder of a teenager who was found dead in her boyfriend’s home, but they landed back at square one after a jury declined to issue an indictment because of a lack of evidence.

Early in the morning hours of May 4, 2007, Brittany McGlone finished working her overnight shift and went to the Winnsboro residence of her boyfriend, Jeff Stogner, and his family.

The family later told investigators they weren’t there at the time. According to Brittany’s half-sister Hope McGlone, when Stogner arrived back home around 2:30 p.m. that day, he discovered 19-year-old Brittany beaten to death in his bedroom, NBC News reported.

The Wood County Sheriff’s Office told Dateline an autopsy determined Brittany died from blunt force trauma to the head. The victim was also sexually assaulted, officials said.

Brittany’s boyfriend, Stogner, denied to Dateline that he had anything to do with his girlfriend’s death.

The case went cold.

Hope recently told KYTX her “silly, goofy” sibling was “very driven and very family oriented” and “wasn’t around people she shouldn’t have been around, wasn’t doing anything she shouldn’t have been doing.”

On Aug. 31, 2022, over 15 years after Brittany was slain, the Wood County Sheriff’s Office announced a major breakthrough in the case: They had obtained an arrest warrant for Chad Earl Carr for capital murder. Carr was taken into custody the following day in Dallas and booked into the Wood County jail.

According to an affidavit obtained by KWTX, police executed a search warrant on Carr’s home just over three weeks after Brittany was brutally killed and allegedly took into evidence women’s undergarments with possible blood stains, a pair of shorts and a gray ski mask.

The affidavit alleged probable cause in the case included that Carr was once convicted of an aggravated assault that bore similarities to Brittany’s murder, he allegedly failed a polygraph test, there were gaps in his alibi and he knew the victim’s whereabouts, KWTX reported.

Almost three months later, however, a grand jury failed to indict Carr after finding there was insufficient evidence against him to move forward with the case.

Hope said she was “enraged” about the decision, and Wood County Sheriff Kelly Cole said in a statement that “injustice was done” to Brittany’s loved ones.

“The evidence was overwhelming, and I will continue to look into this murder case,” Cole added.

Hope told Dateline in a 2021 interview that her sibling “didn’t deserve this.”

“Why would someone do this to her? We just don’t want Brittany to be forgotten,” Hope said. “She deserves to have her story told. And she deserves justice.”

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