Hi there,
php5-curl is not a dependency for Wordfence and it's designed to work without the cURL library. What we do is we fall back to using file_get_contents library. When you posted this I tested that file_get_contents works by disabling cURL on one of our lab systems. And it works great.
So if you have any more information from your web server error logs showing why file_get_contents() was not working for you when you did not have curl installed that would help us diagnose this. But on my end it seems to work great without curl, although I should add for anyone else reading this that curl is preferred by us because it's more configurable.
I understand you want to move on, but I'm also posting this for anyone else who arrives here via google.
Regards,
Mark.