Crime Immemorial

The first half of 1946 saw the brief but horrific reign of one of the most infamous unapprehended serial killers in American history, one whose terrifyingly random attacks on couples parked in lovers’ lanes caused a panic among the residents of Texarkana and the surrounding areas, and later inspired, not only a popular urban legend about a hook-handed killer, but also a 1976 cult horror movie, The Town That Dreaded Sundown.

It was a little before midnight on Friday, February 22nd, 1946. Twenty-five-year-old Jimmy Hollis and his nineteen-year-old girlfriend Mary Jeanne Larey had been at the movies, and were planning to cap off the evening by pulling a short way off of Richmond Road onto a well-known, unpaved lovers’ lane.

The pair had only been sitting in the car for about ten minutes when an unknown individual approached the driver’s side window and shined a flashlight through the glass, blinding Jimmy. At first, Jimmy was not alarmed, believing that this man was simply playing a prank or had mistaken him for someone else. Unfortunately for him and for several other residents of Texarkana, this was not to be the case.

The assailant ordered both Jimmy and Mary Jeanne out of the car, and the pair noticed that the man was pointing a pistol at them. The attacker told them to do what he said, because he didn’t want to have to kill them. He then demanded that Jimmy, “take off your fucking britches.” Mary Jeanne begged Jimmy to do what the man said so that the attacker would not hurt them. Jimmy proceeded to remove his pants, but then the man hit Jimmy repeatedly in the head with some blunt object; the sound of his skull cracking was so loud that Mary Jeanne at first believed he had been shot.

Mary Jeanne then tried to reason with the assailant by saying that neither she nor Jimmy had any money. The man accused her of lying, and knocked her to the ground with something that Mary Jeanne later claimed felt like an iron pipe. The assailant then ordered Mary Jeanne to get up and start running. Mary Jeanne did as she was told, but the man ordered her not to run toward the ditch, as she had been doing, but toward the road. A terrified Mary Jeanne followed his instructions, the sounds of Jimmy Hollis being beaten some distance behind her still ringing in her ears.

Mary Jeanne saw a car parked nearby and approached it to ask for help, but noted that the car was unoccupied. As she was wearing high heels and was unable to run very quickly, the man who had attacked her boyfriend soon caught up with her. Bizarrely, he asked her why she was running. She answered that he had told her to. The man then accused her of lying again, and once again knocked her to the ground, where he proceeded to sexually assault her with the barrel of his pistol. At this point, Mary Jeanne fought him off and stumbled to her feet, telling him to go ahead and kill her, as she would rather be dead than be further violated.

Luckily, Mary Jeanne managed to escape the attacker and run to a nearby house, where she was able to contact police. By the time officers arrived at the scene, the assailant had disappeared, but Jimmy Hollis was thankfully still alive. Though his skull had been fractured in three places, he had managed to get to his feet and flag down a passing driver on Richmond Road, who had called an ambulance for him.

Over the ensuing days, Jimmy and Mary Jeanne would tell police everything they could remember about the horrifying incident. Though Jimmy, who had been blinded by the flashlight beam throughout most of his ordeal, had not gotten a clear look at the perpetrator, he thought the man was a darkly-tanned white man who stood about six feet tall.

Mary Jeanne had gotten a better look at the attacker, but she said that he had been wearing a white mask, made out of a pillowcase or a sack, that had holes cut out for the eyes and mouth. Though she agreed with Jimmy that the assailant had been about six feet tall, she thought that he was perhaps a light-skinned black man. Mary Jeanne would also claim that the police were trying to force her to confess that she knew the attacker, but she insisted that she did not.

Though investigators spent a great deal of time searching for clues to the assailant’s identity over the ensuing weeks, they seemed to be operating under the assumption that this was an isolated attack, perhaps undertaken for the purposes of robbery, and did not expect the incident to be repeated. Tragically, they were one hundred percent mistaken.

Nearly a month later, at around ten p.m. on the evening of March 23rd, twenty-nine-year-old Richard L. Griffin and his seventeen-year-old girlfriend Polly Ann Moore were having dinner at a café just outside of the Texarkana city limits with Richard’s sister and her boyfriend. It was the last time the couple were seen alive.

The following morning, which was a Sunday, a motorist driving past a lovers’ lane known as Rich Road noticed a parked 1941 Oldsmobile sedan that appeared to contain two sleeping people. Upon investigation, however, the motorist discovered that both passengers had been shot dead, and immediately contacted police.

Richard Griffin was found kneeling between the front seats of the car, his head resting on his hands. He had been shot at least twice, once in the back of the head, and his pockets had been turned inside out.

Polly Ann Moore was found face-down in the back seat. She had also been shot in the back of the head, though it was determined that she had been shot while lying on a blanket outside of the car and then placed on the back seat. Both Richard and Polly Ann were fully clothed, but because of Polly Ann’s body being mistakenly taken to the funeral home before a thorough examination could be done, it was undetermined whether she had been raped.

Police were able to uncover a few clues at the scene, including congealed blood spattered throughout the vehicle, on the car’s running board, and on a patch of ground about twenty feet away from the car. A blanket found inside the vehicle contained a .32 cartridge shell that had likely been fired from a Colt automatic pistol. Neither Richard’s pockets nor Polly Ann’s purse contained any money, suggesting that perhaps the victims had been robbed. No footprints were found at the scene, however, due to a heavy rain the night the pair were killed.

Though over 200 suspects were questioned in the course of the subsequent investigation, and though three of these suspects were detained for a brief time, all were eventually cleared of any suspicion. By March 27th, the police had asked for help from the public through a plea in the Texarkana Gazette, though they cautioned any potential tipsters to not waste the police’s time by repeating rumors or reporting information that was unverified. A generous reward was also offered for any information that would lead to the arrest of the killer.

By the second week of April, police were still working around the clock on the murders of Richard Griffin and Polly Ann Moore, and it was then that the killer struck again.

Fifteen-year-old Betty Jo Booker played an alto saxophone in a band called the Rhythmaires, and on the night of Saturday, April 13th, she was performing at the VFW Club with her band, as she did every Saturday night.

Though she would usually get a ride home after the gig with either the bandleader, Jerry Atkins, or another band member, Ernie Holcomb, on this particular night she was getting a ride with an old friend of hers, sixteen-year-old Paul Martin, who had moved away a couple of years prior but was back in town visiting. Betty Jo had reportedly told another friend that she wasn’t all that enthusiastic about going out with Paul, but that she felt an obligation to him, since she had known him since kindergarten.

Paul Martin picked Betty Jo up from the VFW after the gig was over, at about one-thirty a.m. He was supposed to drive her to a friend’s house for a slumber party and drop her off, but neither Paul nor Betty Jo ever arrived at their destination.

At approximately six o’clock on the morning of April 14th, Jerry Atkins received a phone call from one of the girls who had been at the slumber party. She asked if he knew where Betty Jo was, since she had never shown up. Jerry, thinking that it had been Ernie Holcomb’s turn to give Betty Jo a ride, told the girl that he had not seen Betty Jo after the gig was over, and that she should contact Ernie, or Betty Jo’s parents.

Meanwhile, at about six-thirty, the Weaver family was driving down North Park Road and spotted the body of a young man lying on the shoulder. Police soon identified the remains as those of Paul Martin. The victim had been shot four times, once in the back, once through the hand, once through the nose, and once through the back of the neck. Shortly after the discovery, police organized several search parties to fan out and look for Betty Jo Booker.

Betty Jo was found approximately four hours later and two miles away from where Paul Martin had been found. She had been shot twice, once in the chest and once in the face. Both victims had been shot with a .32 caliber Colt automatic pistol. Though Betty Jo was found fully clothed, later examination revealed that she had been raped.

Paul Martin’s Ford coupe was discovered with the keys still in it, about a mile and a half away from where Paul’s body was discovered and about three miles from Betty Jo’s. Investigators were not able to determine which of the two teenagers had been killed first.

At this stage, the two lead investigators on the case, Bowie County Sheriff W.H. Presley and Texas City Police Chief Jack N. Runnels, called in backup from several surrounding counties, as well as from the Texas and Arkansas State Police, the Texas Rangers, and the FBI. The authorities worked tirelessly on the case, following every lead, and interrogating every suspect they could get their hands on within a hundred-mile radius. A midnight curfew was set in Texarkana, with authorities warning that residents should remain locked in their homes after night fell.

Because Betty Jo’s alto saxophone was not found at the scene, investigators sent descriptions and photos of the item, as well as its serial number, to every pawn shop and music store in the area, hoping that a lead would shake loose. More money was added to the reward pot, and the Texas Rangers vowed to stay in town until the slayer was brought to justice.

Despite the best efforts of everyone involved, though, little progress was being made on catching what now appeared to be a serial murderer. And two days after the Paul Martin/Betty Jo Booker killing, the media finally dubbed the elusive perpetrator, “The Phantom Killer.”

On April 25th, just eleven days after Paul Martin and Betty Jo were slain, a young man walked into a music store in Corpus Christi, Texas and asked the woman behind the counter if she wanted to buy an alto saxophone, though he did not have the instrument with him. The clerk told the man that she would have to ask her manager, at which point the man allegedly became agitated and asked her why she needed to do that. The clerk also told police that once she called the manager to the front of the store, the man had run out.

Two days later, on April 27th, the same man was arrested at a Corpus Christi hotel after he had been seen buying a .45 revolver from a nearby pawn shop. Though police did not find a saxophone in his possession, they did find a bag of bloody clothing in his room, though the man claimed that he had been in a bar fight.

This particular lead seemed quite promising, but after an intensive investigation surrounding the strange man, no evidence could be found linking him directly to the Phantom Killer murders, and he was released on Friday, May 3rd, which would, coincidentally, be the same day that the Phantom Killer claimed what are thought to be his final two victims.

Thirty-seven-year-old farmer Virgil Starks lived with his wife Katie on a 500-acre property about ten miles northeast of Texarkana. At around nine p.m. on May 3rd, Katie gave her husband a heating pad for his bad back and then retired to the bedroom to lie down. Virgil turned on the radio to listen to his favorite program, and relaxed in his armchair with that day’s edition of the newspaper.

A few minutes later, Katie thought she heard something in the backyard, and yelled for Virgil to turn down the radio so she could determine what it was. Before he even had time to do so, she then heard what sounded like glass breaking. Thinking that Virgil had dropped something, Katie went into the living room, where she saw Virgil get up from his chair, then slump back down into it. Noticing blood, she ran over to him and realized that he had been shot in the back of the head, and that the closed window three feet behind his chair had been punctured by two bullet holes. Terrified, she ran to the phone to call the police.

As she was doing so, Katie herself was also shot, through the same window. One of the bullets went through her cheek and came out behind her ear, while the other hit her underneath her jaw, where it split open her lips and exploded several of her teeth before embedding itself beneath her tongue.

In spite of being barefoot and clad in nothing but a nightgown, and in spite of being partially blinded by her own blood, after hearing the killer attempting to climb in through the kitchen window, Katie miraculously managed to run through the entire house, out the front door, and across the street to her sister’s house, trailing broken teeth and alarming amounts of blood the entire way.

Her sister and brother-in-law were not home, so Katie continued running to the home of another neighbor, Elmer Taylor, who gathered more neighbors by firing a rifle into the air and then summoned police. Katie, grievously wounded but still mostly conscious and with a strangely normal heart rate, was taken to the hospital, while investigators descended on the Starks household to gather clues.

Virgil Starks was dead on the floor in front of his armchair, which had actually caught fire from the heating pad in the time before the police arrived. As investigators combed the house and grounds, they discovered bloody shoe-prints throughout the house, as well as a few smudged fingerprints. They also found a red and black flashlight beneath the window that the Starks had been shot through.

Oddly, though, it appeared as though Virgil and Katie had been shot with a .22 caliber automatic rifle, and not a .32 Colt, as in the other Phantom Killer murders, leading some to speculate that the attack on the Starks had been perpetrated by a different person. Additionally, nothing of value was taken from the Starks home, not even the large sum of money that the couple kept on hand.

Though the previous murders in Texarkana had certainly caused consternation and anxiety among the residents, the attack on the Starks farm sent the town and surrounding areas into a full-blown panic. Nightclubs, late-night cafés, and movie theaters saw their business drop by a significant margin, as townsfolk refused to go out after dark, while stores who traded in locks, fences, yard lights, and firearms did a brisk trade. The classified section of the newspaper filled up with ads offering guard dogs, and many townspeople even rigged their homes and property with booby traps.

Probably most regrettably of all, unsubstantiated rumors became rampant, despite investigators’ repeated insistence that the public keep misinformation to a minimum to avoid hampering their case. Neighbors with personal grudges called in tips about hated rivals, stories circulated that the police had already captured the killer but were keeping it a secret, and authorities barely had a moment’s rest from residents calling in reports of prowlers, the vast majority of which turned out to be nothing but wind, animals, or fevered imaginations.

Some brave (or perhaps stupid) teenagers even took it upon themselves to stake out lovers’ lanes, waiting in cars with guns in the hopes that the Phantom Killer would make an appearance. Although police investigators used the same tactic, sitting in cars in secluded areas that seemed prime territory for an attack, the killer never took the bait, perhaps because he was following the case as closely as everyone else in town.

Throughout all the chaos surrounding the investigation, a few promising leads did emerge. On May 7th, for example, the body of a man named Earl McSpadden was found lying face-down on the railroad tracks sixteen miles north of Texarkana. His arm and leg had been severed, presumably by the passage of the 5:30 a.m. freight train, but the coroner determined that Earl McSpadden had been murdered before being put on the tracks. Several knife wounds on his body demonstrated that he had probably struggled with his killer, and that he had been dead for a full two hours before the train had come by.

This crime, if that was what it was, was never solved, and some investigators and locals speculated that Earl McSpadden had been the Phantom’s sixth victim, though some residents in Texarkana preferred to think that Earl McSpadden had actually been the Phantom himself, and had committed suicide by jumping in front of the train.

Also on May 7th, a man named Herbert Thomas told police he had been flagged down by a hitchhiker who said that his mother was very sick, and that he would pay five dollars for a ride to the town of Henderson.

Herbert Thomas claimed that once he had driven the man to Henderson, the hitchhiker had pulled out a pistol and said to keep driving or he would kill him, just like he had killed the people in Texarkana. The hitchhiker also allegedly named Betty Jo Booker and Paul Martin specifically, and stated that he wasn’t finished killing. Herbert Thomas then told police that the hitchhiker had taken back the five dollars, as well as another three dollars belonging to Herbert, and exited the car in the town of Lufkin, telling Herbert not to follow him or he would kill him.

Intriguingly, that same night, a man in Lufkin named Robert Atkinson called police about a prowler looking into the windows of his home. Though he hadn’t got a good look at the man, the description he gave—of a man about thirty years old, with dark red hair and khaki pants—very closely matched the description that Herbert Thomas had given police of the mysterious hitchhiker.

And a couple of days later, in Atoka, Oklahoma, a woman named Mrs. Harmon reported to police that a man had come to her house, opened the screen door, and asked her for food, money, and, bizarrely, turpentine. She said she didn’t really have any of those things, at which point the man reportedly grabbed her by the hair and dragged her out onto the porch, telling her that he had already killed several people and that he was going to rape her. The man was frightened away by the sound of an approaching horse’s hoof beats.

The man Mrs. Harmon described, however, was ten to fifteen years older than the reported hitchhiker, and had dark—not red—hair. Police apprehended the suspect two days later, and kept him in custody for several weeks, but eventually determined that he could not have been responsible for the Phantom murders.

A young red-headed Army veteran named Ralph B. Baumann was arrested on May 23rd in Los Angeles, after claiming that he had woken up from a coma on May 3rd and had no memory of anything that had happened prior to that. He told police as well as the press that when he had heard about the Phantom Killer case and the description of the red-headed suspects, he feared that he might be the killer, and stated that he wanted to know if he had done it so that he could have some peace and get on with his life. He further told police that he had had a compulsion to hitchhike out to Los Angeles shortly after awakening from his alleged coma, almost as though he felt he needed to flee the scene of the crime.

Police determined that Ralph Baumann had been discharged from the military the previous year for mental problems, and that it was likely that he was simply imagining that he was responsible for the murders, since no other evidence could be found linking him to the killings.

On June 28th, 1946, there was a break in the case. Arkansas State Police officer Max Tackett came across a car that had been reported stolen on the night that Richard Griffin and Polly Ann Moore had been murdered. Officer Tackett waited in the parking lot to see if anyone would return to the car, and eventually a twenty-one-year-old woman named Peggy Swinney attempted to drive the car away, and was subsequently arrested.

Apparently, Peggy and her new husband Youell Swinney were quite the car thieves, and after Youell was taken into custody, Peggy confessed to police that Youell was not only a habitual stealer of automobiles, but was also, shockingly, the Phantom Killer.

Though Youell would not talk to police at first, and though Peggy was considered an unreliable witness who was legally not allowed to testify against her husband at any rate, authorities did have enough evidence to detain Youell for car theft, and while he was in custody, he made several statements that seemed to indicate his involvement in the Phantom case. For example, when he was arrested, he told the police not to play games with him, because he knew they were arresting him for more than stealing cars, and he made a similar statement shortly afterward, asking other officers if they thought he would get the chair for his crimes.

In addition to these seemingly incriminating statements, both Peggy as well as her family all believed that Youell was the Phantom Killer. Youell also admitted to once owning a .32 caliber Colt pistol that he had since lost in a craps game. Perhaps even more damningly, police also found a khaki shirt in Youell’s bedroom with a laundry mark bearing the word “Stark,” and also found slag in the pocket of one of his own shirts that matched the slag found in Virgil Starks’s welding shop.

In spite of all this circumstantial evidence, however, many of the lead investigators on the case were not convinced that Youell Swinney was their man. First of all, his fingerprints didn’t match the ones found at the scene of the Starks murder. Second of all, despite his strange statements to police about them getting him for “more than car theft,” Youell Swinney himself never confessed to any of the Phantom murders, and repeated interrogations of Peggy Swinney suggested to investigators that she was a habitual liar. Further, authorities discovered that both Peggy and Youell Swinney were probably in San Antonio on the night that Paul Martin and Betty Jo Booker were killed.

Another suspect who came to light nearly two years after the murders was Henry Booker Tennison, nicknamed “Doodie,” an eighteen-year-old college student who committed suicide in early November of 1948. Tennison played trombone in the same high school band as victim Betty Jo Booker, although apparently the two of them hadn’t really known each other. In his suicide note, he confessed to killing Betty Jo Booker, Paul Martin, and Virgil Starks, though not the others; a friend of his, James Freeman, however, told authorities that Tennison couldn’t have killed Starks, because Freeman and Tennison were playing cards together at the time that Virgil Starks was murdered.

Eventually, the trail went cold. The only other significant development in the case occurred in October of 1946, when two men repairing a fence came across Betty Jo’s missing saxophone, still in its leather case, in a field not far away from where her body was found. Though investigators hoped that the finding of this clue would lead to some kind of breakthrough, however small, nothing of note came from the discovery, and the Phantom Killer’s reign of terror subsequently passed into history and legend.