On the afternoon of June 1st, 1948, a woman and her daughter rushed to a train station in Texarkana. Secretly, the woman, Hazel Carpenter, hoped the train had already left so that she could drive her daughter to her destination, but unfortunately, the train was still on the platform. The younger woman kissed her mother goodbye and boarded the train. Hazel Carpenter never saw her daughter again.
Though the case of Virginia Carpenter cannot technically be classified as an unsolved murder, as her body was never found, her disappearance is rather significant in light of one of the most infamous unsolved serial killer cases of the time. Virginia Carpenter, it should be mentioned, was not only a resident of Texarkana, but had been personally acquainted with three of the victims of the Phantom Killer, whose crimes were detailed elsewhere on this site. It seems possible, then, that Virginia herself could have fallen prey to the elusive Moonlight Murderer, though it remains only one possibility out of many.
Virginia was twenty-one years old in 1948, and was planning to attend classes at the Texas State College for Women over the summer, with a view to eventually getting certified as a lab technician. Virginia had always been interested in the sciences, medicine in particular, and had wanted to become a nurse. But a childhood illness had left her with one leg shorter than the other and necessitated her wearing a brace, making her unable to be on her feet for any extended period of time, which of course was an important requirement of the nursing profession. A lab tech, she figured, was the next best thing.
On the first day of June, a Tuesday, Virginia boarded a train bound for the college campus in Denton, Texas. While on board, she met another young woman from Texarkana, named Marjorie Webster, who was also headed to the school to start her summer classes. When the train arrived in Denton, the pair disembarked and shared a cab to the college dorms.
Marjorie was dropped off first, and as she got out of the cab at the Fitzgerald dormitories, Virginia realized she had forgotten to check to see if her trunk had arrived at the train station. She asked the cab driver, Edgar Ray Zachary, if he would drive her back to the station, and he said that the fare would be seventy-five cents. Marjorie offered to ride back with her, but Virginia insisted she would be just fine alone.
Upon inquiring about her luggage back at the station, Virginia was informed that her trunk would not arrive until later that evening, so she paid Zachary an extra dollar to pick up her trunk on Wednesday morning and drop it off at her dorm. Zachary then drove Virginia back to the campus.
At this point, it was around nine-thirty p.m. Zachary stopped the cab in front of Virginia’s dorm, Brackenridge Hall. He later told police that when Virginia got out of the cab, she was hailed by two young men leaning against a yellow or cream-colored convertible. The night was quite dark, as there was no moon and the streetlights were out because they were being repaired, so the cab driver stated that he didn’t get a very good look at the men, but he said that one of them was tall and thin, and the other stocky and short.
Virginia seemed to know who they were, but also appeared surprised to see them. Zachary claimed that he distinctly heard her say, “What are y’all doing here?” She then reportedly went over and spoke to them, though Zachary said he couldn’t hear what they were saying. Virginia told Zachary that the young men would help her with her luggage, so Zachary unloaded the small cases and left them on the curb. He then drove off, after which Virginia Carpenter seemingly vanished off the face of the earth.
The next day, Zachary picked up Virginia’s trunk at the train station and brought it to Brackenridge Hall. Even though Virginia had given him her room number, Zachary simply left the trunk on the front lawn of the dormitory, where it sat for two days before being picked up by a school employee and taken to the campus’s main office.
By the time Friday rolled around, Virginia’s boyfriend Kenny Branham was beginning to get worried, as he had not heard from Virginia for four days. He called Virginia’s mother Hazel back in Texarkana. Hazel called the college, only to discover that Virginia had never checked in or enrolled for her classes. Starting to panic, she then called around to friends and relatives before finally contacting police to report Virginia missing.
On Saturday morning, investigators began a search in earnest, dragging local lakes, organizing search parties through surrounding woods, and eventually extending the search to encompass the entire state. Virginia’s boyfriend Kenny Branham was extensively interviewed, but cleared of any suspicion. Cab driver Edgar Ray Zachary, presumably the last person to see Virginia alive, was interrogated and given a polygraph test, which he passed. Police followed up on several leads concerning cream-colored convertibles, but none led to anything significant.
Though the possibility remained that Virginia had simply disappeared of her own volition, family members and friends who knew her well claimed this was extremely unlikely. She had been looking forward to finishing school and getting on with her career, and didn’t appear to be in any trouble that would have prompted her to abandon her old life. Therefore, most investigators were operating under the assumption that she had been kidnapped and murdered. Because of her connection to three of the victims in the Phantom Killer case, it was speculated that the same perpetrator had perhaps targeted her for some reason, and it was further hypothesized that her body might have been weighted down and disposed of in Lake Dallas, which could not be adequately searched because of its size and depth.
There was a handful of sightings of Virginia in the days following her disappearance, and though police investigated these leads, none were ever substantiated. A gas station attendant in Aubrey, Texas, for example, claimed he saw a young woman matching Virginia’s description, and that she was riding in a yellow convertible with two young men and one other young woman. And a ticket agent at a bus station in DeQueen, Arkansas claimed that she saw a girl who looked like Virginia getting off a bus from Texarkana and then meeting a sandy-haired young man who she subsequently left with. The ticket agent also stated that after the young man and woman left, a woman had called the station, asking if Miss Virginia Carpenter was there. Though police thoroughly pursued these leads, they reached yet another dead end, and the trail soon went completely cold.
In 1955, seven years after her disappearance, Virginia Carpenter was declared legally dead. A little more than four years after that, police discovered some human bones in the smokehouse of an abandoned farm near Jefferson, Texas. Though the couple who had previously lived at the farmhouse claimed that they had simply dug up the bones from a nearby black cemetery because their son was a biology student and wanted the bones, examination of the skeleton confirmed that it had belonged to a young white woman with one leg shorter than the other. Though it seemed that Virginia Carpenter’s body had been found at last, the dental work was not a match, and the case remained unsolved.
In much later years, a few more clues arose, though none have gotten investigators any closer to unraveling the fate of Virginia Carpenter. In 1998, an anonymous tipster told police that two men had raped and killed Virginia, and stated further that her body was buried near a dam at the college campus where she was last seen, but an excavation of the site turned up nothing, and both of the alleged murderers that the tipster named were dead and unable to defend themselves. At this stage, seventy-five years after the disappearance, the whereabouts of Virginia Carpenter are likely to remain a mystery.
Crime Immemorial 