The Texarkana Moonlight Murders

by Michael Newton

  Fast-forward to March 24, as young lovers “Buddy Turner” and “Emma Lou Cook” drive through a rainy night in search of privacy. Deputy Ramsey, on patrol, hears gunshots but arrives too late to stop the killer from escaping in a black sedan. Panic descends on Texarkana, with numerous crank calls to police headquarters (fielded by Charles Pierce in the role of irascible “Patrolman A. C. ‘Spark Plug’ Benson”). Captain Morales soon arrives, vowing to bring in the Phantom, dead or alive.30

  By this time, Deputy Ramsey has noted the (fictitious) three-week gap between attacks, warning Morales that the killer may strike again on April 14. Decoys and stakeouts notwithstanding, on the night predicted, “Roy Allen” and “Peggy Loomis” (played by Pierce’s then-wife, Cindy Butler) drive to lover’s lane after a high school dance, where trombonist Peggy has performed with the band. They nod off after necking in Roy’s car, then wake at 2:40 A.M. and prepare to drive home, but the Phantom appears and grapples with Roy, both of them tumbling from the car. After clubbing Roy unconscious, the Phantom captures Peggy and ties her to a tree. Roy wakes and tries to run, but is gunned down. The Phantom then retrieves Peggy’s trombone, attaches a knife to the instrument’s slide, and stabs her to death while silently “playing” the horn. The next day, while Dr. Kress consults with Captain Morales and Deputy Ramsey at a local diner, we see the Phantom’s trademark slacks and boots retreating from the restaurant.31

  The killer changes tactics and misses his mythical three-week deadline with the final attack, on May 3. The camera follows “Helen Reed”—portrayed by Dawn Wells, “Mary Ann” of Gilligan’s Island fame—home from grocery shopping, to the farmhouse she shares with husband “Floyd.” While she prepares supper, the Phantom approaches, shooting Floyd twice through a window with a silencer-equipped revolver (futile in real life, since sound escapes around the weapon’s cylinder). Helen hears the glass break, coming to investigate, then rushes to the telephone but takes two bullets to the face before she can complete her call. Stumbling outside, she flees to a neighbor’s house while the Phantom stalks her through darkness, armed with a pickaxe. Frustrated by the appearance of an armed neighbor, the night-stalker finally gives up and leaves.32

  The next day, May 4, Ramsey and Morales receive a phone call reporting an abandoned car, resembling the sedan Ramsey glimpsed back on March 24. Racing to the scene, they spot the car, then proceed on foot to a nearby rock quarry, where the hooded gunman stands in broad daylight, surveying the countryside. A frantic chase ensues, toward railroad tracks with a train approaching. The Phantom leaps cross the tracks, putting the train between himself and his pursuers, while Ramsey and Morales fire their shotguns underneath the passing freight cars. One shot strikes the Phantom’s left leg, knocking him down, but when the train has passed, no trace of him remains. Bloodhounds scour the woods and swamps in vain. A final sequence shows the now-familiar booted legs limping along a Texarkana sidewalk, while Vern Stierman tells us that the killer’s fate remains uknown.33

  The Town That Dreaded Sundown earned an R-rating for violence and played to mixed reviews, with one critic unkindly suggesting that Ben Johnson should return the Academy Award he received as Best Actor in 1971, for his performance as “Sam The Lion” in The Last Picture Show. Mark M. Moore—a relative of Phantom victim Polly Ann Moore, residing in Naples, Texas—filed a lawsuit against Pierce and company, on grounds that the film “was advertised as a true story, but was not,” but a court dismissed his claim for damages as groundless.34

  The reverse side of that coin was another strong box-office showing and eventual “cult” status, with Town widely recognized as a pioneering film in the “slasher” genre, later dominated by Halloween (1978) and Friday the 13th (1980), with their countless sequels and low-budget imitators.35 Charles Pierce directed seven more feature films between 1977 and 1998, including a Boggy Creek sequel (1985) in which he played the starring role and shared the screen with his son. Throughout that same period, Pierce also worked as a set decorator on seventeen other films and television series, ranging from The Outlaw Josey Wales to Knots Landing and Remington Steele. He died in Dover, Tennessee, on March 5, 2010.36

  And The Town That Dreaded Sundown lives on. Each October since 2003, around Halloween (weather permitting), it caps a series of films shown outdoors at Spring Lake Park, sponsored by the Texarkana (Texas) Department of Parks & Recreation. According to Director Robby Robertson, the film’s fifth annual screening, in 2008, drew some 600 viewers. The city rents its copy of the film from a distributor, paying $200 per screening. Otherwise, as Robertson observes (and Amazon.com confirms), “It’s still shown only on VHS tape and those aren’t even available anymore.”37

  * * *

  No one knows if Captain Manuel Gonzaullas ever bought a ticket to The Town That Dreaded Sundown, but the Lone Wolf remained active in his declining years, serving on the Texas Rangers Association and the Texas Ranger Commemorative Commission, helping to found the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum in Waco, during 1968. That institution received his scrapbooks and personal papers, along with some of the 580 guns, plus knives, clubs, and other weapons collected throughout his career. Some of those firearms were deadly works of art, inlaid with gold and precious stones, gifts from the Lone Wolf’s admirers, while others were workaday tools that had sent badmen to their reward. “Some have real stories behind them,” Gonzaullas declared, “but it’s nobody’s business where they came from.”38

  The captain’s own story came to an end in Dallas, when cancer claimed his life on February 13, 1977, at age eighty five.39

  * * *

  One ripple from The Town That Dreaded Sundown bore a crimson stain. On March 15, 1978, high school friends Gerald Gedrimas and James Grunstra met after school at Grunstra’s home on Sunset Road, in Teaneck, New Jersey. Gedrimas had a half-baked plan in mind, vaguely embodied in his teenage wish “to be like Jesse James.” Arriving first, he entered Grunstra’s house, collected several rifles owned by Grunstra’s father, pocketed some minor household items, then sat waiting until James arrived. Returning home, Grunstra proceeded to his upstairs bedroom, where Gedrimas shot him once in the chest, then twice more in the head for good measure. Returning the murder weapon to its closet repository, Gedrimas then left on Grunstra’s bicycle, with more rifles braced across the handlebars in a vacuum-cleaner box.40

  Teaneck police had little difficulty tracing Grunstra, and he offered no resistance when they turned up to arrest him. Tried as an adult, he was convicted of second-degree murder and received the maximum sentence under law: thirty-eight to forty years. In court, he told the judge that he conceived the plan to kill his friend while watching The Town That Dreaded Sundown.41

  That claim reignited the familiar, seemingly endless debate over causal relationships between fictional mayhem and real-life bloodshed, ultimately solving nothing. Grunstra served eighteen years and was released two days before Christmas 1986, with minimal parole supervision, by authorities who deemed him harmless to society. In 1998, employed as a chauffeur, residing in the basement of an aging farmhouse not dissimilar to that once occupied by Virgil Starks, he told reporter John Chadwick, “What I did was bad, I cannot justify it; there are so many things that affect me because of that. Jim’s sin was to trust me. There was no argument between us, there was absolutely no reason for him to die, and the weight of that is what has made me into who I am today.” Doris Grunstra, widowed by then and still mourning the death of her son, told Chadwick, “To this day, it boggles the mind. There was no rhyme or reason for it, and it shattered something fundamental in us. It destroyed our lives.”42

  No mention of the Texarkana Phantom, pro or con, which was likely just as well. Each city, town, and village has its home-grown bogeymen.

  * * *

  In spring 1996, between March 31 and April 7, the Texarkana Gazette published a retrospective series of articles on the area’s most famous unsolved crimes, collectively titled “The Phantom at 50.” Reporter Rodney Burgess wro
te: “Yes, fifty years later, many who remember the scenario from living through it still harbor fears of the unknown.... Some witnesses, some friends of the victims, some family of the victims are still too frightened within themselves to allow them to speak freely about that impressionable time in their life. And, too, many still fear retribution from that unknown source of their fear.... Even if the main suspect has been dead for a couple of years, that fear remains. Some would say that it is unrealistic. But reality to some was formed 50 years ago and has changed little since.”43

  Clearly, fascination with the murders—often morbid fascination—still persisted. So did hope for a belated breakthrough in the case.

  In February 1999, an unidentified caller rang the home of victim Paul Martin’s brother, in Kilgore, Texas. As Tillman Johnson, then eighty-nine, told reporter Carlton Stowers, “Actually, it was his wife who took the call. She said a soft-voiced woman who sounded like she was in [her] late forties or early fifties asked if her husband had a brother murdered in Texarkana back in the ’40s. When she said he had, the caller said, ‘Please tell your husband that I want to apologize for what my father did.’” And with that, the connection was broken.44

  Johnson went on to say, “It was almost a year later that I heard virtually the same story again. I was in church one morning, and someone came up to me after the service and mentioned something about my having been involved in the investigation of the Phantom Killer cases. A nephew of Virgil Starks was a member of our congregation and obviously overheard the conversation. He came over and began telling me how his mother had received virtually the same call. He said she’d not paid much attention to it, figuring it was just some sick prankster.”45

  Indeed, it may have been precisely that. No record exists of Youell Swinney siring a daughter—or any child, for that matter—but that only matters if Swinney was the Phantom. Viewed from another angle, if the Phantom killed Paul Martin but did not kill Virgil Starks, one of the calls, at least, must be a hoax or product of misinformation, drawn from media reports. Would any child of Texarkana’s slayer feel compelled to offer an apology for victims felled by other hands?

  On January 5, 2003, Dallas Morning News reporter Ken Biffle wrote yet another in the seemingly endless series of Phantom retrospectives, including a local historian’s opinion that Youell Swinney committed five of the murders. A week later, Biffle told readers that he had received a letter from a woman he called “Lou,” age fifty-five, dismissing that account. Lou wrote: “I read with anticipation that something true would finally be written about my dad. Yes, my dad was the Phantom killer. He did not move to Dallas as you indicated. He married my mother and moved to Louisiana. From there we moved to California, then to Arizona. He and his mother were murdered in California, execution style—which he probably deserved. Sorry you feel the person pinpointed died in a nursing home in Dallas. The article was good fiction.” Lou described her late farther as “one of the meanest persons I ever knew,” recalling that he bore scars on his legs from a shooting by Texas Rangers.46 Mere coincidence, presumably, despite an eerie echo from the climax of The Town That Dreaded Sundown.

  Later in 2003, an Italian film crew passed through Texarkana, adding a segment on the Phantom to its documentary on small-town American life. Tillman Johnson, then ninety-two and the last surviving member of the team that stalked the killer, stood by his assessment of Youell Swinney as the prime suspect in three attacks, while reserving judgment on the Starks raid.47

  Two years later, a Miller County sheriff’s deputy visiting the Arkansas State Crime Laboratory in Little Rock on business unrelated to the ancient Phantom case found a fat, sealed envelope labeled “Starks Case, May 1946.” He brought the package back to Sheriff H. L. Phillips, who contacted Tillman Johnson. Johnson acknowledged that some items of evidence had disappeared over the years, perhaps even the murder slugs, but in the absence of a submission sheet, the contents of the envelope could only be determined by opening it. That, Sheriff Phillips refused to do without proper authorization. As of January 2009, researcher Brett Hardel reported that the envelope, still unopened, remained under lock and key in the sheriff’s office—now occupied by Ron Stovall—to “keep the evidence safe.”48

  In August 2006, the Phantom cycled into headlines once again, with a report of a forthcoming TV documentary, planned by television production students at Texas A&M University–Texarkana. Casey Roberts, TAMU-T’s media specialist and instructor for the class, told the Texarkana Gazette, “When the university administration expanded its mass communication program, they asked me if I had a course to offer students for the summer. They wanted something more advanced than just studio production. This is what gave me the idea for a television documentary on this subject.”49

  Why resurrect the Phantom after sixty years? “I felt the students were ready to take this step in making this documentary, and it’s a subject I’m familiar with,” said Roberts. “The movie contained a lot of fiction, but the actual facts of the cases are just as intriguing.” Stephanie Thomas, an associate producer on the project, added, “What we ultimately hope to do is make more sense out of the cases. A lot of people still have many unanswered questions about the murders. We also found some information that may shed some new light on the cases.”50

  In fact, no breakthrough was forthcoming. The mystery endured.

  * * *

  In August 2006, six days before the Texarkana Gazette announced production of the TAMU-T documentary, author William T. Rasmussen published the second volume in his Corroborating Evidence series. Deprived of state and local police records, which no longer exist in either Arkansas or Texas, Rasmussen did the next best thing, obtaining the FBI’s heavily-edited “Phantom Killer” file under terms of the Freedom of Information Act, passed by Congress forty years earlier.51

  The first book, released in 2004, examined clues which—at least, to Rasmussen’s satisfaction—linked the 1947 “Black Dahlia” slaying and other Los Angeles murders to the 1930s crimes of Cleveland’s still-unidentified “Torso Killer” and a cluster of Chicago homicides that sent defendant William Heirens to prison for life in 1946.52 The second volume, “greatly expanded” to include other cases, propounded an even more surprising theory, linking Texarkana’s Phantom to California’s “Zodiac” killer.

  Most readers of the work in hand will be familiar with the Zodiac. Over a ten-month period in 1968–69, he struck four times, killing five persons and wounding two more. Confirmed victims include David Arthur Faraday and Betty Lou Jensen, shot to death on December 20, 1968, on Lake Herman Road in Benicia, California; Michael Renault Mageau and Darlene Elizabeth Ferrin, shot on July 4, 1969, in the parking lot of Blue Rock Springs Park, in Vallejo, with Mageau surviving; Bryan Calvin Hartnell and Cecelia Ann Shepard, bound and stabbed at Lake Berryessa (Napa County), on September 27, 1969, with Hartnell surviving; and cab driver Paul Lee Stine, shot dead in San Francisco’s Presidio Heights neighborhood on October 11, 1969.53

  Other victims, linked to the Zodiac killer in various accounts, include: Robert Domingos and Linda Edwards, shot and killed on a beach near Lompoc, California, on June 4, 1963; Cheri Jo Bates, stabbed to death at Riverside College on October 30, 1966; Donna Lass, last seen in Stateline, Nevada, on September 6, 1970; and Kathleen Johns, abducted with her infant daughter after their car broke down on Highway 132 west of Modesto, on March 22, 1970. Johns escaped with her baby, later saying that the kidnapper resembled a police sketch of the Zodiac prepared by witnesses to Paul Stine’s murder.54

  The Zodiac varied his methods of murder, using a .22-caliber pistol on victims Faraday and Jensen; a nine-millimeter semiautomatic on Mageau, Ferrin, and Stine; and a long knife like a bayonet on Hartnell and Shepard. In the Lake Berryessa attack, survivor Bryan Hartnell described an assailant disguised with a black hood and bib-like garment marked with a circle and cross, resembling the view through a rifle’s telescopic sight. The same symbol appeared on various notes and postcards sent by the killer to local po
lice and newspapers. One such letter, received by the San Francisco Chronicle on August 7, 1969, bore the salutation: “Dear Editor This is the Zodiac speaking.” Thus the killer named himself, continuing his correspondence—sometimes sending coded messages, their content still debated—at erratic intervals from 1969 to 1990. One letter, sent to the Chronicle in January 1974, included a claim of thirty-seven kills, but offered no supporting evidence.55

  Clearly, if Youell Swinney was the Phantom, jailed until 1973, then the Zodiac was not.

  Rasmussen builds his Phantom-as-Zodiac theory by comparing the crimes in each case, and by scouring anonymous letters for similar words or phrases. Aside from various inaccuracies—the Phantom using a .32-caliber Colt revolver, rather than a semiautomatic pistol; Texas Rangers arresting Youell Swinney56—Rasmussen’s comparison of crime-scene evidence rests on the following points.

  First, both the Phantom and the Zodiac claimed most of their victims in lover’s lane attacks, with the Phantom invariably staging his raids at night. However, the Zodiac’s third confirmed crime, at Lake Beryessa in September 1969, occurred in broad daylight.57

  Second, Rasmussen says that both killers were reported wearing hoods with holes cut for the eyes and mouth. Against that argument, only one Zodiac survivor—Bryan Hartnell, at Lake Berryessa—reported the Zodiac sporting a hood, which he compared to a square, inverted grocery bag. Police sketches of the costume reveal two eye holes, but none for the mouth. The Zodiac’s costume also included a homemade bib-like garment decorated with the killer’s trademark cross-hairs symbol. The Phantom wore no such bib, and three witnesses to the Paul Stine slaying in 1969 described a man in horn-rimmed glasses, wearing no hood or mask.58