The Phantom Killer: Unlocking the Mystery of the Texarkana Serial Murders: The Story of a Town in Terror

by James Presley

  A cab driver found himself a major suspect after his taxi was reported in the Spring Lake Park area early that Sunday morning. But his version soon checked out, his alibi firm. The dispatch records, among other evidence, proved he could not have been near the murder scene at the crucial time. He was one of many who were eliminated only after definitely establishing their innocence.

  As the weary days beat on, Gonzaullas confided to editor Mahaffey, “Texarkana has more human driftwood than any other town I’ve ever been in, other than San Antonio or El Paso. You have more petty thieves, more prostitutes, more pimps, more of an underworld than many big cities.” It was an eye-opener as a major probe dug deep into the social fabric to reveal marginal denizens of whom most of the town’s upwardly mobile people, even prosecutors, were unaware.

  Newspaper staffers, local and out-of-town, camped near the door to the interrogation room. Reporters concluded that the lawmen faced a brick wall, despite their voiced hints of optimism. Two former war correspondents arrived in the first wave of out-of-town newspapermen. Wick Fowler represented the Dallas Morning News; Charles Boatner, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. They were harbingers of the flood of journalists coming from important papers in St. Louis, Kansas City, Denver, and other distant points.

  Fowler, a man of keen wit as well as a hard-nosed reporter, attended a Gonzaullas press conference in the Grim Hotel.

  “Wolf,” asked Fowler, “what kind of a man is this Phantom murderer?”

  “I don’t know, Wick, but he’s a damned sight smarter than I am!” said Gonzaullas.

  “Now, Wolf,” said Fowler, “you don’t think I came all the way over from Dallas to find that out!”

  It was one of a series of anecdotes told at Gonzaullas’s expense.

  A large delegation of investigative experts soon assembled in Texarkana, including men who had cracked some of the most difficult cases in Texas. Officers reserved little time for sleep. Along with state-of-the-art technical equipment—newly developed car radio equipment and fingerprinting devices—Ranger Joe N. Thompson piloted an airplane to provide faster transportation in tracking down a lead or suspect, wherever that might be.

  The sheriff’s office was so packed with Rangers and highway patrolmen that at times the atmosphere edged toward pandemonium. There was not even room for all of them to sit down at the same time.

  Most of the investigators at one time or another made their way to Boyd’s Drugs at Main and West Broad, a half block from the sheriff’s office. Boyd’s was a popular hangout. That was how Jim Wilson, one of the owners, came to meet Gonzaullas. One day the Ranger sought a private chat.

  “Mr. Wilson, we are in dire need of a private place in which we Rangers, alone to ourselves, can meet, out of public view. We need room so we can freely discuss the case and any matters we might bring up. If I’m not mistaken, you have a lot of space in your back storeroom that might serve for this purpose. Would it be possible to use it, so that no one would be aware of our presence? There’s a door to the store from the alley where we could enter relatively unobserved.”

  What they had in mind, Wilson surmised, was an idea to plan operations of their own without the knowledge of other law enforcement officers.

  Wilson conveyed Gonzaullas’s request to his partners, who readily agreed. They wanted to help however they could, and thought perhaps that enabling this “elite squad” to work in privacy would finally be the key to teasing out the killer’s identity.

  The heavy large metal back door, to which Gonzaullas now had the keys, opened for freight deliveries from the alley. The Rangers’ ingress and egress occurred after the drugstore was officially closed. At those hours virtually nobody was on the streets. The Rangers could slip unobtrusively into the alley without notice. By meeting late at night they would avoid inquisitive reporters.

  One of the Rangers’ plans, concocted at the backroom meetings, was to set traps for the killer. A Ranger, for instance, would drive into the countryside to a lonely road where lovers might go. The Ranger would have with him a dressed-up female mannequin, luring the Phantom into believing he had another easy pair of victims. The Rangers didn’t risk borrowing mannequins from a local store. They had them shipped in, to keep the plan a secret.

  With no substantial clues to guide them beyond the pattern of the murders’ timing with three-week intervals, other lawmen took a similar approach. A tactic soon developed on both sides of town to simulate parked couples in remote parking sites, disguising lawmen as couples, with one as a woman, hoping to lure the villain into a trap—and a well-deserved fate.

  Night after night, lawmen strategically set their traps. Night after night, they failed to net their man. Everyone was tense. Lawmen were virtually everywhere, at all times. The heat was on. The killer was lying low in hiding, wary of attacking again, or had left town. He was no longer assured of killing at random and getting away with it. Immediately after the Spring Lake Park shootings, young lovers were hard to find outdoors at night.

  None of the traps worked. Mostly tedium resulted among the trappers, who waited and waited for a phantom that never materialized.

  Gonzaullas, who had served in locales where nothing less than martial law had restored order, realized that the Texarkana situation was getting out of hand. The people needed reassurances. He put it forth with dramatic emphasis.

  The Rangers, he promised, would not leave Texarkana “until officers apprehend the murderer or murderers of Betty Jo Booker, Paul Martin, Polly Ann Moore, and Richard Griffin.”

  Those he hoped to impress took his statement to heart. Few ever forgot.

  CHAPTER 9

  FEAR STALKS BY NIGHT

  The Texarkana Gazette ran a daily box recording the traffic toll, always on the rise. By April 18, the death toll for the year from traffic accidents had reached fifteen, with forty-six injured. But it was the malicious, not accidental, deaths in Texarkana that continued to haunt the community.

  While officers doggedly plodded on, frustrated and exhausted, public tensions peaked. Finally recognizing the Griffin-Moore murders as a horrifying pattern, residents focused on the three-week interval between the crimes. When would the killer strike next? In three weeks—again? And where? Who would be his new victims? Fears generated outrage and anger. Concerns for personal and family safety rapidly set the emotional tone of the region. Chaos lurked in the wings.

  Fear of the night rose in a way none had experienced before. Few, if any, window shades remained up. Doors in a formerly trusting community were locked and bolted. Overnight those who had never owned weapons bought them or improvised by keeping knives or clubs near at hand.

  “People armed themselves and were quick to shoot,” recalled Max Tackett, at the time an Arkansas state trooper. “The biggest danger for a policeman was the chance of getting shot by good citizens. It was just risking death to go out then with civilian clothes on.”

  A visiting hardware salesman told Thomas Pirkey that his Dallas-based company’s warehouse had been depleted of handguns and rifles within three days of the Spring Lake Park murders, all going to Texarkana where they immediately sold out.

  Nothing was as terrifying as the dark threat of the unknown.

  Within hours of the discovery of the bodies on Palm Sunday, the populace approached a rare state of tension. An outcry arose for a curfew and other policies to keep more young people from falling victim. The reward fund skyrocketed overnight, soon reaching $6,425, which is around $76,600 today. Banks, businesses, individuals, veterans and service organizations, and nightclubs contributed as avidly as those striving to meet a United Fund drive goal. Even a lumber company in El Dorado, Arkansas, eighty miles away, kicked in $100.

  Safety of young people became paramount in the minds of men and women over the city, especially among those who had children.

  With that in mind, John Quincy “J. Q.” or “Jake” Mahaffey, the editor of the Gazette and by then known among his fellows in national organizations like the American Society o
f Newspaper Editors and Associated Press Managing Editors, sat down before his old upright L. C. Smith typewriter. That April night he began what would become a steady stream of editorials about the case. This one urged private parental curfews for youngsters. He pointed out the “bad name” the crimes were giving the city nationally. Then he concluded on his opening theme.

  “A caution is indicated, ‘Keep away from remote dark areas. That is where death awaits you.’”

  Within days the entire town appeared to be in consensus about a curfew. Events moved swiftly. The Texarkana Teen-Canteen changed its hours and provided adult escorts to each youth’s car. The Paramount Theater cancelled its midnight movie. The Texarkana Ministerial Alliance unanimously adopted a resolution to petition both city councils to close “all public places of amusements on midnight Saturdays.” A broad group of Christian leaders, ranging from Methodist to Baptist to Catholic, signed a resolution citing an urgent need to curb juvenile delinquency and what they considered its tragic aftermaths.

  A poll reflected a variety of views in the adult community, some of them extremely strong. Roy D. Hopkins, the owner of a feed-and-seed store and father of three children, offered a forceful remedy: “Burn all night clubs, and eliminate every one, as to me there is no such thing as a ‘nice’ one and eliminate the midnight picture shows that are now in existence. Both are immoral and a menace to our growing children. I believe in a nine o’clock curfew.”

  It was a scary time for youngsters, especially for those learning how to drive. After the Martin-Booker murders, teenagers felt as if they were being targeted by the Phantom, even more at risk than adults, and the further paranoia brought down upon them by their parents and other concerned—if sometimes agenda-pushing—adults did nothing to assuage the feelings of fear and trepidation

  Tom Albritton, Paul Martin’s friend, remembered how the city’s youths responded to the threat. “If we went anywhere at night, we took guns with us and went in groups, usually to each other’s homes. Sometimes we’d go to a movie, but always as a group. There was no parking in cars anymore.”

  Any suspect could expect the full, undivided attention of his captors until he was definitely eliminated. A man we will call “Sammy” was one who repeatedly proclaimed his innocence while in the shadow of the electric chair. His problem was physical and circumstantial evidence that placed him near where Betty Jo Booker’s body had been found. The most damning was Plaster of Paris casts of car tracks near Spring Lake Park that matched Sammy’s tires.

  Sammy was a black man about thirty-five years of age with a likeable personality and a clean record. He denied knowing of the murders until everyone else knew of them, didn’t own a .32 automatic, but the tire tracks seemed to condemn him.

  He was willing—eager—to take a polygraph, or “lie detector,” test. It showed he wasn’t telling the truth. He took it again. He flunked it again, and then failed it a third time. He appeared headed for Texas’s Death Row.

  Sheriff Presley pondered the matter. Sammy had a fine reputation, was never known to be violent, but when he claimed he hadn’t been where the tire tracks proved his car had been on that tragic night, the polygraph disagreed—three times.

  Presley didn’t believe in charging a man with a capital crime on the basis of circumstantial evidence—alone, even if a failed polygraph test seemed to back it up. He knew Travis Elliott, a Texarkana psychologist with skills as a hypnotist. Why not have Elliott hypnotize Sammy, even if the session couldn’t be used in court? It would be kept in strict secrecy but perhaps could offer clarity. Sammy agreed. Elliott agreed.

  Elliott explained the process to the sheriff and FBI agent Dewey Presley. A subject in a deep hypnotic trance, he emphasized, cannot tell a lie. The officers were willing to try it.

  Elliott privately talked with Sammy, exploring a gamut of topics, putting the suspect at ease and chatting freely as they reached a stage of transference. Then Elliott left Sammy alone in the office and joined the two men outside. As they left for the café downstairs, Elliott told the lawmen, “I can hypnotize him, but you have the wrong man. He has no criminal tendencies.” Sammy was well adjusted. He was a normal, stable man with a forthright personality. Not the sort of man who would murder four people randomly, or subject women to a brutal assault.

  The sheriff returned with Elliott for the session. Slowly, gradually, the psychologist guided Sammy into a trance. The suspect was counting by threes backward when he went under. Elliott kept him in a state of catalepsy for ten minutes. Then he told Sammy to open his eyes. His first question was the focal one.

  “Did you kill Betty Jo Booker?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know who did?”

  “No.”

  Officers knew where Sammy had been at five P.M. of the Saturday of the murder weekend. Elliott hooked into that time and led the suspect forward. Sammy and a friend had made some honky-tonks, drinking beer and a whiskey called “100 Proof.” Late that night Sammy took his buddy home, cutting through Spring Lake Park. On his way back, he stopped by the little road to urinate. Then he drove to the west side of the park and waited. His married paramour lived near. He could see the house. The light went out, meaning the husband had left for work. Shortly afterward, Sammy went to the house, talked to the woman. His intentions didn’t work out. He went home and to bed. His account was straightforward, without hedging or hesitation.

  The hypnotist invited the sheriff to pose questions, which Sammy answered readily.

  Gradually Elliott woke up Sammy and assured him, “You’ll feel all right and your troubles will be gone.”

  Indeed, they were. The sheriff and deputies checked the story, corroborated every detail. Sammy had been caught in a lie he didn’t believe himself, in a clumsy attempt to conceal a touchy personal affair. Hypnosis had cleared him.

  Rumors snowballed, some ensuring an atmosphere of horror. Within days one spread that the female victims’ bodies had been viciously mutilated. The girls’ breasts, so it went, were chewed up horribly. Another added gnawed fingers to the desecrations. The reports aroused images of a bestial, sex-mad pervert, raising public anxiety to a fever pitch. The rumor mill operated nonstop, day and night.

  Rumors continued to swirl so forcibly that Ranger Gonzaullas just as forcibly denied them, insisting that false reports were hindering officers’ work. He chided those enabling the rumors.

  One account had the killer arrested, another that he had identified himself and confessed, easily refuted. Another: the Phantom had struck again, a third double murder, then a fourth such crime—doubling the death toll.

  “Help” tips poured in. Two women volunteered information collected in dreams. Another woman called that a nineteen-year-old woman living in her house had disappeared. All law agencies searched through the night. In the morning she arrived back home, safe and unharmed. The Phantom had missed her, one he apparently hadn’t known of.

  Nothing slowed the wild rumors, particularly those that a sex fiend was at large, that the girls’ bodies had been mutilated. It wasn’t true. “There was not any evidence of a warped sexual mind on either of the bodies,” said officer Max Tackett. “But because of the wild rumors it seemed to be necessary to sift through any persons who might have had these features—and there were lots of them!”

  The rumors only added to lawmen’s workload.

  Even daylight wasn’t a cure for the nerves. Levia Brower, in her fifties, kept a loaded .25-20 rifle handy, prepared for the unexpected. She was by herself in her rural home when a car drove up. She didn’t recognize it or know who the driver was. Taking no chances, she raised the rifle to her shoulder and aimed a warning shot near the passenger. The motorist hurriedly motored off. Later Mrs. Brower realized her target had been a neighbor woman who hadn’t identified herself quickly enough.

  In the middle of the week following the latest murders, Rose Juliette Victoria Mitts, a petite French war bride, stepped off the train at Union Station at State Line and Front Street. Her
husband, Roy E. Mitts, joyously greeted her. She hailed from Roussillon, France, and knew no English. Perhaps it was just as well, considering the latest brutal news on everyone’s lips. Her husband, fluent in French, translated for her, enabling him to filter the harsh realities. The twenty-four-year-old ex-soldier took his four-foot-eleven wife around town, showing her State Line Avenue and the unique federal courthouse and post office in both states.

  Two weeks after the murders, April 27, a Saturday, a rumor swept over the city that a man had been found dead at Twenty-Ninth and Wood on the Texas side. Had the Phantom struck early? Phones busily circulated the account. Police sped to the scene. They found a fifteen-year-old boy in the middle of the street, drunk and passed out, but very much alive. They took him to the city jail and called his father, who hurried down to take him home to sleep it off.

  That Saturday night, the first shooting occurred. It was not a killing, nor in the secluded countryside, but in a well-lighted café with witnesses. A man wearing an Army uniform entered a West Seventh Street café and shoved his way into the establishment’s dance hall without paying a cover charge. The cashier stopped him. A scuffle ensued. Cleo Wells, thirty-two, a recently discharged member of the Women’s Army Corps, joined the cashier in an effort to block the intruder. The man pulled a pistol and fired at Miss Wells. The bullet struck her in the left thigh. The gunman fled. An ambulance soon arrived and took the woman to Michael Meagher Hospital. She was not seriously injured.

  One early-Saturday event may have contributed to the rumors that spread so explosively. At four-thirty that morning, a man unloading ice at the Texas-side McCartney Hotel, close to Union Station downtown, found the body of a woman. Mrs. Sue Murray, age sixty-seven, had died from an apparent leap from a fire escape at the hotel. As soon as her death was reported, Chief Runnels, Gonzaullas, and Deputy Sheriff Zeke Henslee rushed to the scene. Their investigation revealed that she was in town, apparently despondent, because her husband, a traffic manager for the Cotton Belt rail line, was being treated for a stroke.