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

by James Presley

  Agent Calhoun stuck to the car thefts over which his agency had jurisdiction. He led Swinney through his background. The prisoner claimed to have finished high school at Texarkana, Texas. That would have been at Texas High, if he was telling the truth, and the date would have been 1934 or 1935, a contention later proved to be incorrect. He said he and Peggy Lois Tresnick had married in Shreveport. He was registered, he said, for Selective Service in Miller County, Arkansas.

  Swinney then cited three stolen automobiles that had been transported in interstate commerce.

  CAR # 1: He stated this offense occurred about February 1946. “I stole a red Chevrolet coach, about a 1941 model in Texarkana Texas, near the First Baptist Church. My wife (who was not my wife at that time) had been told to wait, as I was going to get a car. She was not told how I was going to get it.”

  (This apparently was the automobile belonging to Luther McClure, taken in early March, not February, across from the First Baptist Church.)

  “I drove to my mother’s home in College Hill in Texarkana, Arkansas.” (This confirmed he had violated the Dyer Act by driving across the state line.) He picked up Peggy and they drove to Hope, then back to Texarkana before heading west. They picked up hitchhikers en route to West Texas. “Near Lubbock I told Peggy the car was stolen, and said that we had better get rid of it.” He told the couple riding with them to drive the car to Beaumont, Texas, and to deliver it to a man there. He’d made up the recipient’s name.

  CAR # 2: “In about April, 1946, a man I knew in the Texas penitentiary met me in Texarkana, Texas, at which time he had a green Hudson sedan, about a 1940 model. I do not recall his name but he was about 25 years old, 5 ft 8” tall and weighed about 155 lbs. He said that he had stolen this car near the Swann Motel in Texarkana, Arkansas. He was afraid to keep it and gave it to me. I drove this car with Peggy to Dallas, Texas, Oklahoma City, St. Louis, Missouri, Little Rock, Arkansas, and to Texarkana, Arkansas, where I abandoned it.”

  CAR # 3: He also assigned original blame to another, claiming he had purchased it from a man whose name he didn’t recall. “A man I know only as Chuck, with whom I served in Leavenworth pen sold me a 1941 Plymouth sedan about May 1946 for $900.00. I paid him $150.00 in cash. He told me that I could locate him at the White House Cafe near the railroad station and pay the balance, or a part of it, in two or three weeks. He is about 40 years old, weighs about 170 pounds, is 5 feet 11 1/2 In. or 6 ft tall, is a white man of dark complexion. Peggy and I drove in this car to Shreveport, Louisiana, Dallas, Texas, San Antonio, and back to Dallas and I had tried to locate Chuck, without success. I then told Peggy that I felt that the car was stolen. We were married at Shreveport, Louisiana, and came to Texarkana Texas, where Peggy was arrested. I was a block away and saw her picked up and stayed away.”

  Not only did his admissions facilitate documenting his hot-car record; they also provided some insight into his behavior. The FBI agent remained skeptical of Swinney’s account of how he came to possess cars 2 and 3, which on the surface appeared to have been constructed in such a way that identifying the men to whom he claimed he’d turned over the Hudson and the Plymouth would be difficult, if not impossible.

  Swinney had readily implicated himself in a federal crime, of transporting a stolen car across a state line. This could qualify him for less harsh federal time, rather than a state prison. By then he was a connoisseur of correctional facilities, having taken jolts in both state and federal prisons.

  His statement also revealed how close Charley Boyd had come to arresting Swinney along with Peggy in the lot where the car was parked. Swinney, like an old buck sending the doe ahead, should there be hunters near, had sent Peggy as his “doe” to make sure the coast was clear. The coast hadn’t been clear. So he had run away.

  With Swinney and his wife in jail cells across the fourth-floor space from each other, it was possible for one to shout or yell at the other, communicating in primitive fashion when officers weren’t around. The sheriff’s offices were downstairs and much of the time there was no deputy or jailer on hand to monitor the prisoners’ words. A quieter way, avoiding the ears of other prisoners, was to pass notes. There was always the possibility of a note’s being intercepted, so the writing had to be couched in guarded language.

  It didn’t take long for the couple to attempt to pass notes. By the time of Swinney’s arrest, officers had had two and a half weeks in which to fire questions at Peggy. She had talked, but hadn’t provided any significant revelations. Once he was arrested, however, things moved swiftly. Swinney immediately became a hot suspect for some, if not all, of the Phantom killings. Suddenly anything Peggy said took on a greater importance.

  When a lawyer visited her, on behalf of her family, he informed her that Swinney was being held for murder. An officer sat within hearing distance.

  She immediately exclaimed, “How did they find it out?” Then she stopped, realizing she had said more than needed.

  A brief “correspondence” began between the couple. Eventually their written words made their way to their keepers.

  Peggy wrote, alluding to something the officers hadn’t previously known. “I haven’t mentioned anything about the watches or ring.” Tackett noted the sentence and filed it for future reference. Some watches had been stolen in Texarkana, Texas. Was that related to what she wrote? Or was it a euphemism for something else?

  Her note prompted a reply from Swinney that ended up in the state police files. The heat was on. Neither prisoner had any concrete knowledge of how much the lawmen knew.

  Swinney wrote to “Dear Peggy” in an easily readable handwriting.

  “I never expected to have you write me the things you did. As I told you they are trying to make you hate me and peggy [sic] you know as well as I do that you have not did anything and should not be in jail and I dont know what has come over you or what you have heard but whatever it is it isn’t so as I thought you loved me more than to write me the things you did. I believe that you will be released soon and I had hoped you would write me and come to see me. Peggy don’t believe that stuff you have heard about. You can read my statements to the FBI and see for yourself just what I have said. I told them that your statement was correct and I did not add anything to it. If you told everything you knew and everything we did [since] February. Now honey think this over and you will see that I am right. Honey let me hear from you about this because you know how much I love you and how much you mean to me. Let me hear from you. Honey everything I said was written down by the F.B.I. and ask them to let you see the statement. Answer right back. All my love, your husband, Lee.”

  His note was carefully crafted. It was clear that he was anxious about what she had told officers. He wanted her to read his statement to the FBI and tailor her remarks to parallel his. He wanted her to get out of jail so that she could visit him and he could talk directly, and confidentially, to her. He’d revealed nothing that might point to any connection with murder or to a contradiction of any alibi he had given.

  Like Peggy, he had no way of knowing what, or how much, the lawmen knew, nor the extent of evidence they might marshal against him. He did know one thing for certain: if Peggy talked freely, his case would be severely compromised. She had been with him, knew more about him over the past several months than anyone else. She had the information the officers wanted.

  A few days later, more substantial evidence appeared—the promise of an eyewitness. Peggy Swinney surprised officers, suddenly announcing, “I’ll give you a statement.” Whether she was driven by anxiety over how much officers already knew or whether she was determined to relieve her own mind, she was “ready.”

  Events soon relegated the stolen car to a lesser, but integral, status. The prospects of nailing a serial killer now took center stage.

  Over two days, July 23 and 24, she gave three formal statements that Chief Deputy Johnson typed as she spoke. Her statements did not jibe perfectly, but overall, her words fit into a pattern. At long last, hers was
the kind of human information they so sorely needed, the prospect of an eyewitness.

  PEGGY SWINNEY’S STATEMENT # 1

  Ten minutes after eleven o’clock on the morning of Tuesday, July 23, she began the first statement. She told how she was in the Texarkana, Texas, jail in late January or early February when Youell Swinney went looking for another woman (“some girl”). They talked through the window, she upstairs in the jail, Swinney in the alley. He apparently paid her fine, probably for a misdemeanor like drunkenness or vagrancy, to secure her release.

  Her first date with Swinney began on the afternoon of Thursday, February 14, Valentine Day. They met at the Lone Star Sandwich Shop, a beer joint in the 100 block of State Line on the Arkansas side. They spent the evening with a sailor and his girl friend. The next morning they went to his sister and brother-in-law at 220 Senator Street on the Arkansas side. This was a pattern to be repeated over the next several months. That week Swinney obtained a job at Mid-South Supply Company, a business on the Texas side downtown.

  The statement was aimed at establishing a time line with which to determine specifically where Swinney had been over the course of the spring. Certain events stood out, but none of them pinpointed where Swinney was at crucial times on the nights of February 22, March 23. April 13, and May 3. She related events by days of the week, rarely providing the exact date.

  Tillman Johnson later went over the statement, which he had typed single-spaced on three long legal-sized pages. In the margins he noted the dates to which each mention referred. The dates would have to be tentative and, sometimes, approximate. Nonetheless, Peggy Swinney was beginning to fill in the blanks.

  Her account provided Swinney no alibi for the night of February 22. She was with his sister, she said, and he wasn’t there the night on which Jimmy Hollis and Mary Jeanne Larey had been held up, attacked, and viciously beaten.

  On the 26th, Swinney took Peggy back to her mother’s on Richmond Road, outside the city limits on the Texas side. This location was no great distance from where the February 22 beatings had occurred. The following Sunday, Swinney rented an apartment on the Texas side. They remained there a week, until she left him after “a fuss.”

  During this time, her friend Dorothy R— tried to locate her by telephone, calling all over town, to tell her Swinney was looking for her. Later, when Dorothy did get in touch with Peggy, the friend told her that Swinney had a .32 caliber pistol.

  Two days later, Peggy was sitting with another man in a café near Union Station when Swinney appeared, walked directly over to them, and struck her. Swinney told her companion that he meant to have her “even if he had to kill somebody to do it. Swinney took me away from him.”

  The forcibly reunited couple then went to his sister’s, where they stayed until Saturday, when they went to a second-rate hotel. The following day they went to a movie, afterward to his mother’s home for the day. That night after walking downtown by himself, he returned with a red Chevrolet two-door sedan.

  (If this was the red Chevrolet that Swinney told the FBI he had stolen near the First Baptist Church, her or his memory of the date and time was off.)

  The next day, they headed west, beginning a series of trips that continued for months, establishing a pattern of driving great distances in stolen cars, picking up hitchhikers, ferrying passengers from one city to another. She corroborated his account of driving to Lubbock, where he turned the car over to the hitchhiking couple for them to deliver to a fictitious man in Beaumont. Swinney and Peggy hitchhiked back to Texarkana.

  Moving to Saturday, March 23, the night of the Griffin-Moore murders, while they were in a second-run theater he left for two and a half hours, until eleven P.M. after which they went to his mother’s house for the night. Her version left him with unexplained hours but seemed to cover him for the later period when the murders occurred.

  He was gone most of the next day and that night. Subsequently they returned to the hotel. She told him she wanted to go to her mother’s home, angering him. He slapped her in the face with a towel.

  “He started to telling about a girl who testified against him in taking her rings. He told me that he had killed the girl for it.”

  His claim that “he had killed the girl” seems not to have been followed up by officers, perhaps because they viewed it as a threatening lie used to intimidate Peggy.

  From that point on, she cited a series of trips taken over several states in stolen automobiles. He stole a Hudson automobile in Robison Courts, the subdivision in which Richard Griffin’s family lived. Days later they drove to Dallas, almost always short of funds, and began driving in conjunction with Mack’s Travel Bureau, a travelers’ exchange developed during the war. They busily traversed the region, taking strangers to a variety of destinations. Using Dallas and Texarkana as hubs, they transported passengers to San Antonio, Oklahoma City, El Paso, New Mexico, Lubbock, St. Louis, Austin, and Shreveport. They would spend a day or two in Texarkana between trips, then return to the road. When they went to a movie or were in a motel room, he would absent himself for hours while she waited.

  She told of picking up a painter in Dallas, en route to Louisiana. Swinney ran into a city bus in Dallas and kept going. At Longview, Texas, the painter went into a liquor store. Swinney drove off without him, keeping the man’s clothes he’d left in the car. They then spent “about two days” at her mother’s.

  The “about two days” she said they spent at her mother’s coincided with the April 13 weekend of the Martin-Booker murders. Though she hadn’t elaborated, she had documented that Swinney was indeed in Texarkana that Saturday.

  The initial statement stamped uncertainty onto Swinney’s whereabouts on February 22 and parts of March 23 and had blurred over April 13-14, except that each time he was in Texarkana.

  Skipping past the weekend of the Martin-Booker tragedy, she enumerated their travels in a stolen Plymouth.

  From Dallas they took passengers to New York City, a trip of four days and nights each way. They stayed only forty-five minutes in New York before turning around and heading back. Back in Dallas, they drove to Oklahoma City, San Antonio, Wichita Falls, and other Texas points. Their final trip, with Memphis as the destination, ended at Hope, Arkansas, thirty miles from Texarkana, where they dumped a sailor headed for Memphis and went instead to the little town of Antoine where Peggy’s sister lived.

  This brought them to Thursday, April 18, the day before Good Friday, four days after the bodies were found at Spring Lake Park. The day after Easter Sunday, Swinney and Louis Lamb, Peggy’s brother-in-law, applied for work at nearby Murfreesboro on road construction close to a new dam site. They roomed with the Lambs.

  On Friday afternoon, May 3—the day of the Starks murder, Swinney and Peggy’s sister quarreled over the money Swinney owed for his and Peggy’s board. He left in a huff.

  “He went to Antoine and told all the men that had been riding with him to work that he was going to Texarkana and would not be able to haul them to work anymore. Then we went to Delight and got a room at the Delight Hotel. We left my sister’s to go to Delight about six P.M. We arrived at Delight, got the room, and went up to it. Swinney was still mad. Swinney left and drove the car away. In about five hours, or sometime after midnight, Swinney came back into the room. I saw that he was fully dressed. Swinney undressed and got into bed with me.”

  They arose that morning—a few hours later—at five A.M., had breakfast, and went to the job site where her brother-in-law was working, left there at nine, and returned to Delight to find a place to live. They found a room at Jim Mays’s residence, two miles east of Delight, and the next day moved their meager belongings there.

  Again—this time with a greater and even more suspicious gap—she had failed to provide Swinney with an alibi for the Starks shootings. She had, however, guided officers by saying he had gone to Texarkana that night and had been gone long enough to commit the crimes, all without involving herself. She had also documented his anger that afternoon. S
he claimed she wasn’t with him but was at the Delight Hotel during the hours in question. Her omissions raised a string of red flags.

  Swinney went back to work on Monday, May 6, and they stayed at the Jim Mays residence for the next two weeks, running up a bill which Swinney never paid and about which, eventually, Mays complained to the State Police. They left Delight on Sunday, May 19, slightly over two weeks after the Starks murder, and returned to her parents’ home.

  The following day, a Monday, they drove to Nashville, Arkansas, for a movie Swinney was eager to see—Jesse James (1939) in the Howard Theater. The fictionalized, glamorized version of the outlaw’s legend starred handsome Tyrone Power. Swinney drove sixty miles each way to see it.

  If they’d been in Nashville a week earlier they could have seen, at the same theater, Chester Morris as Boston Blackie in The Phantom Thief, a title tailor-made for the times and the region.

  That week they left the Four States Area and drove more than five hundred miles to Waynoka, a town of about three thousand in northwest Oklahoma near the Oklahoma Panhandle. Swinney took a job on a railroad maintenance crew for the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe. He rented a room for Peggy. He stayed at a camp for the workers during the week.

  At Waynoka, Swinney was up to his old ways.

  One Sunday, she said, Swinney took a carload of Mexican workers in his car, took forty dollars from one and, in all, eighty dollars from them. She saw him take the money. They remained in Waynoka for about three weeks, during which time Swinney stole “a bunch of clothes” from a hotel there.