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

by James Presley

  Swinney’s old responses returned. “He was very unemotional. He was cold,” said Johnson.

  Johnson sensed that Swinney now believed he couldn’t be convicted. Why would they take him to Little Rock, if they already had a strong enough case against him? Swinney knew his own attorneys had planned an insanity defense, but the move to commit him had come from the State.

  The hospital casework began for Swinney in his first commitment to a mental institution. He replied to questions regarding his past, detailing his time in reform school at Pine Bluff, Arkansas, at age seventeen for burglary of a school, the divorce of his parents when he was a small boy, his frequent moves after that. At seven a fall from a swing rendered him unconscious, he told hospital attendants, and at eighteen he remained bedfast for two weeks after being run down by a cart. However, he said he’d had no memory lapses, dizzy spells, drug problems, or venereal disease. The rest of his family displayed no criminal tendencies or alcoholism.

  He claimed he wasn’t guilty when sent to the penitentiary in Texas and was not guilty of the present charge, that he knew nothing about it. He cited his June 28 marriage to Peggy. As he reeled off his record, he committed several errors involving time. He said he’d been paroled, not mentioning it was conditional, in 1944 for strong-arm robbery—1944 was the year he was sentenced, not released, which was late 1945.

  His denial of guilt in his previous incarcerations constituted a sweeping claim he would have found impossible to sustain.

  Sodium pentothal was eventually administered intravenously. The procedure backfired. The physician inadvertently gave an overdose, and the patient passed into a deep sleep. Swinney said nothing. “Truth serum” had flunked the test.

  (In the years since, so-called truth serums have been rejected as an interrogation technique, research finding that although the drug, and those like it, may lead to a relaxing of inhibitions, it does not prevent lying and may even lead to fantasies and a mixing of fact and fantasy. More recently it has been classified as abusive and condemned as an interrogation tool.)

  The experience dampened any optimism about cracking a case that lawmen felt was practically solved, and they were no closer to finding a way to keep Swinney in custody for the long term.

  Meanwhile, officers fared better with Peggy Swinney. A developing technology—for which enthusiasm was as high as it had been for “truth serum”—promised to put her on record in a dramatic way. She was willing to waive extradition and be interrogated while connected to a polygraph, or “lie detector,” machine. That would mean a trip to Austin, the state capital, for a session at Texas’s Department of Public Safety.

  The year before, Glen H. McLaughlin, chief of DPS’s crime lab, had gone to Chicago to learn to operate the machine and interpret its recordings. The DPS purchased a Keeler polygraph soon afterward. He was to use it with several persons during the course of the Phantom investigation. But Peggy, whom he remembered as a “strawberry blonde,” was the one with whom he had the best results.

  On schedule, Bill Presley and Max Tackett drove Peggy the 350 miles from Texarkana to Austin. They arrived in the early afternoon.

  The session produced two statements: one, a verbatim interrogation in a Question and Answer format, the second, a narrative statement much as Tillman Johnson had compiled in Texarkana.

  McLaughlin questioned her alone, the machine registering her blood pressure, respiration, and electrical currents as checks on her anxiety and possible deception. Presley and Tackett watched from an adjoining room through a two-way mirror. They could watch her; she could not see them and, presumably, was unaware that they were observing the interrogation.

  For the record, McLaughlin led her through routine matters of her personal background. Then he dipped into her memories of the case. He kept a map of the Spring Lake Park area nearby. Letters marked specific sites.

  “Now if you will, tell me where you were on April 13,” McLaughlin began.

  Her narrative statement, boiled down to its essence, came to this:

  “On April 13, 1946, Youell Swinney and I left Dallas about noon and drove to Texarkana, Texas. We were driving a Plymouth sedan. I think it was a 1941 model. We got to Texarkana about 6:30 P.M. and went to a show. We went to the Joy Theatre. We got out of the show about 8:30. When we went to the show, Swinney left me for about thirty minutes. When we came out of the show, we went out and drank some beer until the cafés were closed, and then we fooled around town and about 3:30 in the morning Swinney took a notion he wanted to go out to Spring Lake Park and rob somebody.

  “We drove out to the park and drove around until we saw where a car was parked. There was a couple in this car. Swinney and I got out of our car and Swinney told the couple to give him what they had. Swinney made me get in the car and I got in the back of the car with the little girl. Swinney got in the front of the car with the little boy. I think the car was a coupe, but it had some sort of a seat in the back.

  “When I got in the car, I moved the saxophone case off of the seat so that both the little girl and I could sit down back there. Swinney drove the car, which was the couple’s car, around to the place [north of the park]. He stopped the car and we all got out of the car. Swinney shot the little boy. He took the billfold out of the little boy’s pocket; I think he took it out of his left hip pocket. He took some money out of the billfold and put the billfold back in the little boy’s right hip pocket. We then got back in the car, Swinney, the little girl, and I. We drove down [the road] and turned around, and when we got back [to where the little boy was shot] we saw that the little boy had gotten up and had gone across the road and was now on the left hand side of the road and Swinney got out and shot the little boy two more times.

  “Swinney then drove on up [by the park] and stopped the car. He made me stay in the car and he and the little girl got out and walked down the road in front of the car. I don’t know how long they were gone, but it seemed like about 30 minutes. They came back in our car. Swinney got out and took the saxophone from the couple’s car and put it in our car. Swinney then drove on around past where the little boy was shot on down to the Summerhill Road, and then on around to [Morris Lane].

  “He stopped the car there, and made me get out of the car. I walked on down the road in front of the car. I heard the little girl begging Swinney not to do something. Swinney got out of the car with the little girl and they went across the fence on the right hand side. I started back to the car and when I got back to the car, I heard Swinney shoot two times. Swinney came back and got in the car. I got in the car. We drove [away] and turned around, then drove back to [Morris Lane] and Swinney stopped the car and threw away the saxophone case. He got out of the car and threw the saxophone on the right hand side of the road. He threw it over the fence; I think there were some bushes there. Swinney took the saxophone because he was going to pawn it. Then he decided it was too hot.”

  (Peggy’s recall of the saxophone’s disposal meshed almost exactly with the facts of its discovery, the details of which she had not been informed. The obvious conclusion was that, whether or not she was reliable on other points, she obviously was present at the time of the park murders, with her statement an unassailable refutation of any claim Swinney might make.)

  “We drove on down to the Summerhill Road, turned right, and went on to a restaurant and got something to eat. We then drove out on the Hope highway, on the Arkansas side, and turned off on an off road and spent the day out in the country on an off road. About dark, we came back in and went to Swinney’s sister’s house, in Texarkana. I don’t know the exact address. We spent the night at Swinney’s sister’s house and left the next morning. The gun that Swinney used was a black automatic, a .32.”

  (Her statement that they drove out on the Hope highway, which would have been the same one on which the Starks couple lived, differs from her earlier statements that they went to her mother’s house that day. Whether these were foibles of memory or whether she intentionally changed her story is not cl
ear.)

  She continued: “After we got in Swinney’s sister’s house, I saw Swinney put the gun in his coat pocket and hang the coat up in the back room. I saw Swinney shoot the little boy two times on one side of the road, and two times on the other side of the road. I didn’t see him shoot the little girl, but he and the little girl went across the fence together and I heard Swinney shoot two times, and then Swinney came back to the car alone.”

  At the end she attested to the truth and accuracy of what she had said.

  Then she wrote, in longhand:

  “Swinney told me if I ever said anything about it He would kill me,”

  She first wrote “anything about this,” then drew a line through “this” and substituted “it.”

  The way she ended her sentence, with a comma instead of a period, seemed to leave dangling whether she had finished writing her thoughts down or not. Her capitalizing He, meaning Swinney, like a deity, created another question.

  Under her handwritten coda she signed her name: “Peggy Swinney.”

  It was the first time she had signed a statement. Did she tell the truth? McLaughlin subsequently concluded that he believed she was being deceptive and holding something back. “I thought she had some involvement, that she had some additional information.”

  Aside from the polygraph, another tool has been developed in more recent years to help investigators figure out whether or not people they are interrogating are telling the truth. Mark McClish, the lead instructor on interviewing techniques at the U. S. Marshals Service Training Academy from 1991 to 1999, developed the Statement Analysis® system to test truth and deception during criminal interrogations. McClish’s book on the technique is I Know You Are Lying: Detecting Deception Through Statement Analysis, and his system is based on the principle that deceptive persons’ words will betray them. “A person cannot give a lengthy deceptive statement without revealing that it is a lie,” said McClish. “People will always word their statement based on all their knowledge. Therefore, their statement may contain information they did not intend to share. Even though people may want to withhold information, they will give us more information that what they realize. The key is to listen to what people are telling you and to know what to look for in a statement.”

  The author applied McClish’s methods and then McClish himself examined the statements. Several points may be made that tend to bear out McLaughlin’s suspicions of evasion on Peggy’s part while supporting her veracity in other areas. As McClish argued, a suspect may tell the truth but not the whole truth. It is the interrogator’s responsibility to search out weaknesses in the story: look for events out of order, pay attention to time references and missing periods of time, while checking for words and phrases suggesting deception. Did the suspect answer the question? Cross out any words? Use unnecessary words? Use an “internal dictionary” that hints of a change in language? The pronouns are important. So are verb tenses and the order of events and the breakdown of the account.

  As for time, Peggy left several hours unaccounted for. She didn’t tell how long they were on the road from Dallas to Texarkana, nor whether they stopped en route. This may not be a major concern, for that trip by car in 1946, over a narrow two-lane Highway 67, took about half a day of ordinary driving. The impression is that Swinney parked her in the Joy Theatre for a purpose. Based on his previous record, the implication was that he had business to take care of alone, suggesting he intended to rob someone. After that they went out on the town, drinking beer until closing time. On Saturday night on the Arkansas side, closing time was midnight; in Texas beer sales continued until one o’clock in the morning. They seemed to have several beer-drinking haunts on the Texas side. This would mean they left the last beer joint around 1:15 or 1:30 A.M. There is a two-hour gap from closing time till they entered Spring Lake Park. What happened during the two hours? Were they just driving? Possibly. Swinney liked to drive. Did he look for someone to rob? Also possible, for that is what took them to the park. It’s possible that her sense of time was off and that they went to the park earlier than 3:30. She had been drinking a lot of beer and may not have remembered well.

  Her selection of pronouns is interesting. She commonly used “we” to represent Swinney and her, as if their actions were joint, or cooperative, ones. It was “our” car, even though a stolen one. She identifies with Swinney as if a part of him or joined to him. Yet on that April night they were not married.

  One of the striking portions of her statement is her precise memory of which hip pocket Swinney took Paul Martin’s billfold from (the left) and which one in which he replaced it (the right). This constituted a close observation of the scene at night, a detail that many individuals would have missed, especially amidst something so violent and chaotic. She does not mention the datebook that Bill Presley found in the brush and which she later acknowledged Swinney had tossed away.

  Sequence seems to be wrong in one instance, when Swinney and the girl returned in “our” car to where Peggy was waiting. Then Swinney got out and took the saxophone from the couple’s car and put it in “our” car. She said she was waiting, alone, but her out-of-order telling may suggest she was there, on the scene, and witnessed the act, instead of learning of it later. On the other hand it may simply reflect the order in which McLaughlin phrased his questions to her and how her answers were combined in the statement.

  When it comes to implicating herself as an eyewitness, she consistently states that she had no choice but to obey Swinney. Officers knew she was deathly afraid of him. But she does testify that she saw him shoot Paul Martin four times, enough of a statement to sink Swinney’s case, were she to repeat it under oath in a courtroom. On other issues, she emphasizes that Swinney “made” her get out of the car, or he forced her to stay. She walked down the road; she heard the little girl begging Swinney. Then she starts back to the car when she hears two shots that ended Betty Jo Booker’s life. The question arises whether Peggy was telling the truth totally, even whether she might have been with Betty Jo Booker when she died.

  It is strange that Peggy did not know Swinney’s sister’s address in Texarkana. But if she intentionally disavowed that knowledge, there is no obvious benefit to her.

  Assuming she told the truth, albeit the partial truth, a review of the way Swinney made Peggy stay in the Martin car, while he herded Betty Jo down the road, later returning in “our” car, indicates that he couldn’t afford to leave the girl in Peggy’s custody, for fear she would escape, bringing an end to his nocturnal game. Betty Jo was already a witness to Paul Martin’s murder, which implied that he had no intentions of letting her live.

  But, following Peggy’s version, if she had somehow been found near Martin’s body by an officer while he took Betty Jo in to the words, such a discovery would have injected disarray into the criminal’s plans. If Peggy had been caught there, in the Martin car, and arrested, it would have incriminated Swinney. This raises a question: did he really leave Peggy by herself?

  At the end of the interrogation, McLaughlin asked, “Is there any other thing about the happenings of that day or that night, April 13th, and the morning of April 14th, that you remember and want to add to this now?” She had replied, “No.” It was a compound question, offering her a choice. Was this all she remembered? Probably not. Did she want to add to it at that time? Almost certainly she had answered that part sincerely and truthfully. She was unlikely to volunteer any more, without being goaded.

  What didn’t she tell? Probably quite a lot. There is a hint that something was going on past her surface reactions, when she edited the coda at the end of her statement, that Swinney had threatened her if she ever told about “this.” She’d crossed out “this” and wrote “it” over the deleted word. Evidently there was a significant difference, in her mind, between “this” and “it.” What was it? Did the two words mean different things? Did “it” refer to a crime she hadn’t described?

  A reasonable explanation might be that “this” referr
ed to the events in Spring Lake Park that night, while “it” encompassed a larger picture, that of their entire series of adventures together that spring and summer, perhaps all of the crimes committed. Might “it” have referred to the Starks shootings? What about the other murder and the beating? No one can say with certainly what she had in mind, but it was important enough for her to change her mind about the first word she used and correct it. Considering the volume of words she had poured out to officers after her arrest months before, this seems to have been the first time she had modified a word in a specific statement, and it was such a slight deviation that it was hardly noticeable at the time.

  The handwritten note contained another item that is more susceptible to analysis. In speaking of Swinney she capitalizes in her own handwriting the pronoun He, representing Swinney, as one would a deity. Was Swinney like a god to her? The Devil, of course, also receives capitalized attention.

  There is one more tantalizing detail. At the end of her note she placed a comma, not a period. She left no doubt she was making a comma, the tail is so long and definite. It was as if she was about to extend her remarks—about what?—and then thought better of it and stopped. She apparently was never questioned about it.

  A close examination of her final statement while attached to the polygraph machine tends to lead to the opinion that she told the truth as she remembered it but not the whole truth. Her account of the night Virgil Starks was killed was never brought up on the Texas side. Her willingness to deal with the Spring Lake Park murders may be interpreted as being her way to get attention off the Starks case and, in fact, out of Arkansas’s jurisdiction. It also may have reflected her horror, and a troubled mind, over the deaths of a couple who were, actually, children. Officers in Austin had not questioned her about the Larey-Hollis beatings, assuming she was not present, or the Griffin-Moore murders. In their quest to nail down Swinney’s complicity and crack the case, evidence on one double murder was seen as sufficient. Once she provided them with a statement on that headline case, they believed, probably correctly, that they had what they needed from her. They could always pursue other cases later.