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

by James Presley

  ‘PHANTOM’ KILLER TAKES LIFE

  Despite their skepticism, Texarkana lawmen drove to Fayetteville to investigate, finding nothing to change their minds. His “confession” didn’t fit the facts, to begin with. Young Tennison was buried in Hillcrest Cemetery, the resting place of Paul Martin and Virgil Starks. Family friend J. Q. Mahaffey was a pallbearer. His suicide-note confession was attributed to the mental illness and depression that caused him to justify the taking of his own young life.

  Over the years similar groundless, but less tragic, confessions abounded. Max Tackett reported than nine men had personally told him they committed the crimes; none of their accounts meshed with facts that had not been made public.

  Despite being behind bars for life as an habitual criminal, Swinney was not scot-free of a murder charge. This became evident in 1948 when he was returned to Bowie County on a bench warrant. The move coincided with a life change for Swinney’s wife, whose statements had focused on him.

  Peggy Swinney had sued for divorce, which was granted in Bowie County in August 1948. In one of those coincidences, her lawyer was Clyde Larey, who had obtained his son’s divorce from Mary Jeanne Larey two years earlier. Days later, in September, Peggy married Buster Rymer in Texarkana, Arkansas, using her maiden name, Peggy Lois Stevens. The bridegroom gave his age as twenty-two, born in 1926. She gave her age also as twenty-two, born in 1926 and two months younger than he. Actually, she had falsely stated her age as a year younger than she was; born in 1925, she was a year older than he and had already passed her twenty-third birthday. A prominent local Baptist minister, Dr. I. Keil Cross, performed the wedding ceremony.

  This was the event lawmen had been waiting for. Once Peggy had severed her legal relationship with Swinney, she could be compelled to testify.

  Sheriff Presley and a deputy, Zeke Henslee, fetched the prisoner from Huntsville with the judge’s order. Swinney was held for about a month before returning to Huntsville on another bench warrant in October. The only extant records are the docket entries in the district clerk’s office, which go no further than the enigmatic notations. Deputy Henslee years later testified that Swinney was ordered back to Bowie County for investigation of murder but remembered nothing more, not even the case involved. Supporting records for the docket notes could not be found in the district clerk’s files, indicating they, like many other records of the Phantom period, had been lost or pilfered over the years. Such documents would have offered some detail as to the official reason for Swinney’s month-long visit to the county.

  With no documents to answer the question and those who would have personal knowledge dead, the most probable explanation is that, learning of Peggy Swinney’s divorce, officers believed they could then use her testimony against him. If so, why then did they return him to prison? She may have continued to refuse to testify or her new husband may have pressured her to remain aloof. Under the circumstances, the prosecutor may have feared she would not be a reliable witness and decided to leave well enough alone. Swinney was already salted away for good. Why press their luck?

  In addition to all the reasons a sheriff would have for solving a case, Bill Presley had a deeply personal motivation to see that the man he was certain had killed Betty Jo Booker and Paul Martin remained out of circulation forever. He had seen Betty Jo’s corpse among the clump of trees north of Spring Lake Park, a fifteen-year-old girl who’d had her life before her until it was snuffed out senselessly. The image never left his mind. He had a daughter a few years younger than Betty Jo named Billie, and his empathy went out to Betty Jo’s parents. He’d lost his first-born daughter, along with his wife, to a malicious drunken driver in 1936. He wanted a world safe for his Billie. He didn’t want to see anyone else lose a daughter or son to a serial killer.

  In 1949, nearly three years after her son Paul was murdered, Inez Martin wrote to Colonel Homer Garrison, Jr., director of the Texas DPS. She had lost faith in “the Rangers and the city police” doing anything about the case. Might Garrison help solve the murder?

  Garrison replied that his men, especially Captain Gonzaullas and the Rangers, would continue to do all they could to bring the murderer to justice. He assured her that “we never quit the investigation of a case until it is finally solved.”

  She never knew that the man whom officers believed had killed her youngest son had been sent to prison for life for another, lesser crime. Her grief remained unmitigated, the mystery the greater. For some reason, Bessie Booker Brown, Betty Jo’s mother, did know of Swinney’s capture and that it was believed he had killed her daughter. She mentioned it in a taped interview, never published until this book, with journalist Georgia Daily years later. Bessie Brown mentioned Gonzaullas, as well as her neighbor FBI agent Hallett. Why Inez Martin was not also told is not clear. Arguably, her knowing the fact might have afforded her a measure of relief.

  In 1954, Swinney earned thirty days of commutation time for donating blood.

  In 1959, twelve years after his conviction, Swinney enlisted a sister in eastern Texas to plead his cause. She wrote her congressman, Wright Patman of Texarkana, one of the most powerful members in the Congress. Patman’s kindly fatherly image inspired constituents to assign him a degree of omnipotence he surely would have denied, but he responded diligently to every letter the day it was received.

  Her three handwritten pages highlighted her brother’s poor health—a walking skeleton, with ulcers—and she didn’t see how he could survive. He needed a transfer from the prison farm and, if paroled, help in finding a job. Her advocacy seems to have been filtered through her brother’s eyes.

  She soon focused on the 1946 murders, which must have come as a great surprise to Patman. Her brother didn’t do that crime, she insisted, because he kept her child while she worked during the “Murder Rampage.”

  If she had been able to prove Swinney was baby-sitting during the crucial periods it would have been his first solid alibi. He had never before claimed a role in childcare.

  Patman replied that he had no control over paroles but would make contact with the authorities. He wrote to the chairman of the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, enclosing her letter. He told her Swinney’s case would be reviewed in February, after which the board would notify the inmate of its action.

  The board denied parole.

  Swinney’s prison life was documented partially by his file at the Texas Department of Corrections office at Huntsville, examined in 1971. At that time inmate files were considered public records. On a later request the same records were no longer available and some were withheld from a Freedom of Information request. Over the years, his file bulged with correspondence and reports. A 2008 Freedom of Information request to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice revealed additional documents. Put together, the files reflected several patterns.

  He wrote letters aimed at gaining better treatment, keyed to complaints. One memorable letter to the Warden spoke of young inmates coming into the prison and his fear of their forcing him to become an “oral queer.” He also sought outside allies; letters to him demonstrated how he’d sought ministers to help in his attempts to make parole; one was from a Lutheran pastor in Texarkana whom he’d approached.

  From time to time he also wrote short stories, some of which he submitted for publication. They demonstrated no particular literary talent; he strung words together but not in a coherent story.

  He served time in solitary confinement—the Hole—for infractions of rules of behavior. One instance was for running a gambling operation with other inmates, but there were several other infractions. In 1954 he was placed in isolation and forfeited “good” time for operating a loan racket; in addition to the other evidence, he possessed a pocketknife, a forbidden weapon. Three years later he returned to isolation for illegal trading and trafficking. He admitted running a poker game but denied having a shakedown scheme. The warden commented: “This inmate’s name has come up too many times on the wrong side of the ledger.” In 1965 he was fo
und guilty of fighting after starting the altercation with another inmate. It was back to solitary, with loss of good time. By then he had spent far more years behind walls than he had at any other time, nearing twenty years. He hadn’t impressed his keepers.

  A more serious violation came when he was caught in a sexual act with another inmate, with Swinney in the male position and his partner in the passive. This might have been related to the pattern among the Phantom’s female victims—one apparent rape—and raises a question whether Swinney was bisexual or homosexual all along or whether the prison experience brought him to male-on-male sex because there was no other choice. The situation also might be viewed as an instance of domination over another person, relating to control more than a strictly sexual act, something which violent rape, like the sort that could have potentially happened to one or more of the female victims, would also have in common with this occurrence in prison. The document was viewed in 1971 but was not made available in 2008 and may have been scrubbed from his file by then.

  If Bowie and Miller County officers felt Swinney would never again walk the streets of Texarkana, the prisoner had other intentions. Failing parole in 1967, he resorted to a new strategy. He wrote the Miller County Circuit Clerk, at the time Morris M. Haak. He requested a copy of the judgment and sentence of his February 11, 1941 trial. Swinney, Inmate No. 108586 at the Ellis Unit of the Texas prison system, by then had discussed his case with older convicts and eventually with an attorney representing prisoners for the state. Old cons usually have a wealth of experience with the legal system but hardly qualify as experts. Their incarceration itself, a certified venture into failure, branded them as losers. Despite their status, they often had been through enough contests in court to absorb considerably more knowledge of criminal law than the ordinary citizen or the novice defendant. Swinney’s story was simple: He’d been in the pen since 1947 for car theft. Twenty years for stealing a car. The maximum penalty on that felony was acknowledged as ten years. The habitual criminal act for a mere stolen car?

  If his had been an ordinary conviction for a single felony theft, his advisers agreed, he would have been out after no more than ten years—by 1957. But the habitual criminal act—some called it The Bitch—assumed other crimes. If he’d been tried and convicted of the other car thefts he’d been linked to, he could have netted up to ten years on each one, for a total forty to fifty years. If the terms had been stacked, or run consecutively, he wouldn’t be cleared of one until he’d served out another. There was no telling how long he would have had to serve, perhaps even his natural life. But the key to freeing himself from the Bitch, his “experts” agreed, was to overturn any one of the previous convictions that had been used to enhance his sentence.

  The weakest link in the convictions was likely to be the oldest one. The further back in time, the less likely witnesses, judges, prosecutors, and officers would remember details of the case. Some might not even still be alive. By this logic, the 1941 conviction in Arkansas for car theft, also being in another state, became a prime candidate for attack.

  Having received a copy of the 1941 judgment and sentence, on July 4, 1967, Swinney wrote back to Circuit Clerk Haak, adding another request.

  “Although the judgment seems to indicate that I was represented by an attorney at the above mentioned trial, I did not employ one and the court did not appoint one for me.

  “If the indication mentioned above is correct please send me the name and mailing address of the attorney who claims to have represented me. May I have an early reply?”

  Six days later Haak reported, through a deputy: “I’m sorry but we don’t have any record of you being represented by an attorney. We have checked all records of your case.”

  Swinney had served, by then, twenty years of his life sentence. He was testing every means possible to gain his freedom. Time, it seemed, was on his side as more and more people involved with the case died off.

  Meanwhile, he sought release through the standard parole process. Nothing worked. When he won a recommendation, the Board of Pardons and Parole sent a form to Bowie County. Uniformly, the judge of the court that had convicted him, the prosecuting attorney, and the sheriff—all different persons from those who had held the offices in 1947—protested his possible release, making it clear that they didn’t want him back in Texarkana. The board wasn’t bound by the protests but usually was influenced.

  On July 7, 1970, Swinney, with assistance of a staff attorney, filed an application for writ of habeas corpus. Filed as petitioner pro se, that is, as his own attorney, Swinney cited his conviction in 1947 under the habitual criminal act which was based on two prior convictions used for enhancement. Alleging that he was “illegally confined and is illegally restrained,” he attacked the 1941 Arkansas conviction, claiming he “was not represented by counsel at any stage of the proceedings, including trial,” thereby making his conviction under the habitual criminal act invalid. He had served twenty-three years and should be released.

  The application for writ went to Judge Stuart E. Nunn of the Fifth Judicial District, the court from which Swinney had been sent to prison.

  Judge Nunn remembered a letter Swinney had written to him, which had nudged him into a more detailed investigation of the man, whom he had not known of previously. In it Swinney had stated that he was coming up for parole and “you dare not protest it.” The veiled threat, or clear threat if interpreted on its face, immediately caught Nunn’s attention. Why would an inmate, hoping to make parole, send such a letter to a judge who might influence the outcome of his application? Was he expecting the judge to be frightened into approving his release? What sort of man was he? What crime had he committed that had sent him to the pen? Nunn didn’t know the name. His judicial career had come after that tense spring of 1946. Had Swinney not written the letter, and in that stern tone, he might have escaped the judge’s notice and gained his liberty. His interest piqued, Nunn began looking into the prisoner’s case. There was little in the county records to guide him. He called, among others, Bill Presley, who had been the sheriff in 1947. Presley briefed him on Swinney’s record, including the Phantom case. Nunn reasoned that Swinney was incarcerated as a habitual criminal, and the threatening letter was proof enough that he hadn’t been rehabilitated.

  Although these thoughts remained in memory when Swinney took a new tack and sought a writ of habeas corpus as a vehicle for leaving the prison, the issue before Nunn now was a clear-cut one: Had Swinney had access to counsel in his 1941 Arkansas trial used to enhance his 1947 conviction? On the surface it seemed to be a simple matter of fact.

  Judge Nunn had the record searched in the Miller County Circuit Clerk’s office. In his assessment of Swinney’s allegation, he found the judgment in Volume N, Page 174 of criminal cases as Case No. 5463, State vs. Youell Lee Swinney, with plea of guilty and sentence both dated February 11, 1941.

  On October 3, 1970, Nunn delivered his decision on the motion, citing the exact language used in the 1941 record:

  “On this Day the State, appeared by her Attorney, Dick Huie; and the Defendant Appeared in proper person and by his Attorney, whereupon the Court sentenced the Defendant to Three (3) years in the State Penitentiary.”

  Circuit Judge Dexter Bush had signed the document.

  Judge Nunn concluded: “The Court finds from the record that the Petitioner Youell Lee Swinney had an Attorney when he entered a Plea of Guilty and was Sentenced in the Circuit Court of Miller County, Arkansas, on February 11, 1941. That his conviction in Bowie County, Texas, as an habitual criminal on February 11, 1947, is valid.

  “Petition for Writ of Habeas Corpus is DENIED.”

  It closed, a little tighter, a door to the outside world for Swinney.

  Several days later, Harry H. Walsh, a staff counsel for inmates at TDC, wrote the clerk of the Court of Criminal Appeals, forwarding copies of documents from the Miller County circuit clerk’s office, asking for a review.

  In a letter on January 21, 1971, J
udge Nunn denied Swinney’s appeal, ruling he had been represented by an attorney. He recommended denial.

  Following protests from Bowie County officials, the board turned Swinney down for parole again.

  In the spring of 1971, I freelanced an eight-part series of articles about the Phantom case. I had reviewed all of the records, including contemporary newspaper accounts, had interviewed numerous local officials associated with the case, and had made trips to the DPS offices in Austin, the Ranger office in Garland, and the main office of the Texas prison system in Huntsville. At the penitentiary I had studied Swinney’s files, which were treated as public records. I had not used Swinney’s name in any of the articles, on the advice of the newspaper’s attorney. (The newspaper’s attorney was Richard Arnold, who as a little boy had been pictured in Life magazine with his mother and his brother taking refuge in the Grim Hotel during the height of the Phantom scare, and who later became a federal appellate judge.)

  The articles appeared in the Texarkana Gazette over an eight-day period. The first article, introducing and presenting the precursor event to the murders, appeared on a Sunday and triggered two events. That afternoon, I received a telephone call from a woman clearly distraught. My wife answered the phone and I never talked to the caller, but she forcibly told my wife that no more should be published of the case. I never knew for sure who the woman was, for she did not wait for me; she just left the message, without identifying herself.

  The other event unfolded a few days later in my uncle Bill Presley’s home. By then he had been out of the sheriff’s office for years. That afternoon, a middle-aged man appeared at his door in a state of high anxiety. The former sheriff could see the man was practically vibrating with agitation.

  He was concerned about the Phantom series being published. He was vague, but clearly nervous. The ex-sheriff, reading his emotional state, invited him to sit with him in the patio. It was a pleasant spring day, warm and comfortable.