In essence, the story of Youell Swinney is one of an abnormal break at birth or in the first few years thereafter and his responses to the world around him, eventually touching the lives, negatively, of almost all those with whom he came into contact. He probably didn’t think of it in the way normal persons would have, ensuring tragedy for everyone, himself included.
One of the most intriguing ideas is that of his emotional environment during his childhood and youth. Assuming he somehow suffered a “genetic accident” that contributed to an abnormal mind, would he have turned to violence even if he had had a stable, supportive family experience as he grew up? If the answer is No, untold tragedies might have been prevented and lives saved. While too late for this American tragedy, it is a question worth considering in future mental-health studies, arguing for intervention. Yet even if his was a case of “bad seed” entirely, that is, being sociopathic, that abnormality alone doesn’t lead to repeated murders. Sociopaths are vastly more numerous than sociopathic killers, indicating much more is at work in serial killers’ minds, probably tracing back to life experiences making a difference.
Glenn Owen’s plan to clear the case by exception, following FBI guidelines, would accomplish what hadn’t happened in 1946 and has been elusive since then. It would provide a public service rare enough in so many serial killings: stamp closed on the case, laying out for the first time all of the evidence attesting to Swinney’s guilt, and offering some modicum of closure to the victims’ extended families.
The approach could be used in both Texas and Arkansas, as well as in Oklahoma for the lesser felonies committed there.
EPILOGUE
Time transformed Texarkana, sending all the major players of 1946 to their graves.
Youell Lee Swinney died in a Dallas nursing home in 1994 at age seventy-seven. His wife Peggy, as noted, divorced him and remarried. She died, also in Dallas, in 1998 at seventy-two.
Ultimately Swinney received the notoriety he craved, in this book. He wanted credit without the consequences. His guilt is nailed down, with him beyond the reach of the law—but the small comfort is that he is unable to enjoy the “credit” that comes with being revealed as the Phantom. Conversely, relatives and friends of his victims are more likely to benefit from the enlightenment.
All of the lawmen and prosecutors died over the years, long before Tillman Johnson finally passed away in 2008, at age ninety-seven. Max Tackett left the state police in 1948 to become Texarkana, Arkansas, police chief; in 1951 he became president of the Arkansas Peace Officers Association. Tillman Johnson left the sheriff’s office where he had served as chief deputy and accepted a job as an insurance claims adjuster until he retired. As he was leaving the sheriff’s office in October 1957, he conveyed to Max Tackett, by then police chief, a pasteboard box containing a cast of the shoeprint he’d found in the field next to the Starks home, along with a piece of linoleum from the house with a shoeprint on it, and the flashlight. He thought having the box in Tackett’s hands was the best way to safeguard it. They’d also found .22 cartridge hulls at the murder site.
Tackett retired as police chief in 1968 and died in 1972, only fifty-nine years old, remembered in his obituary as “a colorful, outspoken, and sometimes controversial figure.” Johnson never found out what happened to the evidence, now long vanished.
Johnson wrestled with the Phantom mystery for the rest of his long life. Deep into his nineties, still agile of mind, he reflected on clues, records, interrogations, and memories, always searching for new insights and fresh ideas.
Even in sleep the case haunted him, invading that most intimate zone of dreams, rendering detailed, vivid, unambiguous scenes. It was as if his unconscious mind was determined to highlight signals overlooked in his waking hours.
For years he’d believed the Starks case was unrelated to the Texas crimes. As he examined material he’d not seen before, much of it from official files acquired through Freedom of Information requests for this book, he revised his opinions. He concluded, as his friend Max Tackett had years before, that Swinney had killed all five victims and had shot Katie Starks, and that Peggy had accompanied him.
Both sheriffs—Elvie Davis and Bill Presley—were gone by the end of the 1970s. Davis was defeated for reelection as Miller County sheriff in the 1950s. Presley did not seek reelection in Bowie County when his second term ended in 1948. He characterized his four years as sheriff as the worst time of his life, which included Army service in France during World War I. “I haven’t averaged six hours sleep per day—or night—since I became sheriff, and financially I figure I’m about where I was four years ago.” Out of office, he sold cars for the local Ford agency until the political bug bit him again and he served three four-year terms as Bowie County treasurer. He died in 1972 at seventy-seven.
Captain M. T. “Lone Wolf” Gonzaullas retired from the Texas Rangers in 1951 after thirty years’ service, consulted for a Hollywood studio filming movies about the West, later helped dedicate the Texas Rangers Hall of Fame and Museum in Waco. He died in Dallas of cancer in 1977 at eighty-four. He never wrote the memoirs he had in mind. Eighteen days before he died, he gave his last interview, for an oral history project for the Texas Rangers museum. Several of his comments seemed in conflict with previous statements and the facts. He said the killer knew the murdered couples and they knew him—clearly not true. Just as surprising, he claimed the Rangers got no credit for their work, that newspapers “never said anything in any paper from all over the United States.” On the contrary, the Rangers—and Gonzaullas—were front and center in almost every article. The most likely explanation is that the cancer and its treatment led to his confusion and impaired memory.
Newsmen who covered the story locally joined the parade of death. Editor J. Q. Mahaffey retired from the Gazette in the 1960s, worked in public relations for the Model Cities program before retiring again. He lived to ninety-two. Calvin Sutton, the Gazette city editor who labeled the Phantom, subsequently joined the staff of the Fort Worth Star Telegram, where he retired as executive editor, after which he ran a smaller newspaper in Arkansas, where he died of a massive stroke. Louis “Swampy” Graves, who’d served as sports editor and the Gazette’s greeter for out-of-town news people, a few years later went into the printing business, then bought a country newspaper in Nashville, Arkansas, which he and his family ran till his death. Others who’d covered the big story—Bob Mundella, Ernest Valachovic, Lucille Holland, Sally Reese—died over the years. Charles B. Pierce, who had focused attention anew on the case with his movie, The Town That Dreaded Sundown, died in 2010. He was seventy-one. (Occasionally the film showed, late at night, on Turner Classic Movies, as it did twice in 2012. A MGM-funded remake of the movie was completed in 2013.)
The judges and prosecutors in both counties were gone. Stuart Nunn, who’d presided over Swinney’s evidentiary hearing, died of cancer. Lynn Cooksey, who as D.A. had opposed Swinney’s release, died in 2008. His adversary in the hearing, Jack Carter, the sole survivor, became a district judge, later gaining a seat on the appellate bench; he retired in 2013.
Bessie Booker Brown mourned her young daughter till her own death in 1977. She lived among her memories, hoping justice would be served in the murder of Betty Jo, who would always be, in her mind, fifteen years old with a promising life before her. Paul Martin’s mother and brothers died not knowing who had wantonly taken his life at sixteen, on the cusp of adulthood.
Mary Jeanne Larey remarried and led a rewarding life cut short by cancer in Montana at age thirty-eight in 1965. James Hollis, her date that night, remarried after his own divorce, siring a set of twins before his second marriage ended, and finally settling down in a subsequent marriage with a family of four. As a Civil Service employee, he traveled far and wide and served a stint with NASA in its early days. He died in 1975 in Oklahoma, where he’d travelled for his older brother’s funeral. He was fifty-four.
Lizzie Moore, Polly Ann’s mother, died in 1958. Polly’s brother, Mark
Moore, survived them both and in retirement lived in northeastern Texas. Of Richard Griffin’s brothers and sisters, only David Griffin in his nineties remained at this writing.
Richard Griffin’s niece, Andrea Anderson, who never knew him, probably spoke for other victims’ families, though they never knew her, when she said, “It has always been like there was a hole in the family where Uncle Richard should have been.” The same large hole existed in other families as well.
Katie Strickland Starks, like other surviving victims and relatives, never fully recovered emotionally from her night of terror and near-death. As soon as she was physically able, she attended business school and lived with a sister and brother-in-law for ten years, working as a secretary. In 1955 she remarried, to Forrest Miller Sutton, who worked for a milk company. She carried on a normal life, except for those fearful moments that haunted her for the rest of her life. A noise at night would wake her; she would ask her husband to investigate. He would go outside, usually find nothing, and temporarily soothe her imagination.
Katie Sutton died on July 3, 1994, at age eighty-four—a few months before Youell Swinney died—and was buried in the family plot at Hillcrest Memorial Park beside Virgil. A gravesite on her other side was reserved for her second husband, Forrest, who died in 2009 and was buried there.
Hillcrest Cemetery, on the Texas side, became the final resting place for several of the Phantom victims, including Paul Martin, Virgil and Katie Starks, as well as any number of prominent figures of the time such as William Rhoads Grim, Judge Stuart Nunn, Congressman Wright Patman, publisher Clyde E. Palmer, editor J. Q. Mahaffey, their graves all situated a short stroll from each other.
As if to replace notables who had faded into yesteryear, the city continued to export noteworthy natives to achieve fame elsewhere. H. Ross Perot, billionaire founder of Electronic Data Systems and a 1992 third party candidate for President, made Dallas his headquarters. Arthur Temple, Jr., with Temple-Inland, became a major business influence. Golfers following Byron Nelson included Miller Barber and Rick Rogers, joining football sensation Billy Sims (from Hooks) and other athletes to lead a crowded parade of those starring in different sports. Others gained recognition belatedly: Scott Joplin for his ragtime compositions (his opera Treemonisha, which won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize, was set near Texarkana) and player piano composer Conlon Nancarrow, who did most of his work in Mexico City.
As Texarkana changed over time, quirks of its bi-state status lingered.
Today a water tower on Interstate 30, which slices through the north side, emphasizes both oneness and twinness: Texarkana—Twice as Nice. The slogan didn’t exist in 1946. Neither did the Interstate. The city limits, which didn’t reach nearly so far, expanded to include Spring Lake Park. A bank sits near where Betty Jo Booker’s saxophone was recovered. Popular Bryce’s Cafeteria, like other businesses, relocated alongside the Interstate.
Downtown, the massive federal courthouse and post office, astride the only bi-state road in the U.S., remained a dominant fixture. It reportedly is the second most photographed courthouse in the nation after the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1960, Democratic nominee John F. Kennedy drew an estimated 100,000 for his speech there. A plaque now commemorates the event. The iconic Confederate soldier still stares south.
Old landmarks underwent a variety of fates. A decrepit, empty Grim Hotel, a shell of its former glory, lies like a scar, awaiting restoration or other final disposition. Once-bustling Union Station became another shell. The Amtrak station nearby operated from a small office. The old Paramount Theater, refurbished, became the Perot Theater. It no longer screens movies but is the venue for musical and dramatic performances.
For years, the twin cities shared Texas ZIP codes—75501 and 75502. Arkansas-side Mayor Londell Williams, the first—and, so far, only—African-American mayor of either city, lobbied his city to its own, Arkansas ZIP code—71854. State Line Avenue also divides the area codes—903 for Texas; 870, Arkansas. For years Jim and Linda Larey operated a printing shop on the Arkansas side of State Line. Its telephone area code was 870; its fax code, in the same room, 903 as if in Texas. Explanation: they had once been across the street; when they moved, the phone company let them keep the fax area code. In the town where Willie Vinson was brutally lynched, interracial couples occasionally could be seen, setting off no incidents, raising no eyebrows.
The tricky boundary continued to bewilder unwary visitors. The Texas Liquor Store sported a billboard in 2010 advertising Lone Star beer, brewed in San Antonio.
ONE MORE
REASON TO NEVER
LEAVE TEXAS
To read the sign, you had to drive north, meaning you’d already left Texas. Both the Texas Liquor Store and its billboard were in Arkansas.
Decades after the murders, incidents continued to open old wounds and raise questions. In 1999 an anonymous woman called the home of Paul Martin’s brother, R. S. Martin, Jr., and talked to his wife Margaret. The caller wanted to apologize for her father. “I never understood why my daddy shot Paul.” Efforts to trace the call failed. In light of facts of the case, it hardly seemed credible even as a “confession by proxy,” adding stress rather than closure to survivors.
The case, resisting oblivion, attracted international attention. Inquiries came from as far off as Sweden and the United Kingdom and all over the U.S. One day a couple from North Carolina appeared on Tillman Johnson’s porch, the man eager to have his picture taken with the old lawman. In 2003 a camera crew from Italy showed up, unheralded, to film Johnson’s version of the crimes.
Everyone wanted to solve the case. In 1977, students from Drury College in Springfield, Missouri arrived in Texarkana, accompanied by their sponsor, Dr. Jay Bynum, intent on cracking the, by then, thirty-year-old mystery. As the Texarkana Gazette reported, the students “were bathed directly in the pool of icy fear immersing the case.” Dr. Bynum explained: “We found out the motel we were staying in was just a hundred yards or so from where Paul Martin’s body was found. The girls were fairly frightened by it, and they even put a chair under the doorknob.” They spent a week in Texarkana researching the case.
On the Internet, Wikipedia expanded its entry. Websites such as crimelibrary.com, angelfire.com, TruTV.com/library/crime/serial, and thedarwinexception conveyed their reports. A few foreign entities joined in—Thai, Russian, Greek, and Italian. A rapper, Nas, mentioned “stabbin’ bitches like the Phantom,” although the Phantom stabbed nobody and no victim was a “bitch.”
In 2010 a play, “Phantom Killer” by Jan Buttram, opened off Broadway in New York’s Abington Theatre. The same year Jane Roberts Wood’s novel, Out the Summerhill Road, turned a fragment into fiction. Casey Roberts and his students at Texas A&M University at Texarkana worked on a projected film about the case. A musician in northeast Arkansas performed under the name Youell Swinney, as if to assume a cloak of dark fame, transforming multiple tragedies of innocent persons, mostly teenagers, into a celebration of a multi-fall convict.
Sometime over the years, decades afterward, far from Texarkana, someone labeled the crimes the “Moonlight Murders,” alliterative and slick but inaccurate, pure imagination. Certainly the Hollis-Larey and Griffin-Moore attacks occurred in the dark. There was some waning moonlight in the Martin-Booker case, and the moon was setting during the Starks shootings. The killer operated in the dark. Any moonlight was purely coincidental and slight, never a factor in the killer’s motivation.
The murders put the town on the map, in a negative way. In 2007 a national tour featured it among sixteen locales that had sustained senseless violence, such as Chicago’s St. Valentine Day massacre. At Texarkana, a musician played John Lennon’s peace anthem, “Imagine,” on the piano on which the Beatle composed it. Afterward the film crew pushed on to Dallas, where President Kennedy was assassinated.
As its signature crime the case seemed woven indelibly into Texarkana’s cultural fabric. The Town That Dreaded Sundown came to be shown annually in Spring Lake Park, sponsored
by the City of Texarkana, Texas. A country club held a Phantom Ball. The chamber of commerce once included the Phantom legacy in its brochure. More recently it gave out DVDs of the movie. In 2013 a Hollywood remake of the movie, backed by MGM, headed to theaters.
Criminologist Jack Levin has observed that residents of a small town in which a high-profile murder occurred often feel stigmatized. This seems not to have happened in Texarkana, except at the time of the murders. The city has almost wallowed in the notoriety, as well as expressing a certain local pride in the fictionalized movie filmed on location there.
The murders represent a case history of domestic terrorism as threatening as any other. Domestic terrorists have abounded over the 20th century, creating a long line of serial killers—the Green River killer, Zodiac, the D.C. sniper, Son of Sam, B.T.K., the Boston Strangler, all named by the media—and mass murderers like Timothy McVeigh, with his Oklahoma City federal building bombing. The Long Island Serial killer has started the 21st century, and still remains at large, as do the tragic legacies left behind by other mass murders, including the Columbine shooters, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, Jared Loughner of Arizona, and Adam Lanza of Sandy Hook. Arguably, domestic terrorists like these have, collectively, inflicted more carnage upon the U.S. than did the foreign terrorism of September 11, 2001, in New York City and Washington. The incidents, because they stretch over decades, lack the dramatic impact of killing thousands on a single day, but the overall toll rapidly mounts in any full accounting. For the victims, their families and friends, the emotional shock and the rampant fear are as great as that of any other tragedy.
Psychiatrist Helen Morrison wrote that the victims of serial killers, whose deaths all too often go unsolved, are numerous enough to populate a small town. Somewhere, she suggested, they deserve a memorial in recognition of what they and their families have suffered. Texarkana would be as good a site as any.
The Phantom Killer: Unlocking the Mystery of the Texarkana Serial Murders: The Story of a Town in Terror Page 40