The Texarkana Moonlight Murders: The Unsolved Case of the 1946 Phantom Killer

by Michael Newton

  No names were mentioned in the article, but for anyone familiar with the case, the bulk of it clearly alluded to Youell and Peggy Swinney. Inasmuch as Sergeant Robertson had played a role in the original investigation, Max Tackett’s suspicion against Swinney, recounted in detail by the Gazette, hardly qualified as late-breaking news.7

  The “new” lead, finally, went nowhere.

  * * *

  America changed radically while Youell Swinney sat in prison, from a Jim Crow land where white made right and a policeman’s word was law, to a society in revolution, rocked by protest marches, riots, bombings, televised assassinations, and the public shaming of a president who swore in vain that he was “not a crook.”

  One engine powering that revolution was the United States Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice Earl Warren from October 1953 through June 1969. During those years, the “Warren Court” delivered epic judgments on a range of vital topics that included civil rights for African Americans, political reapportionment, First Amendment freedoms, and the legal rights of criminal defendants. It was the latter area in which the high court’s rulings aided Youell Swinney, with four cases decided in the 1960s. Those included:

  Gideon v. Wainwright, decided on March 18, 1963, ruled that state courts are required under the Sixth Amendment of the Constitution to provide counsel in criminal cases for defendants who are unable to afford their own attorneys.8 After this decision, all fifty states employed public defenders to represent indigent defendants.

  Doughty v. Maxwell, decided on February 24, 1964, reversed an Ohio court’s ruling that, regardless of Gideon, defendants waived their Sixth Amendment right to counsel by the act of pleading guilty to a criminal charge.9

  Escobedo v. Illinois, decided on June 22, 1964, held by a vote of five to four that the Sixth Amendment entitles criminal suspects to legal representation during police interrogations. Dissenting justices complained that the decision would somehow prevent police from solving crimes.10

  Finally, Miranda v. Arizona, decided on June 13, 1966, held by a vote of five to four that any statements made by suspects during a police interrogation were deemed inadmissible at trial unless prosecutors could show that the defendant was informed of the right to consult with an attorney before and during interrogation and of the right to remain silent when questioned by police. Furthermore, it must be demonstrated that the defendant understood these rights and voluntarily waived them. Dissenting justices warned, “In some unknown number of cases, the Court’s rule will return a killer, a rapist or other criminal to the streets and to the environment which produced him, to repeat his crime whenever it pleases him. As a consequence, there will not be a gain, but a loss, in human dignity.”11

  While those Supreme Court decisions led police nationwide to complain of being “handcuffed,” driving some to join the ranks of segregationists and other right-wing rabble clamoring for Chief Justice Warren’s impeachment, thousands of convicts read the decisions in prison libraries and prepared to challenge their prior convictions.

  One of them was Youell Swinney.

  In 1967, Swinney addressed a letter to the Miller County Clerk’s office, inquiring as to whether he was represented by a lawyer at his trial in 1941. The question, as it happens, was required to support a valid appeal of his designation as a habitual criminal in 1947. A deputy clerk wrote back in due time, “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.”12

  In 1970, Swinney filed for a writ of habeas corpus, also known as the Great Writ, which demands that a prisoner be taken to court, where his or her custodian must present proof of authority for confinement, allowing the court to determine whether the inmate is lawfully incarcerated. If the custodian lacks legal authority, the prisoner must be released from custody. Swinney’s claim was simple: if the 1941 conviction and incarceration was illegal, then he had not been a three-time loser six years later, and his life sentence as a habitual offender should be overturned. The habeas corpus process, though designed to liberate unjustly imprisoned defendants, often takes considerable time, and Swinney’s case would not be heard in Bowie County’s court until September 1972.13

  Fifteen witnesses testified in those proceedings, held between September 12 and 22. Some officials involved in the 1941 case were deceased, and the surviving court record solved nothing with its curt notation of “2/11/41—Plea of guilty—Three years—Sentenced.” The space for an attorney’s name was blank, which seemed to contradict a form retrieved from Miller County’s sparse records, including the phrase “...and comes the defendant hereto in proper person and by attorney....” The file from a separate, unrelated case, reading “...and comes the defendant hereto in proper person and in custody of the sheriff...,” was supplied to demonstrate the normal paperwork for a defendant who had no attorney.14

  To remedy the record’s defects, fifteen witnesses were called to testify at Swinney’s hearing. Fourteen were summoned by Swinney’s attorney, Jack Carter, and one by District Attorney Lynn Cocksey, representing the State of Texas. Either unable or unwilling to address the Arkansas conviction Swinney had originally challenged, both sides focused on his 1947 trial, and thereby made a muddle of the case. Horace Hallett of Durham, North Carolina—formerly a Texarkana FBI agent from 1945 to 1952, testified that Fifth District Judge Robert Vance had advised Swinney of his right to counsel in 1947, but that Swinney chose to defend himself. Swinney countered with sworn testimony that Judge Vance issued no such advice, and that he had received no warning of a possible life sentence as a three-time offender. Tillman Johnson confused matters further, claiming that Swinney was represented at trial in 1947, by lawyer W. A. Pace of Miller County, Arkansas. Former district clerk Frank Cox “vaguely” recalled the trial, but could not say if Swinney was advised of any legal rights. Four members of the jury that convicted Swinney had no memories whatever of the trial. Luther McClure, whose car Swinney had stolen, remembered attending the trial, but could not say if Swinney had a lawyer or was offered one.15

  Another angle of attack, though ultimately futile, focused on Swinney’s various petitions for parole since 1947. Five witnesses—D.A. Cocksey, Sheriff C. C. Rachel, Fifth District Judge Stuart Nunn, 102nd District Judge Herbert Line, and 202nd District Judge Guy Jones—were asked what recommendations they filed in response to Swinney’s parole applications, but all refused to answer, noting that such information had been held by prior court decisions to be privileged. Speaking in general terms, Cocksey said that he opposed parole for any habitual criminal, and that he was not convinced of Swinney’s rehabilitation. Judge Nunn allowed that he had never heard of Swinney prior to receiving a letter from the defendant, cautioning him to “don’t dare” oppose the parole application. (Swinney denied writing any such letter.) Attorney Carter asked Cocksey and Nunn if they opposed Swinney’s release because he was alleged to be the Texarkana Phantom. Both denied it, while admitting knowledge of the claims.16

  Judge Nunn, perhaps ironically, presided at the final hearing, on September 22. He informed Carter and Swinney that a transcript of the hearings, with a bill of exceptions filed by their side, would be prepared and sent to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals sometime within the next three to six months. In the meantime, Swinney would return to the state pen at Huntsville and wait for the higher court’s ruling.17

  What he got, instead—on March 19, 1973—was an order from the appellate court demanding an additional evidentiary hearing. Specifically, Judge Truman Roberts questioned the district court’s finding that in 1941 “Petitioner Youell Lee Swinney was represented by an attorney by the name of W. A. Pace of the law firm of Haynie and Pace, both attorneys being attorneys at the Bar of Miller County, Arkansas. The court further finds that these attorneys had represented Mr. Swinney and his family on other matters. This conclusion is based upon the testimony of Mr. Tilman [sic] Johnson who at the time was Chief Deputy Sheriff of Miller County, Arkansas.” After reviewing Miller C
ounty’s records, Judge Roberts deemed those findings erroneous, noting that “Johnson’s testimony on this issue was that Pace represented petitioner at the primary trial, in 1947. In fact, at the last evidentiary hearing which this Court ordered, Johnson testified that, as for the 1941 trial, ‘I can’t say that the man was represented by an attorney.’”18

  With that established, Judge Roberts declared that “petitioner has sufficiently sustained his burden in attacking the 1941 conviction. Having so concluded, the maximum possible punishment now becomes 10 years’ confinement.” Since Swinney, by that time, had served twenty-six years, Roberts granted the writ of habeas corpus and ordered his release. Curiously, while that order was filed on September 25, 1973, records from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice read: “10-16-1973—Mandate from Court of Appeals orders the Life [sentence] dismissed and discharged same day.”19

  Freedom was sweet, but transitory. After barely a year on the street, he was convicted in Dallas on a federal charge of counterfeiting quarters and half-dollars, which he passed off to their hapless buyers as “collector’s items.” That earned Swinney a two-year sentence, served at the Federal Correctional Institution located at 4001 Leopard Drive in Texarkana, Texas. He escaped in 1975, but was quickly recaptured and sent to a larger prison for completion of his sentence.20

  The breakout cost him extra time, but Swinney was free again by October 23, 1981, when jurors in Longview, Texas, convicted him of theft. He received a six-year sentence in that case, but served only sixteen months. Paroled on February 17, 1983, he was discharged from supervision on September 25, 1987—and quickly took another fall for theft, this time in Dallas. That conviction earned him seven years in prison, but again he was favored with early release, paroled on January 5, 1989, and officially discharged from supervision on January 25, 1995. By that time, it hardly mattered, since Swinney had died at a Dallas rest home, at age seventy-seven, on September 15, 1994.21

  Texarkana realtor Mark Bledsoe, researching a still-unpublished book about the Phantom’s crimes, traced Swinney to the nursing home in 1993 and found him wheelchair-bound, the victim of a crippling stroke. “When I talked to him,” Bledsoe later recalled, “he was coherent to a certain degree. Time has definitely had its effect. I videotaped the interview and it is hard to make out what is being said. You have to go more on the expressions. He spent some time bragging about his counterfeiting days and talking about being in and out of prison. But when I asked him about the Phantom murders, he became angry and denied that he’d had anything to do with them. He said, ‘I got off for that and I was cleared.’ He even refused to admit that he’d ever been married. It was spooky. He was in a wheelchair. I am getting goose bumps just thinking about it, being in the room with that person who had people in Texarkana so terrified.”22

  Denials and evasions notwithstanding, Bledsoe remained “at least 99 percent convinced that he did the majority of the murders credited to the Phantom.” Corroborating that opinion, Bledsoe said, were interviews with other Huntsville prison inmates who alleged that Swinney “told them details of the killings unreported in the newspapers.” As we have seen, Bledsoe excluded Virgil Starks from the Phantom’s tally, blaming that crime on an unknown veteran of World War II, freshly discharged from service in 1946, allegedly confined sometime thereafter to a Wisconsin mental hospital.23

  One last peculiarity regarding Youell Lee Swinney is a record held by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, listing a prisoner of that unusual name with inmate number 22232-149. The Youell Lee Swinney in question was a white male, released from custody for unspecified charges on March 19, 1990. The same record lists his age at release as ninety-five years—twelve years older than the Phantom “prime suspect” at his death, four years later.24 A request filed under the Freedom of Information Act, as research for the work in hand, failed to resolve the odd circumstance.

  * * *

  Enter Charles B. Pierce, an Indiana native whose parents moved to Arkansas before his first birthday. As a child, Pierce met future Hollywood director Harry Thomason, best known for his television series Designing Women, Evening Shade, and Hearts Afire, as well as his friendship with governor and president Bill Clinton. With Thomason, young Chuck Pierce produced two home movies shot on an 8mm camera and never lost his fascination for filmmaking. In the 1960s, Pierce worked at several TV stations in Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas, while edging into Hollywood productions serving as set decorator on fifteen films and TV series between 1966 and 1971.25

  In 1972, Pierce directed his first feature film, The Legend of Boggy Creek, a quasi-documentary relating tales of a Bigfoot-type creature reported around Fouke, in Miller County, Arkansas. Earl E. Smith wrote the screenplay, in his first of several collaborations with Pierce, and the film was shot on location, using “actors” recruited from among the patrons at a local filling station. Premiering at Texarkana’s Perot Theater, Boggy Creek earned $55,000 in its first three weeks, then went on to gross $25 million nationwide, though Pierce’s prediction of Academy Awards was never realized.26

  The success of Boggy Creek established Pierce as a cinematic force to reckon with—or, at least, a large frog in a rather small pond. Between 1974 and 1977 he teamed with Earl Smith to write and direct six more films. In 1983, Pierce and Smith also collaborated on the script for Sudden Impact, the fourth film in Clint Eastwood’s “Dirty Harry” series, wherein Pierce was credited for writing the famous line “Make my day.” For their pièce de résistance, in 1976, Pierce and Smith returned to their Razorback roots with another mockumentary, telling the Texarkana Phantom’s story in The Town That Dreaded Sundown.27

  From the story’s outset, Pierce and Smith changed nearly everything. They started by expunging names of real-life characters, so that Lone Wolf Gonzaullas became “Captain J. D. Morales,” Bill Presley became “Sherif Otis Barker,” and so on. Pierce scored a major coup by landing Oscar-winner Ben Johnson for the Morales role, while Andrew Prine portrayed composite lawman “Deputy Norman Ramsey,” investigating various crimes without apparent regard to legal jurisdiction. Vern Stierman reprised his Boggy Creek role as the film’s solemn narrator, while stuntman Bud Davis donned the Phantom’s hood without a single line of spoken dialogue.28

  Despite a line on-screen claiming that “only the names have been changed,” Pierce and Smith also revised the facts to suit themselves and serve their script. The Phantom’s first attack occurs on March 4, 1946—not February 22—as a masked prowler attacks “Sammy Fuller” and “Linda Mae Jenkins” in lover’s lane. Sammy tries to start his car, but the assailant smashes his window with a metal pipe and drags him from the car, then turns on Linda Mae. Found unconscious the next morning, both are taken to a hospital where “Dr. Kress” (played by Earl Smith himself) tells Deputy Ramsey that Linda Mae has been bitten and “literally chewed” on various parts of her body.29

  Fast-forward to March 24, as young lovers “Buddy Turner” and “Emma Lou Cook” drive through a rainy night in search of privacy. Deputy Ramsey, on patrol, hears gunshots but arrives too late to stop the killer from escaping in a black sedan. Panic descends on Texarkana, with numerous crank calls to police headquarters (fielded by Charles Pierce in the role of irascible “Patrolman A. C. ‘Spark Plug’ Benson”). Captain Morales soon arrives, vowing to bring in the Phantom, dead or alive.30

  By this time, Deputy Ramsey has noted the (fictitious) three-week gap between attacks, warning Morales that the killer may strike again on April 14. Decoys and stakeouts notwithstanding, on the night predicted, “Roy Allen” and “Peggy Loomis” (played by Pierce’s then-wife, Cindy Butler) drive to lover’s lane after a high school dance, where trombonist Peggy has performed with the band. They nod off after necking in Roy’s car, then wake at 2:40 A.M. and prepare to drive home, but the Phantom appears and grapples with Roy, both of them tumbling from the car. After clubbing Roy unconscious, the Phantom captures Peggy and ties her to a tree. Roy wakes and tries to run, but is gunned down. The Phantom then retrieves Pe
ggy’s trombone, attaches a knife to the instrument’s slide, and stabs her to death while silently “playing” the horn. The next day, while Dr. Kress consults with Captain Morales and Deputy Ramsey at a local diner, we see the Phantom’s trademark slacks and boots retreating from the restaurant.31

  The killer changes tactics and misses his mythical three-week deadline with the final attack, on May 3. The camera follows “Helen Reed”—portrayed by Dawn Wells, “Mary Ann” of Gilligan’s Island fame—home from grocery shopping, to the farmhouse she shares with husband “Floyd.” While she prepares supper, the Phantom approaches, shooting Floyd twice through a window with a silencer-equipped revolver (futile in real life, since sound escapes around the weapon’s cylinder). Helen hears the glass break, coming to investigate, then rushes to the telephone but takes two bullets to the face before she can complete her call. Stumbling outside, she flees to a neighbor’s house while the Phantom stalks her through darkness, armed with a pickaxe. Frustrated by the appearance of an armed neighbor, the night-stalker finally gives up and leaves.32

  The next day, May 4, Ramsey and Morales receive a phone call reporting an abandoned car, resembling the sedan Ramsey glimpsed back on March 24. Racing to the scene, they spot the car, then proceed on foot to a nearby rock quarry, where the hooded gunman stands in broad daylight, surveying the countryside. A frantic chase ensues, toward railroad tracks with a train approaching. The Phantom leaps cross the tracks, putting the train between himself and his pursuers, while Ramsey and Morales fire their shotguns underneath the passing freight cars. One shot strikes the Phantom’s left leg, knocking him down, but when the train has passed, no trace of him remains. Bloodhounds scour the woods and swamps in vain. A final sequence shows the now-familiar booted legs limping along a Texarkana sidewalk, while Vern Stierman tells us that the killer’s fate remains uknown.33