The Phantom Killer: Unlocking the Mystery of the Texarkana Serial Murders: The Story of a Town in Terror (17 page)

In addition to the bloody footprint found on the kitchen floor, a similar footprint was found near the driveway entrance to the yard, about fifty yards from the corner of the house. Four tracks were lifted between a cottonwood tree and a willow. Those found near Starks’s welding sign suggested the killer had gone first to the shop, possibly looking for something to steal, before walking toward the house. Casts were made of the prints; but it was problematic, because of the indistinct condition of the tracks, whether they could be used to accurately match a shoe or boot.

Tire tracks across the highway and railroad line, where Tackett and Boyd had spotted the car, showed that a car had turned around at that point, in order to get back onto the highway. It was not possible to tell which direction the car had taken on the highway. Judging by where the car had been parked, it probably had come from the direction of Texarkana. Where it went after the shootings could only be guessed. Had it continued, north, toward the Red River, or had it returned toward Texarkana?

Gazette
city editor Calvin Sutton, who had dubbed the killer the Phantom, arranged with the Associated Press’s Dallas bureau to be ready in case another murder occurred. Bill Barnard was in the AP office that night.

“When the Starks murder happened, I dictated the story to Bill over the phone straight onto the A [i.e., national] wire, off the top of my head, and he shot it to the puncher.

“In the movies or on television, the reporters go out and solve these things, but nothing was further from any of our minds. We grew up a lot in that time, believe me.”

The next morning, a Saturday, the
Gazette
heralded the fifth murder in six weeks with heavy 96-point black Gothic capitals, more than an inch high.

The biggest manhunt in the region’s history continued with renewed energy and greater urgency, as befitted the biggest crime-news story to hit a town that before then had known everything else.

A
s Lt. Miller of the Arkansas State Police worked in and around the house the following morning, Chief Deputy Sheriff Tillman Johnson began about two hundred yards away, near where the suspect car had been parked the night before.

A fence almost directly across the highway from where the car had been parked divided Starks’s land from his neighbor’s. It was about a thousand feet from the fence to the house. Johnson strode across to the fence line. A portion of Starks’s land had been plowed, then dampened by rain, about a third of an inch the previous day. Johnson checked the plowed ground from the edges, looking for any sign. Along the fence row a long, narrow strip of grass provided a firm buffer between the fence and the plowed land.

He walked on the grass while studying the plowed ground. About a hundred feet from the highway, he found what he was looking for—footprints crossing the plowed field, in the direction of the house. He felt sure he’d found the killer’s route. He’d come directly from across the highway where Tackett and Boyd had seen the parked car. The man had taken that route so as not to be seen from the highway.

Recent plowing, along with the rain, had left the soil soft and in rows. Johnson stepped carefully alongside the tracks, following them without going close. None of the prints was ideal, though one was better than the others. It would be difficult to match, but he thought it possibly was a boot print with the heel worn on one side. He couldn’t be sure. The condition of the soil precluded making a precise model.

He followed the tracks across the field. They ran in only one direction, toward the house and outbuildings. Johnson, calm and cool in most situations, suddenly grew excited. These were definitely a man’s footsteps. He felt certain it was the killer’s path.

It appeared the stalker had risked the softer soil of the plowed ground in order to avoid being seen by a passing car on the highway. He had first headed straight for the house. This would have taken him near or into the welding shop where Starks frequently worked.

The gunman had a flashlight, which would have facilitated inspection of the shop. Although there had been some rain earlier, the plowed ground wasn’t boggy, though definitely softer than the grassy strip. Johnson, six-foot-one and weighing almost two hundred pounds and wearing cowboy boots, didn’t bog down at all but walked easily across the plowed field. Once he’d crossed the field, the killer could have wiped the mud off his shoes by dragging his feet over the yard and continued on his way.

After entering the grass of the yard, the tracks couldn’t be traced farther. Finding no tracks around the house, Johnson looked for tracks leading back to where the car had been parked. None crossed the plowed field in the returning direction. Apparently the killer had fled over the yard and crossed the highway and the railroad track to reach his car.

As for the strip of linoleum with a bloody shoe print sent to the FBI lab, no identification ever resulted. Johnson, for one, was never convinced that it was the killer’s footprint. Too many men were milling around inside and outside the house that night. Almost any of them could have left the print. But those across the plowed field, imperfect as they were, had to belong to the killer, Johnson reasoned.

The tracks were distorted. Mud further blurred the evidence. Two plaster casts were made of the imperfect tracks. One track looked like a walking boot with a heel worn off on one side. But they couldn’t take
the cast and make a positive. It would be difficult to prove that a given boot or shoe had made it. The ground was too soggy. Only one thing was certain: the killer had muddy or damp footwear, whether he had washed them off or discarded them.

“You just couldn’t get a good plain track out of it,” said Johnson. “Mine looked the same, going along beside it. But it did put us into the idea that the man in that car had walked down to the house. We couldn’t track him anywhere else.

“We found some tracks leading from the house, but whose they were, we couldn’t determine. We couldn’t know they were the same person’s.

“It appeared that he would have gone across the railroad tracks and then gone back to his car. There was a lot of grass and water and it was wet through there and you just couldn’t tell much about it.”

Officers found several cigarette butts near where the suspicious car had been parked, indicating that, if the butts had been left there by the killer, he—or they, if anyone had been with him—had smoked them while waiting to ease across the highway. He may have arrived before it was fully dark and waited till darkness so that he could explore with impunity. There was also the possibility that someone dealing with a bootlegger had smoked the cigarettes, but it was another suggestive clue and, if true, indicated that the Starks home invasion was a premeditated, carefully calculated crime, whatever may have been the major motive for this or any of the other murders.

An approximate layout of the murder scene followed this rough map.

Howard Giles, son of Arkansas-side Police Chief R. Marlin Giles, served with the Navy in Washington, D.C., as a fingerprint specialist. At war’s end, he was assigned to Europe to help identify German Storm Troopers, using fingerprint records. He was there for about six months before discharge, after which he joined Texarkana’s Arkansas-side police department. Just after the Booker-Martin murders, he took over from Bryan Westerfield, who had filled in during the war. As it happened, he was in place when the Starks murder occurred and was sent out that night to collect any fingerprints he could.

On Monday after the shootings, with Katie still in the hospital in serious but improved condition, more than five hundred persons attended solemn funeral services for Virgil at the First Methodist Church, Arkansas. More than sixty of the mourners were relatives of the couple. The Reverend Edward W. Harris, who earlier had railed against the “criminal element” in Texarkana, conducted the services.

“This tragedy is the third of its kind that has struck our community,” the pastor said. “Each of us in a community way more than in the usual manner feel a sense of kinship with you in the sorrow you feel today,” he said to Mr. and Mrs. Jack Starks, parents of Virgil Starks. “It is a sorrow that weighs upon every home in this community.”

He expressed, for the family, confidence in officers and newspaper people, and all others “who bear the responsibility in the community for ending the reign of terror.”

Somber faces in the audience at times were streaked with tears.

On Tuesday morning, Sheriff Davis had a long talk with Katie Starks in her hospital room. She was in reasonably good spirits, considering what she had been through. She told the sheriff again that she hadn’t seen the man who shot her. She said she had started to get a pistol, but her vision had been so obscured by blood that she couldn’t be sure where she was going. By then she felt she was going to be killed. She wanted to leave a note before she died. But instead she decided to flee as she heard the intruder rip the screen from the back window, whereupon she flung caution to the winds and ran out of the house as fast as she could.

The Arkansas State Police’s forensics lab in Little Rock confirmed that the .22 caliber gun that killed Virgil Starks was an automatic or
semi-automatic weapon. But the bullets were in too rough a condition for them to concretely determine if they came from a rifle or pistol, as the men who collected the bullets initially feared. If the bullets indeed came from a rifle, it was a common weapon that almost every family in the county owned.

It possibly was of foreign make, the ballistics expert said, but in his opinion it was a .22 Colt Woodsman. The weapon in the other four murders had also been a Colt, but a .32 caliber. “I think this is what you’re looking for.” It resulted in a search for the death gun by locating and firing hundreds, starting in the Homan community. Only if the gun itself was found could a definite identification be made.

Dr. C. L. Winchester, a veterinarian serving as coroner, an elected position, signed Virgil Starks’s death certificate. The stated cause of death was no more revealing than it had been in the deaths on the Texas side.

“Gun in hands of unknown person.”

Suspects were in short supply. As in the earlier murders, a clear motive was elusive. Starks’s reputation in the community was solid.

Weeks later, the FBI lab returned the killer’s flashlight to the Miller County sheriff’s department. The technicians hadn’t been able to find prints on the flashlight or its batteries. It was a heartbreaking report. It did, however, mean that they were dealing with an experienced criminal who had wiped off fingerprints or used gloves, an organized killer who had arrived at the crime scene determined to leave no clues.

The color and design of the flashlight was fairly uncommon, to the point that one like it could be identified, a two-celled flashlight with the tip of it red. Tillman Johnson checked every store in Texarkana. Only one store carried the brand, and the storekeeper didn’t remember selling that particular one. Johnson took the flashlight to J. Q. Mahaffey at the
Gazette
and asked if he would run a picture of the flashlight on page one. Mahaffey went to the publisher and owner, Clyde E. Palmer, who agreed to do so.

The
Gazette
also agreed to send a photograph of it, in color, over the Associated Press wire. The incident remained fixed in city editor Sutton’s memory for years afterward.

“The
Gazette
ran the first spot color photograph in the United States, of the flashlight left at the Starks home,” Sutton said. “
Editor & Publisher
magazine credited us with having been the first to do it. It was not a true color picture. We used two cuts, one of the shiny part of the flashlight, and one of the red handle.”

The
Gazette
ran a four-column photo ran on page one.

THIS IS A PICTURE IN DETAIL OF THE FLASHLIGHT FOUND AT THE SCENE OF THE STARKS MURDER. THIS IS A TWO-CELL, ALL METAL FLASHLIGHT, BOTH ENDS OF WHICH ARE PAINTED RED. THREE RIVETS HOLD THE HEAD OF THE FLASHLIGHT TO THE BODY OF THE LIGHT. THERE HAS BEEN ONLY A LIMITED NUMBER OF THESE LIGHTS SOLD IN THIS AREA. IF YOU HAVE OWNED OR KNOW OF ANY ONE WHO OWNED ONE OF THESE LIGHTS, REPORT AT ONCE TO SHERIFF W. E. DAVIS, MILLER COUNTY COURTHOUSE, TEXARKANA, ARK. YOU MAY BE THE ONE TO AID IN SOLVING THE PHANTOM SLAYINGS.

Nothing came of it.

The killing of Virgil Starks gave the case a new level of urgency. The Starks case increased the tension that the murderer still had not been caught, and brought in political figures. Congressman Wright Patman, a powerful U.S. representative who lived in Texarkana, Texas, made contact with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and Attorney General Tom Clark, securing promises that priority would be given to the Texarkana needs.

The governor’s office in Little Rock beefed up the State Patrol contingent in the Texarkana area, assigning ten troopers to Miller County.