The Phantom Killer: Unlocking the Mystery of the Texarkana Serial Murders: The Story of a Town in Terror (20 page)

“
Let me in there! Let me in there!
” came a man’s raucous shouts.

Aroused from a light sleep, Mahaffey and wife Ruth exchanged tense looks. They left their bed without another word. He grabbed his son’s baseball bat. “Who’s there?” Mahaffey called out in a quavering voice from the kitchen. “Get away from that door!”

It was a false alarm, but a heart-thumping one. The instigator turned out to be a harmless meandering old drunk, lost and confused, looking for his home. The drunk was lucky. A man armed with more than a baseball bat might have blown him away first and not given him a chance to identify himself and assuage fears.

The Phantom story spread to far reaches of the globe and to Texarkana’s servicemen overseas. Joe Forgy, with the Army of Occupation in Germany, read about it in
Stars and Stripes
. Don Preston, a soldier stationed in Luxembourg, learned of it in another national magazine. Henry Jackson, with the Navy in the Far East, saw a Texarkana dateline heading the story in the English-language Shanghai
Evening Mercury
. Marines and sailors found details in other international and West Coast newspapers.

Texarkana was on the map, for a reason nobody wanted to brag about.

Uplifting events, with crowds, offered welcome respites. Bluff, hearty Charles B. Driscoll, syndicated columnist of “New York Day by Day,” flew into town for several festive days capped by a speech to a sold-out audience. By then he’d read of the local bad news in New York newspapers.
As if to dispel residents’ jitters, he said, “New York papers just would not go to press at all if there were not at least five murders a day.” His friends in the Big Apple had warned him of the risks in Texarkana, but he shrugged it off. “These Texarkana crimes will soon be solved and the guilty person apprehended.” His optimism failed to infect the crimes’ investigators.

Tension radiated throughout the region, as far as a hundred miles or more.

In Lewisville, Arkansas, in another county, Sheriff Ocie Smith Griffin received calls almost every night from those who insisted they’d seen the Phantom. Even his daughter Jo, home from college, joined the Nervous Nellies. One night while sleeping peacefully in her upstairs bedroom, she was awakened by a noise. She thought it came from their old wooden garage. Peering out, she saw a man headed for the garage. She raced downstairs and alerted her father. “The Phantom is in our garage!” Unconvinced, he finally agreed to shoot the Phantom so all could get some sleep. He opened the front door and shot into the sky. In the next instant, the sheriff’s car, which had been parked in the garage, barreled out, into a deep ditch. Two men jumped out and sprinted to the woods. They were trying to steal his car. After Jo saved his automobile, Sheriff Griffin stopped calling her a Nervous Nellie.

Twice as far off in Texas, Phantomania also took its toll. The Amerson family out of Mt. Pleasant, sixty miles from Texarkana, felt vulnerable when the father worked a night shift at a refinery. Concerned over her seven children, Mary Amerson draped quilts over the windows, propped a chair under the doorknob. Nobody stepped outside after dark. In Little Rock, 165 miles away, Dottie Morrissey recalled, people were “scared to death” of the Phantom.

As panic continued unabated, Mahaffey became convinced that something—anything that might work—had to be done to reduce the mounting hysteria and foster stability. Radio was king of the airways. Everybody tuned in. Why not let a major authority figure provide reassuring words to the community? Who better to deliver the message than Lone Wolf Gonzaullas? Mahaffey arranged for an appearance on Radio Station KCMC, the Voice of Texarkana, situated upstairs in the
Gazette
Building. He
would frame the questions to the legendary figure, leading to a soothing effect on their listeners, who would realize that safety encircled them.

Soon after the introduction, the editor eased into his pivotal question.

“Captain Gonzaullas, what would be your advice to the people of Texarkana who are so frightened at this time?”

He settled back in his chair, a benign smile brightening his face, to admire the famed lawman’s thoughtful, steadying observation that Rangers and other lawmen had the situation under control, were on guard twenty-four hours a day, and could assure them that the killer would not, could not strike again.

“Well,” said Gonzaullas, “my advice would be for everyone to lock up their houses as tight as they can and to oil up their guns and see if they are loaded or get ’em a double-barreled shotgun. Put them out of the reach of children. Do not use them unless it’s necessary,
but if you believe it is, do not hesitate to shoot!”

Mahaffey’s smile faded faster than it had appeared. It was the exact opposite of what he thought would have come out of Lone Wolf’s mouth. A fresh wave of hysteria whisked through the studio. He quickly changed the subject.

Mahaffey soon confirmed what he had already suspected, that the notoriety of the case, hyped to a great extent by the local press as well as by those from out of town, was doing great harm to his city, from the virtually complete disappearance of the tourism industry, to a drying up of night entertainment, as well as nervous daylight shopping. Flashy journalism, coming from a variety of directions, had created a stigma and exacerbated fears.

At the annual meeting of the Associated Press Managing Editors that year, an editor from New England inspected Mahaffey’s badge and said, “Oh, Texarkana! One of the survivors, I presume.”

Another editor friend from the East called Mahaffey one day and began his conversation, “Hey, Jake, anybody still alive down there?”

W
ithout a clue of any kind these men have been called upon to solve one of the worst tragedies that has struck the south in many years. These men are working day and night.”

The Time-Life instructions for the story, though dispatched from far-off New York, framed the plight of the investigators as accurately as anyone could have.

Indeed, “these men” were doing exactly that, with a variety of results, not always up to the expectations of a terrified public.

A culture of fear, fanned by the media, enveloped the region. The citizenry girded as for war. Weapons and blinds sold briskly. By the Friday after the Starks shooting, there were no window shades and few Venetian blinds left in Texarkana stores. One store manager said sales of blinds were up fifty percent over normal. Other customers frantically bought grilles for windows, window sash locks, screen door hooks, night latches, and other protective devices. Classified ads documented the emergency:
Watch dogs wanted. Watch dogs for sale
.

“Texarkanians were nervous and jumpy,” reported the
Daily News
, the
Gazette
’s afternoon sister paper. “In their minds most of them pictured the killer as a sex fiend with an insatiable lust for blood.”

Police busily responded to calls from widely scattered neighborhoods and remote locations. Reports of gunshots in the night often turned out to be backfiring automobiles. Delivery boys like Hayden Coe dreaded going out after dark but had no choice. Dortha Hale Stone lived with her married sister; for safety, five slept in the same room. Her brother-in-law kept a gun inches away. Bill Blocker was one of hundreds who tried to buy guns. His long-barreled .38 Special was back-ordered and arrived too late to do him any good. When Jim Boyd, Jr., took Charlsie Schoeppey to the Texas High prom in May, they and other couples were escorted in and later out by officers, with a warning: “If you go out to eat after the dance, go to Two States Coffee Shop.” Open around the clock, with police usually present, it was a safe public venue.

Only dawn brought relief—until the next night.

Few behaved as if immune, but residents of one house on County Avenue in Arkansas stood out. Curtains on the large picture window were never pulled at night. You could see the occupants walking to and fro, while their neighbors hovered behind tightly bolted doors and darkened windows. Either they felt safe, when thousands did not, or they simply had not succumbed to the hysteria that cloaked their neighbors. They were in the tiniest of minorities.

Uneasy residents bombarded the police with prowler calls. Most complaints were readily explained and nonthreatening, but each one had to be checked out. One call seemed to be the real McCoy—two bodies in a front yard on County Avenue, a well-traveled street. Policemen, brandishing guns, closed in on two Hereford heifers. Somehow escaped from a cattle truck downtown, the cattle had plodded along till they decided to bed down for the night. Residents seeing white faces in the dark on the lawn had assumed the worst.

Other incidents were less easily explained. On the Texas side one Saturday morning, a stranger approached an eleven-year-old girl on the sidewalk. He offered to take her home. She ignored him and kept walking.
He drove away. Police advised parents to warn their children to steer clear of all strangers. It was a sensible policy.

Suspects turned up in almost every city, no matter how far off. Four days after the Starks shootings, a white gunman at Kilgore, Texas, over a hundred miles away, forced a black motorist to drive him to Lufkin, another East Texas town. He brandished two pistols and claimed to be the Phantom killer. Releasing his victim, the gunman apparently stole a car and escaped. Captain Gonzaullas wasn’t impressed. He didn’t think the Phantom would boast about his crimes or let his victim go.

Ultimately, more than a thousand suspects—1,300, by one count—were checked out and dismissed. Numerous enough to populate a small village, the detained or sought men often had little in common: an escaped prisoner of war in Arkansas; a knife-wielding assailant in Oklahoma; a carnival worker from South Dakota arrested in Oklahoma City after buying a bus ticket to Texarkana; a number of war veterans interrogated for various reasons.

The dragnet spread. A twenty-one-year-old Air Corps veteran in Los Angeles feared he might have been involved. He had been in Texarkana, had been in a coma, but was soon cleared.

Murders elsewhere earned scrutiny for any similarity to the Texarkana crimes. When a young couple was shot to death in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, a connection appeared likely. The murder weapon was a .32 automatic. The MO was the same as the Texas double slayings, in which a .32 Colt automatic with six lands and grooves and a left-hand twist was used. The Florida murder weapon, though, was a .32
Savage
automatic with six lands and grooves and a
right-hand
twist. Close, but no match.

Officers received offers of “help” on every hand: written, telephoned, even telegraphed, and mostly going to Gonzaullas. One man with “psychic powers” quoted thirteen chapters from First Corinthians before promising to lower an “orantal boom” on the killer if lawmen would donate the “bounty.” None provided tangible leads that officers could take to heart.

Certain legal activities registered a marked decline. In Miller County’s May 22 report, only three couples applied for marriage licenses, with four of the individuals from out of town, half of those from other states.
Only one divorce suit was filed in the period: Peggy Tresnick vs. Stanley Tresnick. The couple had married in 1944. The soldier husband, from Pennsylvania, had gone overseas and had never returned to her after the war. She claimed desertion.

Crime, unlike legal filings, persisted. Early on Friday, May 24, three weeks after the Starks murder, J. E. Andrews from the Texas side parked his 1941 Chevrolet two-door sedan in front of the State National Bank just on the Arkansas side downtown. It was 8:45
A.M.
When he came back a half hour later, his car was gone. Early morning. Downtown. Broad daylight. The gall of the two men who had tried to steal the sheriff’s car was not in short supply amongst thieves, who perhaps even felt emboldened with law enforcement so distracted with their hunt for the Phantom.

As the case remained unsolved amid a tense populace, lawmen became a target of citizen scorn. Officers weren’t trying hard enough, some believed. Aware that officers of all jurisdictions frequently collected for meals and coffee at a popular downtown café just under the sheriff’s office, one cynic predicted, “If the Phantom ever walks into John’s Place, they’ll catch him!”

Another critic late one night strolled into the café crowded with pistol-totin’, Western-bedecked lawmen. He took one look and hooted:

“Ten thousand dollars worth of cowboy boots and big white hats—and fifteen cents’ worth of brains!”

He was fortunate to escape arrest for public drunkenness.

As befitted the most colorful lawman with the highest profile and a take-charge personality, Ranger Captain Gonzaullas generated the largest share of anecdotes, many of them, never publicly revealed, unlikely to enhance his image.

Editor Mahaffey termed Gonzaullas “my principal headache.”

“He didn’t have time to hunt for the Phantom—he was too busy giving out interviews and trying to run the
Gazette
,” said Mahaffey. “All the other officers working on the case became rather jealous of Lone Wolf and complained bitterly every time his picture appeared in the paper.”

Newsman Graves, who perceived Gonzaullas as warmhearted and sincere (“It was hard to believe he’d killed twenty or so men”), agreed
that the Texarkana assignment was not the best use of his abilities. “He was not a detective,” said Graves. “He was better on horseback and shooting.”

Tillman Johnson, the Miller County chief deputy, held a similar view. “Whenever Gonzaullas came down the stairs from his hotel room, he called for the press. He was a showman, and he had a reputation for being a killer. So the press all followed him.

“He didn’t do any real police work himself. He’d get in that car and ride around, ask a lot of questions about what the other officers had found. Then he’d release it to the press like it was his information. After a while, some officers got to where they wouldn’t tell him anything.”

One day while the investigation was at white heat, Bill Presley was driving on the Texas side with Gonzaullas. Tillman Johnson and Max Tackett sat in the back seat.