The Phantom Killer: Unlocking the Mystery of the Texarkana Serial Murders: The Story of a Town in Terror (24 page)

Tentatively the two sides of Texarkana eased back to what passed for normal. Couples resumed necking in lovers’ lanes, albeit more guardedly.
The traumatic spring still burned deeply into the collective and individual memories. Couples kept their ears open for the odd sound, any movement outside their car. Crime and assorted violence continued much as before the Phantom’s intrusion, but none conveyed the raw terror that the serial murders had precipitated.

Veterans resumed their interrupted lives, seeking jobs, entering college on the GI Bill of Rights. Lawmen continued their weary work. The Phantom may not have killed since early May, but he remained free. The search was still on, but there was a sea change: time to relax, if uneasily, and get on with life.

Trooper Max Tackett, like other lawmen in the region, had his hands full dealing with routine. He had returned from the Army in late 1945 and almost immediately found himself, with his fellow trooper Charley Boyd, in the middle of the headline shootout in nearby Fulton, Arkansas.

Tackett felt a personal responsibility for not having checked out the parked car near the Starks home the night of May 3. He believed he and Boyd would have caught the killer red-handed or possibly prevented the crimes. From then on, he was to pursue any hint of a clue.

Before the Starks murder he had observed a pattern of criminal activity that neither he nor others fully understood, but which he found intriguing.

While examining car-theft files for the Texarkana area, one day he compared thefts with the dates the cars had been reported stolen and when automobiles were abandoned, presumably by the thief or thieves, or recovered. Zeroing in on the dates of the Texas crimes, he correlated some of the car thefts with those weekends. Nothing unusual about car thefts. What stood out, almost like a blaring railway signal, was a connection that hadn’t been reported.

On every night of the assaults and murders, he noted, a car had been stolen in Texarkana, and a previously stolen car was abandoned. Why? Perhaps the man who had stolen the car had used it to leave town, then had returned. Why had he returned? Were these all the actions of one man, or were they coincidences that involved several men? If one man was responsible for all of the weekend thefts, Tackett couldn’t assign a reason to the actions. Had the thief simply tired of a particular vehicle?
Or was it part of a plan, not keeping a hot car long enough for it to be recognized by police? Tackett found it difficult to dismiss the relationship. It justified watching closely.

His next challenge raised the question, why not a coincidence? With old cars wearing out and customers waiting for new models, car theft wasn’t likely to recede. Coincidence was possible, but he couldn’t dismiss the pattern so easily.
Why had the cars been stolen?
Obviously, for transportation. But why steal another and abandon the previous car? The thief might simply have wanted to drive a different, perhaps better, car, or he had another reason, known but to him, for ditching the old car. Tackett felt certain there was more than the surface indicated. The matter rarely strayed from his mind.

In the latter part of June, Tackett received a routine assignment from his district supervisor at Hope. Rather than an intriguing mystery to solve, it was cut-and-dried. Jim Mays, an old farmer who lived near the new dam that was being built near Murfreesboro, a small town in Pike County, had called the state police about a man who hadn’t paid his rent. The old man was angry with the deadbeat. Several weeks’ rent money was worth complaining about.

The district director asked Tackett to see the farmer, who was a good citizen in the community. Tackett knew the area well; he had grown up at Glenwood in northern Pike County.

Tackett called on the farmer, who had taken down his errant tenant’s car license number. The man drove a light green 1941 Plymouth sedan. Its Arkansas license number was 61-917. His name was Youell Swinney. Tackett commiserated with the farmer, promised to start right in on the search. His quarry had previously lived in Texarkana; at the time, he reportedly lived at Delight, in a picturesque part of southwestern Arkansas near Murfreesboro and about sixty-five miles from Texarkana. At the time, construction of the Narrows Dam near Murfreesboro was under way, also not far from Delight.

He reported the license number to the Hope office so that Milton Mosier, the state’s identification specialist, could run a check on it. The results of the license-plate check transformed the routine deadbeat complaint to another level. The car had been stolen the night of March 24, the weekend
of the Griffin-Moore murders, from Wayne O’Donnell in Texarkana, Arkansas, while O’Donnell was visiting inside the Michael Meagher Hospital. Its driver was still operating it under the same license plate. Now Tackett was dealing with a felony.

He, and other officers to whom he passed the information, failed to locate Swinney. He interviewed members of his family in Texarkana. They couldn’t help, either. He hadn’t been seen for a while. The family had no idea where he was and couldn’t track his movements.

Some time later, the car was reported in the vicinity. Late one night Tackett, Charley Boyd, and deputy sheriff Tillman Johnson drove up the highway between Ashdown and Allene where the car had been sighted. They sat in the State Police car at an intersection, waiting, hoping to spot the car. They never saw it.

A larger lead emerged, with other parts of the puzzle gradually falling into place, when the five-year-old son of one of Swinney’s family members remembered a habit of his older relative. The observant boy described a parking lot in Texarkana.

“He always leaves the car there,” the boy said.

Tackett checked the lot. Comparing the stolen car and license number with the others there, he found no match. But if the boy was right, the car would turn up eventually. Trooper Boyd periodically drove by the lot, looking for the stolen Plymouth. One day in late June he spotted it, compared the license tag, and surreptitiously began a stakeout.

Boyd’s patience paid off. When a tall, slender woman in her early twenties appeared and claimed the car, Boyd stepped out and arrested her. But the man he sought wasn’t to be seen.

Her name was Peggy Lois Stevens Swinney. It was her wedding day. She had just returned from Shreveport, Louisiana, she said, where she and Youell Lee Swinney had married a few hours earlier. She was twenty-one years old and had been a resident of Texarkana, Texas. Boyd took her to the Miller County jail until her consort could be found—and impounded the stolen car. She found temporary housing in a cell on the west side of the fourth-floor jail.

They had missed their major quarry, but they had the next best, his wife (of a few hours) and the hot car he had been driving. The dragnet
had tightened. Tackett and Boyd felt it was now only a matter of time before they also had him in custody.

The arrest of Peggy Swinney paid dividends, even if she had no idea where her husband was by then. They had been together when he sent her for the car, she said, but now she had no idea where he might be. She could tell officers about his habits. She had no picture of him but could describe at least some of his behavior. For one thing, he hid—or at least spent a lot of time—in theaters during the afternoons. When he stepped out to smoke, he always stood where he could watch all the other people, presumably to make a getaway if he needed to do so.

They didn’t know what Swinney looked like, but other officers knew the name. He was a “police character,” a man with a record who had been in various kinds of trouble over the years. It wasn’t an unusual profile for a car thief. A period of watchful waiting—and searching—ensued. It was the afternoon of Friday, June 28.

Peggy Lois Stevens Tresnick Swinney was born May 17, 1925, in Breckenridge, Texas, an oilfield boomtown. According to the 1930 census, the Stevens family lived in Stephens County, Texas. Breckenridge is approximately seventy miles west of Fort Worth. She had two older sisters, an older brother, and a younger brother. Other siblings were born in the 1930s.

In 1944, when she was nineteen, she had married Stanley Tresnick, a twenty-one-year-old soldier from Pennsylvania. A justice of the peace performed the ceremony in the Miller County courthouse. It was a fragile marriage, at best. Less than three months later, Tresnick shipped out for overseas. She never saw him again, and apparently neither expressed a need to resume the relationship after the war. In early 1946, while she was in the Texas-side city jail for a minor charge of public drunkenness, she met Youell Swinney, who had gone there to get another woman out of jail but instead encountered Peggy.

She had been together with Swinney since soon after that. In May she filed suit in Bowie County to dissolve the matrimonial bond with Tresnick, charging desertion. The final decree came on June 27, 1946. She was twenty-one.

The next day, June 28, Swinney drove Peggy seventy-five miles south to Shreveport, Louisiana. On the marriage license issued in Caddo Parish,
Swinney gave his birthplace as Arkadelphia, Arkansas, and his age as twenty-nine. Both parents—Mrs. Myrtle Chaffin of Texarkana, Arkansas, and Stanley C. Swinney of Montgomery City, Missouri—were listed as living. He gave his occupation as “bookkeeper.”

Apparently the clerk misheard or Swinney gave the wrong information, citing Breckenridge,
Kansas
, rather than Texas, as Peggy’s birthplace. Her occupation: “none,” her parents, both of Texarkana, Texas. She acknowledged that she had been previously married, to Stanley Tresnick, but was now divorced.

Legally they were man and wife. Their honeymoon trip was a short one back to Texarkana, their married bliss lasting no more than a few hours.

Atlanta, Texas, a town of about 5,000, approximately twenty-three miles south of Texarkana in neighboring Cass County, was a quiet little town in the pine tree belt amid rolling green hills. It lay on U.S. Highway 59 that goes to Houston—or if you turn east at Atlanta onto Highway 77, you are about fifty miles from Shreveport, if you choose the Texas, instead of Arkansas, route.

On Monday afternoon, July 15, oilfield worker Hibbett Lee had the day off and, as was his custom, was hanging around Atlanta, shooting the breeze with anybody he might find. He especially liked to chat with Homer Carter, the town marshal who was The Law in Atlanta, a “tush hog” who had earned respect over the years with his no-nonsense approach to order in his town. White-haired, stocky Carter always kept a Roi Tan Perfecto cigar in his mouth, chewing on it between words. He took it out to eat and at bedtime. If you didn’t see the cigar, well, maybe you’d better take another look to be sure it was Carter you thought you were seeing.

His visit with Mr. Homer finished, Hibbett Lee sauntered over to Ed Hammock’s car lot just a block away. Cleon Partain was helping out there and had his own cars, and Lee thought he’d check on what was going on. The lot was only one block off Highway 77, the route coming from Shreveport into Atlanta. If you went through Atlanta you’d see the lot.

Lee had barely stepped onto the car lot when a new Plymouth drove up. He stopped to take a look. New cars were something to behold. Everybody wanted one.

A tall, slender man, dressed neatly and wearing a white shirt and tie, stepped out of the car and walked toward Lee. Wiry, lean, and tanned, Lee dressed casually, with a big hat, cowboy boots, khaki shirt and trousers, good Texas garb for a man used to working outside.

The stranger approached Lee. “You buying cars, Mister?”

“I don’t work here,” said Lee, hooking his head toward the nearby little office; “somebody there can help you. Mr. Partain.”

By then Cleon Partain was headed their way.

The newcomer glanced about the lot. He was interested in selling his car.

Partain knew the car business and was a shrewd trader. You didn’t get many chances to buy a slightly used car. He sized up the man.

“It’s a good car, drives real good, low mileage. I haven’t had it long, just broke in good, but I can’t afford to keep it. Lost my job and I need the money.”

“It’s a good looking car, all right,” agreed Partain. “It got a lien on it?”

“No, it’s all clear.”

Partain looked it over, inside and out. It was clean looking inside with some dust outside but still shiny. A car like this would sell fast. He could find a buyer almost immediately.

Partain was wary. He didn’t find many people willing to sell a new model like this. As he inspected the car carefully, he realized it had been on the road. There was a thin veneer of dust on its exterior. In the car business you came to know the type: a smooth, assured-talking fellow whose story didn’t quite satisfy. The man wasn’t from Atlanta, not even Cass County. Partain knew every face in his area.

“You got your title?” Partain asked as he studied the man’s face.

The question didn’t faze the man. “Sure. I didn’t bring it with me, but I can take care of that. I’ll get it to you.”

Partain looked at the car again, this time memorizing the Texas license number. The number wasn’t one normally seen in eastern Texas.

“I better not make an offer on it today,” Partain said. “Tell you what. Find the title and maybe we can work out something.”

The stranger eyed Partain coolly, without emotion, and nodded.

“I was just driving by and thought I’d see if we might do business.”

The man got back into the Plymouth and headed toward Texarkana.

“Hibbett, we’re not going to see that guy again,” Partain said. “Run over and tell Homer I had a suspicious fellow tried to sell me a new Plymouth. Didn’t have a title to it. Never saw him before. I got a feeling he’s got a hot car.”

Lee jogged over to Homer Carter’s office to relay the message, with the license number on the piece of paper Partain had handed him. Carter radioed the Texarkana police to be on the lookout for a suspected car thief driving in from Atlanta. The Atlanta police station maintained radio contact with the one local patrol car and with stations in Texarkana and Shreveport.

“I’m coming to Texarkana and I’m bringing a man with me who was there when this joker tried to pull this stunt.”