The Phantom Killer: Unlocking the Mystery of the Texarkana Serial Murders: The Story of a Town in Terror (34 page)

Despite the elder Swinney’s tactics to protect Youell from the law’s grasp (which also would inflict a stigma upon him as the father), there is some evidence that there was a lack of affection between the two. A nephew of Youell recalled a family experience, earlier noted, in which Youell, outside and hungry, was refused entrance to his father’s house while other family members ate dinner. This indicates, contrary to the elder Swinney’s claims, that the relationship between them was hardly what the surface indicated, and perhaps this was all due more to the elder Swinney’s fear of the damage his reputation would suffer from having the Phantom Killer for a son, than any real affection for Youell himself.

On the morning of Thursday, October 24, while Swinney and his wife remained in the Miller County jail, P. V. Ward, while repairing a barbed-wire fence in a marshy area bordering Morris Lane north of the city, spied what looked like an old discarded suitcase. It was almost buried under a pile of dead leaves and underbrush.

“Mack,” he yelled at his companion J. F. McNief, “go call the law! Here’s the Booker girl’s saxophone. I know that’s what it is.”

Soon afterward Police Chief Jack Runnels, Deputy Sheriff Zeke Henslee, and two city policemen arrived. The leather lining and wooden framework of the case had deteriorated; pieces fell to the ground while being placed into a box. Sheet music probably used at the April dance was
still in the case. A selection, protected in a plastic folder, was “The Song of the Navy,” along with an orange-and-white Texas High School emblem.

The discovery came about 140 steps from where Betty Jo’s body was found, on the opposite side of Morris Lane.

At the sheriff’s office, Clark Brown, Betty Jo’s stepfather, identified the case and the gold-plated (now tarnished) Bundy E-flat alto saxophone bearing serial number 52535. The case’s plush blue lining had rotted from exposure to the elements during the previous six months. Spring foliage and water had concealed it. By fall, plants and underbrush had thinned out and leaves had turned brown, helping to reveal what search parties had never seen.

The only chance of there being a latent fingerprint would depend on whether the killer had opened the case and touched the instrument with an ungloved hand.

No fingerprint was found, but police could relax their monitoring of pawnshops and call off the nationwide search for the instrument.

One day in late October—Max Tackett recounted, though he wasn’t present and learned of it afterward—the recalcitrant Swinney was being interrogated in the sheriff’s portion of the courthouse. Deputy Sheriff Bill Scott, a wiry but tough veteran lawman in his forties, lost his patience after a series of evasive answers about the Starks case. He seized a nearby leather razor strap, which deputies used when they had to shave at the office, and advanced toward the prisoner. He impulsively whacked Swinney, who flinched and suddenly blurted out, “My God, don’t hit me with that bat, Mister! Take that bat away and I’ll tell you all about it, exactly how it happened.”

The “bat” he referred to was a strap with which prisoners at some Arkansas and other prisons reportedly were whipped in those days. Swinney’s reaction strongly suggested he’d known the sting of such a beating, probably in the Arkansas penitentiary. He gave the impression that he felt he was about to be worked over and wasted no time in trying to ward it off, even at the cost of self-incrimination.

(A niece, Joyce Swinney Ward, years later remembered seeing “stripes” on her uncle’s back, scars from whippings he’d sustained in either an Arkansas or Texas prison. This would explain his reaction to Bill Scott’s brandishing the “bat” that day in jail.)

About that time—Tackett’s account goes, there being no eyewitness reports, all participants by then being dead—Sheriff Elvie Davis arrived in the room. Davis, a compassionate man, never tolerated mistreatment of prisoners. The lawmen knew a confession compelled by force wouldn’t stand up and would work against them. Scott was fully aware of this but had reached the limits of his patience that afternoon. Many officers believed Swinney was on the verge of talking anyway and that this minor event had only accelerated the tendency.

“We’re not going to hurt you,” Sheriff Davis told Swinney. “I knew your daddy. Let’s sit down and talk about it.”

Swinney said, “I don’t want to talk here.”

That was fine with the sheriff, but Swinney rapidly changed his mind. That was all right with Davis, too. He had another plan.

Davis had several concerns. “Elvie was afraid of a lynching,” recalled his chief deputy Johnson. “At the same time, he didn’t want to mess that case up by getting a confession whipped out of Swinney.”

“We’ll take him to Little Rock to State Police headquarters and let them keep him up there and get the confession out of him,” Davis told his deputies.

A new method, the so-called truth serum, or sodium pentothal, a hypnotic, was beginning to gain public attention. The theory behind its popular name was that the drug relaxed inhibitions and the patient felt free to speak candidly of any and all matters. It wasn’t admissible as courtroom evidence and was, actually, in the early stages of its application. Physicians at the state hospital had worked with the State Police on some cases of which Davis had heard. Davis believed interrogating the suspect in Little Rock under the influence of “truth serum” might be the best way to handle the matter. It would protect the prisoner from a possible lynch mob, should the news leak out, while producing a confession.

Davis told Swinney. “We’ll take you to Little Rock.”

Swinney, hearing the sheriff’s words, visibly relaxed.

There is no other evidence that Swinney was ever whacked or threatened with the “bat,” Tackett’s narrative being the only known source. Swinney never complained or claimed it had happened. The report, though suggestive, likely is accurate.

By late October, arrangements had been made for legal representation for Swinney in Texarkana. Youell’s older, hardworking, law-abiding brother Cleo had enlisted local attorneys Paul J. McDonald and Ted Goldman for onsite counseling while Claude Love became available from El Dorado. J. F. McVey attempted to monitor and direct proceedings from Missouri.

A defense strategy began to evolve: use insanity as a means of easing Youell away from the shadow of Arkansas’s electric chair for the Starks murder and possibly also for the Texas murders. In this as in other moves, Cleo Swinney took the brunt of the spate of instructions steadily flowing from Missouri.

The attorney McVey wrote Cleo to get an affidavit from Youell’s mother attesting to any insanity on her side of the family and anything else that could demonstrate that the son was suffering from a mental disorder. “I understand that he may have been injured at birth, and later on when he was in the Reform School. If she knows of these things, put them in.” Pastor Swinney himself declined to admit any mental infirmities on his side of the family, while pressing his ex-wife to document deficiencies in hers. He did, however, execute an affidavit for the lawyers, addressing it to the director of the Arkansas state hospital, in which he cited four points related to son Youell’s unsound mind: an injury at birth, a history of insanity on his mother’s side, an injury as an inmate in the Arkansas state reform school when another inmate struck him with a stick of wood in the back which caused a spinal hemorrhage, and his own personal observations which convinced him that Youell was not normal and was of unsound mind.

The minister also urged Cleo to secure another lawyer and to contact the top criminal defense attorney, Elmer Lincoln, in Texarkana. Contacts with Lincoln were made but without a follow-up that would have paid a retainer fee. By this time Cleo was already paying the local lawyers seventy dollars a month, not an insignificant amount on a workingman’s pay.

The elder Swinney presented a new scenario for the Texarkana murders that would eliminate his son as a suspect and guide the investigation into an entirely different direction. “McVey is still greatly interested in running down the Phantom killer and both of us believe W— and one other are
the men. The killer will be arrested some day and people will be greatly surprised who it is or rather who they are.”

A parting note dealt with Youell’s defense: see that he pleads not guilty by reason of insanity, and request the judge to appoint him counsel at the state’s expense.

Attorney McVey, following a brief trip to Texarkana, flailed out in several directions. He criticized the Texarkana defense lawyers and wrote to a friend in Illinois, whom he described as a “federal officer,” claiming that Youell Swinney was innocent of everything except taking a car and that he suffered from a form of insanity related to his obsession to drive a car. He was “satisfied” that the prisoner had killed no one. He failed to document his conclusion or to elaborate on his discovery of a new psychological category, insanity with a need to drive (after stealing) a car.

The correspondence made clear that the family was fully aware why Youell was being held, suggesting a large serving of denial, with a side dish of paranoia, by the prisoner’s father.

On October 29, Swinney’s team—McVey and the local firm of Goldman and McDonald—filed a petition for writ of habeas corpus in the Miller County Circuit Court. They sought an immediate preliminary hearing or release.

Judge Dexter Bush ordered Sheriff Davis to bring Swinney before him.

On November 1, prosecutor Lyle Brown presented a motion to dispatch Swinney to the state hospital in Little Rock for observation. Judge Bush granted the motion, agreeing that there were “reasonable grounds for believing the defendant mentally incompetent.” The next step was to deliver Swinney to the State Hospital for Nervous Diseases.

With neither side aware of what the other was thinking, the sheriff’s plans coincided with efforts by Swinney’s father and his lawyers to dispatch Youell Swinney to the state hospital to assess his mental status.

Both sides had seen their wishes fulfilled—for the moment.

The following morning before daylight, Johnson, Tackett, and Charley Boyd drove Swinney to Little Rock. The prisoner had not carried out his promise to tell “exactly how it happened.” He’d clammed up. Tillman Johnson soon had misgivings. He felt officers had been making progress. Even without Scott’s provocative gesture, Johnson felt they’d made
headway. Swinney had no way of knowing what the officers knew. They had him in jail and they were questioning him intensively about the Starks case, as well as the other crimes. Because he was in custody in Arkansas, his blurting out implied he was ready to talk about the Arkansas crime. The incident provided a further insight into how Swinney responded in moments of stress and high anxiety, adding to his other “almost” confession when arrested.

The spell was broken. The process of breaking him down, potentially leading to a confession, had been interrupted. A different persona took over. On the drive to Little Rock, he would have time to ask himself how much evidence they really had on him. If they had to take him to the state hospital, then perhaps they didn’t have all they needed. His resistance returned.

“If we’d have kept him here in Texarkana,” said Johnson, “I think we would have broken him. He was close. That was one bad mistake we made,” he said, referring to the decision to send him to Little Rock.

Swinney’s old responses returned. “He was very unemotional. He was cold,” said Johnson.

Johnson sensed that Swinney now believed he couldn’t be convicted. Why would they take him to Little Rock, if they already had a strong enough case against him? Swinney knew his own attorneys had planned an insanity defense, but the move to commit him had come from the State.

The hospital casework began for Swinney in his first commitment to a mental institution. He replied to questions regarding his past, detailing his time in reform school at Pine Bluff, Arkansas, at age seventeen for burglary of a school, the divorce of his parents when he was a small boy, his frequent moves after that. At seven a fall from a swing rendered him unconscious, he told hospital attendants, and at eighteen he remained bedfast for two weeks after being run down by a cart. However, he said he’d had no memory lapses, dizzy spells, drug problems, or venereal disease. The rest of his family displayed no criminal tendencies or alcoholism.

He claimed he wasn’t guilty when sent to the penitentiary in Texas and was not guilty of the present charge, that he knew nothing about it. He cited his June 28 marriage to Peggy. As he reeled off his record, he
committed several errors involving time. He said he’d been paroled, not mentioning it was conditional, in 1944 for strong-arm robbery—1944 was the year he was sentenced, not released, which was late 1945.

His denial of guilt in his previous incarcerations constituted a sweeping claim he would have found impossible to sustain.

Sodium pentothal was eventually administered intravenously. The procedure backfired. The physician inadvertently gave an overdose, and the patient passed into a deep sleep. Swinney said nothing. “Truth serum” had flunked the test.

(In the years since, so-called truth serums have been rejected as an interrogation technique, research finding that although the drug, and those like it, may lead to a relaxing of inhibitions, it does not prevent lying and may even lead to fantasies and a mixing of fact and fantasy. More recently it has been classified as abusive and condemned as an interrogation tool.)

The experience dampened any optimism about cracking a case that lawmen felt was practically solved, and they were no closer to finding a way to keep Swinney in custody for the long term.

Meanwhile, officers fared better with Peggy Swinney. A developing technology—for which enthusiasm was as high as it had been for “truth serum”—promised to put her on record in a dramatic way. She was willing to waive extradition and be interrogated while connected to a polygraph, or “lie detector,” machine. That would mean a trip to Austin, the state capital, for a session at Texas’s Department of Public Safety.

The year before, Glen H. McLaughlin, chief of DPS’s crime lab, had gone to Chicago to learn to operate the machine and interpret its recordings. The DPS purchased a Keeler polygraph soon afterward. He was to use it with several persons during the course of the Phantom investigation. But Peggy, whom he remembered as a “strawberry blonde,” was the one with whom he had the best results.