The Phantom Killer: Unlocking the Mystery of the Texarkana Serial Murders: The Story of a Town in Terror (46 page)

He spoke persuasively of the injustice done him.

Wood, aware of some details of the case, asked about his companion who had given statements implicating him. How did he explain that?

“The man they called the Phantom” shrugged it off.

“She just cooked up that story to collect the reward money. She made it up. I didn’t have nothing to do with all that, and she knew it.”

The editor told him that he knew a man who wrote books in collaboration. Would he like to talk to him? Sure, that’d be fine.

I hadn’t been in my small office at the farm long that morning when Harry Wood called. It was still shivering cold inside from the prolonged hard freeze that had lingered for days, and I hadn’t had time to heat the space and warm my hands sufficiently

Harry said, “Jim, Youell Swinney is here and would like to talk to you.”

“Swinney?” I said. “You’re kidding.”

“No, he’s here in the office. I wonder if you’d like to collaborate with him on a book.”

The situation didn’t ring true. Why would he show up at the
Gazette
and be brought into contact with, of all persons, me?

“Is this a joke?” I asked, a bit incredulous.

“No, it’s not a joke,” said Harry. “He’s sitting right here in the office with me now. He’s looking for someone to help him write a book about his experience.”

Convinced he wasn’t pulling my leg, I said, “Sure, I’ll talk to him. But I doubt I can help him.”

I was more than well acquainted with the case. Years before, I had explored it in a free-lanced eight-part series of articles.

I’d also studied Swinney’s records at the state penitentiary’s main office in Huntsville. I remembered, without referring to my files, a great deal of what I had read and noted there.

We talked.

“I want to write a book about how I was unfairly imprisoned and held for twenty-seven years,” Swinney said. “The Court of Criminal Appeals finally released me last year. Back in 1946 they said I was connected to those killings. I didn’t have anything to do with it.

“Steve McQueen and those other actors were at Huntsville making that movie,
The Fugitive
. I told ’em my story and they said it was a good one. They said, ‘You oughta write a book and it’d be a best seller!’ I can’t write it by myself and I was looking for someone to help me with it.”

He apparently referred to
The Getaway
, featuring McQueen with Ali MacGraw, filmed partly in the Texas prison system and released in 1972.
The Fugitive
was a television series; McQueen wasn’t in it.

“Where were you when the Texarkana murders were committed?” I asked.

“I wasn’t even here then.”

I tried again. “Where were you at that time?”

“I was up in St. Louis,” he said.

That was what he had claimed in his interview when he had entered the prison in 1947. In his version, he’d worked for the Green Tree Construction Company in St. Louis during a period that coincided exactly with when the murders were committed near Texarkana. I’d called Information for such a company and found there was none. I’d checked with the Chamber of Commerce there, to see if such a firm had operated in 1946. I was told none did. At the prison, the assistant warden told me they didn’t check the inmate’s claim. It was just part of his record. Swinney seemed to have
forgotten that in 1946 he’d admitted he was in Texarkana but denied that he had killed. His own words disputed his claim to me.

“Do you live in Texarkana now?” I asked.

“No, I’m in Marshall right now. I’m foreman on a construction job there. It was too cold to work today, so I came up here to see relatives.”

“What’s your address there, in case I need to get back in touch with you?” I asked him.

He gave it in a low, cautious voice in control of himself.

“I live at 808 North Fulton in Marshall,” he said.

“Well,” I said, “I’m pretty busy now on another book”—very true, on a collaboration with an M.D. about preventive medicine—“but I’ll get in touch if things change. Meanwhile, you might talk to a newspaper writer in Marshall, since you’re there, about doing a book.”

That ended our conversation. I called Information for a phone listing for him at the Fulton Street address in Marshall. There was none. That didn’t disprove his statement, but only indicated that he had no listed telephone in his name.

In the
Gazette
office, as he hung up and turned to the editor, he said, “He’s too busy now.”

“The man they say was the Phantom” left the building. A reporter headed for the window to monitor his return to the car. On the street, a car with plainclothes detectives awaited him as he approached the Maverick. One of the reporters told the editor of the scene below. (Later the editor learned that one of his reporters had tipped off the District Attorney, who probably had spread the word to the police.)

Down the street, the policemen spoke sternly and earnestly with The Man They Say Was the Phantom, advising him, “We don’t want you back here.”

They then escorted him to the city limits and watched him drive south on U.S. Highway 59 toward Marshall.

I called Harry Wood afterward and asked his impressions.

“He just looked like an old con,” he said. Harry had worked for the newspaper at Huntsville, the site of the state prison system headquarters, before going to Texarkana and was an old hand at sizing up old cons.

That night I called Tillman Johnson, who had been chief deputy sheriff during the murder spree. Johnson already knew of Swinney’s appearance.
Policemen from both Texas and Arkansas sides had called him around noon. Swinney, they told him, had gone to an address in the College Hill neighborhood on the Arkansas side, the residence of a sister and brother-in-law. He never voluntarily returned to Texarkana after that.

FBI records document his short stay in Marshall. He worked for a construction company from November 1973 to July 1974. On the surface he seemed to be following the plan he’d told Carter—a job and staying out of trouble.

However, in an investigation made afterward a different picture emerged. One informant told an agent of a pattern contradicting the outward image.

“Swinney was believed to be a homosexual and spent most of his time around young people at the Dairy Queen in Marshall. He was also suspected of dealing in narcotics. Swinney had a young boy fourteen or fifteen years of age who was with him a lot and finally moved in with Swinney.” When Swinney moved to Grand Prairie, Texas, the boy went with him. Grand Prairie is a northern suburb of Dallas. A nephew of Swinney said his uncle even took the teenaged boy to work with him, suggesting a level of control over the boy that Swinney had once exercised with Peggy.

(One family account has it that he grew angry with the boy one night and “almost beat the boy to death,” as a relative put it. He escaped police scrutiny that time.)

Swinney’s suspected homosexual behavior might offer counter-insight into why Mary Jeanne Larey and Polly Ann Moore had not been raped, though Betty Jo was, assuming Swinney was the culprit in all the cases. The Marshall informant’s opinion meshed with Swinney’s behavior in the Texas penitentiary when he was punished for sexual engagement with another inmate. On the other hand, he might have been bisexual or, despite the prison incident, possibly not homosexual either.

As for his possible involvement in the narcotics trade, that too added to a pattern in Swinney’s 1946 actions in western Oklahoma when he’d sold bootleg whiskey. By the 1970s, drugs had replaced bootleg whiskey as the illicit stimulant of choice.

Swinney’s relationships with relatives varied. When he lived in Arlington, Texas, he crafted a gold-plated necklace for his niece Joyce that proved to be durable and never tarnished. She didn’t realize that he was also counterfeiting gold coins at the same time. (He also created bogus bills.) On the other hand he persuaded his nephew Clarence to sign a note with him. Clarence was stuck with paying off the loan.

There is no evidence that Youell visited violence upon family members, though he was vocal toward those he disliked, usually in-laws. He threatened to kill one brother-in-law, the husband of a sister. The sister remonstrated, “If you kill him, you might as well kill me.” She was one of his favorites and often helped him. No actual violence occurred, beyond strong words.

Swinney did not make the best of his newly won freedom. He worked for a while, including the construction job in Marshall, followed by another construction job in the Dallas area, where he worked from August 1974 to March 1975 as a cement finisher.

In the spring of 1975 his criminal résumé took on renewed life. In March, U.S. marshals nabbed him for counterfeiting money, another old pattern. Police at Greenville, a short distance east of Dallas, levied an automobile theft charge, along with possession of bogus coins—counterfeited silver dollars and quarters he’d tried to pass as collectors’ items. It was back to the marshals in Dallas, where he was convicted of counterfeiting. U.S. District Judge Sarah T. Hughes sentenced him to two years in prison. (Judge Hughes had sworn in Lyndon B. Johnson as President aboard Air Force One following President Kennedy’s assassination in 1963.)

On April 18, Swinney was dispatched to the Federal Correctional Institution in Texarkana, Texas, a medium security prison. He was fifty-eight years old. As one psychiatrist put it, an aged, burnt-out psychopathic killer might kill again, if backed into a corner, but is not likely to commit a highly dramatic crime like those of the Phantom case.

In Swinney’s case, the crime pattern of counterfeiting and felony thefts continued, but he was never held for murder again.

Ironically, his return to Texarkana was less heralded than his departure back in 1947. Only federal officers—marshals and prison
authorities—knew Swinney had been placed in the Texarkana FCI. None was aware of Swinney’s link to the terrifying days in 1946.

That relative anonymity lasted briefly. On May 8, less than a month after his arrival at the Texarkana FCI, Swinney escaped, a familiar pattern in his federal criminal record. That day, Swinney was assigned duty on an outside work detail at the institution’s dairy farm. Shortly after noon, the guard realized a worker was missing. At that point Swinney—FCI prisoner 22232-149—by walking away, became an escaped federal prisoner. The warden notified local authorities and issued an all-points bulletin.

Unlike his previous escapes, this one garnered widespread attention, including front-page coverage in the
Texarkana Gazette
. An old con and counterfeiter who didn’t know any better than to commit dumb crimes, he hadn’t drawn any special attention from his keepers till then.

FBI records help reconstruct Swinney’s itinerary for the next few days. At the dairy farm, he watched the guard out of the corner of his eye. As soon as the guard was out of sight, Swinney set down his tools and simply walked off. The Texarkana FCI is near Lake Drive, the local street that follows the route of U.S. Highway 59, which goes south to Marshall and on to Houston.

At the highway, he began hitchhiking. He had stored his clothes with his sister in Marshall. He needed to replace his prison khakis. He had no money.

It is not clear what happened on the road or where he spent that night. Along the way, he acquired a large knife about six inches long with a folding blade—and a red hat. Who would expect an escaped felon to wear a red hat? Where he acquired the knife and hat was never explained, whether they came from a motorist or a burglarized house.

At nine-thirty the next morning, he surprised his sister in Marshall by walking into her house through the open back door. He was wearing a tan khaki shirt and trousers, along with the red hat.

He wanted something to eat. She asked how he’d gotten out of prison.

“I tied up a guard,” he said, “but I didn’t hurt nobody.”

She agreed to fry bacon and eggs but cautioned, “You can’t stay here. You’ll have to leave.”

“Then take me out to the highway soon as I eat, so I can catch a ride to Shreveport.”

First, she said, she had to go to Texarkana and pick up their sister.

“Okay,” he agreed, “but I want to borrow some money.”

As soon as he had finished eating breakfast, he sifted through a box of clothing he had shipped to her from the Texarkana FCI. He took out a brown dress suit and put it in a paper bag. He then changed into brown khaki trousers and shirt and set a brown corduroy hat on his head, leaving the distinctive red hat behind.

His sister took him to a point west of Hallsville, a town near Marshall. When she came to a sign, pass with care, she let him out. He was to remain in the woods there until she returned. She drove on to Texarkana, where she picked up her sister. Her sister already knew of Swinney’s escape. An FBI agent had visited her the day before, telling her that if Swinney made contact she should call immediately. He failed to tell her that she would be in trouble if she gave the escapee any assistance.

The two women returned to Hallsville, stopped at the sign where Swinney had gotten out of the car. Swinney spotted them and came out of the woods.

They tried to persuade him to turn himself in and save himself—and them—a lot of grief. He refused. They needn’t worry about him. Just help him get away so he could go to Shreveport. They kept talking to him, pointing out that if he turned himself in, he would get better treatment, since authorities were bound to recapture him anyway. He resolutely refused.

Late that afternoon, his sister drove him out of Marshall on Interstate Highway 20. When he got out, one sister gave him twenty dollars; the other, thirty dollars. He said he was going to the Salvation Army in Shreveport for the night, and he would call in a week to ten days. He had no gun but was still carrying the large knife with the long blade.

At six o’clock, a special FBI agent arrived to interview the Marshall relative. She told him she had let Youell out on the highway about thirty minutes before.

This information set off a new alarm. The FBI agent sounded the alert that Swinney might be headed into Louisiana.

The FBI’s all-points bulletin, sent out by Teletype immediately on learning of the escape, contained a full profile of Swinney, including his criminal record.