The Phantom Killer: Unlocking the Mystery of the Texarkana Serial Murders: The Story of a Town in Terror (47 page)

SWINNEY HAD BEEN CONFINED AT TEXAS DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS, HUNTSVILLE, TEXAS, FROM FEBRUARY 15, 1947 UNTIL OCTOBER 16, 1973. HE HAD BEEN CONFINED UNDER THE HABITUAL CRIMINAL ACT. SWINNEY IS BELIEVED RESPONSIBLE FOR SEVEN
[
sic
]
MURDERS AT TEXARKANA, TEXAS, IN
1945-46 [
sic
];
HOWEVER, HE WAS NEVER CONVICTED
.

SWINNEY DESCRIBED AS WHITE MALE AMERICAN, DOB FEBRUARY 9, 1917, ARKANSAS, 6’, 195 POUNDS, BROWN HAIR, BLUE EYES, WEARS EYEGLASSES. HE HAS TATTOO OF TWO INCH HEART WITH SKULL ON LEFT FOREARM AND WORD “MOM” ALSO ON LEFT FOREARM; SCAR ON RIGHT KNEE; SSAN 459-32-1164; BOTH PARENTS DECEASED; SWINNEY DIVORCED 1946
[
sic
]
AND DID NOT HAVE ANY CHILDREN
.

The description overlooked the tattoo, revenge. The oversight was corrected in subsequent FBI records.

The bulletin ended with a blunt warning:

CONSIDER ARMED AND DANGEROUS

Special instructions went to agents to interview individuals who knew him at Texarkana, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Grand Prairie, Longview, Marshall, and Weatherford, Texas.

The manhunt took on greater urgency because of Swinney’s history, now coming to light. He was not a run-of-the-mill escapee. Like many a time before, he had simply walked away. Nor had he tied up a guard, as he’d boasted to his sister.

Three days after Swinney walked off the FCI grounds, an FBI agent called the sister in Marshall. She was at her job in Jefferson, fifteen miles from Marshall. It was five-thirty in the afternoon. “He’s here now,” she said. “I’ll try to talk with him, to keep him long enough for you to get here.” The agent took off.

Fifteen minutes later, Swinney was gone, driving a dark brown compact car with the rear end square. She didn’t know the license number.

The following morning—May 12, a Monday—Swinney’s relative in Grand Prairie telephoned officers that Swinney, seeking money, had tried to contact him. Swinney, alone, was driving a bronze-colored American-made compact car, bearing Texas license plates, numbers unknown.

FBI agents swarmed into Grand Prairie. At nine o’clock a woman called from Swinney’s former employer. Swinney was in her office in nearby Carrollton, trying to obtain money he claimed was due him. The FBI immediately notified Carrollton police. Minutes later a sergeant and patrolman reached the office. Swinney was on his way out of the building.

They stopped him, informed him he was under arrest. It was 9:10
A.M.
Ten minutes later two FBI agents arrived, identified themselves, and took him into custody. One of the federal agents provided him a Rights and Waiver Form. Swinney read it, said he understood it, but declined to sign. He agreed to be interviewed orally.

Once in custody he verbally traced his itinerary over the past few days. He had hitchhiked to Dallas, not Shreveport, the first day. He left blank his visit to Marshall. Two days after his escape, he was in Lewisville, in the Dallas area. He took a used car from the Newt Miller Ford Agency for a test drive. He admitted he had no intention of buying it or returning it. He simply needed transportation. He slept in the car that Saturday and the following night. He remained vague as to where he went during that time.

He handed the car keys to the agents. It was a 1973 two-door Ford Maverick, bronze with 1975 Texas license number GTA 806.

The Carrollton police ascertained that the Maverick was, indeed, stolen from the Ford agency. The car’s value was assessed at $2,900. Another felony.

Swinney spent the night at the Dallas County jail, with a hold for the U.S. Marshal Service.

His description remained basically as in his earlier arrests. His tattoos on the left forearm hadn’t changed, including the heart and skull and crossbones and the word
Revenge
. The difference was his occupation: cement finisher, a trade he’d acquired in prison.

His level of education was stated as eighth grade, two steps above what he had testified to in 1973. His IQ was 95, considered low average.

A decision followed not to prosecute his family members for any aid they may have given him; they had cooperated with authorities in tracking him, had urged him to surrender. In late May he was dispatched to Leavenworth, a maximum-security prison where he had resided more than thirty years before.

In July he pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Topeka, Kansas, to one count of escape and received a sentence of two years, to be served after he completed his two-year term for counterfeiting.

His self-initiated freedom had been short-lived—four days.

The following year, a movie,
The Town That Dreaded Sundown
, was filmed in the Texarkana area and hit the theaters. Purporting to be a true account of the famous case, it was anything but that. The title, however, was an undisputed accurate reflection of the town’s mood during the killing spree. Starring Ben Johnson, Andrew Prine, and Dawn Wells, it was directed by Charles B. Pierce, a regional moviemaker who had previously achieved a degree of success with another local incident,
The Legend of Boggy Creek
. The
Sundown
killer, left unnamed and his face never displayed, cavorted about with a pillowcase, with eyeholes, over his head, even in daylight. For anyone acquainted with the facts, the movie only vaguely paralleled what had happened in 1946. One of its most memorable scenes, in which the pillowcase–hooded killer tortures a female victim tied to a tree with knives on a trombone slide while he plays a mournful melody, evoked raucous laughter from those who knew the details of the case. There was never a knife used by the killer, never a trombone, never a girl tied to a tree.

“Poetic license has rarely been stretched so thin,” wrote Dr. Robert Kerr, a Texarkana journalist who went on to teach at the University of Oklahoma. “Total fiction.” Nonetheless, the “dreadful little horror” came to have a cult following, spreading, via translated subtitles, to Europe:
Kaupunki pelon valiassa
and
Verenpunainen auringonlasku
in Finland,
Staden som fruktade solnedgången
in Sweden, and
La citta che aveva paura
in Italy.

It became a new vehicle contributing to distortions of a hometown tragedy, on the heels of a vast array of published errors and word-of-mouth
accounts that, aided by time’s erosive nature, had seriously blurred, then kidnapped, the truth.

During the late 1970s, Swinney made another attempt at writing short stories, as he had done at Huntsville during his major stretch. His nephew Clarence said some of the stories were published in a “small Jewish publication,” a newsletter from Temple Yaakov in Atlanta. Atlanta was one of his several federal “homes.” The nine stories or sketches that are extant offer a range of topics from cotton picking to Independence Day to some superficial love stories. One gains the impression of a hard-luck loser striving for recognition but seemingly without a clue as to how to make it, beyond clichés of uplift philosophy.

Under a general heading of “Random Thoughts,” he submitted a series of stories around 1979 containing titles like “King Cotton,” “Fathers Are the Greatest,” “A Lonely Vigil,” “Angry Waters,” “Love Is Forever,” and “Each Dawn I Die.”

“Angry Waters” tells of a typical summer’s day in the long-forgotten year of 1927 when “Steve” was nine. (This is close to the time—1926—when Swinney’s parents divorced and the age he would have been.) The piece bristles with words of violence—“lightning streaked the heavens like stabbing knives in quest of hidden victims,” “maddened force,” “fury,” “angry waters,” with “outings of fantasy,” “envisioned himself as a pirate in search of loot or a captain of a luxury liner,” “danger,” “dangerous situations,” “bone-chilling spasoms [
sic
] of wintery coldness,” “the savagery of wild animals locked in battles to the death.” This memory was of a boat in a millpond during a storm, employing a great many symbols that suggest violent inner turmoil and uncertainties.

In another, “Love Is Forever,” he uses phrases like “devastation triggered by a hidden time bomb” and “fury of the fiery explosion.” The lead in the story survives an explosion on an oil derrick but loses both legs, amputated at the knees. He had married his schoolhood girl friend, Beth, in a church, but because he is legless and can’t support her, apparently he does not go back to her. It does not say she rejected him and doesn’t explain how he could have gone away without her knowing it. He becomes a street singer. One day Beth and her new husband come by, hear him sing, but she doesn’t recognize him. It is a jerky story in
many respects, suggesting a pitiable man with low self-esteem amid a disturbed relationship.

His nephew, Clarence Swinney, called them “rather odd stories from a possibly disturbed mind.” They were closer to a junior high effort that crammed in big words as if to impress. Most of all, they reflected an inner disturbance amid a violent background.

The seeds of his anger were planted early. His life story reveals numerous troubled relationships that may have become models for his acts of “revenge.” The roots of his behavior can be traced to a childhood when he was ignored by his parents, left adrift, gaining attention by negative activities, and eventually acting out his emotional responses to the world around him.

It was small wonder that many, if not all, of the family believed that Youell had committed the murders.

His short stories, though poorly crafted, may have enabled him to express his frustrations and violent inner world in a nonviolent manner. If he had taken the literary route years earlier, instead of acting out his anger, the question arises whether he might have channeled his drive for revenge into a direction other than murder. Or if mental-health services had been available in his childhood, and used, would early intervention have prevented the multiple tragedies? It wouldn’t have “cured” his psychopathy, which probably was set at birth or early in life, but it might have headed off the tragic violence.

Swinney’s brushes with the law continued. He returned to Texas custody for felony theft in 1981 as Inmate # 326380 with a hold—yet again—for the U.S. Marshal in Houston. He was sixty-four years old. He subsequently returned to the Texas penitentiary as Inmate # 476635, much altered in appearance, old and seemingly embittered. Once paroled in January 1989, he had another hold on him by the U.S. Marshal in Houston. By then he was nearing his seventy-second birthday. He was a beaten, time-ravaged old man, a pathetic old con who had ruined a multitude of lives, including his own.

In his old age, Swinney was paroled from a federal institution in Fort Worth and moved to a nursing home in Dallas. He suffered a stroke but died of lung cancer in Southhaven Nursing Center in Dallas on September
15, 1994, technically and legally a free man, at the age of seventy-seven, a ripe age for a man with his record. He had spent the bulk of his life behind bars and at the end, as an indigent, was cared for infinitely better than he had treated any of his victims, including those on whom he had passed his counterfeit concoctions and whose cars he had stolen. He also had survived the three who had lived to tell of their attacks by the Phantom—James Hollis, Mary Jeanne Larey, and Katie Starks.

Because his body wasn’t claimed by relatives, it was donated to The University of Texas Health Science Center in Dallas, which uses cadavers for teaching purposes. Medical students, unaware of the history of the body before them, dissected and studied the remains of The Man They Said Was the Phantom, who had once boasted of the label. The students, some of whom probably would practice medicine in the region terrorized by the serial killer, never knew what the body before them, when alive, had done. Once the body was no longer needed, it was cremated and the ashes disposed of. With the ashes unclaimed, it is not certain where the ashes went. His was a wasted life, whatever the outcome of a murder trial might have proved. He had besmirched the name of hardworking family members. He had cost society untold hundreds of thousands of dollars in law enforcement and incarceration expenses alone. Add the toll of Phantom victims—the dead and the survivors, along with their sorrowing families and friends—and the total loss is inestimable, stretching across decades.

In the end, he had literally burned, a fate many had sought for him back in 1946.

His official record belied any belief, by him or anyone else, that he was a “brilliant” criminal who had demonstrated that he was smarter than the men trying to catch him. “They”—the law—caught him over and over again. The only people he had ever managed to truly con were the parole board members, whom he somehow managed to convince each time that he would not commit any further crimes.

For the central crimes for which he had been blamed, but not charged, he had been no more brilliant than in the lesser theft, robbery, and counterfeit cases for which he had been convicted. In the crimes of murder for which circumstantial evidence and an eyewitness account existed, he had
been uncommonly lucky. His only action even approaching brilliance was his marrying Peggy so that she couldn’t be forced to testify against him. It didn’t take a legal education to know that.

His wasted life was a cautionary tale so graphic as to defy explanation, forever beyond understanding.

In that sense, his victims—the dead and surviving loved ones—would never be avenged in full, though marginal justice had emerged in disguised form.

H
ad he gained political support for the idea, Glenn Owen, a Texarkanian born seven years after the murders occurred, intended to stamp solved on the Phantom mystery. His mechanism followed a protocol effective in other jurisdictions.

Owen dedicated a significant portion of his time and energies to clearing the case through this overlooked process. Even with the culprit, witnesses, and officers all dead, his plan, proposed more than sixty years after the crimes, was reasonable, logical, faithful to the law, and practically guaranteed to succeed.

Owen was ten when he heard his older brothers and parents talking about the case. His family had a peripheral connection to the first double murders just off Highway 67. His grandfather, Hass Owen, operated Owen Brothers Livestock Sales, set back on the north side of the highway, a short walk to the death scene. In front of the livestock auction, a café sold beer. Swinney and Peggy, based on her statements, bought beer there several times. (They bought beer at a lot of other West Seventh Street cafés too.)