The Phantom Killer: Unlocking the Mystery of the Texarkana Serial Murders: The Story of a Town in Terror (48 page)

As an adult, Owen compiled an impressive résumé of investigative experience: ten years as an Army criminal investigator, twenty years of part-time work as a Texas police officer. As a part-time investigator for the Bowie County district attorney’s office, he watched “experts” on TV talk about criminal cases. Doubting their authority, he began profiling cases as a hobby. His skill grew until he profiled, with great accuracy, a number of headline cases.

Eventually his intense interest brought him into contact with Tillman Johnson, who had pondered the case for decades. Owen decided the mystery could be reopened and settled with some satisfaction. The means would be the FBI-approved process set up for qualifying crimes, including murder as well as lesser transgressions.

The method was to clear the case
by exception
, following FBI guidelines.

The FBI requires three steps.

1. Identifying the perpetrator

2. Sufficient information to justify an arrest, charge, and prosecution

3. The offender’s location is known and he can be apprehended, but there is an overriding reason why he can’t be taken into custody and prosecuted.

If the culprit is alive and can be delivered, obviously he would be brought to trial.

If, however, he is in custody in another state and for some reason can’t be extradited, proceedings could begin without him.

If the culprit is dead, so that he can’t physically face the bar of justice, the case still may be resolved. Clearing a case by exception doesn’t assign a penalty or sentence. It removes the mystery from its unsolved status.

The Phantom case, Glenn Owen reasoned, qualified on all counts. Sufficient evidence existed to meet the FBI standards, which would be administered by local authorities.

The approach had been utilized in a variety of jurisdictions over the nation. Owen followed a case so cleared in Indiana. Why not in Bowie and Miller Counties?

Before DNA became a trump card in criminal investigation, with the power to liberate as well as convict, the Phantom case had to depend on less dramatic findings. There were no reliable fingerprints. DNA studies
probably
would have helped at the time, but no such science existed. Other evidence, however, tied all of the cases together as the work of a single perpetrator.

Above all, one common feature characterized all four Texarkana attacks. They were “stranger” crimes. Neither attacker nor victims knew the other. This alone doesn’t prove the same stranger committed all the acts, but is a starting point.

The killer was a very angry man, obvious in the February beatings before the murders began. The assault victims suffered the man’s vicious acts; he came close to killing them. Hollis and Larey had witnessed his rage up close. Hollis, describing the man as “desperate,” warned officers that he would kill next time. The warning went unheeded. Hollis was right; it cost Richard Griffin and Polly Ann Moore their lives the following month.

Bearing in mind that all of the incidents were committed by a stranger driven by deep anger, the victims then become innocent surrogates for the persons whom the criminal blamed for his own distress. Emotionally he was getting even with those who, he perceived, had done him wrong. Such twisted logic fit snugly within the framework of his behavior.

Hollis was lucky to survive. The assailant had intended to kill him, had left him for dead. The brutal February beatings, as precursor event, set the stage for the murders to come.

The Griffin-Moore murders presented the same MO as the beatings. The thug attacked a couple parked in a lovers’ lane late at night. He wielded a pistol and, in February, a very strong flashlight. A pistol was the centerpiece of the subsequent attacks. A flashlight was used—and left—at the Starks house in May.

Another part of the MO linked the Hollis-Larey beatings to the Griffin-Moore murders. In February, in which we have a clear, up-close eyewitness account from Hollis, the gunman forced Hollis to drop his trousers. The gunman obviously knew this would limit his male victim’s movements.

A month later, Richard Griffin’s body was found with his trousers around his ankles. This was a similar attempt to control the male victim, hobbling Griffin so that he would be unable to move freely. Thus the killer controlled the scene more effectively than in February. He’d corrected his errors. He’d improved his technique, as serial killers usually do. The first attack is a learning experience. Afterward he goes over the event in his mind, devising ways to improve the next one. In effect, he perfects his methods in his fantasies. At the next opportunity he puts into practice what he has learned.

The February beatings can be read as the seminal event from which the murders grew. The lawmen to a man misinterpreted the case, believing the victims knew their attacker, despite having no such proof, despite the couple’s consistent, forceful certainty that they had never seen him before—and that the man was a potential killer. Four bodies later, lawmen tardily acknowledged the connection. At fault was lawmen’s refusal to believe what Hollis and Larey kept telling them, that a stranger had beaten them.

Usually the first incident in a string of attacks or murders will reveal much about the killer. The February attacks tie in with subsequent MOs. He failed to control the crime scene then and, most of all from his viewpoint, he had left witnesses. He apparently hadn’t intended to leave either one alive. His lapses in the February attacks probably generated a degree of anxiety. Might they identify him if he was arrested? As the weeks passed and the story faded from the newspapers, supplanted by other violence, he could relax and meditate on his next venture, a month later.

Glenn Owen, like others, saw money as a motivation but believed humiliating the victims was part of the plan, sexual humiliation in the female and possibly in the male. “Having the male drop his trousers helped control the scene, to keep him from running off, but maybe there was a little sexual perversion there. The criminal may have wanted to humiliate the man in front of his girlfriend. Maybe he wanted to look at him, you know. Maybe he got off by doing that, by humiliating somebody in that form or fashion.”

The connection between the February beatings and the March murders was obvious. Richard Griffin was forced to drop his trousers, as had
happened to Hollis, and was killed before Polly Ann Moore. The February attacker had assaulted the male first. The sequence of deaths was a pattern throughout: disabling or killing the male first, then dealing with the female at a more leisurely pace. This thread runs through all of the four incidents, except that he enjoyed no leisure at the Starks home when his plans were short-circuited, causing him to panic and leave his flashlight.

(The pattern of disposing of the male first, then focusing upon the female, especially for an extended period of time, as in the Betty Jo Booker incident, outwardly suggests an Oedipal model, despite the ages of the victims. Risky though such speculation is, one is reminded of Dr. Luther White’s 1971 analysis along these lines, that a sexual relationship with a respectable woman would seem incestuous, leading to the killing of the female. The tattoo mother may add to the theory.)

While the February crime scene was chaotic, the March murders reflected a more organized offender. He’d had a month to fantasize and improve on his crimes. Instead of slugging his victims, he shot each victim execution-style, in the back of the head: two shots each from a .32 automatic pistol, a Colt with a left-handed twist. No witnesses.

He also posed the bodies inside the car, so that they might be supposed at a glance to be sleeping. Postponing their discovery gave the killer time to distance himself.

The killer learned from his flawed February experience. He had once more exacted revenge—on surrogates—in what was to become his near-perfect crime. He was helped by rain later that night and clumsy police practices that permitted curious crowds to trample the scene and destroy possible evidence.

Still, officers failed to suspect a stranger or see a link with the beatings, despite fervent attempts by Hollis and Larey to point out the similarities and their certainty that their attacker had now killed others, as they’d warned.

The Martin-Booker and the Griffin-Moore murders are tied together without any doubts whatsoever. Irrefutable ballistics evidence proved that the same gun, a .32 Colt automatic pistol with a distinctive left-handed twist, killed all four victims. The same death weapon; therefore, the same
killer. There were other similarities, but no other physical evidence was needed. One killer had taken four lives.

The MO also was the same—defenseless couples parked in lovers’ lanes. The same gun shot each one. There was the same pattern of two shots each, as in the Griffin-Moore case, to kill Paul Martin and Betty Jo Booker, with a slight exception. Martin was shot four times but in two-shot bursts, with an interval between. Although wielding an automatic weapon, the killer seemed addicted to shooting each target twice only.

Unlike the previous case, Paul Martin’s and Betty Jo Booker’s bodies were left some distance apart. No effort was made to conceal Martin’s body—the mark of a disorganized offender—while Betty Jo Booker was killed in a clump of woods and her body not discovered for hours after Martin’s was found. These facts pointed toward a mixed offender as an overall pattern.

Again, the perpetrator had left no witnesses, in the Spring Lake Park crimes selecting a much later time in an even more isolated atmosphere. In effect, the killer had
hours
in which to execute his plans at a more leisurely pace. Every bit paralleled the earlier case.

On top of all else, the ballistics evidence makes the connection airtight.

Tabloid-like headlines to the contrary, modern forensic psychology leads us now to believe that sex was not a primary motive in any of the crimes. The gunman could have done as he wished with any of the females. He had a gun. His bizarre behavior in February was not rape or attempted rape, but a novel way to inflict pain. Possibly there was an intention to rape Polly Ann Moore, but if so, it did not occur. As for rape of Betty Jo Booker, he had been in no hurry to do so, all the while with his female companion, Peggy, near, presumably making it more difficult. He had total control over Betty Jo before he killed her. There is no evidence of rape in any of the other cases.

One difference in Betty Jo Booker’s death is that it came “up close and personal.” She was not shot in the back of the head as the first two victims were. The killer faced her and shot her in the face and heart, after considerable time with her, taking her with him as he moved the cars. This suggests an attempt at a “relationship” with her. She was a respectable girl and probably was so in his eyes, but she resisted him. Recalling
psychiatrist Luther White’s insight, this would constitute rejection in his eyes. Even more important, she was an eyewitness to Paul Martin’s murder. Feeling rejection and fear of discovery, he shot her, facing her, up close. This was the most personal shooting of all of the murders.

If any doubt remained of a stranger’s role in the Starks case, it’s dispelled by the fact that the killer had to be unaware that Starks had one of the few rural telephones in the community. Anyone who knew the Starkses would have known of their telephone. He didn’t know them; assuredly they didn’t know him. That is almost always the way serial killers operate, targeting victims they do not know, which makes them much more difficult to track.

Katie Starks had not seen the killer that night nor had any consistently definite ideas about him. After all, she had no way of knowing, which exacerbated her anxieties. She, like nearly everyone else, felt the killer had to be someone who knew her husband and her—that there had to be a recognized motive. It was a common, understandable concept. Killers almost always know their victims, and they have reasons, in their minds, to kill. It made no sense to her that a stranger would kill her husband and try to kill her. But with serial killers that’s exactly what happens. A stranger had beaten Jim Hollis and Mary Jeanne Larey, had killed Polly Ann Moore, Richard Griffin, Betty Jo Booker, and Paul Martin. It’s what serial killers do. They kill strangers, over and over.

When Katie entered the room, the killer made no attempt to do anything until she turned and went to the wall phone and started to use it. This caught him by surprise, indicating he was not aware of the phone; else he would have cut the line or would have shot her as she stood in horror before her husband’s body, a much closer target than when she was at the phone. Seeing he hadn’t killed her, he panicked, forgot the flashlight he’d set down while he braced his weapon, and dashed to the back of the house to force his way in. At that point he exhibited a touch of disorganization. When he got into the house and realized his quarry was no longer inside, he panicked again, and raced to his car to escape.

He shot Katie two times. The pattern in all the shootings, almost like a signature, was the firing in two-shot bursts in every instance beginning with the first double murders. It was as if the killer believed that two shots
were all that were needed to ensure death. Every murder victim in the series was shot twice except Paul Martin. The same pattern continued at the Starks home.

If, as some believed, Virgil Starks was the target of someone he had angered, his killer would hardly have stopped at two shots. Nor would he have lingered outside till Katie entered the room. And if he knew Starks well enough to want to kill him, he would have known of the phone lines and cut them.

It has been tempting for many to discredit the single-villain argument simply because a different weapon was used in the Starks case and the locale had changed from a lovers’ lane. These objections deserve consideration and shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. But a careful analysis tilts the argument in favor of the same gunman in all four incidents.

The MO at the Starks home—intruding at a home instead of a parked car, using a .22 automatic instead of a .32 automatic—does constitute a shift from the previous pattern in the Texas-side crimes, but the differences are superficial. The killer already knew lawmen were looking for his .32 automatic; any half-savvy criminal would know a change of weapons was necessary. By then, as officers patrolled nightly and set traps, the killer knew better than to scout out parked cars. He would have encountered officers on a stakeout or armed lovers just waiting to shoot anyone who showed up. Vulnerable couples were hard to find. As a further indication that the killer was an experienced criminal, he had broken into the Starks home with a speed and skill no novice was likely to match. Swinney had experience as a burglar. A lot of experience, dating back to childhood.