The Phantom Killer: Unlocking the Mystery of the Texarkana Serial Murders: The Story of a Town in Terror (52 page)

Katie Sutton died on July 3, 1994, at age eighty-four—a few months before Youell Swinney died—and was buried in the family plot at Hillcrest Memorial Park beside Virgil. A gravesite on her other side was reserved for her second husband, Forrest, who died in 2009 and was buried there.

Hillcrest Cemetery, on the Texas side, became the final resting place for several of the Phantom victims, including Paul Martin, Virgil and Katie Starks, as well as any number of prominent figures of the time such as
William Rhoads Grim, Judge Stuart Nunn, Congressman Wright Patman, publisher Clyde E. Palmer, editor J. Q. Mahaffey, their graves all situated a short stroll from each other.

As if to replace notables who had faded into yesteryear, the city continued to export noteworthy natives to achieve fame elsewhere. H. Ross Perot, billionaire founder of Electronic Data Systems and a 1992 third party candidate for President, made Dallas his headquarters. Arthur Temple, Jr., with Temple-Inland, became a major business influence. Golfers following Byron Nelson included Miller Barber and Rick Rogers, joining football sensation Billy Sims (from Hooks) and other athletes to lead a crowded parade of those starring in different sports. Others gained recognition belatedly: Scott Joplin for his ragtime compositions (his opera
Treemonisha
, which won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize, was set near Texarkana) and player piano composer Conlon Nancarrow, who did most of his work in Mexico City.

As Texarkana changed over time, quirks of its bi-state status lingered.

Today a water tower on Interstate 30, which slices through the north side, emphasizes both oneness and twinness: Texarkana—Twice as Nice. The slogan didn’t exist in 1946. Neither did the Interstate. The city limits, which didn’t reach nearly so far, expanded to include Spring Lake Park. A bank sits near where Betty Jo Booker’s saxophone was recovered. Popular Bryce’s Cafeteria, like other businesses, relocated alongside the Interstate.

Downtown, the massive federal courthouse and post office, astride the only bi-state road in the U.S., remained a dominant fixture. It reportedly is the second most photographed courthouse in the nation after the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1960, Democratic nominee John F. Kennedy drew an estimated 100,000 for his speech there. A plaque now commemorates the event. The iconic Confederate soldier still stares south.

Old landmarks underwent a variety of fates. A decrepit, empty Grim Hotel, a shell of its former glory, lies like a scar, awaiting restoration or other final disposition. Once-bustling Union Station became another shell. The Amtrak station nearby operated from a small office. The old Paramount Theater, refurbished, became the Perot Theater. It no longer screens movies but is the venue for musical and dramatic performances.

For years, the twin cities shared Texas ZIP codes—75501 and 75502. Arkansas-side Mayor Londell Williams, the first—and, so far,
only—African-American mayor of either city, lobbied his city to its own, Arkansas ZIP code—71854. State Line Avenue also divides the area codes—903 for Texas; 870, Arkansas. For years Jim and Linda Larey operated a printing shop on the Arkansas side of State Line. Its telephone area code was 870; its fax code, in the same room, 903 as if in Texas. Explanation: they had once been across the street; when they moved, the phone company let them keep the fax area code. In the town where Willie Vinson was brutally lynched, interracial couples occasionally could be seen, setting off no incidents, raising no eyebrows.

The tricky boundary continued to bewilder unwary visitors. The Texas Liquor Store sported a billboard in 2010 advertising Lone Star beer, brewed in San Antonio.

ONE MORE

REASON TO NEVER

LEAVE TEXAS

To read the sign, you had to drive north, meaning you’d already left Texas. Both the Texas Liquor Store and its billboard were in Arkansas.

Decades after the murders, incidents continued to open old wounds and raise questions. In 1999 an anonymous woman called the home of Paul Martin’s brother, R. S. Martin, Jr., and talked to his wife Margaret. The caller wanted to apologize for her father. “I never understood why my daddy shot Paul.” Efforts to trace the call failed. In light of facts of the case, it hardly seemed credible even as a “confession by proxy,” adding stress rather than closure to survivors.

The case, resisting oblivion, attracted international attention. Inquiries came from as far off as Sweden and the United Kingdom and all over the U.S. One day a couple from North Carolina appeared on Tillman Johnson’s porch, the man eager to have his picture taken with the old lawman. In 2003 a camera crew from Italy showed up, unheralded, to film Johnson’s version of the crimes.

Everyone wanted to solve the case. In 1977, students from Drury College in Springfield, Missouri arrived in Texarkana, accompanied by their sponsor, Dr. Jay Bynum, intent on cracking the, by then, thirty-year-old
mystery. As the
Texarkana Gazette
reported, the students “were bathed directly in the pool of icy fear immersing the case.” Dr. Bynum explained: “We found out the motel we were staying in was just a hundred yards or so from where Paul Martin’s body was found. The girls were fairly frightened by it, and they even put a chair under the doorknob.” They spent a week in Texarkana researching the case.

On the Internet, Wikipedia expanded its entry. Websites such as
crimelibrary.com
,
angelfire.com
,
TruTV.com/library/crime/serial
, and thedarwinexception conveyed their reports. A few foreign entities joined in—Thai, Russian, Greek, and Italian. A rapper, Nas, mentioned “stabbin’ bitches like the Phantom,” although the Phantom stabbed nobody and no victim was a “bitch.”

In 2010 a play, “Phantom Killer” by Jan Buttram, opened off Broadway in New York’s Abington Theatre. The same year Jane Roberts Wood’s novel,
Out the Summerhill Road
, turned a fragment into fiction. Casey Roberts and his students at Texas A&M University at Texarkana worked on a projected film about the case. A musician in northeast Arkansas performed under the name Youell Swinney, as if to assume a cloak of dark fame, transforming multiple tragedies of innocent persons, mostly teenagers, into a celebration of a multi-fall convict.

Sometime over the years, decades afterward, far from Texarkana, someone labeled the crimes the “Moonlight Murders,” alliterative and slick but inaccurate, pure imagination. Certainly the Hollis-Larey and Griffin-Moore attacks occurred in the dark. There was some waning moonlight in the Martin-Booker case, and the moon was setting during the Starks shootings. The killer operated in the dark. Any moonlight was purely coincidental and slight, never a factor in the killer’s motivation.

The murders put the town on the map, in a negative way. In 2007 a national tour featured it among sixteen locales that had sustained senseless violence, such as Chicago’s St. Valentine Day massacre. At Texarkana, a musician played John Lennon’s peace anthem, “Imagine,” on the piano on which the Beatle composed it. Afterward the film crew pushed on to Dallas, where President Kennedy was assassinated.

As its signature crime the case seemed woven indelibly into Texarkana’s cultural fabric.
The Town That Dreaded Sundown
came to be shown
annually in Spring Lake Park, sponsored by the City of Texarkana, Texas. A country club held a Phantom Ball. The chamber of commerce once included the Phantom legacy in its brochure. More recently it gave out DVDs of the movie. In 2013 a Hollywood remake of the movie, backed by MGM, headed to theaters.

Criminologist Jack Levin has observed that residents of a small town in which a high-profile murder occurred often feel stigmatized. This seems not to have happened in Texarkana, except at the time of the murders. The city has almost wallowed in the notoriety, as well as expressing a certain local pride in the fictionalized movie filmed on location there.

The murders represent a case history of domestic terrorism as threatening as any other. Domestic terrorists have abounded over the 20th century, creating a long line of serial killers—the Green River killer, Zodiac, the D.C. sniper, Son of Sam, B.T.K., the Boston Strangler, all named by the media—and mass murderers like Timothy McVeigh, with his Oklahoma City federal building bombing. The Long Island Serial killer has started the 21st century, and still remains at large, as do the tragic legacies left behind by other mass murders, including the Columbine shooters, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, Jared Loughner of Arizona, and Adam Lanza of Sandy Hook. Arguably, domestic terrorists like these have, collectively, inflicted more carnage upon the U.S. than did the foreign terrorism of September 11, 2001, in New York City and Washington. The incidents, because they stretch over decades, lack the dramatic impact of killing thousands on a single day, but the overall toll rapidly mounts in any full accounting. For the victims, their families and friends, the emotional shock and the rampant fear are as great as that of any other tragedy.

Psychiatrist Helen Morrison wrote that the victims of serial killers, whose deaths all too often go unsolved, are numerous enough to populate a small town. Somewhere, she suggested, they deserve a memorial in recognition of what they and their families have suffered. Texarkana would be as good a site as any.

END

D
etails of weather, moon and sun data, and temperatures came from U.S. Geological Survey data, newspaper weather reports, and Farmers Almanac for 1946 in online archives. When data were not available for Texarkana, the author used that for nearby Shreveport, Louisiana. The Texarkana City Directories and 1946 telephone book provided other information. In addition to interviews and archival material, the
Texarkana Gazette
and
Daily News
were among the major sources for the events and, especially, headlines.
MeasuringWorth.com
was consulted when translating 1946 dollars into present-day values. Comparisons, of course, are approximate.

Early Texarkana history: “that lively railroad village,” Leet,
Texarkana, A Pictorial History
, p. 33. “Texarkana is the gateway.” quoted in Leet, p. 38. Paragon Saloon tragedy, pp. 33-34.; “great majority . . . gamblers, gunmen,”
Images of Texarkana
, p. 6. The city’s 88 saloons:
Texarkana Gazette
, Sept. 26, 1948. The crimes described were reported in the
Texarkana Gazette
of relevant dates. Tillman Johnson’s files and memory covered the O’Dwyer
and Hasselberg murders. “As a puzzle”: Kent Biffle to Mark Moore, July 7, 2008; “most notorious and intriguing”: Deborah Bauman (Segment Producer for The Ultimate 10) to Jerry Atkins, Aug. 14, 2000.

Events of late 1945, including the Fulton shootout, and early 1946 came from articles in the
Texarkana Gazette
. The author personally viewed the movie,
Three Strangers
, on Turner Classic Movies. The night of the attack is based primarily on an unpublished manuscript, “The Texarkana Phantom Killer” by James M. Hollis, an eyewitness first-hand account in which he recalled his exact thoughts from the beginning of the ordeal, a copy of which is in the possession of the author. His memoir was supplemented by contemporary
Gazette
and
Daily News
accounts, including an interview of Mrs. Larey published in May 1946 in the
Gazette
. James Hollis’s background came from a variety of family sources: an ex-sister-in-law from his second marriage Mary Ann Williamson, a niece Diana Burris, his widow of his last marriage Peggy Francisco, as well as marriage and divorce records in Union County, Ark., along with census records. Mary Jeanne Larey’s background came from census records, marriage and divorce records, and relative interviews.

Billie Presley Edgington provided many details about her father, Bill Presley. His brother, J. A. “Alex” Presley, recalled the Red Springs community in which they grew up. Other material came from a
Gazette
feature as the sheriff was leaving office in 1948. Hollis recalled his hospital experiences in his unpublished memoir. That article and newspaper reports of the
Texarkana Daily News
and
Gazette
combined to fill out his post-hospital period. The
Gazette
reported the Hooks house fire, as well as the two-car crash on Highway 67 around that time. Mary Ann Williamson told of the gunshots startling Hollis. The
Gazette
reported on the returning servicemen, crimes, and social events, as well as the arrival of baby chicks at the post office.

Richard Griffin’s background is based on interviews with his brothers, Welborn Griffin and David Griffin. Polly Ann Moore’s information is based on interviews with her brother, Mark Moore.

Mark Moore and Patti Bishop provided details of the tragic day Polly’s body was found.
Texarkana Gazette
stories contained some details of the couple’s activities. The
Gazette
reported accidents at the Canary Cottage. Most of the accounts of individuals mentioned came through interviews with those persons; for instance, Byron Brower, Jr., Mark Moore, Patti Richardson Bishop, Ray Rounsavall, Sandy Burnett (then Sandy King), David Griffin, and Welborn Griffin. A physician’s report that she was not “criminally assaulted” appeared in the
Texarkana Gazette
, supported by Max Tackett’s interview that there was no rape. Verdicts were written in death certificates of each victim. In addition to accounts at the time, Texas DPS records provided details of the murder weapon, to which Max Tackett and Bill Presley also contributed. The filing label for the bullets is specified in numerous DPS letters then and subsequently, as in Fred R. Rymer, firearms examiner, to W. H. Presley, Aug. 12, 1948. The finding of the Spanish-made revolver three years later was reported in the
Texarkana Gazette
, Oct. 17, 18, 19, 1949, confirmed by telephone interview with Marie Barlow Tammen. Mrs. Larey’s trip to Texarkana was told in a May 1946
Gazette
interview.