The Phantom Killer: Unlocking the Mystery of the Texarkana Serial Murders: The Story of a Town in Terror (7 page)

“I want to know
why
I can’t see where my brother was shot!”

Heated words bounced between them, and finally Welborn told him, “Well, I’m going to
see
where Richard was shot. If
you
don’t turn the body over, I’m going to turn it over myself! Unless you’re big enough to whip me and keep me from it.”

Welborn Griffin, like his brother, was strong and well built. His grief and anger reinforced his demand. The man turned the body over and Welborn saw where two bullets had entered the back of Richard’s head. He struggled to control his emotions as he stood before his brother’s corpse. He saw no exit wound in the front of the head. The bullets hadn’t been removed.

He walked several blocks to the Texas-side police station.

“There was a bunch of officers. I told them who I was and began to try to find out something. Well, they give me the runaround. And I tried asking an officer some questions, and this other officer he got in on the conversation and told me that they found Richard’s car keys a hundred yards out there in that marsh from where they found the bodies which was just a dirt road. I said, ‘You mean a hundred
feet
, not a hundred yards, don’t you?’

“‘No, it was a hundred
yards
, because we measured it.’

“I said, ‘I don’t believe me, you, or nobody else can throw a set of car keys a hundred yards.’

“That ended that conversation. I was afraid I was going to really get into a confrontation with him.”

Had Welborn Griffin known how the keys were actually found, in the dirt by the man cradling a baby girl, after the crowd had dispersed, he might have sustained his argument. It was an example of how fast facts became distorted as word-of-mouth accounts changed, sometimes radically, and repeatedly.

“I stayed there till near daylight,” said Griffin. “About daylight, I went to the cab stand—it wasn’t far down there—and caught a cab and went to Robison Courts where my mother and sister and Richard and David all lived.

“They were up. They hadn’t slept any all night. It just was sadness, crying, and everything. Nobody could figure out
why
.”

In a city in which crime was a constant, the murders left no doubt as to the case’s overriding importance. Most of the violent crimes in Texarkana could be connected to something—an unpaid debt, a drunken fight, jealousy, or even racism. But the deaths of Polly and Richard were disconcertingly random. An eight-column nearly inch-high front-page banner proclaimed the tragedy in Monday morning’s
Texarkana Gazette
.

Accompanying the article were photographs of the two victims, a studio photo of a handsome Griffin and a snapshot of a smiling Polly Moore, with her black-and-white dog, on the front steps of her home while she was in high school. The photo had been found in her purse next to her body.

A justice of the peace executed the death certificates, assessing the cause of death identically in each case: “Gun shot in base of skull.”

At work Monday morning, Byron Brower, Jr., noticed that Polly Moore, with whom he had been working as she checked the ammunition trucks, hadn’t shown up. He hadn’t read the newspaper yet. Others began talking about the murders, and he then realized that the young woman’s body he had seen in the car the morning before was that of Polly. He hadn’t been close enough to recognize her.

Polly’s services were held at the Pleasant Hill Baptist Church Monday afternoon in the little community of Bryans Mill, with burial in the cemetery near where she had been born seventeen years before.

It was late Monday afternoon when the police notified Welborn Griffin that his brother’s body was being released. He called the funeral home in Cass County, and two men accompanied him to the police station to acquire the release. When they arrived, they learned of a change in plans. A Texas Ranger was on the way. The body couldn’t be released until he arrived.

Welborn Griffin and the undertakers waited in the police station for what seemed an interminable period. He heard two uniformed policemen talking about the antics of two women, both drunk, after the bodies and car had been moved. Blood had seeped out of the car onto the ground
beneath. One of the women shoved the other down and tried to push her nose into the blood in the dirt. Welborn didn’t know whether to believe it or not. One policeman said the crowd of onlookers had grown so large, later, that there was hardly standing room.

The Ranger—Jimmy Geer—finally arrived at nine o’clock that night.

As the Ranger bounded up the stairs, the officers—Griffin said—“were just like a bunch of little kids with a schoolteacher. They all run up there and tried to talk at the same time, so he jumped up in a chair and started to cussing and told ’em to
shut up!
They did.

“And the first question he asked ’em was, ‘When y’all found that car and the bodies, did y’all rope that area off? And secure it until you could make a
thorough
investigation?’

“And they told him, ‘No.’

“And I’ll tell you the exact words he said. Told ’em, ‘Well, if you didn’t do that, you destroyed all the goddamned evidence there was!’ That’s just the words he told ’em, right there.”

The room turned chaotic. “They did a lot of talking and I couldn’t tell a word that was said, to save my neck.” The Ranger created a checklist to ensure that all possible evidence would be collected. Foremost was to retrieve the bullets from Richard Griffin’s head, a procedure not done in Polly’s case. Eventually Welborn gained a release of his brother’s body, and the funeral director took it back to Cass County for services. By that time it was nearly daylight.

That afternoon—Tuesday—Richard’s services were held in the Union Chapel church, close to where the family home had been, his grave just inside the cemetery gate. In death, both had returned to Cass County, six miles apart.

Welborn was never satisfied with the response, then or later, from the Texas-side officers.

The town that had two of almost everything and promoted itself with paired images now had an unexpected, unexplained double murder on its hands, one that was not quite like any of the numerous crimes it had known before. But that wasn’t apparent at first, and this was likely why the police and rangers at the time were so lax with their due process in the immediate aftermath of discovering the bodies.

From the beginning, the Griffin-Moore case was a huge one, larger than it first appeared. Dozens of well-coordinated detectives—compiling and processing evidence, filing information, interviewing suspects and potential witnesses, scouring the area—would hardly have been overkill. But manpower, or rather the lack of it, was a problem from the start.

Even worse, evidence was sparse. The bullets taken from Richard Griffin’s head, the hulls of the bullets, and possibly (or possibly not) fingerprints from the dead man’s car—these were the only tangible clues. The bullets that killed Polly Moore had not been removed and had been buried with her body. It was assumed the same weapon killed her as killed Griffin. The cartridge shells seemed to come from the same gun. If the bullets were needed later, her body could be exhumed. If any witnesses existed, it would take energetic, and lucky, digging to identify and locate those.

Although lawmen recognized the case as an exceptional one, residents appeared not overly upset or fearful. The vicious attack upon Mary Jeanne Larey and Jimmy Hollis the month before had faded from most people’s memory. People with no connection to either case tended to wonder if the killer hadn’t known the couple and executed them out of revenge or jealousy.

In the new case, no suspect could be identified; no motive seemed to exist. Those who knew the victims couldn’t provide the slightest information that might lead to a suspect. The verdict of the justice of the peace remained valid: they had died at the hands of an unknown person for unknown reasons.

The morning after his Monday night arrival, Ranger Geer retraced the investigation up to that point, going over the clues presented him and driving to the murder scene where the bodies and Griffin’s car had been found, searching for any clues that might have been overlooked. Two days after the crime, it was futile. The milling throng, following on the heels of rain, fatally complicated the officers’ work.

The ballistics report from the Texas Department of Public Safety’s Bureau of Identification and Records offered the first—and only—solid link to the killer, keyed to the cartridge shells found at the death scene
and the bullets extracted from Richard Griffin’s body. The murder weapon was a .32 automatic pistol with six lands and grooves with a left-hand twist. It was determined to be a Colt or a similar foreign make. Although veterans had brought back any number of foreign-made guns as souvenirs from the recent war, most likely the gun was American-made and therefore a Colt.

The evidence was assigned the filing label L-11672/0-261, to be maintained for comparison with any other pistol and bullets that might turn up.

This did not mean that there was a definite tie to just any .32 Colt automatic that officers might find. It would have to be test-fired to confirm a fit. It was not an uncommon weapon, but was a relatively small handgun that could be readily concealed—and used—very easily.

(Although investigators found no murder weapon after scouring the brush and surrounding area, coincidentally, more than three years later several little girls did find a pistol a quarter-mile from the crime scene. In October 1949, ten-year-old Marie Barlow and girls her age were playing in an open field of about five acres with tall, knee-deep grass when they came upon a rusted, dirt-clogged pistol. They reported it to an adult, who passed it on to authorities. Was it linked to the 1946 murders? Texas Ranger Stewart Stanley dashed any speculation. It was a .38 caliber Spanish-made revolver. The murder weapon had been an automatic, not a six-shooter, and a different caliber. Lawmen periodically found discarded weapons. Whatever the explanation, it did not fit into the murder case.)

Officers sweated over the mystery. Sheriff Presley and Chief Runnels together posted a $500 reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction, which translates to more than $6,000 today. A year before, a reward of the same size had quickly led to the solving of the Curtner murder. Five hundred dollars was a large amount of money, especially when it might be collected with a few words and an appropriate name attached.

No such information was forthcoming. A motive was hard to pinpoint. Griffin’s pockets likely had contained coins or small bills—pocket change—rather than large bills, hardly enough to kill for. This suggested
that robbery had been secondary, an afterthought, perhaps even a ploy to throw lawmen off.

At first, suspicions turned toward sex as a motive, that the assailant had raped, or had intended to rape, Polly Moore. No evidence substantiated it. She was fully clothed. A physician confirmed that she had not been “criminally assaulted.” There was the possibility that the mysterious gunman had
intended
to rape Polly Moore and that sex
was
a motive but the killer got distracted and changed his mind. But if that had been his intent, why had he not at least partially disrobed her, or assaulted her sexually in one way or another? No connection was made in any way to the earlier beating incident and the female’s sexual abuse.

Because the ground had been patted wet by rain, obscuring any car tracks or footprints that may have existed earlier, it was difficult to establish that the killer had driven to the scene, and although it seemed the most likely, it was still possible the killer had walked there. A café and beer joint, Stockman’s Cafe, was situated on Highway 67, not far off. If as a pedestrian he had risked exposure, he could have readily ducked into the heavily wooded area nearby and evaded scrutiny.

Almost any theory was possible, because no one knew.

Within four days following discovery of the bodies, officers had taken more than fifty persons into custody for questioning, while chasing down more than a hundred false leads. It was a grueling process with little rest. Three suspects, arrested and questioned because of bloody clothing, explained the stains to officers’ satisfaction.

Meanwhile, the Texas Rangers dispatched Dick Oldham to join Jimmy Geer. In a state where the old legend “one riot, one Ranger” was the only recipe needed for success, the force in Texarkana had doubled before a week was gone.

The case remained unsolved into April. More than 200 false tips and leads were followed. One suspect, “a girl from Kansas City,” was arrested in San Antonio, 425 miles away. Rangers drove her to Texarkana. Quickly eliminated as a suspect, she had not even known of the crimes.

Mary Jeanne Larey, now living in Oklahoma, learned of the murders. The more she learned, the more certain she was that they were connected
to her own night of horror. She was so certain that she took a trip back to Texarkana to talk to officers.

She was convinced that the same man who had attacked Hollis and herself had now gone a step farther and had killed. If they would listen to her, perhaps they could learn something about the murderer.

Her plea fell on deaf ears. Officers again insisted that she knew her attacker and was protecting him by withholding his name. She just as fervently insisted she had not known the man, and that he was a Negro, just as she had asserted back in February, despite Hollis’s belief that a white man had attacked them.

Still a bundle of nerves, she returned to Oklahoma having changed no minds.

Officers seemed not to have remembered Jimmy Hollis’s prediction three days before the murders that at the next opportunity his assailant would kill. Nor did it dawn on them that a similar
modus operandi
seemed to link the cases, down to the men having to drop their trousers as a means of immobilizing them.

Three weeks passed.

By Palm Sunday, April 14, Texarkanians were gearing up for “Straw Hat Day” and wearing stylish spring apparel. The Sunday edition of the
Texarkana Gazette
featured the first of an Easter series, written by Dr. Tom J. Wilbanks, pastor of the Pine Street Presbyterian Church on the Texas side. At the movies, John Wayne starred in
Tall in the Saddle
, while the Paramount Theater advertised the new RKO Radio production
Deadline at Dawn
. The ad carried a warning: