The Mammoth Book of Killers at Large (41 page)

Detectives questioned friends of Betty Jo Hooker and Paul Martin. What puzzled them was how Martin’s car wound up so far from their destination. Friends swore that he and Betty Jo were just friends, not sweethearts, so why had they parked up on that secluded road? The best theory they came up with was that they had given someone a lift who had then pulled a gun on them. Perhaps it had been someone from the dance. Jerry Atkins noted that the place where Polly Ann Moore and Richard Griffins had been found on Highway 67 was not far from a place called Club Dallas. Perhaps someone hung out at dances looking for their victims. And there was another puzzle: why were the bodies so far from the car – and so far from each other?

Atkins and three other members of the Rhythmaires were pallbearers at Betty Jo Hooker’s funeral. And in her honour, they disbanded the band. They never played again.

After this second double murder, Texarkana was in a state of fear. Few people ventured out at night, and no one ventured out alone. Out-of-town cars were followed. People strung out pots and pans in their backyards so they would be alerted if the Phantom was on the prowl. Hardware shops sold out of locks and guns. And even in the fierce heat of summer, windows remained closed and locked.

Some favoured more direct action. Teenagers, incensed by the murder of two fellow high school students, formed vigilante bands which sometimes unintentionally disrupted police stakeouts. Armed couples would park on lonely roads in the hope of baiting a Phantom attack. With the two Texarkana police departments, the sheriffs’ offices of Bowie, Miller and Cass counties, the FBI, the Texas Rangers and the Texas Department of Public Safety all on the job, Texarkana became the most closely guarded city in the United States. Meanwhile local businesses, civic societies, clubs and private individuals contributed the sum of $4,280 as a reward for the capture of the person behind, as they put it, “the foulest murder ever committed in Texarkana”.

Over 300 suspects were brought in for questioning. They were people who had criminal records, loners and odd-balls, people simply considered a little strange by their neighbours or those caught roaming dark spots at night. They were interrogated thoroughly but, in every case, released without charge.

With the police making little progress, rumours abounded – to the point where Bowie County Sheriff’s Office and Captain Gonzaullas had to issue a press release, which read:

The news of the killings spread across the country and internationally. Newspapers and radio stations covered the story and the
New York Times
, the
Washington Post
,
The Houston Chronicle
, the
Dallas News
and even
The Times
of London, along with Associated Press, United Press and the International News agencies, all sent reporters.

With little to report but local colour, the journalists focussed their attention on Captain “Lone Wolf” Gonzaullas. In his khaki suit and a white 10-gallon hat – and packing two pearl-handled revolvers on his hips – he became the living embodiment of the Old West. He did not deny the oft-repeated tale that he was the Texas Ranger who sat in the cashier’s office in the Crazy Water Hotel in Mineral Wells and gunned down two ex-convicts who sought to rob the place. A good-looking man, he was particularly pestered by the female reporters. And on radio station KCMC, he told listeners: “Check the locks and bolts of your doors and get a double-barrelled shotgun to blow away any intruder who tries to get in.”

Unfortunately he was too busy giving interviews to investigate the case and the jealousy of other officers over all the attention he was getting did not foster good co-operation among the law enforcers. In any case, they were unprepared for what happened next.

At around 9 p.m. on the night of Friday 3 May, 38-year-old Virgil Starks was listening to the radio in his farmhouse on Highway 67 in Miller County, 12 miles from Texarkana. He had just opened the newspaper and, after a hard week’s work on the farm, he was easing his aching back with an electric heating pad. The dinner had been eaten and the dishes cleared away, and Virgil’s wife, 35-year-old Kate Starks, had changed into her nightgown and was lying on her bed reading the
Post
magazine. Her sister lived across the road and some 50 yards down the way was another farmhouse, belonging to the Prater family.

This restful scene was shattered by a shot, following quickly by another one. Both hit Virgil Starks in the back of the head, killing him instantly. Mrs Starks leapt out of bed and ran down the hallway. She saw her husband covered in blood. She thought immediately – the Phantom.

She dashed for the phone and called the operator. But when the operator came on the line, Mrs Starks could not answer. She had been hit in the face by a bullet. As she turned, another bullet hit her, ripping her lower jaw from the upper, smashing her teeth and sending blood gushing to the floor.

Ducking further shots, she fell to the floor and crawled towards the kitchen. But, as she reached the pantry, she noticed that someone was trying to force entry through the back door. She could see the man’s silhouette through the curtains of the door’s window.

Kate Starks stumbled back through the house and made it out of the front door, just as she heard the back door give way. In her blood-soaked nightgown she made it across the prairie highway to her sister’s house. Finding no one at home, she made her way to the Praters’ farmhouse down the road. They called for help and she was rushed to the Michael Meagher Hospital – now St Michael’s – in Texarkana. Miraculously, she survived. The first bullet had penetrated her right cheek and exited behind her left ear. The second had smashed her jaw then lodged in the muscles under her tongue. Emergency surgery removed it. Her condition remained critical for several days, then she pulled through. But she remained scarred – physically and psychologically – for life.

When the police arrived at the farmhouse, they found two small bullet holes in the window of the front porch window. They were small calibre and had not smashed the glass. Entering the house, guns drawn, they found Virgil Starks’ body lying on the floor while the cushions of his easy chair smouldered from the unattended heating pad. There were bloody handprints on the walls and furniture. It seems that the intruder had dabbed his hands in the pools of Virgil Stark’s blood. Now the police had fingerprints, lots of them. There were more on a flashlight he had dropped.

Muddy footprints led in from the kitchen door to the Starks’ bedroom, where the killer must have gone searching for Kate. Then they led back to the living room and out of the front door. The trail then led across the highway. It seems that he had pursued his quarry. Later bloodhounds traced his scent along the highway for some 200 yards before they lost it. At this point, the killer had probably got into his car and driven off. Roadblocks were set up at both ends of Highway 67, but the killer got away.

Although the newspapers headlined this as another Phantom murder, detectives were not so sure. This time, the killer had not used a .32 handgun but a .22 rifle – an automatic as the killer had loosed off two rounds in rapid succession. Not only was the weapon different, but this time the killer had not struck a young couple in a secluded lover’s lane. Before, the killer had been careful not to leave any clues. This time he deliberately daubed the crime scene with fingerprints – and he left his flashlight. Some believed that the killer was not the Phantom at all, but the jealous lover of either Kate or Virgil.

But to Texarkanians the murder had to be the work of the Phantom. It seemed logical that the work of a maniac should become more and more savage with each attack. The change of weapon and MO was immaterial.

The pressure was now on and the police badly needed to make an arrest. But the fingerprints did not help. After being checked by the Arkansas State Police, they were sent to the FBI in Washington, D.C. Still no match was found. Kate Stark was little help either. Questioned weeks after her recovery, she could not give a description of her husband’s killer. She had, she said, seen only his silhouette against the curtains.

Two days after the attack on the Starks, the body of a man named Earl McSpadden had been found on rail tracks north of Texarkana. Some reporters speculated that he was the Phantom and that he had committed suicide. However, the coroner’s report revealed that McSpadden had been stabbed to death before his body was put on the tracks – which only led to speculation that McSpadden was another victim of the Phantom.

A week later, a sheriff in Atoka County called the Texas Rangers that he was holding a 33-year-old itinerant in Paris, Texas after he had threatened a rancher’s wife when she refused to feed him when he knocked on her door. The man was from Lewisville, Arkansas, 30 miles east of Texarkana. The Rangers, the Arkansas State Police and the FBI all questioned the suspect, but he had a solid alibi and his fingerprints did not match.

The authorities then threw their net wider. They contacted every law enforcement agency in the US, asking them for details of any case where the victims of a murder or rape had been parked in some secluded spot. The list they got back included two soldiers at Fort Dix, New Jersey, who were also suspects in the “Black Dahlia” case, a 32-year-old mechanic from Fort Worth, a graduate student from the University of Texas who was dismissed from the US Navy for exhibiting homosexual tendencies and an inmate at San Quentin who had been jailed for the kidnap and rape of a 22-year-old nurse in California – though he had been in jail at the time of the Phantom attacks. Then there was a 42-year-old suspect from College Station, Texas, who owned a .22 calibre rifle and enjoyed sneaking up on courting couples parked in lovers’ lanes. He was thought to be in Texarkana at the time, visiting his sister. And there was a section hand on the Missouri Pacific Railroad who had written to the Governor of Texas admitting to the killings. But he also claimed to have killed Satan and challenged FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and President Harry Truman to a duel.

Closer to home there was a feed store owner in Texarkana, a 45-year-old farm hand, a Texarkana gas station attendant who had been accused of rape and a local Internal Revenue Service agent who had, no doubt, been fingered by a disgruntled taxpayer. They were all released when, once again, their fingerprints did not match those left in the Starks’ home.

The only suspect named by the Texas Rangers was 29-year-old Youell Swinney. Max Tackett, the Chief of Police of the Arkansas State Patrol, noticed that a car had been reported stolen just before each attack and, in July 1946 he arrested Swinney at a bus station when he returned to Texarkana after attempting to sell a stolen car in Atlanta, Texas.

According to Tackett and his assistant Tillman Johnson, Swinney said: “Hell, I know what you want me for. You want me for more than stealing a car!”

Swinney had a long record of car theft, counterfeiting, burglary and assault, and in the hotel room he shared with his wife they found a shirt with the name “Stark” stencilled in it. In the police station, Swinney refused to answer questions, but his wife, who had a short rap sheet herself, sang like a bird. She said that they had recently married 70 miles away in Shreveport, Louisiana, and came to Texarkana not long before the murders began. Then, much to everyone’s surprise, rather than deny all knowledge of the killings, she said she had been with her husband when he had committed them. She even filled in details that were not widely known and, according to some sources, told her interrogators about a book found at the scene of the murder of Betty Jo Booker and Paul Martin that only Bowie County Sheriff Bill Presley knew about.

The problem was that, each time she told the story, she changed the details. For example, in her first statement about the Booker-Martin killings she said that she and her husband had gone to Spring Lake Park in a 1941 green Plymouth they had stolen to drink a bottle of beer. At one point, Swinney had got out of the car to urinate. After he disappeared, she heard two shots ring out from beyond a clump of trees. When he returned later, his trousers were wet and muddy, and he refused to tell her where he had been. But, later, she said they had gone to the park for the sole purpose of robbing someone and, when they spotted a couple in a parked car, he pulled up alongside it and ordered them to get out. Then, to her horror, her husband had shot Paul Martin, killing him instantly. Swinney had then shoved Betty Jo Booker into the Plymouth and had driven off with her, leaving his wife to wait in Martin’s car. After an hour, he returned alone. Later, after persistent questioning by his wife, he confessed that, overcome with lust, he had raped and killed Betty Jo.

Not only was Mrs Swinney’s testimony inconsistent, she also had a criminal record, making her, in the eyes of the law, an unreliable witness. What is more, she refused to testify against her husband, which was a wife’s right. Nevertheless the police were convinced they had the right man.

Swinney was taken to Little Rock for further questioning under sodium pentothal – the “truth drug” – but they gave him too much and he fell asleep. With no shots left, the authorities had to be content with charging Swinney with car theft. It was his third felony conviction and, under the Habitual Criminal Act, he was sentenced to life imprisonment in Texas State penitentiary in Huntsville.

In 1970, Youell Swinney filed a request for a writ of
habeas corpus
, on the grounds that he was not represented by an attorney at his trial in February 1947. At a hearing in Bowie County an FBI agent testified that the trial judge Robert Vance had advised the defendant to hire a lawyer, but Swinney had chosen to defend himself. However, according to the
Texarkana Daily News
: “Swinney testified . . . that he was not advised by Judge Vance of his right to an attorney, nor was he told of the possible punishment he could receive if convicted of the auto theft charge.” Eventually, the Court of Appeals overturned Swinney’s conviction and he was freed in 1974.