The Phantom Killer: Unlocking the Mystery of the Texarkana Serial Murders: The Story of a Town in Terror (10 page)

Another, different female voice asked the same question as had the six o’clock caller.

“Do you know where Betty Jo went?”

“Well, call Ernie Holcomb! He took her home. I don’t know anything about it,” he said.

“We don’t think Ernie picked her up.”

Atkins asked, “Did you check with her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Brown? They live in Sussex Downs.”

This time the voice added, “She was picked up at the VFW by Paul Martin, a boy who drove over from Kilgore. They were both supposed to come to our party but they never showed up.”

Atkins had never heard the name Paul Martin, had not known that anyone but Ernie Holcomb was to have taken her home. Betty Jo hadn’t told him anything about a change in plans.

“What’s the big deal, anyway?” Atkins, now more awake, asked.

“We heard a news bulletin on the radio. A teenaged boy was found shot to death at Spring Lake Park,” she said. “We’re pretty sure it was Paul Martin.”

Despite the caller’s seeming certainty, Atkins still couldn’t believe Betty Jo had gone anywhere with Paul Martin simply because he had never heard his name. In his early-Sunday-morning fog, the whole thing felt distorted and unreal. Atkins, a Texas-side boy, hadn’t realized Betty Jo had known Paul Martin since her school days in Arkansas; her move to the Texas side and Martin’s move to Kilgore,
Texas, had left that part of her history foreign to him. It just hadn’t come up in conversation.

After the second early-morning call, Atkins’s parents and his guest Atchley were out of bed and listening to his end of the conversation. They could tell something unusual was going on.

When Atkins reported what he had been told over the telephone, Atchley told him that he’d known Martin was to have picked up Betty Jo after the dance and that she was not going directly home. He hadn’t thought to tell Atkins. This shifted their attention to Ernie Holcomb. Had he known of the change in arrangements, or had he, after all, taken Betty Jo home?

Atkins asked the operator to ring the Holcombs’ number. Dial phones had not yet come to Texarkana.

The Holcombs’ phone rang and rang. No answer.

This raised additional concerns. Atkins called Haskell Walker, another member of the band, and woke him up. He didn’t know any more than Atkins did. Hurriedly the youths dressed and, skipping breakfast, walked to the Holcomb residence, only three blocks away.

The automobile was gone. There was nobody home.

They walked back to the Atkins house. They turned on the radio, hoping to learn something. They didn’t know what to do. They began calling about town. By then, people were leaving for church or other Sunday-morning activities. Finally they talked with Sophie Anne White and Betty Ann Roberts. Had Ernie taken them home? Did he take Betty Jo home when he collected them? They confirmed definitely that Betty Jo had not left when Ernie Holcomb collected the other three girls and took them home. She had gone with Paul Martin, as she’d told Atchley she would. Prospects grew decidedly grim.

If Paul Martin’s body had been found in Spring Lake Park, what had happened to Betty Jo?

Atkins and Atchley were in a quandary as to what to do next. They soon learned that hundreds had already flocked to the Spring Lake Park area to find Betty Jo or her body. They would have joined the search parties, had not the radio newscasts emphasized that people should
not
go there. It would complicate officers’ duties. There were too many people there already.
So what
could
they do? Well, there was Betty Jo’s saxophone, which she’d taken with her. It could be traced by its serial number. Had it been found? Did the authorities know of it?

Early Sunday morning, a little after eight o’clock, thirteen-year-old Bill Horner’s mother sent him to the little general store next to Spring Lake Park Elementary School for a loaf of bread. As he walked into the store, one of the few open at that hour on Sunday morning, he saw police cars driving by, toward the park itself, and away, in both directions. Inside, he asked a woman in the store, “What’re all these police doing out here?”

“There’s been a killing over there,” she said.

A killing
, he immediately thought,
and we sleep with our doors unlocked!
This piqued the boy’s curiosity. He debated with himself whether he should satisfy his curiosity and walk over to where the activity seemed to be centered, whether he’d get in trouble if he did. He told the storekeeper he would be back, and he left. He crossed the KCS tracks and the wide crossing that lay on the dirt road that ran parallel to the tracks and directly into the park, through the twin guard posts standing symbolically at the entrance. At that point, he saw three men to his right, maybe eighty yards from the crossing up the dirt road between the rail line and the park. He walked there. The three men paid him no attention. He didn’t know what he would have said if they’d asked him what he was doing there. One of the men got into a car and drove off. The other two men, dressed in suits and hats as if on their way to church, stayed, looking down at the ground. Nearby a Ford coupe was parked, mostly off the road but partially at the edge of the dirt road. It was headed south, toward town.

“I can’t figure out why there’re no tracks coming out,” he heard one of the men say.

Young Horner’s eyes followed the route they were surveying, covering an expanse of leaves, pine needles, and dirt, but not enough that anyone wouldn’t have left footprints. They’d found two sets of tracks, one larger and probably a man’s tracks, the other set smaller and probably a woman’s. One of the men said, “They got out here”—indicating the road—“and they went over there. And where did they go from there?” The tracks
appeared to lead from the road over dirt and leaves toward brush, no more than thirty feet from the road, but they had found none going back toward the road or car, as if they had gone to a point, then disappeared. The two men—Presley and Runnels—then got into their car and drove off. They had hardly noticed the boy’s presence.

After they left, teenager Horner strolled near where the lawmen had gone, careful not to intrude upon the tracks they had observed. Nor did he want to leave his tracks close to the scene. He realized what they had been talking about. The two sets of tracks pointed away from the road but didn’t return. Where had they gone? Why had they ended so abruptly, apparently not returning to the road? He kept walking back and forth, back and forth, trying to see where the tracks had gone but couldn’t. “That bothered me ever since I’d seen that,” he was to say years later. Where did they go? How did they get out of there? He even looked around to see if there was a vine they might have swung out on—the fictional character Tarzan was strong in the boy’s imagination. He stood around, puzzled, trying to reason how it had happened, why no tracks seemed to go back out toward the road. It was as if, he concluded, the owners of the tracks had vanished. There was no evidence that one of the persons had tried to escape the other. They were just plain footsteps.

Had the tracks had anything to do with the case? Had they gone from one car, presumably the one parked by the road—as it turned out, the car Paul Martin had driven—to another car, unknown to the officers? The puzzle seemed unsolvable.

After a while, young Horner walked back home. He had forgotten to buy the loaf of bread his mother had sent him for. He didn’t explain where he had been and what he had seen. The rest of the day, and for days afterward, he fretted over the scene. For decades later he would tumble it over in his mind from time to time.

Before Tom Albritton had gotten out of the house that morning, an officer appeared at the door. Paul Martin’s body had been found in Spring Lake Park. Hadn’t he been spending the weekend with him? The news numbed. He couldn’t believe it. Yes, Tom told the lawman, Paul was spending the weekend with him but hadn’t come back the night before.
Why would they have gone to Spring Lake Park? Tom was asked. He groped for words. If you had a car, the usual thing to do was to go to Spring Lake Park and smooch, he told the man. It was popular for young people on both sides of the state line.

When Herbert Wren arrived at First Methodist Church, Arkansas, for Sunday school, he learned of Paul Martin’s body being found.

Later that morning he and others drove to Spring Lake Park. The pleasant venue was now a backdrop to horror.

“It changed our community overnight,” said Wren. “Before that, youngsters never felt threatened or uncomfortable anywhere. Now young people suddenly were in potential danger at night almost anywhere.”

Swarms of lawmen converged upon Spring Lake Park as search parties organized to find Betty Jo or, what was more likely by now, her body, unless she had been kidnapped and was, somehow, still alive. The search widened beyond the immediate area where Martin’s body had been found and where his car had been parked.

With the crime scene secured, Sheriff Presley drove into town and headed for the First Methodist Church on the Texas side of State Line. He was a member of the Men’s Bible Class there. It was a large class; more than a hundred men attended on Sundays, drawn by two popular teachers, Dr. Henry Stilwell, superintendent of Texarkana, Texas, schools and president of Texarkana College, and District Judge Norman L. Dalby, who alternated Sunday sessions. Presley knew the large group of friends would be assembling, and he recruited them to join the search. Grimly he announced the mission, and men spilled from the church into cars headed for the park. It was the easiest way he knew to organize a search party on short notice on a Sunday morning.

In the morning, fifteen-year-old Charlsie Schoeppey was so sleepy that she begged to miss services and stay in bed; her parents consented. Sleep was short-lived. Her father returned soon and explained why he’d come home unexpectedly. Ted Schoeppey had arrived at the church to learn of the tragedy and the need for search parties. He didn’t know that his daughter and other youngsters had been frolicking in the park several hours before. He piled into the car with the Boyd brothers—James and George—and James’s two sons Jim, Jr., and Jack. All but
George were neighbors of the Browns in Sussex Downs. Jack Boyd sat beside Betty Jo in class. Young Jim Boyd, Jr., had been Charlsie’s date the night before; he was returning to the scene in a decidedly more somber mood. The older Boyds chose the Pleasant Grove community to search because they’d grown up there, had played and hunted in the woods as boys, knew every foot of it. They drove the car off Summerhill Road onto a dirt road. They unloaded and fanned out.

George Boyd was the first to see a body behind the trees in rough terrain in a wooded stretch a few yards off the lane.

“Oh, my God, oh, my God,” he yelled repeatedly, “there she is!”

He was close enough for the others to hear him. They came running. It was, indeed, a girl’s body, fully clothed, her full-length coat buttoned, lying on her back with her right hand in the overcoat pocket. She was wearing a Middie blouse, as it was called, and a plaid skirt, with patent leather shoes. She lay in apparent peace, as if she’d gone to sleep. Amid pine trees and saplings sprouting green signs of spring alongside the dead leaves of winter, the body was covered by noonday shadow while sunlight streamed down several feet away. It was Betty Jo Booker.

Ted Schoeppey and George Boyd stood guard at the tragic scene while the others drove off to relay word to officers at a barricade on Summerhill Road. The road had been closed and manned by lawmen to ward off the curious.

Sheriff Presley was soon upon the scene, setting about to protect the crime scene from any milling curiosity seekers as had contaminated the Griffin-Moore case. The body was approximately a mile from the location of Martin’s body and twice that from the coupe they had ridden in the night before.

Betty Jo had been shot twice, once in the heart and once in the head, entering the left cheek near the nose. The angle of the bullets, on cursory examination, suggested the gunman had been right-handed and had faced her as he killed her. It wasn’t much of a clue.

The sheriff believed Martin had been killed first, though he acknowledged that it was impossible, at that point, to tell the exact time of the shootings.

From the first discovery of the bodies, the sheriff cited the compelling outward similarities to the Griffin-Moore case. Other evidence would soon back up that assumption. He emphasized, to news reporters and other investigators, that the bodies had not been abused, beyond the bullet wounds. Unlike the Griffin-Moore case, however, no attempt seemed to have been made to conceal the bodies of Paul and Betty Jo. Although the bodies of the first couple had not been hidden, they had been left inside the car where they might be mistaken for weary travelers sleeping, posed inside the parked car in order to avoid or delay their discovery. The new bodies had been left recklessly where they had been killed, Paul’s in full view of anyone driving along the road, Betty Jo’s in the woods where she had been taken; no effort had been made to hide or bury the bodies. The killer had heartlessly taken their lives as if they had been hunted animals. It was a chilling discovery.

The finding of Paul’s body swept through the town within hours. Discovery of Betty Jo’s body accelerated the spread of both news and rumors. Almost immediately, as residents remembered the earlier double murder, a state of horror and panic began building. Another young couple had been slain in a lovers’ lane, forming a pattern in people’s minds that had never existed before, though the Hollis-Larey beatings still hadn’t been connected to the pattern. Four deaths in three weeks—exactly three weeks apart, a late-Saturday-night crime—shouted out that something previously unheard of had shattered the pattern of life—and death—in Texarkana.

The Griffin-Moore case hadn’t really alerted the public to its personal implications. Now with a second similar one, most residents suspected that the same hand had killed all four. Previous headline murders had been single ones or perhaps a rampage by one criminal on one occasion, then ended. As bad as the Griffin-Moore case was, it had seemed to be an act unlikely to reoccur. The Martin-Booker murders suddenly presented a different face. There was no way to conclude that this was just another murder in a violence-prone region. The known facts, even before they had been collected and ascertained, put the three-week spree in a separate, frightening category of its own.