The Phantom Killer: Unlocking the Mystery of the Texarkana Serial Murders: The Story of a Town in Terror (12 page)

There would be no closure for Betty Jo’s grieving mother. Bessie, trying to grasp the tragedy, told a reporter, “I can’t understand this.” She was convinced her daughter was “an innocent victim of a madman.” No one could refute that. She had lost her entire early family.

What would newsmen call the unknown murderer? Editor J. Q. Mahaffey and his staff at the
Gazette
recognized the need for a short term by which to refer to the case. Rather than describe it as “the Texarkana murders,” which would not necessarily distinguish it from numerous other cases and would sully any chamber of commerce promotion, City Editor Calvin Sutton saw a solution. “We’ve got to have a handle for the killer,” he told Mahaffey. “How about calling him the Phantom? He has been elusive, like a phantom.” Mahaffey couldn’t think of a better label, and agreed. “Why not?” he said. “If the sonofabitch continues to elude capture, he certainly can be called a phantom.”

Though derivative, it was an effective summing-up, and a term already in popular use locally. The killer appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, left only death, and faded into the darkness, like an apparition. The daily newspaper contained several models. “The Phantom,” a purple-garbed avenger, chased and punished evildoers in the comic section, acting, however, in an opposite manner than did this local Phantom. There were the movie,
The Phantom of the Opera
, showing locally, and The Masked Phantom, who had wrestled at the Armory.

From that point on, Phantom it was, a one-word label to serve as a symbol for a murderous plague, and a thuggish killer operating under cover of darkness. Neither Mahaffey nor Sutton realized the significant part this would play in the lasting drama, as the naming of the criminal, and the case, only added to the tension, as well as the mystery.

On Tuesday the local newspaper used the brand for the first time. The afternoon
Daily News
’s front page featured a photograph of Paul Martin’s casket being borne down the steps of the church. A five-column headline labeled the case.

The morning
Gazette
further fixed the name in the region’s mind.

PHANTOM SLAYER STILL AT LARGE AS PROBE CONTINUES

By injecting the manufactured name, Phantom, the newspaper created a melodramatic twist that suggested a battle of wits between lawmen and villain that might have issued from a Charlie Chan or Sherlock Holmes film.

“Texarkana’s Phantom Killer continued to match wits with some of the best investigative brains in Texas Tuesday as the investigation of the brutal murder of Paul Martin, 17, [
sic
] and Betty Jo Booker, 15, trudged along methodically and laboriously Tuesday with no break in the case anticipated immediately.

“Texas Ranger Captain M. T. Gonzaullas said that it was one of the most puzzling cases he had encountered in his 20 years of criminal investigation.”

It was the birth of an image that would become larger than its reality and invade every person’s mind with fear throughout the town. The mystique of the Phantom would only grow.

Within days, what most people and officers had guessed was confirmed: that the two double murders were linked. The
modus operandi
was similar. A ballistics expert at the Texas DPS lab in Austin reported that the murder weapon for Paul and Betty Jo was also a .32 caliber Colt automatic pistol—or foreign make—with six lands and grooves, with a left-hand twist. The Colt was the only American-made pistol that fit the description. This was identical to the bullets that snuffed out the lives of Richard Griffin and Polly Ann Moore. It was clear that the expert thought an American Colt was the gun to seek. A Colt was infinitely more common; any such foreign-made caliber would have been quite rare.

Captain Gonzaullas was not alone in being baffled. The local
Daily News
called it “the most puzzling crime ever committed in Bowie County.” That covered a multitude of cases stretching back to the town’s boisterous nineteenth-century founding, if not to de Soto’s brief visit in 1541.

I
f, in 1946, Texas Ranger Captain Manuel Trazazas “Lone Wolf” Gonzaullas had pranced into Texarkana on a white Arabian steed decked out in silver buckles and ensconced in a saddle capable of drawing the envy of Hollywood, along with his usual accouterments of a pearl-handled, gold-and-silver-plated .45 caliber pistol strapped on each hip and, of course, crowned by the obligatory ten-gallon white Stetson, he wouldn’t have created any more of a stir than he actually did. By then he was the stuff of movie lore, a legend in his own time. Most of it was true.

The Martin-Booker murders brought him and additional Rangers to Texarkana for an indefinite stay. As the Ranger in charge, he also came to be an official spokesman, along with Sheriff Bill Presley, for the investigation. Gonzaullas soon was regularly holding informal press conferences at the downtown Grim Hotel. He was put up at the Grim for the duration of the investigation, conveniently across from the offices of the
Texarkana Gazette
and
Daily News
. The Gazette Building served as a nerve center for media. Most mornings Gonzaullas held forth “in full bloom,” as an
Arkansas officer described it, entertaining newspaper staffers and anyone else who happened to drop by.

He was colorful, in all the term implied, and he was not shy. By 1946 he’d had a variety of experiences that young lawmen today wouldn’t have the opportunity to boast about. He worked oil boomtowns, bootleg cases, and mob violence. A devout Presbyterian and regular Bible reader who’d eschewed alcohol his whole life, he relished his cigars and—something he shared with his wife—
legal
gambling. His concept of justice was keyed to the Old Testament’s eye-for-an-eye, tooth-for-a-tooth approach in Exodus. A biographer likened him, as far as his law enforcement went, to “a thundering prophet of old who brought down the wrath of God on wrongdoers.”

Explaining his nickname, he once told a reporter, “I guess I got that nickname because I went into a lot of fights by myself—and I came out by myself, too.” Another quoted him as saying, “I’ve been in many a fight. Knives, guns, and fists. I won all with His hand on my shoulder.”

During his career he was reputed to have killed as many as seventy-five men in the line of duty, some in fierce gunfights in which he beat the odds of survival. He was tight-lipped about it, refusing to cite a number. “That’s a gross exaggeration,” he commented of the high figure, without correcting it. A biographer eventually reduced the toll to one-third as many, only twenty-five.

He was not a big man, physically, hardly the model for the six-foot-plus Ranger of movie fame, but of average height. He was broad-shouldered, carrying about 170 pounds, with dark hair and with piercing grey-green eyes. He was born in Cadiz, Spain, on July 4, 1891, to naturalized American citizens visiting the country. His father was born in Spain and his mother was born in Canada of German parents. Gonzaullas was the first man of Spanish descent to rise to captain in the Texas Rangers. He grew up in El Paso, across the Rio Grande from Mexico in the far southwestern corner of Texas. His intense interest in law enforcement dated at least from the time he was fifteen and saw his only two brothers murdered and his parents wounded in a border raid by outlaws. That was around 1906. He found a role model in Captain John B. Hughes, a tall, rugged Ranger frequently seen on horseback in the streets of El Paso and known
as the Border Boss. Young Gonzaullas was determined to follow in his hero’s footsteps and, it could be argued, did exactly that.

After a stint in federal service, he rejoined the Texas Rangers in 1927 as a sergeant in Company B and remained until he retired in 1951. Lewis Rigler, one of his men, called him a “very, very intelligent man” who “didn’t have much education. Carried a dictionary with him all the time. Looked up words and learned a lot.” Rigler praised his work ethic. “He was the last one to go to bed and the last one to eat. Absolutely.”

When Gonzaullas arrived in Texarkana, his headline power was assured. He was made to order for reporters, a flamboyant star from Hollywood sent by God (and the governor of Texas). He consistently provided good copy in a case that hardly needed embellishing. He relished his role and rarely disappointed. Women reporters were especially drawn to him, and he to them.

“Lone Wolf Gonzaullas was the best-looking man I ever saw in my life,” said editor J. Q. Mahaffey. “He sent my girl reporters back to the office with stars in their eyes. He had them talking to themselves.”

He had a sense of the theatrical, knew how to dress, how to pose. Reporters flocked to him like geese in migration, expecting, and usually getting, a colorful and newsworthy quote, whether they printed it or not.

Mahaffey designated sports editor Louis “Swampy” Graves, a recently returned Air Corps veteran of the Asian theater of the war, as the paper’s greeter to the visiting press. Graves was on hand when Gonzaullas checked in to the Bowie County sheriff’s office for what was to be an extended stay.

“He was wearing sharply creased whipcord trousers with a short jacket, boots with a high sheen, carrying pistols with ivory handles, all crowned with a Stetson,” Graves said. “He was a fine-looking fellow with the skin texture of the Spanish, dark hair and eyes, standing about five-ten and weighing maybe 180. Nothing in his appearance to indicate a killer, even on the side of the law. He was personable. It was hard to believe the Ranger had killed anybody, much less the high number cited.”

Lone Wolf’s imperfections were rarely reported, but fondly remembered, even treasured. Graves enjoyed one such moment.

“Lone Wolf dropped a leather box on a constable’s desk and when asked what it contained, he said:

“‘A new fangled fingerprint set.’

“‘How do you operate it?’

“‘Danged if I know!’”

That week, the Texas Department of Public Safety distributed an all-points bulletin. If it produced the hoped-for response, it could lead to an early break in the case by tracing a trail leading to the killer, with evidence no jury could ignore.

WANTED person or persons unknown, for the murder of Betty Jo Booker and Paul Martin, on or about April 13, 1946, in Bowie County, Texas. Subject or subjects may have in their possession or may try to dispose of a gold-plated Bundy E-flat Alto saxophone, serial #52535, which was missing from the car in which the victims were last seen, when it was found abandoned about 1.55 miles from the location of the boy’s body, and about 3 miles from the location of the girl’s body. This saxophone had just been rebuilt, replated, and repadded, and was in an almost new black imitation case with blue plush lining.

It is requested that a check be made of music stores and pawnshops. Any information as to the location of the saxophone or description and whereabouts of the person connected with it should be forwarded immediately to the Sheriff, Bowie County, Texarkana, Texas, and the Texas Department of Public Safety, Austin, Texas. (Refer our file O-261/997).

In the absence of more tangible clues, officers pinned hopes on finding the missing instrument, which eventually might be traced to the killer.

A twenty-four-hour-a-day investigation became the norm. Every imaginable suspect, or anyone who might have had even the remotest connection to the victims or the case, was taken in for grilling. City police rounded up suspects and herded them into the sheriff’s office. Youngsters who had known the victims were questioned. All day and into the night,
individuals of all ages and statuses trod the creaking stairs to the second floor on Main Street. Any man with an arrest record or a shady reputation of any degree was hauled in and subjected to scrutiny of his whereabouts on the tragic Saturday night. A dragnet, broad and fine, brought in men and women, black and white, within a radius of 100 miles, some from even farther. No one was exempt from being detained.

A cab driver found himself a major suspect after his taxi was reported in the Spring Lake Park area early that Sunday morning. But his version soon checked out, his alibi firm. The dispatch records, among other evidence, proved he could not have been near the murder scene at the crucial time. He was one of many who were eliminated only after definitely establishing their innocence.

As the weary days beat on, Gonzaullas confided to editor Mahaffey, “Texarkana has more human driftwood than any other town I’ve ever been in, other than San Antonio or El Paso. You have more petty thieves, more prostitutes, more pimps, more of an underworld than many big cities.” It was an eye-opener as a major probe dug deep into the social fabric to reveal marginal denizens of whom most of the town’s upwardly mobile people, even prosecutors, were unaware.

Newspaper staffers, local and out-of-town, camped near the door to the interrogation room. Reporters concluded that the lawmen faced a brick wall, despite their voiced hints of optimism. Two former war correspondents arrived in the first wave of out-of-town newspapermen. Wick Fowler represented the
Dallas Morning News
; Charles Boatner, the
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
. They were harbingers of the flood of journalists coming from important papers in St. Louis, Kansas City, Denver, and other distant points.

Fowler, a man of keen wit as well as a hard-nosed reporter, attended a Gonzaullas press conference in the Grim Hotel.

“Wolf,” asked Fowler, “what kind of a man is this Phantom murderer?”

“I don’t know, Wick, but he’s a damned sight smarter than I am!” said Gonzaullas.

“Now, Wolf,” said Fowler, “you don’t think I came all the way over from Dallas to find that out!”

It was one of a series of anecdotes told at Gonzaullas’s expense.

A large delegation of investigative experts soon assembled in Texarkana, including men who had cracked some of the most difficult cases in Texas. Officers reserved little time for sleep. Along with state-of-the-art technical equipment—newly developed car radio equipment and fingerprinting devices—Ranger Joe N. Thompson piloted an airplane to provide faster transportation in tracking down a lead or suspect, wherever that might be.