The Phantom Killer: Unlocking the Mystery of the Texarkana Serial Murders: The Story of a Town in Terror (19 page)

Forty-seven officers, most of them special deputies, patrolled secluded lanes. None would be quoted, but the
Gazette
reported that “general sentiment of the majority [is] that the motive for the murder was one of sex mania.”

An unnamed officer said, “I believe that a sex pervert is responsible.” Off the record, one said he thought that in the first murders Griffin’s pockets had been turned inside out in an effort to conceal the real motive.

In most minds, sexual assault, despite evidence to the contrary, was accepted as the chief motive. The news article built upon that existing belief.

“A diabolical killer,” the story began, “believed to be a sex maniac, who blasted the peace of a modest farm home into a nightmare of blood and horror Friday night, remained at large Saturday night and it was feared he might strike again at any moment, at any place, at anyone.”

On Sunday after the murder, three weeks since Betty Jo Booker and Paul Martin were shot to death, an eight-column, inch-high, all-capitals headline on page one of the
Gazette
proclaimed:

A three-column picture of Katie Starks in her hospital bed, her head swathed in so much bandaging that she was unrecognizable, commanded a portion of the front page under the headline.

The prison riot at Alcatraz, tagged as “the most spectacular in the history of federal prisons,” which had ended in the deaths of the convict ringleaders and two guards, with fourteen wounded, remained on page one but was swept from the main headline into a one-column story.

The Texarkana headline verified the suspicions and anxieties of thousands. Panic knew no bounds.

What type of man was responsible? The unknown factors promoted his mystique, making kings of rumors. The
Gazette
began looking for an
expert who might offer insight. Two days after the Starks shooting, staffers found their man—Dr. Anthony Lapalla, a psychiatrist at the Texarkana Federal Correctional Institution.

Dr. Lapalla offered meager solace to a populace already up to their necks in fear. He predicted that the murderer was planning “something as unexpected as was the murder Friday night of Virgil Starks and the attempted murder of Mrs. Starks.” He believed the same man had committed all of the crimes. “He may lay low for awhile, but eventually he probably will commit another crime.”

He pegged the man to be about middle age, with a strong sex drive, a sadist. Such persons—intelligent, clever, and shrewd—Dr. Lapalla said, often are not apprehended.

Dr. Lapalla’s theory held that the murderer knew at all times what was going on in the investigation and realized the outlying roads were being constantly patrolled. That would explain why he had struck the Starkses in their home instead of waylaying persons on the roads.

Basing his theory on case histories of similar criminals, he noted that such criminals often divert attention to a distant community, causing people to believe the crimes are unrelated, or else he may overcome his desire to kill and assault women.

Dr. Lapalla doubted the man had ever been confined in a mental institution. He also doubted he was a war veteran because such “maniacal tendencies” would have been observed while in the service. The killer wasn’t necessarily a resident of the area, despite how well he seemed to know it. He could have come from another community but acquainted himself with the local situation before beginning his killing spree.

“This man is extremely dangerous, with a tremendous impulse to destroy,” Dr. Lapalla emphasized. “He works alone, and no one knows what he is doing because he tells no one. He might be thought of as a good citizen. He probably has reasoned that the only way to remain unidentified is to kill all persons at the scene of his crime.”

Although several black men had been picked up by then, Dr. Lapalla felt certain a white man was to blame.

With the unknown factor gnawing insidiously at every mind, Dr. Lapalla’s insights soothed few nerves and only brought into the open old hidden
fears. The Phantom could be anyone! Residents wondered about the man across the street, the respected businessman, the minister’s son, or some returning veteran perversely reacting to his combat trauma.

Satisfied that the February beatings had been the early work of the same man who had attacked and killed other couples, J. Q. Mahaffey dispatched a reporter to Frederick, Oklahoma, to interview Mary Jeanne Larey, the young woman beaten in February. The editor contracted with Paul A. Burns, a printer, entrepreneur, and pilot, to fly Lucille Holland there. Burns’s 65-horsepower, two-place side-by-side Luscombe Silvaire had a three-hour range and he expected to reach Frederick, Oklahoma, before dark. A stout headwind, however, slowed the plane significantly. He had to stop once to refuel, then land at Frederick in the dark after buzzing the field to bring the airport manager out to train car headlights on the field.

The teenaged Mary Jeanne insisted that the February 22 attack on her and Jimmy Hollis was the first in the series of crimes committed by the Phantom. She was sure of it beyond any doubt. She still did not understand why officers didn’t believe her when she told them the man was black, an assessment with which Hollis had disagreed. But, she added, Texas Ranger Joe Thompson had flown to Frederick after the Martin-Booker murders and questioned her again.

“I believe now that the officers connect all of the crimes,” she said.

She was trying to lead a normal life, but for the first time in her life, her aunt said, Mary Jeanne was “extremely nervous” and would neither sleep in a room alone nor go upstairs by herself. “And in her dreams,” wrote Holland, “Mary Jeanne sees her attacker almost every night.”

The following morning, Holland’s story dominated the front page.

A week after the Starks shootings, the traffic death toll remained stuck at fifteen. None had died from traffic in May, with thirty-one
days since the last death. A total of fifty-six had been injured for the year, three in May. Gunshots had claimed more lives than traffic accidents over the past two months, a dramatic turnabout. The Phantom, competing with thousands of motorists, seemed to be winning the death game, hands down.

A current movie title featuring Richard Arlen reflected the rising tensions, titled
The Phantom Speaks
.

I
have arrived in Texarkana, the home of the Phantom killer. I have talked to a newspaperman named Graves. I am quartered at the Grim Hotel, and the hair is rising on my neck.”

Kenneth Dixon, a popular columnist for the International News Service, wrote the most widely quoted lead about the Phantom case. A master of suspense like Alfred Hitchcock couldn’t have produced a more tantalizing opening. It took an outsider like Dixon to see anything unusual about the landmark hotel or the surname of a respected local family.

The 250-room hotel, a source of civic pride, eight stories high with a rooftop garden, was named for the Pennsylvania-born banker William Rhoads Grim, dead since 1925.

Dixon, a veteran war correspondent who’d covered the European theater, arrived in town by bus from Kansas City. Most of the incoming news people used bus or train service, if they were beyond easy driving range. Sports editor Louis “Swampy” Graves escorted Dixon to the hotel, across
the street from the newspaper office. Taking care of out-of-town reporters was a major assignment.

No other story had ever brought so much attention from the national news media. Reporters checked in from New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Miami. “They were intrigued not only with the Phantom and the Texas Rangers sent here by the governor,” said editor Mahaffey, “but they were gripped by the mass hysteria our headlines had created in the city during March, April, and May.”

Incoming news people added another dimension to the developing chaos. Mahaffey, serving as liaison, as he put it, “between the invading press and the local community,” was to see more than he’d expected. “I didn’t have to worry about the phantom killer,” Mahaffey said years later. “I had a staff of pretty fair newspaper hands who were taking care of him—and in spades. My problem was the horde of newspaper and radio people that came to town from the big cities.”

He subsequently reported his experience to his peers at the American Society of Newspaper Editors in Washington. “The mass media descends upon Texarkana,” he said, “and all hell breaks loose. If some of the reporters and photographers sent to us had not been so old I would figure they were your rankest cubs. They had very bad manners, couldn’t hold their whiskey, and they made passes at my girl reporters!

“One young squirt from one of the Western papers had the audacity to complain to me about the fact that he wasn’t making much time with my girl reporters. He seemed to be totally unaware of the possibility that the girls were being true to me.” The audience laughed.∗

Because of the preponderance of female reporters Mahaffey hired during the war, fellow editors called him “The Phil Spitalny of Newspapers,” referring to the director of the popular “All-Girls Orchestra” of that time.

Many reporters, he complained, weren’t content merely to cover the murders but wanted “desperately” to become a part of the story, perhaps even solve the case themselves.

“The mass media proceeded to get themselves into all kinds of trouble. Two of them had a fight in the corridor of the Grim Hotel and got jugged for being drunk and disturbing the peace. Another was picked up for
drunk driving. The officers found another in a parked car with one of my girl reporters—the one that was
not
being true to me. They said they were laying a trap for the Phantom. A likely story!”

Bob Carpenter of the Mutual Broadcasting System in New York City had arrived in Texarkana before INS reporter Ken Dixon, eventually doing a coast-to-coast broadcast hookup. The Blue Network, as it was also known, covered 315 stations in the nationwide broadcast.

Time
and
Life
both sent a reporter and photographer. They sought several types of pictures: a long shot of Texarkana, Texas; long shot down “Fatal Lane” (“as it is now called”) with Texas Rangers and officers from both sides simulating the investigation around the murder site at Spring Lake Park; three or four pictures of the victims, “being held so that camera can make the Closeup of the gruesome condition”; Captain Gonzaullas—“and his staff who have been placed in charge and to coordinate the search for the phantom killer . . . Gonzaullas giving instructions to the men, in front of a State Police Map—laying out the block system. . . . Whatever else Captain Gonzaullas can suggest that would help the buildup to a Dramatic Story. . . .”

All the reporter and photographer—and local cooperating officers—had to do was fill in the blanks.

A trumpeting headline in
Life
’s June 10, 1946, issue proclaimed to the world what the local residents already knew.

SOUTHERN CITY IS PANICKED BY KILLER

WHO SHOOTS ACCORDING TO SCHEDULE

The article described the city as “tight in the grip of mass terror.” A two-page spread recounted the five murders, commenting that after the latest shooting “housewives in mounting hysteria were barricading themselves inside their homes and rigging up homemade alarms of pots and pans and string which their husbands kept tripping over. Friday passed, then Saturday and Sunday, without a murder. Texarkanians breathed a sigh of relief. But it was a small one. The Phantom was still at large.”

The article did not exaggerate. One of the accompanying photographs shows a woman with two little boys leaving their imposing two-story brick Georgian-style home to stay at the city’s downtown Hotel Grim during her attorney husband’s absence from the city. The woman was Mrs. Janet Sheppard Arnold and her sons, ten-year-old Richard S. Arnold and four-year-old Morris S. “Buzz” Arnold, each of whom later would become a federal judge. Eventually Richard and Morris Arnold served together on the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals based in St. Louis, Morris appointed by a Republican, Richard by a Democrat. Each was to be mentioned as a possible Supreme Court nominee. She was the daughter of the late U.S. Senator Morris Sheppard (D-Texas); her husband, the prominent attorney Richard L. Arnold. Each morning they would return to the family home. Less affluent residents bolted their doors, nailed down their windows, and cowered in the dark, sleeping fitfully, praying for the dawn, greeting each new day with eyes red-rimmed and puffy. If the man of the house was out of town, his family spent the night with relatives or neighbors. What there was of a tourist business dried up. Travelers didn’t want to spend the night in Texarkana with the Phantom still at large.

The city was under siege by both print and radio media. Colonel Homer P. Garrison, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, telegrammed Captain Gonzaullas:

UNIVERSAL NEWS REEL COMPANY IS SENDING CAMERAMAN JIMMY LEDERER TO TEXARKANA TO MAKE SOME BACKGROUND SHOTS. ANY COURTESY EXTENDED TO HIM WILL BE APPRECIATED
.

Gonzaullas’s boss in Austin need not have worried that his man would snub a newsreel camera likely to further burnish the reputation of the colorful Ranger force. Gonzaullas had had many years of experience in dealing with the press and radio and relished it. An Associated Press reporter—among others—quoted Gonzaullas, his eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep, as saying of the Phantom, “I’d give that fellow two shots at me if I could get one shot at him!” He wasn’t likely to have the opportunity. The Phantom didn’t go in for dramatic Old West high-noon showdowns. He preferred the dark, with unarmed and unsuspecting victims.

Sensationalism whipped the flames of fear. Much of the rank speculation was simply false, including an out-of-town news report that a “sex maniac” had mutilated the female victims’ bodies, had dabbled his hands in blood, neither of which had happened but which many in the town believed. Locally, gunshot and prowler calls turned out to be cars backfiring or a prowling cat thrashing about in a garbage can. A more hopeful local rumor had the killer in jail, guarded by Texas Rangers with submachine guns. Reporters, as well as the public, were caught up in the frenzy. Nor were veteran newspaper people immune to the scare they had helped generate. Mahaffey himself, a veteran at covering gore-and-guns stories, personified the reality of a region on edge. He could hardly sleep. One Saturday night, a pounding at his front door brought him face to face with a dreaded crisis.