The Phantom Killer: Unlocking the Mystery of the Texarkana Serial Murders: The Story of a Town in Terror (25 page)

As Carter and Lee motored toward Texarkana, they speculated on their suspect. A man trying to sell a car without a title would alert a legitimate dealer, which is what had happened. Hibbett Lee might not remember the features of the man, but he would recognize the car if they found it parked along the road or at a filling station en route to Texarkana.

By time they reached Texarkana, Carter had his answer. The car had been stolen in Pampa, in the far-off Texas Panhandle. Partain’s hunch was validated. By then, patrol cars circled all around downtown Texarkana and on the main thoroughfares, searching for the car. Officers felt they could at least keep the man inside the small city, then narrow the search to a few areas. As one officer said, “We could bottle this town up with five cars.”

Carter drove to the Miller County sheriff’s office where Tackett maintained a small office. Carter’s old friend Johnson was out on a whiskey-still bust in the county. Tackett, in uniform, listened as Carter and Lee described the situation. Carter hadn’t seen the man and Lee wasn’t sure how to describe him, beyond the fact that he wore a neat dress shirt and a tie and was tall. Not enough, really, to go on.

Tackett’s mind flashed back to the man he’d sought for the unpaid rent which, in turn, had become a stolen car case.

“I think I know who you’re after,” Tackett told them. The fugitive was still around, he believed, driving yet another stolen car. What he knew of the man’s behavior fit the man who had appeared in Atlanta. If they caught him now they would solve two car-theft cases, instead of one.

Tackett had never seen the man, and Hibbett Lee didn’t remember exactly what the man looked like. Tackett observed how distinctively Lee was dressed: cowboy boots, big Western hat, thick belt buckle—easy to remember.

Tackett said to Lee, “You wouldn’t recognize him, but he’d recognize you! He doesn’t want to see you again. Tell you what we can do. You go into a number of public places we’ll pick out. I’ll follow at a respectable distance. We may be able to find our man, because he’ll do all he can to avoid you.”

Tackett rushed home, pulled off his uniform, put on a truck driver’s garb, work khakis and an old floppy hat, ordinary work clothes he wore when he wanted to blend in, and hurried back to join the pair from Atlanta. By the time he returned, Tillman Johnson had arrived from his rural assignment. He drove the men downtown where they could initiate their plan. Then he would patrol around, looking for the stolen car or any sign of action.

The plan was simple. Lee would saunter into the places they selected. Tackett, so as not to be associated with him, would keep a respectable interval but close enough to observe any reactions Lee’s entrance might cause. He would look for a man to make a fast move when Western-bedecked Lee and his flashy cowboy boots strode in.

It was a hot July afternoon. A steady flow of traffic and pedestrians gave the downtown area a lively picture. They entered a couple of businesses. Lee went in, trailed discreetly by Tackett, slouching along. After making sure nobody had reacted, Lee went back out, Tackett well behind.

Next they headed for the Arkansas Motor Coach station just off Front Street, by the popular Jefferson Coffee Shop and across from always-busy Union Station and the rail yards.

As Lee went through the door and stepped forward as if going to the rest room, Tackett scanned the waiting room.

Most of the people hardly noticed the colorfully dressed Lee, but suddenly a man in a white shirt standing by the wall turned on his heels and dashed toward the back of the station.
That’s our man!
Tackett told himself. He gave chase, running as hard as he could. The passengers, startled, peered questioningly about. Some stood up, to see what was going on.

The stairwell was empty as Tackett lost sight of the man. Tackett pulled his concealed pistol and climbed the stairs two steps at a time. There was but one place left for him to go—the fire escape. Tackett slipped through the opening and found the man crouched there. Tackett pointed his pistol meaningfully.

“Please don’t shoot me!” the tall young man said, his anxiety level soaring. He held up his hands. His eyes showed a touch of terror.

“I’m not going to shoot you for stealing cars,” Tackett replied as he frisked his prisoner. He found no weapon.

“Mister, don’t play games with me. You want me for more than stealing cars!” And then he added, “I will spend the rest of my life behind bars this time.”

Slightly winded, his adrenaline still pumping from the chase, Tackett registered the remark without comment. He marched the man back to the waiting room, where Lee and Carter stood. Meanwhile, Johnson was driving about the Union Station area. As Tackett came out of the building with his prisoner, Johnson was parked in the street. Tackett hustled the man into the car, with the Atlanta pair in the back.

The prisoner settled in the front seat, between Johnson and Tackett. By then he appeared calm, as you’d expect a veteran thief to be. They hadn’t driven two blocks when he suddenly turned to Johnson and blurted out, “Mr. Johnson, what do you think they’ll do to me for this? Will they give me the chair?”

“They don’t give you the electric chair for stealing cars,” said Johnson.

“Hell, I know what you want me for. It’s for more than stealing cars! You don’t electrocute someone for stealing cars.”

Nobody had mentioned anything about the electric chair. Johnson frowned.
What brought all that out of him?

The captive persisted. “Do you think I could be lucky enough to get out in twenty-five years?”

“Oh, you won’t get much,” Johnson said. “Maybe five or ten years.”

Puzzling as it was, the comment didn’t mean much to Johnson and the other men. Though they couldn’t forget what he’d said, they hadn’t questioned that he was more than a garden-variety hot-car artist. The unusual replies came so unexpectedly, so reflexively, that the words
wedged in their minds. They had a prisoner to hustle to jail, then get to their other duties. They knew they had a car thief, but what, exactly, did he mean? When one of the men asked what he’d meant, he clammed up. Within minutes, he was a different man, giving nothing but perfunctory answers. He was cool, even cold, with no affect. He became a textbook exhibit of noncooperation.

After he reflected on it, Johnson realized that the prisoner hadn’t reacted as an ordinary, innocent person would have. Based on his own experience, Johnson had found that if the arrested person was not guilty, he would have demanded, in outrage, “What have you got me for?” The prisoner hadn’t. Instead, to Tackett upon his capture and later in the car, the man had made his statements impulsively, displaying a high degree of anxiety.

By sheer coincidence, the event was recorded for posterity. When they arrived at the Miller County sheriff’s office on the first floor of the Miller County Courthouse, a photographer just happened to drop by. Within minutes of the arrest, Ted Dougan with a click of his lens recorded a lasting impression. The photo can be found in the photo section of this book. Dougan often dropped by the office; this day he had no real reason to do so or for taking the picture. He just lined up six men and took their picture. Dougan mostly took school pictures, and sometimes pictures for the sheriff’s office. Five in the picture are hard-looking men. One is in a state trooper’s uniform; that’s Charley Boyd. Chief Deputy Johnson, in khakis, stands next to him at the edge of the photo; he also wears a badge and has a pistol strapped on his hip. Three others are in khakis, tough guys who might have been rounded up in a raid. The tall, neatly dressed man in a white shirt with delicate stripes and tie, with a cigarette in his hand, could have passed for a plainclothes detective who had designed the raid. Few persons unaware of the circumstances would have picked out the prisoner.

The khaki-clad men were Tackett, Carter, and Hibbett Lee.

The well-dressed young man in the middle, standing between Boyd and Tackett, was the freshly nabbed fugitive and alleged car thief, Youell Lee Swinney.

Minutes later, Johnson booked Swinney and guided him, via the elevator, upstairs to the jail on the fourth floor of the massive old concrete
block building. The county kept cells on both the fourth and fifth floors, depending on the number of prisoners at a time. Women’s cells were separate from the men’s. Peggy Swinney was in one. If the fourth floor became crowded, deputies would walk the women up to the fifth floor. Sometimes a trusty assisted the jailer in feeding or checking the prisoners.

The newlyweds resumed their interrupted honeymoon behind bars, in separate cells, in a town hardly noted as a resort center.

A
s Tackett, Johnson, and Boyd discussed Youell Lee Swinney’s intriguing arrest reactions with Miller County Sheriff Elvie Davis, their questions rapidly congealed into firm suspicions. Had they apprehended someone other than a common car thief? Obviously their prisoner thought so. “You know you want me for more than stealing cars!” He had impulsively tipped them off, believing they knew more about him than they did. And why would he ask if he might get the electric chair? Or ask if Johnson thought he might be lucky enough to get out in twenty-five years? These were questions even a novice thief would not have asked. Inexperienced youths knew a stolen car wouldn’t land them on Death Row or even close to a quarter-century in lockup. This man, approaching thirty, was no beginner.

Most of all, he was asking these questions of authorities in Arkansas, as if he were concerned about a matter related to their jurisdiction. But this concept did not readily come to mind as the officers wrestled with the larger picture.

Tackett wasted no time applying his observations about the spring’s car-theft pattern to Swinney. Was he the one who had stolen, then abandoned, those cars on the murder weekends? Swinney was barely in his fourth-floor cell before officers began avidly expounding theories. Swinney had placed himself high on the lengthy list of suspects.

Was this the lucky break they had hoped for?

Soon, though, Swinney started to talk, sparingly and guardedly, but never again about the topics he had blurted out to his captors that afternoon. No, he told them, the only thing he had ever done was drive a car he didn’t realize was stolen. That was all he meant, he said, if he said anything at all.

Any stolen car in Texarkana automatically interested the FBI because of the likelihood it had crossed the state line in violation of the federal Dyer Act. The FBI was notified of the arrest and entered the case almost immediately. Three days later FBI Special Agent J. C. Calhoun sat down with Swinney in the sheriff’s office and questioned him about the cars he may have stolen. By then Swinney had had time to think over what he intended to say. He readily, almost eagerly, incriminated himself in felony theft, documenting that he’d violated the Dyer Act as well as state laws. He admitted having possession of stolen cars.

Agent Calhoun stuck to the car thefts over which his agency had jurisdiction. He led Swinney through his background. The prisoner claimed to have finished high school at Texarkana, Texas. That would have been at Texas High, if he was telling the truth, and the date would have been 1934 or 1935, a contention later proved to be incorrect. He said he and Peggy Lois Tresnick had married in Shreveport. He was registered, he said, for Selective Service in Miller County, Arkansas.

Swinney then cited three stolen automobiles that had been transported in interstate commerce.

CAR # 1:
He stated this offense occurred about February 1946. “I stole a red Chevrolet coach, about a 1941 model in Texarkana Texas, near the First Baptist Church. My wife (who was not my wife at that time) had been told to wait, as I was going to get a car. She was not told how I was going to get it.”

(This apparently was the automobile belonging to Luther McClure, taken in early March, not February, across from the First Baptist Church.)

“I drove to my mother’s home in College Hill in Texarkana, Arkansas.” (This confirmed he had violated the Dyer Act by driving across the state line.) He picked up Peggy and they drove to Hope, then back to Texarkana before heading west. They picked up hitchhikers en route to West Texas. “Near Lubbock I told Peggy the car was stolen, and said that we had better get rid of it.” He told the couple riding with them to drive the car to Beaumont, Texas, and to deliver it to a man there. He’d made up the recipient’s name.

CAR # 2:
“In about April, 1946, a man I knew in the Texas penitentiary met me in Texarkana, Texas, at which time he had a green Hudson sedan, about a 1940 model. I do not recall his name but he was about 25 years old, 5 ft 8” tall and weighed about 155 lbs. He said that he had stolen this car near the Swann Motel in Texarkana, Arkansas. He was afraid to keep it and gave it to me. I drove this car with Peggy to Dallas, Texas, Oklahoma City, St. Louis, Missouri, Little Rock, Arkansas, and to Texarkana, Arkansas, where I abandoned it.”

CAR # 3:
He also assigned original blame to another, claiming he had purchased it from a man whose name he didn’t recall. “A man I know only as Chuck, with whom I served in Leavenworth pen sold me a 1941 Plymouth sedan about May 1946 for $900.00. I paid him $150.00 in cash. He told me that I could locate him at the White House Cafe near the railroad station and pay the balance, or a part of it, in two or three weeks. He is about 40 years old, weighs about 170 pounds, is 5 feet 11 1/2 In. or 6 ft tall, is a white man of dark complexion. Peggy and I drove in this car to Shreveport, Louisiana, Dallas, Texas, San Antonio, and back to Dallas and I had tried to locate Chuck, without success. I then told Peggy that I felt that the car was stolen. We were married at Shreveport, Louisiana, and came to Texarkana Texas, where Peggy was arrested. I was a block away and saw her picked up and stayed away.”

Not only did his admissions facilitate documenting his hot-car record; they also provided some insight into his behavior. The FBI agent remained skeptical of Swinney’s account of how he came to possess cars 2 and 3, which on the surface appeared to have been constructed in such a way
that identifying the men to whom he claimed he’d turned over the Hudson and the Plymouth would be difficult, if not impossible.