The Phantom Killer: Unlocking the Mystery of the Texarkana Serial Murders: The Story of a Town in Terror (28 page)

“That’s where the little boy and girl and the car was parked.”

She told how she had gone into the clump of woods nearby. This explained the woman’s heel tracks that officers had found exactly there. She gave an account of the teenagers’ final hours.

The Bowie County sheriff asked, “Did you see Swinney take anything out of the boy’s pockets, besides his wallet? Did he take anything else out?”

“I saw him take some papers or stuff.”

“What did he do with it?” Presley asked.

“He took it and threw it over in those bushes over there,” she said.

After she was back in the car and out of hearing, Presley pulled a small datebook from his coat pocket, displaying it so all could see.

“I’ve had this ever since we made our first investigation at the scene the day the bodies were found. It’s Paul Martin’s datebook. I’ve kept it in my pocket, and I found it right where she said Swinney threw it.”

He’d preserved the evidence, unknown to anyone else, to keep the newspapers from getting hold of it or others learning he’d picked it up, to keep the killer from knowing of it. The one piece of physical evidence, not known to any of the others until that moment, which Peggy had not known he possessed, strongly supported her claim that she had been where she said she was and that she was telling the truth. It tightly linked Swinney to the crime scene. Although Peggy sometimes wove confusing accounts, the general contours of her statements meshed with the known facts. Lawmen believed she edited her comments from time to time to minimize her own role in the killings, in order to insulate herself from the most serious criminal charges that might be levied. There also was a sense that she jumped about in her versions, reflecting mental or emotional instability. Johnson put it two ways, in the folk vernacular. “Her bread wasn’t brown. The elevator didn’t go all the way to the top.”

Tackett believed she knew a great deal more than she revealed. “If the full truth be known, Swinney would be in the electric chair, and Peggy would be sitting in his lap.”

The datebook was a compelling piece of evidence. The problem was, officers needed Peggy’s testimony to verify the connection, and there was a catch.

As Swinney’s wife, they couldn’t force her to testify against her husband. The Texas law was firm on that point. The couple’s trip to Shreveport on June 28 had erected a powerful roadblock not readily removed.

Peggy Swinney cooperated in a variety of ways. She even submitted to hypnosis. The hypnotist, Travis Elliott, who’d hypnotized “Sammie” and exonerated him, put her in a trance in a room of people that included her parents and other “reliable people” such as a prominent physician, several lawmen, and a prosecutor. She talked freely. Texas Ranger Stewart Stanley, concerned about corpses found along Texas roads, questioned her about passengers Swinney had transported. She told of one man Swinney had picked up. When they stopped by the roadside, Swinney and the man walked away from the car to “take a leak.” The other man never came back. That was as far as she went about the other deaths. In the Texas roadside cases, people had gotten robbed and were slain, with their belongings missing. Swinney was suspected, for he robbed and stole clothing, but nothing was proved.

Her three statements, while yielding new insights, also contained inconsistencies. Sheriff Presley, for one, citing the Texas-side murders, said some of her details were incorrect. Officers acknowledged, though, that flirting with the electric chair herself, she had a vested interest in modifying her story from time to time.

A steady stream of investigators bombarded her with questions. Although only the three sessions recorded by Tillman Johnson were reduced to print, other revelations were as intriguing, also implicating Swinney. In every instance, she placed him in the general locale of each crime, while leaving him without an alibi.

FBI agent Horace “Buzz” Hallett told his neighbor Bessie Brown, Betty Jo Booker’s mother, what Peggy had recalled about the first double murders. Swinney returned to their motel room that night with blood all over him, she said, and “just
laughed
about what he had done” and got away with. This fit the facts, as for the bloody clothing, for Richard Griffin’s blood almost certainly spurted all over his murderer.

Max Tackett remembered another instance. “She made the statement that he came in, the night of the death of Virgil Starks and the shooting
of his wife, to the place where they were staying, and he had blood all over him. She said he wiped the blood on a towel and put it under a mattress in the room. Sometime later we found the towel there.”

Tackett did not make clear whether the blood came from Swinney or someone else. The technology of the time was imprecise. There is no record that it was tested, nor an explanation of how Swinney would have had so much blood on him. Had her memory failed her, mixing up an earlier incident with that one, or had she simply misstated?

While Peggy managed to place Swinney on stage, or at least in the vicinity of the crime scenes, she herself was always somewhere else, except in the Martin-Booker case, according to her version. In the Spring Lake Park slayings, she minimized her role to that of an imperiled observer who had no choice in being there. What officers seem to have failed to recognize, and to pursue with vigor, was that while she claimed no alibi for Swinney, she had none herself, either. If she wasn’t where she claimed to be, was she with him on each occasion?

Of the several incidents, she singled out one, the Martin-Booker case, in which she was an eyewitness. Why had she seized upon this one, when she could have just as well maintained silence, as did Swinney? From all indications, the park murders troubled Peggy deeply. The victims were young teenagers, children, really. She referred to them as “the little boy and the little girl.” Despite her fear of Swinney, these killings in which she was in close contact may have inspired her readiness to talk in the first place. Betty Jo Booker’s mother said an officer, probably an FBI agent or Captain Gonzaullas, had told her of Peggy’s reaction that fatal night. “She said that she held Betty Jo while he killed Paul, and she said that she felt so sorry for Betty Jo, but if she hadn’t been scared to death of the man she would have let her go.”

Being on the scene of any of the crimes would have haunted any normal person. The evidence suggests that Peggy herself was basically not a criminal. Whatever she may have thought of the other victims, these were children, fifteen and sixteen, just kids. She was up close with them and perceived them as young innocents who hadn’t harmed anyone, who deserved to live. The experience must have pushed her to the breaking point by time of her arrest. It was as if she wanted Swinney to be held responsible for that night of horror.

There may have been another factor at work. Her telling of the Texas crimes might deflect attention from the more recent Starks shootings, as it did, and get her, and Swinney, out of Arkansas’s custody. But nothing was likely to suppress the terrible memory of the little girl and the little boy at the mercy of a pitiless criminal enforcing his whims with a pistol. Her fears soared even with Swinney behind bars. It wasn’t a certainty that he would remain a prisoner, although she seemed willing, even intent, to help keep him there.

As she poured out her memories, Peggy from time to time gave the impression she was living a kind of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow adventure. In 1946 the exploits of the bank-robbing outlaw couple of the 1930s was still fresh, especially in Texas. Bonnie and Clyde had met their fate in a hail of bullets on a north Louisiana road in 1934, only a dozen years earlier. Dallas, their home base, was also a second home for the Swinneys.

Like Bonnie and Clyde, Peggy and Lee Swinney traveled the country, eluded the law, and had all kinds of adventures. If Peggy felt she was a latter-day Bonnie Parker, with Swinney her Clyde Barrow, she could make the case, part of the way. Swinney had taken her to places she’d never been before, would never have seen—St. Louis, Oklahoma City, San Antonio, even New York City. It was a heady, if fearful, experience. Constant movement. New places. New people. She’d never seen anything like it.

Although Bonnie and Clyde killed people, it was in the course of a bank robbery or during flight from the cops. The Phantom killings were cowardly, in the dark, with the unarmed victims unable to strike back. Swinney had never displayed such boldness as to rob a bank. By comparison, his stickups were petty stuff.

Swinney had spent enough time in the Texas prison system to hear inmates spin yarns about Clyde Barrow and his gang. In a way, he could compare his own feats to Barrow’s. He had a special interest in outlaws. He’d driven 120 miles, round-trip, to catch a movie about Jesse James. Now, if Peggy’s statements were true, Swinney possessed his own brand. He was the Phantom, in his mind a brilliant successor to Clyde Barrow and Jesse James, finding his notoriety under a code name.

Peggy was aware of the darker side that generated mixed feelings. Swinney killed with little thought and never in a running gun battle with the police. He’d threatened to kill her if she talked. Her fears took the edge off any glamour she might have gained from the relationship. This set her apart from Clyde Barrow’s mate. Bonnie Parker took an active role and exhibited no fear of her man. Peggy, according to her own view, took a passive, often reluctant, stance as Swinney’s companion. Moreover, Tillman Johnson suspected that Swinney manipulated Peggy, using her as bait in their travels to lure men whom he robbed.

Tackett made a comment that has not been corroborated by any other source, which was that Peggy had a venereal disease and Swinney did not, indicating they had no sexual contact. If true, that would fit into Johnson’s theory that she was “bait” to attract men into Swinney’s grasp and little more.

Whatever the details of their relationship, it was, for Peggy, exciting but risk-laden. When she looked at the downside of their life together, it was very, very far down, as deep as down can go.

Y
ouell Lee Swinney at twenty-nine was no stranger to jails.

His criminal record stretched as far back as 1929, at least, when he was twelve years old. By 1946—seventeen years later—he was an ex-convict several times over. At the time of his arrest in July he’d been out of the Texas penitentiary barely more than six months, having made it back to Texarkana in time for Christmas, 1945. He’d served time in reform school, two state penitentiaries, and federal prisons in Oklahoma, Georgia, and Kansas. His résumé was impressive, in a negative sense, highlighting a variety of crimes ranging from theft, burglary, and counterfeiting to strong-arm robbery. This was the first time he had been held as a suspect in a murder case.

Born February 9, 1917, in Arkadelphia, Arkansas, Swinney appeared in the census of 1920 as a member of a family residing in Redland Township, at New Edinburg, Cleveland County, in southern Arkansas. The father and head of household, Stanley Swinney, was a thirty-two-year-old Arkansas native and a Baptist minister, at New Edinburg
apparently on a preaching job. The mother, Myrtle Looney Swinney, was also thirty-two; she’d been born in Georgia. Youell was two years old, the fifth of five children with two older brothers, two older sisters at that time. The census was taken on January 3. The following month Youell would be three.

Over the years, the elder Swinney moved about frequently, at various times living in Bodcaw in Miller County, Arkansas, in Stamps and Eureka Springs in Arkansas, in Texarkana (both sides of town), and Oak Cliff in Dallas. He attended college, Ouachita Baptist, in Arkadelphia for one semester. That seems to have been when Youell was born there.

Youell exhibited troubled signs early in life. Essentially he fell through the cracks of society in a rocky family environment. “I know he was in trouble all the time,” a niece—older brother Cleo’s daughter Joyce—said, keyed to family memories she’d heard. Swinney Sr. struggled with alcoholism. His daughter-in-law Winnie, Cleo’s wife, later assumed the task of getting him sobered up on Saturday night so he could preach on Sunday. At the time, the two families lived nearby in College Hill on the Arkansas side of Texarkana.

Neither parent gave Youell much attention. It was as if he was unwanted. “His mother and daddy didn’t care,” Joyce said. “I hate to say that, but it’s true.” Swinney Sr. reputedly was a ladies’ man. Cleo, the eldest son, eventually assumed a role of responsible adult, helping rear his younger siblings. While holding a job, he also grew a vegetable garden, raised hogs for meat, kept a milk cow and beehives, all to feed the large family. His parents’ behavior created a sore spot for at least some. “They wouldn’t even let us call them Grandpa and Grandma,” said Joyce. “We had to call them Mr. and Mrs. Swinney.”

Youell’s favorite in the family became his older sister-in-law, Cleo’s wife Winnie. She was kind to him and became a mother figure. She and Cleo assumed a major role of supporting the younger siblings as well as their own children.

In 1926, by which time two more daughters had been born and the family was in Texarkana, Arkansas, Stanley Swinney sued Myrtle for divorce. She answered with a motion seeking alimony, suit money, and attorney fees. The case came before the Miller County Chancery Court on
November 6, 1926. Following depositions from Swinney’s relatives, the judge granted an “absolute and complete divorce” for Stanley from Myrtle “on grounds of personal indignities such as to render his condition in life intolerable.” Stanley paid the court-directed attorney’s fee for Myrtle. Custody of the children proceeded. By then, the older son and daughter were grown and gone and two girls younger than Youell had been born.

Stanley Swinney received custody of Youell, nine, and two daughters, twelve and seven. They were to live with him for the full nine months of each school year. Myrtle had visitation rights. During the three months of summer vacation Myrtle, if she wished, could have them with her. The court awarded Myrtle custody of a son, fourteen, and a daughter, three. Stanley would have visiting rights and pay fifty dollars each month for support of those in Myrtle’s keep.