The Phantom Killer: Unlocking the Mystery of the Texarkana Serial Murders: The Story of a Town in Terror (29 page)

Subsequent reports were that Youell moved about from one place to another over the years. It may have been soon after the divorce that Youell, just a boy, was living with his grown brother Cleo in the College Hill neighborhood of the Arkansas side of Texarkana and got into trouble, possibly for the first time. Unknown to Cleo and his wife, the boy Youell broke into a neighborhood store and stole candy and chewing gum. Money was scarce; when Cleo’s wife saw the boy eating candy and chewing gum, she wondered how he’d gotten it. He denied doing anything wrong. Cleo had a small barn behind the house. Suspecting the treats had been stolen, Cleo searched the barn for contraband and found Youell’s cache. Cleo, a hardworking man when jobs were scarce, wanted nothing to jeopardize his good reputation. He reported it to the police. It probably was Youell’s first burglary. Because of his age and the small value of the loot, the boy was given a harsh admonition and let go.

What is certain is that Youell’s arrest record started at an early age. With the store burglary for candy not appearing on the police blotter, his first recorded criminal act, so far as can be ascertained, came a few years after divorce had split up the family and left him shifting from one domicile to another.

On September 25, 1929, Youell Lee Swinney became the subject of a front-page story in the
Texarkana Evening News
, with lurid headlines almost as sensational as those later tracking the Phantom story. As a
juvenile, his name didn’t appear in the story, but a matching of his name on the Bowie County district court docket with details in the newspaper article leaves no doubt that he was the boy described. It was, in effect, his official debut in crime, and a media splash. What experiences or nether connections may have prepared him for that moment, we have no way of knowing; his family life documents that his boyhood was anything but normal. He was a troubled boy by then, as the following news headline from the
Evening News
revealed:

Three boys were held in the Bowie County holdover jail on Main Street after their arrest for theft and possession of stolen goods. Youell, at twelve, was the oldest; the youngest, only eight. If the reporter and editor were to be complimented for recalling the plot of
Oliver Twist
, the spelling, of Dickens’s child manipulator Fagin’s name, only missed by a letter.

“Three boys, the youngest eight and the oldest twelve,” the
Evening News
reported, “nonchalantly gazed through the bars of the Bowie county holdover jail Tuesday while officers searched for other members of an alleged band of child racketeers who made smoking and spending money through sale of stolen property to a junk shop in the city.

“Two other youths, believed by county officers to have been the brains behind the theft combine, were the objects of a search. Officers expressed a belief that they were the ‘Fagans’ of the organization, using the children as their cats’ paws.

“The three were arrested as they attempted to escape from the yard of a warehouse owned by the electric company near the Texas viaduct. An employee caught them in possession of bars of brass. He took them to police headquarters.

“‘Some older boys told us they’d give us six bits if we’d sell the brass for them,’ one of the lads told county officers.”

The newspaper added: “The three youths seemed little worried by their imprisonment Tuesday or by the prospect of possible terms in the state reformatory should Judge [George W.] Johnson so decree.”

Because juvenile records are shielded from public view, the disposition of young Swinney’s case was not available. However, in the 1930 census, taken just a few months later, Youell’s name is missing from the household of his father, in whose custody the judge in 1926 had placed him. This raises the probability that he was temporarily residing elsewhere when the census taker came. The census showed Stanley Swinney and his new wife Bessie, nee McKinsey, a church pianist, in Bowie County with four children—three daughters from his first marriage and a son from the second, but no Youell. Piecing together data from other sources, he may have been in a Texas reformatory.

In 1930, Myrtle married John Rudolph Travis, and they resided in Texarkana, Arkansas. Family lore labeled him as a mail-order husband, following Myrtle’s ad that lured him from California to Texarkana with his two small children. The liaison was short-lived. A few years later she filed for divorce, which was granted in an uncontested case. In 1936 she married J. H. Tackett, “a very good old man” ten years her senior. He died. By 1946 when her son Youell was arrested, she had remarried again, to Carl Chaffin, in Texarkana. Stanley Swinney, following his second wife’s death, was living in Missouri with his third wife, nee Nella Dorcas Fitzgerald.

Although the father, Stanley Swinney, had received custody of Youell, the boy seems to have spent some time with his mother and, later, stepfather. Years later, Youell complained that his stepfather had been abusive to him, but there is no proof of it extant nor of which stepfather he meant. Most likely he referred to his mother’s second husband, his first stepfather, because of the age when he would have been most sensitive to such behavior.

According to Swinney family informants, there was more to the story, that neither birth parent was supportive in his younger years. One account has it that on one occasion in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, Swinney Sr. forced Youell to remain outside while the rest of the family ate dinner inside the house. In this version, Youell pleaded with a sister that he was starving and begged, “Can’t you get me a biscuit or something?” These observers have it that both father and mother “virtually disowned” him as a boy and youth, with the father treating him harsher, the mother less so.

Swinney’s rap sheet, compiled by the FBI, grew lengthy as his encounters with the law stretched forward.

On February 19, 1932, ten days after his fifteenth birthday, he was arrested in Texarkana, Arkansas, for burglary and larceny at a school building. According to a niece and nephew, this was the College Hill Elementary. This resulted, based on his prison records viewed in 1971 in Huntsville, Texas, in his being sent to the reformatory for boys at Pine Bluff, Arkansas, a fact confirmed by family members.

His next brush with the law came on January 4, 1935. The U.S. Secret Service held him for possession of and attempting to pass counterfeit nickels. Luck held for him. The charge was dismissed because of his being a juvenile—he was seventeen, a month shy of eighteen—and the “minor character” of the coins, five-cent pieces. But three months later, on April 3, 1935, he was picked up for investigation by the police in San Antonio, then released. A few months later, July 24, Texarkana, Texas police arrested him for possessing counterfeit coins and turned him over to the Secret Service. He was sentenced to two years in federal prison and taken by U.S. marshals to El Reno, Oklahoma. When he was conditionally released in 1937 at age twenty, he had lost fifteen days of good time for prison violations.

He was soon back in custody. In 1937, picked up by the sheriff’s office in Monroe, Louisiana, for counterfeiting, he returned to federal custody. The following year, he escaped from federal marshals, for which he was assessed three years and eighteen days in the U.S. maximum-security prison at Leavenworth, Kansas. Imposition of sentence was deferred till his term at Leavenworth was completed; he was ordered to report to the court at the expiration of his current prison sentence. In 1939, the twenty-two-year-old Swinney was given three years for counterfeiting and escape from the U.S. marshals. He was lucky again, to receive a conditional release, but authorities sought him soon for violating the conditional release by failing to report and an alleged robbery. He was arrested in November 1940 for parole violation by the sheriff’s office in Shreveport and held for U.S. marshals.

By then his life was an old, recurring story: arrested for a variety of crimes, including felony theft, with a record of raising money through
counterfeiting, then sentenced, getting out early, escaping from federal custody, as well as violating conditions of his probation.

At some point during these years, he claimed to be married to a woman he lived with in Hobo Jungle, a neighborhood next to College Hill on the Arkansas side. A search of county records turned up no such union or a divorce dissolving it, apparently making his claim fictive.

His criminal career shifted gears in late 1940. In December he was arrested and charged with grand larceny—automobile theft. According to the indictment, on November 19 in Texarkana, Arkansas, he stole Dr. J. W. Burnett’s new 1941 Master Deluxe Chevrolet Coupe, valued at eight hundred dollars. Although Swinney’s counterfeiting activities had netted him federal prison terms, this felony bought him into the Arkansas state judicial system as an adult for the first time, eligible for the harsher confines of the state prison.

Prosecuting Attorney Dick Huie worked out an agreement with the defendant to plead guilty in exchange for a three-year sentence. On February 11, 1941, Circuit Judge Dexter Bush, accepting the plea of guilty and the agreement, pronounced sentence.

The bleak legal wording spelled out the outcome.

“On this day comes the State of Arkansas, by its attorney Dick Huie, and comes the defendant hereto in proper person and by attorney and enters his plea of guilty to the crime of Grand Larceny and prays the mercy of the court and the court after due consideration fixes his punishment at a term of Three Years in the State Penitentiary for Grand Larceny.”

Though the record asserted that an attorney represented him, no lawyer’s name appeared on the instrument. Decades later, this would become the major focus of contention of whether an attorney had been present or not.

Swinney was just a few days shy of his twenty-fourth birthday. It was his first state conviction since his juvenile days.

Swinney remained behind bars when the United States entered World War II in December 1941. Less than three years after his conviction, he was released into wartime America—but only briefly. In August 1943, when he left the state prison, the sheriff’s office in Little Rock detained him as a federal parole violator. That took him to federal prison in
Atlanta, Georgia, to complete his counterfeiting sentence and for his earlier escape.

On April 12, 1944, he was discharged upon expiration of his sentence, only to be seized the next day in Monroe, Louisiana, for parole violation, the specific reason left unclear in the records. The incident resulted in an extension of his probation, with supervision extended for five more years, until 1949.

His in-and-out status with federal authorities made his name familiar to U.S. marshals, but he was soon back in a state court, now Texas, where his boyhood escapades had begun.

In August 1944, he faced a charge of robbery by assault, or strongarm banditry, in Texarkana, Texas. He pleaded not guilty. The jury found him guilty as charged. Judge Robert S. Vance sentenced him to five years in the Texas state penitentiary. He remained in the Bowie County jail at Boston, the county seat, until his transfer to the state penitentiary at Huntsville in November, when he acquired his new identity, Offender # 103738. He had entered a new phase, convicted of a violent crime. His release date would be 1949, the same year his federal probation had been scheduled to end, before the new state conviction.

Swinney was one of three prisoners arriving from Bowie County the same day. The other two had been convicted of burglary. Swinney was the oldest and the only one sentenced for a violent personal crime. The others were seventeen, drawing a two-year sentence, and twenty-two, assessed nine years on multiple counts.

Swinney’s processing into the Texas prison system provided one of the most detailed impressions of him up to that point. He was twenty-seven years old. He had two juvenile sentences and four adult convictions behind him. Physically he was five feet eleven inches tall, weighed 166 pounds, with blue eyes, brown hair, and a fair complexion. He stated he was a Baptist. He wore size nine shoes.

The most intriguing part of the citation referred to “Marks on Person” that the clerk entered.

“Vaccination scar. Tattoo of skull and heart with letter Revenge, lower inner left arm. Cut scar left side upper lip, cut scar at side of eyebrow.”

He used tobacco. His habits were “Temperate”—the same self-assessment that all other inmates invariably told the clerk.

Swinney answered “Yes” to his ability to read and write—a claim many convicts of that day could not make. He said he’d completed nine and a half years of school. In light of later information, he appears to have stretched his claim by several years, possibly in hopes of getting assigned an easier job. He cited an occupation as an office clerk and that he could type. He had served time before. He knew which skills helped avoid hard labor.

As for being an ex-serviceman, the space was left blank at a time when the U.S. was fighting some of its bloodiest battles overseas.

The tattoo on his lower left arm was the prisoner’s most distinctive physical feature. It combined a drawn heart and skull with letters spelling a word that left no confusion as to its meaning:
Revenge
.

Whatever circumstances led to his ordering the tattoo, the results strongly suggested anger sufficient to distill his feelings into a single, unambiguous word. It was as close as one was likely to peer into Swinney’s inner turmoil.

His mug shots, frontal and side views, at the time of this incarceration reflect a boyish face with a head of dark hair coming to the collar at the back with long sideburns, and a prominent Adam’s apple. He is fairly good looking. He is staring sullenly into the camera.

Of the three from Bowie County who took the long ride together to the state prison that November 1944 day, Swinney was the first of the three out, after serving slightly more than a year of his five-year term. The seventeen-year-old, sentenced to two years, was discharged in July 1946. The twenty-two-year-old, with a nine-year sentence, escaped in 1947, was recaptured the next day, and was finally released in 1950.