The Phantom Killer: Unlocking the Mystery of the Texarkana Serial Murders: The Story of a Town in Terror (3 page)

She came upon an old model car parked by the side of the road. It faced toward Hollis’s car.
Someone to help me!
She stopped momentarily and glanced inside. She saw no one. Her brief hope evaporated. In her panic,
she didn’t realize it may have been the stranger’s car, parked unnoticed with the lights off before he stalked them.

Then, suddenly, as if the gunman had decided to turn the bizarre aggression into a sport, he took off and chased her down the isolated road. She could hear his footsteps thudding on the dirt road. Just after she’d passed the old car, he caught up with her.

“What the hell are you running for?” he demanded.

“You told me to run,” she answered in a trembling voice.

“You’re a goddamned liar!” he yelled back at her.

In that moment she knew he was going to kill her. Fear and anticipation paralyzed her. She stopped in her tracks. She was so frightened, she couldn’t move. She could think of nothing she could do. It was the end.

He then slammed her—harder than before—with the blunt object, opening a wound on her scalp. She dropped to the ground again.

Then the game changed. Helpless on the ground, she felt a violent tug at her panties and then the sudden intrusion of a metallic object like a pistol muzzle. She cried out in excruciating pain. She feared it would never end. Yet he didn’t try to rape her.

Somehow, and she never was able to remember afterward how she did it, she rose unsteadily to her feet.

The abuse was so painful, so humiliating that, once on her feet and knowing she didn’t want him to ever touch her again, she begged him, “Go ahead and kill me!”

She remembered little of the scene after that. She believed he intended to force her into his car and later kill her. Then suddenly he turned and left her in the middle of the road. Days later she decided the headlights of a car had frightened him away.

As soon as the man was gone, Mary Jeanne ran pell-mell, despite her high heels, to sound the alarm. She kept thinking,
I’ve got to get help for Jimmy!

She ran to the first house she saw on Richmond Road.

“Help me! Help me!” she screamed as she pounded on the front door.

Just then a car came along. She yelled for it to stop. It cruised on past.

Frantic, she ran to the back of the house, shouted and pounded on the door. A man came to the door.

“Call the police!” she said. She explained what had happened. The man immediately called the sheriff’s office.

Meanwhile Hollis, taking advantage of the gunman’s momentary absence, had regained consciousness and faced the most horrible moment of his life. He instantly remembered what had happened. Where is the guy? he thought. If he sees me move he’ll finish killing me. Nearly blind and helpless, he tried to clear his foggy mind enough to decide what to do, what he
could
do. Blood oozed from his head wounds, down his face and into his eyes. His trousers were gone, back in the road somewhere. He was clad only in underwear from the waist down. His glasses were in the dirt somewhere. Through his hazy and impaired eyesight he saw car lights on Richmond Road. He concentrated on making his way to Richmond Road to find help from a passing motorist. He rubbed the congealed blood from his eyes. He groggily rose to his feet and stumbled toward the graveled road. He fell back to the ground but crawled on. He saw a car’s lights. He flagged it down. The car eased to a halt and pulled up.

Reflexively Hollis experienced a new fear.
Is the guy behind the wheel the one who tried to kill me? Will he finish me off?
Then his more immediate needs took over. He had no choice but to seek help.

“I’ve got to see a doctor,” said Hollis. “I’m hurt bad. Take me to the hospital.”

A man and a woman were in the car, the man driving. Hollis, knowing he had to have medical care fast, tried to open the door of the sedan and crawl into the back seat.

“Don’t do that,” the driver shouted. “You’ll get blood in my car!”

What is wrong with him? Hollis thought. What is he thinking? Here I am dying, and he refuses to help, afraid of getting a little blood on his back seat. The man’s actions added to Hollis’s confusion.

“I’ll call an ambulance for you, soon as I can get to a telephone,” the motorist promised. He didn’t have to. Presently, with Hollis leaning on the car, a siren going full blast rent the air. An ambulance pulled up. Its driver rushed to Hollis. Immediately afterward a city policeman, with siren screaming, arrived. Hollis, barely conscious, stumbled toward the ambulance. The policeman stopped to talk to the motorist. It was the last Hollis saw of the man.

Minutes later the ambulance whisked Hollis to Texarkana Hospital, a few blocks from downtown. Mary Jeanne, seeing the ambulance coming, hurried from the house, in time to ride with the policeman to the hospital.

Groggy, semiconscious, Hollis’s mind raced. Why had the motorist acted so strangely? Had he seen anything that might help identify the attacker? Or had the motorist been his assailant? His sense of time was deranged. He didn’t even know if the man in the car could have even been the criminal.

Afterward Hollis would learn that the police tried to locate the man in the car but never could. Hollis’s mind returned to the slight possibility that the motorist had been his assailant and had narrowly escaped from the police by spinning a fictitious identity. But how could he explain the woman in the car with him, who had said nothing at all? Didn’t even gasp at the sight of such a brutally beaten person. One thing made as much sense as another.

In his confusion and pain, it was understandable that Hollis failed to accept a perfectly logical explanation: Who was likely to let a stumbling, bleeding stranger in his underwear into his car, particularly in a place with Texarkana’s reputation? Even if the cautious driver had been willing, it’s doubtful that his female companion would have wanted a stranger in the car.

Once in the ambulance, Hollis obsessively recited to the attendant his name, address, and where his brother Bob could be reached, over and over again. His trousers and wallet were gone. He had no identification. He was afraid no one would know who he was if he died.

Though it seemed like an eternity to the two victims, the entire action in the dark had taken not more than ten minutes. Likely, no more than five to eight minutes.

Long after both victims had arrived at the hospital, a fading moon—a day away from the last quarter—began almost tentatively to peek faintly beyond the tree line to the east. It would take a while for it to cast any light.

The mass movement of people during World War II is the simplest way to explain why Jimmy Hollis and Mary Jeanne Larey met in Texarkana in 1946.

James Mack Hollis was born in 1920, in little Dubach in northern Louisiana, a short drive from the Arkansas line. Months after his birth, his parents moved to El Dorado, Arkansas, to open a general store and restaurant and profit from the huge oil discovery. It was a typical rough-and-ready boomtown. The elder Hollis ran the store; his wife cooked for the restaurant. Jimmy, his two brothers, and two sisters grew up in El Dorado.

Later Hollis and his parents moved to California for a while, where he attended high school and obtained his Social Security card. When the war came, he hurried to join the Navy but failed the physical examination because of a congenital heart defect. He opted for the next best, a job in aircraft manufacturing at Fort Worth, Texas. On the side he sang in a dance band. It was during this time that he met and married his first wife, Dora Louise Nichols. Hollis took her to El Dorado where, in December 1942, they married. He was twenty-two; she, nineteen. As the war wound down, so did their marriage. In January 1946 they separated for good. Hollis left Fort Worth. He went first to Texarkana, where his two brothers lived, and then on to El Dorado where he filed for divorce.

El Dorado was several hours east of Texarkana on Highway 82. Hollis’s older brother Edmond managed the Texarkana office of the Reliable Life Insurance Company. Reliable Life was a debit insurance company that collected premiums on a door-to-door basis. Edmond pointed out that their younger brother Robert Jr., recently returned from Europe, was already working for the company in Texarkana. Why didn’t Jimmy, by then at loose ends, also join the Reliable Life team? It made sense. He moved in with Bob in an apartment on the Arkansas side. Texarkana was a good way-station.

Mary Jeanne Harris was born in Tishomingo, Oklahoma, in 1927. When the war boom came, her father took his family to Texarkana, finding a job at Red River Ordnance Depot. As government housing became available closer to work the family moved to East Hooks Courts, a short distance from the gate to the defense plant. Mary Jeanne enrolled at Hooks High School.

Mary Jeanne, a lovely dark-eyed brunette with a fraction of Indian blood, met Roland L. “Stretch” Larey, eighteen, in Texarkana and
married him in the Miller County Courthouse, on the Arkansas side, in 1943. His father, local attorney Clyde Larey, signed as security on the marriage license bond, required by Arkansas law. Mary Jeanne listed her birthday as January 11, 1925, which made her, for the record, eighteen and old enough to marry without parental permission.

Actually, she was sixteen; she’d bumped her age up by two years.

The marriage was brief. Larey went into the Navy. By time he returned from the war, the marriage had deteriorated. Larey left for college in Arkadelphia, Arkansas, eighty miles from Texarkana. She remained in Hooks, living with her parents; by the end of 1945 their separation was permanent.

An uncontested divorce suited both parties. Larey filed; Mary Jeanne waived her appearance in court. They had no children and no community property. She signed the waiver in January 1946, two days before her true nineteenth birthday—in Harlingen, Texas, where she was visiting a friend in the service as the wartime airfield there was shutting down.

After she returned to Hooks, she met Jimmy Hollis, recovering from his own unhappy marriage.

T
he vicious beatings disrupted what had promised to be a routine, though hardly boring, Friday night for Bowie County Sheriff Bill Presley.

Since taking office slightly more than a year before, William Hardy Presley, a personable fifty-year-old widower who had served in France during World War I, had grown used to unexpected disturbances of sleep and schedule. He lived in the little town of Nash, a few miles west of Texarkana. His household consisted of his aged mother in her eighties and his teenaged daughter. Presley’s wife and older daughter had died from injuries after a drunken driver had intentionally crashed into the Presley vehicle in 1936; only Presley and his younger daughter had survived.

Unlike the stereotypical tall Texas sheriff, ruddy-faced, usually mild-mannered Presley stood slightly under average height. Though he packed a pistol, he usually kept it on the car seat beside him, not on his hip. He dressed immaculately in a neat business suit and felt hat instead of the
ten-gallon version popularized by brawny sheriffs in the movies. Even without a gun at his side, he wasn’t an easy man to confront. Growing up in rough-and-tumble rural Bowie County, he’d had his share of fistfights. As sheriff, however, he’d drawn his gun only once, to tame a husky, crazed drunk.

He hadn’t called it a day yet when the call came late that Friday night. He had just a few deputies for the entire county, so he sped to the scene himself. Although the attack had occurred in the county’s jurisdiction, outside the Texarkana city limits, three city policemen had also answered the call. With a small staff to cover a large county, Presley granted special deputy commissions to city policemen. This enabled them to respond beyond their usual range, particularly in emergencies such as this one.

The sheriff and the policemen checked out what little was known of the Friday night attack, then scoured the area in search of the assailant. Tracking what they believed to be the route of the gunman’s automobile, they traced him to the house to which Mrs. Larey had fled. This suggested that she had narrowly escaped him a second time. From there they followed the tracks eastward to Summerhill Road, another graveled branch north of the city. They found Hollis’s trousers about a hundred yards from the scene of the attack.

The culprit had made a clean getaway. Presley and the policemen drove downtown to interview the victims. Both were still at the hospital, where Hollis would remain for weeks.

Hollis was barely conscious and in critical condition, hovering between life and death, his skull fractured in three places. There was no hope of talking with him. Mrs. Larey was being treated in the emergency room when the officers arrived. She had deep cuts on her head. The doctor used eight stitches to close the wounds. She was in a state of severe emotional distress. She just wanted to go home.

Presley and his deputy Frank Riley gently questioned her at the hospital. What, exactly, had happened?

In a semi-hysterical condition, her mind jumped about. She worried about Hollis. Was he going to survive? She did the best she could to describe the experience.

The stranger had driven up and ordered them out of the car, she said. He told Hollis to remove his trousers, after which he bludgeoned Hollis in the head with a heavy blunt object. Then he turned to her.

Who was he? What did he look like? Did you know him? Did Hollis know him? Had she ever seen him before? What kind of gun did he have?

“I don’t know,” she said. “I never saw or heard him before. I’d never forget that voice, how mean it was. He had on a white mask. It had cut-out places for his eyes and mouth.”

She felt certain he was a Negro, of light complexion. This was based partially on her interpretation of the way he talked.

Clearly she was not in the best frame of mind to be interrogated. The sheriff drove her home to East Hooks Courts, still in a mild state of shock. He’d question her again when she regained her equilibrium.

Hollis, in a coma, was in no position to corroborate, refute, or add to what she said. The impression from her statement left the focus on a black man with a sadistic streak who had tried to rob them—and wore a mask. The mask became a sensational part of the front-page story in the
Daily News
, the following afternoon with an eight-column headline.