The Phantom Killer: Unlocking the Mystery of the Texarkana Serial Murders: The Story of a Town in Terror (36 page)

There is one more tantalizing detail. At the end of her note she placed a comma, not a period. She left no doubt she was making a comma, the tail is so long and definite. It was as if she was about to extend her remarks—about what?—and then thought better of it and stopped. She apparently was never questioned about it.

A close examination of her final statement while attached to the polygraph machine tends to lead to the opinion that she told the truth as she remembered it but not the whole truth. Her account of the night Virgil Starks was killed was never brought up on the Texas side. Her willingness to deal with the Spring Lake Park murders may be interpreted as being her way to get attention off the Starks case and, in fact, out of Arkansas’s jurisdiction. It also may have reflected her horror, and a troubled mind, over the deaths of a couple who were, actually, children. Officers in Austin had not questioned her about the Larey-Hollis beatings, assuming she was not present, or the Griffin-Moore murders. In their quest to nail down Swinney’s complicity and crack the case, evidence on one double murder was seen as sufficient. Once she provided them with a statement on that headline case, they believed, probably correctly, that they had what they needed from her. They could always pursue other cases later.

Mark McClish, the originator of Statement Analysis®, reviewed the author’s foregoing conclusions, essentially agreed, and then reviewed the statement himself, as well as Peggy’s July 1946 unsigned statements. In the process he added comments that offer further enlightenment—all in 2013, decades after she had made the statements. His analysis obviously came long after the fact, much too late for officers to use; his work does provide an expanded insight into the fruits of the interrogation.

McClish zeroed in on references aimed at further testing her reliability.

As for her account of Swinney’s disposal of the saxophone, McClish commented: “We must remember that nothing happens in a vacuum. There will be other things going on besides the incident itself, which will enter into the statement. Her mentioning that she ‘moved the saxophone case off the seat in the back’ so she and the little girl could sit down is an example of this. This additional information indicates it is a truthful statement. A deceptive story is usually very simplistic.”

When Peggy responded to her interrogator’s question as to whether she had more to tell, McClish pointed out, “By saying ‘No,’ she is not saying nothing else happened that she has not told them. If that was the case, she should have said, ‘No. That is all that happened’ or ‘No, I have told you everything I remember.’ By simply saying, ‘No,’ she may be saying there is nothing else that she wants to add even though she has more information.”

By drawing a line through “this” and replacing it with “it,” McClish noted, she may have revealed a hidden motive. “While the word ‘this’ indicates specificity it also indicates closeness; the word ‘that’ indicates distance. By using the word ‘this’ she is showing closeness to the murders. She may have realized what she was saying and changed the word to ‘it’ which is a more distant way of describing the situation.”

As for punctuating her sentence with a comma instead of a period, McClish clarified: “We end a thought by placing a period at the end of a sentence. The missing period is an indication she purposely stopped writing. She may have more information to share but chose not to.”

Her choice of language also proved to be revealing. “The pronouns ‘we’ and ‘us’ always indicate there was a partnership between the participants,” wrote McClish. “We may not know how much of a partnership existed, but it does mean two or more people did something together.” This suggests the possibility that she cooperated in the killings or was at least more than a terrified witness.

McClish’s additional comments on the November statement focused on details of language that ordinarily are overlooked but which may reveal a subtext of their own in the mind of an expert.

He cited her account of the evening of April 13: “
We got out of the show
about 8:30. When we went to the show, Swinney
left
me for about
30
minutes.
When we came out of the show
, we went out and drank some
beer until the cafés were closed, and then we fooled around town and about
3:30
in the morning, Swinney took a notion he wanted to go to Spring Lake Park and rob somebody.”

McClish’s comment: “She states they ‘got out of the show about 8:30.’ At this point in her statement, we believe the two of them are no longer in the show. In the next sentence, she backs up in her story and talks about going to the show and Swinney leaving for 30 minutes. If a story is coming from memory, it should flow in sequential order. This out-of-order statement indicates she may not be drawing this portion of her story from memory.

“The word ‘left’ when used as a verb indicates sensitivity in the statement. She may have withheld some information about what was going on at this point in her statement.

“The number ‘three’ is a liar’s number. When deceptive people have to come up with a number they often choose the number. It should also be noted that when a person is unsure of a number, they use the number three. We have two references to the number three: ’30 minutes’ and ‘3:30 in the morning.’

“‘
This
car was parked at the place labeled on the map which I drew.’

“The word ‘this’ can indicate specificity but it also shows closeness. She could have said, ‘The car was parked . . .’ which would show some distance. However, she used language that places her close to the car. In the Q & A, she refers to it as ‘that car.’ ‘Swinney
made
me get in the car . . .’ ‘He
made
me stay in the car . . .’ ‘He stopped the car there and
made
me get out of the car.’ She used the word ‘made’ but does not tell us how he made her do something. ‘I don’t know how long they were gone but it seemed like about
30
minutes.’ She may be deceptive or as she stated she does not know how long they were gone which caused her to use the number 30. ‘I
started back
to the car and when I got back in the car, I heard Swinney shoot two times.’ The word ‘started’ means a person began an action but did not finish it. It is odd she used this word because she tells us that she did make it back to the car. A better statement would have been to say, ‘I walked back to the car and I heard Swinney shoot two times.’ Earlier she said, ‘I walked on down the road.’ Now, she does not use the word ‘walked’ but used the word ‘back.’

“All of her verb tenses were in the past. Since she is recalling what happened, we expect her to use past tense language. Deceptive people will sometimes unknowingly use present tense verbs if the story is not coming from memory. She also used strong tone verbs such as ‘told’ and ‘made’ versus soft tone verbs such as ‘said’ and ‘asked.’ In this type of statement, we would expect to see strong tone language.

“A truthful person will be consistent in his language. If he views a firearm as a ‘gun,’ he will always call it a ‘gun.’ He will not suddenly start to call it a ‘pistol’ because to him it is a ‘gun.’ Deceptive people will sometimes use synonyms because they are making up the story and not following their personal dictionary. A change in language indicates deception unless there is a justification for the change. In her statement, she consistently uses the words ‘gun,’ ‘billfold,’ ‘car,’ ‘little girl’ and ‘little boy.’ She does not use any synonyms to describe these things or people.”

McClish also found her statements taken by Tillman Johnson to be generally reliable. “She appears to be truthful in her unsigned statements given in July. She does use the word ‘pistol’ one time which is a change from ‘gun.’ It may be Swinney called it a ‘pistol’ and she adopted his language, which frequently happens, when two people are interrogated together.

“She used the present tense verb ‘ask’ when she stated, ‘The boy in the car ask us what we wanted.’ Her use of the word ‘ask’ may be due to poor grammar skills and not necessarily deception.” (It also may have reflected Johnson’s interpreting a slurred “asked” as “ask” or even a typographical mishap, for the statement was not tape-recorded.)

McClish continued: “As we saw she did contradict herself several times. She said that she watched the girl while Swinney drove their car to where the couple’s car was parked. In November, she will state that Swinney and the girl drove the car back.

“After shooting the boy, she states, Swinney picked him up and put him in the back seat. She does not mention this in her November statement.”

Summarizing his overall opinion of the statements, McClish concluded:

“After reading the documents, I believe Peggy Swinney is telling the truth in regards to Youell Swinney killing Paul Martin and Betty Jo Booker. However, everyone edits their statements. No one is going to tell us
every little detail. Even a truthful person will only tell us what he thinks we need to hear. Therefore, as pointed out, in her statement there are some things she has not told the police. For example, she stated, ‘Swinney told the couple to give him what they had.’ However, she never states what, if anything, they gave to Swinney. There are other areas [where] she has withheld information and may be trying to minimize her involvement.”

Prosecutors now had two
signed
statements from Peggy that implicated Swinney in the murders of Paul Martin and Betty Jo Booker. Like a savings account they could be stored away and held in reserve if all else failed. There were two possibilities: She might change her mind about testifying. And should she divorce Swinney, she could be called as a witness whether she agreed or not.

The signed statements constituted an ace in the hole, should a trump card be needed in the future.

Three days after the interrogation in Austin, Peggy appeared in the Miller County Circuit Court, charged with grand larceny as a partner in Swinney’s car theft. Basically it was a holding tactic, to keep her in the clutches of the law as an accomplice. She was essential to the developing strategy.

She pleaded not guilty

The following day—November 26—Judge Dexter Bush ordered Swinney discharged as a patient in the Arkansas State Hospital and returned to Texarkana. Four days after that, Swinney’s attorneys—J. F. McVey, Paul McDonald, and Ted Goldman—filed a petition for writ of habeas corpus. This resulted in his being formally charged with grand larceny involving the theft of an automobile. A few days later, in early December, he entered a plea of not guilty. These maneuvers enabled the county to continue holding him but raised the possibility of his making bond on such a charge.

Another local lawyer, William E. Haynie, served as a contact for Swinney.

Meanwhile, Cleo Swinney visited his brother Youell in jail and found him well taken care of, seeming to refute what their father had claimed earlier. There is no evidence that Youell ever complained, even once, about having the “bat” used on him.

After Youell was arraigned, his brother Cleo telephoned attorney McVey that Youell, as instructed, had pleaded not guilty to grand larceny for stealing a Plymouth. McVey complained about the local representation, charging that Goldman had tried to get Youell to confess to the murders. No evidence supports his contentions. McVey then turned his attention to his favorite substitute, a phantom Phantom, W—, whom he had never seen, classifying him as “psychopathic, possibly praecox with a saddistic [
sic
] complex.” He instructed attorney Love immediately to seek a change of venue “swearing both against the Judge and the inhabitants of Miller County and any other County in which any of these crimes occurred.”

McVey said he was getting a picture of W—, his candidate to replace Youell as the Phantom, as well as to try to get “a statement from the wife of the first man that was killed, if possible, and to warn her to be very cautious as we have reason to believe that its [
sic
] possible that an attempt maybe [
sic
] made upon her.” He seemed confused about the victims and the murders. Presumably he had in mind getting Katie Starks to make a statement that would fit in with his theory of the criminal while ruling out Youell, at the same time setting off alarms that Katie was still at risk from his candidate for the slayer of her husband. He also urged Cleo not to share the information with Youell’s attorneys in Texarkana—another strange defense tactic.

McVey’s barrage of letters left the impression that he was flailing about on all fronts at once. He reported to Cleo that he had made contact with the Arkansas governor, Ben Laney. “The fight is just beginning,” he insisted, adding: “I will leave no stone unturned to see that justice is done.” He included a bill of $16.60 for his phone, telegram, and postal bills. “All this phoning was rather expensive.”

P
rosecutors and officers on both sides of the state line had pondered how they might overcome the possibility of Peggy’s continued refusal to testify. Sheriff Presley in Texas, for one, was opposed to charging a man in a capital case on circumstantial evidence alone, without eyewitness or strong physical evidence such as fingerprints or other laboratory data. He later told Henry Slaton, a highway patrolman, that he had no doubts about Swinney’s guilt in the Texas slayings. Even with circumstantial evidence, he believed, the suspect could have been convicted and given the death penalty. But the sheriff didn’t want to send any man to his death on circumstantial evidence alone.

During his stint in office, Presley had to convey prisoners to Huntsville whom juries had dealt death sentences. “Not a one of them could read and write,” he said. That knowledge further convinced him that only an airtight case bolstered by more than circumstantial evidence should be required if the death penalty might be invoked. With emotions as high as they were surrounding the Phantom murders, a death penalty might be
won merely on a charge, with slight evidence. He believed he had the right man for the crimes but didn’t think that was the right approach, and he wasn’t alone in that stance. Some Arkansas officers agreed.