The Phantom Killer: Unlocking the Mystery of the Texarkana Serial Murders: The Story of a Town in Terror (5 page)

Too much else was going on for the public to brood over the beatings. Veterans, like AAF Sergeant George Reese and Seaman First Class Bob Mundella, a
Gazette
reporter, returned home to wide welcome. Professionals resumed interrupted careers. One man met his Australian wife’s train and saw their months-old son for the first time. Some enrolled in two-year Texarkana College or a larger college elsewhere. The unemployed ranks reached 9,707, a huge number. Ex-GIs searched for jobs or joined the 52-20 Club to draw twenty dollars a week for a year or until they found suitable work.

Emblematic of the changing times, peace had ended War Savings Time. Darkness now came an hour earlier than during the war. Months later the USO Club on the Texas side shut down. (The Negro USO Club of that Jim Crow era operated a few blocks away.) In a seamless transition, the local Veterans of Foreign Wars chapter snapped up the lease on the USO building. The management changed; the dance continued.

Meanwhile, crime maintained its lively pace. A purse thief netted $312. Three men forced an out-of-town man into their car downtown, drove him out five miles, and robbed him of a wrist watch, pocket knife, and fifteen dollars. Safecrackers hit the New Boston, Texas, school for $500 and tried to do the same at Hooks. In other cases, men wanted elsewhere were arrested: an ex-convict in Hooks for two murders in Iowa, a Louisiana man possessing a cache of dynamite and two pistols.

The traffic and accident toll grew: six-year-old Charles Elvey Whitlock killed by a car; two veterans dead in a Highway 82 crash; just outside the city, a wagon’s driver injured. A farmhouse fire near Redwater, in Texas, claimed the lives of a young couple and their year-old child.

Yet optimism peeked through. Bridal showers, like the one for Jacqueline Hickerson at the fashionable Hotel Grim, dominated the society pages. At the post office downtown, mail-order baby chicks, cheeping in their boxes while awaiting delivery, heralded the advent of spring.

Even as uncertainty fueled instability, life flowed on. It would take a heavy jolt, indeed, to shake the town and plunge every individual into panic. Until 1946, no event had quite achieved that questionable distinction. The savage Hollis-Larey beatings didn’t come close.

I
n a word, “rambunctious” aptly described Texarkana in 1946. It had a reputation as a rough little town. Yet if you were prudent in what you did and where you went, by all odds you would be safe. Stay out of dives. Avoid overindulging in alcohol and shun those who did. Beware of contentious situations. Choose your company carefully. In other words, mind your own business, much as you would anywhere else, and, chances were, you’d live a long and injury-free life.

The horrible O’Dwyer murder in 1940 in her bed and the vicious lynching of Willie Vinson were memorable exceptions. Most residents recognized and kept away from the relatively few danger zones. Children were free to roam downtown and in their neighborhoods. Boys as young as ten rode bicycles to Spring Lake Park, miles north of the city, or deep into the countryside without fear.

It was a small town of vibrant neighborhoods. Billie Hargis House remembered how, as a girl of twelve, she played outside with her friends, at times as late as ten o’clock at night, with no anxiety or incidents.

In many ways it was an idyllic, wholesome place to grow up. Among the most reliably safe places around Texarkana were its movie theaters and its sequestered off-road parking spots where young couples could cuddle, pet, or quietly chat in as private a setting as was likely to be found outside of a private home or motel room. The vicious assault upon Jimmy Hollis and Mary Jeanne Larey was dismissed by most as a rarity, probably sparked by jealousy or some weird desire for revenge, unlikely to recur.

With the world in flux, the movies continued to draw with films like the war drama
They Were Expendable
vying with more sinister titles like
The Last Ride
(“Lives Are Cheap by Their Standards”).

They were both young with their lives before them, he a veteran, she a recent high school graduate now working at a defense plant.

Twenty-nine-year-old Richard Lanier Griffin, relieved that he had gotten through the war alive and unwounded, had served in the Navy’s Construction Battalions, or SeaBees, in the South Pacific. Griffin, a handsome man with dark auburn hair and freckles, was the oldest boy of a Cass County, Texas, farm family of five children—two girls, three boys. His father had served as the county’s tax collector before resigning to go back to farming. They all knew, first hand, hard work and how difficult times were during the Great Depression. They plowed, chopped cotton in the spring, picked it in the summer and fall. Richard and his brother Welborn never made more than 75 cents for a twelve-hour day for wages except when they picked cotton, which paid by weight and thus by how much you picked. Somehow the family managed. Everyone worked all week and on Sunday attended, virtually without fail, Methodist church services. Norman Rockwell could have used them as models to paint a
Saturday Evening Post
cover celebrating salt-of-the-earth rural America.

Richard’s two brothers also served in World War II. David, the youngest, joined the peacetime Army in 1940, eventually participating in the European invasion soon after D-Day. Richard, as a carpenter and cabinet-maker, worked for a contractor before the war. After Pearl Harbor he went with the contractor to Hawaii, repairing damage sustained during the Japanese attack, as well as new construction for wartime needs. Some of his work was on one of the bombed ships at Pearl Harbor. He returned
from Hawaii, still single and eminently eligible for the draft. He joined the Navy and, because of his experience, was welcomed into the SeaBees. His brother Welborn was conscripted. By early 1942 all three were in uniform.

The family suffered two tragedies before the war was over. In April 1941, months before the war, a sailor brother-in-law, who was married to Richard’s older sister Hattie Merle, was fatally shot in an accident aboard ship at Pearl Harbor. Then in 1943, in the middle of the war, their father died. Welborn and David attended the funeral on emergency furloughs. Richard, by then in the Pacific theater building bases and landing strips for Marines and soldiers as they seized island after island from the entrenched Japanese, was unable to go home.

After the father’s death, their mother, Bernice Griffin, moved in with her daughter Eleanor, who worked at Lone Star Army Ammunition Plant west of Texarkana. They lived in Robison Courts, wartime housing on the western edge of Texarkana, near the bus line for Eleanor. After the war, David lived with them while he looked for work.

Following his discharge Richard returned to his civilian work, carpentry. He joined his mother and two siblings at the Texarkana apartment but spent most of his time in Cass County, where he worked on a long-term project. Because of the distance, close to forty miles, he usually went to Texarkana only on weekends.

In February 1946, Richard began dating Polly Ann Moore, also from Cass County. He hadn’t known her when he went off to war. She had been a little girl. When he returned, she had grown up and was an attractive young woman, brown-haired, blue-eyed. He was twenty-nine; she, only seventeen. In those days, the twelve-year difference in age didn’t generate a great deal of conversation. She was an emotionally mature young woman.

Polly and her younger brother Mark were reared by their mother, Lizzie, after their father, George Moore, died of a stroke when Polly was eight. Polly attended Atlanta (Texas) High School for her last two years, graduating in 1945 at age sixteen. Before the war was over in the Pacific, she took a job at Red River Ordnance Depot as a checker of ammunition and other materiel being loaded onto trucks, helping maintain records of the inventory. With the war soon over, the ammunition was stored in igloos.

The family’s situation created a transportation crisis for Polly. No one nearby, with whom she could ride, worked at the defense plant. A solution came through her mother’s cousin. Ardella Campbell lived in Texarkana, just a few steps off State Line on the Texas side. She had an extra room that she rented to Polly. Ardella worked nights as a telephone operator. Polly could take the city bus downtown and catch another bus to the defense plant.

The arrangement worked well. Ardella and her mother soon grew fond of their new roomer. Polly was quiet and easy to like.

The little family kept in touch. About once a month Lizzie and her son would ride the bus from Douglassville, or Polly would take the bus there, where someone would meet her and take her the rest of the way home.

On Saturday, March 23, Texas-side police recovered a 1940 Hudson sedan found abandoned in Robison Courts, not far from where the Griffin family lived. It had been stolen ten days earlier at another location. For four years the public had to make do with prewar models. Waiting lists for new cars were long. Car thefts had become common. A columnist in the weekly
Two States Press
summed it up. “Suggested Slogan: There’s an auto in your future—if you live long enough.” Or if you were inclined to steal. If you owned a car, no matter how old, you were advised to keep a close eye on it.

Like millions of other veterans, Richard Griffin yearned for a normal life. He had located a four-door 1941 Oldsmobile sedan in Shreveport. It was the best he could do. The Olds had been used as a taxicab during the war, sustaining considerable wear and tear. Practically worn out, it nonetheless provided transportation at a time when a new car was out of the question.

Unlike Richard, Polly had known little of life outside her circumscribed area. She’d turned seventeen a few months earlier. Like others in her family, she was quiet, had been a good student with good manners, serious, wholesome—the kind of young woman who would impress a man like Richard, despite their difference in age. Polly’s dating was confined to spending time with Richard. Several weeks into March, they had been “going together” for six weeks.

On Saturday evening, March 23, Richard drove to 1215 Magnolia and picked up Polly. They were going to dinner at the popular Canary Cottage, then to a movie. The Canary Cottage was an all-night restaurant specializing in steak and chicken, situated at the edge of the city limits on West Seventh. A very short distance further, the Texas & Pacific railroad track crossed the street. Past that, near Waggoner Creek, the city-limit sign marked the beginning of the rural environs “out in the country.” West Seventh Street was the Texas-side route of U.S. Highway 67 as it wound through the city, conveying motorists to Dallas and beyond. A string of cafés, some merely beer joints, dotted the route.

Richard and Polly met Richard’s unmarried sister Eleanor and her boyfriend Jesse A. Proctor at the restaurant and enjoyed a leisurely, pleasant supper. Afterward, the two couples went their separate ways. Richard drove Polly back to her Magnolia Street address. She had spilled something on her blouse, and she went to her room to change. Later they headed to the midnight movie at the Paramount Theater downtown.
SNAFU
was a 1945 Columbia comedy just making its way to Texarkana.

It had been a pleasantly cool day, the temperature never moving out of the sixties. After the movie, popcorn and all, they went to a West Seventh café for an after-movie snack, leaving around two
A.M.
Before taking Polly home, Richard drove out West Seventh, less than a half-mile past the city limits near the Stockman’s Cafe, where he turned south onto a dirt road. About fifty yards off the highway he stopped at a parking area in a low marshy spot, the ditch nearby banked by willows. Behind the willows a dense stand of trees and bushes made the off-road stretch practically impenetrable. Across the road was a gravel pit, its gate locked. In the darkness, the road was as secluded as anyone could want. Perfect privacy. No one around for blocks. He killed the engine.

After a short while another car drove up and parked. More lovers, no doubt. Then a man stealthily walked up, unnoticed, his movements cloaked by darkness. Unaware of the intruder’s presence, Richard and Polly continued their conversation. Suddenly the shadowy figure was upon them. Brandishing a handgun, he ordered Griffin to drop his trousers. Griffin did so. They fell to his ankles.

We cannot be certain exactly what happened next. Eventually the gunman shot both Richard and Polly, first restricting Richard’s movement by forcing him to drop his trousers and then, inside the car, shooting him twice in the back of the head, spattering blood all over the inside of the car and, probably, onto himself. He shot Polly twice outside the car on a blanket. Her blood soaked the blanket and the ground beneath it. Outwardly there was no sign of a beating or of rape.

His night’s atrocity completed, the killer moved Polly’s body into the car with her body slumped in a sitting position while Richard’s body leaned forward from the back seat and on his face, his trousers to his ankles. In the darkness there was no way the murders would be noticed from the highway. By the time the moon, waning into the last quarter, sluggishly appeared over the trees high enough to cast any light on the tragic scene, the murderer had long escaped.

There had been light rain during the day. In a few hours, more rain patted the dirt in the lane and dampened the trees and vegetation, obscuring any tracks the killer might have left.

Daylight, Sunday morning, broke hours later.

Texarkanians had to fish their Sunday
Gazettes
off wet lawns. There was plenty to read about. The Cold War hadn’t yet been officially declared, but sparks were beginning to appear. Baseball, another interrupted pleasure, was poised to return. “Gabby” Lusk looked forward to playing for and managing the city’s professional team, the Texarkana Bears.

The
Tarzan
strip in the
Gazette
’s comics was to become of more than casual interest as the day wore on. The day’s particular episode, “Dance of the Dum-Dum,” involved the Apeman’s violent encounter with a panther. At the end of the strip, a preview teaser heralded, as if a foreshadowing:
Next Week: Trail of Blood
.