The Phantom Killer: Unlocking the Mystery of the Texarkana Serial Murders: The Story of a Town in Terror (50 page)

The bullets that snuffed out the lives of Richard Griffin and Polly Ann Moore matched those in the Spring Lake Park murders, thus connecting all four murders. Peggy documented Swinney’s actions at Spring Lake Park.

Other statements coincided as to time and place in support of her account. Tom Moores heard the gunshots that killed Betty Jo Booker at about the time Peggy reported. Ernest Browning saw the car that had to have been driven by Swinney in the early dawn but was unable to see the license number. Thus unrelated, objective witnesses backed her up on the time and place. Coupled with her description of the crime scene, she had to be believed. Additionally, Mark McClish’s analysis of her statements supports her version.

Peggy told of Swinney’s washing blood off of his clothes at the spring at the park. This indicated how he dealt with possibly incriminating evidence, which resurfaced in the Starks case. According to her, Swinney took care to leave no fingerprints, wearing a glove; he also instructed her not to touch surfaces where she might leave her prints. He fit the organized offender category in this respect. Yet he left Martin’s body in plain view, though on a little-traveled dirt road or path. As an ex-convict, Swinney, as Owen pointed out, had learned police tactics from other criminals and knew what to do to avoid detection. The results showed a mixture of offender traits.

Even the discarding of the saxophone, which at first he’d considered pawning, showed his organized side dominating his impulse to profit from the crime. A pawned saxophone would have tied him to the murders. It didn’t take him long to realize that and to dispose of the evidence. At that point his sense of self-survival had burst forth.

Peggy’s statements fail to reveal an immediate triggering event for the two double murders in March and April. There need not have been one close to the crimes. His tattoo, revenge, documented an emotion long festering. If he was intent on killing surrogates to satisfy his deep-seated anger, he would not have required an unsettling experience on that particular night. Seeing couples apparently happy would have been enough to set him off. He would ensure that they suffered. It was as if they were flaunting their relationship, and it was all he needed to get even. It was
a strange, but effective, means of revenge, with his innocent victims unarmed in the dark with his gun upon them.

Some of Swinney’s short stories written in prison also touch upon shattered relationships and further support what Dr. Frazier concluded about the motivation of the gunman.

A mountain of evidence, everything but eyewitness testimony, points to Swinney’s guilt in the Starks case.

The triggering event in the Starks case was Swinney’s blowup with Peggy’s sister on the afternoon of May 3, a few hours before Virgil Starks died. The Swinney couple, not yet married, left after a volatile argument over Swinney not paying for their board. (He also didn’t pay his rent to Jim Mays, which led to his downfall.) Swinney was in a foul mood. Peggy stated that he left for Texarkana. He would have passed the Starks home.

She claimed to have
been in the hotel at Delight while Swinney drove to Texarkana. She wasn’t, nor was he. The couple operating the hotel remembered the two had arrived after midnight, several hours after the murder.

This indicated that they were together that night, but not where they claimed to be. She stated that Swinney had gone to Texarkana. She must have gone with him. From other evidence, they must have been at the Starks home, she waiting for him in the parked car. Cigarette butts near the parking space indicated that more than one person was there.

Though ownership of the flashlight left behind at the Starks home could not be traced, two pieces of evidence linked Swinney to the scene: the shirt with the laundry mark
STARK
and shoes found among Swinney’s possessions.

The shirt would have fit Starks but not Swinney. Swinney was known to steal clothing. Contents of the shirt pocket matched materials found in Virgil Starks’s shop. The laundry mark was close enough to starks to leave little doubt whose shirt it had been. Katie Starks’s initial identification of the shirt as being Virgil’s lent further credence to his having owned it, even though she subsequently said she wasn’t sure. It was understandable that she decided she could not be absolutely certain that the shirt belonged to Virgil. A man’s life hung upon her testimony. Upon reflection she cited the mending, which she at first had identified, was that which any wife
would have done. Most of all, she realized her testimony could send a man to the electric chair. It was an awesome responsibility.

The shoes found among Swinney’s possessions had been washed and put away wet, which distorted their size and shape. A reasonable explanation is that the shoes had made the tracks crossing the plowed field, sinking into the soft, wet soil. Going into the house, the shoes may also have picked up blood from the floor, either Virgil’s or Katie’s blood, or both. In either instance, a skilled criminal—which Swinney was—would recognize the need to remove any trace of evidence linking him to the scene. The obvious solution would be to wash any suspicious taint from the shoes. This could have been done in a stream between the death house and Delight, an area with a number of creeks, or at any other source of water.

Peggy’s statements indicated how Swinney disposed of incriminating evidence. He washed blood off his clothing and shoes. His once-wet shoes, which might have been worn the night of the Starks case or on another attack night, fit into her observations. At the Starks farm it was virtually impossible to match a specific shoe or boot with the muddy impressions left. The killer’s shoes, as a certainty, were muddy, possibly bloody, and needed to be washed off—as Swinney did his shoes.

A .22 caliber weapon killed Virgil Starks and critically wounded Katie. Many officers assumed it was a rifle because of the accuracy. The bullets were so battered that no conclusion could be drawn as to whether they had come from a pistol or a rifle. Today, improved ballistics science might establish which type of weapon fired the bullets.

A document not included in Owen’s studies suggested that some officers considered the Starks murder weapon to be a .22 caliber automatic
pistol
, rather than rifle. In January 1949, Captain Gonzaullas wrote, referring to the Starks case, that the shootings were “committed with a .22 caliber Colt’s Woodmaster Automatic pistol, or some foreign type of automatic of the same dimensions and characteristics.” Max Tackett in a 1971 interview also believed the murder weapon was an automatic pistol. Testimony from Waynoka, Oklahoma, proved that Swinney had owned, and sold, a .22 pistol.

Witnesses, aside from Peggy, confirmed Swinney had owned a .22 automatic pistol, as well as a .32 automatic pistol. He had sold them in
western Oklahoma following the murders. These fit the calibers of all the shootings.

Thus, he’d owned pistols like those in the murders, with the strong probability that they were the ones that took five lives.

In addition, at the Starks home the killer broke into the house like an experienced burglar, which Swinney was, having served reformatory time for burglary as a youth. In one of Peggy’s statements about the Martin-Booker slayings she told of Swinney’s taking a gate off its hinges, another sign of a skilled intruder. A novice would have taken more time to get into the Starks house, might have botched it.

Though the Starks case may have begun as an opportunity to steal from the shop, it also showed the work of an organized offender—most of the time. He went prepared, with gun and flashlight. The work shirt in Starks’s shop would have caught his eye. When he saw the light through the window and Virgil Starks’s head a few feet away, he’d found a tempting way to exact revenge—through a surrogate. He was armed, ready to kill, or he would not have taken a gun. It may be interpreted as a way to strike back at Peggy’s sister and her husband, who had kicked Youell and Peggy out of the house. He took revenge at another house, belonging to strangers. Starks was shot twice in the back of the head, just as Richard Griffin had been. The killer knew the surest way to deliver death.

The Starks case was linked, then, by physical evidence to Swinney—the once-wet, dried-out shoes, the stolen shirt—and circumstances: witnesses that Swinney went to Texarkana that night, passing the crime scene, that he owned a pistol matching the death weapon, the two-shot bursts, and that he had no alibi to account for his presence anywhere else. The couple at the Delight hotel shredded his claimed alibi, and Peggy’s along with his.

Most telling was his heated argument with Peggy’s sister over money owed her for their board. Many serial killings are preceded by a triggering event. Swinney’s encounter that Friday afternoon was a trigger that stirred his anger and led to Virgil Starks’s murder—a twisted form of revenge that led to the shooting of surrogates.

The flashlight abandoned at the Starks home also is a reminder that the February attacker carried a flashlight, possibly the same one. It is not known if Swinney used a flashlight in the Texas double murders.

Of particular interest, outside the evidence of the beatings and the murders themselves, is the incident in the Texas prison in which Swinney was caught in a sexual act with another male inmate. Though one female murder victim was raped, sex was not the main motive. The prison encounter may have been strictly a homosexual act, which might explain the relative absence of rape in the killings, or more likely it may have been an expression of violent dominance with sex a secondary meaning. Swinney’s relatives believed, based on his post-release behavior with a young boy in Marshall and Dallas, Texas, that he was homosexual or at least bisexual. Whether they believed it earlier in his life is uncertain. He cohabited with a woman in Texarkana in the 1930s or 1940s—before Peggy—and was said to be “married” to her. A search of Miller County marriage licenses failed to turn up one with his name on it; apparently the earlier liaison had no legal basis. His later marriage to Peggy in Shreveport, of course, is solidly documented.

Added to this is the belief held by some in Marshall during Swinney’s brief sojourn in the free world—and noted in a FBI report—that he was homosexual and kept a young boy. Even so, he may not have been an actual homosexual but was merely exerting dominance over another, weaker individual as he once did with Peggy, and this time the person he felt he could manipulate and control at the right level was a boy. Chances are, sexuality wasn’t a factor. He got his kicks through violence, especially killing, and control.

My own encounter with Swinney, briefly by telephone, revealed a pattern of evasion, not uncommon for an ex-convict. He never said he hadn’t killed anyone. Instead, he said he “wadn’t even here then,” something that was not true at all. He concentrated, with officers as well, on unsubstantiated alibis rather than proving he didn’t kill. He also didn’t claim he was illegally convicted for the charge of automobile theft. Instead he sought to profit from writing a book about being unjustly imprisoned as the Phantom. The case was crucial to his story. He hadn’t been charged with those crimes. Jurors in 1947 hadn’t known of any connection. By thrusting himself forward as a victim, with the Phantom highlighted, he would link his name forever to the notorious deeds without suffering the consequences. He was indulging in fantasy, with a grandiose view of
himself. Swinney seemed to yearn for recognition by associating his name with the crime wave, perhaps even reaching the status of Jesse James, glamorized by Hollywood and a hero to Swinney.

If Swinney believed he’d been falsely imprisoned, more logically he would have filed a lawsuit against the State of Texas and Bowie County. He never took that approach. It seems not to have entered his mind. He would have had great difficulty sustaining his contention, or finding a lawyer to handle it. He no doubt recognized its futility.

Swinney came close to identifying himself as the Phantom years before he dubbed himself as The Man They Said Was the Phantom. Jones Floyd, a U.S. marshal who later served as sheriff, then county judge, of Howard County, Arkansas, told newspaperman Louis Graves that Swinney sent word back to Texarkana that he was ready to admit he’d done the murders, then changed his mind. Like other lawmen, Floyd was convinced that the convict Swinney was the serial killer.

Graves’s report of Jones’s comments is hearsay, of course, but meshes with other, stronger evidence. At Swinney’s arrest, he came close to admitting his guilt when he blurted out, “Do you think they’ll give me the chair for this?” As a psychiatrist had noted, sociopaths exhibit no sign of anxiety except when apprehended, and then they become very anxious. This described Swinney to a T. Once he realized his captors didn’t know what he knew, he regained his composure and refused to cooperate or further incriminate himself.

Mark Bledsoe, a Texarkana probation officer who maintained a keen interest in the case in the 1990s, acquired material revealing that Swinney had boasted of his exploits to others. Bledsoe talked with men who had interviewed Swinney’s cellmates over the years.

“He gave the cellmates vivid tales of what had gone on,” Bledsoe told the
Texarkana Gazette
in 1996. “But when the Rangers went to interview him, he would not [confess]. There were those that had been his cellmates that had the same stories and details that were not in the newspapers. I think he felt like he was bulletproof, he was omnipotent. No one was going to get him.”

Bledsoe also interviewed Swinney in 1992 in a Dallas nursing home, videotaping the session in hopes of gaining a confession. Results were
disappointing. By then, Swinney had suffered a stroke and he revealed little. Swinney grew angry when Bledsoe asked about the murders, claiming, “I got off for that and I was cleared.” Yet he had not been tried or found not guilty of murder and was never “cleared.”

Why would Swinney even consider admitting to such high-profile murders? A probability is that he was proud of his “accomplishments” and wanted recognition for his “brilliance.” An impulsive gesture would have soon paled upon realizing the consequences. No judge or jury would have been impressed by his dubious claim to fame. At an earlier time, resigned to his life sentence, he may have reasoned that so long as he could negotiate himself out of the electric chair, he wouldn’t be any worse off, while gaining recognition as the Phantom. The moniker, Phantom, was an appealing label. It gave him status.