The Texarkana Moonlight Murders

by Michael Newton

  Later in 1957, Tillman Johnson retired from the Miller County Sheriff’s Department to become an insurance adjustor. He stuck with that profession until the early 1970s, when he began work as a private investigator for various local attorneys.127 Even then, he kept his interest in the Phantom case, telling anyone who would listen that he held Swinney responsible for four of the 1946 murders, excluding that of Virgil Starks.

  Others remained unconvinced. The Phantom had passed into legend—at least, urban legend—with various supposed solutions to the case in circulation. Lubbock folklorist and Texas Tech professor Dr. Kenneth W. Davis heard one of the more popular tales in September 1958, and related it to Dallas Morning News reporter Kent Biffle thirty-eight years later.

  “I was on my way to Nashville,” Davis told Biffle, “returning to graduate school. Near the western edge of Texarkana, I stopped for gasoline at a small Conoco filling station whose operator was a toothless gnome, but quite a talker. His failing eyes couldn’t quite read the official-looking parking sticker on my car that let me park on the Texas Tech campus. As he took my credit card, he asked, ‘You one of them laws come to keep an eye on that killer?’ I assured him that I wasn’t a ‘law.’ I asked if he referred to the famous Phantom Killer.”128

  “That’s him,” the aged man replied, prompting Davis to ask, on a whim, if he knew what became of the killer.129

  “With a conspiratorial look,” Davis went on, “he said, ‘The Texas Rangers, the highway patrol, and them local laws figgered out who was doin’ all that killin’, but they couldn’t get no real stout evidence on him. So, they went to that old boy’s rich momma and daddy and laid it on the line. Them laws told the killer’s folks that if they didn’t keep him locked up somebody would have to up and kill him and save the state a passel of time and money. So, his rich momma and daddy, they built a room on the back of that big old plantation house. Made it out of sheet steel and cement. They put a couple of windows in the room, but they’s bars as big as baseball bats over them. They’s no way that killer son could get out’n there.’”130

  Davis naturally asked if his informant knew the palatial home’s location. “Not exactly,” the pump jockey replied. “But I got a purty good idee. Anyway, a few years after those folks locked him up because he was meaner’n hell, they died within a couple of months of each other. The momma died first. Some say it was a broken heart killed her. Some say she drank herself to death because that boy was locked up. The old daddy walked into a freight truck on the Dallas highway. It turned out them two had made a will and had a deal with the laws that if somethin’ happened they’d be money to keep watch over him till he died.”131

  In a quirky twist, the old man added that at least twice a week a Texas Ranger or “one of ‘them highway cops’ stopped in the station to fill up with gas and buy a case or two of RC Colas. He’d heard the killer liked RC Colas.”132

  As we saw in Chapter 8, Lone Wolf Gonzaullas was, himself, among local purveyors of this rumor, hinting to James Duke—and others?—that “although the local lawmen in Texarkana knew who the killer was, they wouldn’t arrest him because they had too little evidence, or the family was too rich and influential, or this rich family had agreed to maintain a private prison.”133

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  The motif of a homicidal maniac sequestered by his wealthy kin is not unique to Texarkana. From nineteenth-century London to Boston in the 1960s, conspiracy theories seasoned with dashes of fact have been raised to explain the cessation of murders by slayers unknown.

  The first such case was that of “Jack the Ripper,” a gaslight ghoul who killed and mutilated at least five prostitutes—some accounts claim seven, fourteen, or twenty—between August and November 1888. Seven years after the last confirmed murder, Dr. Forbes Winslow of London offered a solution to the mystery, during his visit to a Medico-Legal Conference held at Manhattan’s Federal Building in September 1895. Described by the New York Times as “a well-known specialist on suicide and insanity,” Dr. Winslow declared that the Ripper was “incarcerated at a county lunatic asylum in England.” According to the Times, “Dr. Winslow says this fact is known to the authorities, but they have hushed up the case.” Winslow declined to name the slayer, but described him as “a medical student of good family,” driven by “religious fervor [that] resulted in homicidal mania toward the women of the street.”134

  Adding an odd twist to his story, Dr. Winslow told the Times, “I have in my possession now a pair of the Canadian moccasins stained with blood that the ‘Ripper’ wore while on his murderous expeditions. I notified the Scotland Yard authorities, but at the time they refused to co-operate with me. Subsequently the young man was placed in confinement and removed to a lunatic asylum, where he is to-day. Since his incarceration there has been no repetition of the horrible murders that he perpetrated.”135

  Nearly seven decades later, in 1962, French author Philippe Jullian published a biography of Edward VII, king of the United Kingdom from January 1901 to May 1910. In passing, Jullian mentioned rumors that Edward’s son—Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale, grandson of Queen Victoria and heir to the British throne—had been the Ripper.136 Eight years later, in November 1970, Dr. Thomas E. A. Stowell published an article in The Criminologist, suggesting that Prince Albert began killing prostitutes when he was driven mad by syphilis. On November 5 of that same year, however, Stowell sent a letter to The Times of London, saying, “I have at no time associated His Royal Highness, the late Duke of Clarence, with the Whitechapel murderer.” He died on November 8, one day before his letter was published, and Stowell’s son announced that he had burned is father’s personal papers after reading “just sufficient to make certain that there was nothing of importance.”137

  Various authors ran with Stowell’s original suggestion, heaping on layers of conspiracy for good measure. In one scenario, Prince Albert—“Eddie,” to his friends and family—was identified as Jack the Ripper and was kept out of circulation until his death in January 1892. A more elaborate version, first advanced by author Stephen Knight in 1976, claims that the Ripper slayings were a strictly practical matter, executed by aides of the royal family to avert a major scandal. According to Knight, the prince had impulsively (and illegally) married a Catholic commoner, with their union producing a daughter. The Ripper’s street-walking victims all had knowledge of the marriage, and were silenced permanently, mutilated for good measure in the style of ancient Masonic ritual. All Knight lacked was evidence, a void ill-advisedly filled with The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion—an antisemitic forgery published by Tsarist secret police in 1903, unaccountably transformed by Knight into a Masonic blueprint for world domination.138

  A variation on the “royal Ripper” theme names Prince Albert’s tutor, James Kenneth Stephen, as the elusive killer. British author Michael Harrison (né Maurice Desmond Rohan) pioneered this theory in 1972, after publishing numerous mystery and fantasy novels over four decades. Harrison based his case in large part on the misogynistic tone of Stephen’s poetry, and on perceived similarities between his handwriting and that of certain letters written by the Ripper. (Other students of the case contend that Jack wrote nothing, and that all the notes were hoaxes penned by journalists or cranks.) Harrison surmised that Stephen’s hatred of women was exacerbated by his homosexual attraction to Prince Albert, unrequited by the womanizing royal. Stephen also suffered a head injury during the winter of 1886–87, which may have caused or aggravated a bipolar disorder. In November 1891, Stephen’s family committed him to St. Andrew’s Hospital, a mental institution in Northampton. On learning of Prince Albert’s death, two months later, Stephen refused to take any food and died on February 3, 1892. His death certificate states that Stephen expires from “mania,” refusal of food, and exhaustion.139

  An odd hybrid theory, published by forensic psychiatrist David Abrahamsen in 1992, cast Eddie and Stephen as collaborating team killers, in the mold of Los Angeles “Hillside Stranglers” Kenneth
Bianchi and Angelo Buono from the 1970s. As with the tales presented by Knight and Harrison, Dr. Abrahamsen failed to produce any solid evidence connecting either suspect to the Ripper’s crimes.140

  Leap forward from the foggy streets of London to Cleveland, Ohio, in the Great Depression. Between September 1934 and August 1938, an unidentified “torso killer”—nicknamed the “Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run,” for a gully where several victims were found—decapitated and dismembered thirteen persons, including seven men and six women. Only two of the dead, both petty criminals, could be reliably identified. Investigators and reporters often credit the Butcher with five other victims, all male: one found at New Castle, Pennsylvania, in July 1936; three found at McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania, in May 1940 (with one identified as an ex-convict); and Robert Robertson, dead six to eight weeks before his remains were found in Cleveland on July 22, 1950. Famed crime-fighter Eliot Ness served as Cleveland’s director of public safety from 1935 to 1941, and while he never managed to arrest the Butcher, Ness later claimed that the killer was identified, committed to a mental institution by his wealthy family in the latter part of 1938. From there, the suspect harassed Ness with mocking letters and greeting cards into the 1950s. Ness died in 1957, and the supposed Butcher followed him into oblivion seven years later, dying at a veteran’s hospital in Dayton, Ohio.141

  The alleged Butcher’s name remained a secret from the general public until 2001, when author James Badal identified him as Dr. Francis Edward Sweeney, a Cleveland physician who performed battlefield amputations during World War I. He reportedly failed two polygraph tests administered in 1938, but since the test results were inadmissible, Ness filed no charges. Another factor may have been the suspect’s family. An uncle, Congressman Martin Leonard Sweeney, was a political opponent of Cleveland Mayor Harold Burton (who hired Ness), and had harangued Ness over his failure to capture the Butcher. Congressman Sweeney was also related by marriage to Cuyahoga County Sheriff Martin O’Donnell, whose officers beat a false confession out of suspect Frank Dolezal, leaving Dolezal with broken ribs and other injuries before he allegedly hanged himself in custody, on August 24, 1939. Because his hospital commitment was voluntary, it appears that Sweeney was free to come and go at will until 1956, when he was finally judged mentally incompetent and confined for good.142

  Jump another three decades, to Boston, Massachusetts, in the 1960s. There, over a span of nineteen months, thirteen women were sexually assaulted and murdered by a predator nicknamed the “Boston Strangler.” (A fourteenth, initially unrecognized by police as a murder victim, died from heart failure when the killer accosted her.) The first seven victims, slain between June 14 and August 30, 1962, ranged in age from fifty-five to eighty-five, prompting psychiatric speculation that the stalker chose victims who reminded him of a despised mother figure. Between December 1962 and January 1964, the killer changed pace, slaying five victims aged eighteen to twenty-three, plus two aged fifty-eight and sixty-nine. That shift in targets—including one young African American victim in the latter round—led some profilers to suggest that Boston had two stranglers working in tandem.143

  The case broke, after a fashion, when Albert Henry DeSalvo confessed to the murders in autumn 1964. At the time, he was confined for psychiatric observation on a rape charge, at a mental hospital in Bridgewater, Massaschusetts. Represented by celebrity lawyer F. Lee Bailey in plea-bargain negotiations, DeSalvo admitted all thirteen murders, plus one unrecognized by the police as homicide, and also confessed to scores of unsolved rapes. Though never charged with murder, he received a life sentence in 1967, and was stabbed to death by another inmate in November 1973.144

  There matters rested until 1975, when veteran crime reporter Hank Messick collaborated with syndicate hit man Joseph “The Animal” Barboza on a more-or-less candid autobiography. In addition to describing many contract murders, Barboza detailed various examples of Mob-related corruption—including a throwaway comment, dropped in passing, that a patsy had been found to “take the rap” for the real Boston Strangler.145 That startling remark went largely unnoticed, and my own inquiries to Messick brought no response, but future revelations would demonstrate Barboza’s role in other frame-ups. In October 1966, before DeSalvo’s trial, Barboza and mafioso Stephen “The Rifleman” Flemmi collaborated with corrupt FBI agents to convict four innocent defendants for the March 1965 muder of victim Edward Deegan (actually killed by Barboza and Flemmi’s brother). Decades passed, and two of the blameless men died in prison, before the other two were vindicated and won a multimillion-dollar settlement from the FBI. Long before that, Joe Barboza had been executed gangland-style, in February 1976.146

  In 2000, the same year that FBI scandal went public, attorney Elaine Whitfield Sharp represented the DeSalvo family and relatives of Strangler victim Mary Sullivan in filing lawsuits to exhume DeSalvo’s remains and compare his DNA with that from semen found at the Sullivan crime scene. Results of that test cleared DeSalvo as Sullivan’s killer, thereby casting doubt on his involvement in the other crimes.147 Author Susan Kelly and others suggest that DeSalvo was coached through his confessions by fellow Bridgewater inmate George Nassar, first convicted of murder in May 1948 and awaiting trial for a second homicide when he met DeSalvo in custody. A second conviction in 1967, for a murder committed in September 1964, consigned Nassar to prison for life, where he remains today. At this writing, Nassar’s DNA has not been compared to any evidence recovered from the Boston Strangler’s crime scenes.148

  Moving from speculation to the realm of fact, we have the case of Japanese cannibal-killer Issei Sagawa. In June 1981, at age thirty-two, Sagawa murdered, raped, and partially devoured Dutch student Renée Hartevelt, a classmate at the Sorbonne Academy in Paris, France. Confined for two years prior to trial, during which time his wealthy father provided top-flight legal counsel, Sagawa was finally deemed legally insane and remanded to a mental institution. Interviews about his crime developed into a bizarre celebrity, prompting French authorities to deport him in 1984. Again, his father paved the way, procuring a place for Sagawa at Japan’s Matsuzawa Psychiatric Hospital. In August 1985 he signed himself out of the hospital, his future movements unrestricted since French prosecutors refused to share their files on his case with Japanese police. Since then, Sagawa had published four novels, appeared in several pornographic films, and graced the cover of a Japanese gourmet magazine. “The public has made me the godfather of cannibalism,” he says. “And I am quite happy about that.”149

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  Max Tackett continued his search for the Phantom into 1960, Youell Swinney’s imprisonment notwithstanding. On February 15 of that year, he sent FBI headquarters the name of a forty-three-year-old suspect, name deleted from surviving records, to request a fingerprint comparison. The man was cleared four days later.150

  On June 24, 1960, FBI agents arrested Melvin David Rees in Hyattsville, Maryland, on charges of illegal flight to avoid prosecution. The charge in question dated back to January 1959, when Rees had forced a car occupied by Carrol Jackson, wife Mildred, and their two children off a rural highway in Virginia. He killed all four, raping Mildred in the process, later fleeing across country when he fell under suspicion for the mass murder. After his arrest, agents found Rees’s pistol and a diary detailing the crime at his parents’ home. Before trial in the quadruple-murder, Rees—dubbed the “Sex Beast” by reporters—was convicted of killing victim Margaret Harold, kidnapped during a drive with her boyfriend near Annapolis, Maryland, in June 1957. He received a life term in that case, then was sentenced to death in Virginia, but that sentence was later commuted to life. He died in custody, at a federal prison hospital, in 1995.151

  At the time of his arrest, Rees intrigued Texas investigators, perhaps unaware that he was only thirteen years old in 1946. Ranger Captain Bob Crowder sent a copy of Rees’s fingerprints to the DPS Identification and Criminal Records Division in June 1960, and heard back from Chief Joel Tisdale on July 7. Tisdale wrote: “We have received co
pies of the fingerprints of Melvin D. Reeves, Jr. [sic] charged with the murder of the Carroll V. Jackson family in Maryland. In accordance with your request, we have compared these with the latent fingerprints from the Texarkana case and wish to report that they are not identical to the latents from Texarkana.”152 FBI analysts reached the same conclusion on July 19, pursuing an inquiry from the bureau’s field office in Charlotte, North Carolina.153

  A month later, on August 13, one Robert Fause mailed a letter from Farmersville, California—a suburb of Visalia, in Tulare County—addressed to a nonexistent “States Crime Commission” in Austin, Texas. The letter found its way to Chief Joel Tisdale at the DPS Identification and Criminal Records Division, who had cleared Melvin Rees in July. It read, with spelling and grammar intact:

  Dear Sirs.

  in 1946 when the five women were killed in Texarkana Texas, at that time, if I Remember correctly, Ranger Captian Frank Hammer was assigned to solve the killings, and there were a Reward offered in each case for information in the killing.

  Do the Reward offer still stand for a Lead that might solve the case.

  if so, what assurance would I have to Receve the money in case my lead might solve the killings.

  Was this Reward offered by the state of Texas or by the victims folks or both, and what is the total Reward offered or has the state closed the case.154

  Tisdale sent the letter on to Captain Crowder in Dallas, with a notation that “It is typical of many we receive; however, you may want to check it out.”155 If Crowder did, no trace of what he learned from Robert Fause remains in ranger files today.

  Leads in the Phantom case kept dribbling into Washington during the final months of 1960. Analysts checked another suspect’s fingerprints and cleared him on November 28; cleared another via prints on December 5; and examined two .32-caliber slugs and one cartridge case submitted by the Texas Department of Safety on December 1, only to discover they’d been tested ten years previously. An apology smoothed Hoover’s ruffled feathers, as the trail once more went cold.156