The feds were pleased to let Arkansas prosecutors have first crack at Swinney. On February 11, 1941, Youell pled guilty to auto theft in Miller County, receiving a three-year sentence. On February 19, he arrived at the Cummins State Farm, a rural prison outside Gould, Arkansas, where officials listed his occupation at “typist and file clerk,” noted his “ruddy” complexion, and logged a half-inch scar on the bridge of his nose.22
* * *
The prison farms of Arkansas have a long and sordid history. In 1838, Governor James Conway signed legislation establishing the state’s first penitentiary, built during 1839–40 on a ninety-two-acre tract in Little Rock. From 1849 to 1913, the state leased convicts out to private individuals as virtual slave labor, in a system popular throughout the South and rife with physical abuse. In 1899, new legislation moved the penitentiary—popularly called “The Walls”—to a fifteen-acre site southwest of Little Rock, ceding its former structure to the present-day State Capitol. Three years later, Governor Jefferson Davis convinced state legislators to allocate $140,000 for purchase of 10,000 acres for creation of a rural prison farm. He hoped to buy the acreage from a political crony in Jefferson County, but lawmakers preferred the former Cummins and Maple Grove plantations in Lincoln County. In a fit of pique, Governor Davis waged a losing fight to scuttle his own proposed project, but construction went ahead without his blessing, and inmates began occupying the Cummins State Farm in December 1902. In 1913, Arkansas established a permanent execution chamber at The Walls. Three years later, a second rural facility—the Tucker State Farm—was established in Jefferson County. Governor Junius Futrell closed The Walls in 1933, moving the state’s electric chair to Tucker, while the defunct prison’s inmates were divided between the two farms.23
Thrifty state legislators envisioned the prison farms as self-supporting facilities, run with a minimal complement of “free world” personnel. To that end, inmates raised crops and livestock for sale, supervised in many cases by “trusties” bearing firearms. Discipline was enforced by means of corporal punishment, including state-sanctioned flogging and other methods, such as the “Tucker telephone”—an antique hand-cranked phone whose wires delivered agonizing jolts of electricity to inmates’ genitalia.24 As late as 1965, a federal court in Arkansas not only validated whipping as a mode of discipline in state prison facilities, but also laid down guidelines for delivering the lashes.25 Four years later, Judge J. Smith Henley ruled several aspects of the state’s penal system unconstitutional, dictating specific steps for reform. In 1970, faced with stubborn official reaction, Henley ruled the entire prison system unconstitutional and ordered the State Correction Board to prepare a plan of action for remediation.26 The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed that ruling in 1978.27
Those reforms came too late to help Youell Swinney, or the inmates allegedly murdered at Cummins by guards and trusties. Those tales were partially corroborated in 1968, when maverick Warden Thomas Murton unearthed multiple inmate graves at the farm, including some corpses whose legs had been sawed off to fit undersized homemade caskets. That embarrassment led to Murton’s dismissal, with an unconvincing claim that all the inmates buried without markers or death certificates had died from natural causes, necessitating creation of a makeshift pauper’s graveyard. Thirty years after that fiasco, a new scandal broke with revelations that prison officials had extracted blood from inmates, many infected with hepatitis and/or HIV, which was sold to blood brokers and shipped worldwide, infecting countless innocent recipients.28
* * *
The feds did not lose interest in Youell Swinney when Arkansas sent him away for three years. Sixteen days after he reached the Cummins farm as inmate number 39066, Walter Urich, Parole Executive for the Bureau of Prisons in Washington, D.C., addressed a letter to the warden at Cummins. It read:
Dear Sir:
We have received information that the above-named man has been sentenced to your institution on a charge of grand larceny.
Swinney is wanted by this office as a conditional release violator. The violator warrant is being forwarded to the United States Marshal at Little Rock, Arkansas.
Please place our detainer and notify this office with a copy of your notice to the Marshal approximately thirty days prior to date set for release so that arrangements may be made for custody.
In order to bring our records up to date we should like to be advised now of the probable date of release.29
It seems that Swinney did not last long at Cummins. The next federal letter concerning his case, penned by U.S. Marshal Louis LeBlanc in Shreveport, Louisiana, on April 15, 1941, was addressed to the warden at Tucker, home of “Old Sparky” and the dreaded “Tucker telephone.” It read, in part: “This is to advise you that I have a bench warrant for the above mentioned subject, charging him with violating the terms of his probation.... Therefore, let this letter serve as a detainer against this subject and notify this office [of] the date on which we may execute our bench warrant.”30
Tucker’s superintendent, T. C. Cogbill, replied to Marshal LeBlanc on April 18, saying: “At present his nearest release date will be August 11th 1945. There is a warrant filed previous to yours by the U.S. Marshall [sic] at Little Rock, Arkansas. You will be given the usual thirty (30) days notice prior to his release, in order that you may arrange to take him into custody, and return him to your jurisdiction.”31
In fact, Swinney got lucky, after a fashion. On July 17, 1943, Superintendent Cogbill wrote to the Little Rock marshal’s office, advising that Swinney would be released from the Tucker farm on August 1—two weeks’ notice, rather than the promised thirty days. The letter also advised: “We have a detainer request in favor of the U.S. Marshal, Shreveport, La., but yours is a prior request, and your warrant will be delivered to the proper Deputy that calls for this man.”32
Marshal V. C. Pettie replied to Cogbill from Little Rock on July 20, confirming that a deputy U.S. marshal would take custody of Swinney at Tucker on August 1. The deputy in question, V. O. Purvis, duly retrieved his man on the appointed Sunday, and transported him to Little Rock.33 No further record of his passage through the federal prison system has survived the ravages of time, but we know that Swinney still had not gone straight. On November 24, 1944, he received a five-year term for robbery in Bowie County, Texas, but was favored with a “conditional pardon” on December 22, 1945.34 When caught again, for his latest auto theft, he could be jailed for violating his parole, and if convicted on a third felony charge, might receive life imprisonment as a habitual criminal.
But first, authorities had to find him.
* * *
Again, reports of the manhunt for Swinney are mired in confusion. Kent Biffle, writing for the Dallas Morning News, claims Peggy told Max Tackett and Tillman Johnson that Youell was in Atlanta, Texas, the seat of Cass County, selling another hot car.35 Tackett, speaking in 1971, told a different story: “Around this time [of Peggy’s arrest] Homer Carter, chief of police in Atlanta, Texas, said a man had tried to sell a car to one of his citizens. It was a new Plymouth reported stolen in Pampa [Texas]. I told him I thought I knew who he was looking for.”36
Tackett went on to say, “I only knew his habits. I never had seen a picture of him. He hid in theaters in the daytime and when he stepped back to smoke he always stood where he could watch all the other people and get away if he needed to.”37 No one living today can tell us whether Tackett knew that Swinney was, in fact, a distant relative of his by marriage.
According to Tillman Johnson, lawmen knew a great deal more about Swinney than Tackett admits. Johnson told Blair Case, “The suspect came from a family who lived west of town. They were good people but the suspect had a record and a lot of local officers knew him. We talked to some people who had seen him in the stolen car and were able to place him in Spring Lake Park on the night of the Booker-Martin murders. We were also able to place him in the vicinity of the Starks farm the night Virgil Starks was killed. So we were looking for him pretty hard by the
time he tried to sell a stolen car in Atlanta.”38
At this point, we should recall Johnson’s statement, cited in Chapter 6: “I felt like he [the Phantom] did not do the Starks murder. It would be hard to tie him to the Starks murder.” If true, then placing Swinney near the Starks farm on May 3 is meaningless.
* * *
How was Swinney run to earth, at last? Johnson, in 1977, said, “The Atlanta police were suspicious and followed him out of Atlanta into downtown Texarkana. They radioed ahead and police from both the Arkansas side and the Texas side were downtown looking for him.”39 No record of Swinney’s arrest has survived, nor is the date recorded, but Blair Case has the event occurring on a “hot Saturday afternoon in July”40—which narrows the possibilities to July sixth, thirteenth, twentieth, or twenty-seventh. Joseph Geringer’s claim that Swinney was caught “a couple of weeks” after Peggy, coupled with the date of FBI memos cited below—suggests July 13.41
Did Youell Swinney spent the whole time between June 28 and July 13 (or whenever) in Atlanta, trying to sell a hot car under Chief Carter’s watchful eye? If all and sundry knew the car was stolen—much less, that Swinney might be Texarkana’s Phantom—why was he allowed to come and go at liberty? Why not arrest him on the spot, thereby preventing his escape, or worse, another murder? We are left to speculate in vain.
Max Tackett, in 1971, told a more elaborate tale of locating Swinney. Reminiscing for James Presley, Tackett persisted in the curious assertion that Swinney’s appearance was unknown to local police, despite his record of arrests. He said:
The citizen he had tried to sell the car to didn’t remember exactly what the man looked like. But the citizen was dressed distinctively in cowboy boots and western hat. You couldn’t miss him. So I told him, “You wouldn’t recognize him, but he would recognize you.” I told him if he would cooperate by going through a number of public places in Texarkana, with me following at a respectable distance, we might be able to find our man. I knew the man we were looking for wouldn’t want to see the citizen again and would try to avoid him if he did see him again.
I went home and pulled off my uniform and put on a truck driver’s garb. I would look for a man to make a fast move or to run when the citizen in the flashy cowboy boots entered a place.
Later, when we entered the old Arkansas Motor Coach station off Front Street, a man dashed toward the back of the station, and I followed, running. There was only one place he could go and I rushed on back and found him up on the fire walk.42
Compare that account to the scene sketched by Blair Case six years later, based on interviews with Tillman Johnson. In that scenario, Tackett—“perspiring in his khaki Arkansas State Police uniform”—was one of several dozen lawmen fanning out through downtown Texarkana, searching for a “tall, slender, good-looking fellow” suspected of car theft. Tackett entered the bus station alone and “searched for a face in the crowd”—which, by his own account, he had never seen before. “Evidently,” Johnson said, “the suspect spotted Max about the same time Max spotted him, because he made a break for the back door and Max trapped him on the fire walk of the old Jefferson Coffee Shop.”43
From that point on, Tackett’s and Johnson’s stories are virtually identical. Cornered on the fire escape—either by a recognizable policeman or a stranger dressed in “truck driver’s garb,” Youell Swinney said, “Please don’t shoot me!” Tackett replied, “I’m not going to shoot you for stealing cars.” Swinney, cringing, answered, “Mister, don’t play games with me. You want me for more than stealing cars.”44
Tillman Johnson soon joined Tackett and marched their prisoner to Johnson’s patrol car. Inside the cruiser, Swinney allegedly asked, “What do you think they’ll do to me for this? Will they give me the electric chair?” Johnson replied, “You won’t get much, maybe five or ten years. They don’t give you the electric chair for stealing cars.” And once again both officers agreed, Swinney answered, “You know you want me for more than stealing cars.”45
Indeed, they did—but could they make a case?
Perhaps, with Peggy’s help.
* * *
Detained in lieu of bond, Peggy had offered nothing further to police while Youell was still at large. With his arrest, however, she agreed to talk. Tillman Johnson later said, “When we told his wife [falsely] that we were holding him for murder, she asked, ‘How did you know?’ She decided to make a statement and took us over the scenes of the crimes, telling us things only a person who was there could know, things we had held back from the press.”46
As Max Tackett told the story, twenty-five years later, “She started us by giving a minute detailed statement for the past several months. From this information we formulated a calendar that gave their location in Texarkana on the nights of these killings, even though they had in the intervening days been as far away as New York. We verified this information.”47
Nor was that all. Peggy said that Youell had driven from Dallas to Texarkana on April 13, bought twelve bottles of beer on the “wet” Texas side, and she had helped him drink them, getting drunk before they went to Spring Lake Park with the intent “to rob someone.” Tackett claimed that Peggy led officers to the park, then “walked directly to the point” where Paul Martin’s car was discovered on April 14, further admitting that she’d walked into a nearby “clump of woods,” where the heel print of a woman’s shoe was found. Peggy told police she had remained in Youell’s car, drinking beer, while he took “the little boy and little girl” off somewhere, out of sight. She “fell asleep,” Peggy claimed, and was roused sometime later by four gunshots, then two more. Youell returned “highly excited” and “wet up to the knees,” reminding Tackett of a marshy area located 100 to 150 yards from the site where Betty Jo Booker was slain.48
Tillman Johnson’s recollection of that visit to the park was somewhat different. Speaking to Carlton Stowers in 2001, Johnson said, “Sheriff Presley wanted to take her out to the park and see if she could show us where the murders had taken place, and she agreed. She couldn’t locate the exact spot, but got pretty close. Once we got her back in the car, the sheriff asked her if her husband had robbed Martin. She acknowledged that she remembered him taking some things out of the boy’s pocket and then tossing them away in a nearby ditch. What very few people knew at the time was that a small date book belonging to Martin had been found in a washed-out area not too far from his body.”49
Peggy also had something to share concerning the Starks raid. On the night of May 3, she said Youell had returned to the motel where they were staying “with blood all over him.” According to Tackett, “She said he wiped his blood on a towel and put it under the mattress in the room.” Officers searched the room, recovering that towel, together with a khaki work shirt. According to Tackett, “The laundry mark, read under a black light, said S-T-A-R-K. This shirt was taken to Mrs. Starks and she said yes, that was her husband’s shirt and pointed to a place on the front of the shirt where she remembered personally repairing it. But on reflection, the next day, she said she couldn’t be sure. She knew it would mean death for the suspect, based on her identification of the shirt, and she said she could not positively identify it. The name was spelled ‘Stark’ instead of ‘Starks,’ and any woman would have repaired a damaged place such as that on her husband’s shirt.”50
One published account refers to bloodstains on the khaki shirt, but if such stains existed, neither Johnson not Tackett acknowledged them in later interviews.51 Even without DNA evidence—still forty-one years in the future—blood from the motel towel (and shirt, if any stains were actually present) could have been tested to see if they matched Starks’s blood group or Swinney’s. Forensic laboratories had practiced antibody testing for ABO blood types since 1915, and the technique was certainly known the DPS crime lab in Austin.52 Blood from both Starks shooting victims was logged as Type O. Still, it seems no such tests were performed, or even considered.
In 1971, Tillman Johnson said that numerous particles
of “slag” were found in the khaki shirt’s pocket. “Max and I went out there [to the Starks farm] with a dozen pillboxes,” he told James Presley, “and collected samples at random. One or two samples corresponded with the slag in Virgil Starks’ welding shop.”53 And still, it was not enough.
There is, as usual, more to this story than the sparse details offered through hazy hindsight. An FBI laboratory work sheet, dated July 15, 1946, records delivery of two items routed through the Little Rock field office: one tan shirt bearing laundry mark “LS6,” and “one dungaree [blue denim] jacket belonging to suspect.” Little Rock requested microscopic examination of the garments’ fibers, and petrographic analysis of “slag material from pockets of shirt.” Add the worksheet’s heading—“VIRGIL STARKS, Victim”—and this clearly refers to the shirt recovered from Texarkana.54 The unnamed suspect can only be Youell Swinney.
The bureau’s file contains six photographs of material submitted for examination. One has no caption, while three reportedly depict “magnetic material removed from the debris found between the bottom seams of the left pocket of the tan shirt, Q16. This clearly shows the presence of the magnetic slag balls similar to those found in grinding or welding operations.” Two others depict “magnetic material removed from the soil from the welding shop, KS”—presumably operated by Virgil Starks. Also found in the pocket were brown human hair fragments, and an unspecified quantity of sand. A memo from director Hoover ordered Little Rock to obtain a sample of hair from Starks, and to compare the sand with soil around the victim’s residence.55
Meanwhile, another FBI memo posed problems for investigators focused on Youell Swinney. First, while the dungaree jacket was again described as “the known clothing of the subject,” it bore the same “LS6” laundry mark as the khaki shirt. Furthermore, the name handwritten on the shirt’s collar was “partially obliterated.” Analysts could not decide if it originally read “STARK” or “STARR.”56
The Texarkana Moonlight Murders Page 12
