THE
PHANTOM KILLER
UNLOCKING THE MYSTERY OF
THE TEXARKANA SERIAL MURDERS:
THE STORY OF A TOWN IN TERROR
JAMES PRESLEY
To the memory of
the Phantom’s victims
and to their families and friends.
May they always be remembered.
I have arrived in Texarkana, the home of the Phantom Killer. I have met a newspaperman named Graves. I have checked into the Grim Hotel, and the hair is rising on my neck.
—Kenneth Dixon,
International News Service dispatch
The people were panicky. They were really panicky. I had never in my life run into anything like it.
—Texas Ranger Captain M. T.
“Lone Wolf” Gonzaullas
CONTENTS
Author’s Note
The Town
CHAPTER 1 Stranger in the Dark
CHAPTER 2 Conflicting Perceptions
CHAPTER 3 Double Death in a Car
CHAPTER 4 A Baffling Case
CHAPTER 5 A Boy, a Girl—And a Gunman
CHAPTER 6 Palm Sunday Horrors
CHAPTER 7 Rising Terror
CHAPTER 8 A Legendary Ranger
CHAPTER 9 Fear Stalks by Night
CHAPTER 10 Murder Strikes Home
CHAPTER 11 Nobody Is Safe!
CHAPTER 12 A Media Invasion
CHAPTER 13 Law and Disorder
CHAPTER 14 Behind a Serial Killer’s Façade
CHAPTER 15 An Accidental Break
CHAPTER 16 Incriminating Revelations
CHAPTER 17 The Primary Suspect
CHAPTER 18 Tightening the Noose
CHAPTER 19 Mounting Pressures
CHAPTER 20 A Quiet “Solution”
CHAPTER 21 Behind Walls Again
CHAPTER 22 Back in Court
CHAPTER 23 On the Witness Stand
CHAPTER 24 “Beyond Belief and Incredible”
CHAPTER 25 Life After “Life”
CHAPTER 26 Cracking a Cold Case
Epilogue
Source Notes
Selected Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Illustrations
AUTHOR’S NOTE
My personal interest in the Phantom murders, officially unsolved since 1946, traces from boyhood. My uncle, Bill Presley, served as sheriff of Bowie County, Texas, where most of the attacks took place. Later as a teenaged police reporter for the Texarkana Gazette I came to know the investigators, as well as reporters and editors who’d covered the story. Eventually doctoral studies in history enabled me to add perspective to the ravages of a willful domestic terrorist.
The case cried out for a reliable record to preserve the known facts, dig up new ones, and separate the substantive evidence from the spurious and imaginary. This book applies the tools of history to explain how and why the crimes and the panic happened—and seek a solution.
The Texas Department of Public Safety labeled it “the Number One unsolved murder case in Texas history.” That’s a lot of crimes over many decades in a state hardly celebrated for its peacefulness. “As a puzzle,” wrote Dallas columnist Kent Biffle, “the case remains more popular than sudoku, but seemingly uncrackable.” National and regional media continue to revisit the tantalizing case. The Internet, with Wikipedia in the lead, ripples with references. The Learning Channel’s “Ultimate Ten,” on which I appeared, classified it as one of “the most notorious and intriguing unsolved crimes in history,” in a dead heat with Jack the Ripper’s 1888 London rampage. The Ripper killed five women. The Phantom killed five victims, badly injured three others, as he hunted couples at a disadvantage in the dark.
This account offers an antidote for the rumors and distortions caused by time, journalistic excesses, and, on occasion, clumsy police work. With the principal participants dead (most of whom I interviewed at some point in their final years) and documentary evidence fragile and scattered and possibly on the way to being lost forever, this was the last chance to set the record straight and close a popular but vexing old mystery.
THE TOWN
Tucked away in the far northeastern corner of Texas—or southwestern edge of Arkansas, if you prefer—Texarkana mostly goes unnoticed, the abandoned stepchild of both states. Occasionally its geographical anomaly rescues it from oblivion, by attesting to Texas’s size. Such as the hoary anecdote of the salesman whose home office in Chicago orders: “Check on our new customer in Texarkana.” The salesman, based in El Paso, fires back: “Go yourself. You’re closer than I am!” It’s true. Texarkana, spilling over into Arkansas and near the boundaries of Louisiana and Oklahoma, is nearer to Lake Michigan than to its sister city on the Mexican border.
Commonly spoken of as one city, Texarkana actually is a shorthand term for two separate political entities sprawled carelessly astride the state line: Texarkana, Texas, and Texarkana, Arkansas, each with its own mayor, municipal government, police, and firemen. The United States and the Republic of Texas set the boundary in 1841, before there was a Texarkana. East is Arkansas and West is Texas: Numbered streets are preceded by either a W or an E to designate which side of town they’re on. East 16th is in Arkansas, but cross the state line in search of the nearest counterpart and you’ll find West 23rd in Texas. Fitted together like asymmetrical line dancers glued to each other, the cities were, and are, joined physically at the hip, sharing utilities and a chamber of commerce, while periodically behaving like dysfunctional Siamese twins.
In a solidly Southern town, with nearly a third of the population black, the obligatory Confederate memorial features a stone soldier forlornly staring southward. Yet a cosmopolitan mix of ethnic groups—Irish, Italian, German, Jewish, Greek, and French—not found in most Southern towns its size, by the 1920s supplemented the predominant English and Scotch-Irish Caucasian stock. Baptists and Methodists led in numbers, with Catholics a significant minority, and with one Jewish temple.
Duality has characterized—or plagued—Texarkana from its founding in 1873, in the waning days of Reconstruction. Each side of town had its own separate post office until 1892, when the first joint one was built on its present site on the state line. That one was razed in 1930. Three years later the present one was built, combining Texas pink granite and Arkansas limestone in its materials. The state line defined even religious jurisdictions. The city’s two Catholic parishes—Sacred Heart in Texas, St. Edward in Arkansas—were in different dioceses, Dallas and Little Rock. Protestant denominations experienced similar realities. Crosstown rivalries flourished. The annual football game between Texas High’s Tigers and Arkansas High’s Razorbacks often included fistfights in the stands. One photo promoting the city portrayed a pair of young twins with boxing gloves confronting each other. The most popular symbol of duality, though, was a postcard that depicted a man on the Texas side clutching a rope tied to a donkey on the other side of the state line. In the background the massive United States Courthouse and Post Office, billed as the only one in America situated in two states, imposingly straddles State Line Avenue. The postcard’s caption signified, perhaps humorously, perhaps not, a potential for friction.
A MAN IN TEXAS AND HIS ASS IN ARKANSAS
To balance things out, a competing card placed a Biblical ass in Texas.
In the nineteenth century the timber industry flourished in both states with an abundant supply of pine and hardwood, creating jobs, albeit often dangerous ones, and a numb
er of local fortunes. Texarkana’s location made it a natural railroad center as lines crossed from almost every direction en route to either coast. The town became known as “that lively railroad village” festooned with saloons and bawdy houses and rampant with crime. “Texarkana is the gateway between the East and Texas, and the half-way house, where burglars, thieves and robbers stop momentarily to recuperate,” commented one early observer.
The most horrifying tragedy of those days occurred on a July night in 1882. A violent storm drove dozens inside the Paragon Saloon and gambling house for refuge. Lightning struck the building next door, under construction, and strong winds blew a wall onto the saloon, shattering timbers, knocking over kerosene lamps. A fierce fire broke out, compounding the plight of those trapped beneath the rubble. At least forty men perished. One, pinned painfully and hopelessly, ended his agony with a gunshot to his own head.
With its location “a veritable magnet for the criminally inclined,” an early editor charged, “the great majority of Texarkana’s early settlers were gamblers, gunmen and other lawless individuals who flocked into towns where law enforcement was weak.” By 1888, by one accounting, the fledgling city boasted twenty-three saloons, eighteen of them on Broad Street, with flashy names like Cosmopolitan, Hole-in-the-Wall, Gateway, Triangle, Golden Star, and Red River. Over the years the city—or cities—grew out of its frontier roughness but never shook off the image entirely. Open saloons and gambling dens vanished in time; brothels continued to flourish. Organized prostitution persisted well beyond World War II.
Texarkana has since remained a crossroads. Four major highways intersect in the town today. In the 1940s, four rail lines provided passenger service, which was on par for a city several times Texarkana’s size. American and Mid-Continent Airlines each offered two flights daily. American’s DC-3s landed and departed from either coast; Mid-Continent flew north and south. Buses and automobiles brought in people of all descriptions and statuses. A large sign above U.S. Highway 67, a major artery connecting Dallas and Little Rock, proclaimed the city to be the “Gateway to the Southwest.” Texarkana, as the unofficial capital of this Four States Area, became a stopover for national travelers, as well as a regional hub for commerce—and for crime. Law enforcement grew knottier, as criminals crossed state lines to avoid arrest.
Intensifying Texarkana’s crossroads status, World War II jerked the region out of the Great Depression. Red River Ordnance Depot, later elevated to Arsenal status, and Lone Star Army Ammunition Plant nearly doubled the population. Workers and their families swarmed in from all points, as far off as Illinois and Michigan. The economy boomed. So did the work of the police.
A duality of both dark and light emerged. Old-timers remembered an idyllic small town where everyone knew everybody else and enjoyed a sense of community and a pleasant life—unless, perhaps, you were black or poor. They’d cite a long roster of men and women who came from their town to achieve fame or fortune: Byron Nelson the legendary golfer; politicians Wright Patman, longtime chairman of the House Banking and Currency Committee, and Morris Sheppard (Senate tenure, 1913-1941), to name a few.
Undismayed by negative distractions, the business sector’s ingrained booster spirit burst forth most forcibly in the 1940s with an Old West do-or-die slogan emblazoned on city buses: Pull for Texarkana or Pull Out.
It didn’t work. True to the town’s dual nature, denizens of a darker side continued, in counterpoint, to scar its sunny face, neither pulling for nor pulling out.
The nether side was almost never completely out of view. One observer reported the most frequent datelines in the Police Gazette to be Peoria, Illinois, and Texarkana. Some occasionally referred to their hometown as Little Chicago. As a lawman of the time, Max Tackett, put it, Texarkana was “calloused to murder.”
Selected headlines from the 1940s seem to bear out Tackett’s contention. The gruesome Arkansas-side murder of Gertrude Hutchinson O’Dwyer on July 24, 1940, was one of the most shocking: her head smashed by a car axle, her throat slit from ear to ear, her bed soaked with blood. The case remains unsolved.
The next year a sixteen-year-old boy, on parole for a shotgun killing in Alabama four years earlier, fatally slugged a younger boy with a pop bottle in Fouke, Arkansas, about ten miles from Texarkana.
A rigidly segregated Southern city, Texarkana’s last recorded lynching had occurred on July 13, 1942, about seven months into World War II. The chain of events began near the little town of Hooks, a dozen miles west of Texarkana and next door to the defense plants. An intruder dragged a twenty-two-year-old white woman, asleep with her baby at her side while her husband worked a night shift, from her trailer home. She broke free and escaped. He fled. She identified him only as a black man. A group of white men—none a police officer—started looking for suspects. At a café they tried to arrest Willie Vinson, thirty-one years old, who was visiting from Louisiana. He refused to go with them. One of the men shot him in the abdomen. Vinson was taken to the hospital. The woman never positively identified Vinson or any other man. Vinson languished near death. Around midnight Sunday several white men wrenched a groaning Vinson, begging for his life, from his unguarded hospital bed. They dragged him by car through the streets and hanged his corpse at a cotton compress a mile away. Relegating the global war to lesser headlines, the Texarkana Gazette thundered forth with a bold, all-capitals 8-column banner:
NEGRO LYNCHED BY MOB HERE
The case made national news. Racial tensions rose exponentially; rumors flew. The FBI entered the case. No arrests were made, no culprits named, no charges filed.
Months later, on the Arkansas side, a war-plant worker, H. H. Hasselberg, was shot and left for dead. Before he died he named Curtis Lee Jones, nineteen, as the man who had shot him. Jones, on probation for car theft, fled. Arrested in Houston and returned to Texarkana, he jumped bail and escaped to Mexico. Extradited, he pleaded guilty to avoid a death sentence and received life in the penitentiary. It was not the end of his criminal career; he ended up with a long rap sheet. After his early release, he continued to add to his record.
On December 9, 1944, Walker L. Curtner, age thirty, a used-car salesman, was found shot in the head and dying in a Texas-side street. He’d been robbed of $1300 in cash. The year ended with no break in the mystery. With the case his top priority, the new Bowie County sheriff, Bill Presley, and Texarkana police chief Jack Runnels posted a hefty reward and received a tip leading to the arrest and conviction of Guy Brantley, an escaped convict. Assessed a life sentence, he later died in prison.
The Japanese surrender brought no end to violence in Texarkana. On October 20, 1945, Ernest F. Bryers, an overseas Army veteran discharged two days earlier in Oklahoma, was found dead, almost decapitated, in a pool of blood near downtown on the Texas side. He’d had a brief layover en route home to Louisiana. Subsequently Jarvis Andrew Elliott, twenty-three, and Vera Jackson, seventeen, confessed to the grisly murder, claiming Bryers had resisted their robbery, leading to the killing. Elliott, a black man, was sentenced to the electric chair; his teen-aged confederate, life in prison.
Holdups, cuttings, burglaries also vied for headlines. At the edges of four states, Texarkana lay in the direct path of traffickers in illicit goods. Scofflaws ran whiskey from wet Louisiana to dry Oklahoma through the area. Specially rigged automobiles carried from fifty to seventy cases of liquor; a stake-bed truck, a hundred. High-speed chases, at times in town and accompanied by gunfire, might register as high as ninety miles per hour. It was a lively atmosphere, during a lively time.
The old year 1945 went out—literally—with a bang. In a shootout at nearby Fulton, Arkansas, the day before New Year’s Eve, Arkansas State Policemen Charley Boyd and Max Tackett, both war veterans back at their old jobs, returned fire from James W. Moore, a thirty-five-year-old ex-convict from Missouri, fatally wounding him.
An ominous foreshadowing, with sequel over the next several weeks of the new year 1946: a $485 holdup of a liquor store in Arkansas (the o
nly side with legal liquor sales), shootings, the sentencing of three men for robbery with firearms, a war veteran’s fatal blow with a hammer to an adversary’s head in an alcohol-fueled fracas, a gunshot suicide, a fatal knife fight, a string of burglaries and thefts netting from five dollars to as much as seven hundred. One Texas-side pistol-backed holdup yielded only thirty-eight dollars. Clothing, radios, jewelry, vehicles, saddles and horses—nothing was off limits to thieves. Highway crashes snuffed out two lives and injured others.
The unexpected kept cropping up. Weeks after New Year’s, three inches of snow covered Texarkana, which was extremely rare. Even more unusual, a rabid dog meandered about Pleasant Grove, a rural community north of town. Hydrophobic dogs came and went, but mostly in the heat of summer, hardly ever in the midst of winter.
The two anomalies soon faded from memory. The snow melted. The weather grew cooperative. Fears of a roving mad dog evaporated. The war was over.
What could happen next?
THE
PHANTOM KILLER
CHAPTER 1
STRANGER IN THE DARK
When they met in February, 1946, tall, bespectacled Jimmy Hollis and petite, brunette Mary Jeanne Larey were married, but not to each other. He was twenty-five; she, nineteen. Each was in the process of dissolving a wartime marriage that hadn’t worked out. While awaiting their final divorce decrees, they felt free to date, and did. Their lives, like the rest of the town and the world, were in flux.
Jimmy and Mary Jeanne may have been scarcely aware of how unsettled and unruly the times were. The evidence, however, lay on every hand. In twin-city Texarkana (pop. 52,393) crime tormented both sides of the Texas-Arkansas line. The unexpected had become so common as to lose its ability to surprise.
Hollis, captivated by Mary Jeanne’s striking good looks, asked her out for the evening of Friday, February 22. He arranged a double date for them with his younger brother Bob and a girl to whom he’d introduced Bob, Virginia Lorraine Fairchild. Bob, on the shy side, benefitted from Jimmy’s gift of gab.
The Phantom Killer: Unlocking the Mystery of the Texarkana Serial Murders: The Story of a Town in Terror Page 1
