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

by James Presley

  Officers sweated over the mystery. Sheriff Presley and Chief Runnels together posted a $500 reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction, which translates to more than $6,000 today. A year before, a reward of the same size had quickly led to the solving of the Curtner murder. Five hundred dollars was a large amount of money, especially when it might be collected with a few words and an appropriate name attached.

  No such information was forthcoming. A motive was hard to pinpoint. Griffin’s pockets likely had contained coins or small bills—pocket change—rather than large bills, hardly enough to kill for. This suggested that robbery had been secondary, an afterthought, perhaps even a ploy to throw lawmen off.

  At first, suspicions turned toward sex as a motive, that the assailant had raped, or had intended to rape, Polly Moore. No evidence substantiated it. She was fully clothed. A physician confirmed that she had not been “criminally assaulted.” There was the possibility that the mysterious gunman had intended to rape Polly Moore and that sex was a motive but the killer got distracted and changed his mind. But if that had been his intent, why had he not at least partially disrobed her, or assaulted her sexually in one way or another? No connection was made in any way to the earlier beating incident and the female’s sexual abuse.

  Because the ground had been patted wet by rain, obscuring any car tracks or footprints that may have existed earlier, it was difficult to establish that the killer had driven to the scene, and although it seemed the most likely, it was still possible the killer had walked there. A café and beer joint, Stockman’s Cafe, was situated on Highway 67, not far off. If as a pedestrian he had risked exposure, he could have readily ducked into the heavily wooded area nearby and evaded scrutiny.

  Almost any theory was possible, because no one knew.

  Within four days following discovery of the bodies, officers had taken more than fifty persons into custody for questioning, while chasing down more than a hundred false leads. It was a grueling process with little rest. Three suspects, arrested and questioned because of bloody clothing, explained the stains to officers’ satisfaction.

  Meanwhile, the Texas Rangers dispatched Dick Oldham to join Jimmy Geer. In a state where the old legend “one riot, one Ranger” was the only recipe needed for success, the force in Texarkana had doubled before a week was gone.

  The case remained unsolved into April. More than 200 false tips and leads were followed. One suspect, “a girl from Kansas City,” was arrested in San Antonio, 425 miles away. Rangers drove her to Texarkana. Quickly eliminated as a suspect, she had not even known of the crimes.

  Mary Jeanne Larey, now living in Oklahoma, learned of the murders. The more she learned, the more certain she was that they were connected to her own night of horror. She was so certain that she took a trip back to Texarkana to talk to officers.

  She was convinced that the same man who had attacked Hollis and herself had now gone a step farther and had killed. If they would listen to her, perhaps they could learn something about the murderer.

  Her plea fell on deaf ears. Officers again insisted that she knew her attacker and was protecting him by withholding his name. She just as fervently insisted she had not known the man, and that he was a Negro, just as she had asserted back in February, despite Hollis’s belief that a white man had attacked them.

  Still a bundle of nerves, she returned to Oklahoma having changed no minds.

  Officers seemed not to have remembered Jimmy Hollis’s prediction three days before the murders that at the next opportunity his assailant would kill. Nor did it dawn on them that a similar modus operandi seemed to link the cases, down to the men having to drop their trousers as a means of immobilizing them.

  Three weeks passed.

  By Palm Sunday, April 14, Texarkanians were gearing up for “Straw Hat Day” and wearing stylish spring apparel. The Sunday edition of the Texarkana Gazette featured the first of an Easter series, written by Dr. Tom J. Wilbanks, pastor of the Pine Street Presbyterian Church on the Texas side. At the movies, John Wayne starred in Tall in the Saddle, while the Paramount Theater advertised the new RKO Radio production Deadline at Dawn. The ad carried a warning:

  “A night filled with TERROR.”

  CHAPTER 5

  A BOY, A GIRL—AND A GUNMAN

  Before the trolleys shut down in Texarkana in the 1930s, subsequently to be replaced by buses, one route took passengers all the way to Spring Lake Park north of the city limits, where they enjoyed picnic grounds, recreation for softball and other sports, and a relaxing site for all ages. Sue Wilson McCrossen recalled that her Girl Scout troop would hike all the way from their gathering point at Highland Park Elementary School about twenty-five blocks from downtown, out Ghio Boulevard and past the city limits to the park. It was three miles each way. They took their lunches. The park was a popular family venue, featuring a dance pavilion along with the eponymous body of water with its own resident alligator. People from surrounding areas visited the springhouse to fill jugs with its water, believed to harbor healthful constituents.

  In the park’s spacious and wooded bounds, some sealed off from public view by clumps of trees and bushes, young couples traditionally trysted, day or night. To those exploring the park for the first time at night, its winding roads and trails could seem more like a perplexing labyrinth; to its frequenters they were avenues of graceful respite and abandon. It was a fun place.

  Yet, historically, or at least in legend, Spring Lake Park was the backdrop for Texarkana’s first known act of violence. In 1541, so the story went, the Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto quelled a mutiny by hanging a soldier from a tree in what was to become the park. Every schoolchild in the region learned the account. Some residents vowed they knew which tree the unfortunate Spaniard had been hanged from—400 years before.

  The murders of Polly Ann Moore and Richard Griffin, as violent as they were, set off relatively few alarms among young people in Texarkana. What residents hadn’t noticed was that the Griffin-Moore murders had broken the pattern of the past, when a motive was readily apparent, however mundane, petty, or grand it may have been. That had not become apparent in the aftermath of the killings. Nor had officers or the public linked the February beatings to the murders. Consequently what might have been seen as a huge red flag escaped anyone’s notice. Violence was the last thing anybody expected as a result of necking and smooching.

  Despite the steady crime level in this town, it was still a trusting time. Most encounters were peaceable. Minor troubles almost always led to amicable resolutions. When a man driving an old-model Dodge skidded into C. J. Neighbors’s car on the Texas side in the late afternoon of Thursday, April 11, Neighbors saw no reason for alarm. No one was injured. The damage to his car was slight. The other driver was apologetic and friendly. “I’m Smith,” he said. “I live on College Hill. Just let me know what it costs.” The affable, cooperative man drove off. It was the last Neighbors saw of “Smith.”

  It was easy to conclude that “Smith” was driving a stolen car. Taking another’s car required so little expertise that teenagers could do it. Yet many residents continued to leave the keys in the ignition, both tempting and enabling thieves. Theft wasn’t complicated. “Hot-wiring” was almost as simple as turning the key. All you had to do was connect two wires to the ignition to fire the engine. A thief with any experience could hot-wire a car and drive it off in about two minutes. The older the car, the easier it was to steal.

  After school on Friday, April 12, James Paul Martin, a junior at Kilgore, Texas, High School, borrowed his brother’s shiny Ford coupe and drove more than a hundred miles to Texarkana. His mother had misgivings about the trip. He was only sixteen, his seventeenth birthday three weeks off. She was afraid he wouldn’t drive safely enough.

  Young Paul had many friends in Texarkana. His father had operated an ice business in the oil town Smackover, Arkansas, where Paul was born. When a more explosive boom opened in the huge East Texas field in the early 1930s, Martin, Sr., m
oved his business to Kilgore. His wife, loath to live in yet another rough-and-tumble boomtown, chose Texarkana’s Arkansas side as the family’s new home. Her husband periodically returned to Texarkana. Paul and his three older brothers attended school in Texarkana.

  In late 1940, when Paul was eleven, his father died unexpectedly. Inez Martin and her sons moved to Kilgore. The war came. Paul’s brothers entered the service. Paul, too young to serve, attended military school in Mississippi the last year of the war, then returned to Kilgore High and worked part-time in the ice plant. That summer, he was to be the plant’s night engineer.

  His Texarkana friends liked him. One classmate remembered him as “a short boy with the best attitude you ever saw. I don’t think he had an enemy in the world. Everybody loved him, and he just loved people.”

  Upon arrival in Texarkana that Friday, Paul headed to his close friend’s house in the same block where he once had lived. He would stay with Tom Albritton for the weekend. As young boys they’d walked all over Texarkana together. They reminisced and made plans for the next day.

  High among Paul’s plans was seeing Betty Jo Booker. They’d known each other for ten years, since elementary school on the Arkansas side.

  Betty Jo Booker, a fifteen-year-old junior at Texas High, was busier than Paul Martin probably realized. A popular girl and a serious student, she also held a part-time job that few others, boys or girls her age, could claim. She played the saxophone in a local orchestra. Jerry Atkins and His Rhythmaires performed at VFW Club dances. Band director Atkins, only sixteen himself, had inherited the band when older musicians went to war.

  For her fifteen years, Betty Jo had a packed background, much of it tragic. Her brother four years older—Billy Boy, the family called him—was born with brain damage. He never developed mentally past childhood. He had died in a Little Rock institution when he was sixteen.

  Worst of all, her father died young. A personable man, Miller County, Arkansas, tax assessor William Blanton “Boogie” Booker had died in a traffic accident near Shreveport, Louisiana, in 1932. He and others were en route to check on relatives in northern Louisiana after a killer tornado had taken eighty lives. His skull was fractured. He was thirty years old. Betty Jo, not quite three, never had a chance to know him.

  Following Booker’s death, the governor of Arkansas appointed the widow to serve the rest of the term. Bessie Booker subsequently was elected to several terms.

  The following year after her father’s death, Betty Jo was crowned Miss Tiny Texarkana at a local pageant. Her mother had a bathing suit of gold lamé made for the occasion. While still a child, Betty Jo took swimming and dance lessons. She performed song-and-dance numbers for civic groups and sang at church. One Christmas she sang all four verses of “Silent Night, Holy Night.” She had to stand on a table so the congregation could see her.

  Betty Jo became painfully aware of growing up without a father. “Everybody has a daddy but me,” she would tell her mother. Once, she suggested, “Let’s go downtown and find me a daddy.” After four years of widowhood, Bessie married Clark Brown, a salesman for a sand-and-gravel firm. Betty Jo, then seven, was jubilant. “Now I have a daddy!” Her stepfather became the father she’d never known. The two of them would sing together while washing and drying dishes. He taught her old cowboy songs. He was everything she’d wanted in a father. She felt whole again. So did her mother. “Our home was the happiest in the world.”

  After Bessie Booker Brown finished that term as tax assessor, the new little family moved to the Texas side of town, settling in a pleasant middle-class neighborhood, Sussex Downs.

  Betty Jo had played in the Arkansas High band. When she moved, she became a member of the Texas High band. She made new friends in Texas, while keeping those in Arkansas. “Everybody liked her,” a classmate said. During the bitter 1945 football rivalry between the schools, she emphasized that after the game the score would be forgotten. The Razorbacks and the Tigers tied, 7-7.

  The earlier tragedies only strengthened the mother-daughter bond. To say that they were close merely approximates their relationship. Betty Jo was all Bessie had left from her early family. The mother adored her daughter—or, as she put it, “I worshipped her.” She maintained scrapbooks documenting virtually every aspect of Betty Jo’s life, a consolation for her double tragedies.

  Though not “boy crazy,” as her mother put it, Betty Jo dated from time to time. Herbert Wren, a childhood friend from the Arkansas side, remembered she was the first girl he ever kissed. Later, on the Texas side, she occasionally dated Sonny Atchley, drummer for the dance band, and, more often, Jimmy Morriss, another Texas High student.

  As the April weekend rolled around, Betty Jo was unaware how prominently she figured in Paul Martin’s plans during his visit from Kilgore.

  Paul Martin had in mind taking Betty Jo to the midnight movie at the Paramount. He didn’t spell it out when he called her Saturday morning. He said he’d drop by in the afternoon. He’d also learned of a slumber party to which they might drop by.

  Paul spent the morning getting ready. He washed and shined his brother’s car. Nearby old friend Herbert Wren was mowing his family’s lawn; the boys waved at each other.

  The weather was so pleasant that Betty Jo changed her afternoon plans. She and Sophie Anne White decided to go swimming. She told her mother to tell Paul, if he came by. Sophie Anne had already graduated from Texas High and was studying music at the University of Texas in Austin. Betty Jo spent a lot of time at the White home, a brisk walk away. Sophie Anne’s mother taught Betty Jo piano lessons. When she was in town, as she was this weekend, Sophie Anne played trumpet in Jerry Atkins’s band.

  Sophie Anne drove them to TP (or Texas & Pacific) Lake southwest of town. Her father was the lake’s superintendent. The family swam and fished there regularly. It was early in the year for swimming, but the large lake was shallow and the water wasn’t cold. The girls enjoyed the brisk first-of-the-year swim and returned home about four o’clock, invigorated and looking forward to playing for the dance that evening.

  While Betty Jo was gone, Paul drove by. Her mother explained that Betty Jo had gone swimming. Paul, who’d known the family for years, lingered and chatted with Bessie and Clark Brown for more than an hour, talking of school and his family’s business in Kilgore. As he left, he said, “Tell Betty Jo I’ll call later.”

  He did. He said since he hadn’t seen her, he’d pick her up after the band finished playing. She said she would have to modify her own plans but thought she could do it. She had expected Jimmy Morriss, a fellow student, to meet her after the dance. Young Morriss worked late Saturdays in a department store.

  She called Morriss at work. “Jimmy, an old friend of mine, Paul Martin, is in town from Kilgore and called me. Do you mind if he picks me up tonight?”

  Morriss, like most of the other Texas-side youths, had never heard of Paul Martin. Basically, she was breaking the date, but considering that she’d told him Martin was an old friend, Morriss, a pleasant and agreeable youth, assured her that it was all right with him.

  While Betty Jo performed in Atkins’s band, Paul Martin and Tom Albritton spent the evening with friends about town. Tom had a date with Ramona Putman. Paul wanted to go to the midnight movie after meeting Betty Jo. He would pick up Tom and Ramona as soon as he fetched Betty Jo. Tom and Ramona would wait on the Albrittons’ front porch.

  It was a warm afternoon, cooling as night came near, but not expected to hit lower than the mid-forties, enough to wear a coat or jacket. The days were gradually growing longer, the sun setting at 6:45 that afternoon. It would be dark by the time Betty Jo showed up for her stint with the dance band. The moon, which rose that afternoon, would be on the wane and soon gone by time they called it a night. One of the mothers took the girl members of the orchestra to the VFW Club. This night the duty of taking the girls home fell to Ernest Holcomb.

  Charlsie Schoeppey was fifteen and a “high sophomore” at Texas High. Her family lived on
Anthony Drive in Sussex Downs, across the street from Betty Jo’s family. That night she and her boyfriend, Jim Boyd, Jr., with other couples drove out to Spring Lake Park and parked on a dirt road. Accompanied by car radio music, they danced in the road by the side of the car. It was a great night. They were energetic teenagers, and it was spring, with the end of school a few weeks off. She was in by midnight but then went to a slumber party near where she lived, got little sleep and ate too much junk food. She had to be home in time to attend Sunday school and church.

  It was a big night at the VFW, with a big crowd expected. Manager Lacy Lawrence promoted the event by promising to give away eight pairs of nylon hose, with the following ad: who will be the 8 lucky women—attend this dance & find out. The same day, a string of four movie theaters—Ritz, Princess, Joy, and Palace, the latter a “colored” site—proclaimed similar promotion tactics. If you patronized one of their theaters, you could purchase a genuine Army steel helmet for only twenty-five cents. Nylons, steel helmets—all readily evoked the recent war and its consumer scarcities.

  Emblematic of postwar transitions, the VFW Club’s Saturday night dances made it a popular nightspot. During the war the large white frame building had housed the USO Club. A short stroll from downtown, it was even nearer the town’s busy, widely known red-light district in the other direction. Lacy Lawrence, a local café proprietor, assumed its management, sold beer, and added a local orchestra of skilled teenagers who had developed during the war—Jerry Atkins and His Rhythmaires. You could dine and dance—and drink beer. “BRING YOUR WIFE/BRING YOUR GIRL FRIEND.”