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

by James Presley

  “There’s been a killing over there,” she said.

  A killing, he immediately thought, and we sleep with our doors unlocked! This piqued the boy’s curiosity. He debated with himself whether he should satisfy his curiosity and walk over to where the activity seemed to be centered, whether he’d get in trouble if he did. He told the storekeeper he would be back, and he left. He crossed the KCS tracks and the wide crossing that lay on the dirt road that ran parallel to the tracks and directly into the park, through the twin guard posts standing symbolically at the entrance. At that point, he saw three men to his right, maybe eighty yards from the crossing up the dirt road between the rail line and the park. He walked there. The three men paid him no attention. He didn’t know what he would have said if they’d asked him what he was doing there. One of the men got into a car and drove off. The other two men, dressed in suits and hats as if on their way to church, stayed, looking down at the ground. Nearby a Ford coupe was parked, mostly off the road but partially at the edge of the dirt road. It was headed south, toward town.

  “I can’t figure out why there’re no tracks coming out,” he heard one of the men say.

  Young Horner’s eyes followed the route they were surveying, covering an expanse of leaves, pine needles, and dirt, but not enough that anyone wouldn’t have left footprints. They’d found two sets of tracks, one larger and probably a man’s tracks, the other set smaller and probably a woman’s. One of the men said, “They got out here”—indicating the road—“and they went over there. And where did they go from there?” The tracks appeared to lead from the road over dirt and leaves toward brush, no more than thirty feet from the road, but they had found none going back toward the road or car, as if they had gone to a point, then disappeared. The two men—Presley and Runnels—then got into their car and drove off. They had hardly noticed the boy’s presence.

  After they left, teenager Horner strolled near where the lawmen had gone, careful not to intrude upon the tracks they had observed. Nor did he want to leave his tracks close to the scene. He realized what they had been talking about. The two sets of tracks pointed away from the road but didn’t return. Where had they gone? Why had they ended so abruptly, apparently not returning to the road? He kept walking back and forth, back and forth, trying to see where the tracks had gone but couldn’t. “That bothered me ever since I’d seen that,” he was to say years later. Where did they go? How did they get out of there? He even looked around to see if there was a vine they might have swung out on—the fictional character Tarzan was strong in the boy’s imagination. He stood around, puzzled, trying to reason how it had happened, why no tracks seemed to go back out toward the road. It was as if, he concluded, the owners of the tracks had vanished. There was no evidence that one of the persons had tried to escape the other. They were just plain footsteps.

  Had the tracks had anything to do with the case? Had they gone from one car, presumably the one parked by the road—as it turned out, the car Paul Martin had driven—to another car, unknown to the officers? The puzzle seemed unsolvable.

  After a while, young Horner walked back home. He had forgotten to buy the loaf of bread his mother had sent him for. He didn’t explain where he had been and what he had seen. The rest of the day, and for days afterward, he fretted over the scene. For decades later he would tumble it over in his mind from time to time.

  Before Tom Albritton had gotten out of the house that morning, an officer appeared at the door. Paul Martin’s body had been found in Spring Lake Park. Hadn’t he been spending the weekend with him? The news numbed. He couldn’t believe it. Yes, Tom told the lawman, Paul was spending the weekend with him but hadn’t come back the night before. Why would they have gone to Spring Lake Park? Tom was asked. He groped for words. If you had a car, the usual thing to do was to go to Spring Lake Park and smooch, he told the man. It was popular for young people on both sides of the state line.

  When Herbert Wren arrived at First Methodist Church, Arkansas, for Sunday school, he learned of Paul Martin’s body being found.

  Later that morning he and others drove to Spring Lake Park. The pleasant venue was now a backdrop to horror.

  “It changed our community overnight,” said Wren. “Before that, youngsters never felt threatened or uncomfortable anywhere. Now young people suddenly were in potential danger at night almost anywhere.”

  Swarms of lawmen converged upon Spring Lake Park as search parties organized to find Betty Jo or, what was more likely by now, her body, unless she had been kidnapped and was, somehow, still alive. The search widened beyond the immediate area where Martin’s body had been found and where his car had been parked.

  With the crime scene secured, Sheriff Presley drove into town and headed for the First Methodist Church on the Texas side of State Line. He was a member of the Men’s Bible Class there. It was a large class; more than a hundred men attended on Sundays, drawn by two popular teachers, Dr. Henry Stilwell, superintendent of Texarkana, Texas, schools and president of Texarkana College, and District Judge Norman L. Dalby, who alternated Sunday sessions. Presley knew the large group of friends would be assembling, and he recruited them to join the search. Grimly he announced the mission, and men spilled from the church into cars headed for the park. It was the easiest way he knew to organize a search party on short notice on a Sunday morning.

  In the morning, fifteen-year-old Charlsie Schoeppey was so sleepy that she begged to miss services and stay in bed; her parents consented. Sleep was short-lived. Her father returned soon and explained why he’d come home unexpectedly. Ted Schoeppey had arrived at the church to learn of the tragedy and the need for search parties. He didn’t know that his daughter and other youngsters had been frolicking in the park several hours before. He piled into the car with the Boyd brothers—James and George—and James’s two sons Jim, Jr., and Jack. All but George were neighbors of the Browns in Sussex Downs. Jack Boyd sat beside Betty Jo in class. Young Jim Boyd, Jr., had been Charlsie’s date the night before; he was returning to the scene in a decidedly more somber mood. The older Boyds chose the Pleasant Grove community to search because they’d grown up there, had played and hunted in the woods as boys, knew every foot of it. They drove the car off Summerhill Road onto a dirt road. They unloaded and fanned out.

  George Boyd was the first to see a body behind the trees in rough terrain in a wooded stretch a few yards off the lane.

  “Oh, my God, oh, my God,” he yelled repeatedly, “there she is!”

  He was close enough for the others to hear him. They came running. It was, indeed, a girl’s body, fully clothed, her full-length coat buttoned, lying on her back with her right hand in the overcoat pocket. She was wearing a Middie blouse, as it was called, and a plaid skirt, with patent leather shoes. She lay in apparent peace, as if she’d gone to sleep. Amid pine trees and saplings sprouting green signs of spring alongside the dead leaves of winter, the body was covered by noonday shadow while sunlight streamed down several feet away. It was Betty Jo Booker.

  Ted Schoeppey and George Boyd stood guard at the tragic scene while the others drove off to relay word to officers at a barricade on Summerhill Road. The road had been closed and manned by lawmen to ward off the curious.

  Sheriff Presley was soon upon the scene, setting about to protect the crime scene from any milling curiosity seekers as had contaminated the Griffin-Moore case. The body was approximately a mile from the location of Martin’s body and twice that from the coupe they had ridden in the night before.

  Betty Jo had been shot twice, once in the heart and once in the head, entering the left cheek near the nose. The angle of the bullets, on cursory examination, suggested the gunman had been right-handed and had faced her as he killed her. It wasn’t much of a clue.

  The sheriff believed Martin had been killed first, though he acknowledged that it was impossible, at that point, to tell the exact time of the shootings.

  From the first discovery of the bodies, the sheriff cited the compelling outward similar
ities to the Griffin-Moore case. Other evidence would soon back up that assumption. He emphasized, to news reporters and other investigators, that the bodies had not been abused, beyond the bullet wounds. Unlike the Griffin-Moore case, however, no attempt seemed to have been made to conceal the bodies of Paul and Betty Jo. Although the bodies of the first couple had not been hidden, they had been left inside the car where they might be mistaken for weary travelers sleeping, posed inside the parked car in order to avoid or delay their discovery. The new bodies had been left recklessly where they had been killed, Paul’s in full view of anyone driving along the road, Betty Jo’s in the woods where she had been taken; no effort had been made to hide or bury the bodies. The killer had heartlessly taken their lives as if they had been hunted animals. It was a chilling discovery.

  The finding of Paul’s body swept through the town within hours. Discovery of Betty Jo’s body accelerated the spread of both news and rumors. Almost immediately, as residents remembered the earlier double murder, a state of horror and panic began building. Another young couple had been slain in a lovers’ lane, forming a pattern in people’s minds that had never existed before, though the Hollis-Larey beatings still hadn’t been connected to the pattern. Four deaths in three weeks—exactly three weeks apart, a late-Saturday-night crime—shouted out that something previously unheard of had shattered the pattern of life—and death—in Texarkana.

  The Griffin-Moore case hadn’t really alerted the public to its personal implications. Now with a second similar one, most residents suspected that the same hand had killed all four. Previous headline murders had been single ones or perhaps a rampage by one criminal on one occasion, then ended. As bad as the Griffin-Moore case was, it had seemed to be an act unlikely to reoccur. The Martin-Booker murders suddenly presented a different face. There was no way to conclude that this was just another murder in a violence-prone region. The known facts, even before they had been collected and ascertained, put the three-week spree in a separate, frightening category of its own.

  Added to this, Richard Griffin and Polly Ann Moore, though they had both lived in Texarkana, were not widely known because they had moved there from Cass County. Nor were they as young as Paul Martin and Betty Jo Booker, who had gone to school in the city and had a broad range of friends locally.

  That bright and sunny Palm Sunday morning, as young Jimmy Morriss arrived at First Methodist Church, Texas, teenager Ross Perot, who decades later would make his name internationally known, came up to him. Perot told him there’d been a murder of a boy at Spring Lake Park. Betty Jo Booker may also have been a victim. Her escort had been found dead. Officers were looking for her or her body. Perot didn’t yet know that Morriss was to have picked up Betty Jo the night before, had her plans not changed.

  Deep shock was the only way to describe Morriss’s reaction. He vaguely remembered Martin’s name from his brief telephone conversation with Betty Jo the night before.

  After church, he drove his parents home and then rushed in the family’s 1937 Chevrolet to see the Browns. He saw a line of cars parked on Anthony Drive. In his haste to go inside, he put the gear in reverse, opened the door to get out before he realized he hadn’t turned off the engine. The car jerked backward before he could remedy the error. Then he went inside and joined the mournful crowd.

  Jerry Atkins and Sonny Atchley experienced the worst day of their young lives. They talked with Sophie Anne White and Betty Ann Roberts, who had both been in the band the night before. They soon realized that the Rhythmaires were the last to have seen Betty Jo alive. They needed to tell officers whatever they might know or could remember from the night before.

  The radio and word of mouth spread the news that the Texas Rangers were descending upon Texarkana in force. They would want to talk to anybody who knew the victims. The musicians hadn’t heard anything on the radio about Betty Jo’s saxophone. That led to a guess that it hadn’t been found in Martin’s car.

  About nine o’clock Sunday night the teenagers went to the sheriff’s office. Captain M. T. “Lone Wolf” Gonzaullas had arrived that afternoon from Dallas to lead the Rangers’ investigation. The four musicians spent considerable time talking to, and answering questions from, Sheriff Presley and Captain Gonzaullas. Right off, they mentioned the saxophone. It hadn’t been found in Martin’s automobile, making it an important key to the mystery. They described every detail they could recall about the night before and the dispersal of the musicians. Had anything unusual happened at the dance? Did anybody among the customers do anything unusual or suspicious? Did anyone seem to direct his attention especially toward Miss Booker or the other girls? Had anyone followed her to the car? Had anyone loitered near Paul and Betty Jo outside the building? The answers were consistently No or that they didn’t know. The gap between the couple’s leaving the VFW and discovery of their bodies remained a mystery.

  The Gazette captured the scene in a front-page photograph of Atkins, Betty Ann Roberts, and Sophie Anne White talking to the officers. Gonzaullas, wearing the traditional ten-gallon hat and cowboy boots adorning his crossed legs, sits in profile, dominating the scene, while Presley, in suit and tie with a felt business-style fedora, sits listening in the background. Every face in the picture is grimly serious.

  There was no thought of school the next day. Atkins went to the Beasley Music store, where Betty Jo had bought the instrument, and acquired the make and serial number of the saxophone, which was circulated to music stores and pawnshops over several states. By then Atkins had learned that Ernest Holcomb had gone early Sunday morning to Vivian, Louisiana, with his parents to visit his married sister. They hadn’t returned until late Sunday night. The Holcomb family learned of the trouble soon after returning to Texarkana, when a Texas Ranger rapped on their door. Holcomb remembered seeing Betty Jo push her saxophone behind the seat of Martin’s coupe. Betty Jo had already told him she wouldn’t be leaving with him, because Paul Martin was picking her up. He’d not thought to tell Atkins about her change in plans.

  On Monday, Atkins went to see Betty Jo’s mother and stepfather. Weeks of anguish lay ahead.

  CHAPTER 7

  RISING TERROR

  Tension hung heavily over the town. Four young people had been murdered, almost at random, over a three-week period. Where might the killer strike next?

  The death certificates were less revealing than the newspaper reports: “Murdered—Shot to death.” The difference in the new case was that the death scenes were not at a single site. Inez Martin, Paul’s mother, signed his certificate; Clark Brown, Betty Jo’s stepfather, signed hers.

  Although results of a medical examination were not made public, it was assumed by many that Miss Booker had been raped before her death. Outwardly, however, there was no concrete proof, although it could not be completely dismissed. She had been fully clothed, as well as wearing her coat on that cool night, indicating she had not been undressed. Sheriff Presley emphasized that neither body had been abused. Considering the almost haphazard manner in which the two bodies had been left, apparently just as they had fallen, it seemed unlikely that the killer would have raped the girl, then had her put her clothes back on before shooting her. However, one detail in the state’s file at Austin, never made public, noted that her vagina displayed bruising. No mention was made of semen or rape, and the bruise could have been caused by a handgrip, or an object such as a pistol barrel, as was done with the female beating victim, or other means. No one but the two earlier victims, however, had connected the beating incident to the murders. There was another note in the same file, however, that indicated she had had her coat off—outside—at some point: a leaf was found between her coat and her blouse.

  On the other hand, and more telling, FBI lab results a week later, on April 20, revealed that a swab test of the girl’s vaginal passage was positive for male seminal secretion. No foreign hairs were present among her pubic hairs, though they did contain semen. A saline solution wash of the boy’s penis ruled out the possibility of int
ercourse between the young couple, thus leading to the conclusion that her killer had raped her. The evidence was as precise as the science could make it at the time and definite enough to assign blame to an unknown man. In the absence of today’s DNA studies, results were unable to tie the event to a specific man.

  One phrase alluded to the previous double murders: “Not definitely known if victim Moore had been raped.” No data had been presented that she had been raped, which meshed with evidence cited earlier that she had not been “criminally assaulted,” as a physician had stated, and that she was wearing a sanitary pad, which may have saved her from that crime if the killer had had rape in mind.

  In the same April 20 dispatch, the FBI confirmed that the same firearm—a .32 automatic—had killed all four victims. But, also, three latent fingerprints could not be explained. One found on the steering wheel, while not necessarily that of the killer, was not the owner’s print or that of either victim.

  No publicity was being released about the bullets and cartridges or the unexplained latent prints—nor that the girl had been raped.

  The report signed off with the most disturbing part: No definite suspect known.

  Despite the lab evidence, a reflective analysis would tend to conclude that the killer was not a conventional rapist who more likely would have sought a lone vulnerable female, although attacks, followed by rape, on couples were not rare. He had, however, eliminated the male first in both cases, which left a lone vulnerable female in his grasp. Betty Jo Booker’s killer also had taken care that her body was normally clothed and left in a condition unlike that of many rape-murder victims. The body was not hidden, beyond being left in the woods, and was not desecrated or mutilated. The single bruise appeared to be incidental. In addition, unlike the first double murders, the killer had faced Betty Jo Booker when he shot her, rather than in the back of the head. Although the results were the same in all four deaths, the Spring Lake Park killer had modified his tactics in these small, but possibly important, ways. Why? What was going on?