“As soon as this story ends,” he said.
A little later Katie heard a noise in the back yard.
“Virgil, turn down the radio a little,” she said. “I hear a noise outside.”
Whether he heard her or not she never knew.
Minutes later, an intruder wielding a .22 automatic weapon standing just outside the window, eighteen to twenty inches from the pane where he could see the back of Virgil’s head, shot twice, pulling the trigger immediately after the first shot, firing through the screen and window, pumping two bullets into the back of the homeowner’s head. The killer had to stand back because of the heavy hedge. It didn’t take a crack shot to accomplish the feat. A six-year-old child, one lawman later stated, could have hit a target from that distance.
Without making a sound, Starks slumped forward in his chair. The newspaper fell to the floor, his blood spattering it. One bullet went through the heating pad, short-circuiting it.
Katie, in the bedroom, didn’t recognize the shots. It sounded like the breaking of glass. Virgil’s dropped something, she thought. Wondering what had happened, she got off the bed and hurried into the sitting room. The radio was still on. Virgil was slumped over in his chair, blood running down his neck. A pool of blood had formed on the floor. She saw the holes in the windowpane. She rushed up, lifted his head, and saw he was bleeding and lifeless. Immediately she recognized that he had been shot from outside the window. She turned and raced to the hand-crank telephone on the wall.
The killer remained just outside the window, making no attempt to flee.
With the light on in the room, the killer could watch her movements, as he had observed her coming into the room. She could not see outside into the dark.
She never got to use the phone. When she reached it, the killer fired twice more, at her head, before she could start her call. One bullet entered her cheek beside her nose and emerged from behind the ear; the other shot entered her lower jaw just below the lip. The shots crashed through her teeth, scattering fragments to the floor.
She fell to the floor and lay there stunned for a moment, miraculously still alive. Though seriously wounded and in full view of the killer in the well-lighted room, she had the presence of mind to drop to the floor, so that he, outside on the ground, might believe he had killed her and that she lay dead on the floor, but he would be unable to see her and keep shooting at her from outside. In that position on her hands and knees, she inched her way toward the back of the house. She crawled until she thought she was out of view from outside and then went back into the bedroom.
There was a .45 revolver in a dresser drawer. She wasn’t sure exactly where it was. Time was moving fast, her needs urgent, and the pain must have been unimaginable. She might waste precious time searching for it. Then other frenzied thoughts surged through her mind. She could find paper and pen and leave a note. Saying what, she wasn’t sure, but attesting to what had happened, if she didn’t survive. Then she started to the kitchen in the corner room. She opened the door to the kitchen and heard a noise—someone was trying to come in the back door of the kitchen. Just as she entered the kitchen door she heard the man trying to enter the house through the kitchen window, then saw him climbing through a window at the screened-in back porch. All she saw was his leg and knee. He was coming after her! Her only thought was to get away as fast as she could. Her home was no longer a sanctuary.
Terrified, throwing caution to the wind and blinded by blood spurting from her wounds, she ran back, half stumbling, into the bedroom, through a passage way, then another bedroom, and through the living room, frantically flung open the front door and ran pell-mell out of her home into the yard, into the darkness, down the driveway, and headed for the highway. Dressed only in her nightgown, by then saturated with blood, and barefoot, she left a bloody trail in the house. Hardly aware of the rough surfaces her bare feet trod, she crossed the highway, then the railroad tracks.
Oblivious to her condition and dominated by the greatest fear she had ever known, she dedicated all of her energies to escaping. She had to get over to her sister and brother-in-law Betty and Jeff Allen, who lived almost directly across the highway. Approximately two hundred yards away, they were her closest and most obvious sources of protection. Was he behind her? Would he shoot her again? Would he kill her? Her overriding thoughts were of escape.
She hadn’t seen the man at all, only his leg poking through the kitchen window, had no idea what he looked like.
It was the beginning of a night of terror for Katie Starks.
After shooting her, the killer ran along the side of the house and around to the rear of the house and bounded up the steps. Then he entered the screened porch and broke into the house through the kitchen window. He wasted no time gaining entry. Though his primary goal had become finishing off the only witness, he paused long enough in the house to survey his work before pursuing Katie farther. He stopped for a moment before Starks’s body, staring down at what he had wrought with his own hands. Then he headed out of the room to the front. The brief halt may have given Katie a few more minutes’ headway. By then, seeing that she had fled, his own thoughts turned to escape. There was no time to search for her in the dark and compromise his safety. The hunter could become the hunted—fast—if things went awry, and they had.
Upon reaching the Allen house, Katie’s expectations were dashed. There was no light in the house. She stumbled to the front porch, called out, and knocked on the door, frantic with fear. No response. No one home. She was farther from help than she’d realized.
She was not the sort to give up without her strongest effort. The Praters! she thought. Somebody must be home there. She stepped carefully off the Allens’ front porch and, her struggle for survival overcoming her fatigue, started running toward the home of A. V. Prater, whose house was about fifty yards from the Allen home.
Reaching the Praters’ home, she knocked on the door and called for help. She was bleeding profusely and feeling weaker by the second.
The family was home. Prater rushed to the door, switched on the light, recognized Katie immediately, and seized his rifle and fired it from the front porch into the air to signal neighbors. Elmer Taylor heard the shot and rushed to the scene.
“Bring your car, Elmer,” Prater yelled at Taylor. “Mrs. Starks has been shot!”
They rushed her to Texarkana, to Michael Meagher Hospital just east of the state line. Easing Katie in the front seat and the Praters and their baby in the back, Taylor lost no time in covering the ten miles. Katie turned to the driver and handed him one of her dislodged teeth, this one with a gold filling, which she had clutched in her hand during her escape, for safekeeping. She had spat it out into her hand. Katie slumped forward in the front seat, in a semi-conscious state during the entire trip to the city. She had been losing blood the whole time. Her nightgown was soaked. Several of her lower teeth had been shot out. They drove into the Emergency entrance to the hospital. Taylor and Prater jumped out of the car to get help.
Rushed into the hospital, she gained true sanctuary for the first time. A physician scurried in. The bullet striking her right cheek had emerged from behind the left ear. The bullet to her jaw had broken the lower jaw and lodged under her tongue. It was a miracle she was even able to talk. While the doctor was amazed she hadn’t bled to death, even more striking was that her pulse was normal, no evidence of shock. These indicators boded well for her prognosis. She was whisked into the operating room. Although in critical condition, she was no longer in the dark, barefoot and bleeding, with a cold-blooded gunman on her trail. Her husband was dead, but she was safe in a hospital with physicians and nurses to care for her. Nothing was assured, but now she had a chance to fight for her life, with proper medical assistance.
Troopers Tackett and Boyd had crossed the Red River bridge and were back in Miller County when the call came on their patrol car’s radio. They’d already passed the Starks home, about five miles from the Red River bridge, on their way back to T
exarkana. The old model car they’d intended to check was gone. Tough luck. We should have stopped then, they agreed.
The police radio message was somber. A shooting at the home of Virgil Starks on Highway 67. Starks dead, Mrs. Starks critically wounded. Another murder! Tackett turned the car around in the middle of the highway and stomped the accelerator. He and Boyd were the first officers on the scene.
He remembered the old-model car they’d seen parked in the vicinity of the Starks home. He worked it over in his mind. That must have been the killer’s car. It was a disquieting revelation. They had passed around the time of the shootings or shortly afterward. From that moment he believed they had missed an opportunity to either prevent the murder or to apprehend the culprit. They never changed their opinions. The driver of the car, they were certain, had shot the Starks couple.
The lights were still on in the farmhouse. The troopers went inside, guns drawn to be sure. Mr. Starks was slumped over in death in the blood-soaked chair. The first things they saw were a blood-stained floor and muddy footprints. Smoke filled the room where Starks’s body lay, stinging the nostrils. Starks’s armchair smoldered from fire caused by a short-circuit of the electric heating pad. The victim’s blood soaked into the chair and onto the floor. The body, however, was not burned, while smoke swirled all about and from between his legs. Within seconds they ascertained that Starks was beyond help.
They had to work fast. Numerous other officers would be converging on the death house in a very short time. They had only a few precious minutes in which to rope off the house and surrounding area in order to preserve any possible clues that specialists might find. In accepted police procedure, they began carefully isolating possible clues in the house.
Their efforts were almost for naught. Minutes later the house and grounds were inundated by lawmen from both sides of the state line, some from as far as thirty miles away. Everyone raced to the scene as soon as the emergency message went out. “Hundreds of officers,” said Tackett, in a bit of exaggeration, swarmed in. They couldn’t control the outsiders and, according to Tackett, the incoming officers “stomped out all possible evidence.”
Soon it would be impossible to preserve any important clues the killer may have left behind, as lawmen got in each other’s way.
Chaos and poor liaison continued to characterize the investigations.
Early Friday evening, Sheriff W. E. “Elvie” Davis, a stout forty-five-year-old cigar-smoking veteran lawman, was sitting with Chief Deputy Tillman Johnson discussing what the weekend was likely to bring. Davis, former police chief on the Arkansas side who had started out as a rural schoolteacher, had been elected sheriff in 1938. Though a good speaker on the stump, he was shy in many ways and dodged reporters, usually assigning that duty to his chief deputy.
Johnson had just returned to Texarkana and his old job on May 1 after receiving his discharge from the Army. He had been drafted in January 1944 as a private and sent to Camp Chaffee, near Fort Smith, Arkansas. He advanced fast, became a tech sergeant and acting first sergeant of his outfit. He was to recall later, “I got shot at more at home in Miller County than I did in the Army!”
In the Army, Johnson often went home on weekends and had kept up with the Texarkana murders. Davis, like his counterpart in Bowie County, sported a small staff—seven in all, including the sheriff and the jailer—to cover the entire county.
When the city desk sergeant called on Friday night, Johnson answered the phone. Davis, Johnson, and Deputy Bill Scott left immediately for the Starks farm.
“By time Elvie and I got there it was a three-ring circus,” said Johnson. “It was a carnival. There were already a lot of people, including officers, around when we arrived. Max and Charley were there. The city police were already there. Buzz Hallett and Dewey Presley from the FBI were there. Neighbors had started pouring in.
“The house was wide open. Soon people were tromping all over. I tried to seal off the scene, but by then much had probably been lost.”
Scurrying about outside, Johnson first sought to cordon off the crime scene with whatever material he could find. He located some telephone wire around the house and stretched it around to keep the curious at bay. The word had gotten out; soon people began collecting, gawking. Other lawmen began arriving. The sheriff’s men left the inside of the house to the FBI agents to the extent they could. Outside, Johnson found hulls from the bullets used to shoot the couple and saved them as evidence. Three empty cartridge hulls from a .22 caliber gun were collected.
Immediately a blockade was thrown up on U.S. Highway 67 for several miles both northeast and southwest of the murder scene. Several men found in the general vicinity were picked up for questioning. Occupants of cars believed to have been in the area at the time of the shootings were also picked up.
While the other officers rushed about the house and grounds, Johnson and Bill Scott headed west from the house, to see if anyone in the community knew anything. They knocked on the doors of neighbors. They briefed them on the crimes. The neighbors were horrified. They could imagine no possible motive, knew no enemies that Starks may have had. His reputation was excellent.
There were a lot of hitchhikers around Texarkana; anybody out of the ordinary automatically qualified as a suspect. They would sort them out later. Time was of the essence. Better to detain an innocent man temporarily than to let the guilty one slip through.
Several men in the general vicinity were picked up. Tenants lived some distance behind the Starks house. In each of the two houses there were two men, who worked on the nearby farms, and their families. Without ceremony Johnson and Scott seized the men, to question them later. It was no time for calm reasoning. If anyone even faintly qualified as suspect, he was held.
There was no way of knowing from whence the killer had come or where he had gone. Within hours deputies arrested a dozen men, took them to jail for safekeeping until they had time to check out their stories. Over the weekend three men remained in lockup. It didn’t mean they were strong suspects; they had only been near enough to the Starks home to justify rounding up.
Johnson and Scott didn’t go inside the Starks house that night. But just about everybody else did.
Sheriff Davis headed for Michael Meagher Hospital to question Katie Starks.
Officers inside the house found a scene of rural tranquility violently and abruptly shattered. The dining-room table was covered with material and patterns that Katie Starks had been using to cut out a dress. Money in the house was not bothered. Katie’s purse lay on a bed in full view, containing both money and jewels. Nothing seemed to be missing from the house, with no evidence of ransacking or burglarizing. This did not necessarily mean the intruder hadn’t intended to rob the house and its owners; if so, his plans apparently had gone awry the moment Katie ran to the telephone. From that point the killer apparently concentrated his efforts on eliminating her and, that failing, on escaping himself. If he had simply wanted to kill Starks, and nothing else, he had ample time to shoot and run immediately. But he had lingered until she had appeared.
They found what some believed to be the killer’s bloody footprints on the linoleum floor. He had gone into the sitting room, apparently inspected Starks’s body, then stepped into a pool of blood nearby. The Texarkana Gazette that Starks had been reading lay on the floor, splattered with blood.
The killer’s lingering by his victim’s body, while Katie was fleeing, pointed toward his desire to survey the product of his work, like a boy checking out an animal he has hunted and killed, not to be sure it was dead but to examine the result of his sport and handiwork
Three clues remained. The killer had dropped a red flashlight outside in the hedge beneath the window from which he took aim. He had probably set it down on the ground when he’d aimed the weapon, then forgot to retrieve it when Katie’s entrance threw him into a panic. The .22 bullets and shells were collected. The bullets were .22 caliber but too battered to identify definitively. The cases apparently came from
an automatic or semi-automatic weapon because of the closeness of the holes in the window with each pair of shots, believed to be from an old model .22 Colt Woodsman. The gun was unlikely to have been a pump or bolt-action rifle, which would have created a different shot pattern. Based on their accuracy, many officers felt the shots came from a rifle, but they couldn’t be sure it wasn’t a .22 pistol, instead. The bloody footprint only provided an approximate clue but helped track the killer’s steps—and were the first concrete physical markers the killer had left behind thus far.
The flashlight along with the tracks provided the first tangible clues in the six weeks of murder. The flashlight would be checked for fingerprints. It was a two-cell light with a black barrel, red-rimmed around the glass. It wasn’t much, but it was more than had been left behind in the earlier cases.
Was the shooting connected to the earlier ones in Texas? Miller County Sheriff Davis hedged his comments. Not definitely, for a different gun was used, a different caliber. But he didn’t close the door on the possibility.
“It is possible that the killer is one and the same man.”
The flashlight was turned over to the FBI agents. Fingerprints weren’t likely to be found on the flashlight itself, but hopes rose that a print might turn up on the batteries therein. Agents Hallett and Presley walked carefully through the house. Although it might be difficult to match definitively with a shoe, the man’s track in Katie’s bloody path was hard evidence. The track seemed to be about a size 10. The retouched shoe sole apparently had been loose and had been sliced off about the place that a man would cut it off in order to half-sole it. The corner of the cut-off sole had folded back, leaving a triangular imprint.
Footprints appeared to have gone out the front door, down to the edge of the highway. He apparently had run about two hundred yards along the highway, crossed to the other side, and continued beside the railroad tracks a quarter mile away, where Tackett and Boyd had spotted the parked car. Making a plaster cast of the track in the house was out of the question because of its condition, so Hallett took the next best step. He cut out that portion of the linoleum floor as possible evidence.
The Phantom Killer: Unlocking the Mystery of the Texarkana Serial Murders: The Story of a Town in Terror Page 12
