The teenaged Mary Jeanne insisted that the February 22 attack on her and Jimmy Hollis was the first in the series of crimes committed by the Phantom. She was sure of it beyond any doubt. She still did not understand why officers didn’t believe her when she told them the man was black, an assessment with which Hollis had disagreed. But, she added, Texas Ranger Joe Thompson had flown to Frederick after the Martin-Booker murders and questioned her again.
“I believe now that the officers connect all of the crimes,” she said.
She was trying to lead a normal life, but for the first time in her life, her aunt said, Mary Jeanne was “extremely nervous” and would neither sleep in a room alone nor go upstairs by herself. “And in her dreams,” wrote Holland, “Mary Jeanne sees her attacker almost every night.”
The following morning, Holland’s story dominated the front page.
MARY JEANNE LAREY DECLARES MAN WHO ATTEMPTED TO ATTACK HER ON FEB. 22 WAS PHANTOM
A week after the Starks shootings, the traffic death toll remained stuck at fifteen. None had died from traffic in May, with thirty-one days since the last death. A total of fifty-six had been injured for the year, three in May. Gunshots had claimed more lives than traffic accidents over the past two months, a dramatic turnabout. The Phantom, competing with thousands of motorists, seemed to be winning the death game, hands down.
A current movie title featuring Richard Arlen reflected the rising tensions, titled The Phantom Speaks.
CHAPTER 12
A MEDIA INVASION
I have arrived in Texarkana, the home of the Phantom killer. I have talked to a newspaperman named Graves. I am quartered at the Grim Hotel, and the hair is rising on my neck.”
Kenneth Dixon, a popular columnist for the International News Service, wrote the most widely quoted lead about the Phantom case. A master of suspense like Alfred Hitchcock couldn’t have produced a more tantalizing opening. It took an outsider like Dixon to see anything unusual about the landmark hotel or the surname of a respected local family.
The 250-room hotel, a source of civic pride, eight stories high with a rooftop garden, was named for the Pennsylvania-born banker William Rhoads Grim, dead since 1925.
Dixon, a veteran war correspondent who’d covered the European theater, arrived in town by bus from Kansas City. Most of the incoming news people used bus or train service, if they were beyond easy driving range. Sports editor Louis “Swampy” Graves escorted Dixon to the hotel, across the street from the newspaper office. Taking care of out-of-town reporters was a major assignment.
No other story had ever brought so much attention from the national news media. Reporters checked in from New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Miami. “They were intrigued not only with the Phantom and the Texas Rangers sent here by the governor,” said editor Mahaffey, “but they were gripped by the mass hysteria our headlines had created in the city during March, April, and May.”
Incoming news people added another dimension to the developing chaos. Mahaffey, serving as liaison, as he put it, “between the invading press and the local community,” was to see more than he’d expected. “I didn’t have to worry about the phantom killer,” Mahaffey said years later. “I had a staff of pretty fair newspaper hands who were taking care of him—and in spades. My problem was the horde of newspaper and radio people that came to town from the big cities.”
He subsequently reported his experience to his peers at the American Society of Newspaper Editors in Washington. “The mass media descends upon Texarkana,” he said, “and all hell breaks loose. If some of the reporters and photographers sent to us had not been so old I would figure they were your rankest cubs. They had very bad manners, couldn’t hold their whiskey, and they made passes at my girl reporters!
“One young squirt from one of the Western papers had the audacity to complain to me about the fact that he wasn’t making much time with my girl reporters. He seemed to be totally unaware of the possibility that the girls were being true to me.” The audience laughed.∗
Because of the preponderance of female reporters Mahaffey hired during the war, fellow editors called him “The Phil Spitalny of Newspapers,” referring to the director of the popular “All-Girls Orchestra” of that time.
Many reporters, he complained, weren’t content merely to cover the murders but wanted “desperately” to become a part of the story, perhaps even solve the case themselves.
“The mass media proceeded to get themselves into all kinds of trouble. Two of them had a fight in the corridor of the Grim Hotel and got jugged for being drunk and disturbing the peace. Another was picked up for drunk driving. The officers found another in a parked car with one of my girl reporters—the one that was not being true to me. They said they were laying a trap for the Phantom. A likely story!”
Bob Carpenter of the Mutual Broadcasting System in New York City had arrived in Texarkana before INS reporter Ken Dixon, eventually doing a coast-to-coast broadcast hookup. The Blue Network, as it was also known, covered 315 stations in the nationwide broadcast.
Time and Life both sent a reporter and photographer. They sought several types of pictures: a long shot of Texarkana, Texas; long shot down “Fatal Lane” (“as it is now called”) with Texas Rangers and officers from both sides simulating the investigation around the murder site at Spring Lake Park; three or four pictures of the victims, “being held so that camera can make the Closeup of the gruesome condition”; Captain Gonzaullas—“and his staff who have been placed in charge and to coordinate the search for the phantom killer . . . Gonzaullas giving instructions to the men, in front of a State Police Map—laying out the block system. . . . Whatever else Captain Gonzaullas can suggest that would help the buildup to a Dramatic Story. . . .”
All the reporter and photographer—and local cooperating officers—had to do was fill in the blanks.
A trumpeting headline in Life’s June 10, 1946, issue proclaimed to the world what the local residents already knew.
TEXARKANA TERROR
SOUTHERN CITY IS PANICKED BY KILLER
WHO SHOOTS ACCORDING TO SCHEDULE
The article described the city as “tight in the grip of mass terror.” A two-page spread recounted the five murders, commenting that after the latest shooting “housewives in mounting hysteria were barricading themselves inside their homes and rigging up homemade alarms of pots and pans and string which their husbands kept tripping over. Friday passed, then Saturday and Sunday, without a murder. Texarkanians breathed a sigh of relief. But it was a small one. The Phantom was still at large.”
The article did not exaggerate. One of the accompanying photographs shows a woman with two little boys leaving their imposing two-story brick Georgian-style home to stay at the city’s downtown Hotel Grim during her attorney husband’s absence from the city. The woman was Mrs. Janet Sheppard Arnold and her sons, ten-year-old Richard S. Arnold and four-year-old Morris S. “Buzz” Arnold, each of whom later would become a federal judge. Eventually Richard and Morris Arnold served together on the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals based in St. Louis, Morris appointed by a Republican, Richard by a Democrat. Each was to be mentioned as a possible Supreme Court nominee. She was the daughter of the late U.S. Senator Morris Sheppard (D-Texas); her husband, the prominent attorney Richard L. Arnold. Each morning they would return to the family home. Less affluent residents bolted their doors, nailed down their windows, and cowered in the dark, sleeping fitfully, praying for the dawn, greeting each new day with eyes red-rimmed and puffy. If the man of the house was out of town, his family spent the night with relatives or neighbors. What there was of a tourist business dried up. Travelers didn’t want to spend the night in Texarkana with the Phantom still at large.
The city was under siege by both print and radio media. Colonel Homer P. Garrison, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, telegrammed Captain Gonzaullas:
UNIVERSAL NEWS REEL COMPANY IS SENDING CAMERAMAN JIMMY LEDERER TO TEXARKANA TO MAKE SOME BACKGROUND SHOTS. ANY COURTESY EX
TENDED TO HIM WILL BE APPRECIATED.
Gonzaullas’s boss in Austin need not have worried that his man would snub a newsreel camera likely to further burnish the reputation of the colorful Ranger force. Gonzaullas had had many years of experience in dealing with the press and radio and relished it. An Associated Press reporter—among others—quoted Gonzaullas, his eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep, as saying of the Phantom, “I’d give that fellow two shots at me if I could get one shot at him!” He wasn’t likely to have the opportunity. The Phantom didn’t go in for dramatic Old West high-noon showdowns. He preferred the dark, with unarmed and unsuspecting victims.
Sensationalism whipped the flames of fear. Much of the rank speculation was simply false, including an out-of-town news report that a “sex maniac” had mutilated the female victims’ bodies, had dabbled his hands in blood, neither of which had happened but which many in the town believed. Locally, gunshot and prowler calls turned out to be cars backfiring or a prowling cat thrashing about in a garbage can. A more hopeful local rumor had the killer in jail, guarded by Texas Rangers with submachine guns. Reporters, as well as the public, were caught up in the frenzy. Nor were veteran newspaper people immune to the scare they had helped generate. Mahaffey himself, a veteran at covering gore-and-guns stories, personified the reality of a region on edge. He could hardly sleep. One Saturday night, a pounding at his front door brought him face to face with a dreaded crisis.
“Let me in there! Let me in there!” came a man’s raucous shouts.
Aroused from a light sleep, Mahaffey and wife Ruth exchanged tense looks. They left their bed without another word. He grabbed his son’s baseball bat. “Who’s there?” Mahaffey called out in a quavering voice from the kitchen. “Get away from that door!”
It was a false alarm, but a heart-thumping one. The instigator turned out to be a harmless meandering old drunk, lost and confused, looking for his home. The drunk was lucky. A man armed with more than a baseball bat might have blown him away first and not given him a chance to identify himself and assuage fears.
The Phantom story spread to far reaches of the globe and to Texarkana’s servicemen overseas. Joe Forgy, with the Army of Occupation in Germany, read about it in Stars and Stripes. Don Preston, a soldier stationed in Luxembourg, learned of it in another national magazine. Henry Jackson, with the Navy in the Far East, saw a Texarkana dateline heading the story in the English-language Shanghai Evening Mercury. Marines and sailors found details in other international and West Coast newspapers.
Texarkana was on the map, for a reason nobody wanted to brag about.
Uplifting events, with crowds, offered welcome respites. Bluff, hearty Charles B. Driscoll, syndicated columnist of “New York Day by Day,” flew into town for several festive days capped by a speech to a sold-out audience. By then he’d read of the local bad news in New York newspapers. As if to dispel residents’ jitters, he said, “New York papers just would not go to press at all if there were not at least five murders a day.” His friends in the Big Apple had warned him of the risks in Texarkana, but he shrugged it off. “These Texarkana crimes will soon be solved and the guilty person apprehended.” His optimism failed to infect the crimes’ investigators.
Tension radiated throughout the region, as far as a hundred miles or more.
In Lewisville, Arkansas, in another county, Sheriff Ocie Smith Griffin received calls almost every night from those who insisted they’d seen the Phantom. Even his daughter Jo, home from college, joined the Nervous Nellies. One night while sleeping peacefully in her upstairs bedroom, she was awakened by a noise. She thought it came from their old wooden garage. Peering out, she saw a man headed for the garage. She raced downstairs and alerted her father. “The Phantom is in our garage!” Unconvinced, he finally agreed to shoot the Phantom so all could get some sleep. He opened the front door and shot into the sky. In the next instant, the sheriff’s car, which had been parked in the garage, barreled out, into a deep ditch. Two men jumped out and sprinted to the woods. They were trying to steal his car. After Jo saved his automobile, Sheriff Griffin stopped calling her a Nervous Nellie.
Twice as far off in Texas, Phantomania also took its toll. The Amerson family out of Mt. Pleasant, sixty miles from Texarkana, felt vulnerable when the father worked a night shift at a refinery. Concerned over her seven children, Mary Amerson draped quilts over the windows, propped a chair under the doorknob. Nobody stepped outside after dark. In Little Rock, 165 miles away, Dottie Morrissey recalled, people were “scared to death” of the Phantom.
As panic continued unabated, Mahaffey became convinced that something—anything that might work—had to be done to reduce the mounting hysteria and foster stability. Radio was king of the airways. Everybody tuned in. Why not let a major authority figure provide reassuring words to the community? Who better to deliver the message than Lone Wolf Gonzaullas? Mahaffey arranged for an appearance on Radio Station KCMC, the Voice of Texarkana, situated upstairs in the Gazette Building. He would frame the questions to the legendary figure, leading to a soothing effect on their listeners, who would realize that safety encircled them.
Soon after the introduction, the editor eased into his pivotal question.
“Captain Gonzaullas, what would be your advice to the people of Texarkana who are so frightened at this time?”
He settled back in his chair, a benign smile brightening his face, to admire the famed lawman’s thoughtful, steadying observation that Rangers and other lawmen had the situation under control, were on guard twenty-four hours a day, and could assure them that the killer would not, could not strike again.
“Well,” said Gonzaullas, “my advice would be for everyone to lock up their houses as tight as they can and to oil up their guns and see if they are loaded or get ’em a double-barreled shotgun. Put them out of the reach of children. Do not use them unless it’s necessary, but if you believe it is, do not hesitate to shoot!”
Mahaffey’s smile faded faster than it had appeared. It was the exact opposite of what he thought would have come out of Lone Wolf’s mouth. A fresh wave of hysteria whisked through the studio. He quickly changed the subject.
Mahaffey soon confirmed what he had already suspected, that the notoriety of the case, hyped to a great extent by the local press as well as by those from out of town, was doing great harm to his city, from the virtually complete disappearance of the tourism industry, to a drying up of night entertainment, as well as nervous daylight shopping. Flashy journalism, coming from a variety of directions, had created a stigma and exacerbated fears.
At the annual meeting of the Associated Press Managing Editors that year, an editor from New England inspected Mahaffey’s badge and said, “Oh, Texarkana! One of the survivors, I presume.”
Another editor friend from the East called Mahaffey one day and began his conversation, “Hey, Jake, anybody still alive down there?”
CHAPTER 13
LAW AND DISORDER
Without a clue of any kind these men have been called upon to solve one of the worst tragedies that has struck the south in many years. These men are working day and night.”
The Time-Life instructions for the story, though dispatched from far-off New York, framed the plight of the investigators as accurately as anyone could have.
Indeed, “these men” were doing exactly that, with a variety of results, not always up to the expectations of a terrified public.
A culture of fear, fanned by the media, enveloped the region. The citizenry girded as for war. Weapons and blinds sold briskly. By the Friday after the Starks shooting, there were no window shades and few Venetian blinds left in Texarkana stores. One store manager said sales of blinds were up fifty percent over normal. Other customers frantically bought grilles for windows, window sash locks, screen door hooks, night latches, and other protective devices. Classified ads documented the emergency: Watch dogs wanted. Watch dogs for sale.
“Texarkanians were nervous and jumpy,” reported the Daily News, the Gazette’s afte
rnoon sister paper. “In their minds most of them pictured the killer as a sex fiend with an insatiable lust for blood.”
Police busily responded to calls from widely scattered neighborhoods and remote locations. Reports of gunshots in the night often turned out to be backfiring automobiles. Delivery boys like Hayden Coe dreaded going out after dark but had no choice. Dortha Hale Stone lived with her married sister; for safety, five slept in the same room. Her brother-in-law kept a gun inches away. Bill Blocker was one of hundreds who tried to buy guns. His long-barreled .38 Special was back-ordered and arrived too late to do him any good. When Jim Boyd, Jr., took Charlsie Schoeppey to the Texas High prom in May, they and other couples were escorted in and later out by officers, with a warning: “If you go out to eat after the dance, go to Two States Coffee Shop.” Open around the clock, with police usually present, it was a safe public venue.
Only dawn brought relief—until the next night.
Few behaved as if immune, but residents of one house on County Avenue in Arkansas stood out. Curtains on the large picture window were never pulled at night. You could see the occupants walking to and fro, while their neighbors hovered behind tightly bolted doors and darkened windows. Either they felt safe, when thousands did not, or they simply had not succumbed to the hysteria that cloaked their neighbors. They were in the tiniest of minorities.
Uneasy residents bombarded the police with prowler calls. Most complaints were readily explained and nonthreatening, but each one had to be checked out. One call seemed to be the real McCoy—two bodies in a front yard on County Avenue, a well-traveled street. Policemen, brandishing guns, closed in on two Hereford heifers. Somehow escaped from a cattle truck downtown, the cattle had plodded along till they decided to bed down for the night. Residents seeing white faces in the dark on the lawn had assumed the worst.
The Phantom Killer: Unlocking the Mystery of the Texarkana Serial Murders: The Story of a Town in Terror Page 15
