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

by James Presley

  Other incidents were less easily explained. On the Texas side one Saturday morning, a stranger approached an eleven-year-old girl on the sidewalk. He offered to take her home. She ignored him and kept walking. He drove away. Police advised parents to warn their children to steer clear of all strangers. It was a sensible policy.

  Suspects turned up in almost every city, no matter how far off. Four days after the Starks shootings, a white gunman at Kilgore, Texas, over a hundred miles away, forced a black motorist to drive him to Lufkin, another East Texas town. He brandished two pistols and claimed to be the Phantom killer. Releasing his victim, the gunman apparently stole a car and escaped. Captain Gonzaullas wasn’t impressed. He didn’t think the Phantom would boast about his crimes or let his victim go.

  Ultimately, more than a thousand suspects—1,300, by one count—were checked out and dismissed. Numerous enough to populate a small village, the detained or sought men often had little in common: an escaped prisoner of war in Arkansas; a knife-wielding assailant in Oklahoma; a carnival worker from South Dakota arrested in Oklahoma City after buying a bus ticket to Texarkana; a number of war veterans interrogated for various reasons.

  The dragnet spread. A twenty-one-year-old Air Corps veteran in Los Angeles feared he might have been involved. He had been in Texarkana, had been in a coma, but was soon cleared.

  Murders elsewhere earned scrutiny for any similarity to the Texarkana crimes. When a young couple was shot to death in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, a connection appeared likely. The murder weapon was a .32 automatic. The MO was the same as the Texas double slayings, in which a .32 Colt automatic with six lands and grooves and a left-hand twist was used. The Florida murder weapon, though, was a .32 Savage automatic with six lands and grooves and a right-hand twist. Close, but no match.

  Officers received offers of “help” on every hand: written, telephoned, even telegraphed, and mostly going to Gonzaullas. One man with “psychic powers” quoted thirteen chapters from First Corinthians before promising to lower an “orantal boom” on the killer if lawmen would donate the “bounty.” None provided tangible leads that officers could take to heart.

  Certain legal activities registered a marked decline. In Miller County’s May 22 report, only three couples applied for marriage licenses, with four of the individuals from out of town, half of those from other states. Only one divorce suit was filed in the period: Peggy Tresnick vs. Stanley Tresnick. The couple had married in 1944. The soldier husband, from Pennsylvania, had gone overseas and had never returned to her after the war. She claimed desertion.

  Crime, unlike legal filings, persisted. Early on Friday, May 24, three weeks after the Starks murder, J. E. Andrews from the Texas side parked his 1941 Chevrolet two-door sedan in front of the State National Bank just on the Arkansas side downtown. It was 8:45 A.M. When he came back a half hour later, his car was gone. Early morning. Downtown. Broad daylight. The gall of the two men who had tried to steal the sheriff’s car was not in short supply amongst thieves, who perhaps even felt emboldened with law enforcement so distracted with their hunt for the Phantom.

  As the case remained unsolved amid a tense populace, lawmen became a target of citizen scorn. Officers weren’t trying hard enough, some believed. Aware that officers of all jurisdictions frequently collected for meals and coffee at a popular downtown café just under the sheriff’s office, one cynic predicted, “If the Phantom ever walks into John’s Place, they’ll catch him!”

  Another critic late one night strolled into the café crowded with pistol-totin’, Western-bedecked lawmen. He took one look and hooted:

  “Ten thousand dollars worth of cowboy boots and big white hats—and fifteen cents’ worth of brains!”

  He was fortunate to escape arrest for public drunkenness.

  As befitted the most colorful lawman with the highest profile and a take-charge personality, Ranger Captain Gonzaullas generated the largest share of anecdotes, many of them, never publicly revealed, unlikely to enhance his image.

  Editor Mahaffey termed Gonzaullas “my principal headache.”

  “He didn’t have time to hunt for the Phantom—he was too busy giving out interviews and trying to run the Gazette,” said Mahaffey. “All the other officers working on the case became rather jealous of Lone Wolf and complained bitterly every time his picture appeared in the paper.”

  Newsman Graves, who perceived Gonzaullas as warmhearted and sincere (“It was hard to believe he’d killed twenty or so men”), agreed that the Texarkana assignment was not the best use of his abilities. “He was not a detective,” said Graves. “He was better on horseback and shooting.”

  Tillman Johnson, the Miller County chief deputy, held a similar view. “Whenever Gonzaullas came down the stairs from his hotel room, he called for the press. He was a showman, and he had a reputation for being a killer. So the press all followed him.

  “He didn’t do any real police work himself. He’d get in that car and ride around, ask a lot of questions about what the other officers had found. Then he’d release it to the press like it was his information. After a while, some officers got to where they wouldn’t tell him anything.”

  One day while the investigation was at white heat, Bill Presley was driving on the Texas side with Gonzaullas. Tillman Johnson and Max Tackett sat in the back seat.

  After they had discussed several angles to the case and some current suspects, Gonzaullas suddenly said, “I’m not going to leave Texarkana until we solve this case!”

  Johnson (“I was kind of a smart-ass back then”), fully aware of the slow, nonexistent progress of the case, piped up from the back seat. “Have you bought you a home here yet, Captain?”

  The long silence that ensued told Johnson he was in Lone Wolf’s doghouse from then on.

  As a veteran of gun battles, Gonzaullas knew how to prevent an ambush. Although he was never shot in the back in Texarkana, his preparations weren’t always flawless. He never realized that Dorothy Blanchett, agent for Texas Air Lines in the Grim Hotel lobby, kept a .45 revolver in her desk drawer each time he held news briefings a few feet in front of her. He was safe, but only she knew why. Keeping the weapon handy was standard, having nothing to do with the murder case, but to protect receipts paid the airline.

  Another day as he was walking down Pine Street near the Gazette, pleasantly chatting with reporter Ruth Bryan, she surreptitiously slipped her hand to his pearl-handled pistol, gripped the handle, gingerly lifted it from its holster, and presented it to the astonished Ranger, a playful prank its victim was loath to advertise. Fortunately for his public image, these anecdotes never saw print, nor did they diminish the magnetism he exerted on young reporters. He continued to be “good copy.”

  Resentment toward Gonzaullas boiled over in the days after the Starks murder. J. Q. Mahaffey was at the Miller County sheriff’s office, talking with trooper Max Tackett, when an urgent telephone call came. Following the shooting, the Starks home had been put off limits. But just now, a neighbor reported seeing strange lights in the farmhouse.

  Tackett dashed to his car, Mahaffey close behind. They sped to the scene. As police cars converged on the farmhouse, Tackett got out, joined by three other policemen. As Mahaffey crouched behind one of the police cars, unwilling to test anyone’s aim, Tackett and the patrolmen, guns drawn, fanned out toward the house.

  Tackett yelled out, “WE’VE GOT THE HOUSE SURROUNDED. YOU MAY AS WELL GIVE UP. COME OUT WITH YOUR HANDS UP!”

  The front door to the house opened slowly, tentatively, and a head, bedecked by a large white hat, cautiously peered out.

  “Hold your fire!” came a man’s voice.

  Mahaffey stood up from behind the car to see Lone Wolf Gonzaullas himself emerge, accompanied by a female photographer from Life and Time.

  “What are you doing here?” Tackett asked, more than a little peeved.

  “I was just reenacting the crime for her,” replied the Ranger, rather sheepishly, “and she was taking some pictures.” The flash
bulbs accounted for the strange lights seen in the house.

  Tackett exploded with exasperation. He turned to the editor and shouted at the top of his voice, for the benefit of all within earshot, “Mahaffey, you can quote me as saying that the Phantom murders will never be solved until Texarkana gets rid of the big city press and the Texas Rangers!”

  The minor league Texarkana Bears became a major beneficiary of the troubled times. Fans could forget the Phantom for a few hours, find safety among thousands, and be entertained. Owner Dick Burnett offered a bonus: hard-to-find beer, out-of-state Griesedieck, from St. Louis. A talented club kept the fans excited—southpaw Jinx Poindexter, who had pitched for Connie Mack’s Philadelphia A’s; fireballer Vallie Eaves and power hitter Vernon “General Gawge” Washington, both former Chicago White Sox players; and Bit McCulloch, Hal Simpson, Hal Van Pelt, and Gabby Lusk. Cold beer, hot baseball, cheering people all around you: the games drew more than at much larger Little Rock. Once the game was over, people seemed reluctant to head home.

  Summer brought a cautious return to “normal.” On June 17, eight were injured in a car collision in Miller County. Two days later, the heralded Louis-Conn rematch at Yankee Stadium ended with Joe Louis keeping his heavyweight title by knocking out challenger Billy Conn in eight rounds. A series of weddings followed in the Texarkana area, some with links to the murders of the spring: Robert M. Hollis (beating victim Jim Hollis’s brother) and Lorraine Fairchild (with whom he’d double-dated that terrible night); Howard Giles (the new Texarkana, Arkansas, fingerprint specialist) and Ossie Jean Mote; Eleanor Bernice Griffin (Richard Griffin’s sister) and Jesse Alva Proctor; and Bill Blocker (who’d bought a new revolver that arrived when the worst was over) and Wanda Ann Wood. Additionally, Peggy Tresnick, nee Stevens, who had sued her soldier husband on grounds of desertion, received her divorce on June 27. The spring’s traumatic events had claimed their victims and left long-lasting scars, but life was still moving on.

  Stakeouts designed to nab the Phantom became mostly dull exercises in which tedium dominated, but a few patrols produced the unexpected.

  One night deputy Tillman Johnson, a tall, cool sort of man who himself had been shot at in the line of duty, was patrolling with trooper Charley Boyd and came upon a couple parked on the Sugar Hill Road north of town. Johnson got out and walked up to the car. Boyd remained in the police car to cover Johnson. The couple cuddled in the back seat of the parked car.

  Johnson identified himself and proceeded to lecture them. “There’s a killer loose. Aren’t you scared to be parked out here at night?”

  “You’re the one that ought to be scared, Mister,” said the girl. “It’s a good thing you told me who you are. I was ready for the killer.”

  She’d held a .25 caliber pistol on him all the time.

  Finding lonely, isolated sites for stakeouts was no problem. The rural environs of Texarkana abounded with them.

  One dark night, Bill Presley and two colleagues drove an unmarked coupe onto a dirt lane branching off Highway 67, a few miles west of town. It was a perfect setting for a love-struck young couple seeking privacy—or for a would-be killer stalking them. They parked the car with two store dummies inside, propped snugly by each other to simulate cozy sweethearts. The officers slipped into the grass and bushes nearby and quietly waited. All were heavily armed. Presley clutched a submachine gun. They waited. And waited. And waited.

  About an hour later, a car turned off the highway onto the dirt road. It moved slowly, then on past. Yards ahead, it stopped. It had run into a dead-end, as the officers knew it would. The suspect car turned around.

  “We’ve got him now!” Presley whispered excitedly to the others.

  As the car moved slowly back to the set-up, the officers as one rose up, pointing guns. “Get out, with your hands up!” Presley shouted.

  The car stopped. Out came the driver and two women, visibly shaken.

  The driver, his hands hoisted as high as they would go and his lips twitching, identified himself, his wife, and another woman. One woman’s legs were quivering. They were lost.

  It was the nearest officers came to capturing anyone that night.

  The day-and-night routines exhausted officers. None slept soundly or long. Sheriff Presley, like many others, slept in his clothes an hour or two at a stretch. Usually an immaculate dresser, he once went a week without changing clothes. One day, while talking to a friend in Boyd’s Drugs, he tried to explain the status of the investigation.

  “Well, we’ve had a lead or two, but so far we—” The sheriff’s words trailed off in midsentence. His eyes fluttered and closed. He slumped.

  “Grab him. Bill’s gone to sleep!” his friend yelled as he reached out.

  Feeling hands upon him, Presley’s red-rimmed eyes opened, surprise upon his face.

  “Every day just wore you down,” summarized Howard Giles, the Arkansas-side fingerprint specialist.

  Meanwhile, technology forged ahead. Local residents learned that on January 1, 1947, dial telephones would come to Texarkana.

  As promising as telephone technology appeared, it lagged far behind what was to come. The same was true of forensic science. Today’s crime labs make those of 1946 seem primitive by comparison. On all fronts in Texarkana, lawmen struggled. They lacked the tools available today in a major case. No computerized fingerprint searches. No refined ballistics techniques. No advanced fiber and blood analyses. No standardized crime-scene protocols to be followed without exception. No psychological and criminal profiling that the FBI and other agencies have developed to an art and science. No depth of knowledge of serial-killer behavior that has accrued over the years; it took a while to realize that they were dealing with a serial killer. Most of all, DNA studies were far in the future.

  Serial murders are perplexing under any circumstances, even today. But without the advances made over the past six decades, officers too often faced a wall. Had they benefited from today’s science, especially DNA, they might well have broken the mystery to everyone’s satisfaction.

  That said, lawmen themselves made miscues that even today would jeopardize their hard work. But if they’d known what investigators now know routinely, through training and application, they might have avoided those blunders. They might have, for instance, ordered autopsies on all the bodies, possibly disclosing evidence unseen by eyes alone, even latent fingerprints on victims’ bodies. For one thing, a proper autopsy would have recovered the bullets from Polly Ann Moore’s body. It wouldn’t have revised the cause of death, which was obvious, but other data might have surfaced. Certainly autopsies would have provided more details as to sexual abuse or rape, though FBI records do document that in the Booker case. With today’s DNA science, the semen found on her body could be compared to the DNA of any major suspect who might be arrested. At the time, there was no medical examiner to study the bodies, though a physician did ascertain that Miss Moore had not been raped. Only justices of the peace ruled the cause of death. DNA evidence also could have been collected from the cigarette butts left near the car parked across from the Starks home.

  Officers, often with an assist from good citizens, muddled the picture. This was especially true in the Griffin-Moore case. The crime scene, already compromised by rain, was left unprotected, to be trampled by the feet of the morbidly curious. Compounding the matter, no care was taken to isolate Richard Griffin’s car from being touched by the gawkers; police themselves pushed the car by hand, adding their own prints and possibly smudging or erasing suspect evidence.

  In the Martin-Booker murders, the crime scene was preserved somewhat better, but the distance created its own problem. The search for Betty Jo Booker’s body, though necessary, may have destroyed other evidence such as tracks.

  The Starks case, despite initial efforts to seal off the house and yard, soon presented a muddled crime scene. Mostly visiting lawmen did what gawkers had done in the first Texas slayings. Even the bloody footprint saved by the FBI agents probably wasn’t th
at of the killer. Too many men had passed through the house and grounds. The tracks in the plowed field probably were those of the killer but were too squishy to compare to a shoe or boot.

  Today’s improved ballistics science might establish whether the .22 bullets at the Starks home came from a rifle or a pistol, possibly narrowing the search.

  Without a fingerprint identification or an eyewitness, the investigation then, as it would today, boiled down to human information. No valid confession was likely. Hordes of people offered their suspicions, which landed their targets in custody temporarily, but none really qualified as an eyewitness. One man did see the killer’s car speed away from the Spring Lake Park murders. Unfortunately the car had been too far away in the dim dawn to make clear the license plates or the driver’s face.

  The best human information came from the Hollis-Larey case, though the victims disagreed on crucial features of the criminal. Officers refused to connect the case to the murders until months later. Without some sort of human information, especially a degree of eyewitness evidence, investigators were likely to continue to grope in the dark.

  They didn’t know where to look for the killer or what he was like. They could only persist without letup and pray for a lucky break.

  CHAPTER 14

  BEHIND A SERIAL KILLER’S FAÇADE

  If serial killers gloat over their misdeeds, they almost never do so publicly, and rarely to other individuals. Doing so would betray them. To risk exposure would court severe punishment. Although they may be proud of what they’ve done—frustrating the police, terrifying the public at large—and revel in their notoriety, their crimes are so monstrous that they will go to any length to thwart detection.

  Mostly their efforts will be aimed at keeping a low personal profile to avoid arrest and denying culpability, much as might any lesser criminal. This is not to say that some may not taunt the police, once they believe they can safely do so. A few grow so arrogant as to dare lawmen to find them or learn their identity. And some few, once captured and facing certain punishment, may agree to cooperate with their captors by revealing their actions, usually in hopes of evading a death penalty.