They returned to Texarkana and stayed with his sister until June 28, the day she married Swinney in Shreveport, after which she was arrested.
Tillman Johnson witnessed the statement. Peggy read it, said it was accurate, but would not sign. She told him that Swinney threatened to kill her if she talked to officers. Johnson recognized she was scared to death of Swinney. “I should have put it into the statement, which I didn’t,” he said later.
It was a beginning. She’d implicated Swinney in several felonies—thefts, armed robbery—but not murder. What stood out, however, was that she had placed Swinney in Texarkana on each of the pertinent nights, without providing him an alibi.
PEGGY SWINNEY’S STATEMENT # 2
The next afternoon Johnson sat her down for a second statement that delved deeper and produced more incriminating revelations.
“Sometime during the middle of April—it was only two or three days after the Booker-Martin murder, Lee Swinney and I were at his sister’s on Senator Street. We were in the back room alone. We were discussing the murders in Texarkana. I asked Lee who killed these people. Swinney told me that it was someone with a brilliant mind, someone with more sense than the cops.
“He then told me that he had better come to town and get rid of it. I ask him what he was talking about. Swinney then told me that he had the saxophone that was taken from the Booker-Martin car. He said that a man gave it to him. After this conversation we came to town and Swinney carried me to the Joy Theatre and left me there. He was gone about one or two hours. He came back to the theatre and got me out. Before I went to the show, Swinney had only about two dollars and fifty cents. When he got me out of the show Swinney had about twenty-two dollars in all.”
Then she reverted to April 13, the night of the Spring Lake Park killings. In early evening they arrived in Texarkana from Dallas. After eating steaks at a café, they went to a movie at the Joy Theatre. Before the film was over, they drove to the Stockman Hotel just outside the city limits on the Dallas highway and drank several bottles of beer. (This was a short distance from where the Griffin-Moore murders had occurred three weeks earlier.) From there they moved to Drivers Café, inside the city limits, drank beer till closing time, then bought four bottles to take with them.
On a Saturday night, last calls for beer in Texas would have been one o’clock in the morning.
They drove about town for a while, then Swinney headed for Spring Lake Park. They found several cars parked on the road in the park. Swinney drove close to a dairy, where they stopped. They drank the four bottles of beer, after which Swinney left her in the car alone. After he was gone for about an hour, she heard what sounded like gunshots. Hours later he returned, as dawn was breaking. He drove out of the park area at a rapid rate of speed.
She observed that his clothes were wet to his knees, damp to his waist. Before they left the park, Swinney stopped at a parked coupe and removed a large black case and put it in the trunk.
“I asked Swinney what he was doing, getting something out of that car. Swinney replied that a friend told him to come out there and get it.”
En route to her mother’s early that morning, Swinney stopped and changed clothes in the woods. Near her parents’ home they drove to a locked pasture gate. Swinney ignored the lock and took the gate off its hinges at the other end. They then drove into the pasture and parked in the woods. Shortly before dark they drove to the gate. A man on horseback, who owned the property, met them there. He threatened to have them arrested. “Swinney told him that if he did he would sure get him after he got out of jail. The man let us go on.”
This time she had placed Swinney on or near the scene of the Martin-Booker murders but nothing more. Each time she spoke, she seemed to edge closer to the kind of eyewitness evidence the officers sought.
PEGGY SWINNEY’S STATEMENT # 3
The same date, shortly after ten o’clock that night, she produced a meatier version, complete with details she had skirted around in her first two statements. Johnson always had other witnesses present when he took her statements. This time Sheriff Davis, Tackett, and Boyd joined the session. Along with some modifications, she offered the kind of specific details she earlier had studiously avoided. It was as if she previously had wanted to divulge all but was held back by some unseen hand, such as Swinney’s threats.
Repeating her account of their arrival from Dallas and drinking beer at the two cafés the night of April 13, she said they left the Drivers Café at closing, drove about town and then to Spring Lake Park.
“He told me that he was going out to the park and rob someone that we would find in the park. He told me that he was not going to work as long as he could get money from someone else.”
They drove through the park and took a road away from the lake.
“We had passed several cars parked along the road in the park. We passed one car which was a coupe. Swinney pointed the car out to me and said, ‘The people in that car should have some money.’”
The coupe was parked on the gravel road outside the park along the railroad track. It was a few hundred yards from the gate to the park.
“We drove about two hundred yards past this coupe and Swinney stopped our car. Swinney told me that he wanted me to go with him to rob the people. We both got out of the car and walked back toward the coupe that we had spotted. Swinney had taken a gun from the car seat. This gun had been laying in the seat between us while we were driving toward the park. Swinney had the gun which he told me was an automatic in his hand as we walked back toward the parked coupe. We walked up to the coupe and the couple were in the car talking. We walked up on the driver’s side of the car.
“Swinney had the gun in his right hand and I was standing on his left side. Swinney told the couple to get out of the car. The boy in the car asked us what we wanted and who are you to tell me to get out of the car. Swinney told him to get out of the car or he would show him who he was.
“The boy got out of the car on our side and the girl got out on the side away from us and walked around the front of the car to where I was standing. Swinney told me to search the couple. I did not search them and told Swinney I was not going to. Swinney told the couple that if they did not hand over everything they had that he would kill them. The boy had his hands up and begging Swinney not to kill them. The little girl was begging me to make Swinney stop and not kill them.
“Swinney got mad because they would not hand over their stuff and I would not search them. The little girl and I were standing near the front of the car. Swinney was standing several feet from the side of the car and to my right. The little boy was standing in front of Swinney about four to six feet. Swinney had the gun pointed at the boy. He shot him two times and the boy fell to the ground. The little girl and I began to scream. I told Swinney not to kill him. Swinney told the boy that he ought to shoot him again. The boy did not say anything that I heard after the shots were fired and he went to the ground.
“After the boy fell to the ground, shot, Swinney bent over him and went through his pockets and took his billfold and what money he had. I saw him then put the boy’s billfold back into the boy’s pocket after he had taken the money out of it. While this was going on, I was holding the girl and she was crying.”
Swinney told Peggy to keep the girl while he got the Plymouth and returned. He backed up to the coupe and ordered the girl into the stolen car.
“The girl got into the front seat of our car. She got into the car and Swinney then picked the boy up and put him into the back seat. Swinney told me to get into the car. I told him that I was not going to get into the car. He told me that he was going to kill me. Swinney then told me to get into the coupe and be sure not to touch anything so that I would leave fingerprints. Swinney had a glove on his left hand. It was a brown cotton glove.
“He held the door of the coupe open for me with the glove hand. Swinney then got into the Plymouth car of ours and drove north on the gravel road toward the dairy back of the Spring Lake Park. It
was just breaking day when Swinney drove up beside the coupe with our [car] headed toward town, the same way the coupe was headed. Swinney got out of our car and came to the coupe and with his gloved hand opened the door for me to get out. He then looked into the coupe and found a large black leather case in the car. He put this case into our car in the trunk. Swinney told me that he had tried to get some from the little girl and she would not let him have it and that he killed her. I ask Swinney what he did with the bodies and he told me that he put them where no one would find them.”
Swinney drove into the park area. His clothes were bloody. He changed clothes in a restroom near the springhouse and washed his hands in the spring.
They drove to a café on the Arkansas side and drank coffee. They then drove near her parents’ house on the Texas side and parked on a side road in the woods. They slept in the car until that afternoon, then went to her parents’ house. When her parents walked to a bus stop near there to go to town, she said, “Swinney got scared that they were going after the law.” He followed them to the bus stop and talked to her father, who assured him they didn’t intend to call the officers.
Swinney and Peggy drove to a lane near the parents’ home to a gate.
“The gate was locked. Swinney took the gate loose from the hinge side of the gate; he did not bother the lock. We drove into the pasture about a quarter of a mile from the gate and parked the car. We then walked back down to my mother’s house and hid in some woods near the house. We were close enough that we could watch the house to see if the law came here. We stayed here until almost dark and went back to the car. Swinney made me wait and let him go to the car first to see if there was anyone there. We got into the car and started to drive out. We were stopped by some man on a horse who told us that it was his land and he threatened to have us arrested. Swinney told him to have him put in jail but he would get him when he got out of jail.
“I ask Swinney what he did with the gun that he killed the two kids with in the park. He told me that he did away with it at the same time he did away with the bodies.”
They then left the pasture and headed for Swinney’s sister’s home for a short stay, then back to her mother’s house where they spent the night and the following day, a Monday. That night they left for Dallas, stopping at almost every town in between. About ten or fifteen miles east of Dallas Swinney drove onto a side road.
“Swinney got out of the car and took the clothes out of the trunk of the car that he had on the night he killed the couple in Spring Lake Park. These clothes were khaki pants and shirt. They had a lot of blood on them. Swinney put paper under the clothes and set them afire. We stayed there about two hours burning the clothes, as they were hard to burn. Swinney made sure that every part of the clothes burned. He said that he wanted to be sure that they were all burned up so the officers would not find them.”
In Dallas they picked up a man at the travel bureau and took him to Tyler in east Texas. They registered under “A. J. White” at a tourist court that night and returned to Dallas the next day.
Again Peggy refused to sign. She said Swinney would kill her if she did.
By her word she’d been an eyewitness to Swinney’s shooting Paul Martin and had implicated him in Betty Jo Booker’s murder. Yet parts of her third account, while more detailed than her first two statements, blurred over some of the events and were not clear about Paul Martin’s death; he was shot, in all, four times, whereas she had cited only two shots. Was her memory impaired—she’d drunk a great many bottles of beer that night—or was she holding back something?
One of her sentences seems to have gone unquestioned by officers: “Swinney told me that he had tried to get some from the little girl and she would not let him have it and that he killed her.” He may have told her that, but it raises questions. If Swinney were interested in sex, it wouldn’t have mattered whether the helpless fifteen-year-old schoolgirl would “let him have some” or not. He was a strong, hardened man with a gun. He could have done as he wished, easily could have raped her whether she fought back or not. The lab evidence was that he had raped her, though not in the way that a conventional rapist might have. This indicates he didn’t want Peggy to know and thus lied to her. But if Peggy’s version was accurate it may suggest sex was not a driving force, at least not the main factor. In the final analysis, his dominant goal was to destroy.
The next time Peggy gave a formal statement four months later, her responses would be recorded by a polygraph.
Events moved swiftly. The next day, Miller County Sheriff Davis took Peggy to Dallas. They spent the day trying to locate the site where she claimed Swinney had burned his blood-spattered clothing. The search failed. The several sites she thought might be the one never revealed evidence of a burn. Either her memory was defective or her story was not true. Dallas detective Will Fritz interviewed her and concluded she wasn’t telling the truth. Then she refuted her earlier claim and admitted that Swinney hadn’t burned any clothing near Dallas.
Things fared better when Texas officers questioned her and took her to the crime scene at Spring Lake Park. She guided them to the graveled road and walked directly to where Paul Martin’s car had been parked.
“That’s where the little boy and girl and the car was parked.”
She told how she had gone into the clump of woods nearby. This explained the woman’s heel tracks that officers had found exactly there. She gave an account of the teenagers’ final hours.
The Bowie County sheriff asked, “Did you see Swinney take anything out of the boy’s pockets, besides his wallet? Did he take anything else out?”
“I saw him take some papers or stuff.”
“What did he do with it?” Presley asked.
“He took it and threw it over in those bushes over there,” she said.
After she was back in the car and out of hearing, Presley pulled a small datebook from his coat pocket, displaying it so all could see.
“I’ve had this ever since we made our first investigation at the scene the day the bodies were found. It’s Paul Martin’s datebook. I’ve kept it in my pocket, and I found it right where she said Swinney threw it.”
He’d preserved the evidence, unknown to anyone else, to keep the newspapers from getting hold of it or others learning he’d picked it up, to keep the killer from knowing of it. The one piece of physical evidence, not known to any of the others until that moment, which Peggy had not known he possessed, strongly supported her claim that she had been where she said she was and that she was telling the truth. It tightly linked Swinney to the crime scene. Although Peggy sometimes wove confusing accounts, the general contours of her statements meshed with the known facts. Lawmen believed she edited her comments from time to time to minimize her own role in the killings, in order to insulate herself from the most serious criminal charges that might be levied. There also was a sense that she jumped about in her versions, reflecting mental or emotional instability. Johnson put it two ways, in the folk vernacular. “Her bread wasn’t brown. The elevator didn’t go all the way to the top.”
Tackett believed she knew a great deal more than she revealed. “If the full truth be known, Swinney would be in the electric chair, and Peggy would be sitting in his lap.”
The datebook was a compelling piece of evidence. The problem was, officers needed Peggy’s testimony to verify the connection, and there was a catch.
As Swinney’s wife, they couldn’t force her to testify against her husband. The Texas law was firm on that point. The couple’s trip to Shreveport on June 28 had erected a powerful roadblock not readily removed.
Peggy Swinney cooperated in a variety of ways. She even submitted to hypnosis. The hypnotist, Travis Elliott, who’d hypnotized “Sammie” and exonerated him, put her in a trance in a room of people that included her parents and other “reliable people” such as a prominent physician, several lawmen, and a prosecutor. She talked freely. Texas Ranger Stewart Stanley, concerned about corpses found along Texas roads, que
stioned her about passengers Swinney had transported. She told of one man Swinney had picked up. When they stopped by the roadside, Swinney and the man walked away from the car to “take a leak.” The other man never came back. That was as far as she went about the other deaths. In the Texas roadside cases, people had gotten robbed and were slain, with their belongings missing. Swinney was suspected, for he robbed and stole clothing, but nothing was proved.
Her three statements, while yielding new insights, also contained inconsistencies. Sheriff Presley, for one, citing the Texas-side murders, said some of her details were incorrect. Officers acknowledged, though, that flirting with the electric chair herself, she had a vested interest in modifying her story from time to time.
A steady stream of investigators bombarded her with questions. Although only the three sessions recorded by Tillman Johnson were reduced to print, other revelations were as intriguing, also implicating Swinney. In every instance, she placed him in the general locale of each crime, while leaving him without an alibi.
FBI agent Horace “Buzz” Hallett told his neighbor Bessie Brown, Betty Jo Booker’s mother, what Peggy had recalled about the first double murders. Swinney returned to their motel room that night with blood all over him, she said, and “just laughed about what he had done” and got away with. This fit the facts, as for the bloody clothing, for Richard Griffin’s blood almost certainly spurted all over his murderer.
Max Tackett remembered another instance. “She made the statement that he came in, the night of the death of Virgil Starks and the shooting of his wife, to the place where they were staying, and he had blood all over him. She said he wiped the blood on a towel and put it under a mattress in the room. Sometime later we found the towel there.”
Tackett did not make clear whether the blood came from Swinney or someone else. The technology of the time was imprecise. There is no record that it was tested, nor an explanation of how Swinney would have had so much blood on him. Had her memory failed her, mixing up an earlier incident with that one, or had she simply misstated?
The Phantom Killer: Unlocking the Mystery of the Texarkana Serial Murders: The Story of a Town in Terror Page 21
