While Peggy managed to place Swinney on stage, or at least in the vicinity of the crime scenes, she herself was always somewhere else, except in the Martin-Booker case, according to her version. In the Spring Lake Park slayings, she minimized her role to that of an imperiled observer who had no choice in being there. What officers seem to have failed to recognize, and to pursue with vigor, was that while she claimed no alibi for Swinney, she had none herself, either. If she wasn’t where she claimed to be, was she with him on each occasion?
Of the several incidents, she singled out one, the Martin-Booker case, in which she was an eyewitness. Why had she seized upon this one, when she could have just as well maintained silence, as did Swinney? From all indications, the park murders troubled Peggy deeply. The victims were young teenagers, children, really. She referred to them as “the little boy and the little girl.” Despite her fear of Swinney, these killings in which she was in close contact may have inspired her readiness to talk in the first place. Betty Jo Booker’s mother said an officer, probably an FBI agent or Captain Gonzaullas, had told her of Peggy’s reaction that fatal night. “She said that she held Betty Jo while he killed Paul, and she said that she felt so sorry for Betty Jo, but if she hadn’t been scared to death of the man she would have let her go.”
Being on the scene of any of the crimes would have haunted any normal person. The evidence suggests that Peggy herself was basically not a criminal. Whatever she may have thought of the other victims, these were children, fifteen and sixteen, just kids. She was up close with them and perceived them as young innocents who hadn’t harmed anyone, who deserved to live. The experience must have pushed her to the breaking point by time of her arrest. It was as if she wanted Swinney to be held responsible for that night of horror.
There may have been another factor at work. Her telling of the Texas crimes might deflect attention from the more recent Starks shootings, as it did, and get her, and Swinney, out of Arkansas’s custody. But nothing was likely to suppress the terrible memory of the little girl and the little boy at the mercy of a pitiless criminal enforcing his whims with a pistol. Her fears soared even with Swinney behind bars. It wasn’t a certainty that he would remain a prisoner, although she seemed willing, even intent, to help keep him there.
As she poured out her memories, Peggy from time to time gave the impression she was living a kind of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow adventure. In 1946 the exploits of the bank-robbing outlaw couple of the 1930s was still fresh, especially in Texas. Bonnie and Clyde had met their fate in a hail of bullets on a north Louisiana road in 1934, only a dozen years earlier. Dallas, their home base, was also a second home for the Swinneys.
Like Bonnie and Clyde, Peggy and Lee Swinney traveled the country, eluded the law, and had all kinds of adventures. If Peggy felt she was a latter-day Bonnie Parker, with Swinney her Clyde Barrow, she could make the case, part of the way. Swinney had taken her to places she’d never been before, would never have seen—St. Louis, Oklahoma City, San Antonio, even New York City. It was a heady, if fearful, experience. Constant movement. New places. New people. She’d never seen anything like it.
Although Bonnie and Clyde killed people, it was in the course of a bank robbery or during flight from the cops. The Phantom killings were cowardly, in the dark, with the unarmed victims unable to strike back. Swinney had never displayed such boldness as to rob a bank. By comparison, his stickups were petty stuff.
Swinney had spent enough time in the Texas prison system to hear inmates spin yarns about Clyde Barrow and his gang. In a way, he could compare his own feats to Barrow’s. He had a special interest in outlaws. He’d driven 120 miles, round-trip, to catch a movie about Jesse James. Now, if Peggy’s statements were true, Swinney possessed his own brand. He was the Phantom, in his mind a brilliant successor to Clyde Barrow and Jesse James, finding his notoriety under a code name.
Peggy was aware of the darker side that generated mixed feelings. Swinney killed with little thought and never in a running gun battle with the police. He’d threatened to kill her if she talked. Her fears took the edge off any glamour she might have gained from the relationship. This set her apart from Clyde Barrow’s mate. Bonnie Parker took an active role and exhibited no fear of her man. Peggy, according to her own view, took a passive, often reluctant, stance as Swinney’s companion. Moreover, Tillman Johnson suspected that Swinney manipulated Peggy, using her as bait in their travels to lure men whom he robbed.
Tackett made a comment that has not been corroborated by any other source, which was that Peggy had a venereal disease and Swinney did not, indicating they had no sexual contact. If true, that would fit into Johnson’s theory that she was “bait” to attract men into Swinney’s grasp and little more.
Whatever the details of their relationship, it was, for Peggy, exciting but risk-laden. When she looked at the downside of their life together, it was very, very far down, as deep as down can go.
CHAPTER 17
THE PRIMARY SUSPECT
Youell Lee Swinney at twenty-nine was no stranger to jails.
His criminal record stretched as far back as 1929, at least, when he was twelve years old. By 1946—seventeen years later—he was an ex-convict several times over. At the time of his arrest in July he’d been out of the Texas penitentiary barely more than six months, having made it back to Texarkana in time for Christmas, 1945. He’d served time in reform school, two state penitentiaries, and federal prisons in Oklahoma, Georgia, and Kansas. His résumé was impressive, in a negative sense, highlighting a variety of crimes ranging from theft, burglary, and counterfeiting to strong-arm robbery. This was the first time he had been held as a suspect in a murder case.
Born February 9, 1917, in Arkadelphia, Arkansas, Swinney appeared in the census of 1920 as a member of a family residing in Redland Township, at New Edinburg, Cleveland County, in southern Arkansas. The father and head of household, Stanley Swinney, was a thirty-two-year-old Arkansas native and a Baptist minister, at New Edinburg apparently on a preaching job. The mother, Myrtle Looney Swinney, was also thirty-two; she’d been born in Georgia. Youell was two years old, the fifth of five children with two older brothers, two older sisters at that time. The census was taken on January 3. The following month Youell would be three.
Over the years, the elder Swinney moved about frequently, at various times living in Bodcaw in Miller County, Arkansas, in Stamps and Eureka Springs in Arkansas, in Texarkana (both sides of town), and Oak Cliff in Dallas. He attended college, Ouachita Baptist, in Arkadelphia for one semester. That seems to have been when Youell was born there.
Youell exhibited troubled signs early in life. Essentially he fell through the cracks of society in a rocky family environment. “I know he was in trouble all the time,” a niece—older brother Cleo’s daughter Joyce—said, keyed to family memories she’d heard. Swinney Sr. struggled with alcoholism. His daughter-in-law Winnie, Cleo’s wife, later assumed the task of getting him sobered up on Saturday night so he could preach on Sunday. At the time, the two families lived nearby in College Hill on the Arkansas side of Texarkana.
Neither parent gave Youell much attention. It was as if he was unwanted. “His mother and daddy didn’t care,” Joyce said. “I hate to say that, but it’s true.” Swinney Sr. reputedly was a ladies’ man. Cleo, the eldest son, eventually assumed a role of responsible adult, helping rear his younger siblings. While holding a job, he also grew a vegetable garden, raised hogs for meat, kept a milk cow and beehives, all to feed the large family. His parents’ behavior created a sore spot for at least some. “They wouldn’t even let us call them Grandpa and Grandma,” said Joyce. “We had to call them Mr. and Mrs. Swinney.”
Youell’s favorite in the family became his older sister-in-law, Cleo’s wife Winnie. She was kind to him and became a mother figure. She and Cleo assumed a major role of supporting the younger siblings as well as their own children.
In 1926, by which time two more daughters had been born and the family was in Texarkana,
Arkansas, Stanley Swinney sued Myrtle for divorce. She answered with a motion seeking alimony, suit money, and attorney fees. The case came before the Miller County Chancery Court on November 6, 1926. Following depositions from Swinney’s relatives, the judge granted an “absolute and complete divorce” for Stanley from Myrtle “on grounds of personal indignities such as to render his condition in life intolerable.” Stanley paid the court-directed attorney’s fee for Myrtle. Custody of the children proceeded. By then, the older son and daughter were grown and gone and two girls younger than Youell had been born.
Stanley Swinney received custody of Youell, nine, and two daughters, twelve and seven. They were to live with him for the full nine months of each school year. Myrtle had visitation rights. During the three months of summer vacation Myrtle, if she wished, could have them with her. The court awarded Myrtle custody of a son, fourteen, and a daughter, three. Stanley would have visiting rights and pay fifty dollars each month for support of those in Myrtle’s keep.
Subsequent reports were that Youell moved about from one place to another over the years. It may have been soon after the divorce that Youell, just a boy, was living with his grown brother Cleo in the College Hill neighborhood of the Arkansas side of Texarkana and got into trouble, possibly for the first time. Unknown to Cleo and his wife, the boy Youell broke into a neighborhood store and stole candy and chewing gum. Money was scarce; when Cleo’s wife saw the boy eating candy and chewing gum, she wondered how he’d gotten it. He denied doing anything wrong. Cleo had a small barn behind the house. Suspecting the treats had been stolen, Cleo searched the barn for contraband and found Youell’s cache. Cleo, a hardworking man when jobs were scarce, wanted nothing to jeopardize his good reputation. He reported it to the police. It probably was Youell’s first burglary. Because of his age and the small value of the loot, the boy was given a harsh admonition and let go.
What is certain is that Youell’s arrest record started at an early age. With the store burglary for candy not appearing on the police blotter, his first recorded criminal act, so far as can be ascertained, came a few years after divorce had split up the family and left him shifting from one domicile to another.
On September 25, 1929, Youell Lee Swinney became the subject of a front-page story in the Texarkana Evening News, with lurid headlines almost as sensational as those later tracking the Phantom story. As a juvenile, his name didn’t appear in the story, but a matching of his name on the Bowie County district court docket with details in the newspaper article leaves no doubt that he was the boy described. It was, in effect, his official debut in crime, and a media splash. What experiences or nether connections may have prepared him for that moment, we have no way of knowing; his family life documents that his boyhood was anything but normal. He was a troubled boy by then, as the following news headline from the Evening News revealed:
TEXARKANA CHILD RACKETEER GANG
DISCLOSED AS ‘FAGANS’ ARE SOUGHT
Three boys were held in the Bowie County holdover jail on Main Street after their arrest for theft and possession of stolen goods. Youell, at twelve, was the oldest; the youngest, only eight. If the reporter and editor were to be complimented for recalling the plot of Oliver Twist, the spelling, of Dickens’s child manipulator Fagin’s name, only missed by a letter.
“Three boys, the youngest eight and the oldest twelve,” the Evening News reported, “nonchalantly gazed through the bars of the Bowie county holdover jail Tuesday while officers searched for other members of an alleged band of child racketeers who made smoking and spending money through sale of stolen property to a junk shop in the city.
“Two other youths, believed by county officers to have been the brains behind the theft combine, were the objects of a search. Officers expressed a belief that they were the ‘Fagans’ of the organization, using the children as their cats’ paws.
“The three were arrested as they attempted to escape from the yard of a warehouse owned by the electric company near the Texas viaduct. An employee caught them in possession of bars of brass. He took them to police headquarters.
“‘Some older boys told us they’d give us six bits if we’d sell the brass for them,’ one of the lads told county officers.”
The newspaper added: “The three youths seemed little worried by their imprisonment Tuesday or by the prospect of possible terms in the state reformatory should Judge [George W.] Johnson so decree.”
Because juvenile records are shielded from public view, the disposition of young Swinney’s case was not available. However, in the 1930 census, taken just a few months later, Youell’s name is missing from the household of his father, in whose custody the judge in 1926 had placed him. This raises the probability that he was temporarily residing elsewhere when the census taker came. The census showed Stanley Swinney and his new wife Bessie, nee McKinsey, a church pianist, in Bowie County with four children—three daughters from his first marriage and a son from the second, but no Youell. Piecing together data from other sources, he may have been in a Texas reformatory.
In 1930, Myrtle married John Rudolph Travis, and they resided in Texarkana, Arkansas. Family lore labeled him as a mail-order husband, following Myrtle’s ad that lured him from California to Texarkana with his two small children. The liaison was short-lived. A few years later she filed for divorce, which was granted in an uncontested case. In 1936 she married J. H. Tackett, “a very good old man” ten years her senior. He died. By 1946 when her son Youell was arrested, she had remarried again, to Carl Chaffin, in Texarkana. Stanley Swinney, following his second wife’s death, was living in Missouri with his third wife, nee Nella Dorcas Fitzgerald.
Although the father, Stanley Swinney, had received custody of Youell, the boy seems to have spent some time with his mother and, later, stepfather. Years later, Youell complained that his stepfather had been abusive to him, but there is no proof of it extant nor of which stepfather he meant. Most likely he referred to his mother’s second husband, his first stepfather, because of the age when he would have been most sensitive to such behavior.
According to Swinney family informants, there was more to the story, that neither birth parent was supportive in his younger years. One account has it that on one occasion in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, Swinney Sr. forced Youell to remain outside while the rest of the family ate dinner inside the house. In this version, Youell pleaded with a sister that he was starving and begged, “Can’t you get me a biscuit or something?” These observers have it that both father and mother “virtually disowned” him as a boy and youth, with the father treating him harsher, the mother less so.
Swinney’s rap sheet, compiled by the FBI, grew lengthy as his encounters with the law stretched forward.
On February 19, 1932, ten days after his fifteenth birthday, he was arrested in Texarkana, Arkansas, for burglary and larceny at a school building. According to a niece and nephew, this was the College Hill Elementary. This resulted, based on his prison records viewed in 1971 in Huntsville, Texas, in his being sent to the reformatory for boys at Pine Bluff, Arkansas, a fact confirmed by family members.
His next brush with the law came on January 4, 1935. The U.S. Secret Service held him for possession of and attempting to pass counterfeit nickels. Luck held for him. The charge was dismissed because of his being a juvenile—he was seventeen, a month shy of eighteen—and the “minor character” of the coins, five-cent pieces. But three months later, on April 3, 1935, he was picked up for investigation by the police in San Antonio, then released. A few months later, July 24, Texarkana, Texas police arrested him for possessing counterfeit coins and turned him over to the Secret Service. He was sentenced to two years in federal prison and taken by U.S. marshals to El Reno, Oklahoma. When he was conditionally released in 1937 at age twenty, he had lost fifteen days of good time for prison violations.
He was soon back in custody. In 1937, picked up by the sheriff’s office in Monroe, Louisiana, for counterfeiting, he returned to federal custody. The following year, he esc
aped from federal marshals, for which he was assessed three years and eighteen days in the U.S. maximum-security prison at Leavenworth, Kansas. Imposition of sentence was deferred till his term at Leavenworth was completed; he was ordered to report to the court at the expiration of his current prison sentence. In 1939, the twenty-two-year-old Swinney was given three years for counterfeiting and escape from the U.S. marshals. He was lucky again, to receive a conditional release, but authorities sought him soon for violating the conditional release by failing to report and an alleged robbery. He was arrested in November 1940 for parole violation by the sheriff’s office in Shreveport and held for U.S. marshals.
By then his life was an old, recurring story: arrested for a variety of crimes, including felony theft, with a record of raising money through counterfeiting, then sentenced, getting out early, escaping from federal custody, as well as violating conditions of his probation.
At some point during these years, he claimed to be married to a woman he lived with in Hobo Jungle, a neighborhood next to College Hill on the Arkansas side. A search of county records turned up no such union or a divorce dissolving it, apparently making his claim fictive.
His criminal career shifted gears in late 1940. In December he was arrested and charged with grand larceny—automobile theft. According to the indictment, on November 19 in Texarkana, Arkansas, he stole Dr. J. W. Burnett’s new 1941 Master Deluxe Chevrolet Coupe, valued at eight hundred dollars. Although Swinney’s counterfeiting activities had netted him federal prison terms, this felony bought him into the Arkansas state judicial system as an adult for the first time, eligible for the harsher confines of the state prison.
The Phantom Killer: Unlocking the Mystery of the Texarkana Serial Murders: The Story of a Town in Terror Page 22
