Totally veiled from public view, officers wrestled with how to deal most effectively with The Man They Said Was the Phantom.
Taking a serial killer out of circulation was the surest way of stopping his crimes. The overriding issue was far from simple: how to keep Youell Lee Swinney off the streets, not just for a mere handful of years that an ordinary felony conviction would ensure, but for a much longer stretch, for life, if possible. The more officers learned about him, the more convinced they were that he was the “Phantom” with a mystique of its own, far beyond what a wanton murderer deserved.
Peggy was the officers’ wild card. Her statements told more than enough to be certain Swinney had killed, at the very least, the youngsters Paul Martin and Betty Jo Booker. Her testimony in that case should be sufficient to gain a conviction. With that case solved, ballistics evidence would link the Griffin-Moore murders.
She faced her own problem in the Starks case. She isolated Swinney as a likely suspect while claiming she was in a Delight hotel during the hours when Swinney was in Texarkana. The operators of the hotel shredded her alibi. The couple did not arrive until midnight or later, they insisted. Statements by this reliable couple left Peggy also without a credible alibi. When Swinney drove to Texarkana, going by the Starks home, she must have been with him. The cigarette butts by the site where the killer’s car had been parked indicated that more than one person had been there. Swinney wasn’t likely to go anywhere, especially at night, without her.
One point officers were to make over and over was that once Swinney was arrested, the murders stopped. Suggestive, but not proof. The Phantom, if he were not Swinney, could have departed for other hunting grounds. No murders elsewhere fit the pattern exactly, but it still did not rule out the possibility that the Phantom had moved elsewhere.
There still were substantial barriers to his successful prosecution. The murder weapons hadn’t been recovered. Swinney had possessed both a .32 automatic and a .22 automatic pistol, but he had gotten rid of both and to men who had not been traced.
Without Peggy’s testimony, the case would have to be built around circumstantial evidence, a higher bar for the prosecution. Officers had to make a case—rapidly—or risk letting slip the best opportunity yet for solving it. They had him off the street; now they must keep him off. The mechanics of doing so were uncertain. There seemed to be no foolproof method to achieve it. If the prisoner was in jeopardy, his captors also faced a crisis.
A new complication arose: Swinney’s father and those of the family whom he rallied—or browbeat—in support. Vowing to save his troubled son from the clutches of the law, one way or another, the Reverend Stanley C. Swinney marshalled a vigorous offense as he fired off letters and telephone calls to offspring and lawyers. Now pastoring the First Baptist Church in Montgomery City, Missouri, where he lived with his third wife, the father Swinney concentrated his pressure on his son Cleo, who lived in Texarkana. He also attempted to field a legal team, repeatedly insisting that Youell was completely innocent and guilty of no crime at all—an absolute denial. If all else failed, he claimed that his connections at high levels in Arkansas would ensure an appellate victory. He journeyed to Texarkana, where he had once lived, to see his wayward son and consult with family members.
In a flurry of correspondence he directed strategy, often contradictory, always aggressive, sometimes bellicose, and self-justifying. He repeatedly spelled out the gravity of Youell’s situation as an innocent man about to be railroaded, as if by a kangaroo court. From Missouri he wrote his son Cleo that he wanted a lawyer in El Dorado, Arkansas, Claude E. Love, to look into Youell’s case; he urged Cleo, “Please do this at once.” “At once,” often heavily emphasized, was an admonition he habitually incorporated into his summons. He was in bed, he explained, taking “heavy sedatives to keep me going.” He made a plea that was to be duplicated over the coming months, in a variety of guises and emphases. “If something is not done at once they will kill him and my life would be worthless if they should because I know he is innocent and those people down there and everywhere would have no respect for any of us if we stood by and let those bandits swear his life away which I am convinced they will do if they can.” He also repeatedly invoked self-pity, asserting he was ready to sell his furniture (which he seems not to have done) to raise funds for Youell’s defense, while asking his son and daughters to contribute money. If he sought a loan, he said, he would have to explain why he needed it and that would ruin him. He continually insisted that Youell was an “innocent boy” at risk of being “cruelly killed.”
The lawyer Claude Love eagerly accepted the defense assignment. “Perhaps we may be able to help them understand the ‘Sixth Commandment,’” the lawyer wrote, seeming to apply the commandment, “Thou shalt not kill,” to the accused man’s captors rather than to the crimes officers believed he had committed.
Each new Stanley Swinney letter to Cleo frantically emphasized urgency—“something must be done AT ONCE today”—as he felt “the boy’s life is at stake” while he himself was “definitely convinced that he is innocent.” He directed Cleo to either get the trial postponed or get Youell turned over to federal jurisdiction, where he would fare better. Meanwhile, he continued, he had appealed to members of the Arkansas Supreme Court, where he intimated he had an ally, for a chance to convict some of the lawmen for malfeasance of office. To start the ball rolling, he ordered Cleo to get Love “at ONCE.” The absentee father’s orders were easier hurled than carried out.
To one daughter he confided that he had a friend at the state’s highest court, should a conviction be appealed, but she must keep it quiet. “A life is at stake,” he said, adding his familiar order, “PLEASE ACT AT ONCE.” But she must not reveal what he had said of his friend in a high place. “BURN THIS LETTER BY ALL MEANS,” he wrote, or his best source of information would be closed. “Tell Youell all will be well.”
He bombarded his son Cleo with complaints and orders, ranging from wheedling to demanding. He claimed, on the basis of no evidence that he provided, that Youell was being beaten and starved to death, causing “the poor innocent Youell untold suffering” and creating a “very precarious condition.” At this point he brought in the name of a man, W—, as his substitute candidate for the Phantom, accusing him of trying to harm Youell and asserting that the man would be “brought to justice.” There was never any indication his charge had any substance as the minister unleashed tirades and directives in manipulative efforts that waxed and waned. It was anything but pleasant for Cleo, who was becoming the true martyr in the matter.
Despite the elder Swinney’s tactics to protect Youell from the law’s grasp (which also would inflict a stigma upon him as the father), there is some evidence that there was a lack of affection between the two. A nephew of Youell recalled a family experience, earlier noted, in which Youell, outside and hungry, was refused entrance to his father’s house while other family members ate dinner. This indicates, contrary to the elder Swinney’s claims, that the relationship between them was hardly what the surface indicated, and perhaps this was all due more to the elder Swinney’s fear of the damage his reputation would suffer from having the Phantom Killer for a son, than any real affection for Youell himself.
On the morning of Thursday, October 24, while Swinney and his wife remained in the Miller County jail, P. V. Ward, while repairing a barbed-wire fence in a marshy area bordering Morris Lane north of the city, spied what looked like an old discarded suitcase. It was almost buried under a pile of dead leaves and underbrush.
“Mack,” he yelled at his companion J. F. McNief, “go call the law! Here’s the Booker girl’s saxophone. I know that’s what it is.”
Soon afterward Police Chief Jack Runnels, Deputy Sheriff Zeke Henslee, and two city policemen arrived. The leather lining and wooden framework of the case had deteriorated; pieces fell to the ground while being placed into a box. Sheet music probably used at the April dance was still in the case. A selection, protected in a pl
astic folder, was “The Song of the Navy,” along with an orange-and-white Texas High School emblem.
The discovery came about 140 steps from where Betty Jo’s body was found, on the opposite side of Morris Lane.
At the sheriff’s office, Clark Brown, Betty Jo’s stepfather, identified the case and the gold-plated (now tarnished) Bundy E-flat alto saxophone bearing serial number 52535. The case’s plush blue lining had rotted from exposure to the elements during the previous six months. Spring foliage and water had concealed it. By fall, plants and underbrush had thinned out and leaves had turned brown, helping to reveal what search parties had never seen.
The only chance of there being a latent fingerprint would depend on whether the killer had opened the case and touched the instrument with an ungloved hand.
No fingerprint was found, but police could relax their monitoring of pawnshops and call off the nationwide search for the instrument.
One day in late October—Max Tackett recounted, though he wasn’t present and learned of it afterward—the recalcitrant Swinney was being interrogated in the sheriff’s portion of the courthouse. Deputy Sheriff Bill Scott, a wiry but tough veteran lawman in his forties, lost his patience after a series of evasive answers about the Starks case. He seized a nearby leather razor strap, which deputies used when they had to shave at the office, and advanced toward the prisoner. He impulsively whacked Swinney, who flinched and suddenly blurted out, “My God, don’t hit me with that bat, Mister! Take that bat away and I’ll tell you all about it, exactly how it happened.”
The “bat” he referred to was a strap with which prisoners at some Arkansas and other prisons reportedly were whipped in those days. Swinney’s reaction strongly suggested he’d known the sting of such a beating, probably in the Arkansas penitentiary. He gave the impression that he felt he was about to be worked over and wasted no time in trying to ward it off, even at the cost of self-incrimination.
(A niece, Joyce Swinney Ward, years later remembered seeing “stripes” on her uncle’s back, scars from whippings he’d sustained in either an Arkansas or Texas prison. This would explain his reaction to Bill Scott’s brandishing the “bat” that day in jail.)
About that time—Tackett’s account goes, there being no eyewitness reports, all participants by then being dead—Sheriff Elvie Davis arrived in the room. Davis, a compassionate man, never tolerated mistreatment of prisoners. The lawmen knew a confession compelled by force wouldn’t stand up and would work against them. Scott was fully aware of this but had reached the limits of his patience that afternoon. Many officers believed Swinney was on the verge of talking anyway and that this minor event had only accelerated the tendency.
“We’re not going to hurt you,” Sheriff Davis told Swinney. “I knew your daddy. Let’s sit down and talk about it.”
Swinney said, “I don’t want to talk here.”
That was fine with the sheriff, but Swinney rapidly changed his mind. That was all right with Davis, too. He had another plan.
Davis had several concerns. “Elvie was afraid of a lynching,” recalled his chief deputy Johnson. “At the same time, he didn’t want to mess that case up by getting a confession whipped out of Swinney.”
“We’ll take him to Little Rock to State Police headquarters and let them keep him up there and get the confession out of him,” Davis told his deputies.
A new method, the so-called truth serum, or sodium pentothal, a hypnotic, was beginning to gain public attention. The theory behind its popular name was that the drug relaxed inhibitions and the patient felt free to speak candidly of any and all matters. It wasn’t admissible as courtroom evidence and was, actually, in the early stages of its application. Physicians at the state hospital had worked with the State Police on some cases of which Davis had heard. Davis believed interrogating the suspect in Little Rock under the influence of “truth serum” might be the best way to handle the matter. It would protect the prisoner from a possible lynch mob, should the news leak out, while producing a confession.
Davis told Swinney. “We’ll take you to Little Rock.”
Swinney, hearing the sheriff’s words, visibly relaxed.
There is no other evidence that Swinney was ever whacked or threatened with the “bat,” Tackett’s narrative being the only known source. Swinney never complained or claimed it had happened. The report, though suggestive, likely is accurate.
By late October, arrangements had been made for legal representation for Swinney in Texarkana. Youell’s older, hardworking, law-abiding brother Cleo had enlisted local attorneys Paul J. McDonald and Ted Goldman for onsite counseling while Claude Love became available from El Dorado. J. F. McVey attempted to monitor and direct proceedings from Missouri.
A defense strategy began to evolve: use insanity as a means of easing Youell away from the shadow of Arkansas’s electric chair for the Starks murder and possibly also for the Texas murders. In this as in other moves, Cleo Swinney took the brunt of the spate of instructions steadily flowing from Missouri.
The attorney McVey wrote Cleo to get an affidavit from Youell’s mother attesting to any insanity on her side of the family and anything else that could demonstrate that the son was suffering from a mental disorder. “I understand that he may have been injured at birth, and later on when he was in the Reform School. If she knows of these things, put them in.” Pastor Swinney himself declined to admit any mental infirmities on his side of the family, while pressing his ex-wife to document deficiencies in hers. He did, however, execute an affidavit for the lawyers, addressing it to the director of the Arkansas state hospital, in which he cited four points related to son Youell’s unsound mind: an injury at birth, a history of insanity on his mother’s side, an injury as an inmate in the Arkansas state reform school when another inmate struck him with a stick of wood in the back which caused a spinal hemorrhage, and his own personal observations which convinced him that Youell was not normal and was of unsound mind.
The minister also urged Cleo to secure another lawyer and to contact the top criminal defense attorney, Elmer Lincoln, in Texarkana. Contacts with Lincoln were made but without a follow-up that would have paid a retainer fee. By this time Cleo was already paying the local lawyers seventy dollars a month, not an insignificant amount on a workingman’s pay.
The elder Swinney presented a new scenario for the Texarkana murders that would eliminate his son as a suspect and guide the investigation into an entirely different direction. “McVey is still greatly interested in running down the Phantom killer and both of us believe W— and one other are the men. The killer will be arrested some day and people will be greatly surprised who it is or rather who they are.”
A parting note dealt with Youell’s defense: see that he pleads not guilty by reason of insanity, and request the judge to appoint him counsel at the state’s expense.
Attorney McVey, following a brief trip to Texarkana, flailed out in several directions. He criticized the Texarkana defense lawyers and wrote to a friend in Illinois, whom he described as a “federal officer,” claiming that Youell Swinney was innocent of everything except taking a car and that he suffered from a form of insanity related to his obsession to drive a car. He was “satisfied” that the prisoner had killed no one. He failed to document his conclusion or to elaborate on his discovery of a new psychological category, insanity with a need to drive (after stealing) a car.
The correspondence made clear that the family was fully aware why Youell was being held, suggesting a large serving of denial, with a side dish of paranoia, by the prisoner’s father.
On October 29, Swinney’s team—McVey and the local firm of Goldman and McDonald—filed a petition for writ of habeas corpus in the Miller County Circuit Court. They sought an immediate preliminary hearing or release.
Judge Dexter Bush ordered Sheriff Davis to bring Swinney before him.
On November 1, prosecutor Lyle Brown presented a motion to dispatch Swinney to the state hospital in Little Rock for observation. Judge Bush g
ranted the motion, agreeing that there were “reasonable grounds for believing the defendant mentally incompetent.” The next step was to deliver Swinney to the State Hospital for Nervous Diseases.
With neither side aware of what the other was thinking, the sheriff’s plans coincided with efforts by Swinney’s father and his lawyers to dispatch Youell Swinney to the state hospital to assess his mental status.
Both sides had seen their wishes fulfilled—for the moment.
The following morning before daylight, Johnson, Tackett, and Charley Boyd drove Swinney to Little Rock. The prisoner had not carried out his promise to tell “exactly how it happened.” He’d clammed up. Tillman Johnson soon had misgivings. He felt officers had been making progress. Even without Scott’s provocative gesture, Johnson felt they’d made headway. Swinney had no way of knowing what the officers knew. They had him in jail and they were questioning him intensively about the Starks case, as well as the other crimes. Because he was in custody in Arkansas, his blurting out implied he was ready to talk about the Arkansas crime. The incident provided a further insight into how Swinney responded in moments of stress and high anxiety, adding to his other “almost” confession when arrested.
The spell was broken. The process of breaking him down, potentially leading to a confession, had been interrupted. A different persona took over. On the drive to Little Rock, he would have time to ask himself how much evidence they really had on him. If they had to take him to the state hospital, then perhaps they didn’t have all they needed. His resistance returned.
“If we’d have kept him here in Texarkana,” said Johnson, “I think we would have broken him. He was close. That was one bad mistake we made,” he said, referring to the decision to send him to Little Rock.
The Phantom Killer: Unlocking the Mystery of the Texarkana Serial Murders: The Story of a Town in Terror Page 26
