In another, “Love Is Forever,” he uses phrases like “devastation triggered by a hidden time bomb” and “fury of the fiery explosion.” The lead in the story survives an explosion on an oil derrick but loses both legs, amputated at the knees. He had married his schoolhood girl friend, Beth, in a church, but because he is legless and can’t support her, apparently he does not go back to her. It does not say she rejected him and doesn’t explain how he could have gone away without her knowing it. He becomes a street singer. One day Beth and her new husband come by, hear him sing, but she doesn’t recognize him. It is a jerky story in many respects, suggesting a pitiable man with low self-esteem amid a disturbed relationship.
His nephew, Clarence Swinney, called them “rather odd stories from a possibly disturbed mind.” They were closer to a junior high effort that crammed in big words as if to impress. Most of all, they reflected an inner disturbance amid a violent background.
The seeds of his anger were planted early. His life story reveals numerous troubled relationships that may have become models for his acts of “revenge.” The roots of his behavior can be traced to a childhood when he was ignored by his parents, left adrift, gaining attention by negative activities, and eventually acting out his emotional responses to the world around him.
It was small wonder that many, if not all, of the family believed that Youell had committed the murders.
His short stories, though poorly crafted, may have enabled him to express his frustrations and violent inner world in a nonviolent manner. If he had taken the literary route years earlier, instead of acting out his anger, the question arises whether he might have channeled his drive for revenge into a direction other than murder. Or if mental-health services had been available in his childhood, and used, would early intervention have prevented the multiple tragedies? It wouldn’t have “cured” his psychopathy, which probably was set at birth or early in life, but it might have headed off the tragic violence.
Swinney’s brushes with the law continued. He returned to Texas custody for felony theft in 1981 as Inmate # 326380 with a hold—yet again—for the U.S. Marshal in Houston. He was sixty-four years old. He subsequently returned to the Texas penitentiary as Inmate # 476635, much altered in appearance, old and seemingly embittered. Once paroled in January 1989, he had another hold on him by the U.S. Marshal in Houston. By then he was nearing his seventy-second birthday. He was a beaten, time-ravaged old man, a pathetic old con who had ruined a multitude of lives, including his own.
In his old age, Swinney was paroled from a federal institution in Fort Worth and moved to a nursing home in Dallas. He suffered a stroke but died of lung cancer in Southhaven Nursing Center in Dallas on September 15, 1994, technically and legally a free man, at the age of seventy-seven, a ripe age for a man with his record. He had spent the bulk of his life behind bars and at the end, as an indigent, was cared for infinitely better than he had treated any of his victims, including those on whom he had passed his counterfeit concoctions and whose cars he had stolen. He also had survived the three who had lived to tell of their attacks by the Phantom—James Hollis, Mary Jeanne Larey, and Katie Starks.
Because his body wasn’t claimed by relatives, it was donated to The University of Texas Health Science Center in Dallas, which uses cadavers for teaching purposes. Medical students, unaware of the history of the body before them, dissected and studied the remains of The Man They Said Was the Phantom, who had once boasted of the label. The students, some of whom probably would practice medicine in the region terrorized by the serial killer, never knew what the body before them, when alive, had done. Once the body was no longer needed, it was cremated and the ashes disposed of. With the ashes unclaimed, it is not certain where the ashes went. His was a wasted life, whatever the outcome of a murder trial might have proved. He had besmirched the name of hardworking family members. He had cost society untold hundreds of thousands of dollars in law enforcement and incarceration expenses alone. Add the toll of Phantom victims—the dead and the survivors, along with their sorrowing families and friends—and the total loss is inestimable, stretching across decades.
In the end, he had literally burned, a fate many had sought for him back in 1946.
His official record belied any belief, by him or anyone else, that he was a “brilliant” criminal who had demonstrated that he was smarter than the men trying to catch him. “They”—the law—caught him over and over again. The only people he had ever managed to truly con were the parole board members, whom he somehow managed to convince each time that he would not commit any further crimes.
For the central crimes for which he had been blamed, but not charged, he had been no more brilliant than in the lesser theft, robbery, and counterfeit cases for which he had been convicted. In the crimes of murder for which circumstantial evidence and an eyewitness account existed, he had been uncommonly lucky. His only action even approaching brilliance was his marrying Peggy so that she couldn’t be forced to testify against him. It didn’t take a legal education to know that.
His wasted life was a cautionary tale so graphic as to defy explanation, forever beyond understanding.
In that sense, his victims—the dead and surviving loved ones—would never be avenged in full, though marginal justice had emerged in disguised form.
CHAPTER 26
CRACKING A COLD CASE
Had he gained political support for the idea, Glenn Owen, a Texarkanian born seven years after the murders occurred, intended to stamp solved on the Phantom mystery. His mechanism followed a protocol effective in other jurisdictions.
Owen dedicated a significant portion of his time and energies to clearing the case through this overlooked process. Even with the culprit, witnesses, and officers all dead, his plan, proposed more than sixty years after the crimes, was reasonable, logical, faithful to the law, and practically guaranteed to succeed.
Owen was ten when he heard his older brothers and parents talking about the case. His family had a peripheral connection to the first double murders just off Highway 67. His grandfather, Hass Owen, operated Owen Brothers Livestock Sales, set back on the north side of the highway, a short walk to the death scene. In front of the livestock auction, a café sold beer. Swinney and Peggy, based on her statements, bought beer there several times. (They bought beer at a lot of other West Seventh Street cafés too.)
As an adult, Owen compiled an impressive résumé of investigative experience: ten years as an Army criminal investigator, twenty years of part-time work as a Texas police officer. As a part-time investigator for the Bowie County district attorney’s office, he watched “experts” on TV talk about criminal cases. Doubting their authority, he began profiling cases as a hobby. His skill grew until he profiled, with great accuracy, a number of headline cases.
Eventually his intense interest brought him into contact with Tillman Johnson, who had pondered the case for decades. Owen decided the mystery could be reopened and settled with some satisfaction. The means would be the FBI-approved process set up for qualifying crimes, including murder as well as lesser transgressions.
The method was to clear the case by exception, following FBI guidelines.
The FBI requires three steps.
1. Identifying the perpetrator
2. Sufficient information to justify an arrest, charge, and prosecution
3. The offender’s location is known and he can be apprehended, but there is an overriding reason why he can’t be taken into custody and prosecuted.
If the culprit is alive and can be delivered, obviously he would be brought to trial.
If, however, he is in custody in another state and for some reason can’t be extradited, proceedings could begin without him.
If the culprit is dead, so that he can’t physically face the bar of justice, the case still may be resolved. Clearing a case by exception doesn’t assign a penalty or sentence. It removes the mystery from its unsolved status.
The Phantom case, Glenn Owen reasoned, qualified on all
counts. Sufficient evidence existed to meet the FBI standards, which would be administered by local authorities.
The approach had been utilized in a variety of jurisdictions over the nation. Owen followed a case so cleared in Indiana. Why not in Bowie and Miller Counties?
Before DNA became a trump card in criminal investigation, with the power to liberate as well as convict, the Phantom case had to depend on less dramatic findings. There were no reliable fingerprints. DNA studies probably would have helped at the time, but no such science existed. Other evidence, however, tied all of the cases together as the work of a single perpetrator.
Above all, one common feature characterized all four Texarkana attacks. They were “stranger” crimes. Neither attacker nor victims knew the other. This alone doesn’t prove the same stranger committed all the acts, but is a starting point.
The killer was a very angry man, obvious in the February beatings before the murders began. The assault victims suffered the man’s vicious acts; he came close to killing them. Hollis and Larey had witnessed his rage up close. Hollis, describing the man as “desperate,” warned officers that he would kill next time. The warning went unheeded. Hollis was right; it cost Richard Griffin and Polly Ann Moore their lives the following month.
Bearing in mind that all of the incidents were committed by a stranger driven by deep anger, the victims then become innocent surrogates for the persons whom the criminal blamed for his own distress. Emotionally he was getting even with those who, he perceived, had done him wrong. Such twisted logic fit snugly within the framework of his behavior.
Hollis was lucky to survive. The assailant had intended to kill him, had left him for dead. The brutal February beatings, as precursor event, set the stage for the murders to come.
The Griffin-Moore murders presented the same MO as the beatings. The thug attacked a couple parked in a lovers’ lane late at night. He wielded a pistol and, in February, a very strong flashlight. A pistol was the centerpiece of the subsequent attacks. A flashlight was used—and left—at the Starks house in May.
Another part of the MO linked the Hollis-Larey beatings to the Griffin-Moore murders. In February, in which we have a clear, up-close eyewitness account from Hollis, the gunman forced Hollis to drop his trousers. The gunman obviously knew this would limit his male victim’s movements.
A month later, Richard Griffin’s body was found with his trousers around his ankles. This was a similar attempt to control the male victim, hobbling Griffin so that he would be unable to move freely. Thus the killer controlled the scene more effectively than in February. He’d corrected his errors. He’d improved his technique, as serial killers usually do. The first attack is a learning experience. Afterward he goes over the event in his mind, devising ways to improve the next one. In effect, he perfects his methods in his fantasies. At the next opportunity he puts into practice what he has learned.
The February beatings can be read as the seminal event from which the murders grew. The lawmen to a man misinterpreted the case, believing the victims knew their attacker, despite having no such proof, despite the couple’s consistent, forceful certainty that they had never seen him before—and that the man was a potential killer. Four bodies later, lawmen tardily acknowledged the connection. At fault was lawmen’s refusal to believe what Hollis and Larey kept telling them, that a stranger had beaten them.
Usually the first incident in a string of attacks or murders will reveal much about the killer. The February attacks tie in with subsequent MOs. He failed to control the crime scene then and, most of all from his viewpoint, he had left witnesses. He apparently hadn’t intended to leave either one alive. His lapses in the February attacks probably generated a degree of anxiety. Might they identify him if he was arrested? As the weeks passed and the story faded from the newspapers, supplanted by other violence, he could relax and meditate on his next venture, a month later.
Glenn Owen, like others, saw money as a motivation but believed humiliating the victims was part of the plan, sexual humiliation in the female and possibly in the male. “Having the male drop his trousers helped control the scene, to keep him from running off, but maybe there was a little sexual perversion there. The criminal may have wanted to humiliate the man in front of his girlfriend. Maybe he wanted to look at him, you know. Maybe he got off by doing that, by humiliating somebody in that form or fashion.”
The connection between the February beatings and the March murders was obvious. Richard Griffin was forced to drop his trousers, as had happened to Hollis, and was killed before Polly Ann Moore. The February attacker had assaulted the male first. The sequence of deaths was a pattern throughout: disabling or killing the male first, then dealing with the female at a more leisurely pace. This thread runs through all of the four incidents, except that he enjoyed no leisure at the Starks home when his plans were short-circuited, causing him to panic and leave his flashlight.
(The pattern of disposing of the male first, then focusing upon the female, especially for an extended period of time, as in the Betty Jo Booker incident, outwardly suggests an Oedipal model, despite the ages of the victims. Risky though such speculation is, one is reminded of Dr. Luther White’s 1971 analysis along these lines, that a sexual relationship with a respectable woman would seem incestuous, leading to the killing of the female. The tattoo mother may add to the theory.)
While the February crime scene was chaotic, the March murders reflected a more organized offender. He’d had a month to fantasize and improve on his crimes. Instead of slugging his victims, he shot each victim execution-style, in the back of the head: two shots each from a .32 automatic pistol, a Colt with a left-handed twist. No witnesses.
He also posed the bodies inside the car, so that they might be supposed at a glance to be sleeping. Postponing their discovery gave the killer time to distance himself.
The killer learned from his flawed February experience. He had once more exacted revenge—on surrogates—in what was to become his near-perfect crime. He was helped by rain later that night and clumsy police practices that permitted curious crowds to trample the scene and destroy possible evidence.
Still, officers failed to suspect a stranger or see a link with the beatings, despite fervent attempts by Hollis and Larey to point out the similarities and their certainty that their attacker had now killed others, as they’d warned.
The Martin-Booker and the Griffin-Moore murders are tied together without any doubts whatsoever. Irrefutable ballistics evidence proved that the same gun, a .32 Colt automatic pistol with a distinctive left-handed twist, killed all four victims. The same death weapon; therefore, the same killer. There were other similarities, but no other physical evidence was needed. One killer had taken four lives.
The MO also was the same—defenseless couples parked in lovers’ lanes. The same gun shot each one. There was the same pattern of two shots each, as in the Griffin-Moore case, to kill Paul Martin and Betty Jo Booker, with a slight exception. Martin was shot four times but in two-shot bursts, with an interval between. Although wielding an automatic weapon, the killer seemed addicted to shooting each target twice only.
Unlike the previous case, Paul Martin’s and Betty Jo Booker’s bodies were left some distance apart. No effort was made to conceal Martin’s body—the mark of a disorganized offender—while Betty Jo Booker was killed in a clump of woods and her body not discovered for hours after Martin’s was found. These facts pointed toward a mixed offender as an overall pattern.
Again, the perpetrator had left no witnesses, in the Spring Lake Park crimes selecting a much later time in an even more isolated atmosphere. In effect, the killer had hours in which to execute his plans at a more leisurely pace. Every bit paralleled the earlier case.
On top of all else, the ballistics evidence makes the connection airtight.
Tabloid-like headlines to the contrary, modern forensic psychology leads us now to believe that sex was not a primary motive in any of the crimes. The gunman could have done as he wished
with any of the females. He had a gun. His bizarre behavior in February was not rape or attempted rape, but a novel way to inflict pain. Possibly there was an intention to rape Polly Ann Moore, but if so, it did not occur. As for rape of Betty Jo Booker, he had been in no hurry to do so, all the while with his female companion, Peggy, near, presumably making it more difficult. He had total control over Betty Jo before he killed her. There is no evidence of rape in any of the other cases.
One difference in Betty Jo Booker’s death is that it came “up close and personal.” She was not shot in the back of the head as the first two victims were. The killer faced her and shot her in the face and heart, after considerable time with her, taking her with him as he moved the cars. This suggests an attempt at a “relationship” with her. She was a respectable girl and probably was so in his eyes, but she resisted him. Recalling psychiatrist Luther White’s insight, this would constitute rejection in his eyes. Even more important, she was an eyewitness to Paul Martin’s murder. Feeling rejection and fear of discovery, he shot her, facing her, up close. This was the most personal shooting of all of the murders.
If any doubt remained of a stranger’s role in the Starks case, it’s dispelled by the fact that the killer had to be unaware that Starks had one of the few rural telephones in the community. Anyone who knew the Starkses would have known of their telephone. He didn’t know them; assuredly they didn’t know him. That is almost always the way serial killers operate, targeting victims they do not know, which makes them much more difficult to track.
Katie Starks had not seen the killer that night nor had any consistently definite ideas about him. After all, she had no way of knowing, which exacerbated her anxieties. She, like nearly everyone else, felt the killer had to be someone who knew her husband and her—that there had to be a recognized motive. It was a common, understandable concept. Killers almost always know their victims, and they have reasons, in their minds, to kill. It made no sense to her that a stranger would kill her husband and try to kill her. But with serial killers that’s exactly what happens. A stranger had beaten Jim Hollis and Mary Jeanne Larey, had killed Polly Ann Moore, Richard Griffin, Betty Jo Booker, and Paul Martin. It’s what serial killers do. They kill strangers, over and over.
The Phantom Killer: Unlocking the Mystery of the Texarkana Serial Murders: The Story of a Town in Terror Page 37
