The Texarkana Moonlight Murders: The Unsolved Case of the 1946 Phantom Killer

by Michael Newton

  Dr. Lapalla theorized that the Phantom “knows at all times what is being done in the investigation of the crimes,” and had changed his modus operandi for the Starks attack because he knew outlying areas were being heavily patrolled. “The murderer,” Lapalla said, “probably is planning something unexpected like the last crime. He probably will continue to operate in the outskirts of town. He may lay low for a while, but eventually, he probably will commit another crime.” Such offenders the doctor declared, “are able to hold themselves under control until their cold and deliberate plans are worked out, which usually is done over a period of days.” Basing his opinions on “the activities of a large number of people who have committed crimes similar to the five recent killings here,” Lapalla also suggested that the Phantom might change hunting grounds to “some distant community where it is believed the crimes are committed by a different individual, or else he overcomes the desire to kill and assault women.”46

  Dr. Lapalla dismissed military veterans as likely suspects, on grounds that “if the man had served in the armed forces for as much as a year the maniacal tendencies would have been observed.” (He made no allowance for the possibility that combat had inspired those impulses or given the Phantom an approved outlet for homicidal violence.) The Phantom was “not necessarily” a Texarkana resident, despite his thorough knowledge of the area, since the slayer “could have come from some other community and acquainted himself with the local situation before he struck.” If dwelling locally, however, he “may appear to be a good citizen, and he may be a good citizen in some respects.”47

  An interesting observation, in light of later events, is Lapalla’s surmise that the Phantom “works alone, and no one knows what he is doing because he tells no one.”48 If certain officers involved in the investigation are correct, the killer actually traveled with a witness who observed at least one of the crimes (see Chapter 8).

  Lapalla recommended contacting mental hospitals nationwide, to see if anyone matching the Phantom’s presumed pathology had lately been released, then cautioned that “the man probably never had been confined to such an institution.” The Phantom was not a “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” yet could lead a seemingly normal life. The apparent contradictions continued, as Lapalla said he “did not believe the slayer would find it necessary to kill a man every time he killed a woman, but that the man may be so insane that he is obliged to kill a man also.”49

  In short, he could be almost anyone. The public, we may take for granted, was not reassured.

  * * *

  Not everyone agreed with Dr. Lapalla’s view that one subject had committed all five slayings. J. Edgar Hoover, in a memo to Attorney General Tom Clark, declared that “[w]hile there is no possible connection between these various cases, local officers believe, in the light of all the facts, that the same person is responsible for all of them.”50 The facts, as Hoover should have known, included positive balllistic matches in the first four deaths—a clear connection—but persistent doubts surround the Starks attack.

  Sheriff Davis deemed it “possible” that one man was responsible for all three crimes, while Sheriff Presley spoke more assuredly of a single assassin, saying, “This killer is the luckiest person I have ever known. No one sees him, hears him in time, or can identify him in any way.”51 Brownson Malsch, official biographer of Lone Wolf Gonzaullas, also blamed the Phantom for all five murders.52

  Others disputed that opinion. Fort Worth artist William Martin—no relation to victim Paul Martin—was fifteen years old at the time of the slayings, working behind the soda fountain at Brown’s Drug Store in Texarkana. Six decades later, he told the Dallas Morning News, “The first three crimes were on the edge of T-town, all on the Texas side. The last one was something like seven miles or more in Miller County, Ark. This one—the murder of Virgil and Katy Starks [sic]—appeared to be inconsistent with the previous crimes. I have been one of many who doubted the connection. There was a different weapon—a .22 instead of a .32—and there was speculation about a different motive, maybe revenge, jealousy, whatever. Of course, as a naive kid, I didn’t have access to the insider information that seems to be emerging now.”53

  Another local teen, James Grigson—later a forensic psychologist in Dallas, well experienced with violent felons—shared those doubts when he discussed the Phantom’s crimes in 2001. “The first three attacks,” Dr. Grigson said, “were obviously committed by someone with a psychopathic personality. The attacker was not only cold-blooded but obviously very angry. I suspect a great deal of that anger had to do with rejection he felt from women and, very likely, hostility toward males who had accomplished more with their lives than he had. And while there was apparently a degree of sexual abuse in at least one of the cases, these were not the traditional sex crimes. The killer wasn’t in search of sexual gratification. He was venting an incredible degree of anger.” As for the Starks raid, “That one was either a copycat killing or done by someone with some kind of personal grudge against Starks or his wife.”54

  In Miller County, Chief Deputy Tillman Johnson apparently shared that view, although he kept it to himself for over half a century. Speaking to Texarkana Gazette reporter Greg Bischof, Johnson said, “I felt like he [the Phantom] did not do the Starks murder. It would be hard to tie him to the Starks murder.”55 (In fact, as we shall see in Chapter 8, Johnson tried very hard to do exactly that, in 1946.) In private conversations with researcher Glenn Ferguson, Johnson alleged that “Mr. Starks had been carrying on an affair with one of his relative’s wives while this person was away in the military and that the shooting was in revenge for that. After she recovered Mrs. Starks would not discuss the incident with ANYONE and went to her grave with what she knew.”56 (Emphasis in the original.)

  As for the other suspect, never publicly identified, Texarkana probation officer-turned-realtor and prospective author Mark Bledsoe said, in 2001, that the Starks attack was perpetrated by a local serviceman who had returned from duty overseas in early 1946. “The last I heard of him,” said Bledsoe, “was that he was residing in a mental institution in Milwaukee.”57

  True or false? One indication may reside in Texas Ranger files, among the few surviving documents related to the Phantom’s crimes. Four letters written by Captain Gonzaullas between August 15, 1946, and October 21, 1947, begin with lists of the Phantom’s identified victims: Mary Jean Larey and James Hollis; Polly Ann Moore and Richard Griffin; Betty Jo Booker and James Paul Martin. None of the lists includes victims of the Starks raid.58 Their first and only addition to the roster appears in a letter sent by Gonzaullas to Texas Ranger Stewart Stanley in Clarksville, Texas, on January 16, 1951.59 Omission of Virgil and Katy Starks from the list, four times within a span of fourteen months, cannot be accidental. As to why they were excluded, then added to the list more then four and one-half years after the raid on their home, we can only speculate. It is another nagging mystery.

  * * *

  A few nights after Virgil Starks was buried, one of his neighbors noted lights resembling muzzle-flashes from a gun inside the victim’s now-abandoned farmhouse. His telephone call to the Arkansas-side police station caught Gazette editor J. Q. Mahaffey killing time with State Trooper Max Tackett and other lawmen. As Mahaffey described the event to a Dallas reporter, long after the fact, “We sped to the place and, while I hid behind the police car, Tackett and other police officers approached the house with drawn guns. They announced that the house was surrounded and whoever was in there had better come out with their hands up. Who should come out of the house but Lone Wolf Gonzaullas of the Texas Rangers and a girl photographer from Time-Life. He explained rather sheepishly that he had been re-enacting the crime for the young lady, who was taking pictures of him. Her flash bulbs accounted for the strange lights seen in the house.”60

  Disgusted, Tackett turned to Mahaffey, raising his voice to a shout. “Mahaffey,” he bellowed, “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!”61

  Jack Starks, Virgil’s father, offered a five hundred-dollar reward for information leading to the capture and conviction of whoever killed his son and wounded his daughter-in-law.62 Like the other money pledged toward a solution of the Phantom’s crimes, it would remain unclaimed. If anyone had knowledge that could break the case, they kept it to themselves, either from fear or guilt. Those Texarkansans who knew nothing of the crimes beyond what they had read in newspapers or shared in guarded whispers, brooded over Dr. Lapalla’s prediction of more brutal mayhem to come.

  Chapter 7

  Madhouse

  At 6:00 A.M. on Tuesday, May 7, 1946, a workman in Little River County, Arkansas, found a mangled body lying on the Kansas City Southern Railroad’s tracks, approximately sixteen miles north of Texarkana. The corpse’s left arm and leg had been severed by a passing train at 5:30 A.M., unnoticed by the engineer and crew. Sheriff’s deputies responded to the scene and notified railroad detectives who, while lacking any legal authority, were customarily informed of incidents occurring on KCSR property. A hearse removed the corpse to Ashdown, where it was examined at the Phillips Funeral Home.1

  Little River County’s coroner, Dr. Frank Engler, found a Social Security card on the body—No. 147-09-4323—identifying its holder as Earl Cliff McSpadden.2 Later reports render his middle name as “Clifton.”3 Initial accounts said the card had been issued in Kansas, but that claim sparked a controversy.4 McSpadden also carried a registration card from the United States Employment Service in Shreveport, Louisiana, where a clerk claimed that the dead man’s Social Security card had been issued in Baltimore, Maryland.5 In fact, the 147 prefix—a Social Security area number—belonged to the state of New Jersey.6

  McSpadden had stopped by the USES office in Shreveport on May 6, to file what the helpful clerk described as a “courtesy claim,” but he neglected to record his home address, thereby frustrating any future job referrals.7 By May 8, authorities had managed to locate a brother of McSpadden, living in Dallas, Texas.8

  At first glance, McSpadden’s death appeared to be an unfortunate accident, but Dr. Engler found “no bruises as there would have been had the man fallen under the train.” Instead, he reported “a deep wound two inches long on the left temple which was serious enough to have caused death.” Cuts on McSpadden’s hands, furthermore, “indicated that the victim had struggled with an assailant armed with a knife.” A coroner’s jury empanelled by Engler ruled that McSpadden had been slain by persons unknown and afterward placed on the tracks. Bloodstains on the highway, near the spot where he was found, supported that opinion.9

  Immediately, Texarkansans worried that McSpadden might be yet another victim of the Phantom Killer. Why the slayer might resort to stabbing, and in Little River County, was a matter of debate. Some locals thought the Phantom may have wished to fake his own death, thereby getting lawmen off his case. Lacking any proof of that scenario, others surmised that McSpadden might have been killed for “knowing too much”—or that his death was a coincidence, entirely unrelated to the Phantom’s other crimes.10

  In any case, his murder would remain unsolved, like all the rest, while spawning some peculiar speculation totally divorced from fact. In spite of Dr. Engler’s homicide verdict, some locals theorized that Earl McSpadden was the Phantom and had killed himself in a fit of remorse.11 British true-crime author Colin Wilson repeated the suicide theory in 1964, while claiming that McSpadden’s corpse was unidentified.12 Decades later, Brownson Malsch, in his biography of Lone Wolf Gonzaullas, acknowledged McSpadden’s death as a murder but unaccountably claimed he was “never identified.”13 As late as 2001, writing for the Dallas Observer, Carlton Stowers reported that “It’s not difficult to find someone who still believes a mysterious, unnamed hobo jumped into the path of a passing train, taking the secrets of the Phantom to his gruesome death.”14

  * * *

  Another unsolved murder was the last thing Texarkansans needed in the spring of 1946. Lone Wolf Gonzaullas himself almost became an unintended casualty, a few days after McSpadden’s slaying, as he left his quarters at the Hotel McCartney, a ten-story structure at the corner of Main and Front Streets. A cry from above saved the captain’s life, as a suicidal jumper plummeted from the hotel’s top floor, smashing into the sidewalk before him. “This is the damndest town I’ve ever seen,” Gonzaullas later told J. Q. Mahaffey, “just bodies falling everywhere.”15

  Or so it seemed, that spring, thanks in part to the press. Thirty years later, speaking to the Arkansas Gazette, Mahaffey acknowledged, “We were just crazy, you know. We cared nothing about what kind of hysteria we were creating or anything like that. And people began to circulate rumors as to who the Phantom might be, and every eccentric fellow in town was suspect, and rumors grew and everybody was suspicious of everybody else. Just as these things would quiet down, another one would break out, and we certainly played it for all it was worth.”16

  Visiting reporters sometimes made the news themselves in Texarkana. One was jailed for driving while intoxicated, two others for a fistfight at the Hotel Grim. One of Mahaffey’s own writers, a young woman, was picked up with an out-of-towner, cuddling in a car at Spring Lake Park. As Mahaffey recalled it, fifty years later, “They said they were setting a trap for the Phantom—a likely story.”17

  Even Mahaffey himself was not immune to fright during the killer’s heyday. One midnight in May, a pounding on the front door of his house aroused him, with a gruff voice shouting, “Let me in!” Grabbing his eight-year-old son’s baseball bat, Mahaffey stood behind the door, warning the prowler to depart. When the demand for entry was repeated, Ruth Mahaffey fled through a rear window, seeking help from neighbors. Before she returned, silence fell, and her husband cracked the door to peek outside. He was in time to see a drunken man retreating, apparently lost en route home from a binge.18

  Others were not so fortunate. A half century after the fact, Dr. Kenneth Davis told Dallas reporter Kent Biffle, “Ranger Gonzaullas also told my uncle some rather grim, darkly humorous stories that fit into the grand tradition of folk humor.” One case involved a farmer who heard strange sounds outside his home, one rainy night. Firing both barrels of his shotgun through the home’s screen door, he killed a neighbor’s mule. In town, a nervous cotton ginner who’d been sleeping with a pistol woke one night, convinced that an intruder was reaching over the foot of his bed. He fired at the specter, blowing off his own big toe.19

  Louis Graves, employed in 1946 as the Texarkana Gazette’s sports editor—later publisher of the Nashville (Arkansas) News—had his own memories from the Phantom’s reign of terror, recalled in 1971. “Sometime during that era of fright,” he said, “a boxcar load of white-faced calves broke loose and scattered in the County Avenue area, taking up a night sleeping position on lawns. Officers were called plenty, as residents told of seeing white-faced things in the dark.”20

  As for intrepid manhunter Lone Wolf Gonzaullas, Graves said, “It may not do to tell, but as I remember, a renowned Texas Ranger arrived on the scene, tan whipcord slacks and jacket with full-sized sombrero and a pair of ivory-handled pistols. He also had a big black box. He opened it up at a news conference and identified it as a new style fingerprint outfit. He couldn’t work it.”21

  * * *

  With or without the fingerprint kit, the hunt for the Phantom continued. On the evening of May 7, 1946, word came from Little Rock of a tip passed to the FBI by Texas officers. Roy Smith, a secretary for Arkansas Governor Benjamin Travis Laney, Jr., told the Texarkana Gazette that the lead came from an unspecified southeastern Texas town, where an anonymous informant claimed he had been kidnapped by a hitchhiker armed with a rifle. By May 8, the victim was identified as Herbert Thomas of Kilgore, who had accepted five dollars in return for driving the hitcher to Lufkin. While en route, the stranger had drawn his weapon, saying, “I’m on the run. I’ve killed five people around Texarkana and I’ll make it six if you don�
��t get me where I want to go.” On arrival in Lufkin, the gunman spared Thomas, but retrieved his five dollars and stole an additional three for the road. Thomas then drove back to Kilgore, reporting his abduction to police in his hometown.22

  By the time Angelina County Sheriff H. C. Billingsley heard of the crime, at his office in Lufkin, the kidnapper had vanished, perhaps in a green Plymouth stolen the same Tuesday night as the kidnapping. Also on that evening, Robert Atkinson caught a stranger peering through a window of his Lufkin home. Atkinson pursued the Peeping Tom on foot, lost him, and then resumed the chase in his car. Overtaking a man who resembled the prowler, Atkinson detained him, then accepted his tale of taking a girlfriend home from a date and released him, without getting his name.23

  Herbert Thomas described his abductor as a white man in his late twenties, around five feet tall, dressed in khaki, with dark red hair. Atkinson pegged his voyeur’s height some nine inches taller, estimating his weight at 130 pounds, but agreed to the red hair, khaki trousers, and a military-issue G.I. jacket. Sheriff Lonnie Smith of Kilgore’s Gregg County, in his all-points bulletin on the suspect, amended the fugitive’s arsenal to include two pistols.24 Coincidentally or otherwise, while Lufkin residents armed themselves with guns, knives and axes for home defense, the FBI announced its search for a German prisoner of war, reported missing from a POW camp in Oklahoma. Bureau spokesmen labeled him a “routine suspect,” and no further news of his flight was forthcoming. As for the red-haired hitchhiker, he proved as elusive as the murderer he claimed to be, vanishing as if into thin air.25