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

by Michael Newton

  On July 25, 1946, Sheriff Davis sent the FBI various items taken from the 1941 Plymouth seized when Peggy Swinney was jailed. The list included one set of fiber seat covers, one pair of tan cotton pants with the legs cut off, both legs from the pants, one rubber floor mat from the car’s backseat area, and two envelopes filled with scrapings from the front and rear floorboards, respectively. Four days later, a terse memo from Hoover to Davis reported that no blood was found on any of the items submitted.59

  Concerning Youell’s .32-caliber Colt automatic, Peggy told lawmen the gun was long gone. According to Tackett, “It had been sold at a crap game by our suspect, and a Negro laborer had bought it. He [the buyer] had got drunk and had promiscuously shot it and got fired. The Negro sold it to a white man working under a ‘flag name’ [alias], who went west.”60 She had nothing to say about a .22, and if it seems unusual that Peggy kept such close track of the Colt’s migration, that was not the most peculiar part of her recital.

  Glossed over in the later Tackett-Johnson interviews is the disturbing fact that Peggy Swinney gave at least three very different and contradictory accounts of the Martin-Booker slayings. According to one published source, two of the conflicting tales ran as follows (spelling and grammar unaltered):

  Story #1: The wife of the main suspect in the case had told police that she had been with her husband on the night of the Booker/Martin murders. On the night of April 13, the couple had driven in from Dallas, Texas and stopped at a cafe on New Boston Road at about 6:30 P.M. After eating a steak dinner, they went to a movie at the Joy theater. Afterwards, they drank a beer at the Drivers Cafe and took some beer with them. They later ended up at behind spring lake park near a dairy. After finishing their beer, the suspect left the car, saying he had to take a leak. He was gone from the car for about one hour when his girlfriend heard 2 gunshots. It was just getting daylight when the suspect returned to the car. He never said where he had been and she says she never asked but his pants were wet up to his knees.

  Story #2: The wife said that the suspect told her that he was going to Spring Lake Park to find someone to rob. This time she claims she got out of the car with him after they had spotted Martin’s coup and drove up ahead of it about 200 yards and walked back to it. She said the suspect walked up to the window with his pistol drawn and told them to give him all their money. He then told the couple to get out of the car and he shot Martin twice with a 32 caliber pistol. He took Betty Jo to his 1941 Green Plymouth sedan and forced her inside. The girl-friend/wife stayed behind in Martin’s coup. The suspect told his girl-friend/wife that he tried to have sex with the girl and then shot her and placed both bodies where nobody could find them. He then drove to the Spring House where he changed his clothes and washed himself off.61

  A third version of the crime, allegedly delivered by Peggy during a polygraph test on November 22, 1946, ran as follows: After drinking beer in Texarkana on the night of April 13, Swinney and Peggy “fooled around town” until 3:30 A.M. on Sunday, then drove to Spring Lake Park, where Swinney spotted Martin and Booker. He stopped and forced his way into Martin’s car at gunpoint, taking the wheel with Martin beside him, while Peggy sat with Booker in the backseat. Around 4:00 A.M., after some aimless driving, Swinney stopped and ordered everyone out of the car. Peggy said he “shot the little boy two times,” then drove on, but soon circled back to find Martin still upright and walking, then shot him twice more. Returning to his stolen 1941 Plymouth, Swinney forced Booker into that car and drove off, leaving Peggy behind. Returning sometime later, he put Booker and her saxophone in the Plymouth and drove toward Morris Lane, where he stopped yet again and took Booker out of the car. Peggy said he “took the little girl over toward the fence,” where Peggy “heard the little girl begging Swinney not to do ‘something.’ By the time I got back to the car, he had the little girl over across the fence, then I heard him shoot two times.” Around 5:00 A.M., with the sun rising, Swinney tossed Booker’s saxophone over a fence on the right-hand side of the road.62

  In that version, related by Tillman Johnson, Peggy pointed out the site of Martin’s murder on a map, then accompanied lawmen to the scene, where she elaborated on her story with a description of Swinney emptying Martin’s pockets. According to Johnson, she also provided other “additional details that could only have been known to someone present at the killings.” Johnson noted that discrepancies in criminal confessions are not unusual. “When you take statements from people like her,” he said, “and it’s exactly the same every time, something would be wrong.” And, while Johnson insisted that Peggy’s various statements “squared with the evidence,” we must acknowledge the radical shift in her stories that changed her from an innocent, distant bystander to a direct eyewitness.63

  Some of the confusion in Peggy’s varying statements may have derived from the methods employed to grill her. “At one stage,” Johnson told James Presley, “we used a hypnotist on her. We got her parents up there that night, a doctor, a judge, Max [Tackett], and a roomful of reliable people. He put her in that trance and she started talking. A lot of things tied in with what we already knew.” On the Texas side of State Line Avenue, however, officers were unconvinced, insisting that “some of her details were incorrect. ‘It didn’t happen like that,’ they said at the time.”64

  * * *

  Those discrepancies—or self-serving lies, perhaps, concocted to keep Peggy out of the electric chair—are all the more remarkable in light of published claims that Peggy passed a polygraph exam. As Tillman Johnson told Blair Case, “At this time, polygraphs were coming into use, and we took her down to Austin and had her tell the story over again to a man who was considered to be the leading authority on polygraphs. He said she was telling the truth.”65

  The modern polygraph—popularly, and inaccurately, called a “lie detector”—was a long time in the making. Italian physician and criminologist Cesare Lombroso first used measurement of changing blood pressure to judge deception in 1895. Nine years later, another Italian inventor, Vittorio Benussi, measured respiration in pursuit of “truth.” American psychologist William Moulton Marston used blood pressure readings as an aid to interrogation of German prisoners during World War I, publishing results in 1915 and 1917.66 Invention of the polygraph as recognized today is credited to John Augustus Larson, a Canadian immigrant who earned his master’s degree in 1915, with a thesis on fingerprint identification. Five years later, he earned a Ph.D. in physiology from the University of California at Berkeley. Larson joined the Berkeley Police Department that same year, 1920, and began experimenting with a “deception test” based on blood pressure, pioneered by William Marston. In 1921, he completed his invention, which, aside from reading blood pressure, measured a subject’s pulse, respiration, and skin conductivity.67 Meanwhile, William Marston advertised himself as “father of the polygraph,” lobbied for its use in courts, and published a book—The Lie Detector Test (1938)—detailing its use in theory and practice. The same year saw him hired by the Gillette Company, using a verison of the polygraph to “prove” the superiority of Gillette razors over competing brands.68

  Despite its various depictions in films and on television, a standard (and theoretically “valid”) polygraph test proceeds by stages. First, the subject should be interviewed apart from the machine, permitting the examiner to established “control” questions—those with answers known to be true—and covering every topic slated for inclusion in the test. Once connected to the polygraph, the subject may be asked to lie in response to other simple questions where the truth is known—his age, the color of his eyes, and so on—to establish more “controls.” From there, subsequent questions should relate only to topics covered in the pre-test interview, and should be phrased so that they may be answered “yes” or “no,” without elaboration. Surprise questions and rambling, explanatory answers instantly invalidate the test results.69

  The popular belief that polygraph results are banned from courts across America is incorrect. In fa
ct, rules differ radically from one state to another. Some, including Texas, Illinois, New York, Pennsylvania, and the District of Columbia, forbid their use by law enforcement even with a suspect’s consent. Others, such as Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, and Nevada, admit polygraph evidence if both sides in a case agree to it. Florida requires polygraph tests for paroled sex offenders, ostensibly as part of rehabilitative therapy, but the compulsory tests may not be used against them in court. New Mexico allows a polygraph exam to be conducted in the jury’s presence, under certain circumstances. Massachusetts bars polygraph results from court, but does allow their use as supporting probable cause for search warrants.70

  Admissible or not, how accurate are polygraph results? Professional polygraphers—that is, the individuals who earn their livings with a “lie detector”—frequently claim accuracy rates of 90 to 100 percent, at least for tests administered by them. Conversely, a 1997 survey of 421 licensed psychologists estimated the machine’s average accuracy around 61 percent, or slightly better than random chance on a coin-toss. Demonstrably innocent persons, including this author, have “failed” polygraph exams on numerous occasions. (My personal experience, with two tests administered years apart, produced erroneous results on both, an error rate of 100 percent.) Aside from health issues, canny suspects can employ various countermeasures to “beat the box,” while hard-core sociopaths, essentially creatures without “conscience,” routinely frustrate polygraphers.71 As far as Peggy Swinney goes, vague reports of her “successful” polygraph exam tell us nothing of substance, omitting even the content and form of the questions she answered.

  * * *

  While Peggy spun her tangled tales for lawmen, Youell was playing dumb. After his questions about going to the chair, he seemed to toughen up and bite his tongue. Authorities had learned more about Swinney’s movements, namely that he’d spent the recent war years as a kind of long-range taxi driver, ferrying customers across country for pay, perhaps in stolen cars.72 That knowledge might have helped them link their prime suspect to crimes in other states, but if such leads were found, no record of them has survived.

  Confronted with the statements from his bride, Swinney continued to deny participation in the Phantom’s crimes, professing innocence. “Then,” according to Tillman Johnson in 2001, “one night, out of the blue, he says, ‘OK, I’ll tell you all about it.’ But by the time we got everything ready to take his confession, he’d changed his mind.”73 At that point, the frustrated officers opted to do it the hard way: with “truth serum.”

  Various drugs have worn the “truth serum” label since the late 1920s, when American psychiatrist William Jefferson Bleckwenn used intravenous injections of sodium amytal to produce “lucid intervals” of normal conversation in patients suffering from catatonic mutism. Dr. Bleckwenn published his findings in 1930, leading others to experiment with a wide range of sedatives and hypnotics. In the early 1930s, Abbott Laboratories chemists Ernest Volwiler and Donalee Tabern discovered sodium thiopental, commonly called Sodium Pentothal (an Abbott trademarked name). Human experimentation began in March 1934, indicating that the drug weakened a subject’s resolve or made him more compliant to pressure.74

  Most recently, two days before Peggy Swinney’s arrest in Texarkana, Chicago police had jailed seventeen-year-old William Heirens on burglary charges, quickly naming him as a suspect in the murders of two women and a six-year-old girl, slain between June 1945 and January 1946. After six days of round-the-clock interrogation, two psychiatrists injected Heirens with Sodium Pentothal and, over the course of three hours, procured statements blaming an alter-ego called “George” for the murders. Heirens pled guilty to the crimes on August 7, 1946, and received three life terms on September 5. He died in custody on March 5, 2012, with many supporters convinced of his innocence.75

  Swinney’s experience was less dramatic. In 1977, Tillman Johnson told Blair Case, “We took the suspect over to Little Rock to take the truth serum but, when we got there, he refused. By this time, his family had gotten him a lawyer. He and the girl were looking at the electric chair, and they [Swinney’s relatives] did their best to save them.”76

  Twenty-four years later, Johnson spun a very different tale for Carlton Stowers. “We got him there,” Johnson said, “and the doctor injected him with too much of the stuff, knocking him out cold. That was the biggest mistake we ever made.” Once revived, Swinney refused any further injections and clammed up tight.77

  Whichever version is correct, if either, prosecutors still considered ways and means to hang—or, rather, fry—the Swinneys. Peggy was a problem, with her ever-changing stories, plus spousal immunity from being forced to testify against her husband. Even if her voluntary statements were admitted into evidence, a good defense attorney could destroy them by revealing contradictions to a jury. Years later, Tillman Johnson told Glenn Ferguson that he had found a witness who could place the Swinneys in Spring Lake Park on the night of April 13–14, 1946, but the informant was an African American (discredited by race alone, for many white jurors) and himself had briefly been a suspect in the case.78

  Another lead was Betty Booker’s saxophone. In one account of the crime, Peggy Swinney described her husband tossing the instrument out of their car, over a roadside fence.79 Strangely, despite reports that officers searched widely for the alto sax, and circulated its serial number (52535) to music stores and pawn shops in “many states,” it seems that no one bothered to pursue Peggy’s lead.80 On the morning of October 24, 1946—three months after Peggy’s confessions—workmen P. V. Ward and J. F. “Mack” McNief found the instrument while repairing a barbed-wire fence near the sight of April’s double-murder, on the south side of Morris (now Moores) Lane. Ward saw it first, later saying, “It looked more like an old broken-down suitcase. As soon as I got to it and got a good look, I knew exactly what it was. I told Mack to go and call the law.” Chief Jack Runnels arrived to investigate the find, with Officers Pete Carrara and Bill Bagwell, plus Deputy Sheriff Z. C. Henslee. Five hours later, Clark Brown identified the saxophone, its decomposing case, and some enclosed sheet music as belonging to his stepdaughter, complete with an orange-and-white logo from Texas High School.81

  The evidence seemed damning, but it still posed problems. Why had the horn remained undiscovered for seven months after the slayings, and three months after Peggy Swinney aimed officers toward its location? Jurors might believe local police were negligent—or even that the saxophone was planted, perhaps on behalf of the Phantom’s rumored wealthy family. And introducing any part of Peggy’s statements opened a Pandora’s box of problems for the prosecution. Suppose defense attorneys noted Peggy’s claim that Youell had told her Betty Booker “wouldn’t give me none so I shot her,”82 then disclosed FBI reports describing semen found in Booker’s pubic hair. What, then?

  In retrospect, Tillman Johnson was probably right when he said, “The only way we were going to close the case was with a confession.”83

  Or, they could leave the case “open” and do their best with what they had.

  * * *

  For starters, they had Youell Swinney dead to rights on violation of his 1945 parole, for stealing cars. That charge alone would send him back to Huntsville Prison, to complete the forty-seven months remaining on his five-year sentence from November 1944. But, better still, conviction on a third felony count, for the theft of Wayne O’Donald’s vehicle in March, made Swinney eligible for life imprisonment as a habitual offender. It wasn’t the chair, but it would do.

  At trial for that offense, in April 1947, Youell was defended by attorney W. A. Pace, from the Miller County firm of Haynie and Pace, but prosecutors had an indisputable case for car theft, and jurors duly found Swinney guilty. The judge obliged by pronouncing him a habitual offender and imposing the desired life term. Swinney returned to Huntsville on April 18, 1947, with no immediate prospect of seeing the free world again.84

  And what became of Peggy? One source claims she was convicted as an
accomplice to auto theft, but records from the Texas Department of Corrections refute that claim.85 Those records do confirm her divorce from Youell, in 1947, procured in Shreveport, but inquiries there have failed to reveal a specific date.86 Glenn Ferguson recalls that “[i]n my discussions with Tillman Johnson he became evasive when I asked about her. He claimed not to know where she was but I’m convinced he was covering for her, because he certainly knew where everyone else was and what they were up to.”87 In July 2012, a Google search revealed that Peggy died in Dallas on January 8, 1998, and was buried under her maiden name.88 From that, while we cannot be certain, it seems that she never remarried.

  Sometimes, once is too much.

  * * *

  Lawmen tracking the Phantom were not unanimous in buying the Swinney solution. While Max Tackett and Tillman Johnson proclaimed his guilt for the remainder of their lives—supported in that view, third parties claim, by Swinney’s sister, Mildred Swinney-Sones89—Lone Wolf Gonzaullas and most other Texas Rangers seemed to disagree.

  Or did they?

  Gonzaullas biographer Brownson Malsch, writing in 1980, said: “The ‘Lone Wolf’ had his opinion in the matter. Years after the series of events, he commented that the officers had a good idea who the perpetrator was, but could not move in because of lack of conclusive evidence.”90 That might suggest support for Swinney as a suspect, though police had certainly “moved in” on him with other charges and imprisoned him for life.

  Conversely, Dr. Kenneth Davis offered a rather different take on the Lone Wolf’s opinion to newsman Kent Biffle, in 1996. As Davis told it, “My uncle, the late James R. Duke, was parts manager for the Dallas Hudson Co. Famous Texas Ranger Lone Wolf Gonzaullas was a customer. He told my uncle the rumors that although the local lawmen in Texarkana knew who the killer was, they wouldn’t arrest him because they had too little evidence, or the family was too rich and influential, or this rich family had agreed to maintain a private prison.”91