In the spring of 1946, a man in a white hood made an entire city afraid of the dark. Police had three meager clues to work with: a flashlight, a few .22-caliber bullet casings and a single footprint. Texarkana couldn't believe a monster lived in its midst. That kind of shock takes a certain amount of forgetting.
Two states, one Main Street
Texarkana straddles the line between Texas and Arkansas, and nobody is entirely sure where the name came from. It might have been a railroad surveyor named Gus Knobel who scrawled it on a plank and nailed it to a tree. It might have been a Louisiana shopkeeper's drink called Texarkana bitters, or a steamboat of the same name. In the 1940s, grand hotels with marble columns lined the downtown streets. The Beaux-Arts post office, built of limestone and Texas pink granite, is still the only one in the United States that sits across the border between two states. Soldiers from the Red River Ordnance Depot liked to stand spread-eagle across State Line Avenue with one foot in each state while a buddy snapped the picture.
The biggest fight in town was the Thanksgiving football game between the Texas and Arkansas high schools. In the old days it usually turned into a brawl, complete with rotten eggs lobbed at the opposing superintendents. It looked like the heartland. It was an illusion, like greasepaint spackled over a scar.
What the town forgot
In May 1922, a Black man named Hurley Owen was arrested for stealing car parts. He promised to lead officers to more stolen goods, pulled a gun from a trash can and shot Officer R.C. Choate six times in the abdomen. Choate, a well-liked cop, died 30 minutes later. Owen, shot in the face by the police chief, fled into the woods and tried to drown himself in a pool of water before the sheriff dragged him out.
This was Arkansas, a state that spent half a century driving Black residents out through job discrimination, lynchings and sundown signs, the notices warning Black people to be gone before nightfall. By 8 p.m., a mob of roughly a thousand people had gathered outside the jail. At 8:20 they smashed the doors with an iron battering ram. They dragged the half-conscious Owen into the street with a rope and strangled him. Then they burned his body on a kerosene fire near the Union Depot and kept it going all night. By sunrise only ashes and a few charred bones were left, and people carried off bits of bone as souvenirs. A grand jury indicted nine men, including farmers, a blacksmith, a private eye and a car salesman. Their case got a continuance and then simply evaporated. Neighbors went back to being neighbors.
Hunting the lovers' lanes
On February 22, 1946, close to midnight, 25-year-old Jimmy Hollis and his 19-year-old girlfriend, Mary Jean Larey, were parked on a lovers' lane outside town. A man in a white mask with holes cut for his eyes and mouth shined a flashlight in Jimmy's face. "I don't want to kill you fella," he said. He clubbed Jimmy so hard that Mary Jean heard the skull crack and thought he'd been shot. Then he caught Mary Jean as she tried to run in high heels, beat her and sexually assaulted her with the barrel of his gun. "I begged him to kill me that night," she said. The sound of an approaching car sent him running. Both survived, but they couldn't even agree on whether he was white or Black.
A month later, on March 24, a passing driver spotted blood on the running boards of a parked car. Richard Griffin, 29 and just out of the Navy Seabees, and 17-year-old Polly Ann Moore had each been shot in the back of the head. Three weeks after that, it was Paul Martin, 17, and Betty Jo Booker, 15. They had been friends since kindergarten, and she had spent her last night playing saxophone at a VFW dance. Paul was shot four times. Betty Jo was sexually assaulted and shot, and her body turned up two miles away, posed with one hand tucked into the pocket of her buttoned coat.
The man troopers believed was the Phantom Killer never stood trial for a single murder. The truth serum meant to crack him just put him to sleep, so he got life for stealing a car and walked free in 1973.
Four bullets, two holes
Then the killer came indoors. Virgil Starks was reading the paper in his armchair at his farmhouse northeast of town when two bullets came through a closed window and struck him in the back of the head. His wife Katie ran to the crank telephone and was shot twice in the face from the same window. Blinded by her own blood and spitting out broken teeth, she ran barefoot across a highway and railroad tracks to a neighbor's porch, screaming, "Virgil's dead. Help me. Help me." Behind her, the killer walked through the house past her purse, which had cash in it, and smeared Virgil's blood with his hands. Four bullets had gone through just two holes in the glass.
Texarkana came apart. Late movie shows played to empty theaters, liquor stores stopped selling at 9:30 p.m., and farm lights blazed all night. A Texas Ranger captain told residents to "shoot first and ask questions later," and one man promptly shot a drunk in the foot for peering through his window. The FBI found no fingerprints on the flashlight. Ranger M.T. Gonzaullas, who went by "the lone wolf," said his men had questioned more than a thousand people. "So many murders so few clues," he said.
The car thief's wife
Rookie state trooper Max Tackett noticed a pattern: a car was stolen on the night of every attack. That pointed to U.L. Swinney, a Baptist preacher's son and career thief. In June 1946, police arrested his wife, Peggy, in a stolen car. In the couple's hotel room they found a shirt with the name Starks stenciled on the pocket. U.L. looked at it, looked away and said nothing. Peggy talked and talked. Her story changed with every telling, but she knew details police had kept from the public, and she never stopped placing U.L. at every scene. She also said she would never testify against him.
Troopers took Swinney to Little Rock and gave him sodium pentothal, the so-called truth serum. It put him straight to sleep. With the electric chair off the table, prosecutors used the Habitual Criminal Act, a law that allowed life sentences for repeat offenders, to get him life in prison for car theft. He was released on a technicality in 1973 and died in Dallas in 1994. Ranger Gonzaullas was never convinced he was the man.
The case remains unsolved. Thirty years later, the 1976 film The Town That Dreaded Sundown turned the hood into a horror icon. Ken Dixon, a wire-service correspondent who covered the killings in 1946, remembered his arrival like this: "I checked into a hotel called Grim and the first newspaper man I met was a man named Graves."