The Phantom Killer
In 1946, a killer targeted teenagers in the border town of Texarkana. With little help from police, the kids decided to fight back.
By Spencer Hall and Holly Anderson
It was an unseasonably warm night. Jimmy Hollis, 24, and his date, Mary Jeanne Larey, 19, were driving home from a double-date at the movies when they decided to stop at a local lovers’ lane.
After a few minutes, a car pulled up. A man approached the driver’s side door, holding a flashlight and a pistol. He wore a white cloth bag with eyeholes cut in it to cover his face. The man shone the light in the car and, in an unnerving voice, told the couple to get out of the car. Speaking to Hollis, he said that he did not want to kill him. Hollis and Larey did as they were told.
Once outside the car, the man told Hollis to take his pants off. When Hollis did, the man in the mask struck him with a heavy object once, then twice. The second hit was loud — so loud Larey thought the gun had gone off in the masked man’s hand. It sent Hollis crumpling to the dirt. The man in the mask then turned to Larey and struck her, too.
Then, he told her to run.
Larey staggered away from her attacker, and the man turned his attention to stomping Hollis’s body. In heels, Larey ran half-blind through the dark, desperate to find help. Eventually, the man in the mask caught up to her, and struck her again, before brutally sexually assaulting her with his weapon.
“Go ahead and kill me,” she said. Instead, he fled the scene.
Larey was treated for minor head injuries. After the attack, she would move to Oklahoma to live with her aunt and uncle, mostly because being so close to the scene of the crime was too much for her to bear. Hollis suffered two skull fractures, and would take months to recover. The Texarkana Gazette, the town’s local paper, noted the attack three days later on February 25, 1946, with the subhed: “Insurance agent, girl assaulted on lonely dirt road.” Hollis, speaking to police, predicted their assailant would kill the next couple he attacked.
He would soon be proven right.
Act I: The Sex-Crazed Killer in the Dark
There is a story in America that we’ve told for years. A story about youth and freedom and danger. About young lust and young love, and the unseen forces that keep them at bay. It’s the wellspring for a whole way of looking at flyover country, a Cold War-era morality play, warning children not to roam; the source material for countless slasher movies and urban legends; and an abiding mystery without an official ending.
This is one place where that story began. But it isn’t the exact story you know.
More than 75 years after the fact, the details are solid enough. In 1946, someone started killing teenagers around the city of Texarkana, a border town split between Texas and Arkansas. The killings were random, and the killer was never identified, despite a huge investigation that involved local law enforcement from two states, the Texas Rangers, and the FBI. The assailant would eventually be given the name the Phantom Killer. The killings themselves would be called the Moonlight Murders.
The story stuck. What happened in Texarkana would eventually become the foundation for a lot of what we now recognize — for good and for bad — as true crime storytelling. Sensationalism came first: The media played up the most ghoulish details of the crimes for circulation across newspapers and radio. The police would be framed as crusaders. The victims and the community around them would largely be written out, unless useful as a depiction of panic and hysteria. It would become the quintessential horror story, about teenagers, hapless and helpless, trying to escape a mad killer in the dark.
But despite the story we’re all familiar with, the teenagers at its center weren’t idle characters, content to let fate take its course. They were young, but they were not helpless — and in most retellings, there’s an important detail that conveniently got edited out: While someone hunted them in 1946, some of Texarkana’s teenagers hunted back.
But first, they would be hunted.
On the morning of March 24, 1946, a passing motorist spotted a car sitting on a lovers’ lane just off Highway 67, about a mile outside Texarkana. At first, the motorist thought the passengers were sleeping. Then, approaching the 1941 Oldsmobile, the motorist found the bodies of 29-year-old Richard L. Griffin and 17-year-old Polly Ann Moore, each shot once in the back of the head. The motorist called the police.
Moore and Griffin were last seen alive the night before, at around 10 p.m., eating with Griffin’s sister and her boyfriend. They were next seen around 9 a.m., dead in Griffin’s car. His pockets had been emptied.
The killer left only bodies behind. A single recovered shell at the scene and a pool of dried blood about twenty feet from the vehicle were the closest things the authorities had to evidence. Most of what might have been left in the form of tracks, footprints, or fingerprints had been washed away by morning rain. The rest was contaminated or obliterated by curious onlookers and incautious law enforcement officers trampling an unmanaged crime scene. Without modern criminal forensics or data to lead them, the investigation stalled before it started.
The next morning, the Texarkana Gazette ran a front page story with the headline, “Couple Found Shot to Death in Auto.” It would take another attack, however, before people started to pay attention.
Paul Martin’s evening seemed innocent enough. On the night of Saturday, April 13, 1946, he headed to the Texarkana VFW building, where Jerry Atkins and His Rhythmaires played their weekly gig, to meet up with their alto sax player, Betty Jo Booker.
The pair had known each other since kindergarten, and while it’s unclear if they were dating, most newspapers seem to think the circumstances at least make their night look like something of a date. Martin was seventeen, a well-liked guy who his classmates described as a sweet kid with no enemies. Booker was fifteen and a junior at Texas High, where her classmates described her as well-liked, as well. She made good grades and did dance and belonged to a sorority, and played saxophone not just with the Rhythmaires but in the school band, too.
Martin was visiting Texarkana — where his family lived from his early childhood until he was 11 — from his new home in Kilgore, Texas. He still had lots of friends in town, and was in Texarkana against the wishes of his mother, who feared for Martin’s safety on the hundred mile trip. He arrived late at the VFW building: The crowd didn’t begin to disperse until well after midnight, and witnesses said Martin and Booker left the VFW together at 2 a.m., in Martin’s 1946 Ford.
When Betty Jo Booker didn’t come home the next morning, search parties spread out to look for her.
Paul Martin’s body was found first. A family discovered him on the edge of North Park Road, lying on his left side. But if someone had seen him and kept driving, no one would have blamed them. In the crime scene photos, he looks like a drunk sleeping off a long Saturday night. Only up close could one tell Martin had been shot four times: once through the back of his neck with the bullet exiting his face, once entering through his face, once through his left shoulder, and once through his right hand.
Though he’d driven to Texarkana, his car was nowhere in sight. It would later be found a mile away, near the railroad tracks by Spring Lake Park, a popular cruising spot for local teens. The keys were still in it.
Booker’s body wouldn’t be found until noon that Sunday. It had been left nowhere near Martin’s, but nearly two miles away, in a wooded area just a few yards off Morris Lane. She was found with her coat on and a hand in her pocket, shot once in the chest and once in the head, her Bundy E-Flat alto saxophone nowhere in sight. The saxophone would later be found under some brush nearby, still in its case.
Word of the Martin/Booker murders spread through Texarkana by late Sunday. The town was shaken — but more than that, they were baffled. Not so much by the violence of the murders, but by their complete lack of context or justification. Texarkana had always drawn a certain amount of violence, but also a certain kind of violence, one of reason and maybe even predictability: drunken altercations, crimes of passion, the odd shooting or two.
This, however, did not appear to be a robbery gone bad, or a vengeance killing, or a love triangle gone haywire. This could not be written off. The killer hadn’t even taken Betty Jo’s saxophone or stolen Martin’s car. To the town of Texarkana, this was something new. Someone had killed two teenagers, after a dance, for no apparent reason.
Someone in Texarkana was killing off random teenagers, and no one had an easy answer as to why.
Three attacks made a pattern, and law enforcement responded by swarming to Texarkana. The FBI showed up. The Texas Rangers commandeered a spot at the Hotel Grim downtown, a fortress-like building whose profile lived up to its name. The local police grinded away, doing much of the grunt work, and coordinated with the federals and the Rangers, who played the public face of the investigation.
None of it turned up much in the way of leads. The Ranger in charge of the investigation, Manuel T. Gonzaullas, even admitted as much in a press conference.
“Of course I have my opinion as to how the murders were committed,” he said, “but I don’t think this is the time to be putting out theories. I might be wrong.”
Ramping up the terror was a new batch of arrivals to the hulking Hotel Grim, looking to sell Texarkana’s nightmares for a profit: the media. They came from Texas newspapers and radio, though there were national correspondents on the scene, too — many working to make the story of the Texarkana murders as sensational as possible.
With little evidence to go on, Gonzaullas eventually told citizens to go ahead and arm themselves in case they should run into the Phantom Killer alone. Guns, window shades, and locks disappeared from local stores. And, with no one able to save them, some of Texarkana’s teenagers prepared themselves for war.
Act II: The “Victims”
There’s a story about a girl without a name.
One night, at the height of Texarkana’s panic, this unnamed girl parked along Sugar Hill Road with a date. Making the rounds, Chief Deputy Sheriff Tillman Johnson spotted the car and approached the vehicle, identifying himself as he got closer. Seeing two people in the car, he asked if the girl and her date weren’t scared to be out at night.
She replied: “You’re the one that ought to be scared, mister. It’s a good thing you told me who you are.”
She had a .25 caliber pistol pointed at him the whole time.
The unnamed girl likely wasn’t afraid to use it. Founded in 1873 at the junction of two rail lines near the Red River, Texarkana had always been a hotbed of crime. By design, the city had a split personality: State Line Avenue, the main north-south road, ran right down the middle of it. The city had two separate mayors, two different law enforcement entities. Two different sets of rules depending on the side of the street you stood on. And in the dead middle of it all were Texarkana’s teenagers, born into a state of being “in between” one thing and another.
The teens of Texarkana were a latchkey generation — given all the burdens of adulthood with none of the benefits. In 1946, at the height of Phantom Killer mania, many of their brothers, fathers, and uncles were still in Germany, Japan, or wherever else the end of World War II had left them. Some of them would not come back.
They kept busy. They hung around after concerts at diners and at the movies. They went dancing at clubs. And they had furtive sex where they could, including on piney back roads in the pitch-black darkness.
They were also largely ignored. In the mid-1940s, “teen-agers,” as the media referred to them, might be found mentioned in local newspapers as breathless devotees of the latest fashions, or as the subject of vague concern. But on the whole, “teen-agers” were barely consulted on anything, much less the issue of being teen-aged. During the killings, they were hardly asked for comment. If anything, it seemed teenagers were all but invisible — until they turned up dead. Only a little note in the Paris, Texas News actually seemed to capture the feeling of being a teenager at the time — trapped between childhood and adulthood, forced to fend for themselves: “War was taking its toll and restless teenagers had more energy than places to spend it.”
Now, with the Cold War looming just around the corner, the teens of Texarkana had been forced to deal with another unseen menace: They were being targeted by a serial killer, a concept so monstrous and so unstudied at the time that it wouldn’t even be properly named for another three decades.
The media only fanned the flames. Former war correspondent Kenneth Dixon from the International News Service started his dispatch with the subtle, measured lede: “I have arrived in Texarkana, the home of the Phantom Slayer… and the hair is rising on my neck.” Print reporters spread the story along the wires, working to come up with their own catchy name to attach to their faceless subject. Some in the press eventually used the name “Moonlight Murderer,” which sounded mysterious and terrifying enough except that the phases of the moon on the nights of the attacks didn’t match what anyone would call “moonlight.”
The locals weren’t much better. The editor of the Texarkana Gazette at the time, J.Q. Mahaffey, later admitted that he and his staff were “responsible in a large degree for creating the hysteria” that surrounded the killings:
PROGRESS OF PROBE OF DOUBLE SLAYINGS VEILED IN SECRECY
ENTIRE AREA FIGHTING JITTERS
MURDER ROCKS CITY AGAIN
TEXARKANA TERROR
Paranoia took hold. Anything and everything became a possible narrative in the murders. Given little to go on by the police, the public made up theories of their own to fill the vacuum. The killer had already been caught, some reasoned, and they just hadn’t announced it.
The randomness of the attacks and the killer’s refusal to leave clues gave away nothing about his identity or motive. There wasn’t even a consensus about what he looked or sounded like. Mary Jeanne Larey said she thought the killer was a Black man, but she couldn’t be sure as he wore a mask over his head during her attack. Jimmy Hollis could only describe the “crazy” things the man said. At the height of the town’s murder-panic, the Texarkana Gazette ran a front page story with the headline SEX MANIAC HUNTED IN MURDERS, followed by an interview with the Texarkana Federal Correctional Institution’s psychiatrist. Dr. Anthony Lapalla told the paper that the killer could look like “[a] good citizen,” was likely smart, and might even be considered shrewd, and was probably a white man, because “…in general, negro criminals are not that clever.”
There was a brief disclaimer at the top of the Gazette that they did not want to alarm anyone with Lapalla’s profile. Still, people became very, very alarmed. They stocked up on guns. Ministers called for a Saturday night curfew to, in the words of the Texarkana Gazette, “curb juvenile delinquency and some of its tragic aftermaths.” Betty Jo Booker’s mother gave an interview warning “parents who might let children roam” about the dangers of negligence — though she was quick to clarify that she did not believe her daughter was one of those.
In the absence of anything resembling a substantial clue, everything became a possible tip. A mysterious footprint found by a local woman in her flower bed merited investigation. Mysterious gunshots and sirens in town were later confirmed to be car backfires and sound effects from a carnival. After some cows got loose in the dark one night, the police spent the evening fielding calls about white-faced intruders lurking in the dark.
Some took quick advantage of the chaos. One night, Chief Deputy Sheriff Tillman Johnson answered a call from the Shreveport police. A suspect was in their custody, a man who’d confessed committing the murders to an eager reporter. Johnson drove all the way to Shreveport only to find the “confessor” was one of Texarkana’s town drunks, awaiting visitors. The reporter had bought him a fifth of whiskey, and the drunk had told him whatever he’d wanted to hear.
Parents got more cautious than usual after the murders, sure. But it became increasingly clear that no one would be able to save Texarkana from this killer — not the FBI, not the Rangers, not the police.
As for the teens of Texarkana, they all chose to cope in their own ways. Some did their best to be careful, while also keeping things as normal as they could possibly be. They went to the movies at night, for instance, but now went only in groups, sometimes armed. One story around the time said Gonzaullas thought it would be “meaningless” to tell teenagers not to go out. “They know the possible consequences as well as I do now,” he said.
Some, however, took a more proactive approach.
One of these teenagers was a high school kid named Carl Joseph Lauderdale, Jr. He went by C.J. and was a jock in high school, or at least enough of one to merit mention in the newspaper as “a star athlete.”
Like most people in town, he likely read the Texarkana Gazette, the main source of local news, particularly after the murders of Paul and Betty Jo. If it happened to be the May 8h edition of the Texarkana Gazette, he would have read a statement from Gonzaullas, advising the town to “…oil up their guns and see if they are loaded. Put them out of the reach of children. Do not use them unless it’s necessary, but if you believe it is, do not hesitate.”
It stands to reason, then, that if a teenager decided to play vigilante, it wasn’t because they were acting out of reckless abandon. They had armed themselves because that’s what Gonzaullas had said they should do — and now, some of them were getting antsy. All of which might have given C.J. an idea: Rather than wait for the Phantom Killer to strike, he would go out looking for him first.
From the perspective of some teenagers in Texarkana, this breaking point might have already passed the minute the bodies of Paul Martin and Betty Jo Booker were found. But if that attack didn’t convince Texarkana no one was on the way to rescue them, then the night of May 3 would.
Act III: The Final Showdown
Virgil Starks had a bad back. The 36-year-old farmer lived in a small house on 500 acres of land, ten miles to the northeast of Texarkana. At night, he sat in his chair with an electric heating pad on his back, listening to the radio and reading the newspaper.
The chair Virgil Starks liked to sit in sat facing away from Highway 67. On Friday, May 3, at around 9 p.m., Katie Starks, Virgil’s wife, was lying in bed when she heard something in the yard. It made her curious enough to ask Virgil to turn the radio down so she could hear it again.
The sound of broken glass answered her. Katie walked out to the living room, where Virgil Starks was slumped forward in his chair, covered in blood. She took a second to look at her husband’s wounds before moving to their telephone to call for help.
The killer fired two more shots. Standing in the pitch dark, he’d been waiting for her. Two bullets hit Katie Starks in the face — one knocking out multiple teeth, and the other exiting behind her ear. She dropped to the floor.
Crawling back to the bedroom to get a pistol, Katie suddenly changed her mind, deciding instead to leave a note for whoever found the scene first. Meanwhile, the killer circled around the back of the house, before barging through a screen door to get to the porch.
Katie listened as the killer attempted to crawl through a kitchen window. Unarmed, half-blind from the blood in her eyes, and wearing only a nightgown, she ran straight through the house and out the front door.
She first tried her sister and brother-in-law’s house across the road. When no one answered, she ran fifty yards to the house of another neighbor for help. She was in a daze when she was taken in serious condition to Michael Meagher Hospital, but still managed to hand a gold tooth the killer had shot out of her mouth to the driver.
The first officers to arrive to the Starks’ home only had a few minutes to rope off critical parts of the crime scene. Once the other officers from other agencies arrived, they would immediately barge through the house, tainting much of the evidence.
The investigation was left with a few bloody footprints where the killer had stood by Starks’ body; a .22 caliber bullet; a red flashlight he’d dropped outside; and a trail that bloodhounds followed away from the Starks’ house, towards Highway 67, and then lost at the road. The flashlight would be sent to Washington for examination by the FBI, but nothing useful would be found.
The Starks attack sent Texarkana rocketing into the peak of Phantom Killer hysteria. The different M.O. of the Starks murder — an attack on adults in their town, and on a farm in the nearby country surrounding Texarkana — was followed by more wildly unsubstantiated rumormongering. Some believed a different killer committed the Starks murder altogether, others that it could only be the Phantom Killer. The one thing most agreed on? The killer could strike anyone, anywhere.
Texarkana residents bunkered up and fortified their homes. Houses sprouted floodlights, blazing away, lighting up the pitch dark. Some rigged up elaborate homemade alarm systems: string, pots, and pans tied together around a door.
The town closed up what it could. In what had been a late night town, liquor stores were closed at the relatively early hour of 9:30 p.m. The restaurants and nightclubs and theaters sat half-empty. Some locals checked into the fortress-like Hotel Grim just to feel safe.
And some went out to look for the killer, and not all of them working for the law.
On the night of May 10, just after the Starks shootings, C.J. Lauderdale saw a suspicious man getting onto a city bus, and thought he looked suspicious enough to follow. The bus pulled away from the stop, lurching into the road. Lauderdale began to follow close behind in his car.
After a few minutes, another car pulled behind him. Lauderdale had started following someone he suspected to be the killer, and in turn, someone had started following him.
Spotting the car tailing him, the high schooler abandoned his surveillance of the bus. He hit the gas and ran. A three mile chase followed, ending when someone in the pursuing vehicle shot out the tires on Lauderdale’s car. The pursuant car ended up being an unmarked police vehicle, and the man who had shot his tires, an officer investigating his suspicious behavior. Afterwards, Lauderdale said he had failed to stop because he had no idea who was trying to chase him down.
The next day, Captain Gonzaullas warned against teenage sleuths trying to solve the crime themselves. He called it “a good way to get killed” — though Gonzaullas didn’t say by whom.
The police arrested hundreds of people in connection with the killings, but only a few graduated to the status of “suspect.” There was the 30 year old who tried to sell a saxophone like Betty Jo Booker’s in a Corpus Christi music shop, but was cleared after several days of questioning by police. At one point, an escaped German P.O.W. was considered a suspect. A suicide note from a student at the University of Arkansas confessed to the killings, but no evidence backed up the claim.
The prime suspect, however — and the one many experts on the case believe likely committed the murders — was Youell Swinney. Swinney was a career criminal and a car thief, and tied to Texarkana when a rookie Arkansas state trooper named Max Tackett noticed that each murder coincided with a new car theft in the area. A report from the chief of police in Atlanta, Texas, eventually led the investigation to a motor coach station, where they arrested a fleeing Swinney.
At the time, the case against Swinney looked like an easy one. His wife Peggy had made a shaky but still accurate enough confession that her husband was the killer. But he never admitted to the murders, and during his arrest, told investigators, “You want me for more than stealing cars.”
Ultimately, Swinney’s wife could not be compelled to testify against her husband, and prosecutors believed her to be an unreliable witness. When Peggy refused to cooperate with investigators, only circumstantial evidence remained. Though he spent most of his life in jail as a repeat offender for car theft and other crimes, Youell Swinney died in 1994 without ever being charged with any of the Texarkana murders.
In retrospect, it’s easy to spot how the story of the Texarkana killings was written, and how it grew over the years — swollen to mythical status by a public that was terrified of murder, and yet lining up at the newsstand to read about it whenever they could.
There is no one-to-one path between the Texarkana murders and the stories it created or fed, but the basic drift of evolving stories is clear to see. Here was a big, raw country only just starting to develop a connected hive mind. Americans listened to the same big radio networks, read the same wire reports in their local papers, and traveled on the same metastasizing network of highways connecting previously disconnected places. Somewhere in that net of information and open pavement, there were real nightmares roaming around, grown from real psychopaths like the Phantom Killer.
The myth of the Hookman surfaced for the first time in the 1950s, an urban myth with a hundred variations on the grisly story of an escaped lunatic hunting teens in their cars on backroads. Slasher films came soon after. Halloween’s 1978 debut all but codified the genre. There are young people stranded in the dark in the middle of nowhere. A killer on the loose stalks them. There is no chance of help. Bloodshed ensues. Sometimes the killer is caught or killed, but the menace always remains, no matter the ending.
The largely-panned 1976 The Town That Dreaded Sundown focused on the actual Texarkana murders themselves — or at least the idea of them. Director and Arkansas native Charles B. Pierce took some baffling liberties with the story, including but not limited to the Phantom Killer stabbing Betty Jo Booker with a knife tied to a trombone, and the Gonzaullas character pursuing the killer himself before his escape at the end of the film.
The Texarkana murders aren’t the sole true crime story of their time, but they were one of the moments when America’s taste for true crime revealed itself. Horror stories about haunted castles and monsters are fine, but they could never be as familiar or as eerie as known terrors, like isolation, wayward youth, and masked lunatics who exist only in the most terrifying places of all: Amongst us, in the great expanses between what was assumed to be civilization.
Yet: These spots aren’t totally empty, and their characters not nearly as helpless as they seemed. Lauderdale’s attempt at a citizen’s arrest of the Phantom Killer wasn’t the only one. The girl with the gun, too, likely wasn’t the only one to arm herself so that she could go out and have some fun. The police had already been using teen volunteers to sit in parked cars at night, trying to bait the Phantom Killer into an ambush from officers waiting nearby. (It didn’t work.) Wire stories from May of 1946 casually mention teens parking on their own on the roads around Texarkana looking for the killer, too.
A huge blank space sits where the principals in the story of the Phantom Killer should be. The teens of the story are almost all dead, their stories dead with them, subsumed by the narratives of law enforcement and journalists.
But they’re there, if you look hard enough.
Post-Credits: The Killer Escapes
After the Starks attack, the Phantom Killer disappeared.
Four weeks after the Starks shootings, he had missed his window. The Phantom Killer, if the four attacks are to be attributed to the same person, had hit Texarkana once a month since the first beating of Mary Jeanne Larey and Jimmy Hollis. He’d become more and more brazen with each attack — and now, he was gone.
June and the summer heat arrived. The out-of-town press went home. The investigation dragged on in the background, but turned up little. Eventually, many of the Texas Rangers left town, too.
The teenagers of Texarkana, meanwhile, went on with their lives. Perhaps more than other generations, they were uniquely suited to understand this was how life worked sometimes, with no real easy transition between one thing and another. Without warning, in the middle of the horror story everyone now knows, it was over.
But maybe, this is the real story that is rarely told: When confronted with the danger of a real life horror movie, told to play victim, rather than turn away from their fear, some choose to steer into it.
To this day, the killings remain unsolved.
Credits
Editor: Gina Mei
Art: Clark Miller
Fact Checker: Nathan Diller
Photo Credits: Getty Images/Found Images Holding Inc., Getty Images/University of Southern California, Getty Images/Bettmann, Getty Images/LMPC
