The Phantom Killer: Unlocking the Mystery of the Texarkana Serial Murders: The Story of a Town in Terror (14 page)

Two weeks after the murders, April 27, a Saturday, a rumor swept over the city that a man had been found dead at Twenty-Ninth and Wood on the Texas side. Had the Phantom struck early? Phones busily circulated the account. Police sped to the scene. They found a fifteen-year-old boy in the middle of the street, drunk and passed out, but very much alive. They took him to the city jail and called his father, who hurried down to take him home to sleep it off.

That Saturday night, the first shooting occurred. It was not a killing, nor in the secluded countryside, but in a well-lighted café with witnesses. A man wearing an Army uniform entered a West Seventh Street café and shoved his way into the establishment’s dance hall without paying a cover charge. The cashier stopped him. A scuffle ensued. Cleo Wells, thirty-two, a recently discharged member of the Women’s Army Corps, joined the cashier in an effort to block the intruder. The man pulled a pistol and fired at Miss Wells. The bullet struck her in the left thigh. The gunman
fled. An ambulance soon arrived and took the woman to Michael Meagher Hospital. She was not seriously injured.

One early-Saturday event may have contributed to the rumors that spread so explosively. At four-thirty that morning, a man unloading ice at the Texas-side McCartney Hotel, close to Union Station downtown, found the body of a woman. Mrs. Sue Murray, age sixty-seven, had died from an apparent leap from a fire escape at the hotel. As soon as her death was reported, Chief Runnels, Gonzaullas, and Deputy Sheriff Zeke Henslee rushed to the scene. Their investigation revealed that she was in town, apparently despondent, because her husband, a traffic manager for the Cotton Belt rail line, was being treated for a stroke.

Even this tragic event was soon recycled into a rumor that she had jumped out of a hotel window, falling right at Gonzaullas’s feet as he started out the hotel’s lobby door. It wasn’t like that at all—wrong hotel, to begin with—but at the time accuracy continued to be the earliest casualty of the rumor mill.

Editor Mahaffey, hearing of the matter, was shocked. “This is the damnedest town I’ve ever seen. Just bodies falling everywhere!”

Two days later, a Monday night, four teenagers failed to return home at night. This set off rumors that four more bodies had been found. Parents notified officers. Patrols spread out. It had been raining. They turned up, safe but haggard. Their car had been stuck in mud in a rural area. They’d had to walk nine miles for assistance to get the car pulled out. It was three o’clock Tuesday afternoon before they were back in town and in touch with their families.

“All four are safe and sound,” Sheriff Presley told reporters. “But I’ll have to admit that they put some gray hairs in my head today.”

By April 23, nine days after the second murders, the seven-millionth serviceman had been discharged.

Two weeks after the Martin-Booker murders, Ruth Bryan Gabour, a reporter at the
Texarkana Gazette
, received a call. The man suggested he was “the Phantom” or at least was privy to special information. He didn’t say much, didn’t make any threats. He predicted another weekend crime, at the three-week mark. (Everyone else expected it too, or at least feared it.) He suggested they meet at a specific location. Her city editor,
Cal Sutton, ruled that out immediately. The caller gave no hint of his identity. He abruptly hung up. Other reporters also received a plethora of strange calls. She and her colleagues had tentatively deemed it a hoax or practical joke, but there was no way to be certain.

A more recent comment by FBI profiler John Douglas probably sums up the unlikelihood that she had heard from the notorious gunman.

“Killers don’t call, and callers don’t kill.”

City editor Calvin Sutton and Mahaffey worked up ideas to hype the story, ever searching for increasingly lurid and attention-grabbing headlines, giving no thought, at that stage, that in the process they might whip up fears past any reasonable limits.

“We wanted to create something to give an impression of the suspect going up the stairs to the headquarters of the Texas Rangers,” said Mahaffey. “There were all these Rangers in town, and they drove every night. I mean, they guarded the city at night. We cut out a shadow that looked exactly like a ghost and took a picture of this stairway up to the sheriff’s office and superimposed a shadow, to represent the suspect. It was calculated to send people out of their minds.”

And well it probably would have, but for Mahaffey’s ruling it out at the last minute. After giving it more thought, he realized the impact it would have.

“People began to circulate rumors as to who the Phantom might be. And every eccentric fellow in town was suspect as the Phantom, and everybody circulated rumors which would grow till everybody was suspicious of everybody else, and that’s what triggered the hysteria, and the fact that every time one of these would quiet down, another one would break out. And we certainly played it for all it was worth.”

And then some.

While the headlines continued to spin, Betty Jo Booker’s chemistry instructor at Texas High left her lab book in place as a somber reminder. Each time her classmates entered the lab, they would remember her fate, a silent memorial to her absence.

As residents grew more apprehensive, the three-week interval between killings stood out. The Phantom had struck in the early Sunday mornings of March 24 and April 14, exactly three weeks apart. If the pattern
continued, that meant another rampage on the weekend of Saturday, May 4, or Sunday, May 5. A countdown began.

With April winding down, a new hope flared—actually, the only one of any consequence—in far-off Corpus Christi, Texas, 450 miles southwest on the Gulf coast. A thirty-year-old man, whom we’ll call “Charlie Jones,” had tried to sell a saxophone to a music store on April 20, six days after the Spring Lake Park murders, and the report finally reached Texarkana on Monday, April 29. Betty Jo Booker’s missing saxophone had become an integral part of the case, along with the .32 automatic. Jones, witnesses said, had walked into the store and asked the employee if she wanted to buy “an alto Bundy saxophone.” He didn’t have the saxophone with him but described it to her. She said she would have to talk to the manager. “What do you have to talk to him about it for? You work here, don’t you?” he said. She noticed that he had begun behaving extremely nervous. When she tried to call the manager, Jones abruptly turned on his heels and left, disappearing down the street. The manager reported the incident to the police. That wasn’t what led to his arrest, however.

Jones was arrested at a waterfront hotel after he bought a .45 caliber revolver at a pawnshop. When bloody clothing turned up during his arrest, he became a definite suspect in the Booker-Martin case.

The police brought in the saleswoman to identify him. Police didn’t find a saxophone. But they did find his bag with blood-spattered clothing.

“Okay, you’ve got some big explaining to do,” a policeman told him.

“It’s not a big deal,” Jones protested. “I got in a fight in this bar and the guy cut me on my forehead.”

Captain Gonzaullas dispatched Ranger Joe Thompson in the state’s plane to Corpus Christi. It was late Tuesday, April 30. If Thompson turned up sufficient evidence, Presley and other officers expected to head for the coast.

Weather delayed Thompson’s arrival in Corpus Christi.

Presley and others in Texarkana put their optimism on hold. The saxophone hadn’t been found.

Meanwhile, the third weekend since the latest killing was only days off, a fact foremost in everyone’s mind. If the Corpus Christi suspect turned
out to be their man, residents could relax instead of dreading the coming weekend.

The arrest failed to yield much more than very guarded optimism. Captain Gonzaullas, echoing what Sheriff Presley had stated earlier, was quick to dampen expectations. The case against the man grew weaker.

“Everything the man tells us is being checked and double checked, and everything he has told us this far has been found to be true,” Gonzaullas told reporters. “He has answered all of our questions without hesitancy, and we are making every effort to find out if he is telling the truth or is covering up. We are convinced that thus far the man has told the truth.”

The same day, Governor Coke R. Stevenson notified A. C. Stuart, president of the Two States Telephone Company in Texarkana, of his personal interest in the case.

“The governor told me that he was very much interested in the solution of the two crimes and would keep the Texas Rangers on the case indefinitely,” Stuart told reporters.

A week or so after the Martin-Booker shootings, Arkansas Trooper Max Tackett was patrolling the Highway 71 route that ran from Texarkana to Ashdown in Little River County.

At the Index Bridge over the Red River, he stopped a young man in an old car by himself. A man alone in a car was more likely to be stopped than a couple or a car with several people in it. Checking license plates was not as easily done then as it is now. He pulled the man over and walked up to the car. In the back seat the man had a .22 rifle. It was in plain sight, but of course it was no simple matter to conceal a rifle in the car itself. Tackett went through his usual routine. Let’s see your driver’s license. Where are you going? What are you doing with a gun?

The man answered the questions casually and seemingly straightforwardly. The gun was there, in plain view, because he needed to practice target shooting, and he wanted to find a place in the country where he could practice. With the scare going on, he wanted to be ready.

Tackett studied him carefully and decided the answers were convincing.

“Be careful,” he said as he dismissed the man. Having a .22 rifle in the car was as common as anything you could imagine. Almost everyone
owned a .22 rifle in that place and time. Tackett gave it no further thought.

By Thursday night, May 2, a thorough investigation of the Corpus Christi man’s contentions ended in what officers termed “a complete washout.” He had been in a fight, readily explaining the bloody clothing; his alibi was thoroughly checked out. Though he had no saxophone, officers never revealed why he had tried to sell one. Gonzaullas was the first to announce the man’s innocence.

If geography, politics, competition, and athletics had divided the two cities, the Phantom scare changed all that, at least momentarily. Soon everybody was united by fear.

Two weekends had passed since the Spring Lake Park crimes. Might the killer be compulsive, seeking victims by the calendar? While no one expected to be off guard in between, nearly everyone anxiously cast his and her eyes toward Saturday, May 4, hoping, praying a pattern would not form, fearful that it would.

V
irgil and Katie Starks had grown up together, had known each other all their lives. He was only a few months older than she. In March of 1946 they celebrated their fourteenth wedding anniversary. The next month Virgil marked his thirty-seventh birthday; Katie would celebrate hers in September.

Childless, they were a comfortable farm family in the Homan community of Miller County, Arkansas, about ten miles northeast of Texarkana on U.S. Highway 67. They had lived there about five years. Native Texans, they’d grown up in the Red Springs community west of Texarkana. That was the same community from which Sheriff Bill Presley had come. They first emerged in the census of 1910 as children. Both were born in 1909—Walter Virgil Starks on April 3, and Katherine Ila Strickland, six months later. They went to school together. Their families owned nearby farms in Bowie County, as they later were to do in Miller County.

Virgil’s father, Jack Starks, moved his family to Arkansas in the late 1920s. By the time of the 1930 census, Virgil, twenty-one and single,
lived with his parents on the farm at Homan. Katie still lived in Bowie County, twenty and single. That changed on March 2, 1932, when Virgil and Katie, each twenty-two years old, married in Miller County. It was the second union of their families; Charlie Starks, Virgil’s older brother, and Gertie Strickland, Katie’s older sister, had married earlier and also lived in Miller County. (Later, in the early 1940s, the properties their families had sold in Bowie County were taken over by the federal government via eminent domain to build Lone Star and Red River defense plants for the war effort.)

They lived right on U.S. 67, a major highway connecting Texarkana and Little Rock. The same route threaded through Texarkana and stretched westward to Dallas. Although the Starks farm was ten miles out of Texarkana, Katie, an attractive and personable woman, was not isolated. Family members of both Starks and Stricklands lived in the vicinity. They had frequent visits from nieces and nephews. There is a photograph taken that spring with Virgil and Katie kneeling by the side of their house, smiling into the camera. A small niece is standing, with the assistance of Katie, in front. Virgil kept busy on the large farm—500 acres, in cultivation and for grazing of livestock—and in his welding shop; Katie, in the home and working in the yard. She also actively maintained a broad range of social ties; she had, for example, attended the fashionable bridal shower for Jacqueline Hickerson at the Grim Hotel earlier in the year. They had attended the First Methodist Church, Arkansas, in Texarkana for years and had many friends there, having transferred their membership from the church in Texas. Virgil had a solid reputation as a progressive farmer.

At a time when few rural families had electricity, the Starks home did. They had another rural rarity for the time, a telephone, which was listed in the Texarkana directory:
Starks, Virgil, Welding Shop, Highway 67 North: 5016-W
. He was the only Starks listed in the Texarkana directory. The listing immediately before him, J. T. Starkes, came close. The name immediately following Virgil Starks, and one that must have generated an excess of wrong numbers in the middle of the night from inebriated men, was Billie Starr’s at 807 West Fourth in Texarkana, Texas: 3440. Ms. Starr operated a well-known bordello at that address.

Their white frame farmhouse, situated about a hundred feet off the highway, was comfortable and spacious, six rooms and small porches at both the front and back, with a barn nearby. Though set off the highway, one side of the house was in full view of anyone driving along the highway. Shrubbery neatly surrounded the house, in front and at the sides. A screen door at the back was the entrance to a small porch there. As you entered the front, the entrance opened to the living area on the left, a bedroom on the right. The kitchen and dining area were at the back. There was a middle room, an oak-paneled sitting room with an easy chair, the radio, and the telephone with a hand crank ringer on the wall. It comprised around 1500 square feet.