The Phantom Killer: Unlocking the Mystery of the Texarkana Serial Murders: The Story of a Town in Terror (15 page)

A wooden loading chute facilitated the movement of livestock, and a nearby arena served as a stage for impromptu, informal rodeos. Bought earlier when land prices were still low because of the Depression, it was a major holding of choice land. Cotton was the big crop, then corn and feedstuff. A shop in which Virgil kept his welding equipment and other tools lay nearby. The shop was a frame building with a roof and a dirt floor, with a door on hinges. The barn lay to the left of the shop. Virgil, an accomplished welder, had erected a sign.

VIRGIL STARKS

ELECTRIC, ACETYLENE WELDING

WORK GUARANTEED

Two tenant structures—“shotgun houses”—sat at the other end of the farm. The men there worked on other farms in the community.

Friday, May 3, for Virgil was another long day. At the end, his back was giving him fits again. It had been a mild day, no higher than 75 degrees by midafternoon, cooling down to 63 degrees by eight
P.M.
Partly cloudy, there had been slight rain, a bit over a third of an inch. The days were gradually growing longer, the sun setting at seven
P.M.
that day. The moon, which had risen at 7:12 that morning and would soon be setting, was already low in the west and waning.

While Katie put the supper dishes away, Virgil sat in his easy chair in a room in the southwest corner of the house, a heating pad applied to his
sore back, as he listened to the radio and read the
Texarkana Gazette
. It was dark outside. Behind his chair, the window shade was halfway down, covering the upper portion of the window, with a section of the curtain draped to one side. Shrubbery outside reached up to the bottom of the windowsill.

Like everyone else, Virgil and Katie had followed news of the Phantom shootings. The Texas cases had been in isolated lovers’ lanes, but rural Arkansans hardly felt exempt from anxiety. The case was of more than casual interest to the Starks couple and their relatives in the community. They had lived in rural Bowie County and still had numerous friends and relatives there. The fact that their friend Bill Presley was sheriff and investigating the crimes only increased their interest.

The hottest lead, though, had fizzled.

The
Gazette
presented a riveting front page. In a bloody uprising, the “most spectacular in the history of federal prisons,” convicts, armed with a machine gun and rifles, had killed and held guards hostage at Alcatraz Island federal penitentiary. Trouble at the Rock had erupted the day before, gaining front-page coverage over the nation that would continue for days. Authorities dispatched Marines to the scene. Two guards had been killed, and three inmates, described as ringleaders, were to die, with fourteen wounded.

Virgil reclined in a chair, his back to the window. With the newspaper spread over his lap, he listened to a radio program that he regularly heard on Friday nights.

Well before nine o’clock, Arkansas State Troopers Max Tackett and Charley Boyd drove their 1941 Ford State Police patrol car by the Starks house, en route from Texarkana to Hope, the district headquarters for the State Police thirty miles away. They had to turn in their April expense accounts by ten
P.M.
, or they would lose the entire month’s reimbursements, not a trivial amount during a time of tight salaries. Both men, in their thirties, had returned from World War II service in late 1945.
Tackett, thirty-four, had volunteered for the Army in December 1943, and was sent almost directly overseas, where he served in combat zones in Belgium, France, Holland, and Germany. Boyd went into the Navy. Resuming their old jobs, they had hit the ground running, shooting it out with a felon at nearby Fulton during the New Year’s holiday.

Traffic was sparse as they drove along narrow two-lane Highway 67. Miles out of Texarkana, Tackett noted an old-model car parked across the railroad track off a dirt road. This was near a road leading to a large stretch of timber called the Big Woods. Patrons of bootleggers at times parked there to await delivery of moonshine whiskey. It was situated on their right as they drove north, maybe a thousand feet past the house on the left. The car was parked parallel to the railroad track. It was headed north, as if it had come from Texarkana. That was about all they could tell of it in the dark.

Ordinarily they would have stopped and investigated. But this Friday night they were racing the clock. Any delay might cost them their expense money. They couldn’t afford it.

“Charley,” said Tackett, “we don’t have time now, but we need to check out that car on our way back.”

They mentally marked the spot. They roared on.

Their repayment assured in Hope, they headed back to Texarkana. The weekend had begun, and they expected to be busily occupied. The Texas murders had increased their already-heavy workload.

It was dark outside as Virgil Starks sat with his heating pad on his back, the light on, reading the newspaper and listening to the radio. The window was closed, but the shade was up as he sat with his back to the window.

Katie Starks undressed for bed and, in her nightgown, lay on their bed in the next room. She called out to Virgil.

“Why don’t you come on to bed?” It was getting late, for a farm family.

“As soon as this story ends,” he said.

A little later Katie heard a noise in the back yard.

“Virgil, turn down the radio a little,” she said. “I hear a noise outside.”

Whether he heard her or not she never knew.

Minutes later, an intruder wielding a .22 automatic weapon standing just outside the window, eighteen to twenty inches from the pane where
he could see the back of Virgil’s head, shot twice, pulling the trigger immediately after the first shot, firing through the screen and window, pumping two bullets into the back of the homeowner’s head. The killer had to stand back because of the heavy hedge. It didn’t take a crack shot to accomplish the feat. A six-year-old child, one lawman later stated, could have hit a target from that distance.

Without making a sound, Starks slumped forward in his chair. The newspaper fell to the floor, his blood spattering it. One bullet went through the heating pad, short-circuiting it.

Katie, in the bedroom, didn’t recognize the shots. It sounded like the breaking of glass. Virgil’s dropped something, she thought. Wondering what had happened, she got off the bed and hurried into the sitting room. The radio was still on. Virgil was slumped over in his chair, blood running down his neck. A pool of blood had formed on the floor. She saw the holes in the windowpane. She rushed up, lifted his head, and saw he was bleeding and lifeless. Immediately she recognized that he had been shot from outside the window. She turned and raced to the hand-crank telephone on the wall.

The killer remained just outside the window, making no attempt to flee.

With the light on in the room, the killer could watch her movements, as he had observed her coming into the room. She could not see outside into the dark.

She never got to use the phone. When she reached it, the killer fired twice more, at her head, before she could start her call. One bullet entered her cheek beside her nose and emerged from behind the ear; the other shot entered her lower jaw just below the lip. The shots crashed through her teeth, scattering fragments to the floor.

She fell to the floor and lay there stunned for a moment, miraculously still alive. Though seriously wounded and in full view of the killer in the well-lighted room, she had the presence of mind to drop to the floor, so that he, outside on the ground, might believe he had killed her and that she lay dead on the floor, but he would be unable to see her and keep shooting at her from outside. In that position on her hands and knees, she inched her way toward the back of the house. She crawled until she thought she was out of view from outside and then went back into the bedroom.

There was a .45 revolver in a dresser drawer. She wasn’t sure exactly where it was. Time was moving fast, her needs urgent, and the pain must have been unimaginable. She might waste precious time searching for it. Then other frenzied thoughts surged through her mind. She could find paper and pen and leave a note. Saying what, she wasn’t sure, but attesting to what had happened, if she didn’t survive. Then she started to the kitchen in the corner room. She opened the door to the kitchen and heard a noise—someone was trying to come in the back door of the kitchen. Just as she entered the kitchen door she heard the man trying to enter the house through the kitchen window, then saw him climbing through a window at the screened-in back porch. All she saw was his leg and knee. He was coming after her! Her only thought was to get away as fast as she could. Her home was no longer a sanctuary.

Terrified, throwing caution to the wind and blinded by blood spurting from her wounds, she ran back, half stumbling, into the bedroom, through a passage way, then another bedroom, and through the living room, frantically flung open the front door and ran pell-mell out of her home into the yard, into the darkness, down the driveway, and headed for the highway. Dressed only in her nightgown, by then saturated with blood, and barefoot, she left a bloody trail in the house. Hardly aware of the rough surfaces her bare feet trod, she crossed the highway, then the railroad tracks.

Oblivious to her condition and dominated by the greatest fear she had ever known, she dedicated all of her energies to escaping. She had to get over to her sister and brother-in-law Betty and Jeff Allen, who lived almost directly across the highway. Approximately two hundred yards away, they were her closest and most obvious sources of protection. Was he behind her? Would he shoot her again? Would he kill her? Her overriding thoughts were of escape.

She hadn’t seen the man at all, only his leg poking through the kitchen window, had no idea what he looked like.

It was the beginning of a night of terror for Katie Starks.

After shooting her, the killer ran along the side of the house and around to the rear of the house and bounded up the steps. Then he entered the screened porch and broke into the house through the kitchen window.
He wasted no time gaining entry. Though his primary goal had become finishing off the only witness, he paused long enough in the house to survey his work before pursuing Katie farther. He stopped for a moment before Starks’s body, staring down at what he had wrought with his own hands. Then he headed out of the room to the front. The brief halt may have given Katie a few more minutes’ headway. By then, seeing that she had fled, his own thoughts turned to escape. There was no time to search for her in the dark and compromise
his
safety. The hunter could become the hunted—fast—if things went awry, and they had.

Upon reaching the Allen house, Katie’s expectations were dashed. There was no light in the house. She stumbled to the front porch, called out, and knocked on the door, frantic with fear. No response. No one home. She was farther from help than she’d realized.

She was not the sort to give up without her strongest effort. The Praters! she thought. Somebody must be home there. She stepped carefully off the Allens’ front porch and, her struggle for survival overcoming her fatigue, started running toward the home of A. V. Prater, whose house was about fifty yards from the Allen home.

Reaching the Praters’ home, she knocked on the door and called for help. She was bleeding profusely and feeling weaker by the second.

The family was home. Prater rushed to the door, switched on the light, recognized Katie immediately, and seized his rifle and fired it from the front porch into the air to signal neighbors. Elmer Taylor heard the shot and rushed to the scene.

“Bring your car, Elmer,” Prater yelled at Taylor. “Mrs. Starks has been shot!”

They rushed her to Texarkana, to Michael Meagher Hospital just east of the state line. Easing Katie in the front seat and the Praters and their baby in the back, Taylor lost no time in covering the ten miles. Katie turned to the driver and handed him one of her dislodged teeth, this one with a gold filling, which she had clutched in her hand during her escape, for safekeeping. She had spat it out into her hand. Katie slumped forward in the front seat, in a semi-conscious state during the entire trip to the city. She had been losing blood the whole time. Her nightgown was soaked. Several of her lower teeth had been shot out. They drove into the
Emergency entrance to the hospital. Taylor and Prater jumped out of the car to get help.

Rushed into the hospital, she gained true sanctuary for the first time. A physician scurried in. The bullet striking her right cheek had emerged from behind the left ear. The bullet to her jaw had broken the lower jaw and lodged under her tongue. It was a miracle she was even able to talk. While the doctor was amazed she hadn’t bled to death, even more striking was that her pulse was normal, no evidence of shock. These indicators boded well for her prognosis. She was whisked into the operating room. Although in critical condition, she was no longer in the dark, barefoot and bleeding, with a cold-blooded gunman on her trail. Her husband was dead, but she was safe in a hospital with physicians and nurses to care for her. Nothing was assured, but now she had a chance to fight for her life, with proper medical assistance.

Troopers Tackett and Boyd had crossed the Red River bridge and were back in Miller County when the call came on their patrol car’s radio. They’d already passed the Starks home, about five miles from the Red River bridge, on their way back to Texarkana. The old model car they’d intended to check was gone. Tough luck. We should have stopped then, they agreed.

The police radio message was somber. A shooting at the home of Virgil Starks on Highway 67. Starks dead, Mrs. Starks critically wounded. Another murder! Tackett turned the car around in the middle of the highway and stomped the accelerator. He and Boyd were the first officers on the scene.

He remembered the old-model car they’d seen parked in the vicinity of the Starks home. He worked it over in his mind. That must have been the killer’s car. It was a disquieting revelation. They had passed around the time of the shootings or shortly afterward. From that moment he believed they had missed an opportunity to either prevent the murder or to apprehend the culprit. They never changed their opinions. The driver of the car, they were certain, had shot the Starks couple.