The Phantom Killer: Unlocking the Mystery of the Texarkana Serial Murders: The Story of a Town in Terror (16 page)

The lights were still on in the farmhouse. The troopers went inside, guns drawn to be sure. Mr. Starks was slumped over in death in the blood-soaked chair. The first things they saw were a blood-stained floor
and muddy footprints. Smoke filled the room where Starks’s body lay, stinging the nostrils. Starks’s armchair smoldered from fire caused by a short-circuit of the electric heating pad. The victim’s blood soaked into the chair and onto the floor. The body, however, was not burned, while smoke swirled all about and from between his legs. Within seconds they ascertained that Starks was beyond help.

They had to work fast. Numerous other officers would be converging on the death house in a very short time. They had only a few precious minutes in which to rope off the house and surrounding area in order to preserve any possible clues that specialists might find. In accepted police procedure, they began carefully isolating possible clues in the house.

Their efforts were almost for naught. Minutes later the house and grounds were inundated by lawmen from both sides of the state line, some from as far as thirty miles away. Everyone raced to the scene as soon as the emergency message went out. “Hundreds of officers,” said Tackett, in a bit of exaggeration, swarmed in. They couldn’t control the outsiders and, according to Tackett, the incoming officers “stomped out all possible evidence.”

Soon it would be impossible to preserve any important clues the killer may have left behind, as lawmen got in each other’s way.

Chaos and poor liaison continued to characterize the investigations.

Early Friday evening, Sheriff W. E. “Elvie” Davis, a stout forty-five-year-old cigar-smoking veteran lawman, was sitting with Chief Deputy Tillman Johnson discussing what the weekend was likely to bring. Davis, former police chief on the Arkansas side who had started out as a rural schoolteacher, had been elected sheriff in 1938. Though a good speaker on the stump, he was shy in many ways and dodged reporters, usually assigning that duty to his chief deputy.

Johnson had just returned to Texarkana and his old job on May 1 after receiving his discharge from the Army. He had been drafted in January 1944 as a private and sent to Camp Chaffee, near Fort Smith, Arkansas. He advanced fast, became a tech sergeant and acting first sergeant of his outfit. He was to recall later, “I got shot at more at home in Miller County than I did in the Army!”

In the Army, Johnson often went home on weekends and had kept up with the Texarkana murders. Davis, like his counterpart in Bowie County, sported a small staff—seven in all, including the sheriff and the jailer—to cover the entire county.

When the city desk sergeant called on Friday night, Johnson answered the phone. Davis, Johnson, and Deputy Bill Scott left immediately for the Starks farm.

“By time Elvie and I got there it was a three-ring circus,” said Johnson. “It was a carnival. There were already a lot of people, including officers, around when we arrived. Max and Charley were there. The city police were already there. Buzz Hallett and Dewey Presley from the FBI were there. Neighbors had started pouring in.

“The house was wide open. Soon people were tromping all over. I tried to seal off the scene, but by then much had probably been lost.”

Scurrying about outside, Johnson first sought to cordon off the crime scene with whatever material he could find. He located some telephone wire around the house and stretched it around to keep the curious at bay. The word had gotten out; soon people began collecting, gawking. Other lawmen began arriving. The sheriff’s men left the inside of the house to the FBI agents to the extent they could. Outside, Johnson found hulls from the bullets used to shoot the couple and saved them as evidence. Three empty cartridge hulls from a .22 caliber gun were collected.

Immediately a blockade was thrown up on U.S. Highway 67 for several miles both northeast and southwest of the murder scene. Several men found in the general vicinity were picked up for questioning. Occupants of cars believed to have been in the area at the time of the shootings were also picked up.

While the other officers rushed about the house and grounds, Johnson and Bill Scott headed west from the house, to see if anyone in the community knew anything. They knocked on the doors of neighbors. They briefed them on the crimes. The neighbors were horrified. They could imagine no possible motive, knew no enemies that Starks may have had. His reputation was excellent.

There were a lot of hitchhikers around Texarkana; anybody out of the ordinary automatically qualified as a suspect. They would sort them out
later. Time was of the essence. Better to detain an innocent man temporarily than to let the guilty one slip through.

Several men in the general vicinity were picked up. Tenants lived some distance behind the Starks house. In each of the two houses there were two men, who worked on the nearby farms, and their families. Without ceremony Johnson and Scott seized the men, to question them later. It was no time for calm reasoning. If anyone even faintly qualified as suspect, he was held.

There was no way of knowing from whence the killer had come or where he had gone. Within hours deputies arrested a dozen men, took them to jail for safekeeping until they had time to check out their stories. Over the weekend three men remained in lockup. It didn’t mean they were strong suspects; they had only been near enough to the Starks home to justify rounding up.

Johnson and Scott didn’t go inside the Starks house that night. But just about everybody else did.

Sheriff Davis headed for Michael Meagher Hospital to question Katie Starks.

Officers inside the house found a scene of rural tranquility violently and abruptly shattered. The dining-room table was covered with material and patterns that Katie Starks had been using to cut out a dress. Money in the house was not bothered. Katie’s purse lay on a bed in full view, containing both money and jewels. Nothing seemed to be missing from the house, with no evidence of ransacking or burglarizing. This did not necessarily mean the intruder hadn’t intended to rob the house and its owners; if so, his plans apparently had gone awry the moment Katie ran to the telephone. From that point the killer apparently concentrated his efforts on eliminating her and, that failing, on escaping himself. If he had simply wanted to kill Starks, and nothing else, he had ample time to shoot and run immediately. But he had lingered until she had appeared.

They found what some believed to be the killer’s bloody footprints on the linoleum floor. He had gone into the sitting room, apparently inspected Starks’s body, then stepped into a pool of blood nearby. The
Texarkana Gazette
that Starks had been reading lay on the floor, splattered with blood.

The killer’s lingering by his victim’s body, while Katie was fleeing, pointed toward his desire to survey the product of his work, like a boy checking out an animal he has hunted and killed, not to be sure it was dead but to examine the result of his sport and handiwork

Three clues remained. The killer had dropped a red flashlight outside in the hedge beneath the window from which he took aim. He had probably set it down on the ground when he’d aimed the weapon, then forgot to retrieve it when Katie’s entrance threw him into a panic. The .22 bullets and shells were collected. The bullets were .22 caliber but too battered to identify definitively. The cases apparently came from an automatic or semi-automatic weapon because of the closeness of the holes in the window with each pair of shots, believed to be from an old model .22 Colt Woodsman. The gun was unlikely to have been a pump or bolt-action rifle, which would have created a different shot pattern. Based on their accuracy, many officers felt the shots came from a rifle, but they couldn’t be sure it wasn’t a .22 pistol, instead. The bloody footprint only provided an approximate clue but helped track the killer’s steps—and were the first concrete physical markers the killer had left behind thus far.

The flashlight along with the tracks provided the first tangible clues in the six weeks of murder. The flashlight would be checked for fingerprints. It was a two-cell light with a black barrel, red-rimmed around the glass. It wasn’t much, but it was more than had been left behind in the earlier cases.

Was the shooting connected to the earlier ones in Texas? Miller County Sheriff Davis hedged his comments. Not definitely, for a different gun was used, a different caliber. But he didn’t close the door on the possibility.

“It is possible that the killer is one and the same man.”

The flashlight was turned over to the FBI agents. Fingerprints weren’t likely to be found on the flashlight itself, but hopes rose that a print might turn up on the batteries therein. Agents Hallett and Presley walked carefully through the house. Although it might be difficult to match definitively with a shoe, the man’s track in Katie’s bloody path was hard evidence. The track seemed to be about a size 10. The retouched shoe sole apparently had been loose and had been sliced off about the place that a
man would cut it off in order to half-sole it. The corner of the cut-off sole had folded back, leaving a triangular imprint.

Footprints appeared to have gone out the front door, down to the edge of the highway. He apparently had run about two hundred yards along the highway, crossed to the other side, and continued beside the railroad tracks a quarter mile away, where Tackett and Boyd had spotted the parked car. Making a plaster cast of the track in the house was out of the question because of its condition, so Hallett took the next best step. He cut out that portion of the linoleum floor as possible evidence.

There were so many people tracking in and out of the house, however, that some wondered whether the track belonged to the killer or to one of the men arriving to investigate. There was no way to be certain. Tillman Johnson, for one, was uncertain that the track belonged to the killer.

The evidence was sent by plane on Monday to FBI headquarters in Washington, where they had been promised priority attention.

Texas Ranger Captain Gonzaullas appeared at the house, even though it was in Arkansas, minutes after receiving the call. On the scene he forcibly vented his emotions. “This is an outrage! I only wish the jury that will try this man could see this house as it is now. This woman possessed tremendous moral courage.”

He viewed the heavy trail of blood Katie had left in her wake and added, “It is beyond me why she did not bleed to death.”

Bowie County Sheriff Presley, getting the report, sped across the state line as fast as he could to the Starks home. The fact that he had known both Virgil and Katie as they had grown up added to his shock. He walked through the house of death, shaking his head.

“This killer is the luckiest person I have ever known. No one sees him, hears him in time, or can identify him in any way.”

The news spread rapidly through the community and to the families of the victims. When Virgil’s father, Jack Starks, learned of the tragedy, he drove to the home of his other son Charlie Starks and his wife Gertie. Jack Starks told them that Virgil had been killed and Katie seriously wounded and was in the hospital.

They all drove to the scene of the shootings. They arrived as the funeral-home attendants were carrying Virgil’s body away. They talked
briefly with officers and neighbors, then headed to the hospital for the long vigil for Katie.

J. Q. Mahaffey left the
Gazette
late. There’d been the usual work to be done on the Sunday edition, some of the pages going in early. As he drove up to the house in Beverly Addition on the Texas side, he saw his son, John Quincy, standing on the porch.

“Daddy,” the boy said, “Mr. Sutton called that he did it again!”

“Who did?”

“The Phantom. He did it again.”

Mahaffey immediately drove back to the newspaper office and soon afterward sped to the scene of the latest shooting.

As soon as he reached the Starks home, he saw Tillman Johnson.

“Tillman, what can you tell me about what happened?” Mahaffey asked.

“I don’t know, J. Q., I just got here. I don’t know any more than you do. When I learn something, I’ll let you know.”

He asked Mahaffey to stand back, as they were combing for evidence. The editor stepped back immediately. Subsequently Johnson found the .22 long-shell cases.

They didn’t see each other again that night. Minutes later, Johnson and Bill Scott began scouring about the farm, picking up anyone who might have been in the area.

Officers at Arkansas’s Cummins State Prison rushed bloodhounds to the scene. Dogs traced two trails to the highway. They ran a trail from the house to the railroad tracks and up to a point where tire tracks were found. Apparently one of the trails had been used to reach the house, the other to flee. The trail was lost at the highway. Bloodhounds are not always as accurate in their tracking as might be desired, and there was no certainty that these were on the right trail, for they had no known scent of the killer to follow, no piece of clothing. The flashlight, which must have been handled by a gloved hand, was not helpful.

Worst of all, by the time the bloodhounds arrived on the scene, a multitude of tracks and scents complicated their work. Men milled around, inside the house and outside on the grounds.

Working with the track the dogs were able to pick up, though, the killer had apparently crossed over the highway, gone down the railroad tracks,
and escaped, probably by a car he had parked nearby. This scenario coincided with Tackett’s belief that the parked car he and Boyd had seen in the shadows was the gunman’s.

As soon as they could drive from Little Rock, a contingent of State Police supervisors arrived. By 6:30
A.M.
, Lt. Carl Miller was jotting notes in a neat hand to file a detailed report with precise measurements, citing distances from ground to window, how far apart were the bullet holes in the window. Apparently the gunman had not changed his stance outside, judging by the horizontal closeness of the two sets of bullet holes. The lower holes, through which Starks had been shot, were 32 inches from the floor; the upper holes, through which Katie was shot, were 42 inches from the floor. The policeman extricated one bullet in the north wall 56 inches from the floor. From the numbers it could be readily seen how Katie had saved her life by dropping to the floor where the assassin could not get a third and fourth shot at her.