The Phantom Killer: Unlocking the Mystery of the Texarkana Serial Murders: The Story of a Town in Terror (2 page)

A duality of both dark and light emerged. Old-timers remembered an idyllic small town where everyone knew everybody else and enjoyed a sense of community and a pleasant life—unless, perhaps, you were black or poor. They’d cite a long roster of men and women who came from their town to achieve fame or fortune: Byron Nelson the legendary golfer; politicians Wright Patman, longtime chairman of the House Banking and Currency Committee, and Morris Sheppard (Senate tenure, 1913-1941), to name a few.

Undismayed by negative distractions, the business sector’s ingrained booster spirit burst forth most forcibly in the 1940s with an Old West do-or-die slogan emblazoned on city buses:
Pull for Texarkana or Pull Out
.

It didn’t work. True to the town’s dual nature, denizens of a darker side continued, in counterpoint, to scar its sunny face, neither pulling for nor pulling out.

The nether side was almost never completely out of view. One observer reported the most frequent datelines in the
Police Gazette
to be Peoria, Illinois, and Texarkana. Some occasionally referred to their hometown as Little Chicago. As a lawman of the time, Max Tackett, put it, Texarkana was “calloused to murder.”

Selected headlines from the 1940s seem to bear out Tackett’s contention. The gruesome Arkansas-side murder of Gertrude Hutchinson O’Dwyer on July 24, 1940, was one of the most shocking: her head smashed by a car axle, her throat slit from ear to ear, her bed soaked with blood. The case remains unsolved.

The next year a sixteen-year-old boy, on parole for a shotgun killing in Alabama four years earlier, fatally slugged a younger boy with a pop bottle in Fouke, Arkansas, about ten miles from Texarkana.

A rigidly segregated Southern city, Texarkana’s last recorded lynching had occurred on July 13, 1942, about seven months into World War II. The chain of events began near the little town of Hooks, a dozen miles west of Texarkana and next door to the defense plants. An intruder dragged a twenty-two-year-old white woman, asleep with her baby at her side while her husband worked a night shift, from her trailer home. She broke free and escaped. He fled. She identified him only as a black man. A group of white men—none a police officer—started looking for suspects. At a café they tried to arrest Willie Vinson, thirty-one years old, who was visiting from Louisiana. He refused to go with them. One of the men shot him in the abdomen. Vinson was taken to the hospital. The woman never positively identified Vinson or any other man. Vinson languished near death. Around midnight Sunday several white men wrenched a groaning Vinson, begging for his life, from his unguarded hospital bed. They dragged him by car through the streets and hanged his corpse at a cotton compress a mile away. Relegating the global war to lesser headlines, the
Texarkana Gazette
thundered forth with a bold, all-capitals 8-column banner:

The case made national news. Racial tensions rose exponentially; rumors flew. The FBI entered the case. No arrests were made, no culprits named, no charges filed.

Months later, on the Arkansas side, a war-plant worker, H. H. Hasselberg, was shot and left for dead. Before he died he named Curtis Lee Jones, nineteen, as the man who had shot him. Jones, on probation for car theft, fled. Arrested in Houston and returned to Texarkana, he jumped bail and escaped to Mexico. Extradited, he pleaded guilty to avoid a death sentence and received life in the penitentiary. It was not the end of his criminal career; he ended up with a long rap sheet. After his early release, he continued to add to his record.

On December 9, 1944, Walker L. Curtner, age thirty, a used-car salesman, was found shot in the head and dying in a Texas-side street. He’d been robbed of $1300 in cash. The year ended with no break in the mystery. With the case his top priority, the new Bowie County
sheriff, Bill Presley, and Texarkana police chief Jack Runnels posted a hefty reward and received a tip leading to the arrest and conviction of Guy Brantley, an escaped convict. Assessed a life sentence, he later died in prison.

The Japanese surrender brought no end to violence in Texarkana. On October 20, 1945, Ernest F. Bryers, an overseas Army veteran discharged two days earlier in Oklahoma, was found dead, almost decapitated, in a pool of blood near downtown on the Texas side. He’d had a brief layover en route home to Louisiana. Subsequently Jarvis Andrew Elliott, twenty-three, and Vera Jackson, seventeen, confessed to the grisly murder, claiming Bryers had resisted their robbery, leading to the killing. Elliott, a black man, was sentenced to the electric chair; his teen-aged confederate, life in prison.

Holdups, cuttings, burglaries also vied for headlines. At the edges of four states, Texarkana lay in the direct path of traffickers in illicit goods. Scofflaws ran whiskey from wet Louisiana to dry Oklahoma through the area. Specially rigged automobiles carried from fifty to seventy cases of liquor; a stake-bed truck, a hundred. High-speed chases, at times in town and accompanied by gunfire, might register as high as ninety miles per hour. It was a lively atmosphere, during a lively time.

The old year 1945 went out—literally—with a bang. In a shootout at nearby Fulton, Arkansas, the day before New Year’s Eve, Arkansas State Policemen Charley Boyd and Max Tackett, both war veterans back at their old jobs, returned fire from James W. Moore, a thirty-five-year-old ex-convict from Missouri, fatally wounding him.

An ominous foreshadowing, with sequel over the next several weeks of the new year 1946: a $485 holdup of a liquor store in Arkansas (the only side with legal liquor sales), shootings, the sentencing of three men for robbery with firearms, a war veteran’s fatal blow with a hammer to an adversary’s head in an alcohol-fueled fracas, a gunshot suicide, a fatal knife fight, a string of burglaries and thefts netting from five dollars to as much as seven hundred. One Texas-side pistol-backed holdup yielded only thirty-eight dollars. Clothing, radios, jewelry, vehicles, saddles and horses—nothing was off limits to thieves. Highway crashes snuffed out two lives and injured others.

The unexpected kept cropping up. Weeks after New Year’s, three inches of snow covered Texarkana, which was extremely rare. Even more unusual, a rabid dog meandered about Pleasant Grove, a rural community north of town. Hydrophobic dogs came and went, but mostly in the heat of summer, hardly ever in the midst of winter.

The two anomalies soon faded from memory. The snow melted. The weather grew cooperative. Fears of a roving mad dog evaporated. The war was over.

What could happen next?

THE
PHANTOM KILLER

W
hen they met in February, 1946, tall, bespectacled Jimmy Hollis and petite, brunette Mary Jeanne Larey were married, but not to each other. He was twenty-five; she, nineteen. Each was in the process of dissolving a wartime marriage that hadn’t worked out. While awaiting their final divorce decrees, they felt free to date, and did. Their lives, like the rest of the town and the world, were in flux.

Jimmy and Mary Jeanne may have been scarcely aware of how unsettled and unruly the times were. The evidence, however, lay on every hand. In twin-city Texarkana (pop. 52,393) crime tormented both sides of the Texas-Arkansas line. The unexpected had become so common as to lose its ability to surprise.

Hollis, captivated by Mary Jeanne’s striking good looks, asked her out for the evening of Friday, February 22. He arranged a double date for them with his younger brother Bob and a girl to whom he’d introduced Bob, Virginia Lorraine Fairchild. Bob, on the shy side, benefitted from Jimmy’s gift of gab.

With the war a fresh memory, people avidly flocked to a broad range of entertainment. Wrestling at the Arkansas Armory featured headliners like the Purple Phantom, whose mask would come off only at his defeat. But movies were the main draw.

Jimmy Hollis chose Warner’s freshly minted
Three Strangers
at the classy Paramount theater. A trip to the Paramount was almost a formal event, the men wearing coats and ties, the women in high heels and their best dresses, sometimes even gloves. The best place in town, for a fifty-cent admission fee. Unlike the other “white” theaters, the Paramount featured a “Colored” entrance at the side, next to an alley, that led up to a segregated portion of the balcony.

Three Strangers
, a black-and-white film billed as “a masterpiece of suspense,” was one of Geraldine Fitzgerald’s earlier movies, with heavies Sidney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre. It had its moments, but not many. Set in London in the spring of 1938, the film climaxes when a desperate Greenstreet viciously slams Miss Fitzgerald over the head with a brass Chinese idol, killing her. Not exactly a happy ending.

About a quarter after ten the couples left the theater. Jimmy Hollis, driving an old-model gray Chevrolet, took them to a drive-in café where they sipped soft drinks and chatted. Then he drove Bob and his date home. It was a long drive from there to the little town of Hooks, in Texas, where Mary Jeanne lived.

Texarkana was small. You could drive across town in a matter of minutes. By eleven, less than an hour after leaving the theater, Jimmy and Mary Jeanne drove onto New Boston Road on the Texas side, which would take them to Highway 82 and west to Hooks. First he detoured to graveled Richmond Road, north of town. They were “young and frivolous,” as Jimmy was to put it; they followed Richmond Road about a hundred yards past the last row of city houses and turned off onto a dirt lane and parked. They were near the rural Pleasant Grove community, scene of the mad dog scare the previous month. By that time of night, traffic was sparse. All was quiet and peaceful.

Earlier there had been a light drizzle with some fog. It was pleasantly cool, in the upper sixties, with a slight breeze. The moon was nearing the last quarter and wouldn’t be rising for more than an hour.

They were in pitch-black darkness as they chatted and Hollis, always an easy conversationalist, told a few jokes. Fancying himself a bit of a crooner, he drew on his experience with a dance band in Fort Worth and began singing to Mary Jeanne. It was a romantic interlude for both. Utter privacy. Whatever might be said of Texarkana, its lovers’ lanes were secluded, peaceful, quiet, and safe, a commonly accepted lure to the young set.

For some reason Hollis never could explain later, to himself or anyone else, he impulsively got out of the car and studied the dark sky, searching for stars.

As he stood in the unpaved lane in the dark, suddenly a powerful flashlight’s beam switched on, seemingly out of nowhere, about twenty feet away, and focused in his eyes, blinding him. From around the halo of light he saw what appeared to be a pistol barrel aimed his way, backed up by a rough voice barking orders in a mean tone. Judging from the voice and level of the flashlight, Hollis assessed the man as tall and fairly young. Who was he? What did he want?

“Take off your fucking pants!”
the gruff voice ordered.

Hollis, partially in shock, partially in denial, couldn’t fathom what was going on. He knew the man was holding a gun on him. He could tell by the orders that the man was uncouth, to put it mildly, and intended to have his way. His mind groped for a reasonable explanation. This must be some kind of strange game, he told himself. A prankster had mistakenly zeroed in on him.

Hollis, startled, knew he had never heard the voice before. “Fellow, you’ve got me mixed up with someone else. You’ve got the wrong man.”

Hollis’s words drove the man, now moving closer, into a spasm of anger.

“I don’t want to kill you, fellow,” the man spat the words back. “So you better do what I tell you! Take off your goddamned pants. Now!”

The second command shook Hollis out of any residual denial or confusion. There was no joke behind the man’s snarled words. Incongruously Hollis ran a question over and over in his mind:
What would Dick Tracy do now?
Even as he thought it, he realized the comic-strip detective would have found himself just as helpless in a situation like this.

From inside the car he heard Mary Jeanne, pleading. “Jimmy, please take them off,” she said, thinking that might keep them from being harmed.

Hollis had no choice. He loosened his belt, lowered his trousers, and eased out of them, one leg almost snagging as he tried to keep from falling. Then the intruder moved closer and slammed Hollis viciously on the head with a heavy blunt object like an iron pipe or pistol’s barrel, once—
whock!
—then a second time—
whock!
The force knocked his glasses off. He crumpled to the ground. The man kicked him, hard. Hollis could feel metal cleats in the man’s shoes or boots stomping his chest. Then the stranger struck Hollis again on the head as he lay on the ground.

Mary Jeanne thought Hollis had been shot. She was mistaken. She’d heard his skull cracking.

With Hollis disabled on the ground, the assailant turned his attention to the petite teenager. She got out of the car. She leaned over to pick up Hollis’s trousers and took out his billfold, showing it to the assailant.

“Look,” she said, “he doesn’t have any money.”

“You’re lying!” the man shouted.

“No, look. You can see.”

He bent over to where Hollis lay and searched his trousers.

He turned to her. “Where’s your purse?”

“I don’t have one,” she said weakly.

Angered, he hit her on the head. It felt like an iron pipe. She fell to the ground.

Somehow she managed to get up.

“Take off!” the man growled. “Run!”

She tried to obey. She headed for a nearby ditch.

“Not that way!” he shouted. “Go up the road.”

She was wearing high-heeled shoes. She did the best she could. She could hear Hollis, still on the ground, groaning. The thug turned his attention back to Hollis, beating and stomping him. As she ran she could hear the thud of the blows and could hear Hollis’s groans. Terrified, she blindly ran down the road. At times stumbling, she dashed off wildly. Would he let her escape, or was he going to shoot her? In the dark she ran and ran, despite her high heels, as if her life depended on every step.