The Phantom Killer: Unlocking the Mystery of the Texarkana Serial Murders: The Story of a Town in Terror (33 page)

In a separate set of notes, Tackett compiled a list of suspicious or potentially incriminating factors connecting Swinney to the crimes.

Upon his arrest, Swinney said, “I will spend the rest of my life behind bars this time.”

Swinney asked Johnson, “Do you think that I could be lucky enough to get out in twenty-five years?”

When car stealing was mentioned en route to the jail, Swinney remarked, “Hell, they don’t want me for car stealing. They want me for something more than that.” Yet he subsequently claimed all he ever did was to steal cars.

When a lawyer told Peggy Swinney that her husband was being held for murder, she exclaimed, “How did they find it out?”

“A maroon Chevrolet figured in one of the Texarkana killings. Swinney took a maroon Chevrolet sedan in March. He used it and gave it away to two hitchhikers (in Lubbock) who promised to deliver it to a man in Texas for him. He gave them a fictitious name. He and Peggy hitchhiked back into Texarkana, Texas. If the car hadn’t been very hot he would not have gotten rid of it and hitched to Texarkana.”

“Peggy Swinney said that Swinney had her whip a man with a piece of chain in Waynoka, Oklahoma, while in a jealous rage. He held a shotgun on him. This might indicate that he was the man who brutally whipped the man and woman in Texarkana, Texas, February 22.”

“All of these killings came after Swinney got out of the pen.”

“According to all the people talked to yet Swinney was in Texarkana or the vicinity at the time of each killing.”

“R. E. Whetstone, Swinney’s brother-in-law, stated that on the morning following the Griffin-Moore killings, Swinney showed up at his house in the early morning in a very nervous state and after a while went to a bed and pulled the sheet over his head and slept the entire day.”

On the Sunday morning very early after the Booker-Martin killings, Swinney showed up at Stevens’s home and drove into the woods and remained nearly all afternoon.

Members of the Stevens family had expressed their belief that Swinney killed those people.

His brother-in-law Whetstone stated that he thought Swinney killed the people.

Swinney told his wife, “I will be blamed for all these killings in Texarkana.”

Swinney was in a hotel at Delight, Arkansas, at 5
A.M.
the morning after Starks was killed.

Swinney had always stolen clothes every time he had a chance. He had a suitcase full of clothing at the time of his arrest. Virgil Starks could be the owner of the shirt found among Swinney’s possessions with the word
STARK
on the back of it. Mrs. Starks stated that she thought it might be one of Virgil’s; it was the right size.

If those who had seen Swinney up close were correct, then Swinney had perpetrated the murders. They added to a web of circumstantial evidence that kept the focus on Swinney.

Officers never placed Swinney in a police lineup, where survivors Hollis or Mrs. Larey—if they had been induced to return to Texarkana—might have identified him, or possibly heard him speak. That incident, in darkness, would have made facial identity difficult, particularly if he actually did wear a mask. As for his voice, it was doubtful that any voice, in a normal tone, would have matched the rage-filled demands made by the February attacker.

Time was running out for holding Swinney without a charge. By then, members of his family had hired lawyers and proposed strategies for setting him free. Miller County had a felony theft charge, for the stolen cars, almost certain to gain a conviction. There were several car-theft cases, on both sides of the state line, for which there was solid evidence. But a felony theft wouldn’t net him more than five to ten years, putting him back on the streets again.

Officers felt certain they had their Phantom. Peggy’s statements were damning. But she could not be compelled to testify against her husband, and she refused to do so. She repeatedly emphasized that she was scared to death of him. Without her testimony, could a murder conviction be won?

The question haunted officers, inspiring them to explore all possible remedies. The goal, they agreed, was urgent: to take Swinney off the streets, with no expectation of release.

But could it be done?

A
s summer edged toward September, Texarkana bustled with activity. Veterans scrambled for scarce local jobs; some hired on at the still-functioning defense plants or left home to seek employment wherever they could find it. Others, especially unmarried veterans, crammed into Texarkana College on the GI Bill of Rights. One of the student veterans was David Griffin, Phantom victim Richard Griffin’s younger brother, back from the war in Europe. Overnight the two-year college experienced growing pains as it registered its largest enrollment since its founding in 1927, necessitating use of temporary buildings.

New, pleasant excitement gradually supplanted the spring horrors. The fact that no similar crime had been committed since early May offered guarded hope that the cycle had ended and life could resume as before. The public knew nothing of Swinney’s arrest and interrogation as the major Phantom suspect. With the murder pattern halted, the spotlight had faded from the Texas Rangers and Lone Wolf Gonzaullas, who had been constant reminders of the case’s unsolved status.

Most officers believed that with Youell Swinney behind bars, the Phantom’s reign of terror was over. They remained tight-lipped about it. No charges had been filed. It was uncertain how the case would be handled, and they did not want another media maelstrom on their hands that could potentially harm their efforts to prove that Swinney was the murderer.

By the end of summer, the entire army of lawmen had entered a relaxed mode. The Texas Rangers quietly eased off, without the fanfare that had heralded their arrival. Captain Gonzaullas concluded, on July 23, as for the Texarkana assignment, “it would not be detrimental to this investigation or cause a recurrence of said crimes if we reduced our forces to a minimum on this assignment.” On August 15, he made it plain and direct in a memo stamped
CONFIDENTIAL
, which he distributed to stations in Dallas, Stephenville, Clarksville, and Waco. The two-page, single-spaced letter spelled out the rationale for the shift of personnel, without revealing the specific reason or mentioning the name of the suspect in Arkansas custody.

In order to conduct other assignments by the Rangers’ limited personnel and budget, he said, “and due to the present status of the investigation,” it was time to reduce the force in Texarkana to a minimum. He assigned only two Rangers at a time in Texarkana for the remainder of August, then only one for September. After that, Ranger Stewart Stanley, stationed at Clarksville sixty miles away, would keep tabs on the situation. Occasionally thereafter, Gonzaullas would have a Ranger drop in, to make his presence known.

“At this time,” he emphasized, “I wish to call your attention to the importance of keeping strictly confidential the contents of this letter and our future plans for handling this investigation.”

The orders, secret and never disclosed publicly, were clear to those receiving them.

The Rangers had been called off.

The Phantom no longer threatened.

The Siege of Texarkana was over.

If the residents at large had known this, they would have organized a gigantic spontaneous celebration, the likes of which the city had never known.

And, possibly, a lynching party.

Thirty miles away, in Hope, Arkansas, William Jefferson Blythe was born on August 19, coming into the world as unheralded as the Texas Rangers’ drawdown in Texarkana. He would become William Jefferson “Bill” Clinton, elected forty-six years later as President of the United States. By that time, one of his future 1992 opponents, third-party candidate H. Ross Perot, was a sixteen-year-old student at Texarkana’s Texas High School.

Totally veiled from public view, officers wrestled with how to deal most effectively with The Man They Said Was the Phantom.

Taking a serial killer out of circulation was the surest way of stopping his crimes. The overriding issue was far from simple: how to keep Youell Lee Swinney off the streets, not just for a mere handful of years that an ordinary felony conviction would ensure, but for a much longer stretch, for life, if possible. The more officers learned about him, the more convinced they were that he was the “Phantom” with a mystique of its own, far beyond what a wanton murderer deserved.

Peggy was the officers’ wild card. Her statements told more than enough to be certain Swinney had killed, at the very least, the youngsters Paul Martin and Betty Jo Booker. Her testimony in that case should be sufficient to gain a conviction. With that case solved, ballistics evidence would link the Griffin-Moore murders.

She faced her own problem in the Starks case. She isolated Swinney as a likely suspect while claiming she was in a Delight hotel during the hours when Swinney was in Texarkana. The operators of the hotel shredded her alibi. The couple did not arrive until midnight or later, they insisted. Statements by this reliable couple left Peggy also without a credible alibi. When Swinney drove to Texarkana, going by the Starks home, she must have been with him. The cigarette butts by the site where the killer’s car had been parked indicated that more than one
person had been there. Swinney wasn’t likely to go anywhere, especially at night, without her.

One point officers were to make over and over was that once Swinney was arrested, the murders stopped. Suggestive, but not proof. The Phantom, if he were not Swinney, could have departed for other hunting grounds. No murders elsewhere fit the pattern exactly, but it still did not rule out the possibility that the Phantom had moved elsewhere.

There still were substantial barriers to his successful prosecution. The murder weapons hadn’t been recovered. Swinney had possessed both a .32 automatic and a .22 automatic pistol, but he had gotten rid of both and to men who had not been traced.

Without Peggy’s testimony, the case would have to be built around circumstantial evidence, a higher bar for the prosecution. Officers had to make a case—rapidly—or risk letting slip the best opportunity yet for solving it. They had him off the street; now they must keep him off. The mechanics of doing so were uncertain. There seemed to be no foolproof method to achieve it. If the prisoner was in jeopardy, his captors also faced a crisis.

A new complication arose: Swinney’s father and those of the family whom he rallied—or browbeat—in support. Vowing to save his troubled son from the clutches of the law, one way or another, the Reverend Stanley C. Swinney marshalled a vigorous offense as he fired off letters and telephone calls to offspring and lawyers. Now pastoring the First Baptist Church in Montgomery City, Missouri, where he lived with his third wife, the father Swinney concentrated his pressure on his son Cleo, who lived in Texarkana. He also attempted to field a legal team, repeatedly insisting that Youell was completely innocent and guilty of no crime at all—an absolute denial. If all else failed, he claimed that his connections at high levels in Arkansas would ensure an appellate victory. He journeyed to Texarkana, where he had once lived, to see his wayward son and consult with family members.

In a flurry of correspondence he directed strategy, often contradictory, always aggressive, sometimes bellicose, and self-justifying. He repeatedly spelled out the gravity of Youell’s situation as an innocent man about to be railroaded, as if by a kangaroo court. From Missouri he wrote his son
Cleo that he wanted a lawyer in El Dorado, Arkansas, Claude E. Love, to look into Youell’s case; he urged Cleo, “Please do this at once.” “At once,” often heavily emphasized, was an admonition he habitually incorporated into his summons. He was in bed, he explained, taking “heavy sedatives to keep me going.” He made a plea that was to be duplicated over the coming months, in a variety of guises and emphases. “If something is not done at once they will kill him and my life would be worthless if they should because I know he is innocent and those people down there and everywhere would have no respect for any of us if we stood by and let those bandits swear his life away which I am convinced they will do if they can.” He also repeatedly invoked self-pity, asserting he was ready to sell his furniture (which he seems not to have done) to raise funds for Youell’s defense, while asking his son and daughters to contribute money. If he sought a loan, he said, he would have to explain why he needed it and that would ruin him. He continually insisted that Youell was an “innocent boy” at risk of being “cruelly killed.”

The lawyer Claude Love eagerly accepted the defense assignment. “Perhaps we may be able to help them understand the ‘Sixth Commandment,’” the lawyer wrote, seeming to apply the commandment, “Thou shalt not kill,” to the accused man’s captors rather than to the crimes officers believed he had committed.

Each new Stanley Swinney letter to Cleo frantically emphasized urgency—“something must be done AT ONCE today”—as he felt “the boy’s life is at stake” while he himself was “definitely convinced that he is innocent.” He directed Cleo to either get the trial postponed or get Youell turned over to federal jurisdiction, where he would fare better. Meanwhile, he continued, he had appealed to members of the Arkansas Supreme Court, where he intimated he had an ally, for a chance to convict some of the lawmen for malfeasance of office. To start the ball rolling, he ordered Cleo to get Love “at ONCE.” The absentee father’s orders were easier hurled than carried out.

To one daughter he confided that he had a friend at the state’s highest court, should a conviction be appealed, but she must keep it quiet. “A life is at stake,” he said, adding his familiar order, “PLEASE ACT AT ONCE.” But she must not reveal what he had said of his friend in a high place.
“BURN THIS LETTER BY ALL MEANS,” he wrote, or his best source of information would be closed. “Tell Youell all will be well.”

He bombarded his son Cleo with complaints and orders, ranging from wheedling to demanding. He claimed, on the basis of no evidence that he provided, that Youell was being beaten and starved to death, causing “the poor innocent Youell untold suffering” and creating a “very precarious condition.” At this point he brought in the name of a man, W—, as his substitute candidate for the Phantom, accusing him of trying to harm Youell and asserting that the man would be “brought to justice.” There was never any indication his charge had any substance as the minister unleashed tirades and directives in manipulative efforts that waxed and waned. It was anything but pleasant for Cleo, who was becoming the true martyr in the matter.