The Phantom Killer: Unlocking the Mystery of the Texarkana Serial Murders: The Story of a Town in Terror (4 page)

The report named Hollis as a victim, identifying him as an insurance man and noting his residence, while identifying Mrs. Larey only as his “19-year-old girl companion.” The newspaper didn’t use her name until later. On Sunday morning the
Gazette
ran a one-column page-one report that essentially rehashed the afternoon newspaper’s story. The story didn’t fade for days.

Upon reflection and further questioning, officers grew uncertain about the accuracy of her description, vague though it was. Considering the locale of the attack and the type of crime, it didn’t fit the pattern of a black criminal, as attackers such as these tend to “hunt” within their own ethnic groups. They considered part of her statement open to question, or at least incomplete. And the mask: the more officers thought about it, the more they wondered. The main reason for wearing a mask would be to hide his features so he wouldn’t be identified. In the dark that seemed unlikely. Darkness would have shielded a black man even more. So why
had he worn a mask? And a white mask, no less? Did he believe they were someone else? Did mistaken identity explain the beatings? And how, in the dark, was she even able to see a mask? One deputy raised the possibility that she, and perhaps Hollis, actually knew the man and out of fear
claimed
he had worn a mask, an effort to prevent retaliation.

As the days wore on, this possibility gained strength. Both victims were married, the sheriff learned, but not to each other. She explained she was estranged from her husband and that, as far as she knew, he was in college in Arkansas. They were in process of obtaining a divorce by mutual agreement. Was the attacker a boyfriend? Absolutely not!

The next day, officers interviewed her again. She could only reiterate what she had told them previously. Her husband’s alibi, readily checked, held firm. So the jilted-lover hunch was now off the table.

The nightmarish experience dominated her days and nights. In her dreams she saw the blurred image of a vicious man almost every time she fell asleep.

She insisted, though, that she could identify him by his snarling voice.

“I’ll never forget that voice, as long as I live,” she said. “It rings always in my ears.”

Two days after the incident, her fears intensified when, unrelated to the beating, a house fire in a small frame building in Hooks, close enough to see and smell the smoke and flames, burned a woman to death. The sirens that responded, the general commotion, and the subsequent reports and rumors all became another hideous reminder that death, accidental or otherwise, lurked in unexpected places, even near at hand. A few days later a two-car crash on a curve on Highway 67 West, eight miles out in the rural community of Red Springs, injured seven motorists from New York and Tennessee; one died the next day. The traffic casualties were names in the newspaper, from other regions, on another highway, but the home fire in Hooks was one witnessed and lamented by the entire little town, adding to the painful emotions of the attack.

Meanwhile, the question remained whether Hollis would survive. Officers learned from his brothers, however, that he also was in the process of obtaining a divorce, which might come through almost any day. They
assured officers that they knew of no one who would want to do harm to him, and that Hollis’s divorce was mutually desired by both parties.

The viciousness of the attack suggested a vengeful nature, which guided officers into a theory that someone had sought to get even. But they could uncover no one bearing a grudge against Hollis or likely to beat up either of them. Still, officers refused to shake the feeling that an angry suitor had been involved.

Hollis, unconscious and in critical condition, spent days in the hospital before he slowly began to improve. Barely conscious when he arrived at the hospital, he later recalled, the last thing he had heard before slipping into a weeklong coma was the sound of surgical scissors snipping off his blood-clotted hair, preparing him for the operating room.

For many days, it seemed doubtful that he would live. His family gathered at his bedside. His encounter with the stranger replayed over and over in his mind. Although he’d been raised in a Baptist atmosphere where one took care with one’s language, his parents and brothers heard him repeatedly vow, “You sonofabitch, I’ll get you if it takes me twenty years!” His body reacted as if he was struggling with the gunman while lying in the hospital bed. Periodically a family member or friend would have to help hospital attendants restrain him. He flailed about, at times punching one of his brothers in the jaw, throwing the other one over the foot of the bed. He kept reliving his close brush with death.

Sheriff Presley arranged for a round-the-clock guard at Hollis’s hospital room. Whoever the criminal was, Hollis was an eyewitness and the fear that the gunman might try to eliminate him was a reasonable one. The sheriff remembered, from 1942, when his predecessor had failed to mount a guard on Willie Vinson’s hospital room, enabling lynchers to spirit the dying black man away with impunity. Protection from further harm was paramount. Hollis’s physician wouldn’t allow lawmen to interrogate him just yet, citing his fragile condition.

When he came out of the coma, Hollis’s nightmare lived on. He would fall asleep and wake in a cold sweat. He would see, vaguely outlined, a monster standing over him as he lay on the ground. His helplessness terrified him.

Fifteen days after the beating, the hospital released him. He was taken home in an ambulance. Afterward, at his apartment, Hollis talked to investigators for the first time. Who was the man? Had you ever seen him before? What did he look like? Did Mrs. Larey recognize him? Do you know why he attacked you? Tell us what he did and said. Describe him.

Hollis did the best he could. No, he did not know him. He’d never seen him before, to his knowledge. Mary Jeanne hadn’t known him either. It had just happened out of the blue—or, more accurately, out of the dark.

Hollis focused on the assailant’s behavior. The man was tall and mean. His words were vile, bristling with anger and projecting violence that immediately followed. Then Hollis summarized his characterization of the gunman.

“I think he is a young white man, not over thirty years old, and he’s desperate.”

“What else did you see? Anything about his face?”

“No, I don’t know what he looked like.”

“Did he have anything on his face or head?”

“No, I didn’t see anything.”

“He wear a mask?”

“I didn’t see any.” He was willing to accept his date’s version of a mask, though.

It wasn’t much, really, to go on, except that two essential points of his statement conflicted with the teenaged woman’s assessment, adding a serious complication. The gunman was a Negro, she had insisted, and he wore a white mask over his head with holes cut out for his eyes and mouth. Hollis hadn’t seen a mask of any kind and was certain that he was a white man. Most of all, he was sure about the man’s mindset.

“That man’s dangerous,” he said. “He’s a potential murderer. The next one he gets ahold of will be killed. Evidently he thought he killed me that night. I know he was crazy. The crazy things he said. I know his mind was warped.”

The discrepancies in the two eyewitness reports created a problem from the beginning. Instead of narrowing down a search for suspects, it opened it up to almost anyone: young and uncouth—and vicious. In Texarkana at the time, this description would apply to hundreds of men.

Some lawmen suspected one or both victims—especially the girl—of concealing the identity of the gunman. Officers didn’t believe a black man had attacked them, thus siding with Hollis on that point. And if Hollis hadn’t seen a mask, why would she claim the man wore one? They acknowledged that in a time of panic a strong-beamed flashlight in your eyes might create the illusion of a hood, or a halo, from the reflection. But the concept gained little support. Instead officers began to insist that she knew her attacker and was protecting him, perhaps out of fear, by claiming he was black and wore a mask.

On a Wednesday afternoon in March, while Hollis lay in bed at home four weeks after the episode, Texas Ranger Stewart Stanley visited him. He followed up on the earlier questioning by Presley and Riley. The line of questioning soon ruffled Hollis.

“Who would try to do this kind of thing to you?” he was asked. “Which of your enemies would do it?”

“I don’t have any enemies!” Hollis shot back. “I don’t know anybody who’d do this to me.”

“Are you sure you don’t know him? Not covering up for him?”

This provoked Hollis even more.

“Are you kidding? After what I’ve gone through, if it was my grandmother I’d want to see her hang! I’m trying to tell you that this man is brutal. He’s a potential killer. If you don’t find him, the next thing you know he’s going to kill someone!”

This interview, Hollis remembered, occurred on Wednesday, March 20, nearly a month after the incident.

What was the underlying motive? The intruder had brutalized Hollis before demanding money. He gained no more than twenty dollars from Hollis’s wallet. He’d abused the girl but hadn’t tried to rape her. Was it an act of jealousy or revenge? No one could say. Was it a case of mistaken identity? Hollis thought so. The case puzzled the lawmen and everyone else.

Both victims agreed their attacker was sadistic and that he was tall, close to six feet. In those hectic moments in the dark with a raging madman, it was understandable that their memories of the horror wouldn’t mesh exactly, and there was no way to reconcile their differing impressions of the man’s race and whether he wore a mask or not.

They agreed, emphatically, however, that he was capable of anything.

The experience unnerved the young woman so deeply that she fled Texarkana, moving to Frederick, Oklahoma, to live with an aunt and uncle. Mary Jeanne was afraid the man would pursue her and kill her. Even there, safe in a secure small town in another state, she feared being alone or going upstairs by herself.

Although no one mentioned it then or later, the gunman’s abuse of his female victim followed the pattern of the fictional character Popeye, a small-time crook in William Faulkner’s horrific 1931 novel,
Sanctuary
. In one scene Popeye violates the teenaged female character Temple Drake with a corncob. Popeye, as drawn by Faulkner, was a vicious thug, but impotent. Did this sexual abuse in Texarkana suggest the perpetrator was impotent? Or was there another reason he used the gun barrel in such a bizarre and sexually sadistic manner?

Little progress was made in the case. Suspects were cleared as soon as they were thoroughly checked out. The teenaged woman’s husband was out of the Navy and in college eighty miles away, apparently nursing no resentment over their break-up. As perfect an alibi as one might imagine.

On March 12 Hollis, while still in the hospital, was granted a divorce from his wife Louise in Union County, Arkansas, where he had filed his complaint in early February.

Even after he was released from the hospital Hollis still had a long recuperation ahead of him. One of his scars was easily discerned, on the left side of his forehead going into the hairline; his hair, growing back, covered the rest of his scars. His physician ordered him not to go back to work for six months. Like his companion of that night, he continued to feel uncomfortable even away from the scene. He moved to Shreveport, Louisiana, seventy-five miles to the south.

“You can’t forget a thing like that,” he said. “Last night in Shreveport, I was riding in a car with a friend. We stopped to wait on a red traffic light. A friend came running up and jumped on the running board, and I began shaking.”

He was still recuperating from his injuries. His voice was weak and low as he talked to a reporter. His physician told him it would be “some time” before he would be completely well.

On April 22—two months to the day after the beatings—Mary Jeanne’s husband was granted an uncontested divorce in district court in Bowie County, Texas. Subsequently Hollis traveled to Frederick, Oklahoma, where Mary Jeanne was living. He spent a week there. They reviewed their night of terror and discussed the future. Hollis was interested in a more permanent relationship. It was obvious, however, that he was far from recovered. Even his behavior reflected as much. If he’d had marriage in mind when he made the trip, the week in Frederick ended the dream. There was simply too much residual trauma from that fateful night to ever hope to salvage a relationship.

In early May, Hollis took a job as a clerk at Arkansas Natural Gas in Shreveport. His Texarkana experience kept him, literally, gun-shy for a long time. The next year in Shreveport, where he met a young woman who was to become his second wife, Addie Nell “Snookie” Thompson, he took her out to a wooded area where they were going target practicing with a rifle. He wanted to teach her how to shoot, as commonly practiced in the region, and it helped him maintain his own skill, should he need it. As they were walking toward the woods, they heard gunshots in the distance. Without a word, Hollis reacted as if he were alone, turning immediately and sprinting back to his parked car. She ran after him. He was already inside and turning the key before she caught up with him and got into the car as it was rolling. He’d never told her about the Texarkana nightmare etched indelibly in his psyche.

Hollis’s brother Bob was more fortunate. He had not only avoided the attack by turning in early that fateful Friday night, he got along so well with his date that they married later the same year, a union that lasted until his death.

“Persons of interest”—to use a later term—were in short supply in the months following the attack. The conflicting impressions compounded the case. Despite its not being unusual for witnesses to offer differing accounts of an attacker, lawmen still believed that one or both of these two knew their assailant.

Investigators gave little or no thought to another element that may have explained why a nineteen-year-old woman, in a desperate moment of high-tension fear, had mistakenly identified the assailant as black. Mary
Jeanne had been a young girl when Vinson, a black man, had been lynched in Texarkana several years earlier. The precipitating event had been the seizing of a white woman from her mobile home near Hooks. Though the woman was not injured and the lynched black man was apparently innocent, there was much talk of the event in Hooks. The emotional tide may have literally colored her perceptions of the February incident. If she had expected a black perpetrator, based on stories she’d heard, her mind would have been geared in that direction.