The Phantom Killer: Unlocking the Mystery of the Texarkana Serial Murders: The Story of a Town in Terror (6 page)

W
hile residents sipped coffee and read their newspapers, there was nothing at the lovers’ lane to alert the casual observer who might pass and glance at Richard Griffin’s parked Oldsmobile in the early-morning light. The road saw little traffic, even less on a quiet Sunday morning. But at nine o’clock, a passing motorist glanced at the car and wondered why it was there at that time of day. There appeared to be two persons inside. There was something unnatural about it. His suspicions rose. On closer inspection, he grew alarmed and concluded that something worth reporting had happened. As soon as he reached a telephone he called the police.

City policemen immediately sped to the scene. The police dispatcher relayed the message to the Bowie County sheriff’s office.

War veterans Byron Brower, Jr., and his brother-in-law Edward Brettel with his young son Eddie set out that morning to fetch a Sunday newspaper and some kerosene. They drove to a Texaco station on Highway 67 just west of the Texarkana city limits. They picked up
a newspaper and purchased the kerosene. Then their eyes followed a string of automobiles down by the little dirt road that branched off the highway.

“Wonder what’s going on there,” Brower said. They turned off the highway and parked behind a long row of cars. They got out to take a closer look. Policemen and curious observers crowded around a car at the end of the row. Immediately they realized that it was a crime scene. There was no police line. They walked within eight feet of the car on which all eyes were focused. They saw two bodies in an Oldsmobile. A man’s body lay between the seats, his face down. A woman was slumped over in the front seat on the passenger side. Brower had only a side view of her face, but could see she had turned dark.

It was Sunday morning in a small city. The dispatcher directed a squad car to the new crime scene before the sheriff or his deputies could be alerted. The sheriff’s Texarkana office was upstairs at 214½ Main over a popular café, John’s Place, in the heart of downtown; the city police headquarters and city jail lay a block away.

By time Sheriff Bill Presley arrived, a “very large” crowd had assembled. The milling throng and light showers throughout the morning obliterated any tracks in the dirt around the car. Very few clues were left. About twenty feet from the car, a section of the ground was saturated with dried blood, indicating that one of the victims—Polly Moore, it was later decided—had been murdered outside, and Griffin had been shot inside the car. Griffin was found on his knees behind the front seat, his trousers down to his ankles, his head resting on his hands. She was found sprawled in the front.

The Oldsmobile was spotted throughout with blood. Blood had seeped through the bottom of the car’s door and onto the running board, where it had congealed. Griffin’s trouser pockets were turned inside out, as if to suggest robbery. Judging from the amount of blood, both inside and outside the car, the killer could hardly have avoided getting blood all over himself as well.

The presence of police cars and other automobiles piqued the curiosity of others who turned off the highway to see what was going on. It became a major chore to keep people away.

Who were the victims? Griffin’s identification was readily established. His wallet contained his driver’s license. The young woman’s purse contained no identification. But she wore an Atlanta High School Class of 1945 ring, which narrowed the search. Inside the ring were initials: PAM. Presley called Homer Carter, city marshal of Atlanta in the next county. Contacting Atlanta school officials, Carter learned the ring apparently belonged to Polly Ann Moore, who had graduated the year before. He passed on the finding to Bowie County. Presley and others began backtracking the couple’s activities the night of their deaths, learning that they’d eaten supper at the Canary Cottage with Griffin’s sister and her boyfriend.

The newspaper soon learned of the deaths. A reporter immediately asked, “Was this a murder and suicide?”

“No, definitely not,” replied the sheriff. “Both were shot in the back of their heads. It’s a double murder. We’re still looking for clues and leads. We’ve found no weapon.”

But there was so little to go on.

The sheriff immediately launched an area-wide investigation. He notified both Texas and Arkansas-side lawmen at city, county, and state levels, along with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Texas Department of Public Safety, and the Texas Rangers. The Rangers promised to dispatch a man.

By the end of the day, the only certainty was that two persons had been murdered. What the rain hadn’t washed away, officers and gawkers had destroyed by plodding around the scene. After the bodies were taken away, the Oldsmobile remained at the site for hours until moved to the Arkansas-side police station, where a more thorough fingerprint examination could be undertaken.

Polly Moore’s immediate family didn’t learn the dismal news until her school ring had been identified. Lizzie Moore’s telephone was on a large party line in the rural community. Her ring was one long and two shorts—she didn’t have to wait long to know whether a call was for her or not.

The caller identified himself as the Cass County sheriff.

“Mrs. Moore, they’ve found two bodies over in Texarkana. A man and a young woman. We think she’s your daughter Polly.”

Lizzie Moore, shocked by the words, maintained her composure. She’d never been an emotional person.

“Why? What happened?”

“They were shot to death, in a car. The girl was wearing an Atlanta High School class ring with the initials PAM. The school thinks it belongs to your daughter. They would like for you to go to Texarkana and verify this.”

It was the Moore family’s introduction to the tragic news. Lizzie Moore owned an old-model automobile that wasn’t reliable. She called a neighbor. The neighbors’ son-in-law drove Lizzie and her son Mark to Texarkana, to the funeral home where she was shown the girl’s body. It was, indeed, Polly.

Mark Moore was a fourteen-year-old sophomore in high school. Dealing with adversity, throughout the Depression, had steeled the family for the unexpected. Polly’s death was a loss they would never get over, but they would deal with it without breaking down. After they finished their business in Texarkana, they left for Atlanta to make funeral arrangements. They would remain in Cass County, where the funeral would be.

Ardella Campbell, in whose home Polly roomed, had worked her regular shift as a telephone operator the night before and wasn’t immediately aware that Polly wasn’t sleeping in her room. She and her mother soon learned that Polly wasn’t home. Ardella felt a sense of responsibility for her young cousin’s safety and grew agitated.
This isn’t like Polly. What has happened?
She wasn’t long in learning that the worst had happened.

Lizzie Moore called from Cass County before leaving for Texarkana.

Ardella’s best friend, Maurice Richardson, lived right around the corner. Maurice’s husband worked nights as a switchman for the railroad. That Sunday morning he had arrived home and gone directly to bed. Ardella, crying on the phone, called her friend Maurice. Polly had been found dead. She had been killed. Ardella choked out the news between sobs.

Ardella didn’t own a car. The Richardsons had an old Chevrolet.

“Will you take me out there where they found the body?” Ardella asked.

The two women herded the four children—Maurice’s two daughters and a son, plus Ardella’s daughter—into the Richardsons’ car and drove to the crime scene.

The experience burned into the memory of Maurice’s daughter Patti, the oldest of the children.

“It was out in the country. There were trees in the background, but up front was just a great big open field. It looked like a lot of cars had been along there, a one-lane dirt road. A dirt trail only went so far into the field. It was where people had been driving in there and parking, and that’s what Richard and Polly did. The car was near the woods. They drove in there and they were parked, and. . . .

“Well, when we drove up there, there were cars all the way up from where Richard Griffin’s car was parked. It was still there. And Mother just pulled right off of [Highway] 67 and in behind that long line of cars. She and Ardella got out and walked down there. They would
not
let any of us children go—at all. Mother said, ‘Don’t you dare get out of the car!’ I did get out of the car, though. I was gonna see what I could see. I saw the car, with people gathered around. I was in the second grade, and so I remember that it was a real tearful thing, and Ardella was very, very upset.

“Mother and Ardella were gone a long time. When they got back to the car where I was keeping my brother and sister and Ardella’s daughter, they were grim-faced and tearful—visibly shaken.”

The bodies had been removed by then.

“But the car was still there. And the blood was just everywhere. I remember them talking about a great big pool of blood right in front of the car.”

The crowd had thinned out by the time Isaac Rounsavall and his son Ray drove unexpectedly upon the murder site. Rounsavall was driving to Highway 67 via the crooked unpaved connections between Highways 59 and 67. The boy saw a half-dozen or so people there, with policemen stationed at the highway to keep others out.

The elder Rounsavall saw Sheriff Presley and got out of the car and walked over to him. Young Ray took in the scene as a curious boy would. The bodies had been moved; the death car remained by the ditch, headed south, framed by rampant honeysuckle. Blood was all over the inside of the car.

Ray watched a young man with a baby girl cradled in his arm, walking about, peering at the ground and all around. About fifty feet from the car, the man suddenly stopped, bent over, the little girl still
in the crook of his left arm, and picked up a set of keys. Ray had heard the men say there’d been no keys in the ignition of the Oldsmobile. The man handed the keys to Presley. With a crowd milling around earlier, the officers had not seen the keys, trampled into the soft wet earth by numerous feet.

Later James and Sandy King, en route to one of the few stores open on Sunday, arrived at the intersection of Robinson Road and Highway 67 West. They were in a truck that King drove for a wrecking business. At the highway they saw a crowd milling around on the dirt road across the highway. He turned and passed by a deputy sheriff he recognized. The deputy, Frank Riley, was directing traffic. Towing damaged cars was King’s job.

“Is it a wreck?” he hollered.

“No, it’s a murder,” replied the deputy. He motioned at King. “Come on back. We need to move the car over to the Arkansas police station.”

King crossed the highway and backed the wrecker close enough to Griffin’s Oldsmobile to hook it to the winch. He hauled it onto West Seventh Street and eastward. Once the Oldsmobile was set down in the alley by the Arkansas police station, the policemen and King pushed it to a space where the fingerprint specialist could go over it.

When King returned to the wrecker, Sandy, who had remained in the truck, shook her head in wonder.

“I don’t understand why everybody’d push the car by hand. They just put that many more fingerprints on it!”

Her husband shrugged. Neither of them realized yet that other disorderly crime scenes would eventually follow, obscuring or obliterating potentially crucial evidence.

A physician examined Polly Moore’s body and determined she had not been raped—or “criminally assaulted,” in the term of the day. But in one of the mix-ups that followed, after the bodies were taken from the scene and given a cursory examination, a hearse conveyed her body late that very afternoon to the funeral home in Atlanta in the next county, so there could be no corroborating autopsy. Griffin’s body remained at the Texarkana Funeral Home the rest of that Sunday and the following day.

In addition to the physician’s assessment that Polly had not been raped, other evidence supported the opinion. Max Tackett, at the time with the Arkansas State Police but in touch with the Texas side, noted that the victim was still wearing a sanitary pad at the time of death. This fact tended to back up the physician’s conclusion. The killer’s moving her body from outside to inside the car seems to have been part of a plan to conceal the deaths as long as possible, at least until dawn, by which time he presumably would have made his getaway. Rumors of rape, however, soon spread and persisted for decades.

The Griffin family—Bernice, her son David, and her daughter Eleanor—had finished breakfast and were sitting around the living room reading the Sunday newspaper when a neighbor knocked on the door. Telephones were rare at Robison Courts; the Griffins had none. The neighbor had just heard a news item on a local radio station about a couple being killed. He thought Richard was the male victim. Word eventually reached them that the car had been taken to the Arkansas-side police station, along with some of Richard’s clothes, because the fingerprinting equipment there was more reliable.

“We were
stunned
,” David Griffin said.

Friends took the Griffins to the other side of the state line. It was Richard’s car, all right. They also positively identified the clothing.

The Griffins never visited the crime scene. They didn’t see Richard’s body until it was at the funeral home. Actually, the murder spot itself was within walking distance from their home in Robison Courts—a long walk but not a great distance. But after identifying the Oldsmobile and his clothing and viewing the body, they’d had a surfeit of tragedy.

Welborn Griffin, Richard’s other brother three months out of the Army, was married and living in Dallas. As soon as they could, Welborn and his wife and baby left Dallas by train.

Welborn arrived at the funeral home after midnight. He went inside and found one man on duty.

He identified himself to the attendant. “I want to see Richard’s body and see where he was shot.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Griffin,” the man said. “I can’t do that. The officers told us not to let any family members see where he was shot.”

Welborn was astonished.