My personal interest in the Phantom murders, officially unsolved since 1946, traces from boyhood. My uncle, Bill Presley, served as sheriff of Bowie County, Texas, where most of the attacks took place. Later as a teenaged police reporter for the Texarkana Gazette I came to know the investigators, as well as reporters and editors who’d covered the story. Eventually doctoral studies in history enabled me to add perspective to the ravages of a willful domestic terrorist.
The case cried out for a reliable record to preserve the known facts, dig up new ones, and separate the substantive evidence from the spurious and imaginary. This book applies the tools of history to explain how and why the crimes and the panic happened—and seek a solution.
The Texas Department of Public Safety labeled it “the Number One unsolved murder case in Texas history.” That’s a lot of crimes over many decades in a state hardly celebrated for its peacefulness. “As a puzzle,” wrote Dallas columnist Kent Biffle, “the case remains more popular than sudoku, but seemingly uncrackable.” National and regional media continue to revisit the tantalizing case. The Internet, with Wikipedia in the lead, ripples with references. The Learning Channel’s “Ultimate Ten,” on which I appeared, classified it as one of “the most notorious and intriguing unsolved crimes in history,” in a dead heat with Jack the Ripper’s 1888 London rampage. The Ripper killed five women. The Phantom killed five victims, badly injured three others, as he hunted couples at a disadvantage in the dark.
This account offers an antidote for the rumors and distortions caused by time, journalistic excesses, and, on occasion, clumsy police work. With the principal participants dead (most of whom I interviewed at some point in their final years) and documentary evidence fragile and scattered and possibly on the way to being lost forever, this was the last chance to set the record straight and close a popular but vexing old mystery.