While 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.”
“I want to know why I can’t see where my brother was shot!”
Heated words bounced between them, and finally Welborn told him, “Well, I’m going to see where Richard was shot. If you don’t turn the body over, I’m going to turn it over myself! Unless you’re big enough to whip me and keep me from it.”
Welborn Griffin, like his brother, was strong and well built. His grief and anger reinforced his demand. The man turned the body over and Welborn saw where two bullets had entered the back of Richard’s head. He struggled to control his emotions as he stood before his brother’s corpse. He saw no exit wound in the front of the head. The bullets hadn’t been removed.
He walked several blocks to the Texas-side police station.
“There was a bunch of officers. I told them who I was and began to try to find out something. Well, they give me the runaround. And I tried asking an officer some questions, and this other officer he got in on the conversation and told me that they found Richard’s car keys a hundred yards out there in that marsh from where they found the bodies which was just a dirt road. I said, ‘You mean a hundred feet, not a hundred yards, don’t you?’
“‘No, it was a hundred yards, because we measured it.’
“I said, ‘I don’t believe me, you, or nobody else can throw a set of car keys a hundred yards.’
“That ended that conversation. I was afraid I was going to really get into a confrontation with him.”
Had Welborn Griffin known how the keys were actually found, in the dirt by the man cradling a baby girl, after the crowd had dispersed, he might have sustained his argument. It was an example of how fast facts became distorted as word-of-mouth accounts changed, sometimes radically, and repeatedly.
“I stayed there till near daylight,” said Griffin. “About daylight, I went to the cab stand—it wasn’t far down there—and caught a cab and went to Robison Courts where my mother and sister and Richard and David all lived.
“They were up. They hadn’t slept any all night. It just was sadness, crying, and everything. Nobody could figure out why.”
In a city in which crime was a constant, the murders left no doubt as to the case’s overriding importance. Most of the violent crimes in Texarkana could be connected to something—an unpaid debt, a drunken fight, jealousy, or even racism. But the deaths of Polly and Richard were disconcertingly random. An eight-column nearly inch-high front-page banner proclaimed the tragedy in Monday morning’s Texarkana Gazette.
Accompanying the article were photographs of the two victims, a studio photo of a handsome Griffin and a snapshot of a smiling Polly Moore, with her black-and-white dog, on the front steps of her home while she was in high school. The photo had been found in her purse next to her body.
A justice of the peace executed the death certificates, assessing the cause of death identically in each case: “Gun shot in base of skull.”
At work Monday morning, Byron Brower, Jr., noticed that Polly Moore, with whom he had been working as she checked the ammunition trucks, hadn’t shown up. He hadn’t read the newspaper yet. Others began talking about the murders, and he then realized that the young woman’s body he had seen in the car the morning before was that of Polly. He hadn’t been close enough to recognize her.
Polly’s services were held at the Pleasant Hill Baptist Church Monday afternoon in the little community of Bryans Mill, with burial in the cemetery near where she had been born seventeen years before.
It was late Monday afternoon when the police notified Welborn Griffin that his brother’s body was being released. He called the funeral home in Cass County, and two men accompanied him to the police station to acquire the release. When they arrived, they learned of a change in plans. A Texas Ranger was on the way. The body couldn’t be released until he arrived.
Welborn Griffin and the undertakers waited in the police station for what seemed an interminable period. He heard two uniformed policemen talking about the antics of two women, both drunk, after the bodies and car had been moved. Blood had seeped out of the car onto the ground beneath. One of the women shoved the other down and tried to push her nose into the blood in the dirt. Welborn didn’t know whether to believe it or not. One policeman said the crowd of onlookers had grown so large, later, that there was hardly standing room.
The Ranger—Jimmy Geer—finally arrived at nine o’clock that night.
As the Ranger bounded up the stairs, the officers—Griffin said—“were just like a bunch of little kids with a schoolteacher. They all run up there and tried to talk at the same time, so he jumped up in a chair and started to cussing and told ’em to shut up! They did.
“And the first question he asked ’em was, ‘When y’all found that car and the bodies, did y’all rope that area off? And secure it until you could make a thorough investigation?’
“And they told him, ‘No.’
“And I’ll tell you the exact words he said. Told ’em, ‘Well, if you didn’t do that, you destroyed all the goddamned evidence there was!’ That’s just the words he told ’em, right there.”
The room turned chaotic. “They did a lot of talking and I couldn’t tell a word that was said, to save my neck.” The Ranger created a checklist to ensure that all possible evidence would be collected. Foremost was to retrieve the bullets from Richard Griffin’s head, a procedure not done in Polly’s case. Eventually Welborn gained a release of his brother’s body, and the funeral director took it back to Cass County for services. By that time it was nearly daylight.
That afternoon—Tuesday—Richard’s services were held in the Union Chapel church, close to where the family home had been, his grave just inside the cemetery gate. In death, both had returned to Cass County, six miles apart.
Welborn was never satisfied with the response, then or later, from the Texas-side officers.
The town that had two of almost everything and promoted itself with paired images now had an unexpected, unexplained double murder on its hands, one that was not quite like any of the numerous crimes it had known before. But that wasn’t apparent at first, and this was likely why the police and rangers at the time were so lax with their due process in the immediate aftermath of discovering the bodies.
From the beginning, the Griffin-Moore case was a huge one, larger than it first appeared. Dozens of well-coordinated detectives—compiling and processing evidence, filing information, interviewing suspects and potential witnesses, scouring the area—would hardly have been overkill. But manpower, or rather the lack of it, was a problem from the start.
Even worse, evidence was sparse. The bullets taken from Richard Griffin’s head, the hulls of the bullets, and possibly (or possibly not) fingerprints from the dead man’s car—these were the only tangible clues. The bullets that killed Polly Moore had not been removed and had been buried with her body. It was assumed the same weapon killed her as killed Griffin. The cartridge shells seemed to come from the same gun. If the bullets were needed later, her body could be exhumed. If any witnesses existed, it would take energetic, and lucky, digging to identify and locate those.
Although lawmen recognized the case as an exceptional one, residents appeared not overly upset or fearful. The vicious attack upon Mary Jeanne Larey and Jimmy Hollis the month before had faded from most people’s memory. People with no connection to either case tended to wonder if the killer hadn’t known the couple and executed them out of revenge or jealousy.
In the new case, no suspect could be identified; no motive seemed to exist. Those who knew the victims couldn’t provide the slightest information that might lead to a suspect. The verdict of the justice of the peace remained valid: they had died at the hands of an unknown person for unknown reasons.
The morning after his Monday night arrival, Ranger Geer retraced the investigation up to that point, going over the clues presented him and driving to the murder scene where the bodies and Griffin’s car had been found, searching for any clues that might have been overlooked. Two days after the crime, it was futile. The milling throng, following on the heels of rain, fatally complicated the officers’ work.
The ballistics report from the Texas Department of Public Safety’s Bureau of Identification and Records offered the first—and only—solid link to the killer, keyed to the cartridge shells found at the death scene and the bullets extracted from Richard Griffin’s body. The murder weapon was a .32 automatic pistol with six lands and grooves with a left-hand twist. It was determined to be a Colt or a similar foreign make. Although veterans had brought back any number of foreign-made guns as souvenirs from the recent war, most likely the gun was American-made and therefore a Colt.
The evidence was assigned the filing label L-11672/0-261, to be maintained for comparison with any other pistol and bullets that might turn up.
This did not mean that there was a definite tie to just any .32 Colt automatic that officers might find. It would have to be test-fired to confirm a fit. It was not an uncommon weapon, but was a relatively small handgun that could be readily concealed—and used—very easily.
(Although investigators found no murder weapon after scouring the brush and surrounding area, coincidentally, more than three years later several little girls did find a pistol a quarter-mile from the crime scene. In October 1949, ten-year-old Marie Barlow and girls her age were playing in an open field of about five acres with tall, knee-deep grass when they came upon a rusted, dirt-clogged pistol. They reported it to an adult, who passed it on to authorities. Was it linked to the 1946 murders? Texas Ranger Stewart Stanley dashed any speculation. It was a .38 caliber Spanish-made revolver. The murder weapon had been an automatic, not a six-shooter, and a different caliber. Lawmen periodically found discarded weapons. Whatever the explanation, it did not fit into the murder case.)
Officers sweated over the mystery. Sheriff Presley and Chief Runnels together posted a $500 reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction, which translates to more than $6,000 today. A year before, a reward of the same size had quickly led to the solving of the Curtner murder. Five hundred dollars was a large amount of money, especially when it might be collected with a few words and an appropriate name attached.
No such information was forthcoming. A motive was hard to pinpoint. Griffin’s pockets likely had contained coins or small bills—pocket change—rather than large bills, hardly enough to kill for. This suggested that robbery had been secondary, an afterthought, perhaps even a ploy to throw lawmen off.
At first, suspicions turned toward sex as a motive, that the assailant had raped, or had intended to rape, Polly Moore. No evidence substantiated it. She was fully clothed. A physician confirmed that she had not been “criminally assaulted.” There was the possibility that the mysterious gunman had intended to rape Polly Moore and that sex was a motive but the killer got distracted and changed his mind. But if that had been his intent, why had he not at least partially disrobed her, or assaulted her sexually in one way or another? No connection was made in any way to the earlier beating incident and the female’s sexual abuse.
Because the ground had been patted wet by rain, obscuring any car tracks or footprints that may have existed earlier, it was difficult to establish that the killer had driven to the scene, and although it seemed the most likely, it was still possible the killer had walked there. A café and beer joint, Stockman’s Cafe, was situated on Highway 67, not far off. If as a pedestrian he had risked exposure, he could have readily ducked into the heavily wooded area nearby and evaded scrutiny.
Almost any theory was possible, because no one knew.
Within four days following discovery of the bodies, officers had taken more than fifty persons into custody for questioning, while chasing down more than a hundred false leads. It was a grueling process with little rest. Three suspects, arrested and questioned because of bloody clothing, explained the stains to officers’ satisfaction.
Meanwhile, the Texas Rangers dispatched Dick Oldham to join Jimmy Geer. In a state where the old legend “one riot, one Ranger” was the only recipe needed for success, the force in Texarkana had doubled before a week was gone.
The case remained unsolved into April. More than 200 false tips and leads were followed. One suspect, “a girl from Kansas City,” was arrested in San Antonio, 425 miles away. Rangers drove her to Texarkana. Quickly eliminated as a suspect, she had not even known of the crimes.
Mary Jeanne Larey, now living in Oklahoma, learned of the murders. The more she learned, the more certain she was that they were connected to her own night of horror. She was so certain that she took a trip back to Texarkana to talk to officers.
She was convinced that the same man who had attacked Hollis and herself had now gone a step farther and had killed. If they would listen to her, perhaps they could learn something about the murderer.
Her plea fell on deaf ears. Officers again insisted that she knew her attacker and was protecting him by withholding his name. She just as fervently insisted she had not known the man, and that he was a Negro, just as she had asserted back in February, despite Hollis’s belief that a white man had attacked them.
Still a bundle of nerves, she returned to Oklahoma having changed no minds.
Officers seemed not to have remembered Jimmy Hollis’s prediction three days before the murders that at the next opportunity his assailant would kill. Nor did it dawn on them that a similar modus operandi seemed to link the cases, down to the men having to drop their trousers as a means of immobilizing them.
Three weeks passed.
By Palm Sunday, April 14, Texarkanians were gearing up for “Straw Hat Day” and wearing stylish spring apparel. The Sunday edition of the Texarkana Gazette featured the first of an Easter series, written by Dr. Tom J. Wilbanks, pastor of the Pine Street Presbyterian Church on the Texas side. At the movies, John Wayne starred in Tall in the Saddle, while the Paramount Theater advertised the new RKO Radio production Deadline at Dawn. The ad carried a warning:
“A night filled with TERROR.”