Tension hung heavily over the town. Four young people had been murdered, almost at random, over a three-week period. Where might the killer strike next?
The death certificates were less revealing than the newspaper reports: “Murdered—Shot to death.” The difference in the new case was that the death scenes were not at a single site. Inez Martin, Paul’s mother, signed his certificate; Clark Brown, Betty Jo’s stepfather, signed hers.
Although results of a medical examination were not made public, it was assumed by many that Miss Booker had been raped before her death. Outwardly, however, there was no concrete proof, although it could not be completely dismissed. She had been fully clothed, as well as wearing her coat on that cool night, indicating she had not been undressed. Sheriff Presley emphasized that neither body had been abused. Considering the almost haphazard manner in which the two bodies had been left, apparently just as they had fallen, it seemed unlikely that the killer would have raped the girl, then had her put her clothes back on before shooting her. However, one detail in the state’s file at Austin, never made public, noted that her vagina displayed bruising. No mention was made of semen or rape, and the bruise could have been caused by a handgrip, or an object such as a pistol barrel, as was done with the female beating victim, or other means. No one but the two earlier victims, however, had connected the beating incident to the murders. There was another note in the same file, however, that indicated she had had her coat off—outside—at some point: a leaf was found between her coat and her blouse.
On the other hand, and more telling, FBI lab results a week later, on April 20, revealed that a swab test of the girl’s vaginal passage was positive for male seminal secretion. No foreign hairs were present among her pubic hairs, though they did contain semen. A saline solution wash of the boy’s penis ruled out the possibility of intercourse between the young couple, thus leading to the conclusion that her killer had raped her. The evidence was as precise as the science could make it at the time and definite enough to assign blame to an unknown man. In the absence of today’s DNA studies, results were unable to tie the event to a specific man.
One phrase alluded to the previous double murders: “Not definitely known if victim Moore had been raped.” No data had been presented that she had been raped, which meshed with evidence cited earlier that she had not been “criminally assaulted,” as a physician had stated, and that she was wearing a sanitary pad, which may have saved her from that crime if the killer had had rape in mind.
In the same April 20 dispatch, the FBI confirmed that the same firearm—a .32 automatic—had killed all four victims. But, also, three latent fingerprints could not be explained. One found on the steering wheel, while not necessarily that of the killer, was not the owner’s print or that of either victim.
No publicity was being released about the bullets and cartridges or the unexplained latent prints—nor that the girl had been raped.
The report signed off with the most disturbing part: No definite suspect known.
Despite the lab evidence, a reflective analysis would tend to conclude that the killer was not a conventional rapist who more likely would have sought a lone vulnerable female, although attacks, followed by rape, on couples were not rare. He had, however, eliminated the male first in both cases, which left a lone vulnerable female in his grasp. Betty Jo Booker’s killer also had taken care that her body was normally clothed and left in a condition unlike that of many rape-murder victims. The body was not hidden, beyond being left in the woods, and was not desecrated or mutilated. The single bruise appeared to be incidental. In addition, unlike the first double murders, the killer had faced Betty Jo Booker when he shot her, rather than in the back of the head. Although the results were the same in all four deaths, the Spring Lake Park killer had modified his tactics in these small, but possibly important, ways. Why? What was going on?
By Sunday night, six Texas Rangers were on the scene, all under the direction of a seventh, Captain M. T. Gonzaullas. The Department of Public Safety dispatched an additional contingent of four technical experts, along with a technical laboratory, from Austin.
The city grew tense. Hundreds of cars jammed the highway and roads near the park. Rumors snowballed, some wild and without any basis in fact. The girl’s body had been abused in unimaginable ways, according to one. The city embraced panic as never before.
Immediately, officers began rounding up anyone who might have been involved, whether transients walking the streets or the objects of tips. Telephone calls poured in. Officers within a hundred-mile radius followed up on all reports, whoever the suspect, whether male or female, white or black, of any age, wherever they might be found. Alibis were checked. Officers toiled through the night.
Residents in the area of the shootings were systematically questioned. Tom Moores, the farmer living near where Betty Jo’s body was found, told officers what he had heard at five-thirty that morning. The sound seemed to come from the direction of Morris Lane, he said. This would tend to tie Betty Jo’s death to that time. However, Mrs. L. L. Swint, who lived only about two hundred yards from where the body was found, had heard nothing. She hadn’t known anything had happened until the hearse passed to collect the body.
Months later, in November, a former resident who’d moved to Broken Bow, Oklahoma, forty-five-year-old Ernest Browning, told of seeing an old-model automobile coming out of the lane around six in the morning. He’d lived at the intersection of a side road and Summerhill Road. He’d heard shots, followed by a car starting. He saw an old-model car drive to Summerhill Road for about a hundred yards, then turn south toward Newtown, a black section of Texarkana. He’d wondered what was going on. It was not quite light enough to tease out the license-plate numbers. He wasn’t sure he could identify the driver. The report seemed to tie in with the time and the place. He was described as “the only living witness found to date.” Browning saw the car’s driver only momentarily early that morning as the man drove out of the lane and passed Browning’s residence. The killer had come very close to being identified or his license tag noted, yet had managed to escape again.
When the news traveled to the 3100 block of Anthony Drive, Betty Jo’s mother and stepfather were hardly the only ones shocked. The neighbors knew each other and felt closely linked. Floyd Edwards, a teacher at Texas High, and his wife lived in the same block. Directly across the street from the Browns’ home, a special agent of the FBI, lived—Horace S. “Buzz” Hallett. Hallett and his partner Dewey Presley (no relation to Sheriff Presley) had already been deep in the investigation of the Griffin-Moore case. Now Hallett had an added, deeply personal motivation for finding the culprit and seeking justice for the little teenager who lived across the street.
On the following morning, a bold eight-column headline in the Texarkana Gazette heralded the tragedy.
The two-column deck head identified the victims in three lines, followed by an assessment of the emotional state of the community:
BETTY JO BOOKER, PAUL MARTIN KILLED IN DOUBLE SLAYING
TENSION GRIPS CITY AS INVESTIGATION LAUNCHED TO SOLVE
SECOND TWIN MURDERS
Large photographs of the teenaged victims accompanied the account. The one of Martin taken four years before, when he was twelve, depicted him boyishly as much younger than his sixteen, almost seventeen, years. In the photo, he is wearing a suit and tie. Characteristically, he is smiling. Betty Jo, in a picture not quite typical of her face and appearing older than her fifteen years, is also smiling. It was a photo she had given her friends in the Delta Beta Sigma sorority. Within a short time, she was to have had her portrait done by local master photographer Nathan Guier when he returned from a conference in New York.
Unlike the funerals of Polly Moore and Richard Griffin, which had been held in neighboring Cass County, the new funerals became citywide events. Hundreds attended—relatives, friends, and others, including the curious and the morbid.
The funerals were held at different times on Tuesday at the Beech Street Baptist Church on the Arkansas side, a church both victims had attended. Martin’s services were in the morning, at ten; Betty Jo’s, at two in the afternoon. Pelting rain fell throughout the morning service; Martin’s mother, heavily veiled, leaned on the arms of her surviving sons as she descended the steps of the church. Martin was buried alongside his father Ruben S. Martin, Sr. and the space that eventually would hold his mother, in Hillcrest Cemetery, just west of the city on the Texas side.
Texas Senior High classes were dismissed at noon for Betty Jo’s funeral. The Texas High School choral group sang hymns. Berta Sue Phillips, who had been a classmate of the dead girl, sang a solo. As a long line of teenagers filed by the open casket, it was more than Bessie Brown could stand. She broke down, sobbing. Sightseers trickled in. Watching the mourners file by the casket, Sue Phillips saw a middle-aged woman in a rough homemade dress, who she couldn’t believe was related to or knew the dead girl. The woman held a child of three or four by the hand. As they reached the casket, the woman picked up the small child and held her up, for a long moment, so that she could view the corpse, then filed on past. Sue Phillips was horrified. The scene left an indelible, distinctly unpleasant, impression. Betty Jo was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery, on State Line in Arkansas, alongside her father and brother, Billy Boy. She was almost Billy Boy’s age at death. The three graves bore mute testimony to the multiple tragedies that had visited the family. Her pallbearers included members of the Rhythmaires band—Atkins, Atchley, and Haskell Walker—as well as Jimmy Morriss and others.
There would be no closure for Betty Jo’s grieving mother. Bessie, trying to grasp the tragedy, told a reporter, “I can’t understand this.” She was convinced her daughter was “an innocent victim of a madman.” No one could refute that. She had lost her entire early family.
What would newsmen call the unknown murderer? Editor J. Q. Mahaffey and his staff at the Gazette recognized the need for a short term by which to refer to the case. Rather than describe it as “the Texarkana murders,” which would not necessarily distinguish it from numerous other cases and would sully any chamber of commerce promotion, City Editor Calvin Sutton saw a solution. “We’ve got to have a handle for the killer,” he told Mahaffey. “How about calling him the Phantom? He has been elusive, like a phantom.” Mahaffey couldn’t think of a better label, and agreed. “Why not?” he said. “If the sonofabitch continues to elude capture, he certainly can be called a phantom.”
Though derivative, it was an effective summing-up, and a term already in popular use locally. The killer appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, left only death, and faded into the darkness, like an apparition. The daily newspaper contained several models. “The Phantom,” a purple-garbed avenger, chased and punished evildoers in the comic section, acting, however, in an opposite manner than did this local Phantom. There were the movie, The Phantom of the Opera, showing locally, and The Masked Phantom, who had wrestled at the Armory.
From that point on, Phantom it was, a one-word label to serve as a symbol for a murderous plague, and a thuggish killer operating under cover of darkness. Neither Mahaffey nor Sutton realized the significant part this would play in the lasting drama, as the naming of the criminal, and the case, only added to the tension, as well as the mystery.
On Tuesday the local newspaper used the brand for the first time. The afternoon Daily News’s front page featured a photograph of Paul Martin’s casket being borne down the steps of the church. A five-column headline labeled the case.
The morning Gazette further fixed the name in the region’s mind.
PHANTOM SLAYER STILL AT LARGE AS PROBE CONTINUES
By injecting the manufactured name, Phantom, the newspaper created a melodramatic twist that suggested a battle of wits between lawmen and villain that might have issued from a Charlie Chan or Sherlock Holmes film.
“Texarkana’s Phantom Killer continued to match wits with some of the best investigative brains in Texas Tuesday as the investigation of the brutal murder of Paul Martin, 17, [sic] and Betty Jo Booker, 15, trudged along methodically and laboriously Tuesday with no break in the case anticipated immediately.
“Texas Ranger Captain M. T. Gonzaullas said that it was one of the most puzzling cases he had encountered in his 20 years of criminal investigation.”
It was the birth of an image that would become larger than its reality and invade every person’s mind with fear throughout the town. The mystique of the Phantom would only grow.
Within days, what most people and officers had guessed was confirmed: that the two double murders were linked. The modus operandi was similar. A ballistics expert at the Texas DPS lab in Austin reported that the murder weapon for Paul and Betty Jo was also a .32 caliber Colt automatic pistol—or foreign make—with six lands and grooves, with a left-hand twist. The Colt was the only American-made pistol that fit the description. This was identical to the bullets that snuffed out the lives of Richard Griffin and Polly Ann Moore. It was clear that the expert thought an American Colt was the gun to seek. A Colt was infinitely more common; any such foreign-made caliber would have been quite rare.
Captain Gonzaullas was not alone in being baffled. The local Daily News called it “the most puzzling crime ever committed in Bowie County.” That covered a multitude of cases stretching back to the town’s boisterous nineteenth-century founding, if not to de Soto’s brief visit in 1541.