The Texarkana Gazette ran a daily box recording the traffic toll, always on the rise. By April 18, the death toll for the year from traffic accidents had reached fifteen, with forty-six injured. But it was the malicious, not accidental, deaths in Texarkana that continued to haunt the community.
While officers doggedly plodded on, frustrated and exhausted, public tensions peaked. Finally recognizing the Griffin-Moore murders as a horrifying pattern, residents focused on the three-week interval between the crimes. When would the killer strike next? In three weeks—again? And where? Who would be his new victims? Fears generated outrage and anger. Concerns for personal and family safety rapidly set the emotional tone of the region. Chaos lurked in the wings.
Fear of the night rose in a way none had experienced before. Few, if any, window shades remained up. Doors in a formerly trusting community were locked and bolted. Overnight those who had never owned weapons bought them or improvised by keeping knives or clubs near at hand.
“People armed themselves and were quick to shoot,” recalled Max Tackett, at the time an Arkansas state trooper. “The biggest danger for a policeman was the chance of getting shot by good citizens. It was just risking death to go out then with civilian clothes on.”
A visiting hardware salesman told Thomas Pirkey that his Dallas-based company’s warehouse had been depleted of handguns and rifles within three days of the Spring Lake Park murders, all going to Texarkana where they immediately sold out.
Nothing was as terrifying as the dark threat of the unknown.
Within hours of the discovery of the bodies on Palm Sunday, the populace approached a rare state of tension. An outcry arose for a curfew and other policies to keep more young people from falling victim. The reward fund skyrocketed overnight, soon reaching $6,425, which is around $76,600 today. Banks, businesses, individuals, veterans and service organizations, and nightclubs contributed as avidly as those striving to meet a United Fund drive goal. Even a lumber company in El Dorado, Arkansas, eighty miles away, kicked in $100.
Safety of young people became paramount in the minds of men and women over the city, especially among those who had children.
With that in mind, John Quincy “J. Q.” or “Jake” Mahaffey, the editor of the Gazette and by then known among his fellows in national organizations like the American Society of Newspaper Editors and Associated Press Managing Editors, sat down before his old upright L. C. Smith typewriter. That April night he began what would become a steady stream of editorials about the case. This one urged private parental curfews for youngsters. He pointed out the “bad name” the crimes were giving the city nationally. Then he concluded on his opening theme.
“A caution is indicated, ‘Keep away from remote dark areas. That is where death awaits you.’”
Within days the entire town appeared to be in consensus about a curfew. Events moved swiftly. The Texarkana Teen-Canteen changed its hours and provided adult escorts to each youth’s car. The Paramount Theater cancelled its midnight movie. The Texarkana Ministerial Alliance unanimously adopted a resolution to petition both city councils to close “all public places of amusements on midnight Saturdays.” A broad group of Christian leaders, ranging from Methodist to Baptist to Catholic, signed a resolution citing an urgent need to curb juvenile delinquency and what they considered its tragic aftermaths.
A poll reflected a variety of views in the adult community, some of them extremely strong. Roy D. Hopkins, the owner of a feed-and-seed store and father of three children, offered a forceful remedy: “Burn all night clubs, and eliminate every one, as to me there is no such thing as a ‘nice’ one and eliminate the midnight picture shows that are now in existence. Both are immoral and a menace to our growing children. I believe in a nine o’clock curfew.”
It was a scary time for youngsters, especially for those learning how to drive. After the Martin-Booker murders, teenagers felt as if they were being targeted by the Phantom, even more at risk than adults, and the further paranoia brought down upon them by their parents and other concerned—if sometimes agenda-pushing—adults did nothing to assuage the feelings of fear and trepidation
Tom Albritton, Paul Martin’s friend, remembered how the city’s youths responded to the threat. “If we went anywhere at night, we took guns with us and went in groups, usually to each other’s homes. Sometimes we’d go to a movie, but always as a group. There was no parking in cars anymore.”
Any suspect could expect the full, undivided attention of his captors until he was definitely eliminated. A man we will call “Sammy” was one who repeatedly proclaimed his innocence while in the shadow of the electric chair. His problem was physical and circumstantial evidence that placed him near where Betty Jo Booker’s body had been found. The most damning was Plaster of Paris casts of car tracks near Spring Lake Park that matched Sammy’s tires.
Sammy was a black man about thirty-five years of age with a likeable personality and a clean record. He denied knowing of the murders until everyone else knew of them, didn’t own a .32 automatic, but the tire tracks seemed to condemn him.
He was willing—eager—to take a polygraph, or “lie detector,” test. It showed he wasn’t telling the truth. He took it again. He flunked it again, and then failed it a third time. He appeared headed for Texas’s Death Row.
Sheriff Presley pondered the matter. Sammy had a fine reputation, was never known to be violent, but when he claimed he hadn’t been where the tire tracks proved his car had been on that tragic night, the polygraph disagreed—three times.
Presley didn’t believe in charging a man with a capital crime on the basis of circumstantial evidence—alone, even if a failed polygraph test seemed to back it up. He knew Travis Elliott, a Texarkana psychologist with skills as a hypnotist. Why not have Elliott hypnotize Sammy, even if the session couldn’t be used in court? It would be kept in strict secrecy but perhaps could offer clarity. Sammy agreed. Elliott agreed.
Elliott explained the process to the sheriff and FBI agent Dewey Presley. A subject in a deep hypnotic trance, he emphasized, cannot tell a lie. The officers were willing to try it.
Elliott privately talked with Sammy, exploring a gamut of topics, putting the suspect at ease and chatting freely as they reached a stage of transference. Then Elliott left Sammy alone in the office and joined the two men outside. As they left for the café downstairs, Elliott told the lawmen, “I can hypnotize him, but you have the wrong man. He has no criminal tendencies.” Sammy was well adjusted. He was a normal, stable man with a forthright personality. Not the sort of man who would murder four people randomly, or subject women to a brutal assault.
The sheriff returned with Elliott for the session. Slowly, gradually, the psychologist guided Sammy into a trance. The suspect was counting by threes backward when he went under. Elliott kept him in a state of catalepsy for ten minutes. Then he told Sammy to open his eyes. His first question was the focal one.
“Did you kill Betty Jo Booker?”
“No.”
“Do you know who did?”
“No.”
Officers knew where Sammy had been at five P.M. of the Saturday of the murder weekend. Elliott hooked into that time and led the suspect forward. Sammy and a friend had made some honky-tonks, drinking beer and a whiskey called “100 Proof.” Late that night Sammy took his buddy home, cutting through Spring Lake Park. On his way back, he stopped by the little road to urinate. Then he drove to the west side of the park and waited. His married paramour lived near. He could see the house. The light went out, meaning the husband had left for work. Shortly afterward, Sammy went to the house, talked to the woman. His intentions didn’t work out. He went home and to bed. His account was straightforward, without hedging or hesitation.
The hypnotist invited the sheriff to pose questions, which Sammy answered readily.
Gradually Elliott woke up Sammy and assured him, “You’ll feel all right and your troubles will be gone.”
Indeed, they were. The sheriff and deputies checked the story, corroborated every detail. Sammy had been caught in a lie he didn’t believe himself, in a clumsy attempt to conceal a touchy personal affair. Hypnosis had cleared him.
Rumors snowballed, some ensuring an atmosphere of horror. Within days one spread that the female victims’ bodies had been viciously mutilated. The girls’ breasts, so it went, were chewed up horribly. Another added gnawed fingers to the desecrations. The reports aroused images of a bestial, sex-mad pervert, raising public anxiety to a fever pitch. The rumor mill operated nonstop, day and night.
Rumors continued to swirl so forcibly that Ranger Gonzaullas just as forcibly denied them, insisting that false reports were hindering officers’ work. He chided those enabling the rumors.
One account had the killer arrested, another that he had identified himself and confessed, easily refuted. Another: the Phantom had struck again, a third double murder, then a fourth such crime—doubling the death toll.
“Help” tips poured in. Two women volunteered information collected in dreams. Another woman called that a nineteen-year-old woman living in her house had disappeared. All law agencies searched through the night. In the morning she arrived back home, safe and unharmed. The Phantom had missed her, one he apparently hadn’t known of.
Nothing slowed the wild rumors, particularly those that a sex fiend was at large, that the girls’ bodies had been mutilated. It wasn’t true. “There was not any evidence of a warped sexual mind on either of the bodies,” said officer Max Tackett. “But because of the wild rumors it seemed to be necessary to sift through any persons who might have had these features—and there were lots of them!”
The rumors only added to lawmen’s workload.
Even daylight wasn’t a cure for the nerves. Levia Brower, in her fifties, kept a loaded .25-20 rifle handy, prepared for the unexpected. She was by herself in her rural home when a car drove up. She didn’t recognize it or know who the driver was. Taking no chances, she raised the rifle to her shoulder and aimed a warning shot near the passenger. The motorist hurriedly motored off. Later Mrs. Brower realized her target had been a neighbor woman who hadn’t identified herself quickly enough.
In the middle of the week following the latest murders, Rose Juliette Victoria Mitts, a petite French war bride, stepped off the train at Union Station at State Line and Front Street. Her husband, Roy E. Mitts, joyously greeted her. She hailed from Roussillon, France, and knew no English. Perhaps it was just as well, considering the latest brutal news on everyone’s lips. Her husband, fluent in French, translated for her, enabling him to filter the harsh realities. The twenty-four-year-old ex-soldier took his four-foot-eleven wife around town, showing her State Line Avenue and the unique federal courthouse and post office in both states.
Two weeks after the murders, April 27, a Saturday, a rumor swept over the city that a man had been found dead at Twenty-Ninth and Wood on the Texas side. Had the Phantom struck early? Phones busily circulated the account. Police sped to the scene. They found a fifteen-year-old boy in the middle of the street, drunk and passed out, but very much alive. They took him to the city jail and called his father, who hurried down to take him home to sleep it off.
That Saturday night, the first shooting occurred. It was not a killing, nor in the secluded countryside, but in a well-lighted café with witnesses. A man wearing an Army uniform entered a West Seventh Street café and shoved his way into the establishment’s dance hall without paying a cover charge. The cashier stopped him. A scuffle ensued. Cleo Wells, thirty-two, a recently discharged member of the Women’s Army Corps, joined the cashier in an effort to block the intruder. The man pulled a pistol and fired at Miss Wells. The bullet struck her in the left thigh. The gunman fled. An ambulance soon arrived and took the woman to Michael Meagher Hospital. She was not seriously injured.
One early-Saturday event may have contributed to the rumors that spread so explosively. At four-thirty that morning, a man unloading ice at the Texas-side McCartney Hotel, close to Union Station downtown, found the body of a woman. Mrs. Sue Murray, age sixty-seven, had died from an apparent leap from a fire escape at the hotel. As soon as her death was reported, Chief Runnels, Gonzaullas, and Deputy Sheriff Zeke Henslee rushed to the scene. Their investigation revealed that she was in town, apparently despondent, because her husband, a traffic manager for the Cotton Belt rail line, was being treated for a stroke.
Even this tragic event was soon recycled into a rumor that she had jumped out of a hotel window, falling right at Gonzaullas’s feet as he started out the hotel’s lobby door. It wasn’t like that at all—wrong hotel, to begin with—but at the time accuracy continued to be the earliest casualty of the rumor mill.
Editor Mahaffey, hearing of the matter, was shocked. “This is the damnedest town I’ve ever seen. Just bodies falling everywhere!”
Two days later, a Monday night, four teenagers failed to return home at night. This set off rumors that four more bodies had been found. Parents notified officers. Patrols spread out. It had been raining. They turned up, safe but haggard. Their car had been stuck in mud in a rural area. They’d had to walk nine miles for assistance to get the car pulled out. It was three o’clock Tuesday afternoon before they were back in town and in touch with their families.
“All four are safe and sound,” Sheriff Presley told reporters. “But I’ll have to admit that they put some gray hairs in my head today.”
By April 23, nine days after the second murders, the seven-millionth serviceman had been discharged.
Two weeks after the Martin-Booker murders, Ruth Bryan Gabour, a reporter at the Texarkana Gazette, received a call. The man suggested he was “the Phantom” or at least was privy to special information. He didn’t say much, didn’t make any threats. He predicted another weekend crime, at the three-week mark. (Everyone else expected it too, or at least feared it.) He suggested they meet at a specific location. Her city editor, Cal Sutton, ruled that out immediately. The caller gave no hint of his identity. He abruptly hung up. Other reporters also received a plethora of strange calls. She and her colleagues had tentatively deemed it a hoax or practical joke, but there was no way to be certain.
A more recent comment by FBI profiler John Douglas probably sums up the unlikelihood that she had heard from the notorious gunman.
“Killers don’t call, and callers don’t kill.”
City editor Calvin Sutton and Mahaffey worked up ideas to hype the story, ever searching for increasingly lurid and attention-grabbing headlines, giving no thought, at that stage, that in the process they might whip up fears past any reasonable limits.
“We wanted to create something to give an impression of the suspect going up the stairs to the headquarters of the Texas Rangers,” said Mahaffey. “There were all these Rangers in town, and they drove every night. I mean, they guarded the city at night. We cut out a shadow that looked exactly like a ghost and took a picture of this stairway up to the sheriff’s office and superimposed a shadow, to represent the suspect. It was calculated to send people out of their minds.”
And well it probably would have, but for Mahaffey’s ruling it out at the last minute. After giving it more thought, he realized the impact it would have.
“People began to circulate rumors as to who the Phantom might be. And every eccentric fellow in town was suspect as the Phantom, and everybody circulated rumors which would grow till everybody was suspicious of everybody else, and that’s what triggered the hysteria, and the fact that every time one of these would quiet down, another one would break out. And we certainly played it for all it was worth.”
And then some.
While the headlines continued to spin, Betty Jo Booker’s chemistry instructor at Texas High left her lab book in place as a somber reminder. Each time her classmates entered the lab, they would remember her fate, a silent memorial to her absence.
As residents grew more apprehensive, the three-week interval between killings stood out. The Phantom had struck in the early Sunday mornings of March 24 and April 14, exactly three weeks apart. If the pattern continued, that meant another rampage on the weekend of Saturday, May 4, or Sunday, May 5. A countdown began.
With April winding down, a new hope flared—actually, the only one of any consequence—in far-off Corpus Christi, Texas, 450 miles southwest on the Gulf coast. A thirty-year-old man, whom we’ll call “Charlie Jones,” had tried to sell a saxophone to a music store on April 20, six days after the Spring Lake Park murders, and the report finally reached Texarkana on Monday, April 29. Betty Jo Booker’s missing saxophone had become an integral part of the case, along with the .32 automatic. Jones, witnesses said, had walked into the store and asked the employee if she wanted to buy “an alto Bundy saxophone.” He didn’t have the saxophone with him but described it to her. She said she would have to talk to the manager. “What do you have to talk to him about it for? You work here, don’t you?” he said. She noticed that he had begun behaving extremely nervous. When she tried to call the manager, Jones abruptly turned on his heels and left, disappearing down the street. The manager reported the incident to the police. That wasn’t what led to his arrest, however.
Jones was arrested at a waterfront hotel after he bought a .45 caliber revolver at a pawnshop. When bloody clothing turned up during his arrest, he became a definite suspect in the Booker-Martin case.
The police brought in the saleswoman to identify him. Police didn’t find a saxophone. But they did find his bag with blood-spattered clothing.
“Okay, you’ve got some big explaining to do,” a policeman told him.
“It’s not a big deal,” Jones protested. “I got in a fight in this bar and the guy cut me on my forehead.”
Captain Gonzaullas dispatched Ranger Joe Thompson in the state’s plane to Corpus Christi. It was late Tuesday, April 30. If Thompson turned up sufficient evidence, Presley and other officers expected to head for the coast.
Weather delayed Thompson’s arrival in Corpus Christi.
Presley and others in Texarkana put their optimism on hold. The saxophone hadn’t been found.
Meanwhile, the third weekend since the latest killing was only days off, a fact foremost in everyone’s mind. If the Corpus Christi suspect turned out to be their man, residents could relax instead of dreading the coming weekend.
The arrest failed to yield much more than very guarded optimism. Captain Gonzaullas, echoing what Sheriff Presley had stated earlier, was quick to dampen expectations. The case against the man grew weaker.
“Everything the man tells us is being checked and double checked, and everything he has told us this far has been found to be true,” Gonzaullas told reporters. “He has answered all of our questions without hesitancy, and we are making every effort to find out if he is telling the truth or is covering up. We are convinced that thus far the man has told the truth.”
The same day, Governor Coke R. Stevenson notified A. C. Stuart, president of the Two States Telephone Company in Texarkana, of his personal interest in the case.
“The governor told me that he was very much interested in the solution of the two crimes and would keep the Texas Rangers on the case indefinitely,” Stuart told reporters.
A week or so after the Martin-Booker shootings, Arkansas Trooper Max Tackett was patrolling the Highway 71 route that ran from Texarkana to Ashdown in Little River County.
At the Index Bridge over the Red River, he stopped a young man in an old car by himself. A man alone in a car was more likely to be stopped than a couple or a car with several people in it. Checking license plates was not as easily done then as it is now. He pulled the man over and walked up to the car. In the back seat the man had a .22 rifle. It was in plain sight, but of course it was no simple matter to conceal a rifle in the car itself. Tackett went through his usual routine. Let’s see your driver’s license. Where are you going? What are you doing with a gun?
The man answered the questions casually and seemingly straightforwardly. The gun was there, in plain view, because he needed to practice target shooting, and he wanted to find a place in the country where he could practice. With the scare going on, he wanted to be ready.
Tackett studied him carefully and decided the answers were convincing.
“Be careful,” he said as he dismissed the man. Having a .22 rifle in the car was as common as anything you could imagine. Almost everyone owned a .22 rifle in that place and time. Tackett gave it no further thought.
By Thursday night, May 2, a thorough investigation of the Corpus Christi man’s contentions ended in what officers termed “a complete washout.” He had been in a fight, readily explaining the bloody clothing; his alibi was thoroughly checked out. Though he had no saxophone, officers never revealed why he had tried to sell one. Gonzaullas was the first to announce the man’s innocence.
If geography, politics, competition, and athletics had divided the two cities, the Phantom scare changed all that, at least momentarily. Soon everybody was united by fear.
Two weekends had passed since the Spring Lake Park crimes. Might the killer be compulsive, seeking victims by the calendar? While no one expected to be off guard in between, nearly everyone anxiously cast his and her eyes toward Saturday, May 4, hoping, praying a pattern would not form, fearful that it would.