As Tackett, Johnson, and Boyd discussed Youell Lee Swinney’s intriguing arrest reactions with Miller County Sheriff Elvie Davis, their questions rapidly congealed into firm suspicions. Had they apprehended someone other than a common car thief? Obviously their prisoner thought so. “You know you want me for more than stealing cars!” He had impulsively tipped them off, believing they knew more about him than they did. And why would he ask if he might get the electric chair? Or ask if Johnson thought he might be lucky enough to get out in twenty-five years? These were questions even a novice thief would not have asked. Inexperienced youths knew a stolen car wouldn’t land them on Death Row or even close to a quarter-century in lockup. This man, approaching thirty, was no beginner.
Most of all, he was asking these questions of authorities in Arkansas, as if he were concerned about a matter related to their jurisdiction. But this concept did not readily come to mind as the officers wrestled with the larger picture.
Tackett wasted no time applying his observations about the spring’s car-theft pattern to Swinney. Was he the one who had stolen, then abandoned, those cars on the murder weekends? Swinney was barely in his fourth-floor cell before officers began avidly expounding theories. Swinney had placed himself high on the lengthy list of suspects.
Was this the lucky break they had hoped for?
Soon, though, Swinney started to talk, sparingly and guardedly, but never again about the topics he had blurted out to his captors that afternoon. No, he told them, the only thing he had ever done was drive a car he didn’t realize was stolen. That was all he meant, he said, if he said anything at all.
Any stolen car in Texarkana automatically interested the FBI because of the likelihood it had crossed the state line in violation of the federal Dyer Act. The FBI was notified of the arrest and entered the case almost immediately. Three days later FBI Special Agent J. C. Calhoun sat down with Swinney in the sheriff’s office and questioned him about the cars he may have stolen. By then Swinney had had time to think over what he intended to say. He readily, almost eagerly, incriminated himself in felony theft, documenting that he’d violated the Dyer Act as well as state laws. He admitted having possession of stolen cars.
Agent Calhoun stuck to the car thefts over which his agency had jurisdiction. He led Swinney through his background. The prisoner claimed to have finished high school at Texarkana, Texas. That would have been at Texas High, if he was telling the truth, and the date would have been 1934 or 1935, a contention later proved to be incorrect. He said he and Peggy Lois Tresnick had married in Shreveport. He was registered, he said, for Selective Service in Miller County, Arkansas.
Swinney then cited three stolen automobiles that had been transported in interstate commerce.
CAR # 1: He stated this offense occurred about February 1946. “I stole a red Chevrolet coach, about a 1941 model in Texarkana Texas, near the First Baptist Church. My wife (who was not my wife at that time) had been told to wait, as I was going to get a car. She was not told how I was going to get it.”
(This apparently was the automobile belonging to Luther McClure, taken in early March, not February, across from the First Baptist Church.)
“I drove to my mother’s home in College Hill in Texarkana, Arkansas.” (This confirmed he had violated the Dyer Act by driving across the state line.) He picked up Peggy and they drove to Hope, then back to Texarkana before heading west. They picked up hitchhikers en route to West Texas. “Near Lubbock I told Peggy the car was stolen, and said that we had better get rid of it.” He told the couple riding with them to drive the car to Beaumont, Texas, and to deliver it to a man there. He’d made up the recipient’s name.
CAR # 2: “In about April, 1946, a man I knew in the Texas penitentiary met me in Texarkana, Texas, at which time he had a green Hudson sedan, about a 1940 model. I do not recall his name but he was about 25 years old, 5 ft 8” tall and weighed about 155 lbs. He said that he had stolen this car near the Swann Motel in Texarkana, Arkansas. He was afraid to keep it and gave it to me. I drove this car with Peggy to Dallas, Texas, Oklahoma City, St. Louis, Missouri, Little Rock, Arkansas, and to Texarkana, Arkansas, where I abandoned it.”
CAR # 3: He also assigned original blame to another, claiming he had purchased it from a man whose name he didn’t recall. “A man I know only as Chuck, with whom I served in Leavenworth pen sold me a 1941 Plymouth sedan about May 1946 for $900.00. I paid him $150.00 in cash. He told me that I could locate him at the White House Cafe near the railroad station and pay the balance, or a part of it, in two or three weeks. He is about 40 years old, weighs about 170 pounds, is 5 feet 11 1/2 In. or 6 ft tall, is a white man of dark complexion. Peggy and I drove in this car to Shreveport, Louisiana, Dallas, Texas, San Antonio, and back to Dallas and I had tried to locate Chuck, without success. I then told Peggy that I felt that the car was stolen. We were married at Shreveport, Louisiana, and came to Texarkana Texas, where Peggy was arrested. I was a block away and saw her picked up and stayed away.”
Not only did his admissions facilitate documenting his hot-car record; they also provided some insight into his behavior. The FBI agent remained skeptical of Swinney’s account of how he came to possess cars 2 and 3, which on the surface appeared to have been constructed in such a way that identifying the men to whom he claimed he’d turned over the Hudson and the Plymouth would be difficult, if not impossible.
Swinney had readily implicated himself in a federal crime, of transporting a stolen car across a state line. This could qualify him for less harsh federal time, rather than a state prison. By then he was a connoisseur of correctional facilities, having taken jolts in both state and federal prisons.
His statement also revealed how close Charley Boyd had come to arresting Swinney along with Peggy in the lot where the car was parked. Swinney, like an old buck sending the doe ahead, should there be hunters near, had sent Peggy as his “doe” to make sure the coast was clear. The coast hadn’t been clear. So he had run away.
With Swinney and his wife in jail cells across the fourth-floor space from each other, it was possible for one to shout or yell at the other, communicating in primitive fashion when officers weren’t around. The sheriff’s offices were downstairs and much of the time there was no deputy or jailer on hand to monitor the prisoners’ words. A quieter way, avoiding the ears of other prisoners, was to pass notes. There was always the possibility of a note’s being intercepted, so the writing had to be couched in guarded language.
It didn’t take long for the couple to attempt to pass notes. By the time of Swinney’s arrest, officers had had two and a half weeks in which to fire questions at Peggy. She had talked, but hadn’t provided any significant revelations. Once he was arrested, however, things moved swiftly. Swinney immediately became a hot suspect for some, if not all, of the Phantom killings. Suddenly anything Peggy said took on a greater importance.
When a lawyer visited her, on behalf of her family, he informed her that Swinney was being held for murder. An officer sat within hearing distance.
She immediately exclaimed, “How did they find it out?” Then she stopped, realizing she had said more than needed.
A brief “correspondence” began between the couple. Eventually their written words made their way to their keepers.
Peggy wrote, alluding to something the officers hadn’t previously known. “I haven’t mentioned anything about the watches or ring.” Tackett noted the sentence and filed it for future reference. Some watches had been stolen in Texarkana, Texas. Was that related to what she wrote? Or was it a euphemism for something else?
Her note prompted a reply from Swinney that ended up in the state police files. The heat was on. Neither prisoner had any concrete knowledge of how much the lawmen knew.
Swinney wrote to “Dear Peggy” in an easily readable handwriting.
“I never expected to have you write me the things you did. As I told you they are trying to make you hate me and peggy [sic] you know as well as I do that you have not did anything and should not be in jail and I dont know what has come over you or what you have heard but whatever it is it isn’t so as I thought you loved me more than to write me the things you did. I believe that you will be released soon and I had hoped you would write me and come to see me. Peggy don’t believe that stuff you have heard about. You can read my statements to the FBI and see for yourself just what I have said. I told them that your statement was correct and I did not add anything to it. If you told everything you knew and everything we did [since] February. Now honey think this over and you will see that I am right. Honey let me hear from you about this because you know how much I love you and how much you mean to me. Let me hear from you. Honey everything I said was written down by the F.B.I. and ask them to let you see the statement. Answer right back. All my love, your husband, Lee.”
His note was carefully crafted. It was clear that he was anxious about what she had told officers. He wanted her to read his statement to the FBI and tailor her remarks to parallel his. He wanted her to get out of jail so that she could visit him and he could talk directly, and confidentially, to her. He’d revealed nothing that might point to any connection with murder or to a contradiction of any alibi he had given.
Like Peggy, he had no way of knowing what, or how much, the lawmen knew, nor the extent of evidence they might marshal against him. He did know one thing for certain: if Peggy talked freely, his case would be severely compromised. She had been with him, knew more about him over the past several months than anyone else. She had the information the officers wanted.
A few days later, more substantial evidence appeared—the promise of an eyewitness. Peggy Swinney surprised officers, suddenly announcing, “I’ll give you a statement.” Whether she was driven by anxiety over how much officers already knew or whether she was determined to relieve her own mind, she was “ready.”
Events soon relegated the stolen car to a lesser, but integral, status. The prospects of nailing a serial killer now took center stage.
Over two days, July 23 and 24, she gave three formal statements that Chief Deputy Johnson typed as she spoke. Her statements did not jibe perfectly, but overall, her words fit into a pattern. At long last, hers was the kind of human information they so sorely needed, the prospect of an eyewitness.
Ten minutes after eleven o’clock on the morning of Tuesday, July 23, she began the first statement. She told how she was in the Texarkana, Texas, jail in late January or early February when Youell Swinney went looking for another woman (“some girl”). They talked through the window, she upstairs in the jail, Swinney in the alley. He apparently paid her fine, probably for a misdemeanor like drunkenness or vagrancy, to secure her release.
Her first date with Swinney began on the afternoon of Thursday, February 14, Valentine Day. They met at the Lone Star Sandwich Shop, a beer joint in the 100 block of State Line on the Arkansas side. They spent the evening with a sailor and his girl friend. The next morning they went to his sister and brother-in-law at 220 Senator Street on the Arkansas side. This was a pattern to be repeated over the next several months. That week Swinney obtained a job at Mid-South Supply Company, a business on the Texas side downtown.
The statement was aimed at establishing a time line with which to determine specifically where Swinney had been over the course of the spring. Certain events stood out, but none of them pinpointed where Swinney was at crucial times on the nights of February 22, March 23. April 13, and May 3. She related events by days of the week, rarely providing the exact date.
Tillman Johnson later went over the statement, which he had typed single-spaced on three long legal-sized pages. In the margins he noted the dates to which each mention referred. The dates would have to be tentative and, sometimes, approximate. Nonetheless, Peggy Swinney was beginning to fill in the blanks.
Her account provided Swinney no alibi for the night of February 22. She was with his sister, she said, and he wasn’t there the night on which Jimmy Hollis and Mary Jeanne Larey had been held up, attacked, and viciously beaten.
On the 26th, Swinney took Peggy back to her mother’s on Richmond Road, outside the city limits on the Texas side. This location was no great distance from where the February 22 beatings had occurred. The following Sunday, Swinney rented an apartment on the Texas side. They remained there a week, until she left him after “a fuss.”
During this time, her friend Dorothy R— tried to locate her by telephone, calling all over town, to tell her Swinney was looking for her. Later, when Dorothy did get in touch with Peggy, the friend told her that Swinney had a .32 caliber pistol.
Two days later, Peggy was sitting with another man in a café near Union Station when Swinney appeared, walked directly over to them, and struck her. Swinney told her companion that he meant to have her “even if he had to kill somebody to do it. Swinney took me away from him.”
The forcibly reunited couple then went to his sister’s, where they stayed until Saturday, when they went to a second-rate hotel. The following day they went to a movie, afterward to his mother’s home for the day. That night after walking downtown by himself, he returned with a red Chevrolet two-door sedan.
(If this was the red Chevrolet that Swinney told the FBI he had stolen near the First Baptist Church, her or his memory of the date and time was off.)
The next day, they headed west, beginning a series of trips that continued for months, establishing a pattern of driving great distances in stolen cars, picking up hitchhikers, ferrying passengers from one city to another. She corroborated his account of driving to Lubbock, where he turned the car over to the hitchhiking couple for them to deliver to a fictitious man in Beaumont. Swinney and Peggy hitchhiked back to Texarkana.
Moving to Saturday, March 23, the night of the Griffin-Moore murders, while they were in a second-run theater he left for two and a half hours, until eleven P.M. after which they went to his mother’s house for the night. Her version left him with unexplained hours but seemed to cover him for the later period when the murders occurred.
He was gone most of the next day and that night. Subsequently they returned to the hotel. She told him she wanted to go to her mother’s home, angering him. He slapped her in the face with a towel.
“He started to telling about a girl who testified against him in taking her rings. He told me that he had killed the girl for it.”
His claim that “he had killed the girl” seems not to have been followed up by officers, perhaps because they viewed it as a threatening lie used to intimidate Peggy.
From that point on, she cited a series of trips taken over several states in stolen automobiles. He stole a Hudson automobile in Robison Courts, the subdivision in which Richard Griffin’s family lived. Days later they drove to Dallas, almost always short of funds, and began driving in conjunction with Mack’s Travel Bureau, a travelers’ exchange developed during the war. They busily traversed the region, taking strangers to a variety of destinations. Using Dallas and Texarkana as hubs, they transported passengers to San Antonio, Oklahoma City, El Paso, New Mexico, Lubbock, St. Louis, Austin, and Shreveport. They would spend a day or two in Texarkana between trips, then return to the road. When they went to a movie or were in a motel room, he would absent himself for hours while she waited.
She told of picking up a painter in Dallas, en route to Louisiana. Swinney ran into a city bus in Dallas and kept going. At Longview, Texas, the painter went into a liquor store. Swinney drove off without him, keeping the man’s clothes he’d left in the car. They then spent “about two days” at her mother’s.
The “about two days” she said they spent at her mother’s coincided with the April 13 weekend of the Martin-Booker murders. Though she hadn’t elaborated, she had documented that Swinney was indeed in Texarkana that Saturday.
The initial statement stamped uncertainty onto Swinney’s whereabouts on February 22 and parts of March 23 and had blurred over April 13-14, except that each time he was in Texarkana.
Skipping past the weekend of the Martin-Booker tragedy, she enumerated their travels in a stolen Plymouth.
From Dallas they took passengers to New York City, a trip of four days and nights each way. They stayed only forty-five minutes in New York before turning around and heading back. Back in Dallas, they drove to Oklahoma City, San Antonio, Wichita Falls, and other Texas points. Their final trip, with Memphis as the destination, ended at Hope, Arkansas, thirty miles from Texarkana, where they dumped a sailor headed for Memphis and went instead to the little town of Antoine where Peggy’s sister lived.
This brought them to Thursday, April 18, the day before Good Friday, four days after the bodies were found at Spring Lake Park. The day after Easter Sunday, Swinney and Louis Lamb, Peggy’s brother-in-law, applied for work at nearby Murfreesboro on road construction close to a new dam site. They roomed with the Lambs.
On Friday afternoon, May 3—the day of the Starks murder, Swinney and Peggy’s sister quarreled over the money Swinney owed for his and Peggy’s board. He left in a huff.
“He went to Antoine and told all the men that had been riding with him to work that he was going to Texarkana and would not be able to haul them to work anymore. Then we went to Delight and got a room at the Delight Hotel. We left my sister’s to go to Delight about six P.M. We arrived at Delight, got the room, and went up to it. Swinney was still mad. Swinney left and drove the car away. In about five hours, or sometime after midnight, Swinney came back into the room. I saw that he was fully dressed. Swinney undressed and got into bed with me.”
They arose that morning—a few hours later—at five A.M., had breakfast, and went to the job site where her brother-in-law was working, left there at nine, and returned to Delight to find a place to live. They found a room at Jim Mays’s residence, two miles east of Delight, and the next day moved their meager belongings there.
Again—this time with a greater and even more suspicious gap—she had failed to provide Swinney with an alibi for the Starks shootings. She had, however, guided officers by saying he had gone to Texarkana that night and had been gone long enough to commit the crimes, all without involving herself. She had also documented his anger that afternoon. She claimed she wasn’t with him but was at the Delight Hotel during the hours in question. Her omissions raised a string of red flags.
Swinney went back to work on Monday, May 6, and they stayed at the Jim Mays residence for the next two weeks, running up a bill which Swinney never paid and about which, eventually, Mays complained to the State Police. They left Delight on Sunday, May 19, slightly over two weeks after the Starks murder, and returned to her parents’ home.
The following day, a Monday, they drove to Nashville, Arkansas, for a movie Swinney was eager to see—Jesse James (1939) in the Howard Theater. The fictionalized, glamorized version of the outlaw’s legend starred handsome Tyrone Power. Swinney drove sixty miles each way to see it.
If they’d been in Nashville a week earlier they could have seen, at the same theater, Chester Morris as Boston Blackie in The Phantom Thief, a title tailor-made for the times and the region.
That week they left the Four States Area and drove more than five hundred miles to Waynoka, a town of about three thousand in northwest Oklahoma near the Oklahoma Panhandle. Swinney took a job on a railroad maintenance crew for the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe. He rented a room for Peggy. He stayed at a camp for the workers during the week.
At Waynoka, Swinney was up to his old ways.
One Sunday, she said, Swinney took a carload of Mexican workers in his car, took forty dollars from one and, in all, eighty dollars from them. She saw him take the money. They remained in Waynoka for about three weeks, during which time Swinney stole “a bunch of clothes” from a hotel there.
They returned to Texarkana and stayed with his sister until June 28, the day she married Swinney in Shreveport, after which she was arrested.
Tillman Johnson witnessed the statement. Peggy read it, said it was accurate, but would not sign. She told him that Swinney threatened to kill her if she talked to officers. Johnson recognized she was scared to death of Swinney. “I should have put it into the statement, which I didn’t,” he said later.
It was a beginning. She’d implicated Swinney in several felonies—thefts, armed robbery—but not murder. What stood out, however, was that she had placed Swinney in Texarkana on each of the pertinent nights, without providing him an alibi.
The next afternoon Johnson sat her down for a second statement that delved deeper and produced more incriminating revelations.
“Sometime during the middle of April—it was only two or three days after the Booker-Martin murder, Lee Swinney and I were at his sister’s on Senator Street. We were in the back room alone. We were discussing the murders in Texarkana. I asked Lee who killed these people. Swinney told me that it was someone with a brilliant mind, someone with more sense than the cops.
“He then told me that he had better come to town and get rid of it. I ask him what he was talking about. Swinney then told me that he had the saxophone that was taken from the Booker-Martin car. He said that a man gave it to him. After this conversation we came to town and Swinney carried me to the Joy Theatre and left me there. He was gone about one or two hours. He came back to the theatre and got me out. Before I went to the show, Swinney had only about two dollars and fifty cents. When he got me out of the show Swinney had about twenty-two dollars in all.”
Then she reverted to April 13, the night of the Spring Lake Park killings. In early evening they arrived in Texarkana from Dallas. After eating steaks at a café, they went to a movie at the Joy Theatre. Before the film was over, they drove to the Stockman Hotel just outside the city limits on the Dallas highway and drank several bottles of beer. (This was a short distance from where the Griffin-Moore murders had occurred three weeks earlier.) From there they moved to Drivers Café, inside the city limits, drank beer till closing time, then bought four bottles to take with them.
On a Saturday night, last calls for beer in Texas would have been one o’clock in the morning.
They drove about town for a while, then Swinney headed for Spring Lake Park. They found several cars parked on the road in the park. Swinney drove close to a dairy, where they stopped. They drank the four bottles of beer, after which Swinney left her in the car alone. After he was gone for about an hour, she heard what sounded like gunshots. Hours later he returned, as dawn was breaking. He drove out of the park area at a rapid rate of speed.
She observed that his clothes were wet to his knees, damp to his waist. Before they left the park, Swinney stopped at a parked coupe and removed a large black case and put it in the trunk.
“I asked Swinney what he was doing, getting something out of that car. Swinney replied that a friend told him to come out there and get it.”
En route to her mother’s early that morning, Swinney stopped and changed clothes in the woods. Near her parents’ home they drove to a locked pasture gate. Swinney ignored the lock and took the gate off its hinges at the other end. They then drove into the pasture and parked in the woods. Shortly before dark they drove to the gate. A man on horseback, who owned the property, met them there. He threatened to have them arrested. “Swinney told him that if he did he would sure get him after he got out of jail. The man let us go on.”
This time she had placed Swinney on or near the scene of the Martin-Booker murders but nothing more. Each time she spoke, she seemed to edge closer to the kind of eyewitness evidence the officers sought.
The same date, shortly after ten o’clock that night, she produced a meatier version, complete with details she had skirted around in her first two statements. Johnson always had other witnesses present when he took her statements. This time Sheriff Davis, Tackett, and Boyd joined the session. Along with some modifications, she offered the kind of specific details she earlier had studiously avoided. It was as if she previously had wanted to divulge all but was held back by some unseen hand, such as Swinney’s threats.
Repeating her account of their arrival from Dallas and drinking beer at the two cafés the night of April 13, she said they left the Drivers Café at closing, drove about town and then to Spring Lake Park.
“He told me that he was going out to the park and rob someone that we would find in the park. He told me that he was not going to work as long as he could get money from someone else.”
They drove through the park and took a road away from the lake.
“We had passed several cars parked along the road in the park. We passed one car which was a coupe. Swinney pointed the car out to me and said, ‘The people in that car should have some money.’”
The coupe was parked on the gravel road outside the park along the railroad track. It was a few hundred yards from the gate to the park.
“We drove about two hundred yards past this coupe and Swinney stopped our car. Swinney told me that he wanted me to go with him to rob the people. We both got out of the car and walked back toward the coupe that we had spotted. Swinney had taken a gun from the car seat. This gun had been laying in the seat between us while we were driving toward the park. Swinney had the gun which he told me was an automatic in his hand as we walked back toward the parked coupe. We walked up to the coupe and the couple were in the car talking. We walked up on the driver’s side of the car.
“Swinney had the gun in his right hand and I was standing on his left side. Swinney told the couple to get out of the car. The boy in the car asked us what we wanted and who are you to tell me to get out of the car. Swinney told him to get out of the car or he would show him who he was.
“The boy got out of the car on our side and the girl got out on the side away from us and walked around the front of the car to where I was standing. Swinney told me to search the couple. I did not search them and told Swinney I was not going to. Swinney told the couple that if they did not hand over everything they had that he would kill them. The boy had his hands up and begging Swinney not to kill them. The little girl was begging me to make Swinney stop and not kill them.
“Swinney got mad because they would not hand over their stuff and I would not search them. The little girl and I were standing near the front of the car. Swinney was standing several feet from the side of the car and to my right. The little boy was standing in front of Swinney about four to six feet. Swinney had the gun pointed at the boy. He shot him two times and the boy fell to the ground. The little girl and I began to scream. I told Swinney not to kill him. Swinney told the boy that he ought to shoot him again. The boy did not say anything that I heard after the shots were fired and he went to the ground.
“After the boy fell to the ground, shot, Swinney bent over him and went through his pockets and took his billfold and what money he had. I saw him then put the boy’s billfold back into the boy’s pocket after he had taken the money out of it. While this was going on, I was holding the girl and she was crying.”
Swinney told Peggy to keep the girl while he got the Plymouth and returned. He backed up to the coupe and ordered the girl into the stolen car.
“The girl got into the front seat of our car. She got into the car and Swinney then picked the boy up and put him into the back seat. Swinney told me to get into the car. I told him that I was not going to get into the car. He told me that he was going to kill me. Swinney then told me to get into the coupe and be sure not to touch anything so that I would leave fingerprints. Swinney had a glove on his left hand. It was a brown cotton glove.
“He held the door of the coupe open for me with the glove hand. Swinney then got into the Plymouth car of ours and drove north on the gravel road toward the dairy back of the Spring Lake Park. It was just breaking day when Swinney drove up beside the coupe with our [car] headed toward town, the same way the coupe was headed. Swinney got out of our car and came to the coupe and with his gloved hand opened the door for me to get out. He then looked into the coupe and found a large black leather case in the car. He put this case into our car in the trunk. Swinney told me that he had tried to get some from the little girl and she would not let him have it and that he killed her. I ask Swinney what he did with the bodies and he told me that he put them where no one would find them.”
Swinney drove into the park area. His clothes were bloody. He changed clothes in a restroom near the springhouse and washed his hands in the spring.
They drove to a café on the Arkansas side and drank coffee. They then drove near her parents’ house on the Texas side and parked on a side road in the woods. They slept in the car until that afternoon, then went to her parents’ house. When her parents walked to a bus stop near there to go to town, she said, “Swinney got scared that they were going after the law.” He followed them to the bus stop and talked to her father, who assured him they didn’t intend to call the officers.
Swinney and Peggy drove to a lane near the parents’ home to a gate.
“The gate was locked. Swinney took the gate loose from the hinge side of the gate; he did not bother the lock. We drove into the pasture about a quarter of a mile from the gate and parked the car. We then walked back down to my mother’s house and hid in some woods near the house. We were close enough that we could watch the house to see if the law came here. We stayed here until almost dark and went back to the car. Swinney made me wait and let him go to the car first to see if there was anyone there. We got into the car and started to drive out. We were stopped by some man on a horse who told us that it was his land and he threatened to have us arrested. Swinney told him to have him put in jail but he would get him when he got out of jail.
“I ask Swinney what he did with the gun that he killed the two kids with in the park. He told me that he did away with it at the same time he did away with the bodies.”
They then left the pasture and headed for Swinney’s sister’s home for a short stay, then back to her mother’s house where they spent the night and the following day, a Monday. That night they left for Dallas, stopping at almost every town in between. About ten or fifteen miles east of Dallas Swinney drove onto a side road.
“Swinney got out of the car and took the clothes out of the trunk of the car that he had on the night he killed the couple in Spring Lake Park. These clothes were khaki pants and shirt. They had a lot of blood on them. Swinney put paper under the clothes and set them afire. We stayed there about two hours burning the clothes, as they were hard to burn. Swinney made sure that every part of the clothes burned. He said that he wanted to be sure that they were all burned up so the officers would not find them.”
In Dallas they picked up a man at the travel bureau and took him to Tyler in east Texas. They registered under “A. J. White” at a tourist court that night and returned to Dallas the next day.
Again Peggy refused to sign. She said Swinney would kill her if she did.
By her word she’d been an eyewitness to Swinney’s shooting Paul Martin and had implicated him in Betty Jo Booker’s murder. Yet parts of her third account, while more detailed than her first two statements, blurred over some of the events and were not clear about Paul Martin’s death; he was shot, in all, four times, whereas she had cited only two shots. Was her memory impaired—she’d drunk a great many bottles of beer that night—or was she holding back something?
One of her sentences seems to have gone unquestioned by officers: “Swinney told me that he had tried to get some from the little girl and she would not let him have it and that he killed her.” He may have told her that, but it raises questions. If Swinney were interested in sex, it wouldn’t have mattered whether the helpless fifteen-year-old schoolgirl would “let him have some” or not. He was a strong, hardened man with a gun. He could have done as he wished, easily could have raped her whether she fought back or not. The lab evidence was that he had raped her, though not in the way that a conventional rapist might have. This indicates he didn’t want Peggy to know and thus lied to her. But if Peggy’s version was accurate it may suggest sex was not a driving force, at least not the main factor. In the final analysis, his dominant goal was to destroy.
The next time Peggy gave a formal statement four months later, her responses would be recorded by a polygraph.
Events moved swiftly. The next day, Miller County Sheriff Davis took Peggy to Dallas. They spent the day trying to locate the site where she claimed Swinney had burned his blood-spattered clothing. The search failed. The several sites she thought might be the one never revealed evidence of a burn. Either her memory was defective or her story was not true. Dallas detective Will Fritz interviewed her and concluded she wasn’t telling the truth. Then she refuted her earlier claim and admitted that Swinney hadn’t burned any clothing near Dallas.
Things fared better when Texas officers questioned her and took her to the crime scene at Spring Lake Park. She guided them to the graveled road and walked directly to where Paul Martin’s car had been parked.
“That’s where the little boy and girl and the car was parked.”
She told how she had gone into the clump of woods nearby. This explained the woman’s heel tracks that officers had found exactly there. She gave an account of the teenagers’ final hours.
The Bowie County sheriff asked, “Did you see Swinney take anything out of the boy’s pockets, besides his wallet? Did he take anything else out?”
“I saw him take some papers or stuff.”
“What did he do with it?” Presley asked.
“He took it and threw it over in those bushes over there,” she said.
After she was back in the car and out of hearing, Presley pulled a small datebook from his coat pocket, displaying it so all could see.
“I’ve had this ever since we made our first investigation at the scene the day the bodies were found. It’s Paul Martin’s datebook. I’ve kept it in my pocket, and I found it right where she said Swinney threw it.”
He’d preserved the evidence, unknown to anyone else, to keep the newspapers from getting hold of it or others learning he’d picked it up, to keep the killer from knowing of it. The one piece of physical evidence, not known to any of the others until that moment, which Peggy had not known he possessed, strongly supported her claim that she had been where she said she was and that she was telling the truth. It tightly linked Swinney to the crime scene. Although Peggy sometimes wove confusing accounts, the general contours of her statements meshed with the known facts. Lawmen believed she edited her comments from time to time to minimize her own role in the killings, in order to insulate herself from the most serious criminal charges that might be levied. There also was a sense that she jumped about in her versions, reflecting mental or emotional instability. Johnson put it two ways, in the folk vernacular. “Her bread wasn’t brown. The elevator didn’t go all the way to the top.”
Tackett believed she knew a great deal more than she revealed. “If the full truth be known, Swinney would be in the electric chair, and Peggy would be sitting in his lap.”
The datebook was a compelling piece of evidence. The problem was, officers needed Peggy’s testimony to verify the connection, and there was a catch.
As Swinney’s wife, they couldn’t force her to testify against her husband. The Texas law was firm on that point. The couple’s trip to Shreveport on June 28 had erected a powerful roadblock not readily removed.
Peggy Swinney cooperated in a variety of ways. She even submitted to hypnosis. The hypnotist, Travis Elliott, who’d hypnotized “Sammie” and exonerated him, put her in a trance in a room of people that included her parents and other “reliable people” such as a prominent physician, several lawmen, and a prosecutor. She talked freely. Texas Ranger Stewart Stanley, concerned about corpses found along Texas roads, questioned her about passengers Swinney had transported. She told of one man Swinney had picked up. When they stopped by the roadside, Swinney and the man walked away from the car to “take a leak.” The other man never came back. That was as far as she went about the other deaths. In the Texas roadside cases, people had gotten robbed and were slain, with their belongings missing. Swinney was suspected, for he robbed and stole clothing, but nothing was proved.
Her three statements, while yielding new insights, also contained inconsistencies. Sheriff Presley, for one, citing the Texas-side murders, said some of her details were incorrect. Officers acknowledged, though, that flirting with the electric chair herself, she had a vested interest in modifying her story from time to time.
A steady stream of investigators bombarded her with questions. Although only the three sessions recorded by Tillman Johnson were reduced to print, other revelations were as intriguing, also implicating Swinney. In every instance, she placed him in the general locale of each crime, while leaving him without an alibi.
FBI agent Horace “Buzz” Hallett told his neighbor Bessie Brown, Betty Jo Booker’s mother, what Peggy had recalled about the first double murders. Swinney returned to their motel room that night with blood all over him, she said, and “just laughed about what he had done” and got away with. This fit the facts, as for the bloody clothing, for Richard Griffin’s blood almost certainly spurted all over his murderer.
Max Tackett remembered another instance. “She made the statement that he came in, the night of the death of Virgil Starks and the shooting of his wife, to the place where they were staying, and he had blood all over him. She said he wiped the blood on a towel and put it under a mattress in the room. Sometime later we found the towel there.”
Tackett did not make clear whether the blood came from Swinney or someone else. The technology of the time was imprecise. There is no record that it was tested, nor an explanation of how Swinney would have had so much blood on him. Had her memory failed her, mixing up an earlier incident with that one, or had she simply misstated?
While Peggy managed to place Swinney on stage, or at least in the vicinity of the crime scenes, she herself was always somewhere else, except in the Martin-Booker case, according to her version. In the Spring Lake Park slayings, she minimized her role to that of an imperiled observer who had no choice in being there. What officers seem to have failed to recognize, and to pursue with vigor, was that while she claimed no alibi for Swinney, she had none herself, either. If she wasn’t where she claimed to be, was she with him on each occasion?
Of the several incidents, she singled out one, the Martin-Booker case, in which she was an eyewitness. Why had she seized upon this one, when she could have just as well maintained silence, as did Swinney? From all indications, the park murders troubled Peggy deeply. The victims were young teenagers, children, really. She referred to them as “the little boy and the little girl.” Despite her fear of Swinney, these killings in which she was in close contact may have inspired her readiness to talk in the first place. Betty Jo Booker’s mother said an officer, probably an FBI agent or Captain Gonzaullas, had told her of Peggy’s reaction that fatal night. “She said that she held Betty Jo while he killed Paul, and she said that she felt so sorry for Betty Jo, but if she hadn’t been scared to death of the man she would have let her go.”
Being on the scene of any of the crimes would have haunted any normal person. The evidence suggests that Peggy herself was basically not a criminal. Whatever she may have thought of the other victims, these were children, fifteen and sixteen, just kids. She was up close with them and perceived them as young innocents who hadn’t harmed anyone, who deserved to live. The experience must have pushed her to the breaking point by time of her arrest. It was as if she wanted Swinney to be held responsible for that night of horror.
There may have been another factor at work. Her telling of the Texas crimes might deflect attention from the more recent Starks shootings, as it did, and get her, and Swinney, out of Arkansas’s custody. But nothing was likely to suppress the terrible memory of the little girl and the little boy at the mercy of a pitiless criminal enforcing his whims with a pistol. Her fears soared even with Swinney behind bars. It wasn’t a certainty that he would remain a prisoner, although she seemed willing, even intent, to help keep him there.
As she poured out her memories, Peggy from time to time gave the impression she was living a kind of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow adventure. In 1946 the exploits of the bank-robbing outlaw couple of the 1930s was still fresh, especially in Texas. Bonnie and Clyde had met their fate in a hail of bullets on a north Louisiana road in 1934, only a dozen years earlier. Dallas, their home base, was also a second home for the Swinneys.
Like Bonnie and Clyde, Peggy and Lee Swinney traveled the country, eluded the law, and had all kinds of adventures. If Peggy felt she was a latter-day Bonnie Parker, with Swinney her Clyde Barrow, she could make the case, part of the way. Swinney had taken her to places she’d never been before, would never have seen—St. Louis, Oklahoma City, San Antonio, even New York City. It was a heady, if fearful, experience. Constant movement. New places. New people. She’d never seen anything like it.
Although Bonnie and Clyde killed people, it was in the course of a bank robbery or during flight from the cops. The Phantom killings were cowardly, in the dark, with the unarmed victims unable to strike back. Swinney had never displayed such boldness as to rob a bank. By comparison, his stickups were petty stuff.
Swinney had spent enough time in the Texas prison system to hear inmates spin yarns about Clyde Barrow and his gang. In a way, he could compare his own feats to Barrow’s. He had a special interest in outlaws. He’d driven 120 miles, round-trip, to catch a movie about Jesse James. Now, if Peggy’s statements were true, Swinney possessed his own brand. He was the Phantom, in his mind a brilliant successor to Clyde Barrow and Jesse James, finding his notoriety under a code name.
Peggy was aware of the darker side that generated mixed feelings. Swinney killed with little thought and never in a running gun battle with the police. He’d threatened to kill her if she talked. Her fears took the edge off any glamour she might have gained from the relationship. This set her apart from Clyde Barrow’s mate. Bonnie Parker took an active role and exhibited no fear of her man. Peggy, according to her own view, took a passive, often reluctant, stance as Swinney’s companion. Moreover, Tillman Johnson suspected that Swinney manipulated Peggy, using her as bait in their travels to lure men whom he robbed.
Tackett made a comment that has not been corroborated by any other source, which was that Peggy had a venereal disease and Swinney did not, indicating they had no sexual contact. If true, that would fit into Johnson’s theory that she was “bait” to attract men into Swinney’s grasp and little more.
Whatever the details of their relationship, it was, for Peggy, exciting but risk-laden. When she looked at the downside of their life together, it was very, very far down, as deep as down can go.