As summer edged toward September, Texarkana bustled with activity. Veterans scrambled for scarce local jobs; some hired on at the still-functioning defense plants or left home to seek employment wherever they could find it. Others, especially unmarried veterans, crammed into Texarkana College on the GI Bill of Rights. One of the student veterans was David Griffin, Phantom victim Richard Griffin’s younger brother, back from the war in Europe. Overnight the two-year college experienced growing pains as it registered its largest enrollment since its founding in 1927, necessitating use of temporary buildings.
New, pleasant excitement gradually supplanted the spring horrors. The fact that no similar crime had been committed since early May offered guarded hope that the cycle had ended and life could resume as before. The public knew nothing of Swinney’s arrest and interrogation as the major Phantom suspect. With the murder pattern halted, the spotlight had faded from the Texas Rangers and Lone Wolf Gonzaullas, who had been constant reminders of the case’s unsolved status.
Most officers believed that with Youell Swinney behind bars, the Phantom’s reign of terror was over. They remained tight-lipped about it. No charges had been filed. It was uncertain how the case would be handled, and they did not want another media maelstrom on their hands that could potentially harm their efforts to prove that Swinney was the murderer.
By the end of summer, the entire army of lawmen had entered a relaxed mode. The Texas Rangers quietly eased off, without the fanfare that had heralded their arrival. Captain Gonzaullas concluded, on July 23, as for the Texarkana assignment, “it would not be detrimental to this investigation or cause a recurrence of said crimes if we reduced our forces to a minimum on this assignment.” On August 15, he made it plain and direct in a memo stamped CONFIDENTIAL, which he distributed to stations in Dallas, Stephenville, Clarksville, and Waco. The two-page, single-spaced letter spelled out the rationale for the shift of personnel, without revealing the specific reason or mentioning the name of the suspect in Arkansas custody.
In order to conduct other assignments by the Rangers’ limited personnel and budget, he said, “and due to the present status of the investigation,” it was time to reduce the force in Texarkana to a minimum. He assigned only two Rangers at a time in Texarkana for the remainder of August, then only one for September. After that, Ranger Stewart Stanley, stationed at Clarksville sixty miles away, would keep tabs on the situation. Occasionally thereafter, Gonzaullas would have a Ranger drop in, to make his presence known.
“At this time,” he emphasized, “I wish to call your attention to the importance of keeping strictly confidential the contents of this letter and our future plans for handling this investigation.”
The orders, secret and never disclosed publicly, were clear to those receiving them.
The Rangers had been called off.
The Phantom no longer threatened.
The Siege of Texarkana was over.
If the residents at large had known this, they would have organized a gigantic spontaneous celebration, the likes of which the city had never known.
And, possibly, a lynching party.
Thirty miles away, in Hope, Arkansas, William Jefferson Blythe was born on August 19, coming into the world as unheralded as the Texas Rangers’ drawdown in Texarkana. He would become William Jefferson “Bill” Clinton, elected forty-six years later as President of the United States. By that time, one of his future 1992 opponents, third-party candidate H. Ross Perot, was a sixteen-year-old student at Texarkana’s Texas High School.
Totally veiled from public view, officers wrestled with how to deal most effectively with The Man They Said Was the Phantom.
Taking a serial killer out of circulation was the surest way of stopping his crimes. The overriding issue was far from simple: how to keep Youell Lee Swinney off the streets, not just for a mere handful of years that an ordinary felony conviction would ensure, but for a much longer stretch, for life, if possible. The more officers learned about him, the more convinced they were that he was the “Phantom” with a mystique of its own, far beyond what a wanton murderer deserved.
Peggy was the officers’ wild card. Her statements told more than enough to be certain Swinney had killed, at the very least, the youngsters Paul Martin and Betty Jo Booker. Her testimony in that case should be sufficient to gain a conviction. With that case solved, ballistics evidence would link the Griffin-Moore murders.
She faced her own problem in the Starks case. She isolated Swinney as a likely suspect while claiming she was in a Delight hotel during the hours when Swinney was in Texarkana. The operators of the hotel shredded her alibi. The couple did not arrive until midnight or later, they insisted. Statements by this reliable couple left Peggy also without a credible alibi. When Swinney drove to Texarkana, going by the Starks home, she must have been with him. The cigarette butts by the site where the killer’s car had been parked indicated that more than one person had been there. Swinney wasn’t likely to go anywhere, especially at night, without her.
One point officers were to make over and over was that once Swinney was arrested, the murders stopped. Suggestive, but not proof. The Phantom, if he were not Swinney, could have departed for other hunting grounds. No murders elsewhere fit the pattern exactly, but it still did not rule out the possibility that the Phantom had moved elsewhere.
There still were substantial barriers to his successful prosecution. The murder weapons hadn’t been recovered. Swinney had possessed both a .32 automatic and a .22 automatic pistol, but he had gotten rid of both and to men who had not been traced.
Without Peggy’s testimony, the case would have to be built around circumstantial evidence, a higher bar for the prosecution. Officers had to make a case—rapidly—or risk letting slip the best opportunity yet for solving it. They had him off the street; now they must keep him off. The mechanics of doing so were uncertain. There seemed to be no foolproof method to achieve it. If the prisoner was in jeopardy, his captors also faced a crisis.
A new complication arose: Swinney’s father and those of the family whom he rallied—or browbeat—in support. Vowing to save his troubled son from the clutches of the law, one way or another, the Reverend Stanley C. Swinney marshalled a vigorous offense as he fired off letters and telephone calls to offspring and lawyers. Now pastoring the First Baptist Church in Montgomery City, Missouri, where he lived with his third wife, the father Swinney concentrated his pressure on his son Cleo, who lived in Texarkana. He also attempted to field a legal team, repeatedly insisting that Youell was completely innocent and guilty of no crime at all—an absolute denial. If all else failed, he claimed that his connections at high levels in Arkansas would ensure an appellate victory. He journeyed to Texarkana, where he had once lived, to see his wayward son and consult with family members.
In a flurry of correspondence he directed strategy, often contradictory, always aggressive, sometimes bellicose, and self-justifying. He repeatedly spelled out the gravity of Youell’s situation as an innocent man about to be railroaded, as if by a kangaroo court. From Missouri he wrote his son Cleo that he wanted a lawyer in El Dorado, Arkansas, Claude E. Love, to look into Youell’s case; he urged Cleo, “Please do this at once.” “At once,” often heavily emphasized, was an admonition he habitually incorporated into his summons. He was in bed, he explained, taking “heavy sedatives to keep me going.” He made a plea that was to be duplicated over the coming months, in a variety of guises and emphases. “If something is not done at once they will kill him and my life would be worthless if they should because I know he is innocent and those people down there and everywhere would have no respect for any of us if we stood by and let those bandits swear his life away which I am convinced they will do if they can.” He also repeatedly invoked self-pity, asserting he was ready to sell his furniture (which he seems not to have done) to raise funds for Youell’s defense, while asking his son and daughters to contribute money. If he sought a loan, he said, he would have to explain why he needed it and that would ruin him. He continually insisted that Youell was an “innocent boy” at risk of being “cruelly killed.”
The lawyer Claude Love eagerly accepted the defense assignment. “Perhaps we may be able to help them understand the ‘Sixth Commandment,’” the lawyer wrote, seeming to apply the commandment, “Thou shalt not kill,” to the accused man’s captors rather than to the crimes officers believed he had committed.
Each new Stanley Swinney letter to Cleo frantically emphasized urgency—“something must be done AT ONCE today”—as he felt “the boy’s life is at stake” while he himself was “definitely convinced that he is innocent.” He directed Cleo to either get the trial postponed or get Youell turned over to federal jurisdiction, where he would fare better. Meanwhile, he continued, he had appealed to members of the Arkansas Supreme Court, where he intimated he had an ally, for a chance to convict some of the lawmen for malfeasance of office. To start the ball rolling, he ordered Cleo to get Love “at ONCE.” The absentee father’s orders were easier hurled than carried out.
To one daughter he confided that he had a friend at the state’s highest court, should a conviction be appealed, but she must keep it quiet. “A life is at stake,” he said, adding his familiar order, “PLEASE ACT AT ONCE.” But she must not reveal what he had said of his friend in a high place. “BURN THIS LETTER BY ALL MEANS,” he wrote, or his best source of information would be closed. “Tell Youell all will be well.”
He bombarded his son Cleo with complaints and orders, ranging from wheedling to demanding. He claimed, on the basis of no evidence that he provided, that Youell was being beaten and starved to death, causing “the poor innocent Youell untold suffering” and creating a “very precarious condition.” At this point he brought in the name of a man, W—, as his substitute candidate for the Phantom, accusing him of trying to harm Youell and asserting that the man would be “brought to justice.” There was never any indication his charge had any substance as the minister unleashed tirades and directives in manipulative efforts that waxed and waned. It was anything but pleasant for Cleo, who was becoming the true martyr in the matter.
Despite the elder Swinney’s tactics to protect Youell from the law’s grasp (which also would inflict a stigma upon him as the father), there is some evidence that there was a lack of affection between the two. A nephew of Youell recalled a family experience, earlier noted, in which Youell, outside and hungry, was refused entrance to his father’s house while other family members ate dinner. This indicates, contrary to the elder Swinney’s claims, that the relationship between them was hardly what the surface indicated, and perhaps this was all due more to the elder Swinney’s fear of the damage his reputation would suffer from having the Phantom Killer for a son, than any real affection for Youell himself.
On the morning of Thursday, October 24, while Swinney and his wife remained in the Miller County jail, P. V. Ward, while repairing a barbed-wire fence in a marshy area bordering Morris Lane north of the city, spied what looked like an old discarded suitcase. It was almost buried under a pile of dead leaves and underbrush.
“Mack,” he yelled at his companion J. F. McNief, “go call the law! Here’s the Booker girl’s saxophone. I know that’s what it is.”
Soon afterward Police Chief Jack Runnels, Deputy Sheriff Zeke Henslee, and two city policemen arrived. The leather lining and wooden framework of the case had deteriorated; pieces fell to the ground while being placed into a box. Sheet music probably used at the April dance was still in the case. A selection, protected in a plastic folder, was “The Song of the Navy,” along with an orange-and-white Texas High School emblem.
The discovery came about 140 steps from where Betty Jo’s body was found, on the opposite side of Morris Lane.
At the sheriff’s office, Clark Brown, Betty Jo’s stepfather, identified the case and the gold-plated (now tarnished) Bundy E-flat alto saxophone bearing serial number 52535. The case’s plush blue lining had rotted from exposure to the elements during the previous six months. Spring foliage and water had concealed it. By fall, plants and underbrush had thinned out and leaves had turned brown, helping to reveal what search parties had never seen.
The only chance of there being a latent fingerprint would depend on whether the killer had opened the case and touched the instrument with an ungloved hand.
No fingerprint was found, but police could relax their monitoring of pawnshops and call off the nationwide search for the instrument.
One day in late October—Max Tackett recounted, though he wasn’t present and learned of it afterward—the recalcitrant Swinney was being interrogated in the sheriff’s portion of the courthouse. Deputy Sheriff Bill Scott, a wiry but tough veteran lawman in his forties, lost his patience after a series of evasive answers about the Starks case. He seized a nearby leather razor strap, which deputies used when they had to shave at the office, and advanced toward the prisoner. He impulsively whacked Swinney, who flinched and suddenly blurted out, “My God, don’t hit me with that bat, Mister! Take that bat away and I’ll tell you all about it, exactly how it happened.”
The “bat” he referred to was a strap with which prisoners at some Arkansas and other prisons reportedly were whipped in those days. Swinney’s reaction strongly suggested he’d known the sting of such a beating, probably in the Arkansas penitentiary. He gave the impression that he felt he was about to be worked over and wasted no time in trying to ward it off, even at the cost of self-incrimination.
(A niece, Joyce Swinney Ward, years later remembered seeing “stripes” on her uncle’s back, scars from whippings he’d sustained in either an Arkansas or Texas prison. This would explain his reaction to Bill Scott’s brandishing the “bat” that day in jail.)
About that time—Tackett’s account goes, there being no eyewitness reports, all participants by then being dead—Sheriff Elvie Davis arrived in the room. Davis, a compassionate man, never tolerated mistreatment of prisoners. The lawmen knew a confession compelled by force wouldn’t stand up and would work against them. Scott was fully aware of this but had reached the limits of his patience that afternoon. Many officers believed Swinney was on the verge of talking anyway and that this minor event had only accelerated the tendency.
“We’re not going to hurt you,” Sheriff Davis told Swinney. “I knew your daddy. Let’s sit down and talk about it.”
Swinney said, “I don’t want to talk here.”
That was fine with the sheriff, but Swinney rapidly changed his mind. That was all right with Davis, too. He had another plan.
Davis had several concerns. “Elvie was afraid of a lynching,” recalled his chief deputy Johnson. “At the same time, he didn’t want to mess that case up by getting a confession whipped out of Swinney.”
“We’ll take him to Little Rock to State Police headquarters and let them keep him up there and get the confession out of him,” Davis told his deputies.
A new method, the so-called truth serum, or sodium pentothal, a hypnotic, was beginning to gain public attention. The theory behind its popular name was that the drug relaxed inhibitions and the patient felt free to speak candidly of any and all matters. It wasn’t admissible as courtroom evidence and was, actually, in the early stages of its application. Physicians at the state hospital had worked with the State Police on some cases of which Davis had heard. Davis believed interrogating the suspect in Little Rock under the influence of “truth serum” might be the best way to handle the matter. It would protect the prisoner from a possible lynch mob, should the news leak out, while producing a confession.
Davis told Swinney. “We’ll take you to Little Rock.”
Swinney, hearing the sheriff’s words, visibly relaxed.
There is no other evidence that Swinney was ever whacked or threatened with the “bat,” Tackett’s narrative being the only known source. Swinney never complained or claimed it had happened. The report, though suggestive, likely is accurate.
By late October, arrangements had been made for legal representation for Swinney in Texarkana. Youell’s older, hardworking, law-abiding brother Cleo had enlisted local attorneys Paul J. McDonald and Ted Goldman for onsite counseling while Claude Love became available from El Dorado. J. F. McVey attempted to monitor and direct proceedings from Missouri.
A defense strategy began to evolve: use insanity as a means of easing Youell away from the shadow of Arkansas’s electric chair for the Starks murder and possibly also for the Texas murders. In this as in other moves, Cleo Swinney took the brunt of the spate of instructions steadily flowing from Missouri.
The attorney McVey wrote Cleo to get an affidavit from Youell’s mother attesting to any insanity on her side of the family and anything else that could demonstrate that the son was suffering from a mental disorder. “I understand that he may have been injured at birth, and later on when he was in the Reform School. If she knows of these things, put them in.” Pastor Swinney himself declined to admit any mental infirmities on his side of the family, while pressing his ex-wife to document deficiencies in hers. He did, however, execute an affidavit for the lawyers, addressing it to the director of the Arkansas state hospital, in which he cited four points related to son Youell’s unsound mind: an injury at birth, a history of insanity on his mother’s side, an injury as an inmate in the Arkansas state reform school when another inmate struck him with a stick of wood in the back which caused a spinal hemorrhage, and his own personal observations which convinced him that Youell was not normal and was of unsound mind.
The minister also urged Cleo to secure another lawyer and to contact the top criminal defense attorney, Elmer Lincoln, in Texarkana. Contacts with Lincoln were made but without a follow-up that would have paid a retainer fee. By this time Cleo was already paying the local lawyers seventy dollars a month, not an insignificant amount on a workingman’s pay.
The elder Swinney presented a new scenario for the Texarkana murders that would eliminate his son as a suspect and guide the investigation into an entirely different direction. “McVey is still greatly interested in running down the Phantom killer and both of us believe W— and one other are the men. The killer will be arrested some day and people will be greatly surprised who it is or rather who they are.”
A parting note dealt with Youell’s defense: see that he pleads not guilty by reason of insanity, and request the judge to appoint him counsel at the state’s expense.
Attorney McVey, following a brief trip to Texarkana, flailed out in several directions. He criticized the Texarkana defense lawyers and wrote to a friend in Illinois, whom he described as a “federal officer,” claiming that Youell Swinney was innocent of everything except taking a car and that he suffered from a form of insanity related to his obsession to drive a car. He was “satisfied” that the prisoner had killed no one. He failed to document his conclusion or to elaborate on his discovery of a new psychological category, insanity with a need to drive (after stealing) a car.
The correspondence made clear that the family was fully aware why Youell was being held, suggesting a large serving of denial, with a side dish of paranoia, by the prisoner’s father.
On October 29, Swinney’s team—McVey and the local firm of Goldman and McDonald—filed a petition for writ of habeas corpus in the Miller County Circuit Court. They sought an immediate preliminary hearing or release.
Judge Dexter Bush ordered Sheriff Davis to bring Swinney before him.
On November 1, prosecutor Lyle Brown presented a motion to dispatch Swinney to the state hospital in Little Rock for observation. Judge Bush granted the motion, agreeing that there were “reasonable grounds for believing the defendant mentally incompetent.” The next step was to deliver Swinney to the State Hospital for Nervous Diseases.
With neither side aware of what the other was thinking, the sheriff’s plans coincided with efforts by Swinney’s father and his lawyers to dispatch Youell Swinney to the state hospital to assess his mental status.
Both sides had seen their wishes fulfilled—for the moment.
The following morning before daylight, Johnson, Tackett, and Charley Boyd drove Swinney to Little Rock. The prisoner had not carried out his promise to tell “exactly how it happened.” He’d clammed up. Tillman Johnson soon had misgivings. He felt officers had been making progress. Even without Scott’s provocative gesture, Johnson felt they’d made headway. Swinney had no way of knowing what the officers knew. They had him in jail and they were questioning him intensively about the Starks case, as well as the other crimes. Because he was in custody in Arkansas, his blurting out implied he was ready to talk about the Arkansas crime. The incident provided a further insight into how Swinney responded in moments of stress and high anxiety, adding to his other “almost” confession when arrested.
The spell was broken. The process of breaking him down, potentially leading to a confession, had been interrupted. A different persona took over. On the drive to Little Rock, he would have time to ask himself how much evidence they really had on him. If they had to take him to the state hospital, then perhaps they didn’t have all they needed. His resistance returned.
“If we’d have kept him here in Texarkana,” said Johnson, “I think we would have broken him. He was close. That was one bad mistake we made,” he said, referring to the decision to send him to Little Rock.
Swinney’s old responses returned. “He was very unemotional. He was cold,” said Johnson.
Johnson sensed that Swinney now believed he couldn’t be convicted. Why would they take him to Little Rock, if they already had a strong enough case against him? Swinney knew his own attorneys had planned an insanity defense, but the move to commit him had come from the State.
The hospital casework began for Swinney in his first commitment to a mental institution. He replied to questions regarding his past, detailing his time in reform school at Pine Bluff, Arkansas, at age seventeen for burglary of a school, the divorce of his parents when he was a small boy, his frequent moves after that. At seven a fall from a swing rendered him unconscious, he told hospital attendants, and at eighteen he remained bedfast for two weeks after being run down by a cart. However, he said he’d had no memory lapses, dizzy spells, drug problems, or venereal disease. The rest of his family displayed no criminal tendencies or alcoholism.
He claimed he wasn’t guilty when sent to the penitentiary in Texas and was not guilty of the present charge, that he knew nothing about it. He cited his June 28 marriage to Peggy. As he reeled off his record, he committed several errors involving time. He said he’d been paroled, not mentioning it was conditional, in 1944 for strong-arm robbery—1944 was the year he was sentenced, not released, which was late 1945.
His denial of guilt in his previous incarcerations constituted a sweeping claim he would have found impossible to sustain.
Sodium pentothal was eventually administered intravenously. The procedure backfired. The physician inadvertently gave an overdose, and the patient passed into a deep sleep. Swinney said nothing. “Truth serum” had flunked the test.
(In the years since, so-called truth serums have been rejected as an interrogation technique, research finding that although the drug, and those like it, may lead to a relaxing of inhibitions, it does not prevent lying and may even lead to fantasies and a mixing of fact and fantasy. More recently it has been classified as abusive and condemned as an interrogation tool.)
The experience dampened any optimism about cracking a case that lawmen felt was practically solved, and they were no closer to finding a way to keep Swinney in custody for the long term.
Meanwhile, officers fared better with Peggy Swinney. A developing technology—for which enthusiasm was as high as it had been for “truth serum”—promised to put her on record in a dramatic way. She was willing to waive extradition and be interrogated while connected to a polygraph, or “lie detector,” machine. That would mean a trip to Austin, the state capital, for a session at Texas’s Department of Public Safety.
The year before, Glen H. McLaughlin, chief of DPS’s crime lab, had gone to Chicago to learn to operate the machine and interpret its recordings. The DPS purchased a Keeler polygraph soon afterward. He was to use it with several persons during the course of the Phantom investigation. But Peggy, whom he remembered as a “strawberry blonde,” was the one with whom he had the best results.
On schedule, Bill Presley and Max Tackett drove Peggy the 350 miles from Texarkana to Austin. They arrived in the early afternoon.
The session produced two statements: one, a verbatim interrogation in a Question and Answer format, the second, a narrative statement much as Tillman Johnson had compiled in Texarkana.
McLaughlin questioned her alone, the machine registering her blood pressure, respiration, and electrical currents as checks on her anxiety and possible deception. Presley and Tackett watched from an adjoining room through a two-way mirror. They could watch her; she could not see them and, presumably, was unaware that they were observing the interrogation.
For the record, McLaughlin led her through routine matters of her personal background. Then he dipped into her memories of the case. He kept a map of the Spring Lake Park area nearby. Letters marked specific sites.
“Now if you will, tell me where you were on April 13,” McLaughlin began.
Her narrative statement, boiled down to its essence, came to this:
“On April 13, 1946, Youell Swinney and I left Dallas about noon and drove to Texarkana, Texas. We were driving a Plymouth sedan. I think it was a 1941 model. We got to Texarkana about 6:30 P.M. and went to a show. We went to the Joy Theatre. We got out of the show about 8:30. When we went to the show, Swinney left me for about thirty minutes. When we came out of the show, we went out and drank some beer until the cafés were closed, and then we fooled around town and about 3:30 in the morning Swinney took a notion he wanted to go out to Spring Lake Park and rob somebody.
“We drove out to the park and drove around until we saw where a car was parked. There was a couple in this car. Swinney and I got out of our car and Swinney told the couple to give him what they had. Swinney made me get in the car and I got in the back of the car with the little girl. Swinney got in the front of the car with the little boy. I think the car was a coupe, but it had some sort of a seat in the back.
“When I got in the car, I moved the saxophone case off of the seat so that both the little girl and I could sit down back there. Swinney drove the car, which was the couple’s car, around to the place [north of the park]. He stopped the car and we all got out of the car. Swinney shot the little boy. He took the billfold out of the little boy’s pocket; I think he took it out of his left hip pocket. He took some money out of the billfold and put the billfold back in the little boy’s right hip pocket. We then got back in the car, Swinney, the little girl, and I. We drove down [the road] and turned around, and when we got back [to where the little boy was shot] we saw that the little boy had gotten up and had gone across the road and was now on the left hand side of the road and Swinney got out and shot the little boy two more times.
“Swinney then drove on up [by the park] and stopped the car. He made me stay in the car and he and the little girl got out and walked down the road in front of the car. I don’t know how long they were gone, but it seemed like about 30 minutes. They came back in our car. Swinney got out and took the saxophone from the couple’s car and put it in our car. Swinney then drove on around past where the little boy was shot on down to the Summerhill Road, and then on around to [Morris Lane].
“He stopped the car there, and made me get out of the car. I walked on down the road in front of the car. I heard the little girl begging Swinney not to do something. Swinney got out of the car with the little girl and they went across the fence on the right hand side. I started back to the car and when I got back to the car, I heard Swinney shoot two times. Swinney came back and got in the car. I got in the car. We drove [away] and turned around, then drove back to [Morris Lane] and Swinney stopped the car and threw away the saxophone case. He got out of the car and threw the saxophone on the right hand side of the road. He threw it over the fence; I think there were some bushes there. Swinney took the saxophone because he was going to pawn it. Then he decided it was too hot.”
(Peggy’s recall of the saxophone’s disposal meshed almost exactly with the facts of its discovery, the details of which she had not been informed. The obvious conclusion was that, whether or not she was reliable on other points, she obviously was present at the time of the park murders, with her statement an unassailable refutation of any claim Swinney might make.)
“We drove on down to the Summerhill Road, turned right, and went on to a restaurant and got something to eat. We then drove out on the Hope highway, on the Arkansas side, and turned off on an off road and spent the day out in the country on an off road. About dark, we came back in and went to Swinney’s sister’s house, in Texarkana. I don’t know the exact address. We spent the night at Swinney’s sister’s house and left the next morning. The gun that Swinney used was a black automatic, a .32.”
(Her statement that they drove out on the Hope highway, which would have been the same one on which the Starks couple lived, differs from her earlier statements that they went to her mother’s house that day. Whether these were foibles of memory or whether she intentionally changed her story is not clear.)
She continued: “After we got in Swinney’s sister’s house, I saw Swinney put the gun in his coat pocket and hang the coat up in the back room. I saw Swinney shoot the little boy two times on one side of the road, and two times on the other side of the road. I didn’t see him shoot the little girl, but he and the little girl went across the fence together and I heard Swinney shoot two times, and then Swinney came back to the car alone.”
At the end she attested to the truth and accuracy of what she had said.
Then she wrote, in longhand:
“Swinney told me if I ever said anything about it He would kill me,”
She first wrote “anything about this,” then drew a line through “this” and substituted “it.”
The way she ended her sentence, with a comma instead of a period, seemed to leave dangling whether she had finished writing her thoughts down or not. Her capitalizing He, meaning Swinney, like a deity, created another question.
Under her handwritten coda she signed her name: “Peggy Swinney.”
It was the first time she had signed a statement. Did she tell the truth? McLaughlin subsequently concluded that he believed she was being deceptive and holding something back. “I thought she had some involvement, that she had some additional information.”
Aside from the polygraph, another tool has been developed in more recent years to help investigators figure out whether or not people they are interrogating are telling the truth. Mark McClish, the lead instructor on interviewing techniques at the U. S. Marshals Service Training Academy from 1991 to 1999, developed the Statement Analysis® system to test truth and deception during criminal interrogations. McClish’s book on the technique is I Know You Are Lying: Detecting Deception Through Statement Analysis, and his system is based on the principle that deceptive persons’ words will betray them. “A person cannot give a lengthy deceptive statement without revealing that it is a lie,” said McClish. “People will always word their statement based on all their knowledge. Therefore, their statement may contain information they did not intend to share. Even though people may want to withhold information, they will give us more information that what they realize. The key is to listen to what people are telling you and to know what to look for in a statement.”
The author applied McClish’s methods and then McClish himself examined the statements. Several points may be made that tend to bear out McLaughlin’s suspicions of evasion on Peggy’s part while supporting her veracity in other areas. As McClish argued, a suspect may tell the truth but not the whole truth. It is the interrogator’s responsibility to search out weaknesses in the story: look for events out of order, pay attention to time references and missing periods of time, while checking for words and phrases suggesting deception. Did the suspect answer the question? Cross out any words? Use unnecessary words? Use an “internal dictionary” that hints of a change in language? The pronouns are important. So are verb tenses and the order of events and the breakdown of the account.
As for time, Peggy left several hours unaccounted for. She didn’t tell how long they were on the road from Dallas to Texarkana, nor whether they stopped en route. This may not be a major concern, for that trip by car in 1946, over a narrow two-lane Highway 67, took about half a day of ordinary driving. The impression is that Swinney parked her in the Joy Theatre for a purpose. Based on his previous record, the implication was that he had business to take care of alone, suggesting he intended to rob someone. After that they went out on the town, drinking beer until closing time. On Saturday night on the Arkansas side, closing time was midnight; in Texas beer sales continued until one o’clock in the morning. They seemed to have several beer-drinking haunts on the Texas side. This would mean they left the last beer joint around 1:15 or 1:30 A.M. There is a two-hour gap from closing time till they entered Spring Lake Park. What happened during the two hours? Were they just driving? Possibly. Swinney liked to drive. Did he look for someone to rob? Also possible, for that is what took them to the park. It’s possible that her sense of time was off and that they went to the park earlier than 3:30. She had been drinking a lot of beer and may not have remembered well.
Her selection of pronouns is interesting. She commonly used “we” to represent Swinney and her, as if their actions were joint, or cooperative, ones. It was “our” car, even though a stolen one. She identifies with Swinney as if a part of him or joined to him. Yet on that April night they were not married.
One of the striking portions of her statement is her precise memory of which hip pocket Swinney took Paul Martin’s billfold from (the left) and which one in which he replaced it (the right). This constituted a close observation of the scene at night, a detail that many individuals would have missed, especially amidst something so violent and chaotic. She does not mention the datebook that Bill Presley found in the brush and which she later acknowledged Swinney had tossed away.
Sequence seems to be wrong in one instance, when Swinney and the girl returned in “our” car to where Peggy was waiting. Then Swinney got out and took the saxophone from the couple’s car and put it in “our” car. She said she was waiting, alone, but her out-of-order telling may suggest she was there, on the scene, and witnessed the act, instead of learning of it later. On the other hand it may simply reflect the order in which McLaughlin phrased his questions to her and how her answers were combined in the statement.
When it comes to implicating herself as an eyewitness, she consistently states that she had no choice but to obey Swinney. Officers knew she was deathly afraid of him. But she does testify that she saw him shoot Paul Martin four times, enough of a statement to sink Swinney’s case, were she to repeat it under oath in a courtroom. On other issues, she emphasizes that Swinney “made” her get out of the car, or he forced her to stay. She walked down the road; she heard the little girl begging Swinney. Then she starts back to the car when she hears two shots that ended Betty Jo Booker’s life. The question arises whether Peggy was telling the truth totally, even whether she might have been with Betty Jo Booker when she died.
It is strange that Peggy did not know Swinney’s sister’s address in Texarkana. But if she intentionally disavowed that knowledge, there is no obvious benefit to her.
Assuming she told the truth, albeit the partial truth, a review of the way Swinney made Peggy stay in the Martin car, while he herded Betty Jo down the road, later returning in “our” car, indicates that he couldn’t afford to leave the girl in Peggy’s custody, for fear she would escape, bringing an end to his nocturnal game. Betty Jo was already a witness to Paul Martin’s murder, which implied that he had no intentions of letting her live.
But, following Peggy’s version, if she had somehow been found near Martin’s body by an officer while he took Betty Jo in to the words, such a discovery would have injected disarray into the criminal’s plans. If Peggy had been caught there, in the Martin car, and arrested, it would have incriminated Swinney. This raises a question: did he really leave Peggy by herself?
At the end of the interrogation, McLaughlin asked, “Is there any other thing about the happenings of that day or that night, April 13th, and the morning of April 14th, that you remember and want to add to this now?” She had replied, “No.” It was a compound question, offering her a choice. Was this all she remembered? Probably not. Did she want to add to it at that time? Almost certainly she had answered that part sincerely and truthfully. She was unlikely to volunteer any more, without being goaded.
What didn’t she tell? Probably quite a lot. There is a hint that something was going on past her surface reactions, when she edited the coda at the end of her statement, that Swinney had threatened her if she ever told about “this.” She’d crossed out “this” and wrote “it” over the deleted word. Evidently there was a significant difference, in her mind, between “this” and “it.” What was it? Did the two words mean different things? Did “it” refer to a crime she hadn’t described?
A reasonable explanation might be that “this” referred to the events in Spring Lake Park that night, while “it” encompassed a larger picture, that of their entire series of adventures together that spring and summer, perhaps all of the crimes committed. Might “it” have referred to the Starks shootings? What about the other murder and the beating? No one can say with certainly what she had in mind, but it was important enough for her to change her mind about the first word she used and correct it. Considering the volume of words she had poured out to officers after her arrest months before, this seems to have been the first time she had modified a word in a specific statement, and it was such a slight deviation that it was hardly noticeable at the time.
The handwritten note contained another item that is more susceptible to analysis. In speaking of Swinney she capitalizes in her own handwriting the pronoun He, representing Swinney, as one would a deity. Was Swinney like a god to her? The Devil, of course, also receives capitalized attention.
There is one more tantalizing detail. At the end of her note she placed a comma, not a period. She left no doubt she was making a comma, the tail is so long and definite. It was as if she was about to extend her remarks—about what?—and then thought better of it and stopped. She apparently was never questioned about it.
A close examination of her final statement while attached to the polygraph machine tends to lead to the opinion that she told the truth as she remembered it but not the whole truth. Her account of the night Virgil Starks was killed was never brought up on the Texas side. Her willingness to deal with the Spring Lake Park murders may be interpreted as being her way to get attention off the Starks case and, in fact, out of Arkansas’s jurisdiction. It also may have reflected her horror, and a troubled mind, over the deaths of a couple who were, actually, children. Officers in Austin had not questioned her about the Larey-Hollis beatings, assuming she was not present, or the Griffin-Moore murders. In their quest to nail down Swinney’s complicity and crack the case, evidence on one double murder was seen as sufficient. Once she provided them with a statement on that headline case, they believed, probably correctly, that they had what they needed from her. They could always pursue other cases later.
Mark McClish, the originator of Statement Analysis®, reviewed the author’s foregoing conclusions, essentially agreed, and then reviewed the statement himself, as well as Peggy’s July 1946 unsigned statements. In the process he added comments that offer further enlightenment—all in 2013, decades after she had made the statements. His analysis obviously came long after the fact, much too late for officers to use; his work does provide an expanded insight into the fruits of the interrogation.
McClish zeroed in on references aimed at further testing her reliability.
As for her account of Swinney’s disposal of the saxophone, McClish commented: “We must remember that nothing happens in a vacuum. There will be other things going on besides the incident itself, which will enter into the statement. Her mentioning that she ‘moved the saxophone case off the seat in the back’ so she and the little girl could sit down is an example of this. This additional information indicates it is a truthful statement. A deceptive story is usually very simplistic.”
When Peggy responded to her interrogator’s question as to whether she had more to tell, McClish pointed out, “By saying ‘No,’ she is not saying nothing else happened that she has not told them. If that was the case, she should have said, ‘No. That is all that happened’ or ‘No, I have told you everything I remember.’ By simply saying, ‘No,’ she may be saying there is nothing else that she wants to add even though she has more information.”
By drawing a line through “this” and replacing it with “it,” McClish noted, she may have revealed a hidden motive. “While the word ‘this’ indicates specificity it also indicates closeness; the word ‘that’ indicates distance. By using the word ‘this’ she is showing closeness to the murders. She may have realized what she was saying and changed the word to ‘it’ which is a more distant way of describing the situation.”
As for punctuating her sentence with a comma instead of a period, McClish clarified: “We end a thought by placing a period at the end of a sentence. The missing period is an indication she purposely stopped writing. She may have more information to share but chose not to.”
Her choice of language also proved to be revealing. “The pronouns ‘we’ and ‘us’ always indicate there was a partnership between the participants,” wrote McClish. “We may not know how much of a partnership existed, but it does mean two or more people did something together.” This suggests the possibility that she cooperated in the killings or was at least more than a terrified witness.
McClish’s additional comments on the November statement focused on details of language that ordinarily are overlooked but which may reveal a subtext of their own in the mind of an expert.
He cited her account of the evening of April 13: “We got out of the show about 8:30. When we went to the show, Swinney left me for about 30 minutes. When we came out of the show, we went out and drank some beer until the cafés were closed, and then we fooled around town and about 3:30 in the morning, Swinney took a notion he wanted to go to Spring Lake Park and rob somebody.”
McClish’s comment: “She states they ‘got out of the show about 8:30.’ At this point in her statement, we believe the two of them are no longer in the show. In the next sentence, she backs up in her story and talks about going to the show and Swinney leaving for 30 minutes. If a story is coming from memory, it should flow in sequential order. This out-of-order statement indicates she may not be drawing this portion of her story from memory.
“The word ‘left’ when used as a verb indicates sensitivity in the statement. She may have withheld some information about what was going on at this point in her statement.
“The number ‘three’ is a liar’s number. When deceptive people have to come up with a number they often choose the number. It should also be noted that when a person is unsure of a number, they use the number three. We have two references to the number three: ’30 minutes’ and ‘3:30 in the morning.’
“‘This car was parked at the place labeled on the map which I drew.’
“The word ‘this’ can indicate specificity but it also shows closeness. She could have said, ‘The car was parked . . .’ which would show some distance. However, she used language that places her close to the car. In the Q & A, she refers to it as ‘that car.’ ‘Swinney made me get in the car . . .’ ‘He made me stay in the car . . .’ ‘He stopped the car there and made me get out of the car.’ She used the word ‘made’ but does not tell us how he made her do something. ‘I don’t know how long they were gone but it seemed like about 30 minutes.’ She may be deceptive or as she stated she does not know how long they were gone which caused her to use the number 30. ‘I started back to the car and when I got back in the car, I heard Swinney shoot two times.’ The word ‘started’ means a person began an action but did not finish it. It is odd she used this word because she tells us that she did make it back to the car. A better statement would have been to say, ‘I walked back to the car and I heard Swinney shoot two times.’ Earlier she said, ‘I walked on down the road.’ Now, she does not use the word ‘walked’ but used the word ‘back.’
“All of her verb tenses were in the past. Since she is recalling what happened, we expect her to use past tense language. Deceptive people will sometimes unknowingly use present tense verbs if the story is not coming from memory. She also used strong tone verbs such as ‘told’ and ‘made’ versus soft tone verbs such as ‘said’ and ‘asked.’ In this type of statement, we would expect to see strong tone language.
“A truthful person will be consistent in his language. If he views a firearm as a ‘gun,’ he will always call it a ‘gun.’ He will not suddenly start to call it a ‘pistol’ because to him it is a ‘gun.’ Deceptive people will sometimes use synonyms because they are making up the story and not following their personal dictionary. A change in language indicates deception unless there is a justification for the change. In her statement, she consistently uses the words ‘gun,’ ‘billfold,’ ‘car,’ ‘little girl’ and ‘little boy.’ She does not use any synonyms to describe these things or people.”
McClish also found her statements taken by Tillman Johnson to be generally reliable. “She appears to be truthful in her unsigned statements given in July. She does use the word ‘pistol’ one time which is a change from ‘gun.’ It may be Swinney called it a ‘pistol’ and she adopted his language, which frequently happens, when two people are interrogated together.
“She used the present tense verb ‘ask’ when she stated, ‘The boy in the car ask us what we wanted.’ Her use of the word ‘ask’ may be due to poor grammar skills and not necessarily deception.” (It also may have reflected Johnson’s interpreting a slurred “asked” as “ask” or even a typographical mishap, for the statement was not tape-recorded.)
McClish continued: “As we saw she did contradict herself several times. She said that she watched the girl while Swinney drove their car to where the couple’s car was parked. In November, she will state that Swinney and the girl drove the car back.
“After shooting the boy, she states, Swinney picked him up and put him in the back seat. She does not mention this in her November statement.”
Summarizing his overall opinion of the statements, McClish concluded:
“After reading the documents, I believe Peggy Swinney is telling the truth in regards to Youell Swinney killing Paul Martin and Betty Jo Booker. However, everyone edits their statements. No one is going to tell us every little detail. Even a truthful person will only tell us what he thinks we need to hear. Therefore, as pointed out, in her statement there are some things she has not told the police. For example, she stated, ‘Swinney told the couple to give him what they had.’ However, she never states what, if anything, they gave to Swinney. There are other areas [where] she has withheld information and may be trying to minimize her involvement.”
Prosecutors now had two signed statements from Peggy that implicated Swinney in the murders of Paul Martin and Betty Jo Booker. Like a savings account they could be stored away and held in reserve if all else failed. There were two possibilities: She might change her mind about testifying. And should she divorce Swinney, she could be called as a witness whether she agreed or not.
The signed statements constituted an ace in the hole, should a trump card be needed in the future.
Three days after the interrogation in Austin, Peggy appeared in the Miller County Circuit Court, charged with grand larceny as a partner in Swinney’s car theft. Basically it was a holding tactic, to keep her in the clutches of the law as an accomplice. She was essential to the developing strategy.
She pleaded not guilty
The following day—November 26—Judge Dexter Bush ordered Swinney discharged as a patient in the Arkansas State Hospital and returned to Texarkana. Four days after that, Swinney’s attorneys—J. F. McVey, Paul McDonald, and Ted Goldman—filed a petition for writ of habeas corpus. This resulted in his being formally charged with grand larceny involving the theft of an automobile. A few days later, in early December, he entered a plea of not guilty. These maneuvers enabled the county to continue holding him but raised the possibility of his making bond on such a charge.
Another local lawyer, William E. Haynie, served as a contact for Swinney.
Meanwhile, Cleo Swinney visited his brother Youell in jail and found him well taken care of, seeming to refute what their father had claimed earlier. There is no evidence that Youell ever complained, even once, about having the “bat” used on him.
After Youell was arraigned, his brother Cleo telephoned attorney McVey that Youell, as instructed, had pleaded not guilty to grand larceny for stealing a Plymouth. McVey complained about the local representation, charging that Goldman had tried to get Youell to confess to the murders. No evidence supports his contentions. McVey then turned his attention to his favorite substitute, a phantom Phantom, W—, whom he had never seen, classifying him as “psychopathic, possibly praecox with a saddistic [sic] complex.” He instructed attorney Love immediately to seek a change of venue “swearing both against the Judge and the inhabitants of Miller County and any other County in which any of these crimes occurred.”
McVey said he was getting a picture of W—, his candidate to replace Youell as the Phantom, as well as to try to get “a statement from the wife of the first man that was killed, if possible, and to warn her to be very cautious as we have reason to believe that its [sic] possible that an attempt maybe [sic] made upon her.” He seemed confused about the victims and the murders. Presumably he had in mind getting Katie Starks to make a statement that would fit in with his theory of the criminal while ruling out Youell, at the same time setting off alarms that Katie was still at risk from his candidate for the slayer of her husband. He also urged Cleo not to share the information with Youell’s attorneys in Texarkana—another strange defense tactic.
McVey’s barrage of letters left the impression that he was flailing about on all fronts at once. He reported to Cleo that he had made contact with the Arkansas governor, Ben Laney. “The fight is just beginning,” he insisted, adding: “I will leave no stone unturned to see that justice is done.” He included a bill of $16.60 for his phone, telegram, and postal bills. “All this phoning was rather expensive.”