On a Sunday afternoon after the decision in Austin, Jack Carter sat relaxing in his den, watching the Dallas Cowboys on television, when the doorbell rang.
He reluctantly rose from his easy chair, wondering who was there. He opened the door.
Youell Lee Swinney stood before him.
He was wearing a hat, the first thing Carter noticed. By then, late 1973, you hardly ever saw a man wearing a hat. It was striking evidence of how unaware of the outside world Swinney had become and of how it had changed during his long incarceration.
Swinney thanked him for representing him and credited him for winning his freedom. Carter asked about his plans. Swinney said he was going straight, for good, and never would be back in jail. He was getting a job and had promising years ahead. It was good to breathe the outside air for a change and he just wanted Carter to know how much he appreciated what Carter had done for him, and that’s why he had come, to personally thank him.
They talked for fifteen or twenty minutes at the door. Carter wished him good luck. Swinney left.
Carter didn’t invite him inside. He never saw him again.
When Youell Swinney asked an arresting officer in 1946, “Do you think I’ll be lucky enough to get out in twenty-five years?” he had come, as it turned out, remarkably close to estimating the time he was to spend behind bars. It was his longest stretch, by far. Even that conviction, however, had one thing in common with his previous terms of servitude. He had gotten out before the intended release date, which, this time, would have been at death.
It is impossible to reconstruct the thought process involved in the decision of the five-judge panel of the Court of Criminal Appeals. Several factors leaned in Swinney’s favor. Foremost was a life sentence for a nonviolent crime, that of stealing an automobile. His conviction immediately preceding that, however, had been for a violent act, robbery by assault.
His most obvious ally was time. The years had brought deaths of key witnesses who might have refuted his uncontested claims, while eroding the memories of those who did testify. In addition, during the interim the interpretation of the Constitution had confirmed individual rights that had not been spelled out in some states, which in turn had led to Swinney’s claim that he hadn’t had a lawyer in either 1947 or 1941.
Then there was another matter. The prisons were filling up with young lawbreakers, some extremely violent. An aging inmate, doing life for a stolen car, as an habitual criminal, was unlikely to be considered a risk to society. As he aged, he would be more of a liability to the state in terms of medical care. In 1973 Swinney turned fifty-six. It was an age by which sociopaths tend to burn out, or at least are not expected to perpetrate dramatic violent crimes that would require great spurts of energy. It is doubtful, however, that the appellate judges gave any thought to whether Swinney would commit such a crime, as they were not working with the knowledge of Peggy Swinney’s testimony that named Swinney as a murderer, potentially the Phantom Killer.
Few in the Texarkana community entertained an inkling of Swinney’s past or that he was the main suspect in the Phantom murders. The first public hint of his connection to the 1946 cases did not come until it was inserted into the evidentiary hearing. By then, nearly three decades had elapsed and though the crimes had become a part of Texarkana’s history, even folklore, emotions had lost their edge. Memories, like those of witnesses, were blurred, faded, or evaporated.
At fifty-six, Swinney had the opportunity to start a new life.
Following release, Swinney relocated to Marshall, Texas, about eighty miles south of Texarkana. He lived there from October 1973 to July 1974. A sister lived in Marshall, which was one reason he took employment there. Another sister lived in Texarkana.
During this period, Swinney made a memorable appearance in Texarkana that drew more attention than he expected. On blistering cold Thursday, January 3, 1974, a day on which it was too cold to work, he drove up to visit the sister on the Arkansas side. Sheets of ice covered northeastern Texas and slowed traffic. Roads and bridges remained guardedly open. A tall, well-built middle-aged man with a crew cut wearing a hard hat, he parked an olive green 1973 Ford Maverick out front of the Texarkana Gazette office. A bumper sticker proclaimed: “Not Only Cars Recalled by its Maker.”
Tugging a newspaper clipping from his pocket, he told the receptionist downstairs he wanted to talk to the woman featured as an author in the item that came from the Gazette. She glanced at it and directed him to Editorial.
Upstairs in the open newsroom, he showed the clipping to the first person he saw and repeated his request. The reporter pointed out the editor, Harry Wood, and returned to her work.
Swinney introduced himself to Wood and thrust out the clipping. Wood recognized his name and the lined, weatherbeaten face from a photograph the paper had run. The brief article was about a woman who had written a book. Swinney wanted to get in touch with her. He wanted her to help him write a book.
The editor scrutinized the clipping, of a syndicated book review. There was no local connection, but Wood was loath to dismiss the visitor. Maybe he had something newsworthy to say. What might it be? Swinney didn’t seem eager to leave, either.
Busy reporters and copydesk personnel glanced at the stranger, then back to their work.
“Can we talk in some other place?” Swinney asked.
“We can go to the conference room,” Wood said. Then he beckoned over an associate, Jim Reavis the news editor, sensing the need for a witness should a story develop.
As Wood closed the conference room door, the man in the hard hat introduced himself to the second editor.
“I’m Youell Swinney.” Then he added, matter-of-factly but with a certain flair and a barely concealed tinge of pride, “I’m the man they say was the Phantom.”
It was a startling, even shocking, way to introduce himself, and the two newsmen stood, expressionless, waiting for him to tell them more. He explained what he had in mind. He’d been framed for a crime he didn’t commit. He wanted to write a book about how he’d spent twenty-seven years in the Texas penitentiary as an innocent man.
He spoke persuasively of the injustice done him.
Wood, aware of some details of the case, asked about his companion who had given statements implicating him. How did he explain that?
“The man they called the Phantom” shrugged it off.
“She just cooked up that story to collect the reward money. She made it up. I didn’t have nothing to do with all that, and she knew it.”
The editor told him that he knew a man who wrote books in collaboration. Would he like to talk to him? Sure, that’d be fine.
I hadn’t been in my small office at the farm long that morning when Harry Wood called. It was still shivering cold inside from the prolonged hard freeze that had lingered for days, and I hadn’t had time to heat the space and warm my hands sufficiently
Harry said, “Jim, Youell Swinney is here and would like to talk to you.”
“Swinney?” I said. “You’re kidding.”
“No, he’s here in the office. I wonder if you’d like to collaborate with him on a book.”
The situation didn’t ring true. Why would he show up at the Gazette and be brought into contact with, of all persons, me?
“Is this a joke?” I asked, a bit incredulous.
“No, it’s not a joke,” said Harry. “He’s sitting right here in the office with me now. He’s looking for someone to help him write a book about his experience.”
Convinced he wasn’t pulling my leg, I said, “Sure, I’ll talk to him. But I doubt I can help him.”
I was more than well acquainted with the case. Years before, I had explored it in a free-lanced eight-part series of articles.
I’d also studied Swinney’s records at the state penitentiary’s main office in Huntsville. I remembered, without referring to my files, a great deal of what I had read and noted there.
We talked.
“I want to write a book about how I was unfairly imprisoned and held for twenty-seven years,” Swinney said. “The Court of Criminal Appeals finally released me last year. Back in 1946 they said I was connected to those killings. I didn’t have anything to do with it.
“Steve McQueen and those other actors were at Huntsville making that movie, The Fugitive. I told ’em my story and they said it was a good one. They said, ‘You oughta write a book and it’d be a best seller!’ I can’t write it by myself and I was looking for someone to help me with it.”
He apparently referred to The Getaway, featuring McQueen with Ali MacGraw, filmed partly in the Texas prison system and released in 1972. The Fugitive was a television series; McQueen wasn’t in it.
“Where were you when the Texarkana murders were committed?” I asked.
“I wasn’t even here then.”
I tried again. “Where were you at that time?”
“I was up in St. Louis,” he said.
That was what he had claimed in his interview when he had entered the prison in 1947. In his version, he’d worked for the Green Tree Construction Company in St. Louis during a period that coincided exactly with when the murders were committed near Texarkana. I’d called Information for such a company and found there was none. I’d checked with the Chamber of Commerce there, to see if such a firm had operated in 1946. I was told none did. At the prison, the assistant warden told me they didn’t check the inmate’s claim. It was just part of his record. Swinney seemed to have forgotten that in 1946 he’d admitted he was in Texarkana but denied that he had killed. His own words disputed his claim to me.
“Do you live in Texarkana now?” I asked.
“No, I’m in Marshall right now. I’m foreman on a construction job there. It was too cold to work today, so I came up here to see relatives.”
“What’s your address there, in case I need to get back in touch with you?” I asked him.
He gave it in a low, cautious voice in control of himself.
“I live at 808 North Fulton in Marshall,” he said.
“Well,” I said, “I’m pretty busy now on another book”—very true, on a collaboration with an M.D. about preventive medicine—“but I’ll get in touch if things change. Meanwhile, you might talk to a newspaper writer in Marshall, since you’re there, about doing a book.”
That ended our conversation. I called Information for a phone listing for him at the Fulton Street address in Marshall. There was none. That didn’t disprove his statement, but only indicated that he had no listed telephone in his name.
In the Gazette office, as he hung up and turned to the editor, he said, “He’s too busy now.”
“The man they say was the Phantom” left the building. A reporter headed for the window to monitor his return to the car. On the street, a car with plainclothes detectives awaited him as he approached the Maverick. One of the reporters told the editor of the scene below. (Later the editor learned that one of his reporters had tipped off the District Attorney, who probably had spread the word to the police.)
Down the street, the policemen spoke sternly and earnestly with The Man They Say Was the Phantom, advising him, “We don’t want you back here.”
They then escorted him to the city limits and watched him drive south on U.S. Highway 59 toward Marshall.
I called Harry Wood afterward and asked his impressions.
“He just looked like an old con,” he said. Harry had worked for the newspaper at Huntsville, the site of the state prison system headquarters, before going to Texarkana and was an old hand at sizing up old cons.
That night I called Tillman Johnson, who had been chief deputy sheriff during the murder spree. Johnson already knew of Swinney’s appearance. Policemen from both Texas and Arkansas sides had called him around noon. Swinney, they told him, had gone to an address in the College Hill neighborhood on the Arkansas side, the residence of a sister and brother-in-law. He never voluntarily returned to Texarkana after that.
FBI records document his short stay in Marshall. He worked for a construction company from November 1973 to July 1974. On the surface he seemed to be following the plan he’d told Carter—a job and staying out of trouble.
However, in an investigation made afterward a different picture emerged. One informant told an agent of a pattern contradicting the outward image.
“Swinney was believed to be a homosexual and spent most of his time around young people at the Dairy Queen in Marshall. He was also suspected of dealing in narcotics. Swinney had a young boy fourteen or fifteen years of age who was with him a lot and finally moved in with Swinney.” When Swinney moved to Grand Prairie, Texas, the boy went with him. Grand Prairie is a northern suburb of Dallas. A nephew of Swinney said his uncle even took the teenaged boy to work with him, suggesting a level of control over the boy that Swinney had once exercised with Peggy.
(One family account has it that he grew angry with the boy one night and “almost beat the boy to death,” as a relative put it. He escaped police scrutiny that time.)
Swinney’s suspected homosexual behavior might offer counter-insight into why Mary Jeanne Larey and Polly Ann Moore had not been raped, though Betty Jo was, assuming Swinney was the culprit in all the cases. The Marshall informant’s opinion meshed with Swinney’s behavior in the Texas penitentiary when he was punished for sexual engagement with another inmate. On the other hand, he might have been bisexual or, despite the prison incident, possibly not homosexual either.
As for his possible involvement in the narcotics trade, that too added to a pattern in Swinney’s 1946 actions in western Oklahoma when he’d sold bootleg whiskey. By the 1970s, drugs had replaced bootleg whiskey as the illicit stimulant of choice.
Swinney’s relationships with relatives varied. When he lived in Arlington, Texas, he crafted a gold-plated necklace for his niece Joyce that proved to be durable and never tarnished. She didn’t realize that he was also counterfeiting gold coins at the same time. (He also created bogus bills.) On the other hand he persuaded his nephew Clarence to sign a note with him. Clarence was stuck with paying off the loan.
There is no evidence that Youell visited violence upon family members, though he was vocal toward those he disliked, usually in-laws. He threatened to kill one brother-in-law, the husband of a sister. The sister remonstrated, “If you kill him, you might as well kill me.” She was one of his favorites and often helped him. No actual violence occurred, beyond strong words.
Swinney did not make the best of his newly won freedom. He worked for a while, including the construction job in Marshall, followed by another construction job in the Dallas area, where he worked from August 1974 to March 1975 as a cement finisher.
In the spring of 1975 his criminal résumé took on renewed life. In March, U.S. marshals nabbed him for counterfeiting money, another old pattern. Police at Greenville, a short distance east of Dallas, levied an automobile theft charge, along with possession of bogus coins—counterfeited silver dollars and quarters he’d tried to pass as collectors’ items. It was back to the marshals in Dallas, where he was convicted of counterfeiting. U.S. District Judge Sarah T. Hughes sentenced him to two years in prison. (Judge Hughes had sworn in Lyndon B. Johnson as President aboard Air Force One following President Kennedy’s assassination in 1963.)
On April 18, Swinney was dispatched to the Federal Correctional Institution in Texarkana, Texas, a medium security prison. He was fifty-eight years old. As one psychiatrist put it, an aged, burnt-out psychopathic killer might kill again, if backed into a corner, but is not likely to commit a highly dramatic crime like those of the Phantom case.
In Swinney’s case, the crime pattern of counterfeiting and felony thefts continued, but he was never held for murder again.
Ironically, his return to Texarkana was less heralded than his departure back in 1947. Only federal officers—marshals and prison authorities—knew Swinney had been placed in the Texarkana FCI. None was aware of Swinney’s link to the terrifying days in 1946.
That relative anonymity lasted briefly. On May 8, less than a month after his arrival at the Texarkana FCI, Swinney escaped, a familiar pattern in his federal criminal record. That day, Swinney was assigned duty on an outside work detail at the institution’s dairy farm. Shortly after noon, the guard realized a worker was missing. At that point Swinney—FCI prisoner 22232-149—by walking away, became an escaped federal prisoner. The warden notified local authorities and issued an all-points bulletin.
Unlike his previous escapes, this one garnered widespread attention, including front-page coverage in the Texarkana Gazette. An old con and counterfeiter who didn’t know any better than to commit dumb crimes, he hadn’t drawn any special attention from his keepers till then.
FBI records help reconstruct Swinney’s itinerary for the next few days. At the dairy farm, he watched the guard out of the corner of his eye. As soon as the guard was out of sight, Swinney set down his tools and simply walked off. The Texarkana FCI is near Lake Drive, the local street that follows the route of U.S. Highway 59, which goes south to Marshall and on to Houston.
At the highway, he began hitchhiking. He had stored his clothes with his sister in Marshall. He needed to replace his prison khakis. He had no money.
It is not clear what happened on the road or where he spent that night. Along the way, he acquired a large knife about six inches long with a folding blade—and a red hat. Who would expect an escaped felon to wear a red hat? Where he acquired the knife and hat was never explained, whether they came from a motorist or a burglarized house.
At nine-thirty the next morning, he surprised his sister in Marshall by walking into her house through the open back door. He was wearing a tan khaki shirt and trousers, along with the red hat.
He wanted something to eat. She asked how he’d gotten out of prison.
“I tied up a guard,” he said, “but I didn’t hurt nobody.”
She agreed to fry bacon and eggs but cautioned, “You can’t stay here. You’ll have to leave.”
“Then take me out to the highway soon as I eat, so I can catch a ride to Shreveport.”
First, she said, she had to go to Texarkana and pick up their sister.
“Okay,” he agreed, “but I want to borrow some money.”
As soon as he had finished eating breakfast, he sifted through a box of clothing he had shipped to her from the Texarkana FCI. He took out a brown dress suit and put it in a paper bag. He then changed into brown khaki trousers and shirt and set a brown corduroy hat on his head, leaving the distinctive red hat behind.
His sister took him to a point west of Hallsville, a town near Marshall. When she came to a sign, pass with care, she let him out. He was to remain in the woods there until she returned. She drove on to Texarkana, where she picked up her sister. Her sister already knew of Swinney’s escape. An FBI agent had visited her the day before, telling her that if Swinney made contact she should call immediately. He failed to tell her that she would be in trouble if she gave the escapee any assistance.
The two women returned to Hallsville, stopped at the sign where Swinney had gotten out of the car. Swinney spotted them and came out of the woods.
They tried to persuade him to turn himself in and save himself—and them—a lot of grief. He refused. They needn’t worry about him. Just help him get away so he could go to Shreveport. They kept talking to him, pointing out that if he turned himself in, he would get better treatment, since authorities were bound to recapture him anyway. He resolutely refused.
Late that afternoon, his sister drove him out of Marshall on Interstate Highway 20. When he got out, one sister gave him twenty dollars; the other, thirty dollars. He said he was going to the Salvation Army in Shreveport for the night, and he would call in a week to ten days. He had no gun but was still carrying the large knife with the long blade.
At six o’clock, a special FBI agent arrived to interview the Marshall relative. She told him she had let Youell out on the highway about thirty minutes before.
This information set off a new alarm. The FBI agent sounded the alert that Swinney might be headed into Louisiana.
The FBI’s all-points bulletin, sent out by Teletype immediately on learning of the escape, contained a full profile of Swinney, including his criminal record.
SWINNEY HAD BEEN CONFINED AT TEXAS DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS, HUNTSVILLE, TEXAS, FROM FEBRUARY 15, 1947 UNTIL OCTOBER 16, 1973. HE HAD BEEN CONFINED UNDER THE HABITUAL CRIMINAL ACT. SWINNEY IS BELIEVED RESPONSIBLE FOR SEVEN [sic] MURDERS AT TEXARKANA, TEXAS, IN 1945-46 [sic]; HOWEVER, HE WAS NEVER CONVICTED.
SWINNEY DESCRIBED AS WHITE MALE AMERICAN, DOB FEBRUARY 9, 1917, ARKANSAS, 6’, 195 POUNDS, BROWN HAIR, BLUE EYES, WEARS EYEGLASSES. HE HAS TATTOO OF TWO INCH HEART WITH SKULL ON LEFT FOREARM AND WORD “MOM” ALSO ON LEFT FOREARM; SCAR ON RIGHT KNEE; SSAN 459-32-1164; BOTH PARENTS DECEASED; SWINNEY DIVORCED 1946 [sic] AND DID NOT HAVE ANY CHILDREN.
The description overlooked the tattoo, revenge. The oversight was corrected in subsequent FBI records.
The bulletin ended with a blunt warning:
CONSIDER ARMED AND DANGEROUS
Special instructions went to agents to interview individuals who knew him at Texarkana, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Grand Prairie, Longview, Marshall, and Weatherford, Texas.
The manhunt took on greater urgency because of Swinney’s history, now coming to light. He was not a run-of-the-mill escapee. Like many a time before, he had simply walked away. Nor had he tied up a guard, as he’d boasted to his sister.
Three days after Swinney walked off the FCI grounds, an FBI agent called the sister in Marshall. She was at her job in Jefferson, fifteen miles from Marshall. It was five-thirty in the afternoon. “He’s here now,” she said. “I’ll try to talk with him, to keep him long enough for you to get here.” The agent took off.
Fifteen minutes later, Swinney was gone, driving a dark brown compact car with the rear end square. She didn’t know the license number.
The following morning—May 12, a Monday—Swinney’s relative in Grand Prairie telephoned officers that Swinney, seeking money, had tried to contact him. Swinney, alone, was driving a bronze-colored American-made compact car, bearing Texas license plates, numbers unknown.
FBI agents swarmed into Grand Prairie. At nine o’clock a woman called from Swinney’s former employer. Swinney was in her office in nearby Carrollton, trying to obtain money he claimed was due him. The FBI immediately notified Carrollton police. Minutes later a sergeant and patrolman reached the office. Swinney was on his way out of the building.
They stopped him, informed him he was under arrest. It was 9:10 A.M. Ten minutes later two FBI agents arrived, identified themselves, and took him into custody. One of the federal agents provided him a Rights and Waiver Form. Swinney read it, said he understood it, but declined to sign. He agreed to be interviewed orally.
Once in custody he verbally traced his itinerary over the past few days. He had hitchhiked to Dallas, not Shreveport, the first day. He left blank his visit to Marshall. Two days after his escape, he was in Lewisville, in the Dallas area. He took a used car from the Newt Miller Ford Agency for a test drive. He admitted he had no intention of buying it or returning it. He simply needed transportation. He slept in the car that Saturday and the following night. He remained vague as to where he went during that time.
He handed the car keys to the agents. It was a 1973 two-door Ford Maverick, bronze with 1975 Texas license number GTA 806.
The Carrollton police ascertained that the Maverick was, indeed, stolen from the Ford agency. The car’s value was assessed at $2,900. Another felony.
Swinney spent the night at the Dallas County jail, with a hold for the U.S. Marshal Service.
His description remained basically as in his earlier arrests. His tattoos on the left forearm hadn’t changed, including the heart and skull and crossbones and the word Revenge. The difference was his occupation: cement finisher, a trade he’d acquired in prison.
His level of education was stated as eighth grade, two steps above what he had testified to in 1973. His IQ was 95, considered low average.
A decision followed not to prosecute his family members for any aid they may have given him; they had cooperated with authorities in tracking him, had urged him to surrender. In late May he was dispatched to Leavenworth, a maximum-security prison where he had resided more than thirty years before.
In July he pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Topeka, Kansas, to one count of escape and received a sentence of two years, to be served after he completed his two-year term for counterfeiting.
His self-initiated freedom had been short-lived—four days.
The following year, a movie, The Town That Dreaded Sundown, was filmed in the Texarkana area and hit the theaters. Purporting to be a true account of the famous case, it was anything but that. The title, however, was an undisputed accurate reflection of the town’s mood during the killing spree. Starring Ben Johnson, Andrew Prine, and Dawn Wells, it was directed by Charles B. Pierce, a regional moviemaker who had previously achieved a degree of success with another local incident, The Legend of Boggy Creek. The Sundown killer, left unnamed and his face never displayed, cavorted about with a pillowcase, with eyeholes, over his head, even in daylight. For anyone acquainted with the facts, the movie only vaguely paralleled what had happened in 1946. One of its most memorable scenes, in which the pillowcase–hooded killer tortures a female victim tied to a tree with knives on a trombone slide while he plays a mournful melody, evoked raucous laughter from those who knew the details of the case. There was never a knife used by the killer, never a trombone, never a girl tied to a tree.
“Poetic license has rarely been stretched so thin,” wrote Dr. Robert Kerr, a Texarkana journalist who went on to teach at the University of Oklahoma. “Total fiction.” Nonetheless, the “dreadful little horror” came to have a cult following, spreading, via translated subtitles, to Europe: Kaupunki pelon valiassa and Verenpunainen auringonlasku in Finland, Staden som fruktade solnedgången in Sweden, and La citta che aveva paura in Italy.
It became a new vehicle contributing to distortions of a hometown tragedy, on the heels of a vast array of published errors and word-of-mouth accounts that, aided by time’s erosive nature, had seriously blurred, then kidnapped, the truth.
During the late 1970s, Swinney made another attempt at writing short stories, as he had done at Huntsville during his major stretch. His nephew Clarence said some of the stories were published in a “small Jewish publication,” a newsletter from Temple Yaakov in Atlanta. Atlanta was one of his several federal “homes.” The nine stories or sketches that are extant offer a range of topics from cotton picking to Independence Day to some superficial love stories. One gains the impression of a hard-luck loser striving for recognition but seemingly without a clue as to how to make it, beyond clichés of uplift philosophy.
Under a general heading of “Random Thoughts,” he submitted a series of stories around 1979 containing titles like “King Cotton,” “Fathers Are the Greatest,” “A Lonely Vigil,” “Angry Waters,” “Love Is Forever,” and “Each Dawn I Die.”
“Angry Waters” tells of a typical summer’s day in the long-forgotten year of 1927 when “Steve” was nine. (This is close to the time—1926—when Swinney’s parents divorced and the age he would have been.) The piece bristles with words of violence—“lightning streaked the heavens like stabbing knives in quest of hidden victims,” “maddened force,” “fury,” “angry waters,” with “outings of fantasy,” “envisioned himself as a pirate in search of loot or a captain of a luxury liner,” “danger,” “dangerous situations,” “bone-chilling spasoms [sic] of wintery coldness,” “the savagery of wild animals locked in battles to the death.” This memory was of a boat in a millpond during a storm, employing a great many symbols that suggest violent inner turmoil and uncertainties.
In another, “Love Is Forever,” he uses phrases like “devastation triggered by a hidden time bomb” and “fury of the fiery explosion.” The lead in the story survives an explosion on an oil derrick but loses both legs, amputated at the knees. He had married his schoolhood girl friend, Beth, in a church, but because he is legless and can’t support her, apparently he does not go back to her. It does not say she rejected him and doesn’t explain how he could have gone away without her knowing it. He becomes a street singer. One day Beth and her new husband come by, hear him sing, but she doesn’t recognize him. It is a jerky story in many respects, suggesting a pitiable man with low self-esteem amid a disturbed relationship.
His nephew, Clarence Swinney, called them “rather odd stories from a possibly disturbed mind.” They were closer to a junior high effort that crammed in big words as if to impress. Most of all, they reflected an inner disturbance amid a violent background.
The seeds of his anger were planted early. His life story reveals numerous troubled relationships that may have become models for his acts of “revenge.” The roots of his behavior can be traced to a childhood when he was ignored by his parents, left adrift, gaining attention by negative activities, and eventually acting out his emotional responses to the world around him.
It was small wonder that many, if not all, of the family believed that Youell had committed the murders.
His short stories, though poorly crafted, may have enabled him to express his frustrations and violent inner world in a nonviolent manner. If he had taken the literary route years earlier, instead of acting out his anger, the question arises whether he might have channeled his drive for revenge into a direction other than murder. Or if mental-health services had been available in his childhood, and used, would early intervention have prevented the multiple tragedies? It wouldn’t have “cured” his psychopathy, which probably was set at birth or early in life, but it might have headed off the tragic violence.
Swinney’s brushes with the law continued. He returned to Texas custody for felony theft in 1981 as Inmate # 326380 with a hold—yet again—for the U.S. Marshal in Houston. He was sixty-four years old. He subsequently returned to the Texas penitentiary as Inmate # 476635, much altered in appearance, old and seemingly embittered. Once paroled in January 1989, he had another hold on him by the U.S. Marshal in Houston. By then he was nearing his seventy-second birthday. He was a beaten, time-ravaged old man, a pathetic old con who had ruined a multitude of lives, including his own.
In his old age, Swinney was paroled from a federal institution in Fort Worth and moved to a nursing home in Dallas. He suffered a stroke but died of lung cancer in Southhaven Nursing Center in Dallas on September 15, 1994, technically and legally a free man, at the age of seventy-seven, a ripe age for a man with his record. He had spent the bulk of his life behind bars and at the end, as an indigent, was cared for infinitely better than he had treated any of his victims, including those on whom he had passed his counterfeit concoctions and whose cars he had stolen. He also had survived the three who had lived to tell of their attacks by the Phantom—James Hollis, Mary Jeanne Larey, and Katie Starks.
Because his body wasn’t claimed by relatives, it was donated to The University of Texas Health Science Center in Dallas, which uses cadavers for teaching purposes. Medical students, unaware of the history of the body before them, dissected and studied the remains of The Man They Said Was the Phantom, who had once boasted of the label. The students, some of whom probably would practice medicine in the region terrorized by the serial killer, never knew what the body before them, when alive, had done. Once the body was no longer needed, it was cremated and the ashes disposed of. With the ashes unclaimed, it is not certain where the ashes went. His was a wasted life, whatever the outcome of a murder trial might have proved. He had besmirched the name of hardworking family members. He had cost society untold hundreds of thousands of dollars in law enforcement and incarceration expenses alone. Add the toll of Phantom victims—the dead and the survivors, along with their sorrowing families and friends—and the total loss is inestimable, stretching across decades.
In the end, he had literally burned, a fate many had sought for him back in 1946.
His official record belied any belief, by him or anyone else, that he was a “brilliant” criminal who had demonstrated that he was smarter than the men trying to catch him. “They”—the law—caught him over and over again. The only people he had ever managed to truly con were the parole board members, whom he somehow managed to convince each time that he would not commit any further crimes.
For the central crimes for which he had been blamed, but not charged, he had been no more brilliant than in the lesser theft, robbery, and counterfeit cases for which he had been convicted. In the crimes of murder for which circumstantial evidence and an eyewitness account existed, he had been uncommonly lucky. His only action even approaching brilliance was his marrying Peggy so that she couldn’t be forced to testify against him. It didn’t take a legal education to know that.
His wasted life was a cautionary tale so graphic as to defy explanation, forever beyond understanding.
In that sense, his victims—the dead and surviving loved ones—would never be avenged in full, though marginal justice had emerged in disguised form.