The Worst Crimes to Ever Occur In Texas
In the room with his body -- he apparently used poison -- were found notes saying he killed himslef because he was the Texarkana "phantom". Besides, a Texarkana youth who was a friend of the young suicide produced proof that the two were together in Texarkana on the night that Starks was killed at his Arkansas country home. Texarkana became a city of sleuths, but officers were forced to warn some of the younger generation they were going too far in trying to catch the Phantom. Highly incensed because two of their teenagers had been killed, some of them planted themselves as decoys to ulre the Phantom into another attack.
Meanwhile, the killer ran around the back of the house and made his way up the steps and into the side-screened porch through the back screen door. Mrs. Starks ran from the bedroom and into the kitchen where she heard the killer coming through the kitchen window. She ran back into the bedroom, down a passageway, through another bedroom and then into the living room and out the front door; leaving behind a "virtual river of blood" and teeth throughout the house and across the street.
A few weeks later, they were joined by another young boy and girl, Paul Martin and Betty Jo Booker. Booker was the Phantom’s youngest victim, at only 15 years old. Booker played the saxophone in a local band, and Martin came out to pick her up. Booker's body would not be found for another six, laying two miles from Martin.
She narrowly escaped, but hadn't been able to see the killer because of the blood pouring from her facial wounds into her eyes. It all started with the murder of Mary Pratt in December of 1990, when she was shot, killed, and had her eyes surgically removed. The killer Murder mysteries than moved on to Susan Peterson, killing her in the exact same way. The third victim, Shirley Williams, was found in March of 1991 – but the circumstances surrounding her murder were a bit different. Her eyes had been removed, but without the same amount of precision.
She was also a member of the Delta Beta Sigma sorority. She was one of four officers in her high school band, and played the Bundy E-flat alto saxophone second in Jerry Atkins' orchestra, The Rythmaires, who played at proms and other events. In 1937, several years after the death of her father, her mother, Bessie, married her stepfather, Carl Brown, an employee of the Gifford-Hill Company. Betty and Paul Martin had been friends since they went to kindergarten together on the Arkansas side until she moved to 3105 Anthony Drive on the Texas side.
According to everyone who knew them they were nice, kind people. Historically, it claims names who have made a mark in our country's social, artistic and political texture. Alamo hero Jim Bowie, along with his brother Rezin, invented the famous Bowie knife nearby. Natives of the town include Scott Joplin, the Pulitzer Prize-winning ragtime composer, and one-time Presidential aspirant Ross Perot. Set in Texarkana and based loosely on a string of local slayings, the proto-slasher film came out just two years after The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Black Christmas, and two years before Halloween. SERIAL KILLER The unlawful killing of two or more victims by the same offender, in separate events.
Little Rock, Nov. 9 – (AP? ) – A ballistics expert said today the bullet which killed one victim of the so-called Texarkana “phantom slayer” could not have been fired from two guns to which H. Well when you committed two double murders you would too. Meantime officers continued working to untangle the conflicting suicide statements left by young Tennison, Texarkana freshman at the University of Arkansas who ended his life Friday in Fayetteville. S conclusion that the suicide notes left by young Tennison, in which he professed he was the Phantom murderer, were the product of a distraught mind. The first assault on Feb. 22 was not a murder and some officers do not believe that the phantom was involved. Mrs. Mary Jean (spelling?) Larey, 19, said a masked man carrying a gun approached the car in which she and Jimmy Hollis were parked.
Police said the youth had made several rough drafts of his note in pencil and then completed typewritten copies. S brothers with the bullet which killed Virgil Starks at his rural home near Texarkana two years ago. The fountain pen, on which he had stuck a small quantity of poison of the same kind which he used to end his life, was a B. If I am out of the way, all of the family can get down to their own lives. Mother will not have to worry about me making my grades, and daddy will not have to put out any more money on me which probably would do no more good than it did in high school.
The killer, described by witnesses as wearing a white mask or sack with holes cut for eyes, was dubbed the Phantom Killer or Phantom Slayer—a name that, like so much about the case, seemed ready-made for drive-in theaters. This image shows the handprint of a suspect in the 1946 Texarkana Phantom Killer serial murder case. Amy Robinson was a young woman with mental disabilities. In 1998, she was abducted & murdered in her hometown of Arlington, Texas, by two men she believed were her friends. Blake Leibel lived a life of luxury, living off his wealthy parents in Los Angeles. In a case of life imitating art, Leibel murdered his girlfriend, Iana Kasian, in a crime which followed a script from his graphic novel, Syndrome.
Law enforcement officers worked for six months trying to validate Peggy's confession and tie Swinney to the murders. They found that on the night of the Booker-Martin murders, the Swinneys were sleeping in their car under a bridge near San Antonio. Swinney was never charged with murder and was instead tried and imprisoned as a habitual offender for car theft. Presley reported in his 2014 book that investigators in the Swinney case later said that the sentence was effectively a plea bargain, though the case files indicated no formal agreement. Swinney was apparently concerned about being sentenced to death for the murders, so agreed to not contest the habitual offender charge and in fact tried to plead guilty despite the charge requiring a jury trial.
Paul Martin and Betty Jo Booker were the second double murder three weeks later in April. Virgil Starks was killed and his wife Katie was shot twice at the beginning of May 1946. Join Gina and Amber in the discussion about the Texarkana Moonlight Murders on social media or email us your thoughts on the case. For example, the New York Daily News reports that he used the barrel of his gun to sexually assault one of his first victims, a 19-year-old woman named Mary Jeanne Larey. She was one of the few to survive the attacks, but most were not so fortunate.
They kept him in jail for three weeks so that his beard would grow back, which would allow Mrs. Harmon to definitively identify him as her attacker. Police were able to independently verify some details of Peggy's confession, such as locating a victim's possessions in a location she said Youell had discarded it. A shirt with a laundry mark perhaps linked to the Starks case was found in Swinney's possession, but the link was not certain. Peggy's confession was the most critical part of the case.
According to Cinema Blend, the remake is set in Texarkana in the 21st century during an annual screening of the original movie. A copycat killer ends up trying to recreate the murders from the original movie, once again plunging the town of Texarkana into a fear-fueled panic. Variety called it "too self-reflexive for the date-night crowd," adding that "it isn't artful enough to pass muster as cinephile-oriented specialty fare." Unlike the killer in the movie, the real Phantom Killer was not as over-the-top as his representation on the screen. In real life, he killed all his victims by shooting them at close range. But in The Town That Dreaded Sundown, the murderer gets a bit more theatrical when killing his victims.
In many instances, to understand how these headlines are false or misleading, the reader will need to be familiar with my analysis of the evidence pertaining to H. B. Tennison that I presented at the November 8, 2014 Phantom Killer Forum in Texarkana, Texas. In 1946, a wave of unsolved slaying in the Texarkana area -- there were five in all -- were attributed to a "phantom" killer.