Just before midnight on Friday, February 22, 1946, Jimmy Hollis, twenty-five, and Mary Jeanne Larey, nineteen, were parked after a movie on a lovers' lane outside Texarkana, Texas, about three hundred feet from the last row of houses. A man wearing a white cloth mask with eyeholes cut in it, in the accounts that describe it like a pillowcase (another account says a burlap sack), shone a flashlight through the driver's window and ordered them out at gunpoint. He beat Hollis with the pistol, fracturing his skull, and sexually assaulted Larey with the gun barrel, then fled when headlights appeared. Larey ran to a house on Blanton Street and the owner called the police. Both survived. It was the first of five attacks on eight people in ten weeks in and around Texarkana, the town that straddles the Texas and Arkansas line, and five of the eight died.
On March 24, deputies of the Bowie County sheriff and Texarkana police found Richard L. Griffin, twenty-nine, and his girlfriend Polly Ann Moore, seventeen, dead in his car on a back road about a hundred yards south of Highway 67, both shot in the back of the head with a .32. Three weeks later, in the early hours of April 14, Paul Martin, sixteen or seventeen by different accounts, picked up Betty Jo Booker, fifteen, from a Veterans of Foreign Wars club where she had been playing with the evening's band. Martin's body was found at about half past six that morning beside North Park Road near the entrance to Spring Lake Park, shot four times. Booker's was found about five hours later almost two miles away; she had been shot in the chest and the face.
On the evening of May 3 the attacker changed his method. At a farm outside Texarkana, Arkansas, Virgil Starks, thirty-seven, was reading his newspaper when he was shot twice in the back of the head through a window with a .22 rifle. His wife Katie, thirty-six, was shot twice in the face and still managed to escape and get help.
The attacks had come on weekend nights, roughly three weeks apart, and fear emptied the streets after dark. The press called the attacker the Phantom Killer and the crimes the Texarkana Moonlight Murders. Investigators noticed that on the night of each attack a car had been reported stolen and later found abandoned, and that led them to Youell Lee Swinney, born in 1917 in Cleveland County, Arkansas, the son of a Baptist minister, with a record of car theft, counterfeiting, burglary and assault. In July 1946 a stakeout of a stolen car on the Arkansas side led police to a woman who said she was Swinney's girlfriend and turned out to be his wife, Peggy; the car had been reported stolen on the night of the Griffin and Moore killings. She gave statements implicating him but changed them repeatedly, and as his wife she could not be compelled to testify against him. Prosecutors declined to charge him with any of the killings.
In 1947 Swinney was sentenced to life in prison as a habitual offender for car theft. He was released on appeal in 1973 and died in Dallas on September 15, 1994, never having been charged in the Texarkana case. It remains unsolved. The filmmaker Charles B. Pierce made the killings the subject of his horror film The Town That Dreaded Sundown.