In the spring of 1946 someone attacked eight people in and around Texarkana, the twin city that sits on the line between Bowie County, Texas, and Miller County, Arkansas. Five of them died. The Texarkana Gazette called the unknown attacker the Phantom Killer, and the case came to be known as the Texarkana Moonlight Murders. Nobody was ever charged. The Texas Department of Public Safety once described it as the number one unsolved murder case in Texas history, according to Texas Monthly and The Texas Observer.
Texarkana straddles the state line. In 1946 the area was home to the Red River Arsenal and the Lone Star Arsenal, which employed local people on evening as well as day shifts. The Texas Observer, reviewing James Presley's history of the case, notes that the city had a long reputation for violence and lawlessness well before 1946. The attacks fell mainly on the Texas side: three on couples parked on back roads in Bowie County, and a fourth at a farmhouse in Miller County, Arkansas.
The first attack came on the night of February 22, 1946, according to the Encyclopedia of Arkansas, which also gives the date as February 23 in one of its daily history items. A young man of 24 and his 19-year-old girlfriend had been to a movie downtown and then parked on a secluded lane at the edge of town. The Dallas Observer reports that they had been there no more than ten minutes when a man in a white hood came up to the car with a flashlight and a pistol. According to the woman's later account, he told the young man he did not want to kill him and ordered him to do as he was told.
The gunman made both of them get out of the car. He beat the young man, who spent several weeks in hospital, and attacked and sexually assaulted the young woman. Then, for reasons she never learned, he turned and walked away into the dark. Both survived.
Neither could describe him well. The Dallas Observer reports that the only description they could agree on was a thin man about six feet tall. Captain M. T. Gonzaullas of the Texas Rangers said in 1977 that the two survivors had been so frightened that their accounts were vague, and that they did not even agree about the attacker's race. Survivors' descriptions of a white mask or sack with eyeholes, recorded by the Encyclopedia of Arkansas and by KTAL News, became the image of the Phantom that the town remembered.
At the time the attack was not treated as extraordinary. Tillman Johnson, a Bowie County deputy who later worked the case, told the Dallas Observer that nobody saw it as unusual until the first double killing a month later.
Richard Griffin was 29 and had recently been discharged from the Navy. KTAL News describes him as a veteran who worked in carpentry and painting. Polly Ann Moore was 17. She had recently graduated from high school in Atlanta, Texas, and worked at the Red River Arsenal.
Early on Sunday morning, March 24, 1946, a motorist near the city limits saw an Oldsmobile parked on a dirt lane close to U.S. Highway 67 and thought someone was stuck in the mud. Griffin was dead in the front seat. Moore was dead in the back seat, with her class ring still on her finger and her purse open. Both had been shot, according to the Encyclopedia of Arkansas. The Dallas Observer reports that Griffin had been shot twice and that his trouser pockets had been turned inside out, which suggested robbery. Investigators believed Moore had been killed outside the car.
Officers found several .32-caliber shell casings near the scene. Heavy rain had fallen through the early morning and went on all day; it washed away footprints and left almost no usable fingerprints on the outside of the car.
Betty Jo Booker was 15, a high school junior with a straight-A average. She played alto saxophone in a local dance band, the Rhythmaires, and planned to train as a hospital technician, according to the Dallas Observer. Paul Martin, 16, was a former classmate. Deputy Johnson had grown up in Stamps, Arkansas, with Booker's mother.
On Saturday night, April 13, 1946, the Rhythmaires played a dance at the Veterans of Foreign Wars hall. The job ended just before one in the morning. Booker had been invited to an all-night slumber party with friends, and Martin had agreed to drive her there. They stopped first at Spring Lake Park, a well-known parking spot on the Texas side.
The next morning a family taking a shortcut toward Prescott, Arkansas, found Martin's body beside the road and alerted a nearby house, which called the authorities. He had been shot, apparently with a .32. Booker's body was found shortly before noon in a grove of trees about a mile from Martin's, the Dallas Observer reports; KTAL News puts the distance at two miles. She had been shot. Martin's car was about another mile away, near a railroad crossing, with the keys still in the ignition. Booker's saxophone was missing. The Encyclopedia of Arkansas dates the discovery to April 14 and places the killings at Spring Lake Park.
This was the second double killing of young people in parked cars in three weeks, and it changed the town. KTAL News reports that casings from the two double killings matched.
Virgil Starks was a farmer in Miller County, Arkansas, and lived with his wife, Katie, on a farm about ten miles from Texarkana. The Dallas Observer gives his age as 36.
On Friday evening, May 3, 1946, shortly before nine o'clock, Starks was sitting in his living room reading the newspaper with a heating pad at his back. His wife was in the bedroom listening to the radio. Two shots came through a window and killed him. When Katie Starks came into the room and started toward the telephone, she was shot twice and badly wounded. She heard someone breaking a kitchen window, ran out of the front door, and reached a neighbor's house less than a hundred yards away. Texas Monthly describes her running for help across dark fields. She survived.
For the first time, investigators had physical evidence to work with. There were bloody footprints across the living room. Bloodhounds from the Arkansas State Police followed a scent to the highway and lost it about half a mile from the house. Officers found spent .22-caliber cartridges and bullet holes in the window, and a flashlight with a red handle that the gunman had dropped. The Texarkana Gazette printed a color photograph of the flashlight and asked readers whether they recognized it. The Dallas Observer reports that journalism historians later credited it as the first color photograph printed in a daily newspaper.
The killings then stopped. The Encyclopedia of Arkansas records that they ended as abruptly as they had begun.
Panic took hold in Texarkana after the Martin and Booker killings and deepened after the Starks shooting. The Dallas Observer describes residents buying guns and locking doors they had never locked before. Wives of evening-shift workers at the Lone Star Arsenal took their children to sleep at a downtown hotel. Western Union stopped delivering telegrams after dark when shots were fired at an employee walking up to a house. Texas Monthly adds that many residents armed themselves and some left town.
Gonzaullas, speaking in 1977, remembered the townspeople as "really panicky" and said that the Rangers and the state Highway Patrol worked to calm them. The case drew national attention. The Dallas Observer reports that Life and Time both covered it and that a reward fund for information grew to more than $5,000.
Officers from both states worked the case. On the Texas side the lead local officer was Bowie County Sheriff W. H. "Bill" Presley, uncle of the historian James Presley, who later wrote a book on the case. His deputies included Tillman Johnson, just out of the Army. On the Arkansas side was Max Tackett, a young Arkansas state trooper.
The best-known figure was Captain Manuel T. Gonzaullas of the Texas Rangers. The Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum records that he was born in 1891 in Cadiz, Spain, joined the Rangers in 1920, was known in the oil fields and border country as "El Lobo Solo," the Lone Wolf, built the crime laboratory of the new Department of Public Safety after 1935, and returned to the Rangers in 1940 as captain of Company B in Dallas. He retired in 1951. The historian Mike Cox writes that Gonzaullas led the investigation into the Texarkana killings and that, unusually for him, the Rangers never caught anyone. The Dallas Observer notes that Gonzaullas was fond of publicity and posed for a Time photographer at the Starks house.
In his 1977 interview, Gonzaullas said the Rangers went to Texarkana to assist local officers after the second couple had been killed, and that there were no further killings of that kind after they arrived. He said he reached the Starks farmhouse within an hour of the shooting, together with the sheriff and an FBI agent.
The FBI took part. In February 2020 the Bureau published more than 1,100 pages of its Texarkana file on its online records library, The Vault, in two parts. The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported at the time that a first look showed memos and reports, news clippings, correspondence involving Director J. Edgar Hoover, photographs of evidence, fingerprints and handprints, maps and diagrams, lists of leads, and suspect lists dated from 1946 to 1949.
The Encyclopedia of Arkansas records that many people either claimed responsibility or were accused, and that every one of those leads proved false. KTAL News reports that nearly 400 people were arrested over the course of the investigation.
The Dallas Observer lists some of them. Rumor attached to the son of a prominent local family who was sent away to boarding school. Callers named a local policeman, a feed-store owner and a gas-station attendant, and a German prisoner of war was questioned. A railroad section hand confessed in a letter to the governor and challenged J. Edgar Hoover and President Harry Truman to duels. An 18-year-old University of Arkansas student left a suicide note confessing to the killings; investigators could not connect him to them. A man in a Shreveport bar confessed to a reporter who was buying him drinks; Deputy Johnson identified him as a local drunk.
Gonzaullas said in 1977 that four or five people had confessed to the crimes, and that none of them knew details that had never been made public. He said the Rangers held a good deal of scientific evidence that had never been released to the press.
The lead that police followed furthest came from Max Tackett. The Dallas Observer reports that he noticed that a stolen car had been involved in each attack and had been abandoned afterward. Texas Monthly records an earlier, missed chance: Tackett and another trooper, Charley Boyd, had seen an old car parked near the woods on a road known as a drop-off route for moonshine. They did not stop to check it, and they later regretted it, because the car was afterward thought to have been the attacker's.
According to the Dallas Observer, a witness from the night of the Martin and Booker killings identified a man who had driven off in a car stolen from a friend of her parents. In late June 1946 Tackett staked out a parking lot in downtown Texarkana where another stolen car had been left, and arrested the young woman who came for it. She was 21 and had recently married the man Tackett was looking for: a local ex-convict with convictions for burglary, counterfeiting and car theft. His name was Youell Lee Swinney.
Swinney was the son of a local lay minister, according to the Dallas Observer, and had been in trouble with the law since his teens. He made money by stealing cars and driving people across the country. The Texas court record of his later case shows a 1941 conviction in Miller County, Arkansas, and a 1944 conviction in Texas before 1946.
Questioned by Tackett, his wife gave an account of the night of April 13. She said she and Swinney had come back from Dallas, stopped in town for a movie and beer, and driven to Spring Lake Park to get drunk and rob somebody. She said she watched as a young couple was forced out of their car at gunpoint and taken into the woods, and that she later heard a series of shots. She said Swinney had taken things from the young man's pockets and thrown them into a ditch, and the Dallas Observer reports that Martin's small date book was later found in a washed-out area near his body. She said he had thrown the saxophone from the car on the drive back toward town, and it was recovered where she described. A polygraph test in Austin indicated that she was telling the truth about what happened at the park. She could not find the exact spot again, though she came close.
Swinney was arrested on a Saturday afternoon in July 1946 at the downtown bus station, after police in Atlanta, Texas, reported that he was heading back to Texarkana. A photograph published by Texas Monthly shows him under arrest at the Miller County Sheriff's Office in July 1946. According to the Dallas Observer, he told the arresting officers that they wanted him for more than stealing a car.
He was held in the Miller County jail in Arkansas, and Johnson, Tackett and Sheriff Presley questioned him night after night. He once said he would talk and then changed his mind. Officers took him to Little Rock to be questioned under sodium pentothal, but the doctor gave him too much and he lost consciousness. Johnson later called that "the biggest mistake we ever made." Swinney never spoke about the killings again.
Prosecutors had a suspect, a statement from his wife and some items she had helped them find, but they did not bring a murder charge. The Encyclopedia of Arkansas gives two reasons: the wife's testimony was considered unreliable, and she could not be compelled to testify against her husband. The Dallas Observer reports that under Arkansas law a wife could decline to testify against her husband, which left a prosecutor little to work with. KTAL News reports that investigators doubted her account because she could not give exact locations or a reliable timeline.
Instead, Swinney was prosecuted for car theft. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals later recorded the result: in 1947, in the District Court of Bowie County, Texas, he was convicted of felony theft, and because of his 1941 Arkansas and 1944 Texas convictions his punishment was enhanced under the habitual-offender article of the Texas Penal Code to a mandatory life sentence. He was never charged with any of the Texarkana killings.
In the early 1970s Swinney challenged the life sentence by petition for a writ of habeas corpus, arguing that the 1941 Arkansas conviction used to enhance it was void because he had had no lawyer.
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals decided the case, Ex parte Swinney, on September 25, 1973, in an opinion by Judge Roberts. The 1941 judgment recited that the defendant had appeared "in proper person and by attorney," and a lower court had found in 1972 that a named attorney represented him. The appeals court rejected that finding: the testimony behind it concerned the 1947 trial, not the 1941 case. Swinney testified that he had no attorney in 1941, was not told he had a right to one, and could not afford one, and the state did not dispute that he was indigent. The 1941 docket sheet had a blank space where counsel would be listed, and a clerk's letter of 1967 said the records showed no lawyer. A sheriff's deputy testified that he could not say Swinney had counsel in 1941.
The court called the question close, but held that Swinney had carried his burden of showing the 1941 conviction invalid. Without it, the maximum punishment for the 1947 theft was ten years. Because he had served longer than that, the court granted the writ and ordered his immediate release from the Texas Department of Corrections. The opinion deals only with the theft case and does not mention the 1946 killings.
The Dallas Observer reports that in 1974 Swinney was convicted in Dallas of counterfeiting quarters and half-dollars and served two years at the federal facility in Texarkana. In 1992 Mark Bledsoe, a Texarkana realtor and former probation officer who had been researching the case, traced him to a Dallas halfway house. Later that year Swinney had a stroke and was moved to a rest home. He spoke freely about his counterfeiting but angrily denied any part in the killings, and also denied that he had ever been married.
Sources disagree on when he died. The Dallas Observer says he died a year after the 1992 meetings, at 76. KTAL News gives 1994 and says he died in prison as a habitual offender. The Texas Observer's 2015 review of Presley's book gives 1998. He was never charged in the Texarkana case at any point in his life.
Among the officers who worked the case, opinion settled on Swinney but never fully. The Encyclopedia of Arkansas calls him the main suspect. Tillman Johnson told the Dallas Observer: "I've always been convinced that he killed the Booker girl and her boyfriend." Mark Bledsoe said he was "at least 99 percent convinced" that Swinney committed most of the attacks attributed to the Phantom. Sheriff Bill Presley told his family that the killer had been caught, according to his nephew James Presley, as reported in Texas Monthly.
James Presley, a Texarkana native who joined the Texarkana Gazette at 17 in 1947, wrote an eight-part newspaper series on the case in 1971 and in 2014 published The Phantom Killer: Unlocking the Mystery of the Texarkana Serial Murders. Texas Monthly says the book makes a convincing case that Swinney was the attacker; The Texas Observer called it a compelling case while adding that it is impossible to know whether Presley is right. Both describe the case as officially unsolved.
Most popular accounts, and the Encyclopedia of Arkansas, count five dead and three wounded across four attacks, including the Starks farmhouse. Several of the people closest to the investigation did not accept that.
Gonzaullas said flatly in 1977 that the case in Texarkana, Arkansas, had nothing to do with the killings on the Texas side. Tillman Johnson told the Dallas Observer that he believed someone other than Swinney killed Virgil Starks. Mark Bledsoe believed the Starks killer was a local serviceman who had recently come home to Texarkana and was later reported to be in a mental institution in Milwaukee; that man was never charged. Dr. James Grigson, a Dallas forensic psychiatrist consulted by the Dallas Observer, thought the first three attacks were the work of one man driven by anger and that the Starks shooting was a copycat crime or a personal grudge.
The differences in method support the question. The first three attacks were on couples in parked cars on the Texas side, with a .32 pistol where the weapon is recorded. The Starks shooting was at a house in Arkansas, through a window, with .22-caliber ammunition.
A white mask. The masked attacker is the best-known detail of the case, but it rests on the survivors of the first attack, whose descriptions were vague. Gonzaullas, asked in 1977 whether the attacker wore a mask, answered that in his opinion he did not, though elsewhere in the same interview he said the man had something on his face.
The moonlight. The case's popular name suggests the attacks came under a full moon. The Dallas Observer lists the full-moon timing among the myths about the case.
Whether the attacker knew his victims. Gonzaullas said in 1977 that he was fairly sure the attacker knew the young people he killed and that they knew him. He gave no evidence for this in the interview.
The man on the railroad tracks. A local story held that a drifter threw himself in front of a train to carry the Phantom's secret to the grave. The Dallas Observer reports that the dead man, Earl McSpadden, had been stabbed to death and his body placed on the tracks.
Florida, October 1946. In October 1946 a young couple was shot dead with a .32-caliber pistol while parked on a secluded road near Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and the case was never solved. The Dallas Observer reports that people who doubt Swinney's guilt point to it, since he was in jail at the time. No evidence linking the two cases has been reported.
Virginia Carpenter, 1948. KTAL News reports that Virginia Carpenter, 21, who disappeared in Texarkana in 1948, was believed by some to be a further victim, and that Swinney was in prison by then. Reports offer no evidence connecting her disappearance to the 1946 attacks.
The apology calls. In February 1999 a soft-spoken woman telephoned the Kilgore home of Paul Martin's brother. His wife answered. The caller asked whether her husband had a brother who had been killed in Texarkana and said she wanted to apologize for what her father had done. The Dallas Observer reports that nearly a year later a nephew of Virgil Starks said his mother had received an almost identical call, which she had taken for a prank. A retired Ranger could not trace the first call. Swinney had no known daughter, and the calls have been cited as a reason to doubt that he was the attacker.
The robbery motive. Griffin's pockets were turned out and Swinney's wife spoke of going to the park to rob someone, which fits a robbery theory. Gonzaullas, by contrast, said in 1977 that the attacker was not after money and that the motive was sexual. The question has never been settled.
In 1976 the Arkansas filmmaker Charles B. Pierce made The Town That Dreaded Sundown, a horror film loosely based on the case. The Encyclopedia of Arkansas records that it was shot in four weeks in June and July 1976, mostly around Texarkana, starred Ben Johnson, Andrew Prine and Dawn Wells, and had its world premiere in Texarkana on December 17, 1976, before general release on December 24. It moved the crimes to the Arkansas side of the city. Its posters claimed that the killer still lurked in the streets of Texarkana, Arkansas, and city officials threatened to sue over the line. The film cost about $400,000 and earned about $5 million, and it is often counted among the first slasher films. A loose remake and sequel under the same title followed in 2014.
Gonzaullas, interviewed for the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum in Dallas on January 26, 1977, as the film was being shown, said the case had never been completely solved. He died the following month, aged 85.
Texas Monthly reports that the case also fed the urban legend of the hook-handed man who preys on parked couples, though there is no evidence that the attacker used a hook. James Presley told Texas Monthly that a 2001 cable program about urban legends, which repeated false claims about the case, was what moved him to write his book. Since 2003 Pierce's film has been screened free each October at Spring Lake Park, where Paul Martin and Betty Jo Booker were killed, and a local country club holds an annual Phantom Ball for charity.
Betty Jo Booker is buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in Texarkana, Texas Monthly notes. The Dallas Observer reported that Tillman Johnson, the last surviving member of the 1946 team, still kept crime-scene photographs, field notes and his own reports at home, while the official police and sheriff's files no longer existed. The FBI file released in 2020 is now the largest public body of records on the case.
No one was ever charged with the Texarkana attacks of 1946, and no court has ruled on who committed them. The man most investigators suspected was imprisoned for theft, freed in 1973 on a point about his right to counsel in 1941, and died in the 1990s without ever being charged. As of February 2026, the Encyclopedia of Arkansas records that the attacker was never identified or caught, and the case remains a cold case.
1891: Manuel T. Gonzaullas born in Cadiz, Spain.
1941: Youell Lee Swinney convicted in Miller County, Arkansas, without counsel, as the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals later found.
1944: Swinney convicted in Texas.
February 22, 1946: A young couple attacked on a lovers' lane outside Texarkana, Texas; both survive.
March 24, 1946: Richard Griffin and Polly Ann Moore found shot dead in a parked car near U.S. Highway 67, Bowie County.
April 13 to 14, 1946: Paul Martin and Betty Jo Booker killed after a dance at the VFW hall; their bodies are found on April 14.
May 3, 1946: Virgil Starks shot dead and Katie Starks wounded at their farmhouse in Miller County, Arkansas.
Late June 1946: Trooper Max Tackett arrests Swinney's wife at a parking lot where a stolen car had been left.
July 1946: Swinney arrested at the Texarkana bus station.
1947: Swinney convicted of felony theft in Bowie County, Texas; life sentence as a habitual offender.
1971: James Presley's eight-part series on the case.
September 25, 1973: Texas Court of Criminal Appeals orders Swinney's release (Ex parte Swinney).
1974: Swinney convicted in Dallas of counterfeiting.
December 17, 1976: The Town That Dreaded Sundown premieres in Texarkana.
January 26, 1977: Gonzaullas's oral history interview; he dies in February 1977.
1992: Mark Bledsoe traces Swinney to a Dallas halfway house.
February 1999: The first anonymous apology call to Paul Martin's family.
2014: Presley's book published; a remake of the film released.
February 2020: FBI publishes more than 1,100 pages of its file.
February 2026: The Encyclopedia of Arkansas still records the attacker as never identified.