Between February 22 and May 3, 1946, someone attacked eight people in five separate incidents in Texarkana, a town straddling the Texas and Arkansas line, and killed five of them. The first two victims, Jimmy Hollis and Mary Jeanne Larey, were assaulted at a lovers' lane and survived, and described a man in a white hood with holes cut for the eyes.
Richard Griffin and Polly Ann Moore were shot dead in a parked car in March. Paul Martin and Betty Jo Booker were shot in April, Booker having been taken some distance and killed separately. On May 3 the pattern changed: Virgil Starks was shot through the window of his own farmhouse ten miles away and his wife Katie was shot twice in the face and survived to run for help. All the shootings but the last were with a .32 automatic.
The attacks came at roughly three-week intervals on weekend nights, and the town emptied after dark. Hardware shops sold out of locks and ammunition. The Texas Rangers sent Manuel Gonzaullas, the most celebrated officer in the force, and several hundred people were questioned.
A man named Youell Swinney was arrested in the summer of 1946 and his wife gave a statement implicating him; she was not a competent witness against her husband under the law as it then stood and she changed her account repeatedly. Swinney was imprisoned as a habitual offender on car theft charges and released in 1973. He was never charged with the murders. The case is open, and the 1976 film The Town That Dreaded Sundown, shot on location, is why most people have heard of it.