While the near deadly assault on one Texarkana couple, followed by the fatal shooting of another, sent a shock wave through these Twin Cities 70 years ago, it wasn't a lasting jolt.
It took a second double murder to cause some sustained tremors as the late winter turned into an early cool spring in 1946.
While the vicious Feb. 22 assault on James "Jimmy" Hollis, 25, and Mary Jeanne Larey, 19, along with the March 24 shooting deaths of Richard L. Griffin, 29, and Polly Ann Moore, 17, were still relatively fresh news items, these two cases seemed like isolated incidents, which dulled concerns about any further attacks.
The story of the third Phantom Killer attack started the evening of April 13, 1946, when a local dance band known as the Rhythmaires finished its traditional Saturday night performance at the Veterans of Foreign Wars Club, located at West Fourth and Oak streets in downtown Texarkana.
Because World War II caused such a male shortage, the band's leader, Jerry Atkins, recruited four females-one was alto saxophone player 15-year-old Betty Jo Booker.
As the band members readied to call it a night, they collected their equipment and started to head home some time around 1:30 a.m. Sunday, April 14. Betty Jo received a ride from 16-year-old Paul Martin, a former classmate. Their original destination was to be a slumber party some distance across town. But they actually ended up dead north of Spring Lake Park-the killer's third and fourth victims.
At the time, Betty Jo was the only child of Bessie Brown, who married Clark Brown some years after the death of Betty Jo's father, Blanton Booker, at age 31. The three lived in a simple frame home at 3107 Anthony Drive in the relatively new Sussex Downs residential neighborhood. As a Texas High School junior, Betty Jo enjoyed dancing, she excelled academically and set her sights on becoming a medical technician.
As for Paul, being the youngest of four sons, he moved with his family's ice business from Smackover, Ark., to Kilgore-an East Texas oil town. But since his mother, Inez Martin, preferred Texarkana, she persuaded her husband to move to Texarkana and commute to Kilgore until his death. She then moved to Kilgore briefly, only to move back to Texarkana, where she kept the family's original home. Today, the two-story house is still standing at 1224 Locust St.
Betty Jo and Paul actually knew each other while they both lived on the Arkansas side during their grade-school years until Paul moved away to Kilgore. Betty Jo eventually moved to the Texas side, while Paul spent some time at a Mississippi military academy before returning to Kilgore High School and occasionally visiting Texarkana. One such visit took place Saturday, April 13.
Authorities found Paul's body the next day lying on its left side on what was then a gravel North Park Road-a crime scene several hundred yards from the road's intersection with what was then a gravel Summerhill Road. He had been shot four times-once in the right hand, once in the face, once in the back of his neck and once in the back. Today, his death site would be on or near a grassy field near the intersection of North Park Road and Greenbrier Forest Circle about a quarter to half a mile north of Interstate 30. Back in 1946, the area was rural.
Authorities found Betty Jo's body lying fully clothed and face up in a wooded area perhaps as much as 25 yards north of what was then a gravel Morris Lane. She had been shot once in the chest and once in the left side of her face. Today, her murder site would either be on or near the newly constructed Galleria Oaks Road extension, in an area where the road intersects Fernwood Drive. The intersection site is now near a newly developing residential and commercial area. Back then, it was heavily wooded.
Like with Richard Griffin and Polly Ann Moore three weeks before, the slayer used the same type of pistol, a .32-caliber Colt. Official reports would state that Betty Jo had been raped.
Law officers found Paul's 1946 Ford Club coupe parked on North Park Road about 400 yards north of Spring Lake Park's main entrance.
However, unlike both the Hollis-Larey and Griffin-Moore cases, the investigation into the Booker-Martin case eventually yielded a main suspect. The case would also lead not only both the Twin Cities police departments, but also the sheriff's offices of both Miller and Bowie counties, along with the Texas Rangers, the Arkansas State Police and even the FBI to probe the Texarkana area by early spring of 1946.
As Miller County's chief deputy, the late Tillman Johnson became one of the lead investigators. This placed him at the epicenter of this violent chapter in Texarkana's history.
"We were constantly getting calls, mostly at night, about prowlers," Johnson said in a 1996 interview as he sat at his dining room table, flipping through what was then a 50-year-old list of informants, witnesses and suspects. "People would called about any noise they heard at all."
Because the attacks started Feb. 22, the late Max Tackett, who at that time was an Arkansas State Police trooper and close colleague of Johnson, noticed that each time the Phantom Killer struck, a car was reported stolen at one location and later abandoned at another. Police eventually tracked down one of the stolen cars, found abandoned on a local downtown parking lot June 28, 1946. A stakeout of the area eventually led to the arrest of a 21-year-old woman named Peggy Swinney. At the time, her new husband, Youell Lee Swinney, would become and remain the prime suspect in the slayings.
The prime suspect, who already had an extensive criminal record that included burglary, counterfeiting, car theft, robbery and assault, attempted to sell a stolen car in Atlanta, Texas, around that same June 28, 1946, time period.
Fueled by suspicion, Atlanta police followed the suspect out of their city as he drove north toward Texarkana, where local police were already looking for him, Johnson said.
Tackett arrested the 29-year-old suspect inside the Arkansas Motor Coach Bus Station on downtown Texarkana's Front Street right across from Union Station.
After being placed in a police car bound for the Miller County Courthouse, Johnson recalled that Youell Swinney turned to him and said, "Hell, I know that you want me for more than just stealing cars."
Meanwhile Swinney's wife, Peggy, decided to give several detailed descriptions and statements to police about the Booker-Martin murders. She even eventually rode with them to Paul Martin's murder site and described how her husband (who at the time of the murders was her boyfriend) shot the young couple.
More importantly, Peggy Swinney started telling police things that only a person actually at the crime scene would know. One such item that directly connected Peggy and Youell Swinney to the scene was Peggy's statement about Paul Martin's datebook being thrown into some nearby bushes-a book that only Bowie County Sheriff W.H. "Bill" Presley found earlier and knew about at the time.
The evidence concerning the datebook was a very helpful addition to four different statements about the Booker-Martin murders Peggy Swinney eventually made to law officers. This woman, who herself had been in trouble with the law numerous times, made her first three statements at the Miller County jail three months after the murders on July 23 and 24, 1946. Her last statement came Nov. 22.
In each of her statements, she told police that she was with her boyfriend, Youell Swinney, on the morning of April 14, 1946, when both Booker and Martin were found shot to death at different locations near Spring Lake Park.
Specifically, in her statements, Peggy Swinney was very precise in her description of Youell Swinney's actions that early morning of April 14. However, some of the details, especially her involvement, changed from statement to statement.
Peggy Swinney, who died in Dallas in October 2014, later confessed that instead of being a bystander, she sat in the back seat of the victim's car after Swinney shot Paul Martin.
In her first statement during a July 23 interrogation, she said, "He (Swinney) and I were at his sister's house at 220 Senator Street. (The house burned down between 2008 and 2010). We were discussing the murders in Texarkana. I asked him who killed these people. He told me that it was someone with a brilliant mind, someone with more sense that the cops," according to an original copy of the police interrogation of Peggy Swinney, which was released in 1996.
This statement recounts that on the night of April 13, Peggy Swinney said she and her boyfriend drove in from Dallas and stopped about 6:30 p.m. at a cafe on New Boston Road, where they ate a steak dinner. After seeing a movie at the Joy Theatre at 104 E. Broad St., the couple drank a couple of bottles of beer at the Driver's Cafe, located at 2106 W. Seventh St., and took four bottles of beer with them.
Shortly after leaving the cafe, they ended up at Spring Lake Park, where he parked the car near a dairy. The two finished their beers, and he left the car, telling her that he was "going to take a leak."
"He was gone from the car about one hour when I heard something that sounded like two gunshots," she told police. "I do not know whether they were pistol or shotgun shots. It was just getting daylight when he (Youell Swinney) came back to the car and started driving out of the park at a rapid rate of speed. When he came back to the car, I saw that his clothes were wet up to his knees and damp on up to his waist."
Peggy Swinney never said she was worried or frightened because her boyfriend had been gone so long.
Swinney then drove their green 1941 Plymouth to Peggy Swinney's mother's home, but not before changing his clothes in a nearby wooded area, according to her statement. He then drove through a pasture and into a wooded area to hide his car.
Leaving the pasture at the end of the day, the couple got stopped by the land's owner, who threatened to call the police. Youell Swinney told the man that he (Swinney) "would sure get him ( the land owner) after he (Swinney) got out of jail." The man let them go.
However, in one of her two July 24, 1946, statements, Peggy Swinney said Youell Swinney told her that "he was going out to the park to rob someone" on April 13, the evening they returned from Dallas.
Her version of what happened once Swinney found a couple in the park to target for robbery changed from her July 23 statement.
This time, she said she got out of their 1941 green Plymouth with Swinney after the two of them had driven about 200 yards past Martin's coupe. She then said that both her and Swinney walked the 200-yard distance and got to the driver's side of Martin's car, at which time Youell Swinney told the couple to "get out of the car."
Youell Swinney then told the couple to give him everything they had while pointing his gun at Paul Martin. Betty Jo Booker and Peggy both screamed and begged Swinney not to shoot anyone.
After Swinney told his girlfriend to search the couple and she refused, she said that Swinney got mad and moments later shot Martin twice with a .32-caliber handgun. Swinney then told his girlfriend to hold Booker while he went back to his car to drive it behind Martin's car.
Swinney ordered both women to get into his car before he drove briefly westward on North Park Road for a short distance. He then doubled back and returned to shoot Martin twice more, since Martin had managed to get up off the road and moved to the north side from where he was first shot, Peggy Swinney recalled in her much more detailed statement.
Youell Swinney then drove again westward on North Park Road toward Summerhill Road, then turned south on Summerhill, before turning west onto Morris Lane for about 100 to 300 yards. He then ordered Booker out of the car and walked with her into a wooded area off the lane, where he eventually shot her after telling Peggy to stay on the road near his car.
Youell Swinney returned later without the victim and told Peggy he tried to "get some" from the girl, but she refused so he shot her.
But while Swinney's wife opened up and talked, Swinney himself would not.
"At one point, we asked him about his wife, and he just clammed up from there," Johnson said.
Police then took the man to Little Rock for a shot of sodium pentothal (truth serum), but they gave him too much and he passed out without saying a word-a mistake Johnson said never should have happened.
"I think that if we had just kept him here ( in Texarkana) and kept questioning him, we would have gotten the truth out of him eventually," Johnson said in 1996.
Swinney's wife refused to testify in court and couldn't be compelled to do so under the law. She married Swinney just hours before she had been taken into custody by police. The new bride, under Arkansas law, couldn't be compelled to testify against her husband.
For a time, Peggy Swinney was jailed for being an accessory to car theft, while the suspect was extradited to Bowie County, where he received a life sentence in state prison on the auto theft charge and a conviction on being a habitual criminal.
The funerals for Paul Martin and Betty Jo Booker were held at Beech Street First Baptist Church.
Johnson, who passed away in 2008 at age 97, said back in 1996 that he never knew what became of Peggy Swinney after 1946.
The Booker-Martin slaying launched a citywide wave of fear that gripped the area. The fright became even more intense after the shooting of another couple in rural Miller County on May 3, roughly three weeks after the Booker-Martin murders. They were expecting another murder on May 24, about three weeks after the Phantom Killer's May 3 attack.
It would, however, never take place.