With the whole weekend ahead, Virgil Starks wasted no time getting comfortable on a Friday evening 70 years ago today.
But for the 37-year-old Miller County farmer, his weekend would be short-lived, literally.
Starks relaxed in his living-room armchair, reading the newspaper and listening to a wooden, short-wave radio, at his farmhouse just off of U.S. Highway 67 about 10 miles northeast of Texarkana, Ark., on May 3, 1946.
He was still reading the paper when an unidentified gunman fired two shots from about a three-foot distance through the closed front porch window, striking the farmer in the back of the head.
While the real culprit in the Starks slaying remains an unsolved puzzle, a fright-driven public nevertheless credited the crime to the mysterious murderer who stalked Texarkana that spring of 1946-the Phantom Killer.
Starks' wife, Katie, who was in her bedroom at the time, entered the living room and saw her husband bleeding. He was slumped in the chair.
She ran to the home's wall-mounted telephone. Before she could finish dialing, a gunshot struck her in her right cheek, followed by another bullet that struck her in her jaw just below her lower lip-the impact removing some teeth from her mouth.
Although severely injured, Katie Starks dropped to the floor and crawled to the bedroom, thereby avoiding the gunman's line of fire.
The gunman, meanwhile, had run around to the Starks' back porch and tried to break in through the kitchen window.
Struggling to her feet, Katie Starks went to the kitchen just in time to hear the killer attempting to break the window. Dazed and bleeding severely, she struggled back to her bedroom before making her way through the living room and out the front door, trailing blood all the way, according to a Texarkana Gazette story published in 1946.
She fled in her blood-splattered nightgown across the highway to her sister's house, only to find no one at home. She eventually made her way to the A.V. Prater farmhouse about 50 yards away from her sister's house. There, she finally found help and a ride to the Michael Meagher Memorial Hospital at 503 Walnut St., where the Miller County Health Unit is now housed.
The bullet that pierced Katie Starks' right cheek emerged from the back of her left ear, while the bullet that struck her lower jaw was lodged under her tongue.
It looked like the mysterious killer had struck again-only this time it immediately attracted droves of local, county, state and federal law officers who converged on the crime scene in the quiet Homan community.
Officers from both Texas and Arkansas, collectively numbering from about 20 to 30, gathered at the Virgil Starks' home.
Normally, a crime wouldn't draw dozens of law officers from local, state and federal agencies.
Miller County Chief Deputy Tillman Johnson had just received his Army discharge May 1, after two years of military service. Around that same day, he returned to his old job with the sheriff's office where he had served from 1938 to 1944 prior to his military service.
Johnson, who died in December 2008, received a radio call the night of Friday, May 3, 1946, dispatching him to the latest shooting-another possible victim of an unknown slayer eventually labeled by newspapers and radio as the Phantom Killer.
"We tried to secure the crime scene and we were in and out of there (the Starks' home) all night long," Johnson said in a 1996 interview. "We were running around, trying to find leads and gather what evidence we could. We tried to interview some people and question some suspects."
Hysteria, generated by two previous murders of young couples on the Texas side, had already put most area residents on edge.
"We went to other peoples' homes in the area to see if they had heard or had seen anything," Johnson said in 1996. "People would stand out near the front of their homes and yell at you to identify yourself before you got too close. You had to (identify yourself) or you would get shot."
Officers arrived in time to find the Starks' living room filled with smoke from a shorted-out heating pad burning in Starks' chair as he remained slumped over from two gunshot wounds to the back of his head.
The killer tracked bloody footprints through the living room. He then exited through the front door and across the highway.
Police canine units followed a suspect's trail on the highway for about 200 yards before they crossed back to the other side of the highway and lost the scent about a half-mile later.
Police found two small bullet holes shot through the front porch window, which led them to believe the gunman used either an automatic or semi-automatic weapon as four shots had been fired altogether.
A few days after being brought to Michael Meagher Memorial Hospital, Katie Starks told police she never saw the killer's face.
Miller County farmer Jack Starks, Virgil's father, offered a $500 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person responsible for his son's murder and his daughter-in-law's injuries.
Katie Starks survived and didn't wind up being the Phantom Killer's sixth victim. As a matter of fact, her husband may not have even been the fifth.
The bullets extracted from Starks' body were apparently fired from a .22-caliber semi-automatic weapon, possibly a rifle. Officers recovered the spent shell casings from the Starks' front porch. They also discovered a relatively rare type of flashlight apparently belonging to the gunman.
Just before the shooting, two Arkansas State Police troopers left Texarkana eastbound on U.S. Highway 67 for their Hope, Ark., headquarters. They noticed an older model car parked on a dirt road on the other side of both U.S. 67 and the railroad tracks running just to the right of the highway-close to where Miller County Road 390 is now.
Ballistic tests showed a .32-caliber pistol was used in the Betty Jo Booker and Paul Martin slayings on April 14 north and west of Spring Lake Park as well as in the murders of Richard L. Griffin and Polly Ann Moore on March 24, off of what would later be called South Robison Road.
At the time, Miller County Sheriff W.E. Davis said he couldn't link the Starks murder with the recent double slayings in Bowie County because of the differences in gun calibers.
Other law enforcement officers disagreed with Davis, but Johnson said during a 1996 interview that he, Davis and others felt like the Starks case may have been a separate crime.
"I felt like he (the Phantom Killer) didn't do the Starks murder," said Johnson, who became one of the lead investigators on the case in 1946. "It would be hard to tie him to the Starks murder."
The first three young couples were in cars, but the Starks couple were in a home-a domestic setting, in addition to being married and in their mid-to-late 30s-still young adults, but approaching middle age.
Yet, while the circumstances in this final shooting attributed to the Phantom Killer didn't entirely match those in the two prior slayings and the double aggravated assault case of Mary Jeanne Larey and James "Jimmy" Hollis on Feb. 22, police nevertheless expanded their investigation to include the Starks murder.
The dissimilarities to the three prior attacks also didn't stop the refreshed flurry of panic that gripped the public throughout the entire Texarkana area.
Following the Starks slaying, local residents were ready to believe the worst. By late May, as another three-week interval between killings neared, the weekend of May 24, 1946 passed without incident. The fear of the Phantom Killer reached a glowing, white pitch in Texarkana-a fear that didn't really subside until early summer that same year.
"In those days you did have murders, of course, but you didn't have that much violence in that short of time, done to so many people in just one area," Johnson said.
During the late spring of 1946, an Arkansas State Police Trooper, the late Milton "Scrub" Mossier, lived in Nashville, Ark., and patrolled Sevier, Polk, Montgomery and Howard counties. Following the April 14 murders of Paul Martin and Betty Jo Booker, he received immediate reassignment farther south.
"They pulled us down to the Texarkana area, for about 30 days, mostly for night patrol after the Spring Lake Park murders," Mossier said in a 1996 interview. "After Spring Lake Park, the fear mushroomed. We had to check on anything suspicious, and people had lights on everywhere."
Jitters-especially after the Starks killings-became wide and severe among the residents.
"I was just a 20-year-old country girl who came to the big city of Texarkana from Nevada County," said the late Miller County Treasurer Imogene West in a 1996 interview.
At the time, West and her husband, Harold, lived at the corner of East Third and Walnut streets in downtown Texarkana.
During the interview, West said she remembered her husband lunging at the back kitchen door with a gun when he spotted a stranger staring in one of the windows.
"The door was locked so he (Harold) never got out, but that caused the gun to go off," she said. "The shot scared off the prowler and no one was injured."
Prior to the last two couples' shootings, both East and West Broad streets were always busy. Then the whole town seemed to shut down. It took at least two months after the Starks murder for people to calm down.
"If you wanted to go to someone's house after dark, you had to call them first and let them know you were coming," said the late W.E. Atchison, a local resident who was just 16 years old at the time of the murders. "The big wonder for everyone back then was whether the killings were being done by someone who lived among us, and I still wonder who did it."
The intense fear also shut down much of the city's night life for at least two months beyond the Starks murder.
During that time, law officers caught a man who became a prime suspect in all five slayings. Although this man, 29-year-old Youell Swinney, would never be charged with any of the murders, he would receive a conviction and life sentence as a habitual criminal, involved mostly in car theft and counterfeiting.
The suspect eventually managed to get his conviction overturned, which secured his release on parole about 1973 when the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruled that he was not adequately represented by an attorney during his initial arraignment on a 1941 car theft charge. That ruling overrode the suspect's conviction under the habitual offender status. Swinney died in a Dallas-area nursing home in 1994.
Texarkana's Phantom Killer legend lives on, forever enmeshed it is history. Continual interest in the subject matter will likely remain intact for decades to come.