In the late winter of 1946, the small twin city of Texarkana — a working-class railroad town that straddled the border between Texas and Arkansas, with a state line running through the post office — was returning to normal after the war. Veterans were coming home. The mills along the Red River were running again. The drive-in theaters that had closed during gas rationing had reopened. The lover’s-lane roads on the outskirts of town, the gravel turnouts and pine-shaded clearings where teenage couples parked, were busy on weekend nights for the first time in years.

And then, for ten weeks between late February and early May, a man in a white cloth mask attacked eight people in five separate attacks, killed five of them, and emptied those roads.

The Texarkana Gazette named him the Phantom Killer. By the middle of April, the city of about thirty thousand was effectively on lockdown. Hardware stores sold out of revolvers. The Texas Rangers had set up a multi-agency task force inside city hall. The local Greyhound bus station was running over capacity with families who had decided to leave town until whoever was doing this was caught.

Whoever was doing this stopped, as suddenly as he had started, on the night of May 3, 1946. The Texas Rangers’s leading suspect was arrested two months later on an unrelated car-theft charge and spent the next quarter-century in Texas state prisons, but he was never charged with the Phantom killings. The case remains officially open in the Texas Department of Public Safety’s records. As of 2026, the Phantom is the unsolved case of an entire small town, eighty years old, that has refused to go away.

A first attack on a Friday night

The first attack came on the night of February 22, 1946. Jimmy Hollis, twenty-four, and Mary Jeanne Larey, nineteen, had been on a double date earlier that evening with another couple. They had pulled off a quiet gravel turnout on the Bowie County, Texas, side of town to talk before he drove her home. It was a little after eleven at night.

A tall man wearing a white cloth sack over his head, with two small holes cut for eyes, walked up to the driver’s side of the car holding a flashlight and what they both later described as a long-barreled pistol. He ordered them out of the car. He attacked both of them with the gun and his fists. Hollis was struck unconscious almost immediately. Larey, somehow, ran. The attacker chased her, caught her, attacked her again, and — when headlights of an approaching second car briefly came into view down the road — vanished into the woods.

Both Hollis and Larey survived. Hollis suffered a fractured skull. Larey would never speak about the attack publicly again, and would move out of Texarkana within the year. Their descriptions of the attacker were the only physical descriptions the investigation would ever have: a white man, six feet tall or slightly taller, wearing dark pants and a white pillowcase or sack over his head.

The Bowie County Sheriff’s Office, working from what at the time was assumed to be an attempted robbery gone wrong, opened an assault investigation. They did not, in late February 1946, have any reason to think they were dealing with anything other than a particularly violent local stickup.

A pattern, on a country road

The pattern revealed itself one month later, on the night of March 24, 1946. Richard Griffin, twenty-nine, a veteran who had recently returned home from World War II, and Polly Ann Moore, seventeen, a young woman he had been seeing for several weeks, had also pulled into a quiet country road — this one on the Arkansas side of town — after a late dinner at a Texarkana café. A passing motorist found Griffin’s parked car the next morning with both Griffin and Moore inside, both shot to death with a .32 caliber pistol. There was no sign of robbery.

Three weeks later, on the night of April 14, 1946, a similar attack occurred. Paul Martin, sixteen, a Texarkana High School student who played the saxophone in the school orchestra, had been driving his date Betty Jo Booker, fifteen, home from an orchestra dance. Booker had been carrying her saxophone case. The bodies of both teenagers were found the next morning in two separate locations along a country road on the Texas side of town. They had been shot with what ballistics confirmed was the same .32 caliber pistol that had killed Griffin and Moore.

By April 15, the Texarkana Gazette had begun running the front-page coverage that would, for the next six weeks, dominate every issue. The paper’s city editor, Calvin Sutton, gave the killer the name that would stick: the Phantom. The Texas Department of Public Safety dispatched Captain Manuel T. “Lone Wolf” Gonzaullas, a legendary Texas Ranger who had been the central figure in a half-dozen earlier serial-crime investigations along the Texas-Oklahoma border, to take command of the task force. He arrived in Texarkana on April 16 with three other Rangers, established his office at the Grim Hotel, and began a press strategy that would, in his view, eventually flush the killer out.

A city under siege

By late April, the Phantom panic had effectively shut down nighttime social life in Texarkana. The drive-in movie theaters reported attendance down by more than seventy percent. The two municipal dance halls closed early on the weekends. Local hardware stores ran out of pistol ammunition. The Texarkana Police Department, which under normal circumstances had a dozen on-duty officers at night, was running with thirty, augmented by reserve deputies from Bowie County and Miller County.

The Texas Rangers had used several thousand dollars from the Texas DPS’s discretionary funds to set up undercover decoy operations. Pairs of young Rangers in plain clothes parked rented cars at lover’s-lane spots around the city, with concealed weapons and radio contact. The decoys were generally young single male agents in their twenties, paired with young female employees of the Texas DPS clerical staff who had volunteered for the operation. The decoy program ran for several weeks. The Phantom never approached one of the decoy cars.

Gonzaullas’s press strategy was a paradox. He wanted the public terrified enough to give him every available lead, but disciplined enough not to interfere with the decoy program. He gave daily press conferences in which he asked young couples to stay off country roads, but also assured them, in his trademark drawl, that the Rangers were closing in. He cultivated reporters at the Gazette and at out-of-town wire services. He photographed well. The national media — Time magazine, Life magazine, the wire services — began carrying the Phantom story by late April.

The fifth attack, indoors

The Phantom’s last known attack came on the night of May 3, 1946, ten miles outside of Texarkana, on a farm property near the small unincorporated community of Beaver Dam. Virgil Starks, thirty-seven, was sitting in the living room of his farmhouse reading the evening paper. His wife Katie, thirty-five, was in the bedroom. They were the first Phantom victims who had not been parked in a car on a country road. They had been at home.

The attacker shot Virgil Starks twice through a closed living-room window, killing him almost instantly. Katie Starks, hearing the shots and her husband fall, ran to the kitchen. The attacker shot her, also through a window, in the face and the jaw. She was severely wounded but managed to crawl across the yard to a neighbor’s house through the rural Arkansas darkness, knock on the door, and survive. She would identify the attacker, in subsequent statements to the Texas Rangers, only as a tall man whom she could not clearly see in the dark.

The change in pattern — attacking an older married couple in their own home rather than two teenagers in a car — was the single most significant indicator the Phantom investigation ever had that the attacker was escalating, that he was not necessarily fixed on lover’s-lane scenarios, and that the protective measures Gonzaullas had been recommending to the city (stay off country roads, do not park at night) might not, going forward, be sufficient.

The Phantom never struck again. The pattern, as suddenly as it had begun, ended.

A suspect named by his own wife

Two months after the Starks attack, on July 15, 1946, a twenty-eight-year-old Texarkana drifter and convicted car thief named Youell Lee Swinney was arrested in Atlanta, Texas, for an unrelated stolen-vehicle violation. His twenty-one-year-old wife, Peggy, was with him at the time of the arrest. In separate interviews over the next several days, Peggy Swinney told Texas Rangers, in increasingly detailed statements, that Youell had been the Phantom Killer. She described his behavior on the nights of the April 14 and May 3 attacks. She described physical objects in their car — a pistol, a bloodstained shirt — that she said matched the dates and victims.

The Texas Rangers and the Bowie County District Attorney’s office spent the next eight months trying to build a Phantom case against Youell Swinney that did not depend on Peggy Swinney’s testimony. The reason they could not depend on it was procedural: under Texas spousal privilege rules as they existed in 1946, Peggy could not be compelled to testify against her husband at trial. She could give statements to investigators. She could not be put in a witness chair against her will. And in subsequent interviews, between July 1946 and the early part of 1947, Peggy began to walk back portions of her original account — enough that the District Attorney’s office concluded they could not put her on the stand as a credible witness even if she had been willing.

Without Peggy’s testimony, the physical case against Youell Swinney as the Phantom collapsed. He was prosecuted on the car-theft charges and sentenced as a habitual offender to life imprisonment under Texas’s three-strikes statutes. He served twenty-seven years in Texas state prison and was paroled in 1973. He died in a Dallas nursing home in 1994. He maintained, in occasional prison-system interviews over the years, that he had not been the Phantom. The Texas Department of Public Safety has neither formally cleared him nor formally named him.

A town that turned its own story into a movie

The Phantom Killer case quietly went dormant in the Texarkana civic memory for the next thirty years. The Texas Rangers task force was wound down by the end of 1946 once the attacks stopped. The Texarkana Gazette continued occasional anniversary stories. Most of the Texarkana residents who had been adults in 1946 simply, in the way of small Southern towns, stopped talking about the spring that had emptied their roads.

That changed in 1976, when the Texarkana-born horror filmmaker Charles B. Pierce released The Town That Dreaded Sundown, a fictionalized retelling of the Phantom attacks that was filmed largely on location in Texarkana, used the actual roads where the attacks had occurred, and starred Ben Johnson as a Gonzaullas-style Ranger. The film was a moderate commercial success on its release and became, over the next two decades, a cult horror staple. The 2014 meta-sequel of the same name, directed by Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, repeated the device but moved the setting forward into modern Texarkana with a self-referential plot about a new killer copying the original Phantom.

Texarkana has a complicated, sometimes uncomfortable relationship with the films. Every late October the city’s downtown movie theater shows The Town That Dreaded Sundown at a free outdoor screening in Spring Lake Park. The screening draws crowds. Civic leaders generally support it as a way to keep the story — and the families of the victims — in public memory. Some of the descendants of the victims have, over the years, said they wish the city would let the story rest.

A case that still has a number

The Texarkana Moonlight Murders case file remains open in the records of the Texas Department of Public Safety, the Arkansas State Police, and the Bowie County and Miller County Sheriff’s Offices. There is no active investigator working it. Any physical evidence the Texas Rangers collected in 1946 has been moved through several agency archives in the eighty intervening years, and the chain of custody on most of it is, by Texas DPS’s own acknowledgment, no longer documented to a standard that would support modern forensic re-testing.

Youell Swinney’s DNA was tested, posthumously, by the Texas Department of Public Safety in 2007 against samples preserved from the 1946 evidence. The test was inconclusive. The 1946 samples were too degraded to produce a workable comparison profile. Genetic-genealogy techniques have not, as of early 2026, been attempted on the surviving evidence; the Texas DPS has cited the same degradation concerns that have slowed similar work in the JonBenét Ramsey and Zodiac cases.

The five names

Richard Griffin was twenty-nine. He had served four years in the Pacific in the Navy. Polly Ann Moore was seventeen and worked in an office supply store. Paul Martin was sixteen and played the saxophone. Betty Jo Booker was fifteen, an honor student, the only child of a Texarkana widow. Virgil Starks was thirty-seven and ran a small farm.

Their gravestones, in the four small Texarkana-area cemeteries where they are buried, list dates in February, March, April, and May of 1946. Local high schools have, over the years, occasionally adopted projects to ensure that flowers are placed on those graves each spring. Katie Starks, who survived the May 3 attack, lived until 1981 and moved to Dallas after the attacks. Mary Jeanne Larey, the survivor of the original February 22 assault, lived until 1965 and never returned to Texarkana.

Whoever the Phantom was — Youell Swinney or another man whose name the Texas Rangers never wrote down — is, by simple arithmetic, dead by now. He has been dead for at least thirty years. The case is what it has been since the summer of 1946: a row of names on five gravestones, and a man in a white sack over his head walking out of a Texarkana woodline and back into one, eighty years ago, and never quite ever leaving.

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Sources: Texas Department of Public Safety case file (selected releases); Arkansas State Police case file; Bowie County, Texas Sheriff’s Office files; Texarkana Gazette archival reporting, February–July 1946; James Presley, The Phantom Killer: Unlocking the Mystery of the Texarkana Serial Murders (Pegasus, 2014); Michael Newton, The Texarkana Moonlight Murders (Strange Tales of Cold Case Files, 2013); Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum, Gonzaullas archival materials.