Speaker 1: Hey guys, Steve here, you are listening to one of
Speaker 1: our original twenty six episodes. If you've listen to any
Speaker 1: of our new episodes, you're gonna notice that we're sounding
Speaker 1: a little different in these ones. Yeah, there's a reason
Speaker 1: for that. There is they've been remastered. They have been
Speaker 1: remastered because they had a really annoying hum. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean a huge thanks to listener James for doing almost
Speaker 1: all of the legwork on this thing. They'll also notice
Speaker 1: if you had listened to what we're calling the last
Speaker 1: twenty six episodes before and you're re listening now, the
Speaker 1: music and sound effects are gone. Yes, we've we've gone
Speaker 1: back to straight audio, so be warned. We sound a
Speaker 1: little different today than we do in what you're about
Speaker 1: to listen to. Yeah, bye bye, Hi there, thanks for
Speaker 1: joining the show again. This is Thinking Sideways the podcast,
Speaker 1: and I am Steve as always, I'm joined by Joe
Speaker 1: Hello and Devin Hi, and we who decided to give
Speaker 1: you a little bit of a holiday extrass. Since it
Speaker 1: is Halloween. We're gonna pull around the campfire. We're gonna
Speaker 1: tell a creepy story. Yeah, pretty excited. We don't usually
Speaker 1: do this, No, now, this one's a little little out
Speaker 1: of our ballpark. But that's okay, So let's let's well, actually,
Speaker 1: before we get into the show, I do want to
Speaker 1: say something for listeners. Uh, this story, ladies and gentlemen
Speaker 1: that we're gonna go into has some pretty graphic details
Speaker 1: in it, and it's got a lot of violence in it.
Speaker 1: So you're not into that thing, or you're gonna be
Speaker 1: listening to the show and there's some some kids around
Speaker 1: or younger folks, you might want to just skip this
Speaker 1: show because it's probably not the style that you want
Speaker 1: to go into. Okay, Well, there to night we are
Speaker 1: going to talk about what is referred to as the
Speaker 1: tech Sarcanna Moonlight Murders Texarcana. Yeah, didn't they base a
Speaker 1: movie on that town that in fear? I think it's
Speaker 1: that dreaded sundown. Yeah, have you seen that? No? I haven't.
Speaker 1: Actually I haven't either. I've just I've been through tex
Speaker 1: Arcana on a train and I can tell you that
Speaker 1: when you stop at what seems to be the train
Speaker 1: station and then go the building seems to transition into
Speaker 1: a jail. So I don't know if that's real or not,
Speaker 1: but in my mind, tex Arcana is the place where
Speaker 1: the train station is the same building as the jail.
Speaker 1: Good thing. Okay, ladies and gentlemen, So here's the story.
Speaker 1: Um and spring at six or a series of fairly
Speaker 1: grizzly murders were committed, most about three or four weeks apart,
Speaker 1: and eventually put the whole town of Texarcana into a
Speaker 1: tremendous state of terror, both people buying guns and nailing
Speaker 1: their windows shut and buying dolber buying Doberman pinchers to
Speaker 1: guard the house. The slayer was never caught. He was
Speaker 1: eventually nicknamed the Phantom Killer. Alternatively, he was called the
Speaker 1: Phantom Slayer. It's unknown why he killed these people, and
Speaker 1: it's unknown if you committed other murders besides this or what.
Speaker 1: It's all just a big mystery because they never caught
Speaker 1: the killer. Yeah, that's the scary part, one of the
Speaker 1: scary parts of the many scary parts of this very
Speaker 1: scary story. It's possibly you and and sometimes it's in
Speaker 1: a series of crimes like this, the killer does get caught,
Speaker 1: but for another crime. It might very well be that
Speaker 1: this guy went away for something else, and that's why
Speaker 1: the murders stopped that's a possibility. But we're getting ahead
Speaker 1: of ourselves. Yeah yeah, So let's uh, let's talk about
Speaker 1: the attacks. The first attack took place on February twenty second,
Speaker 1: around midnight. The first victims were Jimmy Hollis, who was
Speaker 1: twenty four, and his girl friend Mary Jean Larry. Now,
Speaker 1: what do you do when you're in a small town
Speaker 1: and you want to get away? They were parked out
Speaker 1: on a lover's lane. They were gonna have us included
Speaker 1: evening together. They've been there about ten minutes when suddenly
Speaker 1: somebody knocked on the window. Jimmy looked up and he
Speaker 1: thought it was going to be a cop, but instead
Speaker 1: he saw a guy wearing a white hood pointing a
Speaker 1: gun in his face, and he said, felly, you got
Speaker 1: me mixed up with someone else. You've got the wrong man.
Speaker 1: I gotta say, I gotta say, that's that's pretty cool
Speaker 1: demeanor on his part. If I say somebody like, you know,
Speaker 1: with a gun in a white hood, and I wouldn't
Speaker 1: be saying, oh, you got me mixed up with somebody else.
Speaker 1: I'd be handing my wallet or whatever. Well that's the
Speaker 1: first thing you would think. But this, uh, this the
Speaker 1: suspect had what we now are pretty sure is a
Speaker 1: thirty two caliber handgun pointing at him, and he said,
Speaker 1: I don't want to kill you, fellows to do what
Speaker 1: I say. He then proceeded to order them both to
Speaker 1: get out of the car, and the quote, which was
Speaker 1: taken from the police report, says, take off your bleeping bridges,
Speaker 1: at which point his girlfriend Mary Jean said, basically, please
Speaker 1: do what he says. Just do what he says. So
Speaker 1: he goes. He goes ahead, and he takes off his pants.
Speaker 1: But while he's bent over taking off his pants, he
Speaker 1: gets clubbed in the head. He gets hit so hard,
Speaker 1: the noises so loud that his girlfriend Mary thinks that
Speaker 1: he's actually been shot. So he got hit with that
Speaker 1: much force, and it turned out it turned out that
Speaker 1: it was actually a skull cracking. Yes, it was his
Speaker 1: skull cracking. That's that's really hard. Apparently a skull is
Speaker 1: cracked in three places. Yeah, which not not something I'd
Speaker 1: want to have happened. So what happens here is our
Speaker 1: our assailant then of course pulls his wallet out, Jimmy's
Speaker 1: wallet out, and goes through and discovers he doesn't have
Speaker 1: any money. And gets a little upset and starts talking
Speaker 1: to Mary and is upset about and says, no, I'm
Speaker 1: sorry he has no money, at which point he's sure
Speaker 1: that she has a purse and she says, well, no,
Speaker 1: I don't have a purse, and he doesn't believe her.
Speaker 1: He thinks that she's lying to him. He gets so
Speaker 1: angry he hits her and knocks her to the ground,
Speaker 1: and she's on the ground. She starts to get up,
Speaker 1: and he says something along the lines of run. She
Speaker 1: starts to run away from him towards the ditch that's
Speaker 1: on the side of the road and tell HER's, no,
Speaker 1: don't run that way, run down the road. So of
Speaker 1: course she turns around. She starts running down the road.
Speaker 1: He runs and catches up with her and knocks her
Speaker 1: down again, and he says, why are you running? She says,
Speaker 1: the logical thing, because you told me to, at which
Speaker 1: point he starts telling her that. He starts saying she's
Speaker 1: a liar and that he's gonna kill her, and he
Speaker 1: knocks her down again, and this is where the gorries
Speaker 1: parts start happening, because he sexually assault her with his gun.
Speaker 1: Not a lot of details are there, as to exactly
Speaker 1: what happened, and I don't think any of us want
Speaker 1: to know exactly what happened. But she used the guns
Speaker 1: of unsafe. It's it does and there's there's multiple puns there,
Speaker 1: but we're not going to go there today. After he
Speaker 1: had finished that, he started to go back towards Jimmy,
Speaker 1: if I understand correctly, at which point she stood up
Speaker 1: and she ran away again. This time she was able
Speaker 1: to get to a house and knock on the door
Speaker 1: and get the people who were home to wake up,
Speaker 1: tell them what was happening, and call the police. Now,
Speaker 1: didn't the um police not believe her at first that
Speaker 1: she didn't know who it was that did it? Yes,
Speaker 1: the police, and her statements that she's given years, had
Speaker 1: given years after the fact, said she didn't understand why
Speaker 1: the police were continually telling her, no, you know the assailant,
Speaker 1: you know who it was, which, let's be honest, nothing
Speaker 1: like this has happened in the town, and they're pretty
Speaker 1: sure it's probably somebody that they know. It's probably a
Speaker 1: rendezvous gone bad, and she's trying to protect them. That's
Speaker 1: what I would presume the cops are thinking that they
Speaker 1: haven't obviously no idea what's going to come down doesn't
Speaker 1: doesn't necessarily make a lot of sense. So because if
Speaker 1: she wants to protect him, that she wouldn't go to
Speaker 1: the cops to begin with, you're right, right, but people
Speaker 1: do things in the heat of the moment. She might
Speaker 1: have changed her mind. But regardless, the cops show up
Speaker 1: and they find Jimmy and he's obviously not doing so well,
Speaker 1: and they take him to the hospital. But they both
Speaker 1: survived the attack, and they're able to give accounts of
Speaker 1: it to the police, and they are able to give
Speaker 1: what end up being very different accounts in terms of
Speaker 1: what their attacker looked like, because if you remember, I said,
Speaker 1: he had a sack over his head, so we had
Speaker 1: eye holes cut out at a mouth hole cutouts, and
Speaker 1: that was it. And I believe here it is. So
Speaker 1: Jimmy believed that it was quote unquote a dark tanned
Speaker 1: white man, whereas Mary believed it was a light skinned
Speaker 1: quote unquote negro because of the way he pronounced the
Speaker 1: curse words he growled. But we don't know which it was.
Speaker 1: They never agreed on what it was, and so it
Speaker 1: didn't help the case at all. Did they agree on
Speaker 1: anything else? About his physical appearance. They both said that
Speaker 1: he was approximately six ft tall, and that's kind of
Speaker 1: where it ends. And that's the hard part is with
Speaker 1: the records. It's a little difficult because original records are
Speaker 1: hard to get hold of anymore. But that's that's the
Speaker 1: best we've got out of their descriptions. Essentially, you're the
Speaker 1: simplest version that I should say. So. The next attack
Speaker 1: happened about four weeks later on March um and Richard
Speaker 1: Griffin he was twenty nine, and his girlfriend of six weeks,
Speaker 1: Polly Anne Moore, who was seventeen, were found dead in
Speaker 1: Richard's car between like eight thirty or nine UM in
Speaker 1: the morning by a driver that was passing by, and
Speaker 1: the driver stated that he originally thought that they were
Speaker 1: asleep in the car, but as soon as he walked
Speaker 1: up to it realized, oh no, they're not asleep, they're dead.
Speaker 1: So he called the police and they came out. Richard
Speaker 1: was found in between the seats on his knees with
Speaker 1: his head resting on his hands, um in his pocket
Speaker 1: pockets had been turned out so like he had been robbed.
Speaker 1: It looks like a robbery. And Paully was found sprawled
Speaker 1: face down in the back seat. Griffin had been shot
Speaker 1: twice and Polly had been shot once. Both of them
Speaker 1: had been shot in the back of the head. Polly's
Speaker 1: purse was next to her in the back seat, however,
Speaker 1: so maybe it wasn't actually robbery. That's one of the
Speaker 1: things they found was a section of ground about twenty
Speaker 1: ft from the car that was saturated in dry blood.
Speaker 1: Blood was spattered throughout the vehicle and um mrs gross
Speaker 1: congealed blood was found flowing through the bottom of the
Speaker 1: door off of the dashboard a lot of luck. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there was a blanket also found in the car, and
Speaker 1: it had thirty two cartridge shells that were believed to
Speaker 1: be shot from the same kind of gun used in
Speaker 1: the first crime. There inside of the blanket. There was
Speaker 1: no gun ever found, so it couldn't be ruled a
Speaker 1: murder suicide. And the theory was that the assailant had
Speaker 1: wrapped the gun in the blanket and shot it as
Speaker 1: a sort of muffler because those cartridges were found inside
Speaker 1: of the blanket, so and it had rained overnight, so
Speaker 1: they couldn't find any kind of footprints or anything like that. Additionally,
Speaker 1: I think you know, in my mind. If you think
Speaker 1: of a woman sprawled face down in the backseat of
Speaker 1: a car and it's traced to the crime that had
Speaker 1: happened previously. I think there was probably some kind of
Speaker 1: sexual assault play that had happened, except her body was
Speaker 1: taken and they had the examiners examine it not for rape,
Speaker 1: but like cut her open and do that kind of autopsy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: before or they could ever do any kind of rape anything.
Speaker 1: So we don't actually know if she was actually assalted
Speaker 1: or not because then they like screw up and cary
Speaker 1: your body away to the mortuary, and she was embalmed
Speaker 1: and all that stuff. Yeah, that's the second murder, a
Speaker 1: lot of the third one. So attack. Yeah, So three
Speaker 1: weeks go by and nobody gets killed. Everybody's starting to think, hey,
Speaker 1: everything's all right, and then I guess what, two more
Speaker 1: people get killed. So this happened that The victims were
Speaker 1: Paul Martin and Betty Joe Booker on Saturday night, April thirteen.
Speaker 1: Betty Joe Booker did I say? She was fifteen PM.
Speaker 1: So she was playing her saxophone in a band that
Speaker 1: she played with in a bar, and she got away
Speaker 1: with it because you know, her parents wrote her a
Speaker 1: note or something like that. But but she played with
Speaker 1: this band on a regular basis and they finished up
Speaker 1: about one thirty am and her friend Paul Martin, who
Speaker 1: was sixteen. Childhood friend was to pick her up and
Speaker 1: take her home. So at some point after one thirty
Speaker 1: am and before six thirty am, when Paul's body was found,
Speaker 1: they were killed by apparently a thirty two automatic. His
Speaker 1: body was found about six thirty am. It was lying
Speaker 1: on his left side on the side of the North
Speaker 1: Park Road, found a little bit further down on the
Speaker 1: other side of the road by offence. He'd been shot
Speaker 1: four times, once through the nose, once to the ribs,
Speaker 1: one in the right hand, and a fourth through the
Speaker 1: back of the neck and it exited the front of
Speaker 1: his head. That is a lot of shots, a lot
Speaker 1: of times. Yeah, yeah, a lot of a lot of
Speaker 1: spray in there. I'm not sure exactly what was going on.
Speaker 1: I mean, And once you're the hand almost seems as
Speaker 1: if it's a defensive wound. Somebody points a gun and
Speaker 1: you try to move and you've got your hands up,
Speaker 1: you're likely to get shot in the hands. So that
Speaker 1: to me would almost explain that he was in some
Speaker 1: prone position but trying to get away when shot through
Speaker 1: the nose to the left of Yeah, it's three of
Speaker 1: these wounds. I mean, they don't even though they're in
Speaker 1: this particular order, that doesn't mean that the wounds actually
Speaker 1: occurred in the three of them were in the back,
Speaker 1: I said, Well, the right hand, I don't say, but
Speaker 1: me and so two and probably three were in the back,
Speaker 1: which you know, and maybe the kid that he was
Speaker 1: running away, And so that's why I explain to see
Speaker 1: low accuracy of the shots. And then probably the q
Speaker 1: D grad one through the face was the last one,
Speaker 1: but I don't know speculation. So anyway, that's what's going
Speaker 1: on with his body. Her body was nowhere to be found,
Speaker 1: so search parties were organized and it was found about
Speaker 1: eleven thirty am that day, about two miles away. He
Speaker 1: was lying his back fully closed with a button overcoat.
Speaker 1: She'd been shot twice, once in the ribs and once
Speaker 1: in the face. The weapon is apparently the same at
Speaker 1: thirty two automatic. Uh. Some people say that they believe
Speaker 1: it was a thirty two automatic cold pistol, And there's
Speaker 1: it's possible you can identify from the marketings on the cartridge.
Speaker 1: You know what kind of a gun it actually is,
Speaker 1: or it might be somebody just sort of put that
Speaker 1: little tidbit in there. But yeah, thirty two. Back in
Speaker 1: those days, thirty two is actually a pretty popular round.
Speaker 1: It's not that popular these days. It's considered kind of marginal.
Speaker 1: Still obviously pretty good at killing people. Unfortunate following Day's
Speaker 1: newspaper had reports about it. They claimed the bodies were
Speaker 1: not abuse that later rumors claimed that Betty had been raped. Well,
Speaker 1: so that's that's one of the things, right is this
Speaker 1: nineteen forties and they're not big on reporting sexual So no,
Speaker 1: you don't talk about this. This is one of those
Speaker 1: things that we just pushed into the car. Even post mortem. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we don't. We don't discuss that that didn't happen. Now, Joe,
Speaker 1: she was in the band and if I remember writing
Speaker 1: in reading she she had her was it a saxophone
Speaker 1: that she had? Yeah, she played the saxophone And when
Speaker 1: they found her, they did not find her saxophone and
Speaker 1: it was thought perhaps had been taken by the attacker somebody.
Speaker 1: The band leader did report that she had had her
Speaker 1: saxople with hery when she left, and since it was
Speaker 1: nowhere to be found. It wasn't found in Paul's car.
Speaker 1: His car was by by the way I found a
Speaker 1: few miles away, and the saxophone was not there, and
Speaker 1: so that was considered to be a possible clue. I thought, well,
Speaker 1: if we find a guy with the saxophone, obviously he's
Speaker 1: our killer and won't give him the chair. Yes, sax
Speaker 1: well was found about six months later. It was found
Speaker 1: in Bush's pretty close to where her body had been found,
Speaker 1: so it was not actually taken. It was probably just tossed. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's kind of unfortunate really that they didn't
Speaker 1: find it that at that time because they had the
Speaker 1: police actually wasted quite a bit of resources trying to
Speaker 1: find that sax and whoever had that sex. Yeah. Well, unfortunately,
Speaker 1: we've got another murder that we're going to talk about
Speaker 1: in the same series. And yeah, I know. This one
Speaker 1: happened on Friday May three, sometime before nine o'clock in
Speaker 1: the evening. There was a local farmer welder named Virgil
Speaker 1: sat Or Starks. Virgil Starks come home. He had a
Speaker 1: long day, his back was store, so he had his wife,
Speaker 1: you know, give him a heating pad and he sat
Speaker 1: down in a chair to listen to the radio and
Speaker 1: and go through the newspaper and relaxed, and his wife
Speaker 1: went and laid down in the bedroom. At which point,
Speaker 1: and this is again we don't have the exact times,
Speaker 1: but summer before nine o'clock, someone came up to the
Speaker 1: kitchen window and shot him through the window twice in
Speaker 1: the back of the head. His wife reported not hearing
Speaker 1: the shots, but actually hearing the sound of breaking glass,
Speaker 1: at which point she thought her husband had broken something.
Speaker 1: She came out to see what the noise was, at
Speaker 1: which point she saw that her husband was dead, and
Speaker 1: she instantly turned around and went to run for the phone.
Speaker 1: You've got to remember, ladies and gentlemen, this is the
Speaker 1: nineteen forties, and telephones then weren't like they are today.
Speaker 1: They had a wall crank phone. It was probably a
Speaker 1: party line too, it probably was. So she ran to
Speaker 1: the phone, and she reported that she got two cranks
Speaker 1: on the phone, and how these phones were correct me
Speaker 1: if I'm wrong here, Joe, is that you take multiple
Speaker 1: cranks to get to the operator to come through. Is that?
Speaker 1: I have no idea, I don't know, But she she
Speaker 1: got two cranks on the phone to try to get
Speaker 1: someone to come on the line. The operator. The assailant,
Speaker 1: who was still outside the window, shot her twice. And
Speaker 1: this woman is tough, because to survive what we're gonna
Speaker 1: go through, you've got to be a really tough bird. Um.
Speaker 1: She was shot from behind twice. One bullet entered her
Speaker 1: right cheek and exited behind her left ear, and the
Speaker 1: other went in her lower jaw, below her lip and
Speaker 1: splintered her teeth and her jaw before it lodged in
Speaker 1: just below her tongue. That is not a nice way
Speaker 1: to be shot. Sound unpleasant, She she felt obviously fell down,
Speaker 1: but she managed to get back up, and she ran
Speaker 1: to get a pistol from the living room. But she's
Speaker 1: bleeding so profusely. She's blinded by the amount of blood
Speaker 1: that's coming out. Um. She she heard the killer tearing
Speaker 1: loose the screen on her back porch, and you know,
Speaker 1: obviously enough she's figured she's gonna get killed, so she
Speaker 1: starts to run towards the front of the house to
Speaker 1: try to leave a note, which and I read that account,
Speaker 1: I was I was a little puzzled by that, because
Speaker 1: if you can see well enough to write a note
Speaker 1: you can see well enough to find I don't understand that,
Speaker 1: and again in that state of mind, who yeah um.
Speaker 1: At this point, the killer runs around to the back
Speaker 1: of the house, makes his way up the porch steps
Speaker 1: and into the side screen porch and their back screen,
Speaker 1: and it's trying to come through a window. She can
Speaker 1: hear him trying to come to basically tearing through the screen,
Speaker 1: metal screen window, trying to get in. Mrs Starks turns around.
Speaker 1: She she runs through the house, down a hallway out
Speaker 1: of bedroom and makes her way out the door on
Speaker 1: the opposite side of the house, basically runs across the
Speaker 1: street and eventually is able to go to a house
Speaker 1: and get family. I believe it's her her brother and
Speaker 1: sister in law who lived across the street. Across the street. Oh,
Speaker 1: you're right, they weren't home, And so then she had
Speaker 1: to go down to the next house down, which is
Speaker 1: like fifty yards away, and she's barefoot in her nightgown.
Speaker 1: The term they used leaving a literal river. She gets
Speaker 1: to these people house, they opened the door, she says,
Speaker 1: Virgil's dead, and she collapses. She eventually came to as
Speaker 1: they were taking to the hospital. One side note this
Speaker 1: I said, this lady was tough. This lady was super
Speaker 1: tough because as they were taking her to the hospital,
Speaker 1: because somebody just drove her to the hospital and her,
Speaker 1: like we said, teeth falling out, she pulled out one
Speaker 1: of her teeth that had a goals filling and gave
Speaker 1: to the man driving the car as payment to take.
Speaker 1: That's pretty cool, actually, just just for our for our
Speaker 1: viewers knowledge. She eventually recovered from the wounds and wind
Speaker 1: up remarrying and leaving to be a pretty ripe old age. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean, she she was lucky she survived. The investigators,
Speaker 1: as Devon had said, came to the house and they
Speaker 1: found a trail of blood and scattered teeth throughout the house.
Speaker 1: The lead investigator on this case at the second murder
Speaker 1: an noown through this whole time, is a Texas ranger
Speaker 1: by the name of Gonzalez. And Gonzalez walked through the
Speaker 1: house and he said, it's beyond me why she didn't
Speaker 1: bleed to death. That's a lot of blood. When the
Speaker 1: cops says, how did you not bleed today? Yeah, by
Speaker 1: the way, just as in the side, by the way,
Speaker 1: by this by this point in time, the town was
Speaker 1: flooded with state police, Texas rangers, County County cops, you
Speaker 1: know everybody. Yeah, yeah, law enforcement was thick in this town.
Speaker 1: And how that how this guy, and that might explain
Speaker 1: why he stopped committing to murders. Maybe the figures there's
Speaker 1: so many much, so many cops. Every other car there
Speaker 1: rose a cop car. So maybe that's why I quit
Speaker 1: moved on. Well, here's here's what we do know is
Speaker 1: that when they checked out the house, there were only
Speaker 1: two bullet holes in the window where Virgil was shot from,
Speaker 1: so they're pretty sure that a was an automatic weapon
Speaker 1: and be after shooting Virgil, the assailant had to wait,
Speaker 1: had to have waited there for his wife to come
Speaker 1: see what was going on before shooting her. So that's
Speaker 1: pretty cold blooded right there. That's kind of brutal. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: it's really it's pretty calculated to right because Bill then
Speaker 1: because you would assume that she would have been out
Speaker 1: of the room for a little while. It's not like
Speaker 1: he just walked by and I was like, Oh, there's
Speaker 1: a dude I could kill. You knew there were two
Speaker 1: people in the house. He obviously had a preference for
Speaker 1: assaulting two people. At a time. Yeah, which is a
Speaker 1: little weird. But here's here's some clues. So we finally
Speaker 1: get some pretty what seemed like pretty decent clues at
Speaker 1: this murder. First off, is that the caliberl of bullets
Speaker 1: had changed. Originally it was a thirty two. These murders
Speaker 1: were committed with a twenty two. Uh, and they were
Speaker 1: actually though they believe it came out of an automatic handgun,
Speaker 1: they were dear rifle twenty two rounds, which was a
Speaker 1: little strange. I would I would suspect that they were
Speaker 1: fired from a rifle because she reported not hearing any gunshots. Yes,
Speaker 1: and twenty two is make a loud crack coming out
Speaker 1: of a short barrel out of a rifle barrel of
Speaker 1: twenty two? Is it really quiet? Yeah? So yeah, it
Speaker 1: probably was a rifle. Yeah. Well yeah, and we don't know. Um.
Speaker 1: Underneath the window though they did find a flashlight that
Speaker 1: had been dropped, and in the mud underneath the window,
Speaker 1: and in the blood that was trailed through the house,
Speaker 1: they found owned footprints partial prints of a shoe that
Speaker 1: was somewhere between a size nine and a half and
Speaker 1: ten and a half. Dude, if that guy was if
Speaker 1: it was the guy that they were the first attack
Speaker 1: was describing he was six ft tall with a like
Speaker 1: a nine and a half foot that's pretty pretty short,
Speaker 1: strange proportion. There were evidently some fingerprints in the house,
Speaker 1: but they could never get a good fingerprints, so they
Speaker 1: could never use anything to match. They were always smudged
Speaker 1: and unusable. Yeah. Well, no, The only other thing that
Speaker 1: I've got here is that early Saturday morning, the you know,
Speaker 1: the police did bring in bloodhounds, and the bloodhounds did
Speaker 1: track two different trails from the house, but they both
Speaker 1: led to the freeway and or the highway, I should
Speaker 1: say the local highway, and then the scent was gone.
Speaker 1: So obviously a car car was parked there and whoever
Speaker 1: it was, got in their car and drove away and
Speaker 1: that was the end of it. I wonder what the
Speaker 1: other trail was, No, it was two trump right, I'm
Speaker 1: guessing it's two trails one to um. Yeah. But that's
Speaker 1: all there is, and that's all the clues that we've
Speaker 1: got in terms of physical evidence. Yeah, and that and
Speaker 1: that was pretty much it for murders around there for
Speaker 1: a while. But uh yeah, so hard hard to say
Speaker 1: what happened. If the guy just decided to move on
Speaker 1: and you know, quit while it quit while the girl
Speaker 1: was good, or maybe he got picked up and thrown
Speaker 1: in jail and that's why they stopped. Yeah, and and
Speaker 1: there there was a lot of suspects and a lot
Speaker 1: of weird stuff. But we we I think we need
Speaker 1: to step back because we've just talked about three or
Speaker 1: six brutal or five brutal it's five people who died
Speaker 1: far brutal attacks, next victims, five of whom died. So
Speaker 1: this is a word problem, ladies and gentlemen. But a
Speaker 1: lot of people died. And if you can imagine living
Speaker 1: in a town where for two and a half months
Speaker 1: this is happening, you can imagine that there's some panic.
Speaker 1: Apparently it's not this is actually not even Apparently. Gun
Speaker 1: sales were up tremendously. The investigation kind of like launched
Speaker 1: pretty immediately after, especially after that first attack, well, the
Speaker 1: first murder, I guess, not the first attack, but the
Speaker 1: first murder. You know a lot of parents were saying,
Speaker 1: you know, to their kids, don't be out late all that.
Speaker 1: But after the second double murder, the whole city basically
Speaker 1: shut down. They were enforcing curfews on businesses. There was
Speaker 1: just like this hysteria that snowballed out of out of control,
Speaker 1: especially after this last the Starks attacked. Right, this is
Speaker 1: one of the things I thought. It was a little
Speaker 1: a little funny. It was like the day so apparently
Speaker 1: the day after Virginal Starks was murdered, residents started buying
Speaker 1: firearms and locks, and stores were soon sold out of
Speaker 1: guns and ammunition locks. And I'm like, really, why do
Speaker 1: you wait until why do you wait this long to
Speaker 1: start go out and buy a gun after maybe the
Speaker 1: second murder. I think I'm gonna go buy myself a
Speaker 1: little thirty eight or something like that. Yeah, I don't know. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, it's things like you know, Texarcan is pretty small, uh,
Speaker 1: and it was pretty usual for people to leave all
Speaker 1: of their windows open at night or their doors unlocked
Speaker 1: or anything like that, and that, you know, immediately stopped
Speaker 1: as soon as the second murder happened. You know, people
Speaker 1: were just locking their doors. People are setting up traps,
Speaker 1: is that right? Yeah, Well, people were setting off homemade
Speaker 1: alarm or setting up homemade alarm systems. And the people
Speaker 1: were so we're so on edge that the cops if
Speaker 1: they came up to someone's house. They had to have
Speaker 1: the flashing lights on their sirens too, Yeah, their sirens on, yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: so they could get so they didn't get shot by
Speaker 1: someone who was panicked. There's there's actually a story of
Speaker 1: a bar owner who shot one of his own patrons
Speaker 1: who was in the bar looking for beer. Now I
Speaker 1: don't know what he was doing in there looking for beer.
Speaker 1: I'm guessing it wasn't exactly during operating hours or he
Speaker 1: closed early, but he shot one of his patt because
Speaker 1: he was just so freaked out. Yeah, I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: things like want ads for guard dogs were popping up everywhere.
Speaker 1: You know, people other people were selling their guard dogs.
Speaker 1: I don't know why you would sell your guard dog.
Speaker 1: I guess because you could probably get like a lot
Speaker 1: of money for us, probably guard you're probably on a
Speaker 1: lot of guns, or you have like a couple of them, right,
Speaker 1: you know. But it was, you know, things like uh,
Speaker 1: there are stories of one woman set up a table
Speaker 1: leaning against the door with a pot full of nails
Speaker 1: that would spill over into tin trays if the door
Speaker 1: was opened. One woman um actually attacked her husband because
Speaker 1: he came in late um and she thought he was
Speaker 1: the phantom murderer. Um. Lots of people were checking into hotels.
Speaker 1: Husbands if they had to go out of town, would
Speaker 1: check their whole families and hotels for just like ever.
Speaker 1: People were leaving their all of their lights on during
Speaker 1: the day because they were scared of the shadows during
Speaker 1: the day. Well, I mean, this is not this is
Speaker 1: not the kind of thing that people are used to
Speaker 1: dealing with in this that day and age, and we
Speaker 1: were talking to mid fourties. This is not what happened. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean these days serial killings, it's just a routine thing.
Speaker 1: Like yeah, definitely a little out of the ordinary for
Speaker 1: these folks. But high schoolers still went out and parked
Speaker 1: on lonely little lovers lanes and stuff. Although usually they
Speaker 1: armed themselves, this time, you know, they weren't that stupid,
Speaker 1: So they were kind of doing like a teen slew thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I kind of like that, Yeah, the early Scooby Doo. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So one night and and in fact, one night, a
Speaker 1: couple of a state trooper and a county manu were
Speaker 1: at patrolling the road and they came to a park
Speaker 1: car and the sheriff got the sheriff's deputy got out
Speaker 1: and approached the car, and then I identified himself and
Speaker 1: it says, aren't you scared to be parked out here
Speaker 1: at night? And the girl says, you're the one I
Speaker 1: would be scared. Mr. It's a good thing you told
Speaker 1: me who you are. And that's the turns actually got
Speaker 1: a twenty five caliber pistol pointed at him. Yeah, yeah, well,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna go out parking Lover's Land. I'm gonna be
Speaker 1: well armed or something like that. Yeah, yeah, so um.
Speaker 1: And there was another incident where a high schooler named C. J.
Speaker 1: Lauderdale was following a city bus because he had seen
Speaker 1: somebody parking his car and then get on this bus.
Speaker 1: He thought that was suspicious, so he started, that's that's
Speaker 1: a little suspicious. So he's following the bus and then,
Speaker 1: for some reason, I don't know why, that attracted the
Speaker 1: attention of the attention of the Texarkana Police Deparvery, but
Speaker 1: they started chasing him, and they chased him for like
Speaker 1: three miles before they finally caught up. And then he
Speaker 1: explained that, you know, they were in an unmarked police
Speaker 1: car and so he wasn't about to pull over for
Speaker 1: them because he thought that, Yeah, it was. It was
Speaker 1: just yeah, people were paranoid all the way around. Uh,
Speaker 1: and so at that at that point, the local police
Speaker 1: chief started warning teenage what he quote called teenage sluice
Speaker 1: to say, to tell him not to try to take
Speaker 1: their law in the lot of their own hands, and
Speaker 1: not to try to solve these murders themselves. Which is
Speaker 1: funny because the same Gonzales are like police here exactly.
Speaker 1: He actually started recruiting teenagers. Some of them were like
Speaker 1: sons and daughters of his own rangers Texas employees. It's
Speaker 1: a good idea, idea, yeah, Well, he started recruiting them
Speaker 1: to be decoys, like not even to like chase after
Speaker 1: suspicious people, but to just park their cars and like
Speaker 1: pretend to be making out in the car, hoping that
Speaker 1: the phantom would just like walk by or appear. I
Speaker 1: don't really know what they thought was going to happen.
Speaker 1: Who were these decoys, mostly teenagers, and then some of
Speaker 1: them they ended up They started these teenagers at first,
Speaker 1: and then they said, well, actually it was a kind
Speaker 1: of bad idea. So they started using their own Texas
Speaker 1: Rangers who would sit in the car either with each
Speaker 1: other or sometimes with a mannequin. I guess. I guess
Speaker 1: they tried each other first, but then they know they're
Speaker 1: making out and got a little uncomfortable, park their car
Speaker 1: like in behind a bush like douper, sneaky like, and
Speaker 1: wait for the phantom murderer to come along. And obviously
Speaker 1: he never did. Because clearly smarter than that, I think,
Speaker 1: you know, if you learn anything already, he's clearly smarter
Speaker 1: than that. Yeah, Gonzalez, are you know hero Texas ranger?
Speaker 1: He and his officers, he said, we're dealing with and
Speaker 1: I quote a shrewd criminal who had left no stone
Speaker 1: unturned to conceal his identity and activities. I just like that.
Speaker 1: I feel like that comes from like this dude didn't
Speaker 1: fall for our trick. Yeah, well, obviously the guy is
Speaker 1: is wise to well, maybe I should check out what
Speaker 1: I'm dealing with since I've caused so much heat. It
Speaker 1: is basically what it comes down to you. But of course,
Speaker 1: you know they're trying to set up a profile of
Speaker 1: this guy. They're trying to figure it out. And this
Speaker 1: is where the nineteen forties logic gets a little weird
Speaker 1: to me, because they say, and again, this is Gonzalez,
Speaker 1: he says that the murderer was a cunning individual who
Speaker 1: would go to all legs to avoid apprehension, but was
Speaker 1: also dealing with our suffering from sex mania. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: mean again, here's another quote. I believe that a sex
Speaker 1: pervert is responsible. It seems like there's a sexual aspect
Speaker 1: and that's a little weird, but it's just a a
Speaker 1: sex mania is a weird way to put it. You know,
Speaker 1: I don't know of a lot of murders that we
Speaker 1: hear about today where it's a person kills one and
Speaker 1: then has rapes another and then kills that person and
Speaker 1: progressively does that. That sounds like some other compulsion, some
Speaker 1: other weird mental state to be. And then again, this
Speaker 1: is the nineteen forties. They don't have all of the
Speaker 1: forensics that we have now. And it just means, I mean,
Speaker 1: they call it now, they call it a sexually violent predator. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and now. And also, you know, there's no there's you know,
Speaker 1: we don't really have any evidence of proof that besides
Speaker 1: the person who was Mary Jean, who was violated with
Speaker 1: pistol in the first incident, there's not it's not really
Speaker 1: much evidence that the other two were raped. Well though
Speaker 1: there was because it wasn't let's see it was the
Speaker 1: third girl. Yes, there was evidence of sexual assault on
Speaker 1: her immediately because yeah, they held on to it. They
Speaker 1: just didn't put it out basically, And again it's one
Speaker 1: of those things in the forties you protect the family's
Speaker 1: on or you just don't put in the newspaper and
Speaker 1: she was raped because that's just not what you do.
Speaker 1: But you know, Okay, so we've gone an the investigation
Speaker 1: and we've gone into some of the stuff that's going on,
Speaker 1: and then let's go ahead and let's talk about who
Speaker 1: they were trying to get to pin the murders on,
Speaker 1: because the police obviously want to catch somebody, and they
Speaker 1: went through about four hundred suspects. They are like, they
Speaker 1: arrested four hundred people. They investigated four hundred suspects, which
Speaker 1: I mean, which I presumed to believe means brought in
Speaker 1: for questioning as suspects. And the Jimmy Hollis and Mary
Speaker 1: Larry case, Uh, no suspects were apprehended. I think probably
Speaker 1: because the police didn't necessarily believe that. Yeah, I get
Speaker 1: the impression they weren't taking it seriously. They were, Yeah,
Speaker 1: and you know, they had been assaulted, but they weren't dead.
Speaker 1: They had been assaulted, as his skull was cracked at
Speaker 1: three places. Yeah, it's something you know. So, but for
Speaker 1: Richard Griffin and Polly Moore. Um, over two hundred people
Speaker 1: were questioned, uh and at least two hundred false tips
Speaker 1: and leads were checked. So like, it was a pretty
Speaker 1: extensive investigation that they did. People were basically calling in
Speaker 1: anything they saw that they thought related. Yeah, because you know,
Speaker 1: they were clearly linked to this assault that had happened before,
Speaker 1: and so people were starting to take it kind of seriously. Um.
Speaker 1: Three suspects were taken into custody because they had bloody clothing. UM.
Speaker 1: Two of them were released after officers received good alibis.
Speaker 1: One of them was held in Texas for further investigation,
Speaker 1: but was later freed from suspicion. Okay, So in the
Speaker 1: Martin and Booker case, you remember that was the one
Speaker 1: involving the saxophone sixteen and fifteen years old. Uh, there
Speaker 1: was a taxi driver who was a suspect because his
Speaker 1: cab was seen in the vicinity of the crime scene.
Speaker 1: Obviously that lead nowhere, they received the lead from the
Speaker 1: band leader of the band that she was in that
Speaker 1: she had had her saxophone with her and so that
Speaker 1: at that excited a lot of interest with the police.
Speaker 1: The saxophone. Again, it's too bad they didn't search the
Speaker 1: woods around the body a little more carefully and find
Speaker 1: the saxophone. That wouldn't have wasted so much time. So
Speaker 1: the guy was arrested in Corpus Christi, Texas or trying
Speaker 1: to sell a saxophone in a music store. He walked
Speaker 1: in without an instrument and as a salesperson if they
Speaker 1: wanted to buy an Alto Bundy saxophone anyway, well he didn't.
Speaker 1: He didn't what was because he didn't have it. He
Speaker 1: didn't have it, And she says, you know, theoretically, would
Speaker 1: you like to buy a saxophone? And the clerk claimed
Speaker 1: that the nancy nervous, the man left. When the manager
Speaker 1: was summoned, they contacted the police and he was arrested
Speaker 1: two days later the Waterfront Hotel after purchasing a forty
Speaker 1: five revolver from a pawn shop. That's that's not suspicious,
Speaker 1: but you know it's not really. I mean, obviously the
Speaker 1: real killer if he was going to purchase something from
Speaker 1: a pawnshop, it would be a thirty two automatic. Of course, Yeah,
Speaker 1: so she was. He was identified by the sales girls
Speaker 1: the same man who tried to sell the saxophone. They
Speaker 1: didn't find any saxophone in his possession, although in this
Speaker 1: hotel room they found a bag of bloody clothing. Uh.
Speaker 1: He claimed that the blood was from a cut he
Speaker 1: received in his forehead in the bar fight. Uh. They
Speaker 1: grilled him for several days. Man, apparently everything he everything
Speaker 1: he told him was checked out and it was all true.
Speaker 1: So the police at the end decided that they really
Speaker 1: couldn't hold a guy. They really they had no case,
Speaker 1: I mean, trying to operating to sell somebody a saxophone
Speaker 1: is you know. And and as it turns out in
Speaker 1: the answers, we know the saxophone was later found in
Speaker 1: the shrubbery near her body. You obviously a bit of
Speaker 1: a red guy might have been a bit, a bit
Speaker 1: of a questionable character, but obviously he had nothing to
Speaker 1: do with the murder, right And and you know, in
Speaker 1: the murder of Virginal Starts and the attack on his wife,
Speaker 1: several people were found in the vicinity of their home
Speaker 1: and they were all stopped and questioned. Twelve people were detained.
Speaker 1: Nine of them were basically immediately released, and then the
Speaker 1: same thing the remaining three. Their alibis checked out and
Speaker 1: they were released as well. They had some people that
Speaker 1: were obviously more persons of interests than others. You know,
Speaker 1: a lot of people washed out in the beginning of
Speaker 1: their you know, their alibi checked out very clearly. They
Speaker 1: didn't seem to actually, you know, fit any kind of profile.
Speaker 1: But there were some really interesting ones, one of which
Speaker 1: was a German prisoner of war suspect. So on May eight,
Speaker 1: it was announced that an escaped German prisoner of war
Speaker 1: was considered a suspect um and he was hunted as
Speaker 1: a matter of routine. He was described as a twenty
Speaker 1: four year old weighing one and eighty seven pounds with
Speaker 1: brown hair and blue eyes. Uh. He stole a car
Speaker 1: and then attempted to buy ammunition in lots of places
Speaker 1: in Oklahoma. So the night before his apprehension on May seven,
Speaker 1: a black man named Herbert Thomas was flagged down by
Speaker 1: a hitchhiker. The man said that he needed a ride
Speaker 1: because his mother was seriously ill, and offered five dollars.
Speaker 1: Thomas fell for The SOB story basically you know, he said,
Speaker 1: I wouldn't normally pick someone up, but he told a
Speaker 1: really sad story. When they got close to the place
Speaker 1: that the hitchhiker said he was going, the hitchhiker pulled
Speaker 1: out a pistol and told Thomas to keep driving or
Speaker 1: he would kill him like the five people he killed
Speaker 1: in tech Sarcana, mentioning Paul Martin and Betty Joe Booker
Speaker 1: by name, which would have been suspicious except for you know,
Speaker 1: there's such a snowball fear it's everywhere. Yes, it's almost
Speaker 1: an easy story, super easy. Yeah. He made Thomas stop
Speaker 1: in a small town and told him to drive back,
Speaker 1: and then if you followed him, he would trail him
Speaker 1: and kill him. He also told Thomas that he had
Speaker 1: planned to go back to tex Arcana to kill Martin's father,
Speaker 1: which is a little weird, a little weird because his
Speaker 1: father was already dead, which was even weirder. Yeah, So
Speaker 1: the man stole the five, stole back the five dollars
Speaker 1: that he had given to Thomas, as well as an
Speaker 1: additional three dollars in that time, some substantially decent money
Speaker 1: in the couple of not even a couple of Yeah,
Speaker 1: but that's a good amount, um he. So Thomas drove
Speaker 1: back to Kilgore, the place that he was originally going,
Speaker 1: and immediately reported it. He was described as being about
Speaker 1: five eight and thirty pounds and about eight years old,
Speaker 1: with red hair, and wore khaki trousers. On the same night,
Speaker 1: May seven, a local resident named Robert Atkinson spotted a
Speaker 1: peeping tom in his window. Atkinson grabbed a flashlight and pursued,
Speaker 1: but the man escaped. Um Atkinson got in his car
Speaker 1: and went looking for him. He caught the man he
Speaker 1: believed to be the peeping tom and put him under
Speaker 1: citizens arrest, but the man said, no, that wasn't me.
Speaker 1: So Atkins said, okay, I guess that wasn't you, and
Speaker 1: let him go. Uh. He later heard about the story
Speaker 1: with Thomas and decided that he should probably tell the police.
Speaker 1: Um And described a man very very similar to what
Speaker 1: Thomas had described his hitchhiker looked like, and Gonzalez stated
Speaker 1: that quote, we don't believe the man who killed five
Speaker 1: people here in the past six weeks would boast about
Speaker 1: his crimes and then let the negro go. It's not
Speaker 1: totally sure if he was the prisoner of war if
Speaker 1: what what necessarily happened truly circumstantial, and they're saying that
Speaker 1: he kind of vanished into thin air. Yeah, well, plus
Speaker 1: you know, and you know, talk is cheap. You know,
Speaker 1: anybody can reads the papers, can say, you know, I
Speaker 1: got killed all of them people in techs arcana, It
Speaker 1: would have an a timidating effect. There was another suspect.
Speaker 1: Obviously again didn't go anywhere this guy was. And well, okay,
Speaker 1: maintense Tokya, Oklahoma. So this was not long after the
Speaker 1: last murders. A man walked up to a woman's house
Speaker 1: and opened her screen door. Asked this, asked the person
Speaker 1: living there, and it's just harmon, if you could have
Speaker 1: some turpentine, food and money. Now that's a puzzler. I
Speaker 1: really want some turpentines, some food, and some money. So
Speaker 1: she told the man that she had very little turpentine
Speaker 1: and no money your food. So then he grabbed her
Speaker 1: by the hair, dragged her out onto the porch, said
Speaker 1: he might as well kill her. Said she had already
Speaker 1: killed three or four persons and he was going to
Speaker 1: rape her, And then he heard a horse galloping towards
Speaker 1: him and took off. So she took her child with
Speaker 1: her to a neighbor's house and called the police, and
Speaker 1: there was a neighborhood neighborhood searched the man, which included
Speaker 1: twenty officers and in in about a hundred sixty civilians. Uh.
Speaker 1: She had described as five nine or ten, white, five
Speaker 1: years old, hundred fifty pounds, dark hair, and badly in
Speaker 1: need of a shade, carrying a five inch folding pocket knife,
Speaker 1: wearing gloves, faded blue short with khakis, an old, dirty,
Speaker 1: dark colored floppy hat. So they found a suspect that
Speaker 1: fit that description. He was thirty three years old, didn't
Speaker 1: quite imagine all respects. He was also clean shaven. They
Speaker 1: decided to keep him in the jail for about three
Speaker 1: weeks and so his beard would grow back and then
Speaker 1: she could look at him again and decided if you
Speaker 1: picked the description. So but yeah, it turns out that
Speaker 1: they checked out his story. And you know, again talk
Speaker 1: is cheap, so it does not appear this, this is
Speaker 1: the lead against didn't didn't really pan out. It's kind of,
Speaker 1: you know, thinking about the amount of policeman hours that
Speaker 1: went into investigating this whole thing. Yeah, yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: lots and lots of investigative time. Spent by multiple bureaus.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, So there's another suspect. There a lot
Speaker 1: of suspects, a lot um. And this guy came forward
Speaker 1: on May. Um. He's twenty one years old. He was
Speaker 1: an ex Army Force B twenty four machine gunner. His
Speaker 1: name was Ralph Bauman, and he was in Los Angeles.
Speaker 1: He turned himself into the police and he said he
Speaker 1: might be the phantom. He said he's been in a
Speaker 1: coma running from something, maybe murder. He wanted to clear
Speaker 1: it up. Um. And he said, if he didn't kill
Speaker 1: five people in tex Arcana, he wants to settle down
Speaker 1: and be a stuntman in Hollywood because he was the
Speaker 1: happiest when he was living in danger. And then he
Speaker 1: told a reporter quote, I want to sell you some
Speaker 1: murder information. I know who and where the tex Arcana
Speaker 1: killer is. Give me five dollars and let me have
Speaker 1: an hour start and I'll put the information in a
Speaker 1: sealed envelope. The report called the police obviously, Um, and
Speaker 1: he read the note and it said, on a certain
Speaker 1: day in March, I was in our tex Arcana theater
Speaker 1: watching a path movie of the news picture of the war.
Speaker 1: Thank you, And when a part of persons acted wise
Speaker 1: and said over acting it kind of got to me.
Speaker 1: I followed them home. I killed them within a period
Speaker 1: of three days. So yeah, that's a little. That's a little.
Speaker 1: I find it hard to believe the reporter actually gave
Speaker 1: him five bucks. Yeah. So the police arrested this man
Speaker 1: who was a redhead. So yeah, he was in a
Speaker 1: downtown shooting gallery. He had just shot his twenty three
Speaker 1: bulls eye in a row with a twenty two rifle.
Speaker 1: So again, something Bauman said is quota to have said, Um,
Speaker 1: I'm my own suspect. He said he was in a
Speaker 1: coma for several weeks. I think that he really means
Speaker 1: he was blacked out for several weeks that he just
Speaker 1: doesn't remember. He has no memory of, not that he
Speaker 1: was in a comma, like he was incapacity in a hospital.
Speaker 1: And he said he woke up from it and he
Speaker 1: felt like he was running from something. Um, he had
Speaker 1: come to on May three and his rifle was missing,
Speaker 1: and he'd heard about a suspect matching his description, which
Speaker 1: would have been the prisoner of war suspects. He hit
Speaker 1: chiked all the way to Los Angeles because he thought
Speaker 1: he was running for murder. He was discharged from the
Speaker 1: Air Force for being a psychonotic. Yeah. Yeah, that again
Speaker 1: that that almost sounds like he's proclaiming something just to
Speaker 1: get it to Yeah. And Wallace Gonzolvz was quoted as saying,
Speaker 1: I feel the man is certainly a mental case. The
Speaker 1: tech arkanic killings could not have been the work of
Speaker 1: a mental case. We have absolutely this man has an
Speaker 1: absolutely no facts. Yeah. Well, and another one that we've
Speaker 1: got is that the police arrested a thirtysomething year old
Speaker 1: black man based on the fact that his tire tracks
Speaker 1: were found on the opposite side of the road from
Speaker 1: Paul Martin's corpse. I feel like it's nineteen forties. How
Speaker 1: many different tires are there? Well, I think there actually
Speaker 1: was quite a few. But the thing is is, after,
Speaker 1: you know, the police detained him and after he failed
Speaker 1: a polygraph test. They because he was still denying everything,
Speaker 1: and then of course the polygraph does a pass it,
Speaker 1: they decided that they're going to hypnotize him. He was
Speaker 1: taken to a psychiatrist and hypnotized, at which point the
Speaker 1: hypnotist said, you've got the wrong man, and this guy
Speaker 1: has no criminal tendencies. It eventually came out that after
Speaker 1: having been arrested by the police, the reason that he
Speaker 1: had been lying about why he was doing what he
Speaker 1: was was that he said, Okay, here's what really happened.
Speaker 1: I pulled over and I needed to use the restrooms.
Speaker 1: So he urinated onside the road and then drove away.
Speaker 1: But he was lying the whole time, and the reason
Speaker 1: he failed the polygraph is he wasn't He was trying
Speaker 1: not to disclose the fact that he was having an
Speaker 1: affair with a merry woman, so he was trying to
Speaker 1: protect himself and her at the same time, and that
Speaker 1: didn't go so well. Yeah, so that that's that's a
Speaker 1: little bit of a what I mean, because I don't
Speaker 1: know how you can hypnotize somebody against their will. It's
Speaker 1: a little I suspect that he didn't have a problem
Speaker 1: being hypnotized so much. He knew they knew he didn't
Speaker 1: do it. He didn't do it, and he I think
Speaker 1: he also probably knew, you know, it's a doctor some
Speaker 1: doctor client privilege here that he could have said, you know,
Speaker 1: but I think you know, a psychiatrist isn't gonna say, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: he's having a fair he's gonna say, well, he didn't
Speaker 1: murder him, right, or he did murder them. But what
Speaker 1: I love is but what I love about is like,
Speaker 1: you know that the police were a little skeptical to
Speaker 1: apparently according to this story, and accord of course, you know,
Speaker 1: as we know from longer heart experienced stories tend to
Speaker 1: get a little bit modified. But if it's true, it's
Speaker 1: pretty funny because in a sort of appalling way, because
Speaker 1: the psychiatrist he hypnotized him, because the police were skeptical, well,
Speaker 1: as he really under is he really hypnotized. So so
Speaker 1: he basically told the guy, told the suspect that you
Speaker 1: basically had no no feeling in your left side whatsoever,
Speaker 1: and then took a cigarette and stuck it on the
Speaker 1: guy's arm and earned him and he made yeah, and
Speaker 1: he made he and he didn't react at all upon
Speaker 1: being burned with a cigarette and then yeah, yeah, And
Speaker 1: so that's and that's why the police were convinced that, well,
Speaker 1: I guess he really is hypnotized. I liked I like this,
Speaker 1: you know, the casual Yeah, it's pretty awesome. Yeah, let's
Speaker 1: see there's another one, and this is obviously just bs.
Speaker 1: Some guy, some guy was a drunk. Uh. One of
Speaker 1: the local sheriff's traveled to Streeport, Louisiana after being notified
Speaker 1: that the police there were holding a man of custody
Speaker 1: for confessing to the crimes. He was arrested at a
Speaker 1: bar when he told his story to a news reporter.
Speaker 1: He didn't know the guy was a news reporter. The
Speaker 1: reporter promised the man a fifth of whiskey if he
Speaker 1: would tell all, And so he told all. He and
Speaker 1: so the police picked him up after the reporter read
Speaker 1: it him out. And then when Tilman Johnson, the sheriff's deputy,
Speaker 1: arrived in Treeport, Uh, he recognized the guy. He was
Speaker 1: an alcoholic who from texar Can who confessed the crime before.
Speaker 1: And he called the guys but at by name and says,
Speaker 1: you know you didn't kill those people, what'd you go
Speaker 1: and do this for? And then the guy replied, well,
Speaker 1: how I got a fifth whiskey? Yeah, so yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: another another false confession. Not worry. I know you're getting impatient.
Speaker 1: You want us to solve the crime, and we will,
Speaker 1: But you got this thing is full of so many
Speaker 1: weird confessions. And here's okay, So the next one that
Speaker 1: we got is got weird confessions in it. Let me okay,
Speaker 1: let me just run in Yeah, alright. So one of
Speaker 1: the Arkansas State Police officers had realized that a car
Speaker 1: had been stolen on each of the nights or nights
Speaker 1: previous to the murders and then was found abandoned after
Speaker 1: the fact. Uh So, on June eighth, n this officer,
Speaker 1: Max Tackett, went and found a car that had been
Speaker 1: reported stolen in a parking lot, and he staked that
Speaker 1: car out, so he knew this car was stolen. So
Speaker 1: he watches it and a twenty one year old woman
Speaker 1: walks up and starts to get in the car, and
Speaker 1: he of course confronts her. She says, well, I've just
Speaker 1: been married and my husband, who's uh is in Atlanta.
Speaker 1: Uh he stole the car and he's in Atlanta selling
Speaker 1: another car that he stole. So the guy was obviously,
Speaker 1: you know, fencing hot cars all the time. So they
Speaker 1: go and they try and track him down, and they
Speaker 1: had found somebody that this guy had tried. His name,
Speaker 1: by the way, it was Yole Swinney, and Yol had
Speaker 1: evidently tried to sell the guy a car but at
Speaker 1: one point and the guy said, no, I don't want
Speaker 1: to buy this car for whatever reason. So the cops said, well,
Speaker 1: you would recognize him, right, Well, yeah, I would. So
Speaker 1: they went went him to this uh what was it
Speaker 1: the city bus depot, I believe in the unit station. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And when they when the when you'll saw the guy
Speaker 1: that he tried to sell the car to with a cop,
Speaker 1: he turned around and ran this state police offic search
Speaker 1: you know, caught him, wouldn't let him go, obviously, got him,
Speaker 1: knocked him down whatever it was, coughed him. Uh. And
Speaker 1: at that point they were going to go ahead and
Speaker 1: uh and haul him in. Well, the weird things that
Speaker 1: come up with him is that when they put him
Speaker 1: in the car, You'll says, hell, I know what you
Speaker 1: want me for. You want me for more than stealing cars,
Speaker 1: which is a little weird. And he said that statement
Speaker 1: more than once. And he said, you guys are gonna
Speaker 1: give me the chair, aren't you, And then tack it.
Speaker 1: I recall said something like, well, now, we usually don't
Speaker 1: get people a chair for stealing car. Yeah, yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: except that everybody's like, wait, wait, this is a little weird.
Speaker 1: When they interviewed his wife when they had him in custody,
Speaker 1: she knew some details about the murders that hadn't been released.
Speaker 1: She knew the details inside and out, which was a
Speaker 1: little odd. But she also knew about the fact that
Speaker 1: there was a date book that had been found at
Speaker 1: the murder of the Martin Brooker murder scene that the
Speaker 1: police hadn't told anyone about. And so these things are
Speaker 1: adding up. Suddenly it's we're getting an avalanche of information.
Speaker 1: And then all of a sudden, Yold turns around and
Speaker 1: clams up and says, I, Nope, I don't know what
Speaker 1: you're talking about. Nope, I'm not talking. I'm not doing anything. So,
Speaker 1: being great detectives, they decided that they're going to go ahead.
Speaker 1: And what is it they were. They decided they were
Speaker 1: gonna give him sodium pentethal thank you, which is a
Speaker 1: truth serum. It's basically gonna make a talk, except unfortunately
Speaker 1: they gave him too much and it knocked him out,
Speaker 1: so he was unconscious. As they began to uh to
Speaker 1: be building a vest negation against you ole, his wife
Speaker 1: suddenly did a one eighty and refused to talk to
Speaker 1: the police anymore and denied ever saying anything about the murders.
Speaker 1: And because of the law at that time, she couldn't
Speaker 1: be made to testify against her husband, and so she
Speaker 1: was considered an unreliable witness, so they couldn't pursue him
Speaker 1: for the murders. He eventually was put in jail for
Speaker 1: about twenty years for multiple car thefts, but they could
Speaker 1: never pin him to these murders. That that might explain
Speaker 1: that if he was locked away and if he actually
Speaker 1: was a murderer, and then maybe that could explain why
Speaker 1: they stopped. Yeah. Maybe, But there's some details that we're
Speaker 1: going to get into, because there's some there's some fallout,
Speaker 1: there's some aftermath, but through some of these people, well,
Speaker 1: I mean, that's one of the ones that's like really compelling, right,
Speaker 1: And this one I think is really compelling. Two And
Speaker 1: on November five night, so a couple of years after
Speaker 1: these orders, and eighteen year old freshman he called himself
Speaker 1: do be Tennyson Uh from Arkansas University found dead at
Speaker 1: home in Arkansas. He'd kill himself with cyanide of mercury uh.
Speaker 1: And there was a suicide note and it read the
Speaker 1: opening of my box will be found in the following
Speaker 1: few lines, and a tube of paper is found rolls
Speaker 1: on color, and it is dry and sound. The head removes,
Speaker 1: the tail will turn, and the inside of the sheets.
Speaker 1: You yearn two bees mean a lot when they are together.
Speaker 1: These clues should lead you to it. So he his
Speaker 1: suicide note was a riddle. He was basically kind of
Speaker 1: toying with his police or whoever um so. But obviously
Speaker 1: police were notified of this, and so they found another
Speaker 1: note inside of a fountain pen and there was poison
Speaker 1: on the cap, and there were clues that like led
Speaker 1: them on this goose chase to a lock box that
Speaker 1: had a combination lock on it, and since they weren't
Speaker 1: really in the mood for games, they decided to just
Speaker 1: blow the lock off the box instead of trying that, yeah,
Speaker 1: there's pride and open, instead of trying to like figure
Speaker 1: out the combination. And there was a note in there.
Speaker 1: So inside that box, among other things, they found this
Speaker 1: final farewell note that was not a riddle um in
Speaker 1: which he thanked the people who were bringing him up.
Speaker 1: He professed his love to a twelve year old girl,
Speaker 1: and he also confessed to some of the murders. He says,
Speaker 1: why did I take my own life? Well, when you
Speaker 1: commit two double murders. You would too. Yes, I did
Speaker 1: kill Betty, Joe Brooker, and Paul Martin in the city
Speaker 1: Park that night, and then killed Mr Starks and tried
Speaker 1: to get Mrs Starks. You wouldn't have guessed it. I
Speaker 1: guess when my mother was either out or asleep, and
Speaker 1: no no one saw me do it. For the guns,
Speaker 1: I disassembled them and discarded them in different places. And
Speaker 1: then he goes on to what you know, list things
Speaker 1: that he wants for people to be given. The weird
Speaker 1: thing about him is, I don't know if you saw
Speaker 1: this in the some of the research that's out there.
Speaker 1: Uh So he hand wrote these letters out before he
Speaker 1: typed them up, and then they found other notes from
Speaker 1: him that were drafts, and then follow up version that's
Speaker 1: something along the lines of please disregard the previous notes
Speaker 1: that I wrote, which is just strained. Yeah, he was
Speaker 1: a weird guy. I mean, you know, you don't. I
Speaker 1: can't totally figure out what is going on. It's clearly
Speaker 1: a very troubled mind. Beyond just the suicidal tendencies. The
Speaker 1: fact that you know you would kill yourself with this
Speaker 1: riddle note that leads people on a goose chase. Is
Speaker 1: kind of like, at least in movies, indicative of the
Speaker 1: kind of a psychopathic character. Um, and if he was
Speaker 1: in love with twelve year old girls, there's something not there.
Speaker 1: So I don't really know what to make of that.
Speaker 1: You know, he doesn't confess to all of the murder,
Speaker 1: only couple of them. Some of them, Uh, he may
Speaker 1: have been capable of it. So I don't know. And
Speaker 1: the hard part is, I remember the research that talked
Speaker 1: about his his other notes that he had written, was
Speaker 1: the fact that his friends who because he was from
Speaker 1: that area, who who? Then you heard about his suicide,
Speaker 1: said oh, yeah, there's no way that he could have
Speaker 1: done that murder because he was with us that night.
Speaker 1: Now is it someone coming forward saying, yeah, I'm sorry,
Speaker 1: he was troubled and he really didn't do it. Or yeah,
Speaker 1: he he took his own life. Let's go ahead and
Speaker 1: cover for him and protect him for a time on.
Speaker 1: Or it's also possible that he confessed in a suicide
Speaker 1: now because he was protecting somebody else who knew committed
Speaker 1: to murder. Yeah. I like that al right, So let's
Speaker 1: see there wasn't another there another murder? Uh? In on
Speaker 1: May seven? This is about the Starts. The Starts were murdered.
Speaker 1: Virgil Starts was murdered. So, and you know, not necessarily related,
Speaker 1: but a body was found on the Kansas City Southern
Speaker 1: Railway tracks about sixty miles north of Texarkana, UM. He
Speaker 1: was lying face down inside the track with his head
Speaker 1: to the north. His left arm was severed at the
Speaker 1: elbow and his leg was severed at the hip Because
Speaker 1: they were across the tracks. A freight train had passed
Speaker 1: about five thirty am and chopped him off. So let's
Speaker 1: take it to a funeral. And yeah, that sounds unpleasant.
Speaker 1: Corner's verdict stated depth at the hands of persons unknown
Speaker 1: and that he was dead before being placed on the
Speaker 1: railroad tracks. So we got a potential six victim. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so I mean, yeah, so you killed him and then
Speaker 1: he tossed him the tracks just for the front of it.
Speaker 1: But but the love the county sheriff there believed that
Speaker 1: the man had died because he fell into the wheels
Speaker 1: of a passing freight train. Corner examined the body a
Speaker 1: second time and found further evidence of murder. They explained,
Speaker 1: we found a deep cut over the man, his temple
Speaker 1: two inches wide and one and a half inches long,
Speaker 1: which would probably be enough to cause death. Uh See,
Speaker 1: they also found catch about his hands and wrists, which
Speaker 1: indicate that he Those are the defensive wounds. Somebody's coming
Speaker 1: at you with a knife, usually try to block the
Speaker 1: knife of your arms. So yeah, so he was defending
Speaker 1: himself with stuff from somebody with a knife. So and so,
Speaker 1: apparently he was either very deeply wounded to the point
Speaker 1: where he couldn't defend himself and then thrown on the train,
Speaker 1: thrown under the train, or he was killed and then
Speaker 1: his body thrown on the tracks. But the corner believed
Speaker 1: that he was dead for a full two hours before
Speaker 1: being put on the tracks, and that there wasn't enough
Speaker 1: blood around the wounds which caused his death. In other words,
Speaker 1: in other words, the wounds that caused his death blood
Speaker 1: out somewhere else and he was taken to the tracks.
Speaker 1: So that you get another reason. Uh there was blood
Speaker 1: found in the street near the crime scene, which supports
Speaker 1: that theory. Share the sheriff still believes that it was
Speaker 1: accidental and the man was probably trying to jump the
Speaker 1: train and just fell onto the wheels. About the corner
Speaker 1: in the corners believed differently. So the man was fine
Speaker 1: identified Earl Cliff mcspadden from a Social Security card that
Speaker 1: he had on him. His his brother contacted the contact
Speaker 1: of the funeral home after hearing about his death on
Speaker 1: the radio, and he reported that his brother was a
Speaker 1: transient oil storage tank builder, which is interesting thing to
Speaker 1: be transient over and basically he was basically a guy
Speaker 1: on the road work on the road down to Yeah.
Speaker 1: So so anyway, I it appears that that was completely unrelated,
Speaker 1: although you never know, I mean, I didn't there's no
Speaker 1: thirty two caliber bullet holes and the guys, but you know,
Speaker 1: there there are other there are other deaths at the
Speaker 1: time that seemed unrelated but could be. Uh, there were
Speaker 1: two women before I think it was just before or
Speaker 1: just after the Stark murder. A woman was found dead
Speaker 1: in the street shot by a thirty two and then
Speaker 1: another woman was found dead with a thirty two at
Speaker 1: her feet. And they don't fit the profile except that
Speaker 1: they're at the same time, in the same town with
Speaker 1: the same caliber. Well, yeah, that's weird that they aren't
Speaker 1: classed with these, but you know, I mean, and it's possible.
Speaker 1: But again, back in those days, thirty two caliber was
Speaker 1: very popular, and that's the hard part is you know, okay, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: a lot of people had that gun, so we don't know.
Speaker 1: And nobody was ever charged with the murders of these
Speaker 1: two women, so we don't know, you know, are they
Speaker 1: the seventh and eighth victims or are they just unrelated? Yeah? Yeah,
Speaker 1: So there are a couple of things that come up
Speaker 1: in this that are kind of interesting, one of which
Speaker 1: is years after the murders, they were about to demolish
Speaker 1: a school in tex Sarcana Um and they were going
Speaker 1: through and clearing everything out, and they were going through
Speaker 1: the attic and a pile of blood stained clothing was
Speaker 1: found in the attic elementary school that they're about to demolish,
Speaker 1: which is the pretty kind of creepy thing. Now, I
Speaker 1: thought I saw something that it turned out that was
Speaker 1: actually just paint stained clothing. I don't know, Maybe I
Speaker 1: don't know, I remember think of evidence. But the thing,
Speaker 1: you know that's really interesting is that I only saw
Speaker 1: this one place. But again I want to bring it up,
Speaker 1: is that a lot it seems to be that most
Speaker 1: of the files and evidence that tex Arcana and Texas
Speaker 1: law enforcement agencies should have on this case are gone.
Speaker 1: And maybe that's just age, but it isn't. It is
Speaker 1: open murder investigations. It's never been. It seems the files
Speaker 1: have just kind of disappeared. That's not unusual. There was
Speaker 1: and they do. And there was a rumor going around
Speaker 1: the suspected phantom killer was rumored to be from a
Speaker 1: quote well to do tex Arcana family, So they knew
Speaker 1: who he was, but they weren't but they could pursuing
Speaker 1: him because his family had so much influence. Seems unlikely. Well,
Speaker 1: but you you that that's the stuff. This whole thing
Speaker 1: is as the bad movie that was made. Stuff of
Speaker 1: movies and totally we can't go after the guy that
Speaker 1: we know who did it because his family will bury
Speaker 1: the whole Yeah, so that they go through the Hollywood venue.
Speaker 1: That that theory right there kind of makes sense saying it.
Speaker 1: It's but in Texarkana, are there any actual well to
Speaker 1: do families Texas? Yeah? People, you know, we're rich. That
Speaker 1: didn't seem to be rich because people are making fortunes
Speaker 1: all over the place. Yeah. And you know, the other
Speaker 1: really interesting connection that you see all over the internet
Speaker 1: is a connection to the zodiac. Yeah, which I kind
Speaker 1: of like there's some interesting connections, and you know, it's
Speaker 1: like twenty years later, it's in sixty and sixty nine
Speaker 1: is the Zodiac murders, right, So I guess when we're
Speaker 1: talking about the car thief, he went away for like
Speaker 1: twenty years and then came back out and he seemed
Speaker 1: to be a really viable suspect. So the fact that
Speaker 1: murders of this type disappeared for twenty years and then well,
Speaker 1: the problem, the problem with with yol is that he
Speaker 1: was still in jail when the Zodiac he was. And
Speaker 1: here's the other thing is that what what basically put
Speaker 1: the nail in the coffin for him being the killer
Speaker 1: was that in South Florida, I believe it was, there
Speaker 1: was at least one or if not two double murders
Speaker 1: in the late sixties that took place with a thirty
Speaker 1: eight on Lover's Lane. Excuse me, correct. So they talked
Speaker 1: about the similarities with the Zodiac crimes, and I think
Speaker 1: it's interesting, you know, the time periods kind of fit.
Speaker 1: If you take the Texarcanam murders and then you take
Speaker 1: the Florida murders. You know, we're talking about if it
Speaker 1: had maybe been a teen in Texarcana who shipped off
Speaker 1: to the war for a couple of years. He was
Speaker 1: getting his murder fix in there. Came back, went to
Speaker 1: Florida because it's a nice place to be for a
Speaker 1: little while. And then and then you know, well, because
Speaker 1: you know, the drive is there, right, But if you
Speaker 1: have the psychotic drive, it doesn't go away. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: in the Zodiac crimes as well as our crimes, right,
Speaker 1: the suspect war hood, the suspect use a flashlight to
Speaker 1: blind victims in cars. The suspect use different types of handguns.
Speaker 1: They mostly the attacks were done on lover's lanes and
Speaker 1: the victims were young. They're both kind of rough and
Speaker 1: tumble areas with blue collar air, blue collar families, and
Speaker 1: lots of military presence. The suspects all changed both changed
Speaker 1: ms later in their spreeze. They were both labeled Phantom ish.
Speaker 1: Oh the Phantom now where the f to part community
Speaker 1: y Zodiac. The Zodiac Suspected Zodiac letter that was sent
Speaker 1: to Marco Spinelli in eighteen seventy four referred to himself
Speaker 1: as the Red Phantom. Oh, I didn't know, so, you know,
Speaker 1: And it's obviously a loose connection, but it was still
Speaker 1: a little bit of they're all kind of loose. Yeah,
Speaker 1: stolen cars reported before every murder um and the Zodiac
Speaker 1: murderer acquired multiple vehicles. He had lots of different cars
Speaker 1: that he drove around all the time. There's lots of
Speaker 1: car stolen car situations around. The Zodiac killer was considered
Speaker 1: to be from Texas, the Texas area because he used
Speaker 1: a lot of kind of Southern phrases like fiddle and
Speaker 1: fart around. Was that in one of the letters that
Speaker 1: he wrote. Yeah, and he wrote a lot a lot
Speaker 1: of Yeah, he shot female victims through the jaw and
Speaker 1: tongue just like this is it was a star. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So there's some I mean, you know, they're loose connections,
Speaker 1: but I guess when we're talking about serial killers, some
Speaker 1: of these some of these connections are really kind of hilarious.
Speaker 1: Like this last one. Suspect may have frequented restaurants and
Speaker 1: other suspected Zodiac activity, Well, yeah, gone to the same place.
Speaker 1: I guess we're Yeah, that's why you're always is is no.
Speaker 1: So I think that's really interesting. You know, you think
Speaker 1: about serial killers m O evolving a little bit, you know,
Speaker 1: especially over thirty year period, you know, you start out exploring,
Speaker 1: and that may even explain why the rapes and the like,
Speaker 1: really horrific sexual assaults that happened earlier, or the inability
Speaker 1: to actually kill his victims the first couple of times.
Speaker 1: These kind of people who do these things, they tend
Speaker 1: to warm up and explore. So there may have been
Speaker 1: assault that didn't get reported because he just walked up
Speaker 1: to somebody with a gun and threatened him and then
Speaker 1: clocked him in the headwalk. I mean, they tend to
Speaker 1: escalate looking for thank you. They escalate and they build
Speaker 1: and then as you said, they find their m O
Speaker 1: and run. So I mean there's there's a lot of
Speaker 1: ways that that could go. But I just this is
Speaker 1: the thing that drives me crazy about this story is
Speaker 1: there's no theory slash suspect that I could put my
Speaker 1: money against. That's the thing that drives me nuts about this. Yeah. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: it happened a long time ago, so obviously, you know,
Speaker 1: you could come up with a good theory of how, why,
Speaker 1: and whatever. And I think there's there's some reasonable ones
Speaker 1: out there, but you know, most of the people involved
Speaker 1: along dead. Yeah, they're long on so well, and a
Speaker 1: lot of them went on record and we're in books
Speaker 1: and stories, but he just I don't know on this one. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know either. I think that I think a
Speaker 1: strong post ability is that, you know, the the eight victims,
Speaker 1: I think probably there was only maybe one that this
Speaker 1: guy wanted to kill and the rest were just too basically,
Speaker 1: you know, put up a little cloud of bs around
Speaker 1: the whole thing. Let me to basically cover his tracks,
Speaker 1: cover his tracks. Okay, if I'm known to have a
Speaker 1: strong motive to murder you, then if I'm going to
Speaker 1: murder you, I'm going to proceed it with a crime,
Speaker 1: and I'm gonna have After that, I'm gonna murder a
Speaker 1: couple more people, people that I had no connection to whatsoever,
Speaker 1: And that would be one way that that would be
Speaker 1: one way to cover that thing. So if I were
Speaker 1: if I were investigating this, and again, you know, I
Speaker 1: wouldn't confine my investigation just to this. But if I
Speaker 1: were back to the time investigating this, I would look
Speaker 1: into Mr Richard Griffin twenty nine, because he was a
Speaker 1: guy in the second attack, the first you know, the
Speaker 1: first two people he didn't kill. He didn't murder them
Speaker 1: because he didn't really need to and he might have
Speaker 1: actually wanted to leave them alife for a reason. I'm
Speaker 1: not sure why, but you know, it might might have
Speaker 1: very might very well have been that, you know, he
Speaker 1: wanted he wanted them. Maybe he wore maybe he wore
Speaker 1: high heeled shoes or lifts or something like that to
Speaker 1: make himself appear to be taller than he was. So
Speaker 1: maybe he put on you know, maybe he did things
Speaker 1: to sort of change his appearance just to met to
Speaker 1: his voice and everything, and that I would be reported
Speaker 1: the police, and then when they're looking for a suspect,
Speaker 1: he would be if it happens, you know, shorter, lighter,
Speaker 1: lighter skinned, whatever, you know, lighter voiced, deeper voiced, whatever.
Speaker 1: So you know, maybe that's why he left him alive,
Speaker 1: or maybe he just left him alive because it really
Speaker 1: wasn't necessary to kill them. But the second people, let's say,
Speaker 1: let's say his his grievance was against Richard Griffin twenty
Speaker 1: nine and his girlfriend, Paully and More seventeen. Polly and
Speaker 1: More probably wasn't old enough to really made any serious enemies,
Speaker 1: you know, and I'm guessing this killer was probably in
Speaker 1: his twenties, maybe you know, even thirties. So I'm guessing
Speaker 1: if I were the police, I would be looking for
Speaker 1: a connection to Richard Griffin, because after he kills these two,
Speaker 1: then he kills uh, Paul Martin and Betty Joe Booker.
Speaker 1: But again, you know, once you once you killed, once
Speaker 1: you killed your intended target, you've got to kill at
Speaker 1: least a couple more people to cover up your to
Speaker 1: cover up the trail leading to your your motive for
Speaker 1: killing Richard Griffin. And then after that you might decide, well,
Speaker 1: I might I might have killed just a couple more people,
Speaker 1: or maybe somebody else just decided to step in, because
Speaker 1: the circumstances were so much different for the Starks than
Speaker 1: they were for the other for well, basically for the
Speaker 1: other two, when the stars could have been a copycast exactly,
Speaker 1: somebody who's like, well, I'm going to jump on the
Speaker 1: coattails of this and use it to my advantage. Well, exactly,
Speaker 1: so you gotta grieves against one or the other both
Speaker 1: of them. So I'm gonna go ahead and commit a
Speaker 1: little murder. I know that they'll just assume it's this
Speaker 1: other guy, and so yeah, and so that that's always
Speaker 1: a possibility, because it's so much different. So Joe helped
Speaker 1: me in the future. Remember not to upset you, because
Speaker 1: that was scarily accurate and really well thought out. And
Speaker 1: I'm a little disturbed, a little frightened. Yeah that you
Speaker 1: just you just wailed that out. Or did you live
Speaker 1: in Texarkanada? No? I never lived there. I never knew.
Speaker 1: I don't think now this was a little before my time.
Speaker 1: All right, do you have any any other theories? I don't,
Speaker 1: you know that. That's the thing is, this is such
Speaker 1: a weird story. I don't like it. It's weird, it's creepy,
Speaker 1: it's you know, there are definitely people that you can
Speaker 1: kind of think, Okay, on the one hand, it could
Speaker 1: be this person, but there's all this evidence against that
Speaker 1: actually being this person, And I just don't know. It's weird.
Speaker 1: There's there was a lot of deaths in a pretty
Speaker 1: small place, you know, a small amount of time, in
Speaker 1: a really small amount of time, which you know, I
Speaker 1: guess leads me to believe that it must have been
Speaker 1: someone in the community. I think, I deeply think it
Speaker 1: must have been somebody who lived there, and I feel
Speaker 1: like it must have been someone young, and you know,
Speaker 1: someone in there, you know, nineteen twenty year old phase,
Speaker 1: especially because of the youth of the victor, uh you
Speaker 1: know it, it does kind of seem like the sort
Speaker 1: of thing that like a kid, the kid who gets
Speaker 1: bullied in school finally breaks down and like murders his
Speaker 1: worst offenders or you know. And I don't think I
Speaker 1: don't think that it was that because there's there's like
Speaker 1: so much more to it. But you know, because I
Speaker 1: also think that that would have been really easy to spot,
Speaker 1: right that weird kid. They obviously would have called that
Speaker 1: weird kid in as questioning. It would have been a
Speaker 1: really strong um that's why. Yeah, I think if you
Speaker 1: you know, and that's that's a good possibility. But if
Speaker 1: you're murdering like like several people from your high school
Speaker 1: whose guts you hate, then you know that's probably gonna
Speaker 1: be pointing sort of a finger back at you. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess that's why. You know, I kind of think
Speaker 1: the Duby confessions, the suicide confession makes some sense, although
Speaker 1: it's not to all of them, just some of them.
Speaker 1: So I don't I don't know what's going on. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know either, but yeah, one of the things
Speaker 1: about it too is like one of the problems I
Speaker 1: have with that is like the disparity and a just
Speaker 1: between the people who are who are really young. So
Speaker 1: probably and Moore was seventeen, Betty Joe Burker was fifteen,
Speaker 1: and Paul Martin was sixteen. So they were from different
Speaker 1: classes in high school. So and Paul Martin, by the way,
Speaker 1: at that time, was not living in Texarkana. He was
Speaker 1: he was been moved away and was just back for so. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so whoever this person is, and again it could be
Speaker 1: just like what I was talking about, but they were
Speaker 1: there was somebody at high school age. They wanted to
Speaker 1: kill one of these people and just needed to cover
Speaker 1: their cover their tracks by killing a bunch of other
Speaker 1: people a lot. That's another possibility. There's a reason it's unsolved, Yeah,
Speaker 1: there is, unfortunately, but I would I would really love
Speaker 1: to talk to you know, if I could go back
Speaker 1: in time and talk to the investigators and just ask
Speaker 1: them if they considered that possibility. Well, you know, I
Speaker 1: do believe that the case files are available. Really I
Speaker 1: thought they were lost freedom of information in the age
Speaker 1: of the case. You can get a hold of him
Speaker 1: and I well, some some FBI reports do exist, and
Speaker 1: I attempt. I found them on some locations. Unfortunately couldn't
Speaker 1: read them because they were low rez scans of old
Speaker 1: typewritten papers read down well. Plus there was all kinds
Speaker 1: of blackout areas. It was really hard and unfortunately it
Speaker 1: just was one of those things that had I had,
Speaker 1: you know, hours and hours and hours more available to me,
Speaker 1: I could have gone through it. But it just it
Speaker 1: was so much detail. It's just hard to sift. This
Speaker 1: is why people do this for a living. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean I I would never want to go to all
Speaker 1: that stuff because there's got to be like a hundred
Speaker 1: thousand pages of notes from this case when you think
Speaker 1: about all, yeah, there are well, ladies and gentlemen, if
Speaker 1: you have any thoughts or theories or hey, by the way,
Speaker 1: if you are the killer, Hey, yes, you want to
Speaker 1: let us know what those are, you can go ahead
Speaker 1: and just send us an email. Uh. The email address
Speaker 1: that we always use is thinking Sideways podcast at gmail
Speaker 1: dot com. We love to hear from our listeners and
Speaker 1: we enjoy that a lot. You can always go ahead
Speaker 1: and find some of our links for this story on
Speaker 1: our website. That website is thinking Sideways podcast dot com.
Speaker 1: And of course, if you probably are listening to us
Speaker 1: on iTunes, but if not, you can always listen to
Speaker 1: us on iTunes, on Stitcher, or directly off of our website. Uh.
Speaker 1: And again, we love to hear from our our fans
Speaker 1: who were talking to us on the page. We get those.
Speaker 1: We love to go back and forth, so please get
Speaker 1: a hold of us see if you've got thoughts. Uh.
Speaker 1: That having been said, Happy Halloween, everybody. I hope you
Speaker 1: enjoyed a creepy story for a creepy day. I help,
Speaker 1: we scared the crap out of you, and we'll talk
Speaker 1: to you next week. By everybody, I don't want to
Speaker 1: drive home now alone. I'll give you a ride. No
Speaker 1: a second thought now