Captain (3:13)

Yeah, PWW and Beer Run. Make sure you check out truecrimegarage.com and while you're there, sign up on the mainland list. And colonel, that's enough of the B as neatness.

Nick (3:23)

All right everybody gather round, grab a chair, grab a beer. Lets talk some true crime.

Captain (3:44)

The devil's gonna get you in your.

Narrator (3:46)

Sleep.

Nick (3:50)

The devil's gonna get you in in your sleep the devil's gonna get you in.

Narrator (4:08)

This week's true crime story is one that is as scary as any true crime case. In fact, in many ways, it is far more scary than any other unsolved murder case that we have covered. This true story, at its core, is about double murders committed seemingly at random and in the dead of the night by a phantom killer.

Nick (4:35)

This is the eerie tale of the.

Narrator (4:37)

Texarkana moonlight murders, a case that resulted in several double homicides and multiple attacks that left a town in fear for decades. The murders were committed by a masked gunman. The killer remains unidentified to this day. Who was the man stalking his prey in the night? And will his real identity ever be revealed? This is the story of the town that feared sundown a series of homicides today referred to as the Texarkana Moonlight Murders, committed by the one that they call the Phantom Killer. This is True Crime Garage.

Nick (5:54)

The killer known to those of Texarkana and the surrounding towns and cities in both Texas and Arkansas as the Phantom Killer was responsible for multiple attacks. He was never caught, and the case remains one of America's most chilling and haunting mysteries. This case is not just incredibly frightening and undeniably chilling, but a truly haunting mystery that has taken hold of many over the decades. This is the absolute triple threat of a real life true crime story. It's a slasher film, a ghost story and a murder mystery all wrapped up into one homicidal maniac with a hooded mask and a gun. But with this one, it's not so easy to say when the murders began or when they ended. For us. We will start where most folks do when discussing the Texarkana moonlight murders or the Phantom killer. We will start on a dark night in texarkana back in 1946 when, as they say, the Phantom Killer struck for the very first time. So let's go to Texarkana, Captain. This is a twin city. There is Texarkana in the state of Arkansas. And just across the state line, you will find Texarkana in the state of Texas.

Captain (7:16)

How cute.

Nick (7:17)

How cute Together, they are the principal cities of the Texarkana metropolitan area. Carlton Stowers, a great writer for the Dallas observer, called the story the Phantom Menace. And as he writes, the enduring legend began not with death, but with a frightening and vicious attack on two young lovers. This attack took place on a February night in 1946, when two young romantic partners, 24 year old Jimmy Hollis and his girlfriend, Mary Jean Larae, age 19, attended a downtown movie. After the movie, as sometimes young folks do, they decided to prolong the evening with a romantic visit to a secluded lane on the edge of town. They stopped off at, according to legend, a lover's lane not far from a neighborhood. In fact, it is stated that the two were parked approximately 300ft from the last row of city homes. Now, in that spot today sits a mall. According to police reports, they had been parked for no more than about 10 minutes when a man, his face hidden beneath a white hood, approached the car. This terrified the two, obviously the victims, were caught off guard. The masked man was pointing a flashlight and pistol at them. The attack occurred in a very dark and seemingly quiet area. The day and date, It's Friday night, February 22nd, and the time is just shortly before midnight. Jimmy Hollis and Mary Jean Laree are parked on a secluded road just outside of Texarkana, Texas, terrified and alone and at the mercy now of this masked man with a gun. And they're trying to understand exactly what is happening. So neither of them could grasp the reality of the unknown assailant approaching their vehicle in the dark. And it was only when the figure got closer that they could tell it was a man physically fit, menacing, and wearing, as we said, a white cloth mask. The record states that the cloth mask resembled a pillowcase with eye holes cut out and a slit for the mouth. But because our victims are seated and the aggressor standing, even with the holes for the eyes and the mouth, they could not make out a single detail beyond the mask. This is in part due to the shadows and the darkness, of course. The masked man quickly made his way to the driver's side door of the vehicle. He's blinding Jimmy Hollis with the beam of his flashlight.

Captain (10:03)

Complete boner killer.

Nick (10:05)

Jimmy could hardly see the man at all. The attacker is all but a silhouette at this point, but what he could make out very clearly was the barrel of a gun pointed directly at his face. So Jimmy tries to tell this guy, the masked man, hey, you've got the wrong guy. To which the phantom responded, I don't want to kill you, fella. So just do what I say. Now, this masked man, Captain, gave loud, clear and direct orders. He demanded that the two of them get out of their vehicle. And he growled at Jimmy commandingly, telling him to take off your goddamn britches. Then, with Jimmy standing now only in his boxer shorts, the masked man, the phantom menace, struck Jimmy in the head, fast and ferocious, with a solid and likely metallic object. Jimmy step back, stunned and phased, unsure of what he was hit with and wondering what had, what he had said or did to provoke such a violent strike. But before he could sort that out, sort that equation, he was hit once again in the head, and this time even harder than the first. So instantly, Jimmy, everything goes black, his body goes limp. He collapsed. He didn't even feel his body and his head hit the ground as he fell face first into the pavement.

Captain (11:35)

Right.

Nick (11:36)

So now, Captain, we have a very bad situation here. The young woman, mary Jean, just 19 years old, it's midnight. She's now alone, her boyfriend knocked out, lying helpless in the street, and now making his way from the driver's side of the vehicle over to her is a man in a mask with a gun. And what he wants and expects of her is unknown.

Captain (12:01)

Right?

Nick (12:01)

She tries to get in front of it. Maybe if she could just communicate clearly to the man that she might be able to de escalate this situation, stop the violence and get the man to spare them and leave so she can get medical help for her boyfriend. So she's thinking, I've got to get to Jimmy. She needed to know if he was still breathing. I would think that she has to be hoping, right, that the man is just an armed robber. All he wants is money. With the mask hopefully being some form of confirmation that he gets what he wants and you get what you want. Right? He gets the money, can't be identified, and you get to keep your life.

Captain (12:48)

Well, if you're planning on killing them, there's no need to wear the mask.

Nick (12:53)

The mask is almost a hopeful sign.

Captain (12:57)

Do you have any thoughts on why he would have Jimmy take his pants off? I guess if you're going to rob somebody, hey, just give me your pants and your wallet and everything's going to be in there as well.

Nick (13:08)

I think oftentimes when I've seen when a perpetrator, regardless of what the motive is or what they're, they're attempting to achieve, a lot of times when they're having a victim remove their clothes, clothing it is to deter them from fleeing, right? So that could be the situation here. I have a lot of thoughts about this killer under the hood here. A lot of thoughts that we can get to once we get through the different crimes that are going to take place, because this is our first crime scene. So right now, in this very scenario, if I'm Mary Jean, I have three goals. One, check on Jimmy, Two, distance myself from the man with the gun, and three, give him money or prove that we have none and send him on his way. Hopefully, this is just an armed robber with poor targeting skills. As these are young folks parked, not much reason to assume that they would have a large sum of money on them or even in the vehicle, right? So Mary Jean makes her way over to Jimmy, and she tells the gunman, we don't have any money. And by this time, she's so terrified and afraid for her boyfriend that she is crying. She even pulls Jimmy's wallet out from his. His trousers to show the man, look, there's no money.

Captain (14:39)

Yeah, but this phantom menace doesn't make a lot of sense because he says. What was the quote again? Did he say, I don't want to kill you.

Nick (14:46)

I don't. He says, I'm don't want to hurt you, or, yeah, I don't want to kill you, fella, so just do what I say, right? But then. But then he just beats him over the head, right? And in a lot of these reports that you'll read, it's Jimmy says he doesn't know what he was hit with, but we can. We have to make the assumption, right? It's either the butt of the gun or the flashlight.

Captain (15:08)

The.

Nick (15:08)

The phantom is. Could be a lot of things, but he doesn't have three hands or three arms, and he's holding a flashlight and gun. When he approaches the vehicle. And when the two step out of.

Captain (15:18)

The vehicle, and let me tell you something that you might not know. Both of those items would hurt.

Nick (15:24)

So at this time, captain, she's showing him, look, we. We don't have any money, right? He's. She's got the wallet. And then the attacker. He then hits Mary Jean very hard, Seemingly with probably the same object. She falls to the ground. The attacker then orders her to stand up. She believes that the man told her to run, so she does. She's running, fleeing from the scene. And now Mary Jean Laree, she spots an old car parked off of the road. So she runs up to this vehicle, but unfortunately, she finds the car empty. Before she can make her next move, she's caught by the attacker. He seems even more angry and unsettled than before. He Says to her, why are you running? When she said that, he had told her to do so, he calls her a liar. He then forced her to the ground, down to the ground. And then he sexually assaults her with the barrel of the gun. Some accounts of this portion of this story say that that assault happened in a wooded area or some nearby woods. After the assault, Mary Jean, she flees on foot. We can surmise that the attacker likely is making his getaway at the same time.

Captain (16:45)

Do we have any thoughts on how he got there? Did he walk there? Did he motorcycle, car, fall from the sky?

Nick (16:53)

I think. I think the most likely scenario is the. The empty vehicle that she ran up to was probably his.

Captain (17:01)

That makes. That makes a lot of sense.

Nick (17:02)

I think he saw the vehicle. I picture this a couple ways because it's. It's reported this story, I think because it's sort of, and forgive me for saying so, because this is a true story. These are real victims here that were terrified and came very close to death. That's your spoiler alert. They both survive. But.

Captain (17:24)

Well, that's how we have a count of what happened, is they survived.

Nick (17:29)

This story is so action packed that I think that we get many different tellings of this story. I think that a lot of it's based in fact. But one thing that I find interesting is that in some of the versions of the story, keep in mind, we're talking about 1946. So there's been a lot of years, a lot of decades that have passed. And that probably plays to why we have slight variants with, with the different stories here, the different versions.

Captain (18:05)

Right.

Nick (18:06)

Some of those versions include that headlights, somebody was driving, a vehicle showed up in the area, and that is what spooked. That's what they believe may have spooked the attacker. So he may have carried out. If his intent was to murder, he may have carried that out that night. But because of the vehicle showing up on the scene, he didn't. Other versions of that story leave the vehicle out, the headlights out. A lot of the people at the time, Captain, the law enforcement, seem to be of the belief that either the attacker didn't really want to kill the couple.

Captain (18:46)

Right.

Nick (18:47)

Mary Jean, her statement and her opinion of the events and what maybe the killer was thinking, attacker was thinking was that she thinks that the masked man thought that Jimmy was dead.

Captain (19:05)

Yeah.

Nick (19:06)

And in fact, she thought that Jimmy was dead because she said when he hit Jimmy the second time, struck him over the head, he was hit so hard that she thought that the man shot him. She thought that the gun went off. That he shot Jimmy in the head.

Captain (19:25)

That's brutal.

Nick (19:26)

And he had some severe, severe skull damage.

Captain (19:33)

Yeah.

Nick (19:33)

Head trauma. I mean, it was. It. It basically cracked his skull open. And I don't know. I think the noise that she heard was a combination of the butt of the gun striking his head and his head popping at the same time.

Captain (19:48)

But I think it makes these cases more haunting when there's survivors because we get to hear the details of the attacks. You see this in Zodiac and Ted Bundy and. And so many others where there's a survivor. John Wayne Gacy, there was a survivor. And they tell you what happened that was basically leading up to their death, and they were lucky to survive.

Nick (20:16)

Well, and you bring up an interesting question I was glad that you asked about. How did the attacker get there? Because they don't see a car. Right. They never reference a car in their statements that they end up giving to police. We got to keep in mind here, though, when we examine Jimmy Hollis's statement.

Captain (20:35)

Right.

Nick (20:35)

That he. While he does, come to. So let me give you the. The rest of the story, and we'll circle back to this. So, okay, Mary Jean, she says that she ran, or at least the report says that she ran about a half a mile to a nearby home. I think that that might be. That distance might be exaggerated because, remember, we had said earlier that they were only 300ft or 300 yards, depending on the reports you read from the last row of city homes. So I don't think she had a run half a mile to a nearby home. But we do know that she did run to a home. And she pounds on the door. She wakes up the folks that live there, and the people there call the authorities. Meanwhile, Jimmy Hollis, he managed to regain consciousness. He's able to get back to his feet or at least kind of pull himself up a bit, and he alerted a passing motorist who would also call the police.

Captain (21:36)

That's some grit, right?

Nick (21:38)

True, true grit.

Captain (21:40)

I like the cut of that guy's jib. To have the grit to. To pull yourself up like the undertaker rising up.

Nick (21:49)

But he's hurt so badly that once the police. We have, the Bowie County Sheriff's Department, they arrive on the scene. The. The officers there said that Jimmy was in such bad shape that he was going in and out of consciousness. Like he kept. He kept falling out. He kept falling out and falling out and coming to and falling out, coming to.

Captain (22:12)

Right.

Nick (22:12)

And so I. I wanted to make sure we included that when we are talking about Jimmy's Statement because how much Anybody that's been knocked out or even hit on the head real hard fainted. I think most folks would tell you about the same thing. Like I don't know that I fully trust my memory or I have. There's, there's black spots, there's blank spots in my memory of what led up to that. Mary Jean's going to be able to give us a better idea of what happened. But again, she was hit too over the head. So both of these folks are in bad shape. The police are on the scene, the sheriff's department's on the scene. But of course the masked gunman is nowhere to be found. Both victims were sent off to the hospital, Mary Jean for an overnight stay. And Jimmy Hollis was in far worse shape and forced to be hospitalized for an extended stay to recover from multiple skull fractures. Jimmy was hospitalized for several weeks and he was in and out of a coma during that time. We talked about this part in our coverage back on True Crime Garage, episode one, the Phantom Killer. That are two victims, Jimmy Hollis and Mary Jean Larae. I keep saying, Larry Larray, I've heard it pronounced about three different ways, so I apologize to.

Captain (23:40)

And we pronounced it five different ways on episode one.

Nick (23:43)

We'll put our own spin on it.

Captain (23:45)

Yeah.

Nick (23:46)

The two victims, as we said, gave what authorities would later say is a slightly different description. Right. They're giving slightly different descriptions of their attacker. So let's start with what they both agree on. They agree that the assailant was about 6 foot tall and thin. So athletic build, 6 foot tall. Neither of them had recognized his voice. Right. And what they mean by that is it wasn't a voice that they had heard before. They couldn't place the voice. It wasn't somebody that they believed that they knew. And both of them did say, look, we didn't see the face hidden behind the mask. Some reports say that they both believe the attacker to be approximately 30 years old. Now here's the differing accounts, right. We have Mary Jean claim that she could see under the mask and I'm guessing when she says this that it might be through the, the eye holes in the, in the mouth, the slit for the mouth. And, and I don't want to go too far down this road because the brutality of the attack, but obviously by our description of the events that took place, she was would have had a better angle, a better vantage point to at a chance of seeing who this guy was.

Captain (25:13)

Right.

Nick (25:13)

She says that she thought the man to be a light skinned African American and Jimmy Hollis says that he thought the attacker was a tan white man or a dark complected white male.

Captain (25:28)

Again, it would be hard to tell in the dark. And, and, and plus, you know how your eyes have to readjust when you see a bright light and then you look into the darkness.

Nick (25:39)

And that's part of what Jimmy says too. Here. Captain he says he did say like, look, this is my opinion, this is what I think that I saw. But conceded that he could not distinguish the features of this man and that for the majority of the time when he was being attacked or was face to face with the attacker, he was blinded by the flashlight. Cold Mornings Holiday Plans this is when you just want your wardrobe to be simple. Stuff that looks sharp, feels good and things you'll actually wear. That's where Quince comes in. And the bonus quince pieces make great gifts too. This season's lineup is simple but smart and Easy with quints $50 Mongolian cashmere sweaters that feel like an everyday luxury and wool coats that are equal parts stylish and durable. I love quince.com I go there, I shop there. I get the things that I need to stuff my closet full of great classic styles that I want to wear. Just picked up the cotton pique knit overshirt. I love this shirt. It's become my favorite shirt in my closet. I'm looking forward to cold evenings, chilly evenings so I can put on my new shirt and get out there and have some fun. Comes in three different colors. Check out quint.com you're going to love the classic styles. Give and get timeless holiday staples that last this season with quint. Go to quint.comgarage for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns now available in Canada too. That's Q U I n c e.com garage free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com garage did you know you can.

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Captain (30:23)

All right, we are back. Cheers, mates. Tall cans in the air and cheers to the people in the back.

Nick (30:30)

Tall cans in the air and dear God, fix the Internet, please God, that's all we ask of you. And happy Thanksgiving to everybody out there too. Please have a wonderful Thanksgiving. A safe Thanksgiving. It's my favorite long weekend of the year. I mean food, family, friends, football. Doesn't get any better than that, my friends. So make sure you, you, you soak it all in and, and enjoy every second of it. This is. I always catch myself when I have to say this, Captain. I always go, this is the strange part of the story. But they're true crime stories, Nick. Every part of it. There, there's all. There's strange business strewn throughout these stories, right?

Captain (31:16)

See, after the Phantom Menace said he didn't want to kill me and then he hit me really hard with a gun or a flashlight, I would have replied. I thought you said you didn't want to kill me.

Nick (31:30)

Yeah, and I think that was a clever play on words by that writer, Stowers, because he wrote an extensive article for the Dallas observer on this case. His article came out around the time the Star Wars Phantom Menace movie had come out. So I think he was doing a clever play on words there with. With titling the. The article. But one thing that is regularly reported in this story, regardless of where you get your information from, is that it seems like law enforcement didn't fully believe the couple's account of the events and the attacker. In fact, they publicly said that they believed that the couple that was attacked, Jimmy and Mary Jean, knew the identity of the attacker and were covering for him.

Captain (32:24)

That's odd.

Nick (32:26)

Yes. That's a whole lot of crazy right there. So let's try to un. To unpack it. Let's try to get into this bundle of crazy and unbundle it.

Captain (32:35)

A guy cracks my skull open, man, I'm covering for him.

Nick (32:41)

Well, okay, so part of this does make sense once we get some more of the facts. Both Jimmy and Mary are married. Not to each other. Ooh. So from my understanding. Well, from my understanding, they are both well along their way into getting a separation, a legal separation. I don't think that they were doing anything behind anyone's back, but that doesn't mean that they wouldn't be upsetting someone or aggravating somebody, maybe to the point where there would be a threat or even an attack.

Captain (33:13)

Well, not all separations are amicable. Maybe Jimmy's spouse is upset. Maybe her spouse is upset. Who knows?

Nick (33:22)

I think that that was. It would appear to me, Captain, that that is the suspicions of law enforcement at the time. Right. They dig into the background of these two, and they're like, oh, these two are out fooling around. Mary Jean's husband, even though might soon to be the ex husband, he found them in this car together, and he attacked Jimmy. And I think part of that thinking, too, is that Mary Jean's injuries are far less severe than that of Jimmy's. So that probably plays into it a little bit for law enforcement. And guess what? It wouldn't be the first time that a member of law enforcement has been lied to. I firmly believe that both of these two are telling the absolute truth. I've looked at this a million ways, and I'm sitting here thinking, like, who cares if it was my ex who attacked my boyfriend? Even more reason to say that I knew who the guy was, Right? That's where my mind goes.

Captain (34:23)

To me, it's more. I could see if I was Law enforcement. I'm. I'm talking to these witnesses. They just been. And they're not really just witnesses. They're. They're survivors.

Nick (34:34)

Right.

Captain (34:35)

So there would be a part of me that's going, this is a vicious, violent, brutal attack. Is there a possibility they're not saying something. Not because they're covering, but because they're afraid that this son of a. Is going to come back after them and to finish the job. Because this attacker that shows up on this lover's lane might not know who these individuals are. But this is not a giant town.

Nick (35:03)

There's about 40,000 people back.

Captain (35:05)

That's not giant.

Nick (35:07)

Oh, no. It doesn't matter either. Their names are in every newspaper.

Captain (35:11)

Exactly.

Nick (35:12)

You don't have to know who they were when you attacked them. Their names are in every newspaper. Now, I think, though, and let's not stay on this too long, because we have a lot to get to here in this case. But can you imagine if you have. If you are in one room or you're at the hospital with jimmy, interviewing him, And I'm at the hospital and I'm interviewing Mary. We're in separate rooms, I presume. And then we meet up after we've talked to both of our victims, our survivors here, and. And you go, hey. He said, the guy's white. And I said, well, she said, the guy's black. Right. Then I feel like our. Like the wheels are going to start turning, and we're going to start trying to piece this thing together and sort out, well, why do we have that conflict? That's a major conflict in your witness statements. The reason for that conflict is simply they're terrified. They're afraid. The flashlights in their faces, and the guy had a freaking hood over his head.

Captain (36:09)

But also, you don't know what you don't know.

Nick (36:11)

That was a lover's lane attack. And as we said, thankfully, Jimmy Hollis, age 25, and his girlfriend, Mary Jean Larae, 19, parked on a secluded stretch of road after a movie. They survived. Now, in the wake of the traumatic attack, Mary Jean, her attempts to sleep are routinely interrupted by horrible nightmares. She was afraid, just like you had suspected here, captain. She was afraid that the phantom attacker would seek her out. And I saw some reports stating that she left. Reports of her leaving texarkana to go for an extended stay with relatives in the state of Oklahoma. So she left the state. Now, just after one month, just one month after Mary and Jimmy were assaulted, the legend of the phantom killer began to take its ugly form. Jimmy hollis warned police Saying, quote, if you don't find him, he's going to kill someone. End quote. And unfortunately, Jimmy was right. Carlton Stowers writes in part, more than a half century later, that event is looked back on as the precursor of a nightmare that would long terrorize this quiet East Texas railroad center. In the weeks following the attack on Hollis and Larae, five murders would occur in its rural shadows, prompting one of the most intense manhunts in the state's history. Twice, on moonlit nights, an unknown assailant interrupted young lovers, leaving them brutalized and dead. On another evening, a farmer sitting in his living room was shot through a nearby window. So let's go to March 24th. This is March 24th, 1946. The Phantom killed for the first time. We have a heavy rain that was falling early that Sunday morning when a motorist nearing the Texarkana city limits noticed an Oldsmobile sedan parked on a dirt lane near U.S. highway 67. So thinking that someone was just stuck in the mud, this vehicle stuck in the mud, the driver slowed and got close enough to see that two people were in the vehicle and it looked as if they might be asleep. So again, the date was March 24, 1946. And on this day, we, Richard Griffin, 29, and Pollyanne Moore, 17, were found dead in Griffin's car, parked on another lover's lane. Griffin, his body lay awkwardly slumped between the seats, pockets turned out as if robbed. Pollyann Moore lay in the back seat, but investigators suspected that she had been killed outside. So they actually suspect that both were probably killed outside of the vehicle, then.

Captain (39:15)

Placed back into the vehicle.

Nick (39:18)

The killer managed to place them back into the vehicle.

Captain (39:21)

That takes some strength.

Nick (39:23)

Both had been shot in the head with a.32 caliber Colt pistol. And this would end up being the same weapon that would be used in a later attack. The phantom had escalated from assault to murder, and now fear was spreading faster in Texarkana than the ink in the headlines. And again, it goes back to the idea in the first attack. If these two attacks are in fact connected, committed by the same attacker, what was his intent in the first attack? Was it his intent to commit double homicide? Because that's the result here. A little background here. Captain Richard Griffin was recently discharged from the Navy. Pollyanne Moore, a 17 year old employee at the Red River Arsenal. As said, they're both found dead. The way that they're positioned in the vehicle, I apologize, but it's reported all over the shop, especially with Richard Griffin's body. Some of the reports state that he's in the front seat. Some state that he's between the seats, and then others state that he's in the back seat. But with Pollyanne Moore, every account I could find, she's in the backseat. Griffin had been shot twice in the head. And some of this might be a bit repetitive, but it adds some context to the double murder scene and fleshes it out a bit. This says Moore's body lay face down on a blanket in the back seat, her open purse beside her, a ring signifying that she had recently graduated from Atlanta high school, which is. It's in Texas. It's still on her finger. Investigators noted a pool of blood about 20ft away from the vehicle. So investigators concluded that she had likely been killed there and her body placed back inside the car. And then again, some reports state that they believe both were killed outside of the vehicle and placed back inside the inside of the car.

Captain (41:21)

I wonder if the placement of the victims in the car matter. And what I mean by that is, like I said, to put a victim back into the car, that would take some strength. But if you're trying to set a scene or trying to stage the scene in some manner, you'd think that you'd put both of the victims back into the front seat. So that makes me wonder, did he just open up whatever door that they were closest to? And then again, that would make me question how strong this individual was.

Nick (41:52)

I don't know how the vehicle was positioned in relation to the. The road that the motorist that eventually finds them. Because it may this. The strategy there, captain, might lie in the idea of, if I'm going to take the time to put. Place them back in the vehicle, I'm doing that for very. For a very strong purpose. Right. I'm not just doing that just for. For the fun of it. I think it may have been an attempt to conceal the bodies and delay discovery of the bodies. And if. How many times do we drive down a road and we see a vehicle that's just sitting off to the side of the road, Nobody's in it. We just keep driving. I think in this time, yeah. In this scenario, I think that the. The gentleman that approached the vehicle only did so because he assumed due to the rain that was falling, that they were stuck in the mud. He was just attempting to help some people. And then when he gets close, realizes, oh, there's people in here. They look like they're sleeping. Wait a second. No, they're not. They've been shot and they're dead. Aside from several shell casings, from a.32 caliber pistol located near the murder scene, investigators found little evidence. They had stated that the heavy rainfall that continued throughout the day that the bodies were found, had washed away footprints that they were hoping to find, shoe prints that they were hoping to find, and tire tread as well. And it made. Made it all but impossible, they said, to locate any fingerprints on the exterior. On the exterior of the vehicle.

Captain (43:26)

But how do we know it's the same person?

Nick (43:28)

Well, that's a great question. I don't think that we can 100% say that it is because again, it goes back to intent. What was the intent of the first attacker? Was he spooked? Was he scared by the car that was passing by, as some of the reports say? And then he flees the scene. And who's to say what he would have done had he not been spooked? Or did he just leave like some of the reports state? Because some of the reports don't have a mention of the vehicle.

Captain (43:56)

But also, it seems like there was a lot of violence going on in this town anyways.

Nick (44:01)

Like. Like what?

Captain (44:03)

I think when we first covered this, it seems like this sleepy, know nothing town. It seems like there was criminal activity happening. Wasn't like this was like Mayberry.

Nick (44:16)

Yeah, I don't see any. Look, this would be. Certainly be an uptick in violent activity, especially of an extreme nature.

Captain (44:27)

And we don't know if it's the same attacker. We have this couple that was attacked, but they were both ending marriages, which was a way bigger deal back then. So that could incite violence towards the two individuals that were attacked. And then these two individuals, we don't know who they were connected to either. And who in their life did they possibly upset to incite violence against them?

Nick (44:58)

Well, of course. And that's how any good detective would look at any scene. You don't go in there going, hey, this. You don't arrive on the scene going, hey, this attack is probably connected to the one that. The call that I got a month earlier.

Captain (45:15)

Right.

Nick (45:16)

And. But.

Captain (45:18)

But it's very similar.

Nick (45:19)

Oh, it's. It's extremely similar.

Captain (45:22)

And like you said, it's not a major road, but it's. It's a. Some more traveled road than the Lovers Lane attack.

Nick (45:30)

Oh, absolutely. This is near. So this is near US Highway 67 when the. Where the vehicle was spotted. Now if you look at U.S. highway 67 on a map, especially an old map, this is kind of heading out of town. So it's. Look at it like it's the opposite of the first Attack. And what I mean is not the opposite of how things went down. It's opposite in where that it falls on a map. So if you have, if you have the edge of town, this is the opposite edge of town. Both, both on the edge of town. Both of them in these lover lanes as reported. But one thing too, and I, I want to kind of point this out, and I know this might be difficult for some folks to wrap their heads around with the. Regarding the statement from police about, oh, we don't fully believe their story from the survivor story from the first attack. I have a suspicion that that not only has to do with their marital status. That would make the most sense, but what also would make sense to me is if you're saying, hey, you got to keep in mind this is 1946, all right? That, that has to be in your mind the entire time you examine it, examine this case. It's 1946. News flash. It was a different world back then. Segregation was alive and in most cities and Texarkana was no different. And I think that it would have been wise because one thing that gets lost in the sauce in true crime stories is that the purpose of law enforcement, the police, is to protect and serve. What is the first part of that? Protect. Protect. Their. Their number one job is not to solve crimes. Yes, that's what they do. That's. But if you can protect and set up every scenario where a crime is never committed, you don't have to solve the crime. You don't have to solve the crime. Right. So their number one job is actually public protection, to protect the public and keep everybody in the public safe, preventing anything from happening.

Captain (47:39)

My number one job is public erection.

Nick (47:42)

But if you are keeping that in mind at all times, that my number one job is to protect the masses, it's beneficial to that goal that maybe, hey, I don't jump out in front of the public and go, guess what? 1946, Texarkana, a black guy attacked two young white people in a parked car. That's not going to go very well. That's not going to. That's going to create other problems. And further, I don't think that this guy was African American at all. If in fact, all these attacks and murders are connected.

Captain (48:17)

Well, Colonel, let's get into the third.

Nick (48:20)

Crime, the third in the series here, Captain, is on Sunday, April 14, 1946, we have Paul Martin. He's 16 years old. He was found dead on North Park Road, shot four times. His date from the previous night was Betty Jo Booker, age 15. She's discovered nearly two miles away, shot twice in the head and chest. She was actually shot in the heart and in the head. Betty Jo had been playing saxophone at a local dance the night before. So her plan here, Captain, was she was going to go to this dance and perform, play the saxophone, and Paul was going to meet her at the dance, and he was to be her ride home. So this obviously happened as planned. However, before the young couple could get to their destination, the someone, the phantom, had intercepted them, attacking, killing them, shooting them both. They discover Paul Martin's body. So his body's found around 6:30am that morning.

Captain (49:28)

Yeah.

Nick (49:28)

What we do know is Betty Jo Booker, her parents did report her missing, and they were out actively looking for their daughter that morning. And it was during that time that somebody else found Paul Martin's body. He's, you have to picture this. He's essentially laying on the side of the road. So he's found around 6:30am lying on the side of the northern edge of North Park Road, police say. The investigators say we found a bunch of blood on the other side of the road by a fence. And our victim here has been shot four times. Once in the back, once in the hand, the right hand.

Captain (50:13)

Right.

Nick (50:14)

Once in the back of the neck, and then through the nose, through the center of the face.

Captain (50:19)

So chances are he's not moving after being shot. So he's possibly moved by the killer.

Nick (50:27)

Well, that's, that's interesting to ponder here because I, I think we could have a couple of different scenarios. So we get that description of there being blood on the road by a fence on the other side of the road. But what I think we're not getting is the full description of the scene, because I think a couple things could have happened here. Either I think the, the shot, I want to know with the hand, if they were able to determine what position they think the hand was in when he was shot. So what I mean by that is you say he shot four times. You tell me the locations of these four shots. But a hand is one of those appendages that you could, you could be, you could place it up as kind of to block yourself, to shield yourself. Could, could the shot to the face had simply. Was he trying to cover his face and he was shot in the hand, through the hand. I want to know was that a through and through shot with the hand? We don't get that description, but what we do get is that he shot. Also shot in the back and the back of the neck. So it could be he's facing his attacker. When he's first shot. The. The attacker thinks he's dead. And then now my victim starts to move, and I plug two in the back. Another scenario is he's gunned down from behind, shoots him in the face just for good measure. And then after the killer left the scene, this young man somehow had the strength to try to pull himself to safety, and he kind of dragged himself across the street. I think either could play out. And I think without more information, we don't know exactly what happened. The strange part of this particular double homicide is the locations of the bodies. Right. So in the last scene, we are told that police have a lot of reasons to believe that the two victims were killed outside of the car and then placed into the car for whatever reason. Right.

Captain (52:25)

So victims were moved.

Nick (52:27)

You know what, Think about this, though. What does our attacker do? In the first case, he commands the two folks that are in the vehicle to get out of the vehicle.

Captain (52:38)

Yeah.

Nick (52:40)

In this. In the second attack, whether connected or not, what happens? The victims are believed to have been killed outside of the car and then placed back in. Now, the blanket, with there being a blanket, that throws a whole other wrinkle in it because I. I kept examining this and going, well, no shit. He commanded them to get out of the car, decided to shoot them outside of the car, and then places them back in the vehicle for whatever reason. But the blanket being involved. I wonder if in the second scene, if the attacker arrives on the scene and finds them outside of the car, he didn't have to command them to get out. They're out on a blanket fooling around.

Captain (53:19)

Yeah, because some cards are hard to.

Nick (53:21)

Fool around in, but not blankets, my friend.

Captain (53:24)

Get on that blanket. It's easy to touch the bathing suit areas.

Nick (53:29)

It's a. It's a magic carpet ride. So he places him back in the car to conceal the bodies. This is a completely different scene. We have a victim lying on the side of the road, and then we have the other victim who's found a great distance away. A mile and a half to two miles, depending on what reports you read. But also the victim, Paul Martin, his vehicle's found in a completely different location.

Captain (53:56)

But it's the girl sexually assaulted.

Nick (53:59)

Well, try to follow me on this. So the young couple's driving home. We know that. What we do know that happened is Paul Martin successfully picked up Betty Joe Booker at the dance. And we can assume that they were in route to either go park somewhere. But being as late as it was, they might have Been in route to. To go home and decided I'm guessing they probably stopped for a bit and that's when the killer encountered them. So Paul Martin's body's found around 6:30am later that morning we have Betty Joe Booker's body is found by a second search party. This is just before noon. So at 11:30am Approximately two miles from where Martin's body was found. And her body, it's reported, was behind a tree. She's lying on her back fully clothed and in fact the killer had put her coat or at least buttoned the coat up that she was wearing. She had been shot twice. Once in the chest, once in the face, as we said, heart and face. Paul Martin's car was found about 3 miles away from Betty Jo Booker's body. She and a mile and a half away from Paul Martin's body. The vehicle was parked outside of Spring Lake park with the keys still in the ignition. I, I've tried to make heads or tails of this. The best I could come up with is today and I'm assuming it's very similar back in 1946. That park is surrounded by neighborhoods. Would it be so easy for me to drop the vehicle there and walk to my home? Police said that they couldn't figure out who was shot first, who was killed first. They did say this is the one where we do get confirmation when we have no survivor that there was a sexual assault. Investigators did openly say that they believed that Betty Jo Berkler had been sexually assaulted. I say that because in the second case, in the first double homicide, they weren't real open about if there a rape had occurred. Now that might be that they do not know. So the, the first double homicide, they're. They're not firm on their statements of if a sexual assault had occurred in that one. Now I. That could be for multiple reasons. As I was saying, it could be because either they don't know, they can't confirm it 100% or two, it's simply holdback information that they don't want to put that out there in case they have to interrogate someone or they get a confession. But this movement with the vehicle in the bodies here, we don't see this in the other scenes. I've heard people come up with great, and I want to be clear here. I think a lot of the theories I've heard on why the bodies were found, where they were found and the vehicle found elsewhere, I've heard great theories on that. I've heard theories to suggest that maybe he was hunting, that the killer was hunting and wanted to hunt Betty Jo Booker down. Like in the first attack where Mary Jean believed that she, she was told to run and then the guy tracks her down. But I don't know that Booker ran this distance. I think whatever happened to Paul Martin happened first. Just like telling Jimmy Hollis to take off his goddamn britches. I think that the attacker took out Paul Martin first, either killing him or believing that he left him dead and then he was going to do whatever he was going to do to the female victim.

Captain (57:55)

Well, you have to eliminate the threat first and, but also all these old cases of lovers lane and maybe there's just not as many lovers laying anymore. But, or maybe there's just so much.

Nick (58:10)

Now the kids are smoking dope.

Captain (58:13)

Well, they're smoking dope and you know, jerking off.

Nick (58:16)

They're parking. They're parking. They're. No, they're parking to smoke that. But, but no, I think you're onto something here that with, with, especially with the first attack, if you're aware of these lovers lanes or this particular lovers lane and you're looking for some kind of sexually motivated homicide or attack, right? And you're hoping to find a young woman to victimize, well, you're going to go there. I mean that's one of. That's going to be a place where you would go, you know what, probably on a Friday or Saturday night I might be able to find someone. And that's another thing that's interesting about this case with the phantom killer. All of these attacks take place on a weekend. Be it a Friday night, Saturday night, Sunday. They all take place on a weekend.

Captain (59:12)

The devil's want to get you in your sleep. Want to thank everybody for joining us here in the garage. Stick around for part two.

Nick (59:26)

And until then, be good, be kind and don't lift.

Captain (59:35)

Sa.

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