Thinking Sideways: Texarkana Moonlight Murders

all of the legwork on this thing. They'll also notice if you had listened to what we're calling the last twenty six episodes before and you're re listening now, the music and sound effects are gone. Yes, we've we've gone back to straight audio, so be warned. We sound a little different today than we do in what you're about to listen to. Yeah, bye bye, Hi there, thanks for

joining the show again. This is Thinking Sideways the podcast, and I am Steve as always, I'm joined by Joe Hello and Devin Hi, and we who decided to give you a little bit of a holiday extrass. Since it is Halloween. We're gonna pull around the campfire. We're gonna tell a creepy story. Yeah, pretty excited. We don't usually do this, No, now, this one's a little little out of our ballpark. But that's okay, So let's let's well, actually, before we get into the show, I do want to

say something for listeners. Uh, this story, ladies and gentlemen that we're gonna go into has some pretty graphic details in it, and it's got a lot of violence in it. So you're not into that thing, or you're gonna be listening to the show and there's some some kids around or younger folks, you might want to just skip this show because it's probably not the style that you want to go into. Okay, Well, there to night we are going to talk about what is referred to as the

tech Sarcanna Moonlight Murders Texarcana. Yeah, didn't they base a movie on that town that in fear? I think it's that dreaded sundown. Yeah, have you seen that? No? I haven't. Actually I haven't either. I've just I've been through tex Arcana on a train and I can tell you that when you stop at what seems to be the train station and then go the building seems to transition into

a jail. So I don't know if that's real or not, but in my mind, tex Arcana is the place where the train station is the same building as the jail. Good thing. Okay, ladies and gentlemen, So here's the story.

Um and spring at six or a series of fairly grizzly murders were committed, most about three or four weeks apart, and eventually put the whole town of Texarcana into a tremendous state of terror, both people buying guns and nailing their windows shut and buying dolber buying Doberman pinchers to guard the house. The slayer was never caught. He was eventually nicknamed the Phantom Killer. Alternatively, he was called the

Phantom Slayer. It's unknown why he killed these people, and it's unknown if you committed other murders besides this or what. It's all just a big mystery because they never caught the killer. Yeah, that's the scary part, one of the scary parts of the many scary parts of this very scary story. It's possibly you and and sometimes it's in a series of crimes like this, the killer does get caught, but for another crime. It might very well be that this guy went away for something else, and that's why

the murders stopped that's a possibility. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Yeah yeah, So let's uh, let's talk about the attacks. The first attack took place on February twenty second, around midnight. The first victims were Jimmy Hollis, who was twenty four, and his girl friend Mary Jean Larry. Now, what do you do when you're in a small town and you want to get away? They were parked out on a lover's lane. They were gonna have us included

evening together. They've been there about ten minutes when suddenly somebody knocked on the window. Jimmy looked up and he thought it was going to be a cop, but instead he saw a guy wearing a white hood pointing a gun in his face, and he said, felly, you got me mixed up with someone else. You've got the wrong man. I gotta say, I gotta say, that's that's pretty cool

demeanor on his part. If I say somebody like, you know, with a gun in a white hood, and I wouldn't be saying, oh, you got me mixed up with somebody else. I'd be handing my wallet or whatever. Well that's the first thing you would think. But this, uh, this the suspect had what we now are pretty sure is a thirty two caliber handgun pointing at him, and he said, I don't want to kill you, fellows to do what

I say. He then proceeded to order them both to get out of the car, and the quote, which was taken from the police report, says, take off your bleeping bridges, at which point his girlfriend Mary Jean said, basically, please do what he says. Just do what he says. So he goes. He goes ahead, and he takes off his pants. But while he's bent over taking off his pants, he gets clubbed in the head. He gets hit so hard, the noises so loud that his girlfriend Mary thinks that

he's actually been shot. So he got hit with that much force, and it turned out it turned out that it was actually a skull cracking. Yes, it was his skull cracking. That's that's really hard. Apparently a skull is cracked in three places. Yeah, which not not something I'd want to have happened. So what happens here is our our assailant then of course pulls his wallet out, Jimmy's wallet out, and goes through and discovers he doesn't have

any money. And gets a little upset and starts talking to Mary and is upset about and says, no, I'm sorry he has no money, at which point he's sure that she has a purse and she says, well, no, I don't have a purse, and he doesn't believe her. He thinks that she's lying to him. He gets so angry he hits her and knocks her to the ground, and she's on the ground. She starts to get up,

and he says something along the lines of run. She starts to run away from him towards the ditch that's on the side of the road and tell HER's, no, don't run that way, run down the road. So of course she turns around. She starts running down the road. He runs and catches up with her and knocks her down again, and he says, why are you running? She says, the logical thing, because you told me to, at which

point he starts telling her that. He starts saying she's a liar and that he's gonna kill her, and he knocks her down again, and this is where the gorries parts start happening, because he sexually assault her with his gun. Not a lot of details are there, as to exactly what happened, and I don't think any of us want to know exactly what happened. But she used the guns of unsafe. It's it does and there's there's multiple puns there,

but we're not going to go there today. After he had finished that, he started to go back towards Jimmy, if I understand correctly, at which point she stood up and she ran away again. This time she was able to get to a house and knock on the door and get the people who were home to wake up, tell them what was happening, and call the police. Now, didn't the um police not believe her at first that

she didn't know who it was that did it? Yes, the police, and her statements that she's given years, had given years after the fact, said she didn't understand why the police were continually telling her, no, you know the assailant, you know who it was, which, let's be honest, nothing like this has happened in the town, and they're pretty sure it's probably somebody that they know. It's probably a

rendezvous gone bad, and she's trying to protect them. That's what I would presume the cops are thinking that they haven't obviously no idea what's going to come down doesn't doesn't necessarily make a lot of sense. So because if she wants to protect him, that she wouldn't go to the cops to begin with, you're right, right, but people do things in the heat of the moment. She might have changed her mind. But regardless, the cops show up and they find Jimmy and he's obviously not doing so well,

and they take him to the hospital. But they both survived the attack, and they're able to give accounts of it to the police, and they are able to give what end up being very different accounts in terms of what their attacker looked like, because if you remember, I said, he had a sack over his head, so we had eye holes cut out at a mouth hole cutouts, and

that was it. And I believe here it is. So Jimmy believed that it was quote unquote a dark tanned white man, whereas Mary believed it was a light skinned quote unquote negro because of the way he pronounced the curse words he growled. But we don't know which it was. They never agreed on what it was, and so it didn't help the case at all. Did they agree on anything else? About his physical appearance. They both said that he was approximately six ft tall, and that's kind of

where it ends. And that's the hard part is with the records. It's a little difficult because original records are hard to get hold of anymore. But that's that's the best we've got out of their descriptions. Essentially, you're the

simplest version that I should say. So. The next attack happened about four weeks later on March um and Richard Griffin he was twenty nine, and his girlfriend of six weeks, Polly Anne Moore, who was seventeen, were found dead in Richard's car between like eight thirty or nine UM in the morning by a driver that was passing by, and the driver stated that he originally thought that they were asleep in the car, but as soon as he walked up to it realized, oh no, they're not asleep, they're dead.

So he called the police and they came out. Richard was found in between the seats on his knees with his head resting on his hands, um in his pocket pockets had been turned out so like he had been robbed. It looks like a robbery. And Paully was found sprawled face down in the back seat. Griffin had been shot twice and Polly had been shot once. Both of them had been shot in the back of the head. Polly's purse was next to her in the back seat, however,

so maybe it wasn't actually robbery. That's one of the things they found was a section of ground about twenty ft from the car that was saturated in dry blood. Blood was spattered throughout the vehicle and um mrs gross congealed blood was found flowing through the bottom of the door off of the dashboard a lot of luck. Yeah, there was a blanket also found in the car, and it had thirty two cartridge shells that were believed to be shot from the same kind of gun used in

the first crime. There inside of the blanket. There was no gun ever found, so it couldn't be ruled a murder suicide. And the theory was that the assailant had wrapped the gun in the blanket and shot it as a sort of muffler because those cartridges were found inside of the blanket, so and it had rained overnight, so they couldn't find any kind of footprints or anything like that. Additionally,

I think you know, in my mind. If you think of a woman sprawled face down in the backseat of a car and it's traced to the crime that had happened previously. I think there was probably some kind of sexual assault play that had happened, except her body was taken and they had the examiners examine it not for rape, but like cut her open and do that kind of autopsy. Yeah, before or they could ever do any kind of rape anything.

So we don't actually know if she was actually assalted or not because then they like screw up and cary your body away to the mortuary, and she was embalmed and all that stuff. Yeah, that's the second murder, a lot of the third one. So attack. Yeah, So three weeks go by and nobody gets killed. Everybody's starting to think, hey, everything's all right, and then I guess what, two more

people get killed. So this happened that The victims were Paul Martin and Betty Joe Booker on Saturday night, April thirteen. Betty Joe Booker did I say? She was fifteen PM. So she was playing her saxophone in a band that she played with in a bar, and she got away with it because you know, her parents wrote her a note or something like that. But but she played with this band on a regular basis and they finished up about one thirty am and her friend Paul Martin, who

was sixteen. Childhood friend was to pick her up and take her home. So at some point after one thirty am and before six thirty am, when Paul's body was found, they were killed by apparently a thirty two automatic. His body was found about six thirty am. It was lying on his left side on the side of the North Park Road, found a little bit further down on the

other side of the road by offence. He'd been shot four times, once through the nose, once to the ribs, one in the right hand, and a fourth through the back of the neck and it exited the front of his head. That is a lot of shots, a lot of times. Yeah, yeah, a lot of a lot of spray in there. I'm not sure exactly what was going on. I mean, And once you're the hand almost seems as if it's a defensive wound. Somebody points a gun and you try to move and you've got your hands up,

you're likely to get shot in the hands. So that to me would almost explain that he was in some prone position but trying to get away when shot through the nose to the left of Yeah, it's three of

these wounds. I mean, they don't even though they're in this particular order, that doesn't mean that the wounds actually occurred in the three of them were in the back, I said, Well, the right hand, I don't say, but me and so two and probably three were in the back, which you know, and maybe the kid that he was running away, And so that's why I explain to see low accuracy of the shots. And then probably the q D grad one through the face was the last one,

but I don't know speculation. So anyway, that's what's going on with his body. Her body was nowhere to be found, so search parties were organized and it was found about eleven thirty am that day, about two miles away. He was lying his back fully closed with a button overcoat. She'd been shot twice, once in the ribs and once in the face. The weapon is apparently the same at

thirty two automatic. Uh. Some people say that they believe it was a thirty two automatic cold pistol, And there's it's possible you can identify from the marketings on the cartridge. You know what kind of a gun it actually is, or it might be somebody just sort of put that little tidbit in there. But yeah, thirty two. Back in those days, thirty two is actually a pretty popular round. It's not that popular these days. It's considered kind of marginal.

Still obviously pretty good at killing people. Unfortunate following Day's newspaper had reports about it. They claimed the bodies were not abuse that later rumors claimed that Betty had been raped. Well, so that's that's one of the things, right is this nineteen forties and they're not big on reporting sexual So no, you don't talk about this. This is one of those things that we just pushed into the car. Even post mortem. Yeah,

we don't. We don't discuss that that didn't happen. Now, Joe, she was in the band and if I remember writing in reading she she had her was it a saxophone that she had? Yeah, she played the saxophone And when they found her, they did not find her saxophone and it was thought perhaps had been taken by the attacker somebody. The band leader did report that she had had her saxople with hery when she left, and since it was nowhere to be found. It wasn't found in Paul's car.

His car was by by the way I found a few miles away, and the saxophone was not there, and so that was considered to be a possible clue. I thought, well, if we find a guy with the saxophone, obviously he's our killer and won't give him the chair. Yes, sax well was found about six months later. It was found in Bush's pretty close to where her body had been found,

so it was not actually taken. It was probably just tossed. Yeah, it's it's it's kind of unfortunate really that they didn't find it that at that time because they had the police actually wasted quite a bit of resources trying to find that sax and whoever had that sex. Yeah. Well, unfortunately, we've got another murder that we're going to talk about in the same series. And yeah, I know. This one happened on Friday May three, sometime before nine o'clock in

the evening. There was a local farmer welder named Virgil sat Or Starks. Virgil Starks come home. He had a long day, his back was store, so he had his wife, you know, give him a heating pad and he sat down in a chair to listen to the radio and and go through the newspaper and relaxed, and his wife

went and laid down in the bedroom. At which point, and this is again we don't have the exact times, but summer before nine o'clock, someone came up to the kitchen window and shot him through the window twice in the back of the head. His wife reported not hearing the shots, but actually hearing the sound of breaking glass, at which point she thought her husband had broken something.

She came out to see what the noise was, at which point she saw that her husband was dead, and she instantly turned around and went to run for the phone. You've got to remember, ladies and gentlemen, this is the nineteen forties, and telephones then weren't like they are today. They had a wall crank phone. It was probably a

party line too, it probably was. So she ran to the phone, and she reported that she got two cranks on the phone, and how these phones were correct me if I'm wrong here, Joe, is that you take multiple cranks to get to the operator to come through. Is that? I have no idea, I don't know, But she she got two cranks on the phone to try to get someone to come on the line. The operator. The assailant,

who was still outside the window, shot her twice. And this woman is tough, because to survive what we're gonna go through, you've got to be a really tough bird. Um. She was shot from behind twice. One bullet entered her right cheek and exited behind her left ear, and the other went in her lower jaw, below her lip and splintered her teeth and her jaw before it lodged in just below her tongue. That is not a nice way

to be shot. Sound unpleasant, She she felt obviously fell down, but she managed to get back up, and she ran to get a pistol from the living room. But she's bleeding so profusely. She's blinded by the amount of blood

that's coming out. Um. She she heard the killer tearing loose the screen on her back porch, and you know, obviously enough she's figured she's gonna get killed, so she starts to run towards the front of the house to try to leave a note, which and I read that account, I was I was a little puzzled by that, because if you can see well enough to write a note you can see well enough to find I don't understand that, and again in that state of mind, who yeah um.

At this point, the killer runs around to the back of the house, makes his way up the porch steps and into the side screen porch and their back screen, and it's trying to come through a window. She can hear him trying to come to basically tearing through the screen, metal screen window, trying to get in. Mrs Starks turns around.

She she runs through the house, down a hallway out of bedroom and makes her way out the door on the opposite side of the house, basically runs across the street and eventually is able to go to a house and get family. I believe it's her her brother and sister in law who lived across the street. Across the street. Oh, you're right, they weren't home, And so then she had to go down to the next house down, which is like fifty yards away, and she's barefoot in her nightgown.

The term they used leaving a literal river. She gets to these people house, they opened the door, she says, Virgil's dead, and she collapses. She eventually came to as they were taking to the hospital. One side note this

I said, this lady was tough. This lady was super tough because as they were taking her to the hospital, because somebody just drove her to the hospital and her, like we said, teeth falling out, she pulled out one of her teeth that had a goals filling and gave to the man driving the car as payment to take. That's pretty cool, actually, just just for our for our viewers knowledge. She eventually recovered from the wounds and wind up remarrying and leaving to be a pretty ripe old age. Yeah.

I mean, she she was lucky she survived. The investigators, as Devon had said, came to the house and they found a trail of blood and scattered teeth throughout the house. The lead investigator on this case at the second murder an noown through this whole time, is a Texas ranger by the name of Gonzalez. And Gonzalez walked through the house and he said, it's beyond me why she didn't bleed to death. That's a lot of blood. When the

cops says, how did you not bleed today? Yeah, by the way, just as in the side, by the way, by this by this point in time, the town was flooded with state police, Texas rangers, County County cops, you know everybody. Yeah, yeah, law enforcement was thick in this town. And how that how this guy, and that might explain why he stopped committing to murders. Maybe the figures there's so many much, so many cops. Every other car there rose a cop car. So maybe that's why I quit

moved on. Well, here's here's what we do know is that when they checked out the house, there were only two bullet holes in the window where Virgil was shot from, so they're pretty sure that a was an automatic weapon and be after shooting Virgil, the assailant had to wait, had to have waited there for his wife to come see what was going on before shooting her. So that's

pretty cold blooded right there. That's kind of brutal. Yeah, well, it's really it's pretty calculated to right because Bill then because you would assume that she would have been out of the room for a little while. It's not like he just walked by and I was like, Oh, there's a dude I could kill. You knew there were two people in the house. He obviously had a preference for assaulting two people. At a time. Yeah, which is a

little weird. But here's here's some clues. So we finally get some pretty what seemed like pretty decent clues at this murder. First off, is that the caliberl of bullets had changed. Originally it was a thirty two. These murders were committed with a twenty two. Uh, and they were actually though they believe it came out of an automatic handgun, they were dear rifle twenty two rounds, which was a little strange. I would I would suspect that they were

fired from a rifle because she reported not hearing any gunshots. Yes, and twenty two is make a loud crack coming out of a short barrel out of a rifle barrel of twenty two? Is it really quiet? Yeah? So yeah, it

probably was a rifle. Yeah. Well yeah, and we don't know. Um. Underneath the window though they did find a flashlight that had been dropped, and in the mud underneath the window, and in the blood that was trailed through the house, they found owned footprints partial prints of a shoe that was somewhere between a size nine and a half and

ten and a half. Dude, if that guy was if it was the guy that they were the first attack was describing he was six ft tall with a like a nine and a half foot that's pretty pretty short, strange proportion. There were evidently some fingerprints in the house, but they could never get a good fingerprints, so they could never use anything to match. They were always smudged

and unusable. Yeah. Well, no, The only other thing that I've got here is that early Saturday morning, the you know, the police did bring in bloodhounds, and the bloodhounds did track two different trails from the house, but they both led to the freeway and or the highway, I should say the local highway, and then the scent was gone. So obviously a car car was parked there and whoever it was, got in their car and drove away and

that was the end of it. I wonder what the other trail was, No, it was two trump right, I'm guessing it's two trails one to um. Yeah. But that's all there is, and that's all the clues that we've got in terms of physical evidence. Yeah, and that and that was pretty much it for murders around there for a while. But uh yeah, so hard hard to say what happened. If the guy just decided to move on and you know, quit while it quit while the girl was good, or maybe he got picked up and thrown

in jail and that's why they stopped. Yeah, and and there there was a lot of suspects and a lot of weird stuff. But we we I think we need to step back because we've just talked about three or six brutal or five brutal it's five people who died far brutal attacks, next victims, five of whom died. So this is a word problem, ladies and gentlemen. But a

lot of people died. And if you can imagine living in a town where for two and a half months this is happening, you can imagine that there's some panic. Apparently it's not this is actually not even Apparently. Gun sales were up tremendously. The investigation kind of like launched pretty immediately after, especially after that first attack, well, the first murder, I guess, not the first attack, but the

first murder. You know a lot of parents were saying, you know, to their kids, don't be out late all that. But after the second double murder, the whole city basically shut down. They were enforcing curfews on businesses. There was just like this hysteria that snowballed out of out of control, especially after this last the Starks attacked. Right, this is one of the things I thought. It was a little

a little funny. It was like the day so apparently the day after Virginal Starks was murdered, residents started buying firearms and locks, and stores were soon sold out of guns and ammunition locks. And I'm like, really, why do you wait until why do you wait this long to start go out and buy a gun after maybe the second murder. I think I'm gonna go buy myself a

little thirty eight or something like that. Yeah, I don't know. Um, you know, it's things like you know, Texarcan is pretty small, uh, and it was pretty usual for people to leave all of their windows open at night or their doors unlocked or anything like that, and that, you know, immediately stopped as soon as the second murder happened. You know, people were just locking their doors. People are setting up traps, is that right? Yeah, Well, people were setting off homemade

alarm or setting up homemade alarm systems. And the people were so we're so on edge that the cops if they came up to someone's house. They had to have the flashing lights on their sirens too, Yeah, their sirens on, yeah, exactly, so they could get so they didn't get shot by someone who was panicked. There's there's actually a story of a bar owner who shot one of his own patrons who was in the bar looking for beer. Now I don't know what he was doing in there looking for beer.

I'm guessing it wasn't exactly during operating hours or he closed early, but he shot one of his patt because he was just so freaked out. Yeah, I mean, you know, things like want ads for guard dogs were popping up everywhere. You know, people other people were selling their guard dogs. I don't know why you would sell your guard dog. I guess because you could probably get like a lot of money for us, probably guard you're probably on a lot of guns, or you have like a couple of them, right,

you know. But it was, you know, things like uh, there are stories of one woman set up a table leaning against the door with a pot full of nails that would spill over into tin trays if the door was opened. One woman um actually attacked her husband because he came in late um and she thought he was the phantom murderer. Um. Lots of people were checking into hotels. Husbands if they had to go out of town, would check their whole families and hotels for just like ever.

People were leaving their all of their lights on during the day because they were scared of the shadows during the day. Well, I mean, this is not this is not the kind of thing that people are used to dealing with in this that day and age, and we were talking to mid fourties. This is not what happened. Yeah, I mean these days serial killings, it's just a routine thing. Like yeah, definitely a little out of the ordinary for these folks. But high schoolers still went out and parked

on lonely little lovers lanes and stuff. Although usually they armed themselves, this time, you know, they weren't that stupid, So they were kind of doing like a teen slew thing. Yeah, I kind of like that, Yeah, the early Scooby Doo. Yeah. Yeah.

So one night and and in fact, one night, a couple of a state trooper and a county manu were at patrolling the road and they came to a park car and the sheriff got the sheriff's deputy got out and approached the car, and then I identified himself and it says, aren't you scared to be parked out here at night? And the girl says, you're the one I would be scared. Mr. It's a good thing you told me who you are. And that's the turns actually got

a twenty five caliber pistol pointed at him. Yeah, yeah, well, I'm gonna go out parking Lover's Land. I'm gonna be well armed or something like that. Yeah, yeah, so um. And there was another incident where a high schooler named C. J. Lauderdale was following a city bus because he had seen somebody parking his car and then get on this bus. He thought that was suspicious, so he started, that's that's

a little suspicious. So he's following the bus and then, for some reason, I don't know why, that attracted the attention of the attention of the Texarkana Police Deparvery, but they started chasing him, and they chased him for like three miles before they finally caught up. And then he explained that, you know, they were in an unmarked police car and so he wasn't about to pull over for them because he thought that, Yeah, it was. It was

just yeah, people were paranoid all the way around. Uh, and so at that at that point, the local police chief started warning teenage what he quote called teenage sluice to say, to tell him not to try to take their law in the lot of their own hands, and not to try to solve these murders themselves. Which is funny because the same Gonzales are like police here exactly. He actually started recruiting teenagers. Some of them were like

sons and daughters of his own rangers Texas employees. It's a good idea, idea, yeah, Well, he started recruiting them to be decoys, like not even to like chase after suspicious people, but to just park their cars and like pretend to be making out in the car, hoping that the phantom would just like walk by or appear. I don't really know what they thought was going to happen.

Who were these decoys, mostly teenagers, and then some of them they ended up They started these teenagers at first, and then they said, well, actually it was a kind of bad idea. So they started using their own Texas Rangers who would sit in the car either with each other or sometimes with a mannequin. I guess. I guess they tried each other first, but then they know they're making out and got a little uncomfortable, park their car like in behind a bush like douper, sneaky like, and

wait for the phantom murderer to come along. And obviously he never did. Because clearly smarter than that, I think, you know, if you learn anything already, he's clearly smarter than that. Yeah, Gonzalez, are you know hero Texas ranger? He and his officers, he said, we're dealing with and I quote a shrewd criminal who had left no stone unturned to conceal his identity and activities. I just like that. I feel like that comes from like this dude didn't

fall for our trick. Yeah, well, obviously the guy is is wise to well, maybe I should check out what I'm dealing with since I've caused so much heat. It is basically what it comes down to you. But of course, you know they're trying to set up a profile of

this guy. They're trying to figure it out. And this is where the nineteen forties logic gets a little weird to me, because they say, and again, this is Gonzalez, he says that the murderer was a cunning individual who would go to all legs to avoid apprehension, but was also dealing with our suffering from sex mania. Yeah. I mean again, here's another quote. I believe that a sex pervert is responsible. It seems like there's a sexual aspect and that's a little weird, but it's just a a

sex mania is a weird way to put it. You know, I don't know of a lot of murders that we hear about today where it's a person kills one and then has rapes another and then kills that person and progressively does that. That sounds like some other compulsion, some other weird mental state to be. And then again, this is the nineteen forties. They don't have all of the forensics that we have now. And it just means, I mean, they call it now, they call it a sexually violent predator. Yeah,

and now. And also, you know, there's no there's you know, we don't really have any evidence of proof that besides the person who was Mary Jean, who was violated with pistol in the first incident, there's not it's not really much evidence that the other two were raped. Well though there was because it wasn't let's see it was the third girl. Yes, there was evidence of sexual assault on

her immediately because yeah, they held on to it. They just didn't put it out basically, And again it's one of those things in the forties you protect the family's on or you just don't put in the newspaper and she was raped because that's just not what you do.

But you know, Okay, so we've gone an the investigation and we've gone into some of the stuff that's going on, and then let's go ahead and let's talk about who they were trying to get to pin the murders on, because the police obviously want to catch somebody, and they went through about four hundred suspects. They are like, they arrested four hundred people. They investigated four hundred suspects, which I mean, which I presumed to believe means brought in

for questioning as suspects. And the Jimmy Hollis and Mary Larry case, Uh, no suspects were apprehended. I think probably because the police didn't necessarily believe that. Yeah, I get the impression they weren't taking it seriously. They were, Yeah, and you know, they had been assaulted, but they weren't dead. They had been assaulted, as his skull was cracked at three places. Yeah, it's something you know. So, but for

Richard Griffin and Polly Moore. Um, over two hundred people were questioned, uh and at least two hundred false tips and leads were checked. So like, it was a pretty extensive investigation that they did. People were basically calling in anything they saw that they thought related. Yeah, because you know, they were clearly linked to this assault that had happened before, and so people were starting to take it kind of seriously. Um.

Three suspects were taken into custody because they had bloody clothing. UM. Two of them were released after officers received good alibis. One of them was held in Texas for further investigation, but was later freed from suspicion. Okay, So in the Martin and Booker case, you remember that was the one involving the saxophone sixteen and fifteen years old. Uh, there was a taxi driver who was a suspect because his cab was seen in the vicinity of the crime scene.

Obviously that lead nowhere, they received the lead from the band leader of the band that she was in that she had had her saxophone with her and so that at that excited a lot of interest with the police. The saxophone. Again, it's too bad they didn't search the woods around the body a little more carefully and find the saxophone. That wouldn't have wasted so much time. So the guy was arrested in Corpus Christi, Texas or trying

to sell a saxophone in a music store. He walked in without an instrument and as a salesperson if they wanted to buy an Alto Bundy saxophone anyway, well he didn't. He didn't what was because he didn't have it. He didn't have it, And she says, you know, theoretically, would you like to buy a saxophone? And the clerk claimed that the nancy nervous, the man left. When the manager was summoned, they contacted the police and he was arrested two days later the Waterfront Hotel after purchasing a forty

five revolver from a pawn shop. That's that's not suspicious, but you know it's not really. I mean, obviously the real killer if he was going to purchase something from a pawnshop, it would be a thirty two automatic. Of course, Yeah, so she was. He was identified by the sales girls the same man who tried to sell the saxophone. They didn't find any saxophone in his possession, although in this hotel room they found a bag of bloody clothing. Uh. He claimed that the blood was from a cut he

received in his forehead in the bar fight. Uh. They grilled him for several days. Man, apparently everything he everything he told him was checked out and it was all true. So the police at the end decided that they really couldn't hold a guy. They really they had no case, I mean, trying to operating to sell somebody a saxophone is you know. And and as it turns out in the answers, we know the saxophone was later found in

the shrubbery near her body. You obviously a bit of a red guy might have been a bit, a bit of a questionable character, but obviously he had nothing to do with the murder, right And and you know, in the murder of Virginal Starts and the attack on his wife, several people were found in the vicinity of their home and they were all stopped and questioned. Twelve people were detained. Nine of them were basically immediately released, and then the

same thing the remaining three. Their alibis checked out and they were released as well. They had some people that were obviously more persons of interests than others. You know, a lot of people washed out in the beginning of their you know, their alibi checked out very clearly. They didn't seem to actually, you know, fit any kind of profile. But there were some really interesting ones, one of which

was a German prisoner of war suspect. So on May eight, it was announced that an escaped German prisoner of war was considered a suspect um and he was hunted as a matter of routine. He was described as a twenty four year old weighing one and eighty seven pounds with brown hair and blue eyes. Uh. He stole a car and then attempted to buy ammunition in lots of places in Oklahoma. So the night before his apprehension on May seven, a black man named Herbert Thomas was flagged down by

a hitchhiker. The man said that he needed a ride because his mother was seriously ill, and offered five dollars. Thomas fell for The SOB story basically you know, he said, I wouldn't normally pick someone up, but he told a

really sad story. When they got close to the place that the hitchhiker said he was going, the hitchhiker pulled out a pistol and told Thomas to keep driving or he would kill him like the five people he killed in tech Sarcana, mentioning Paul Martin and Betty Joe Booker by name, which would have been suspicious except for you know, there's such a snowball fear it's everywhere. Yes, it's almost

an easy story, super easy. Yeah. He made Thomas stop in a small town and told him to drive back, and then if you followed him, he would trail him and kill him. He also told Thomas that he had planned to go back to tex Arcana to kill Martin's father, which is a little weird, a little weird because his

father was already dead, which was even weirder. Yeah, So the man stole the five, stole back the five dollars that he had given to Thomas, as well as an additional three dollars in that time, some substantially decent money in the couple of not even a couple of Yeah, but that's a good amount, um he. So Thomas drove back to Kilgore, the place that he was originally going, and immediately reported it. He was described as being about five eight and thirty pounds and about eight years old,

with red hair, and wore khaki trousers. On the same night, May seven, a local resident named Robert Atkinson spotted a peeping tom in his window. Atkinson grabbed a flashlight and pursued, but the man escaped. Um Atkinson got in his car and went looking for him. He caught the man he believed to be the peeping tom and put him under citizens arrest, but the man said, no, that wasn't me. So Atkins said, okay, I guess that wasn't you, and

let him go. Uh. He later heard about the story with Thomas and decided that he should probably tell the police. Um And described a man very very similar to what Thomas had described his hitchhiker looked like, and Gonzalez stated that quote, we don't believe the man who killed five people here in the past six weeks would boast about

his crimes and then let the negro go. It's not totally sure if he was the prisoner of war if what what necessarily happened truly circumstantial, and they're saying that he kind of vanished into thin air. Yeah, well, plus you know, and you know, talk is cheap. You know, anybody can reads the papers, can say, you know, I got killed all of them people in techs arcana, It would have an a timidating effect. There was another suspect. Obviously again didn't go anywhere this guy was. And well, okay,

maintense Tokya, Oklahoma. So this was not long after the last murders. A man walked up to a woman's house and opened her screen door. Asked this, asked the person living there, and it's just harmon, if you could have some turpentine, food and money. Now that's a puzzler. I really want some turpentines, some food, and some money. So she told the man that she had very little turpentine and no money your food. So then he grabbed her by the hair, dragged her out onto the porch, said

he might as well kill her. Said she had already killed three or four persons and he was going to rape her, And then he heard a horse galloping towards him and took off. So she took her child with her to a neighbor's house and called the police, and there was a neighborhood neighborhood searched the man, which included

twenty officers and in in about a hundred sixty civilians. Uh. She had described as five nine or ten, white, five years old, hundred fifty pounds, dark hair, and badly in need of a shade, carrying a five inch folding pocket knife, wearing gloves, faded blue short with khakis, an old, dirty, dark colored floppy hat. So they found a suspect that fit that description. He was thirty three years old, didn't

quite imagine all respects. He was also clean shaven. They decided to keep him in the jail for about three weeks and so his beard would grow back and then she could look at him again and decided if you picked the description. So but yeah, it turns out that they checked out his story. And you know, again talk is cheap, so it does not appear this, this is the lead against didn't didn't really pan out. It's kind of, you know, thinking about the amount of policeman hours that

went into investigating this whole thing. Yeah, yeah, I mean lots and lots of investigative time. Spent by multiple bureaus. Oh yeah, yeah, So there's another suspect. There a lot of suspects, a lot um. And this guy came forward on May. Um. He's twenty one years old. He was an ex Army Force B twenty four machine gunner. His name was Ralph Bauman, and he was in Los Angeles. He turned himself into the police and he said he might be the phantom. He said he's been in a

coma running from something, maybe murder. He wanted to clear it up. Um. And he said, if he didn't kill five people in tex Arcana, he wants to settle down and be a stuntman in Hollywood because he was the happiest when he was living in danger. And then he told a reporter quote, I want to sell you some murder information. I know who and where the tex Arcana killer is. Give me five dollars and let me have an hour start and I'll put the information in a

sealed envelope. The report called the police obviously, Um, and he read the note and it said, on a certain day in March, I was in our tex Arcana theater watching a path movie of the news picture of the war. Thank you, And when a part of persons acted wise and said over acting it kind of got to me. I followed them home. I killed them within a period of three days. So yeah, that's a little. That's a little. I find it hard to believe the reporter actually gave

him five bucks. Yeah. So the police arrested this man who was a redhead. So yeah, he was in a downtown shooting gallery. He had just shot his twenty three bulls eye in a row with a twenty two rifle. So again, something Bauman said is quota to have said, Um, I'm my own suspect. He said he was in a coma for several weeks. I think that he really means he was blacked out for several weeks that he just

doesn't remember. He has no memory of, not that he was in a comma, like he was incapacity in a hospital. And he said he woke up from it and he felt like he was running from something. Um, he had come to on May three and his rifle was missing, and he'd heard about a suspect matching his description, which would have been the prisoner of war suspects. He hit chiked all the way to Los Angeles because he thought he was running for murder. He was discharged from the

Air Force for being a psychonotic. Yeah. Yeah, that again that that almost sounds like he's proclaiming something just to get it to Yeah. And Wallace Gonzolvz was quoted as saying, I feel the man is certainly a mental case. The tech arkanic killings could not have been the work of a mental case. We have absolutely this man has an

absolutely no facts. Yeah. Well, and another one that we've got is that the police arrested a thirtysomething year old black man based on the fact that his tire tracks were found on the opposite side of the road from Paul Martin's corpse. I feel like it's nineteen forties. How many different tires are there? Well, I think there actually was quite a few. But the thing is is, after, you know, the police detained him and after he failed

a polygraph test. They because he was still denying everything, and then of course the polygraph does a pass it, they decided that they're going to hypnotize him. He was taken to a psychiatrist and hypnotized, at which point the hypnotist said, you've got the wrong man, and this guy

has no criminal tendencies. It eventually came out that after having been arrested by the police, the reason that he had been lying about why he was doing what he was was that he said, Okay, here's what really happened. I pulled over and I needed to use the restrooms. So he urinated onside the road and then drove away.

But he was lying the whole time, and the reason he failed the polygraph is he wasn't He was trying not to disclose the fact that he was having an affair with a merry woman, so he was trying to protect himself and her at the same time, and that didn't go so well. Yeah, so that that's that's a little bit of a what I mean, because I don't know how you can hypnotize somebody against their will. It's a little I suspect that he didn't have a problem

being hypnotized so much. He knew they knew he didn't do it. He didn't do it, and he I think he also probably knew, you know, it's a doctor some doctor client privilege here that he could have said, you know, but I think you know, a psychiatrist isn't gonna say, oh, yeah, he's having a fair he's gonna say, well, he didn't

murder him, right, or he did murder them. But what I love is but what I love about is like, you know that the police were a little skeptical to apparently according to this story, and accord of course, you know, as we know from longer heart experienced stories tend to get a little bit modified. But if it's true, it's pretty funny because in a sort of appalling way, because the psychiatrist he hypnotized him, because the police were skeptical, well,

as he really under is he really hypnotized. So so he basically told the guy, told the suspect that you basically had no no feeling in your left side whatsoever, and then took a cigarette and stuck it on the guy's arm and earned him and he made yeah, and he made he and he didn't react at all upon being burned with a cigarette and then yeah, yeah, And so that's and that's why the police were convinced that, well, I guess he really is hypnotized. I liked I like this,

you know, the casual Yeah, it's pretty awesome. Yeah, let's see there's another one, and this is obviously just bs. Some guy, some guy was a drunk. Uh. One of the local sheriff's traveled to Streeport, Louisiana after being notified that the police there were holding a man of custody for confessing to the crimes. He was arrested at a bar when he told his story to a news reporter. He didn't know the guy was a news reporter. The reporter promised the man a fifth of whiskey if he

would tell all, And so he told all. He and so the police picked him up after the reporter read it him out. And then when Tilman Johnson, the sheriff's deputy, arrived in Treeport, Uh, he recognized the guy. He was an alcoholic who from texar Can who confessed the crime before. And he called the guys but at by name and says, you know you didn't kill those people, what'd you go and do this for? And then the guy replied, well, how I got a fifth whiskey? Yeah, so yeah, yeah,

another another false confession. Not worry. I know you're getting impatient. You want us to solve the crime, and we will, But you got this thing is full of so many weird confessions. And here's okay, So the next one that we got is got weird confessions in it. Let me okay, let me just run in Yeah, alright. So one of the Arkansas State Police officers had realized that a car had been stolen on each of the nights or nights previous to the murders and then was found abandoned after

the fact. Uh So, on June eighth, n this officer, Max Tackett, went and found a car that had been reported stolen in a parking lot, and he staked that car out, so he knew this car was stolen. So he watches it and a twenty one year old woman walks up and starts to get in the car, and he of course confronts her. She says, well, I've just been married and my husband, who's uh is in Atlanta. Uh he stole the car and he's in Atlanta selling another car that he stole. So the guy was obviously,

you know, fencing hot cars all the time. So they go and they try and track him down, and they had found somebody that this guy had tried. His name, by the way, it was Yole Swinney, and Yol had evidently tried to sell the guy a car but at one point and the guy said, no, I don't want to buy this car for whatever reason. So the cops said, well, you would recognize him, right, Well, yeah, I would. So they went went him to this uh what was it the city bus depot, I believe in the unit station. Yeah.

And when they when the when you'll saw the guy that he tried to sell the car to with a cop, he turned around and ran this state police offic search you know, caught him, wouldn't let him go, obviously, got him, knocked him down whatever it was, coughed him. Uh. And at that point they were going to go ahead and uh and haul him in. Well, the weird things that come up with him is that when they put him in the car, You'll says, hell, I know what you

want me for. You want me for more than stealing cars, which is a little weird. And he said that statement more than once. And he said, you guys are gonna give me the chair, aren't you, And then tack it. I recall said something like, well, now, we usually don't get people a chair for stealing car. Yeah, yeah, exactly, except that everybody's like, wait, wait, this is a little weird.

When they interviewed his wife when they had him in custody, she knew some details about the murders that hadn't been released. She knew the details inside and out, which was a little odd. But she also knew about the fact that there was a date book that had been found at the murder of the Martin Brooker murder scene that the police hadn't told anyone about. And so these things are adding up. Suddenly it's we're getting an avalanche of information.

And then all of a sudden, Yold turns around and clams up and says, I, Nope, I don't know what you're talking about. Nope, I'm not talking. I'm not doing anything. So, being great detectives, they decided that they're going to go ahead. And what is it they were. They decided they were gonna give him sodium pentethal thank you, which is a truth serum. It's basically gonna make a talk, except unfortunately they gave him too much and it knocked him out,

so he was unconscious. As they began to uh to be building a vest negation against you ole, his wife suddenly did a one eighty and refused to talk to the police anymore and denied ever saying anything about the murders. And because of the law at that time, she couldn't be made to testify against her husband, and so she was considered an unreliable witness, so they couldn't pursue him for the murders. He eventually was put in jail for about twenty years for multiple car thefts, but they could

never pin him to these murders. That that might explain that if he was locked away and if he actually was a murderer, and then maybe that could explain why they stopped. Yeah. Maybe, But there's some details that we're going to get into, because there's some there's some fallout, there's some aftermath, but through some of these people, well, I mean, that's one of the ones that's like really compelling, right,

And this one I think is really compelling. Two And on November five night, so a couple of years after these orders, and eighteen year old freshman he called himself do be Tennyson Uh from Arkansas University found dead at home in Arkansas. He'd kill himself with cyanide of mercury uh. And there was a suicide note and it read the opening of my box will be found in the following few lines, and a tube of paper is found rolls

on color, and it is dry and sound. The head removes, the tail will turn, and the inside of the sheets. You yearn two bees mean a lot when they are together. These clues should lead you to it. So he his suicide note was a riddle. He was basically kind of

toying with his police or whoever um so. But obviously police were notified of this, and so they found another note inside of a fountain pen and there was poison on the cap, and there were clues that like led them on this goose chase to a lock box that had a combination lock on it, and since they weren't really in the mood for games, they decided to just blow the lock off the box instead of trying that, yeah, there's pride and open, instead of trying to like figure

out the combination. And there was a note in there. So inside that box, among other things, they found this final farewell note that was not a riddle um in which he thanked the people who were bringing him up. He professed his love to a twelve year old girl, and he also confessed to some of the murders. He says, why did I take my own life? Well, when you

commit two double murders. You would too. Yes, I did kill Betty, Joe Brooker, and Paul Martin in the city Park that night, and then killed Mr Starks and tried to get Mrs Starks. You wouldn't have guessed it. I guess when my mother was either out or asleep, and no no one saw me do it. For the guns, I disassembled them and discarded them in different places. And then he goes on to what you know, list things

that he wants for people to be given. The weird thing about him is, I don't know if you saw this in the some of the research that's out there. Uh So he hand wrote these letters out before he typed them up, and then they found other notes from him that were drafts, and then follow up version that's something along the lines of please disregard the previous notes that I wrote, which is just strained. Yeah, he was a weird guy. I mean, you know, you don't. I

can't totally figure out what is going on. It's clearly a very troubled mind. Beyond just the suicidal tendencies. The fact that you know you would kill yourself with this riddle note that leads people on a goose chase. Is kind of like, at least in movies, indicative of the kind of a psychopathic character. Um, and if he was in love with twelve year old girls, there's something not there. So I don't really know what to make of that. You know, he doesn't confess to all of the murder,

only couple of them. Some of them, Uh, he may have been capable of it. So I don't know. And the hard part is, I remember the research that talked about his his other notes that he had written, was the fact that his friends who because he was from that area, who who? Then you heard about his suicide, said oh, yeah, there's no way that he could have done that murder because he was with us that night. Now is it someone coming forward saying, yeah, I'm sorry,

he was troubled and he really didn't do it. Or yeah, he he took his own life. Let's go ahead and cover for him and protect him for a time on. Or it's also possible that he confessed in a suicide now because he was protecting somebody else who knew committed to murder. Yeah. I like that al right, So let's see there wasn't another there another murder? Uh? In on May seven? This is about the Starts. The Starts were murdered.

Virgil Starts was murdered. So, and you know, not necessarily related, but a body was found on the Kansas City Southern Railway tracks about sixty miles north of Texarkana, UM. He was lying face down inside the track with his head to the north. His left arm was severed at the elbow and his leg was severed at the hip Because they were across the tracks. A freight train had passed about five thirty am and chopped him off. So let's take it to a funeral. And yeah, that sounds unpleasant.

Corner's verdict stated depth at the hands of persons unknown and that he was dead before being placed on the railroad tracks. So we got a potential six victim. Yeah, so I mean, yeah, so you killed him and then he tossed him the tracks just for the front of it. But but the love the county sheriff there believed that the man had died because he fell into the wheels of a passing freight train. Corner examined the body a

second time and found further evidence of murder. They explained, we found a deep cut over the man, his temple two inches wide and one and a half inches long, which would probably be enough to cause death. Uh See, they also found catch about his hands and wrists, which indicate that he Those are the defensive wounds. Somebody's coming at you with a knife, usually try to block the knife of your arms. So yeah, so he was defending

himself with stuff from somebody with a knife. So and so, apparently he was either very deeply wounded to the point where he couldn't defend himself and then thrown on the train, thrown under the train, or he was killed and then his body thrown on the tracks. But the corner believed that he was dead for a full two hours before being put on the tracks, and that there wasn't enough

blood around the wounds which caused his death. In other words, in other words, the wounds that caused his death blood out somewhere else and he was taken to the tracks. So that you get another reason. Uh there was blood found in the street near the crime scene, which supports that theory. Share the sheriff still believes that it was accidental and the man was probably trying to jump the train and just fell onto the wheels. About the corner

in the corners believed differently. So the man was fine identified Earl Cliff mcspadden from a Social Security card that he had on him. His his brother contacted the contact of the funeral home after hearing about his death on the radio, and he reported that his brother was a transient oil storage tank builder, which is interesting thing to be transient over and basically he was basically a guy on the road work on the road down to Yeah.

So so anyway, I it appears that that was completely unrelated, although you never know, I mean, I didn't there's no thirty two caliber bullet holes and the guys, but you know, there there are other there are other deaths at the time that seemed unrelated but could be. Uh, there were two women before I think it was just before or just after the Stark murder. A woman was found dead in the street shot by a thirty two and then another woman was found dead with a thirty two at

her feet. And they don't fit the profile except that they're at the same time, in the same town with the same caliber. Well, yeah, that's weird that they aren't classed with these, but you know, I mean, and it's possible. But again, back in those days, thirty two caliber was very popular, and that's the hard part is you know, okay, well, yeah, a lot of people had that gun, so we don't know. And nobody was ever charged with the murders of these two women, so we don't know, you know, are they

the seventh and eighth victims or are they just unrelated? Yeah? Yeah, So there are a couple of things that come up in this that are kind of interesting, one of which is years after the murders, they were about to demolish a school in tex Sarcana Um and they were going through and clearing everything out, and they were going through the attic and a pile of blood stained clothing was found in the attic elementary school that they're about to demolish,

which is the pretty kind of creepy thing. Now, I thought I saw something that it turned out that was actually just paint stained clothing. I don't know, Maybe I don't know, I remember think of evidence. But the thing, you know that's really interesting is that I only saw this one place. But again I want to bring it up, is that a lot it seems to be that most of the files and evidence that tex Arcana and Texas law enforcement agencies should have on this case are gone.

And maybe that's just age, but it isn't. It is open murder investigations. It's never been. It seems the files have just kind of disappeared. That's not unusual. There was and they do. And there was a rumor going around the suspected phantom killer was rumored to be from a quote well to do tex Arcana family, So they knew who he was, but they weren't but they could pursuing him because his family had so much influence. Seems unlikely. Well, but you you that that's the stuff. This whole thing

is as the bad movie that was made. Stuff of movies and totally we can't go after the guy that we know who did it because his family will bury the whole Yeah, so that they go through the Hollywood venue. That that theory right there kind of makes sense saying it. It's but in Texarkana, are there any actual well to do families Texas? Yeah? People, you know, we're rich. That didn't seem to be rich because people are making fortunes

all over the place. Yeah. And you know, the other really interesting connection that you see all over the internet is a connection to the zodiac. Yeah, which I kind of like there's some interesting connections, and you know, it's like twenty years later, it's in sixty and sixty nine is the Zodiac murders, right, So I guess when we're talking about the car thief, he went away for like twenty years and then came back out and he seemed

to be a really viable suspect. So the fact that murders of this type disappeared for twenty years and then well, the problem, the problem with with yol is that he was still in jail when the Zodiac he was. And here's the other thing is that what what basically put the nail in the coffin for him being the killer was that in South Florida, I believe it was, there was at least one or if not two double murders in the late sixties that took place with a thirty

eight on Lover's Lane. Excuse me, correct. So they talked about the similarities with the Zodiac crimes, and I think it's interesting, you know, the time periods kind of fit. If you take the Texarcanam murders and then you take the Florida murders. You know, we're talking about if it had maybe been a teen in Texarcana who shipped off to the war for a couple of years. He was getting his murder fix in there. Came back, went to Florida because it's a nice place to be for a

little while. And then and then you know, well, because you know, the drive is there, right, But if you have the psychotic drive, it doesn't go away. Yeah. So in the Zodiac crimes as well as our crimes, right, the suspect war hood, the suspect use a flashlight to blind victims in cars. The suspect use different types of handguns. They mostly the attacks were done on lover's lanes and

the victims were young. They're both kind of rough and tumble areas with blue collar air, blue collar families, and lots of military presence. The suspects all changed both changed ms later in their spreeze. They were both labeled Phantom ish. Oh the Phantom now where the f to part community y Zodiac. The Zodiac Suspected Zodiac letter that was sent to Marco Spinelli in eighteen seventy four referred to himself

as the Red Phantom. Oh, I didn't know, so, you know, And it's obviously a loose connection, but it was still a little bit of they're all kind of loose. Yeah, stolen cars reported before every murder um and the Zodiac murderer acquired multiple vehicles. He had lots of different cars that he drove around all the time. There's lots of car stolen car situations around. The Zodiac killer was considered to be from Texas, the Texas area because he used a lot of kind of Southern phrases like fiddle and

fart around. Was that in one of the letters that he wrote. Yeah, and he wrote a lot a lot of Yeah, he shot female victims through the jaw and tongue just like this is it was a star. Yeah. So there's some I mean, you know, they're loose connections, but I guess when we're talking about serial killers, some of these some of these connections are really kind of hilarious.

Like this last one. Suspect may have frequented restaurants and other suspected Zodiac activity, Well, yeah, gone to the same place. I guess we're Yeah, that's why you're always is is no.

So I think that's really interesting. You know, you think about serial killers m O evolving a little bit, you know, especially over thirty year period, you know, you start out exploring, and that may even explain why the rapes and the like, really horrific sexual assaults that happened earlier, or the inability to actually kill his victims the first couple of times. These kind of people who do these things, they tend

to warm up and explore. So there may have been assault that didn't get reported because he just walked up to somebody with a gun and threatened him and then clocked him in the headwalk. I mean, they tend to escalate looking for thank you. They escalate and they build and then as you said, they find their m O and run. So I mean there's there's a lot of ways that that could go. But I just this is the thing that drives me crazy about this story is there's no theory slash suspect that I could put my

money against. That's the thing that drives me nuts about this. Yeah. Well, yeah, it happened a long time ago, so obviously, you know, you could come up with a good theory of how, why, and whatever. And I think there's there's some reasonable ones out there, but you know, most of the people involved along dead. Yeah, they're long on so well, and a lot of them went on record and we're in books and stories, but he just I don't know on this one. Yeah,

I don't know either. I think that I think a strong post ability is that, you know, the the eight victims, I think probably there was only maybe one that this guy wanted to kill and the rest were just too basically, you know, put up a little cloud of bs around the whole thing. Let me to basically cover his tracks,

cover his tracks. Okay, if I'm known to have a strong motive to murder you, then if I'm going to murder you, I'm going to proceed it with a crime, and I'm gonna have After that, I'm gonna murder a couple more people, people that I had no connection to whatsoever, And that would be one way that that would be one way to cover that thing. So if I were if I were investigating this, and again, you know, I

wouldn't confine my investigation just to this. But if I were back to the time investigating this, I would look into Mr Richard Griffin twenty nine, because he was a guy in the second attack, the first you know, the first two people he didn't kill. He didn't murder them because he didn't really need to and he might have actually wanted to leave them alife for a reason. I'm not sure why, but you know, it might might have very might very well have been that, you know, he

wanted he wanted them. Maybe he wore maybe he wore high heeled shoes or lifts or something like that to make himself appear to be taller than he was. So maybe he put on you know, maybe he did things to sort of change his appearance just to met to his voice and everything, and that I would be reported the police, and then when they're looking for a suspect, he would be if it happens, you know, shorter, lighter, lighter skinned, whatever, you know, lighter voiced, deeper voiced, whatever.

So you know, maybe that's why he left him alive, or maybe he just left him alive because it really wasn't necessary to kill them. But the second people, let's say, let's say his his grievance was against Richard Griffin twenty nine and his girlfriend, Paully and More seventeen. Polly and More probably wasn't old enough to really made any serious enemies, you know, and I'm guessing this killer was probably in

his twenties, maybe you know, even thirties. So I'm guessing if I were the police, I would be looking for a connection to Richard Griffin, because after he kills these two, then he kills uh, Paul Martin and Betty Joe Booker. But again, you know, once you once you killed, once you killed your intended target, you've got to kill at least a couple more people to cover up your to cover up the trail leading to your your motive for

killing Richard Griffin. And then after that you might decide, well, I might I might have killed just a couple more people, or maybe somebody else just decided to step in, because the circumstances were so much different for the Starks than they were for the other for well, basically for the other two, when the stars could have been a copycast exactly, somebody who's like, well, I'm going to jump on the

coattails of this and use it to my advantage. Well, exactly, so you gotta grieves against one or the other both of them. So I'm gonna go ahead and commit a little murder. I know that they'll just assume it's this other guy, and so yeah, and so that that's always a possibility, because it's so much different. So Joe helped me in the future. Remember not to upset you, because that was scarily accurate and really well thought out. And I'm a little disturbed, a little frightened. Yeah that you

just you just wailed that out. Or did you live in Texarkanada? No? I never lived there. I never knew. I don't think now this was a little before my time. All right, do you have any any other theories? I don't, you know that. That's the thing is, this is such a weird story. I don't like it. It's weird, it's creepy, it's you know, there are definitely people that you can kind of think, Okay, on the one hand, it could be this person, but there's all this evidence against that

actually being this person, And I just don't know. It's weird. There's there was a lot of deaths in a pretty small place, you know, a small amount of time, in a really small amount of time, which you know, I guess leads me to believe that it must have been

someone in the community. I think, I deeply think it must have been somebody who lived there, and I feel like it must have been someone young, and you know, someone in there, you know, nineteen twenty year old phase, especially because of the youth of the victor, uh you know it, it does kind of seem like the sort of thing that like a kid, the kid who gets bullied in school finally breaks down and like murders his

worst offenders or you know. And I don't think I don't think that it was that because there's there's like so much more to it. But you know, because I also think that that would have been really easy to spot, right that weird kid. They obviously would have called that weird kid in as questioning. It would have been a really strong um that's why. Yeah, I think if you

you know, and that's that's a good possibility. But if you're murdering like like several people from your high school whose guts you hate, then you know that's probably gonna be pointing sort of a finger back at you. Well, yeah, I guess that's why. You know, I kind of think the Duby confessions, the suicide confession makes some sense, although it's not to all of them, just some of them.

So I don't I don't know what's going on. Yeah, I don't know either, but yeah, one of the things about it too is like one of the problems I have with that is like the disparity and a just between the people who are who are really young. So probably and Moore was seventeen, Betty Joe Burker was fifteen, and Paul Martin was sixteen. So they were from different classes in high school. So and Paul Martin, by the way, at that time, was not living in Texarkana. He was

he was been moved away and was just back for so. Yeah, so whoever this person is, and again it could be just like what I was talking about, but they were there was somebody at high school age. They wanted to kill one of these people and just needed to cover their cover their tracks by killing a bunch of other

people a lot. That's another possibility. There's a reason it's unsolved, Yeah, there is, unfortunately, but I would I would really love to talk to you know, if I could go back in time and talk to the investigators and just ask them if they considered that possibility. Well, you know, I do believe that the case files are available. Really I thought they were lost freedom of information in the age of the case. You can get a hold of him and I well, some some FBI reports do exist, and

I attempt. I found them on some locations. Unfortunately couldn't read them because they were low rez scans of old typewritten papers read down well. Plus there was all kinds of blackout areas. It was really hard and unfortunately it just was one of those things that had I had, you know, hours and hours and hours more available to me, I could have gone through it. But it just it was so much detail. It's just hard to sift. This

is why people do this for a living. Yeah, I mean I I would never want to go to all that stuff because there's got to be like a hundred thousand pages of notes from this case when you think about all, yeah, there are well, ladies and gentlemen, if you have any thoughts or theories or hey, by the way, if you are the killer, Hey, yes, you want to let us know what those are, you can go ahead and just send us an email. Uh. The email address that we always use is thinking Sideways podcast at gmail

dot com. We love to hear from our listeners and we enjoy that a lot. You can always go ahead and find some of our links for this story on our website. That website is thinking Sideways podcast dot com. And of course, if you probably are listening to us on iTunes, but if not, you can always listen to us on iTunes, on Stitcher, or directly off of our website. Uh. And again, we love to hear from our our fans who were talking to us on the page. We get those.

We love to go back and forth, so please get a hold of us see if you've got thoughts. Uh. That having been said, Happy Halloween, everybody. I hope you enjoyed a creepy story for a creepy day. I help, we scared the crap out of you, and we'll talk to you next week. By everybody, I don't want to drive home now alone. I'll give you a ride. No a second thought now