On April 16, 1946, the now-defunct Texarkana Daily News christened their city’s elusive gunman the “Phantom Killer.”Read more at location 804ĭissension aside, the authorities still did their best. Newspapers did their part to fuel the panic. Armed young couples were parking on lonely roads hoping the mad killer would try an attack on them.”48Read more at location 801 Meanwhile,Read more at location 609Īs researcher Wayne Beck reports, “Many students who were especially incensed by the killing of two fellow students were conducting their own search. In rural America, axe-wielding home-invaders had claimed twenty-six lives in six attacks spanning as many Midwestern states, betweenRead more at location 607 “Jack the Ripper” slayers in Atlanta (1911) and Manhattan (1915) the Axeman of New Orleans (1918–19) the “Toledo Clubber” (1925) New York City’s “3X” killer (1930) and Cleveland’s “Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run” (1934–38). Atchison-a sixteen-year-old on the Texas side of State Line Avenue in 1946-told the Gazette, “If you wanted to go to someone’s house after dark, you had to call them first and let them know you were coming.” TheRead more at location 599 The only shades pulled down were in bathrooms or bedrooms.”33Read more at location 279 Few people locked their doors or their windows.
They swung on porch swings, rocked in rockers and spoke to neighbors walking home from a movie or from church.
So it was that by 1946, a Texarkana policeman could say that his town was “calloused to murder.”23Read more at location 235Īs Lyn Blackmon observed, in the Texarkana Gazette, “In good weather, families in nice residential sections sat on their front porches after supper, sipping iced tea. Notes on Texarkana and Atmosphere During Crimes The Texarkana Moonlight Murders: The Unsolved Case of the 1946 Phantom Killer by Michael Newton
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