The farmhouse where Virgil Starks was killed and his wife, Katie, was grievously wounded is long gone, but we bumped over the railroad tracks and followed crunchy pea-gravel roads through Arkansas farmland, imagining what it was like for that poor woman to run for help across these dark fields as blood soaked her nightgown.
Presley seemed less sure of the precise location of the final murder scene, in rural Arkansas. Nothing in any of the Texas locales evokes the horror of a sudden flashlight beam on a pitch-black night and an armed stranger demanding, “Take off your f-ing pants”-the instructions given to Jimmy Hollis, the male victim of the first attack. Today, one is in a suburban development, one is a nondescript lot near a handful of commercial buildings, and another is an unremarkable wooded area by a public park. Sixty-eight years ago the sites of the attacks were at the very edges of town. One recent afternoon, I drove around Texarkana with Presley to revisit the four crime scenes.
QUICKCOPY TEXARKANA SERIAL
(Though there’s no evidence that the Texarkana killer had a hook.) In a state hardly celebrated for its peacefulness, the Texas Department of Public Safety once called the serial killings “the number one unsolved murder case in Texas history.” The famous “Hookman” urban legend-the one that begins with a young couple parked on a lovers’ lane and ends with their discovering a bloody hook on the car’s door handle-is said to have been inspired by the Texarkana murders. A remake of the same name came out this past October. The Town That Dreaded Sundown, a largely fictionalized movie, was released in 1976. A handful of books of wildly varying quality have been written about the case. (Photograph from American International/Photofest)ĭecades later, the mayhem has barely lost its hold on the popular imagination, though “imagination” is very much the operative word. Lawmen from Arkansas and Texas and members of the national press overwhelmed the town in pursuit of the assailant, who was dubbed the Phantom Killer by the Texarkana Gazette. People who had never owned guns slept with loaded pistols on both sides of the bed and made pallets on the floor so their children could sleep beside them. Others rigged Rube Goldbergesque security systems, attaching pots and pans to wire that was strung around their property. Women of means packed up their clothes and children and checked into downtown’s Hotel Grim when their husbands were away on business. The traumatized survivors gave the police little to go on. At the end of the spree, three people had been seriously wounded and five had been shot dead.
Three were violent attacks on young people parked on lovers’ lanes on the Texas side of town the fourth was the shooting of a middle-aged couple in their rural farmhouse on the Arkansas side. In 1946 four brutal crimes occurred in less than three months in Texarkana.
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