By the time Bledsoe returned later that year, Swinney had suffered a stroke and was wheelchair-bound, residing in a rest home. "I did talk to him for a while," Bledsoe says, "and he spent some time bragging about his counterfeiting days and talking about being in and out of prison. But when I asked him about the Phantom murders, he became angry and denied that he'd had anything to do with them. He even refused to admit that he'd ever been married."
A year later, at 76, Youell Swinney died.
Michael Hogue
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For the aging Johnson, the case is rarely far from mind. "Over the years," he says, "people have gotten in touch with me about things they thought might be of interest." The most recent contact came in February 1999, when he learned that the brother of Phantom victim Paul Martin had received a strange phone call at his Kilgore home. "Actually, it was his wife who took the call," Johnson says as he looks over his notes. "She said a soft-voiced woman who sounded like she was in the late '40s or early '50s asked if her husband had a brother murdered in Texarkana back in the '40s. When she said he had, the caller said, 'Please tell your husband that I want to apologize for what my father did.'" Then the caller hung up.
At Johnson's request, a retired Texas Ranger living in Kilgore was contacted. The Ranger attempted to determine the origin of the call but was unsuccessful.
"It was almost a year later that I heard virtually the same story again," Johnson says. "I was in church one morning, and someone came up to me after the service and mentioned something about my having been involved in the investigation of the Phantom Killer cases. A nephew of Virgil Starks was a member of our congregation and obviously overheard the conversation. He came over and began telling me how his mother had received virtually the same call. He said she'd not paid much attention to it, figuring it was just some sick prankster."
Perhaps she was right. Nowhere in Johnson's faded records or the research conducted by Bledsoe or Dr. Presley is there indication that Youell Swinney, so long pointed to as the prime suspect, ever had a daughter. Thus those strange and belated calls are legitimate cause to wonder if, in fact, Swinney's lifelong insistence that he had not committed the murders might have been the truth after all.
Those who wish to argue his innocence often point to a night in October 1946--while Swinney was in jail, being questioned about the Texarkana murders that had occurred months earlier--when a young couple was slain while parked on a secluded oceanside road near Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. Just as with the "lovers lane" victims in Texas, they, too, had been shot with a .32-caliber pistol. Like the Phantom, the killer simply vanished; the case never was solved.
Maybe, it is suggested, the long-ago terror that visited Texarkana, sparking fear and frustration, dark secrets and discomforting memories, abruptly ended only because the person responsible for it had simply decided to move to new hunting grounds. Such speculation, of course, continues to enhance the legend.
