The Phantom Killer: Unlocking the Mystery of the Texarkana Serial Murders: The Story of a Town in Terror by James Presley

Author:James Presley
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Pegasus
Published: 2014-11-15T06:00:00+00:00

TEXARKANA CHILD RACKETEER GANG

DISCLOSED AS ‘FAGANS’ ARE SOUGHT

Three boys were held in the Bowie County holdover jail on Main Street after their arrest for theft and possession of stolen goods. Youell, at twelve, was the oldest; the youngest, only eight. If the reporter and editor were to be complimented for recalling the plot of Oliver Twist, the spelling, of Dickens’s child manipulator Fagin’s name, only missed by a letter.

“Three boys, the youngest eight and the oldest twelve,” the Evening News reported, “nonchalantly gazed through the bars of the Bowie county holdover jail Tuesday while officers searched for other members of an alleged band of child racketeers who made smoking and spending money through sale of stolen property to a junk shop in the city.

“Two other youths, believed by county officers to have been the brains behind the theft combine, were the objects of a search. Officers expressed a belief that they were the ‘Fagans’ of the organization, using the children as their cats’ paws.

“The three were arrested as they attempted to escape from the yard of a warehouse owned by the electric company near the Texas viaduct. An employee caught them in possession of bars of brass. He took them to police headquarters.

“‘Some older boys told us they’d give us six bits if we’d sell the brass for them,’ one of the lads told county officers.”

The newspaper added: “The three youths seemed little worried by their imprisonment Tuesday or by the prospect of possible terms in the state reformatory should Judge [George W.] Johnson so decree.”

Because juvenile records are shielded from public view, the disposition of young Swinney’s case was not available. However, in the 1930 census, taken just a few months later, Youell’s name is missing from the household of his father, in whose custody the judge in 1926 had placed him. This raises the probability that he was temporarily residing elsewhere when the census taker came. The census showed Stanley Swinney and his new wife Bessie, nee McKinsey, a church pianist, in Bowie County with four children—three daughters from his first marriage and a son from the second, but no Youell. Piecing together data from other sources, he may have been in a Texas reformatory.

In 1930, Myrtle married John Rudolph Travis, and they resided in Texarkana, Arkansas. Family lore labeled him as a mail-order husband, following Myrtle’s ad that lured him from California to Texarkana with his two small children. The liaison was short-lived. A few years later she filed for divorce, which was granted in an uncontested case. In 1936 she married J. H. Tackett, “a very good old man” ten years her senior. He died. By 1946 when her son Youell was arrested, she had remarried again, to Carl Chaffin, in Texarkana. Stanley Swinney, following his second wife’s death, was living in Missouri with his third wife, nee Nella Dorcas Fitzgerald.

Although the father, Stanley Swinney, had received custody of Youell, the boy seems to have spent some time with his mother and, later, stepfather. Years later,

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