Murder Most Texan (True Crime) by Haile Bartee

Author:Haile, Bartee [Haile, Bartee]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Inc.
Published: 2014-11-11T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10

“Phantom Slayer” Terrorizes Texarkana

In February 1946, the American people were preoccupied with welcoming home the soldiers, sailors and Marines who had won the Second World War and lived to tell about it. Everyone, civilians and veterans alike, had one thing on their minds: getting back to a normal life as quickly as possible.

The twenty thousand inhabitants of Texarkana, the town that straddles the Texas-Arkansas line in the northeastern corner of the Lone Star State, were no different. And “normal” for the younger crowd meant finding romantic spots where they could be alone.

On the night of February 22, 1946, Jimmy Hollis and Mary Jeanne Larey, ages twenty-three and nineteen, parked on a secluded road alongside Spring Lake Park, a lovers’ lane popular with local youth. In the distance, they could hear the traffic on busy Highway 67, which stretched from St. Louis to Little Rock and changed course at Texarkana for Dallas, where it wound its way south to Presidio on the Mexican border.

Jimmy and Mary Jeanne had been talking quietly for five or ten minutes when a masked male figure suddenly appeared at the driver’s door. Shining a flashlight in their eyes, he ordered the blinded couple out of the car at gunpoint.

Hollis was told to unfasten his belt and drop his pants. The instant he did so, the attacker hit him on the back of the head with a pistol, splitting his skull and fracturing most of the vertebrae in his neck. The young man collapsed in an unconscious heap on the gravel-covered dirt road.

The mystery man turned to face the defenseless teenage girl. He pointed up the dark lane and uttered a one-word command: “Run!” Mary Jeanne did indeed run for her life, but she was no match for the physically fit attacker. He easily caught up with her and, with one blow, knocked her down in the middle of the road. He jumped on top of Mary Jeanne and started tearing at her clothes. Just then, an automobile came around a curve and turned night into day with its headlights. The surprised assailant was gone in a flash, and the bruised and battered girl stumbled into the woods, where she waited until she was certain the monster was gone.

The flickering lights of a farmhouse served as a beacon for Mary Jeanne, who bravely followed them to safety. Fortunately, the family was home and cared for her as best they could until the sheriff’s department arrived. Deputies followed her directions to her date’s last known location and found Hollis where he had fallen, still out like a light.

When Jimmy Hollis finally regained consciousness in the hospital the next morning, he could add little to what Mary Jeanne Larey already had told authorities, and that was not much. Complicating the case was the fact that the couple contradicted each other. Hollis thought the suspect was white, while Mary Jeanne remembered him as black, and neither could provide a physical description—not even height or weight. In short, Texarkana lawmen had next to nothing to go.

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