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UBC: Presley, The Phantom Killer
Oct. 13th, 2017 05:52 pm
The Phantom Killer: Unlocking the Mystery of the Texarkana Serial Murders: The Story of a Town in Terror by James PresleyMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
[library]
This is another excellent book like The Midnight Assassin: Panic, Scandal, and the Hunt for America's First Serial Killer, equally local history & true crime. This time, the location is Texarkana (TX/AR) and the true crime is the so-called Phantom Killer of 1946.
I first learned about the Phantom Killer through an indie documentary called Killer Legends, which is about four urban legends & the real life crimes that might have inspired them. (Zeman and Mills investigate the Phantom Killer and The Town That Dreaded Sundown, which really was, for some benighted reason, remade in 2014; the babysitter as target of psychopath (Halloween, Scream, etc.) & a serial killer in Missouri who actually did target babysitters (otherwise, they find, babysitting is a remarkably safe occupation); poisoned Halloween candy and the vile Ronald Clark O'Bryan; and the epidemic of clown sightings in Chicago (which apparently hit again in 2016, after Killer Legends) and John Wayne Gacy.) This documentary is a follow-up to Cropsey (2009), which Zeman and a different research partner filmed about the same idea on their native Staten Island: the link between the urban legends they grew up on and the crimes of Andre Rand.) Presley is interviewed in Killer Legends.
Presley patiently untangles a snarl of personal histories: the victims, the investigators, the panicked people of Texarkana, and Presley's choice for the killer, Youell Swinney. Swinney was never tried for the murders (nor was anyone else), which is why they're still considered unsolved, but Presley's research (including interviews with cops who survived long enough to talk to Presley as very old men but were dead before he wrote the book) presents a compelling case for why Youell Swinney wasn't tried for murder; they chose to try him for something they knew they could make stick instead of relying on a witness who they knew equally was telling the truth and not telling the whole truth, which is just asking for disaster in cross-examination, reasoning that the important thing was to stop him. Presley goes back and forth between theory (FBI profiling developed in the years since Swinney's murders) and practice (what Swinney did) to try to tease out his motives. While I'm becoming increasingly dubious of the FBI's organized/disorganized schema, their theories about what sorts of things you see in the early childhood of signature killers does seem to hold up pretty well across the cases I've read about. In this case, Presley does a good job of lining up the reasons why Swinney would go after couples and what was at the root of his overpowering rage.
This was charming as a history of Texarkana and fascinating as criminology.
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