Texakana Phantom - Zodiac: A Connection?

[Uncle Jack]

I know there was a few years between the Texakana Phantom murders and the Zodiac killings but I was wondering if anyone had ever connected the two series together? They are very similar, for example;

The victims were couples

The similar MO of shooting people in cars.

I am not saying I think the Phantom and Zodiac are definately one and the same but could it be a possibility in your opinion? Yor thoughts?

[corey123]

Adam,

That would depend.
That M.O is too broad.
Do you know what type of gun was used?

[belinda]

I've always seen similarities here.

It's an interesting point to ponder

[Uncle Jack]

Also Zodiac suspect Rick Marshall lived in Texas before moving to California....

[kensei]

The gap between the two cases is 22 years, the Phantom was a rapist while the Zodiac was not, the Phantom made no contact with the press or the cops as the Zodiac famously did, and there is a compelling case for the Phantom having been car thief Youell Swinney, whose arrest coincided with the end of the Texarkana attacks. Swinney's wife confessed that he was the Phantom, but was disputed because the details of her story changed several times. Swinney got out of prison in 1974, after the Zodiac killings, and died in 1993. One of the most compelling things about him is that when arrested he had a shirt among his posessions that had the last name of one of the Phantom's victims on it.

By the way, the movie "The Town the Dreaded Sundown" about the Phantom has loads of inaccuracies in it.

[kensei]

Adam,

That would depend.
That M.O is too broad.
Do you know what type of gun was used?

Zodiac- .22 and 9mm pistols.
Phantom- .32 pistol, and also a .22 in an attack that some disputed as being his work.

[corey123]

kensie,

Yeah I know the Zodiacs weapon chioce. Did the Phantom ever use a knife? I will have to look into this more, seems interesting.

Yours truly

[sdreid]

The McSpadden event involved a knife.

[corey123]

Stan,

Then I wouldn't necissarily be supprised if the two cases were related. Weapon choice cant make this true, I know the basic info on the Zodiac but none on the other so I don't know.


Yours truly

[sdreid]

The question is whether McSpadden was a Phantom victim, the killer himself or neither.

Someone on the old crashbook brought up a possible connection between Zodiac and Phantom.

Regarding The Town That Dreaded Sundown, not only are there a lot of inaccuracies, there are very few accuracies but it's still a great film.

[sdreid]

Regarding The Town That Dreaded Sundown, not only are there a lot of inaccuracies, there are very few accuracies but it's still a great film.

According to The Town That Dreaded Sundown Wiki page, MGM is scheduled (perhaps this year) the remake this Charles B. Pierce masterpiece starring Jennifer Lopez and Brad Pitt. Hopefully they will stay true to the original and not feel compelled to solve the case.

[RivkahChaya]

Speaking of that movie, which came out in 1976, is most people's idea of what the Texarkana "Moonlight Murders" (the contemporary press term-- a little later, the killer came to be known as the "phantom slayer"). Although there is a claim in the credits of the film that "only the names were changed," and it is an otherwise accurate documentation of the events of 1946, it actually played pretty loose with the facts, and one thing that seems to me to be the case, is that the film was meant to capitalize on the Zodiac killings, which were still pretty fresh in people's minds in 1976. It would have been too soon, then, in '76, to make a real Zodiac film (a la, the one with Mark Ruffalo and Jake Gyllenhaal that came out about 5 years ago.

So the production company (notorious B-movie producers, American International), took a real, unsolved crime, that was old enough not to raise cries of "Too soon!" and had the hooded figure, and the stalking couples in cars in common with the Zodiac, and scraped together a screenplay that resembled the Zodiac crime more than the actual crime spree in Texarkana actually did. The Texarkana killer was really a rapist who sometimes killed his victims, and there's no real way to know why he killed the ones he did kill, whether they saw his face, or recognized (or claimed to) his voice, and there's at least one Texarkana murder that may have just been a murder that coincidentally happened during the spree.

However, if you erase the movie from your mind, and try to get the down to the facts of the case, the similarities to the Zodiac murder are basically a serial killer who wore a cloth mask, and was never caught. The masks, for what it's worth weren't even similar. The Zodiac had something he had made, that was pretty much a costume, and ritualized what he was doing. The Texarkana killer pretty much just tied a piece of sheet around his face, and made eyes and mouth holes in it. Totally utilitarian. Nonetheless, very creepy, and that's why they strike us as similar, but from the psychology of the killers, I think they are different.

[kensei]

Despite what some people think, I still believe that Arthur Leigh Allen was the Zodiac. And at the time of the Texarcana killings he was only 13 years old.

[RivkahChaya]

Whoever the Zodiac was, if he was the Texarkana killer, he had to be, at the very least, I would say, 17 in 1946, and the confidence and physical strength he exhibited suggest he wasn't that young, plus witness descriptions make him older: "under 30." So, if we say that a bottom age for him would be 21 in 1946, then he would have been 43 when the attacks started, but aside from the fact that I think 21 is too young an estimate, descriptions of the Texarkana killer put him at 6 feet tall, while the Zodiac was estimated at around 5'8. That's a pretty big difference, especially when witness descriptions in each case were consistent.

But more important, I think, was the fact that the Zodiac was a huge braggart, and always posted his kill number, which police suspected he inflated by crediting himself with some unsolved crimes that took place in the Vallajo area after the first Zodiac murder.

If the Zodiac really had 5 previous victims in Texarkana, or anywhere, in that were unsolved, and had baffled police, it's hard to believe he wouldn't have referenced them, at least obliquely.

I really think it's just a case of people thinking of the Texarkana murders as being Zodiac-like, because of the movie.

A lot of things seem alike until you get more information. After the first couple of Son of Sam killings, newspapers were speculating that the Zodiac had switched coasts. I remember this from TV coverage of the Son of Sam, before he was caught. I was only 10, and we lived in Queens-- or rather, had a house there, but had been in Moscow for my father's sabbatical, then returned to the US, but stayed with my grandmother upstate for several months. My mother told us it was because the people renting our house asked to stay for the summer, which I never questioned, in spite of the fact that there were four of us crowded in my grandmother's tiny house. I realized years later that my parents didn't want to go back to Queens with Son of Sam at large.

In any event, I first heard about the Zodiac in connection with coverage of Son of Sam, and speculation that they were the same person.

The last suspected Zodiac attack in California was in 1972 (although the last confirmed was in 1970), while the last letter that was definitely not a hoax was to the Chronicle in 1974. The first Son of Sam murder was in 1976, so Zodiac-as-Son of Sam didn't sound so crazy in 1977.


ETA: ironically, I think my grandmother's house was actually closer to David Berkowitz's Yonkers residence than our house in Queens was.

[sdreid]

Just some updates regarding the Phantom that didn't know until recently:

I saw a report that Hollis and Larey were both married but not to each other and that Larey's husband was an early person of interest in that attack. He was eliminated rather quickly though because he had a very good alibi.

Also, the Wiki article says that a taxi cab was seen in the area of the Booker/Martin murders at about the said time. This is of some interest, to me at least, because the last person to see Virginia Carpenter alive before she vanished in 1948 was a cab driver. Some have suggested that Miss Carpenter's disappearance and likely murder could have been another crime perpetrated by the Phantom.