In the spring of 1946, for most of their inhabitants, between towns of Texarkana, Texas, and Texarkana, Arkansas, were two halves of the same quiet American dream.

Two small cities pressed up against one another across a painted line in the middle of the aptly named State Line Avenue, where teenagers cruised in their parents' cars, where a neighbor still left, the front

doors unlocked, and where the biggest local scandal usually involved who was cheating on who,

or who'd had too much to drink after the high school football game. This was a railroad town,

a church town, a post-World War II boom town, now that the war was finally finally over after nearly 200 young men from Texarkana

had died overseas. The ones who came back were trying to build something normal again. New jobs,

new families, new lives, but maybe something else came back with them or had been waiting for them,

something they didn't want peace, something they didn't want normal,

something that wanted to dish out terror, pain, and death. On February 22nd, 1946, masked man,

with only his eyes visible, stepped out of the darkness on a lonely dirt road near midnight

and shattered the illusion that Texarkana was safe. He approached a young couple getting hot and steamy along a

known lover's lane and a borrowed car, and after making his presence known, he beat the young man nearly to death.

Then he let the woman run, not because he wanted her to get away, but because he wanted to chase her down.

And he did, and then he beat and tortured and raped her.

Finally, after never taking off his crude mask, after the man was unconscious and the woman was

allowed to race off for help into the night, he disappeared. At first, the town tried to

pretend it was a one-off, a freak crime, some drifter passing through, except it wasn't.

Over the next ten weeks, the killer called the Phantom returned again and again. His attacks came without warning. He showed no mercy,

and he always attacked at night. The papers called him the Phantom Killer, not just because he'd

worn a mask during that first attack, but because he seemed to melt away after every attack,

leaving nothing behind but more terror. Before it was all over, Texarkana would be one of the most

heavily armed, heavily patrolled cities in all of America. Today, we will examine the Texarkana

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