Killer Legends Page #3

All of a sudden,

a guy appears with a gun,

wearing a mask over his head,

white,

two holes cut out

for eyes and mouth.

He tells her to run.

He chases her down

and then starts to attack her,

basically sexually assaults her

with the barrel of his gun.

She said she'd much rather

have been killed like the others

than to have been left

the way she was.

Joshua:
While the attacks

on lover's lanes in texarkana

didn't specifically

involve a hook,

the phantom's sickening crimes

created an equally horrifying

metaphor.

Stephen:
One of the victims

was actually sexually assaulted

with the barrel of a gun,

and so we have the idea

of a foreign metal object

being used in this way

which seems to be

psychologically

behind the idea of the hook.

In the hook story,

we have the hook

about to penetrate the car

when the boy drives away

and the hook is then ripped

from the hand of the murderer.

So we have the idea

of penetration

with a foreign metal object

as already part of that story,

and that in fact happened

in the texarkana cases.

Joshua:
But the sexual assault

was only part

of the phantom's

trademark signature.

These two people

are the only ones

who ever saw the phantom.

Both... wearing masks.

Joshua:
Right, they both said

the guy was wearing a mask.

where the whole white

mask thing came from.

The phantom's disguise

was another chilling detail

as it also helped to popularize

the most widely known

retelling of the murders

in the 1976 cult classic,

"the town that dreaded sundown. "

The movie was thought to be

one of the first slasher films,

having predated Halloween

by two years,

and its take on the phantom

would influence generations

of cinematic boogeymen.

The director,

Charles b. Pierce,

blurred the lines

between fact and fiction

by telling the film

in full documentary style.

Charles b. Pierce:

It was Sunday, march 3, 1946...

the beginning of

a reign of terror

for the people of texarkana,

a terror so indelibly imprinted

that today, people

still speak of it fearfully...

only the names

have been changed.

Casey Roberts:
Now I think

everybody in texarkana

knows about the story

of the phantom killer,

but there's a lot of

intermingling

of facts and legend

between the movie

and the actual

phantom killer case.

Joshua:

This is Casey Roberts,

media manager

at Texas a&m, texarkana.

He's done extensive research

on the crimes

and brought us

to one of the locations where

"the town that dreaded sundown"

was filmed.

A lot the... kind of landmarks

from both the original case

of the phantom killer

and the movie

the town that dreaded sundown

have gone away over the years,

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