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The Town That Dreaded Sundown: The Texarkana Phantom Killer and the Ten Weeks That Terrified the Borderlands
Paperback
Series: Ozark Crime, Book 1
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jul 23 2026
Pages: 52
Weight: 0.32
Height: 0.11 Width: 8.50 Depth: 11.00
Language: English
In the spring of 1946, a man in a white hood came to the lovers' lanes outside Texarkana, Texas and Texarkana, Arkansas. He attacked eight people in ten weeks. Five of them died.
He was never caught.
The Texarkana Moonlight Murders have been called the number one unsolved murder case in Texas history. They inspired the 1976 horror film The Town That Dreaded Sundown. The FBI released more than 1,100 pages of declassified files on the case in 2020. And seventy-nine years after the spring of 1946, the man in the hood has never been definitively identified.
The Town That Dreaded Sundown tells the complete story of the Phantom Killer: the eight people he attacked, the five he killed, the specific terror that emptied Texarkana's lovers' lanes and drove the town's young people to travel in armed caravans. It follows the investigation - the Texas Rangers, the FBI, the two competing state law enforcement agencies divided by a state line down the middle of Main Street - to the one man investigators believed was responsible: Youell Swinney, a car thief from Cleveland County, Arkansas, whose wife confessed to his guilt and then recanted, married him, and made herself legally unavailable as a witness against him.
Swinney died in Dallas in 1994, never charged, never convicted, carrying whatever he knew into the grave.
The Town That Dreaded Sundown is Book 1 in the Ozark Crime series - true crime from the dark hills and small towns of the Ozarks region.
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