The 1976 film The Town That Dreaded Sundown was released internationally and is loosely based on true crime Texas Moonlight Murders. The movie claimed that the “story you are about to see is true, where it happened and how it happened,” the fabricated parts created much of the myth and folklore around the murders for several decades. A cold case in Texarkana in 1948 of the disappearance of Virginia Carpenter has been speculated to be the work of The Phantom.

The 2014 book The Phantom Killer: Unlocking the Mystery of the Texarkana Serial Murders, by James Presley The Texarkana Moonlight Murders, a term coined by the news media, references the unsolved murders committed in and around Texarkana in the spring of 1946 by an unidentified serial killer known as the “Phantom Killer.”

The Phantom Killer is credited with attacking eight people within ten weeks, five of whom were killed. The first attack was Saturday night February 22, 1946. The first two victims, Jimmy Hollis and Mary Jean Larey, survived.

Around 11:45 PM, Jimmy Hollis and Mary Jean Larey were parked on a well-known “lovers lane” in the Texarkana area when a man with a white sack over his head appeared and ordered them out of their car at gunpoint. After about ten minutes of the couple stopping, a man walked up to Hollis’ driver-side door and flashed a flashlight in his face, blinding him. The man showed him a pistol and told him, “I don’t want to kill you fellow, so do what I say and get out of the car.” Hollis thought this was a prank or a case of mistaken identity replied, “Fellow, you’ve got me mixed up with someone else. You’ve got the wrong man.” The masked man repeated his order to get out and they both got out through the driver-side door. The man told Hollis to “take off your god damn britches.” Mary Jean Larey pleaded with Hollis to please take them off, because she thought if they complied the man would not hurt them. After Hollis removed his trousers, he was struck twice in the head with a heavy, blunt object. After Jimmy Hollis went down, Mary Jean picked up Hollis’ pants and pulled out his wallet and handed it to the assailant and stated, “He doesn’t have any money.” The masked man accused her of lying and asked to see her purse. Mary jean replied that she did not have any money either. The masked man hit her with a blunt object and knocked her to the ground. The assailant ordered her to get up, and, when she did, he told her to run. As she ran towards a ditch, the assailant told her not to go that way but to run up the road. She stated that while she was running, she heard Hollis groaning, and that the man continued to beat and stomp him. She was having trouble running in her high heels when the assailant ran after her. She saw an older car parked further up the street facing their vehicle. She quickly looked inside to see if anyone could help her, but after seeing no one, she began to run and was overtaken by the attacker. The man asked her why she was running. She said, “you told me to run.” Larey said, “He called me a liar I knew that he was going to kill me.” At that point in time, he knocked her down again and assaulted her sexually. Mary Jean reported he did not rape her and used the words “he abused me terribly.” Later reports indicated that the assailant sexually assaulted her with the barrel of his gun.

Mary Jean was able to get up and told the guy, “Go ahead and kill me.” He seemed to relax and she ran off.