This is a longer story about Virginia with more info. I cut the references to the other missing girl. Anyway, I contacted the newspaper directly to get a copy of the story and it was OK'd. There's no place to link it to, as it's in their old archives.
It's very interesting; I'd forgotten the bit about Texarkana's Phantom and Lash Larue.
Published in the Denton Record-Chronicle, Aug. 3, 1997:
By Donna Fielder
Staff Writer
Virginia Carpenter vanished in Denton on June 1, 1948.
``When I read about this case, I immediately thought of Virginia,'' said retired Texas Ranger Lewis Rigler, who worked the case on and off most of his career. ``It never has left my mind, though I have been retired for 30 years.''
Miss Carpenter, 21, was all dressed up for a train ride in a striped chambray dress, a white hat and and red platform shoes and bag when she left Texarkana. She got off the train six hours later in Denton and took a taxi to the campus of what is now Texas Woman's University. She stepped out of the cab in front of Brackenridge Hall at the Texas State College for Women a little after 9 p.m. that Tuesday almost half a century ago. Miss Carpenter was 5 feet 3 inches tall and weighed 120 pounds. She had long brown hair. Miss Carpenter's eyes were brown.
She gave the cab driver the ticket for her trunk and a dollar to fetch it the next day from the train station. She walked over to talk to two young men she appeared to know. ``Well, hi. What are you doing here?'' she asked them. The cab driver drove away.
And Virginia Carpenter melted into history
never heard from again.
``The campus was chaotic,'' said Betty Igo Duncan, former Denton County home demonstration agent. As Miss Igo, she arrived at school that same day from her home in Hooks, about 12 miles from Miss Carpenter's home in Texarkana.
Their mothers knew each other.
``When we found out she was missing, we were scared for ourselves and scared of what may have happened to her,'' Mrs. Duncan remembers. ``They were building Hubbard Hall and it was a big hole in the ground, and they poured concrete the next day. Some said her body was under the concrete.''
It was three days before she was discovered missing. Miss Carpenter's boyfriend called her mother, saying he couldn't find her. She was supposed to enroll as a junior. She never did. She was supposed to live in Room 200 of Brackenridge Hall on the old Dormitory Row. The spot now is occupied by the Student Union at TWU.
The cab driver delivered her trunk the next morning. It sat on the porch
for days.
In 1948, police questioned Miss Carpenter's boyfriend for 12 hours the first time around and interviewed him more than a dozen times after that. He also passed a polygraph test.
Mr. Rigler searched the cab driver, looking for scratches or bruises. The Texas Ranger grilled the cabby, Jack Zachary, numerous times. He was 45, with little education and a reputation for physical abuse.
According to yellowing reports in the still-open Denton police files, Mr. Zachary was a ``bootlegger, part-time mechanic and automobile trader'' who beat his wife and kids.
``The boyfriend was a wonderful suspect,'' Mr. Rigler said in a telephone interview Friday. ``But not nearly as wonderful as the cab driver. I took him up to Austin for a polygraph. I don't put much stock in them. But the operator gave him seven tests, and he believed Zachary was telling the truth.
``I sort of liked the old boy,'' the Ranger said. ``He always cooperated with me.''
The cab driver ``whipped'' a private investigator whom Mr. Rigler said was harassing him hoping to collect a reward that rose to $2,000. The Texas Ranger testified for the cabby in his assault trial, and he was acquitted.
Nevertheless, in August 1951, three years after the girl's disappearance, officers dug up the cab driver's back yard. They found the bones of a dog but nothing to tie him to the girl's disappearance.
And in 1957, his wife, who was married to someone else by then, told Midland police she had lied when she said he was home that night by 10. Actually, according to the police files, she said he had come in at 2 or 3 a.m. the next morning.
And each year on June 1, when the Denton Record-Chronicle rehashed the unsolved case, Mr. Zachary traveled from Midland to Denton and bought a paper, his wife told the officers.
He became nervous, uneasy, and she believed he had something to do with the girl's disappearance. He was never charged.
Lash Larue, a Grade B western star of the '40s and '50s, became a prime suspect for a time. On June 26, 1948, a tip came from Jackson, Miss. A clerk in the Heidelburg Hotel there said he had seen a man who was working in a theater register June 6 with Miss Carpenter. The man was back, the clerk reported.
Denton officers rushed by train to Jackson. They showed the clerk her photo. Yes, that was the woman, he confirmed. So the officers went up to the room, pounded on the door and announced that the occupant was under arrest.
Mr. Larue ``threw a fit,'' according to their report when they returned. He swore that it was his wife who had been with him. The wife confirmed it, and her mother confirmed her confirmation. The officers returned to Denton with the case still unsolved.
The coeds at TSCW were terrified that summer and fall. They kept looking for a yellow convertible that police first thought was involved in the disappearance. Later, the convertible was eliminated from the investigation.
``When we would swim in Lake Dallas, we would wonder if her body was in there, too. Some thought she had been sold into white slavery, though we weren't exactly sure what that was,'' Mrs. Duncan said.
In his report a year after the disappearance to Ranger Capt. M.T. ``Lone Wolf'' Gonzaullas, Mr. Rigler said it was possible she was alive and simply didn't want to be found. She was a little fickle, he reported, and had lots of boyfriends but didn't go too far with petting.
Another theory could never be proven. The year before her disappearance, five Texarkana teens were murdered by a person who has never been identified. The press dubbed him the ``Phantom Killer.'' Miss Carpenter and her family were friends with three of the five victims.
Did she know something someone didn't want revealed? Did the Phantom Killer follow her to Denton? Those cases, like hers, were never solved.
When TWU dug up the campus in the '60s, rumors surfaced that it was a search for Miss Carpenter's body.
``They were just putting in drainage,'' the Ranger recalls with a laugh.
Two Denton police detectives reopened the case in 1970. They weren't talking, but former Officer J.N. Pruett told the Wise County Messenger newspaper that they had a suspect they would arrest if they could just find the body.
The fat, old file contains nothing of that investigation. Not supplements. Not reports. The only thing in the file from that era is the crackly newspaper with its front page story and the
report of a polygraph examiner who said the boyfriend told the truth.
Rumors surfaced at that time that the officers suspected a prominent Denton man who had been a college student when she disappeared. They remain unsubstantiated.
``There's nothing in the file to indicate that,'' said Denton Police Capt. Paul Abbott. ``This file is still open, but it's not active. No one actually is assigned to it, but we haven't closed
it, either.''
Mr. Rigler empathizes with the detectives who are working the frustrating case with almost no clues to follow.
``You start out, and you get good press, and there are a lot of leads from it. One day, for good reason, the press has got to stop. The leads dry up. At first, the family is real helpful. Then, they get frustrated and there's nobody to take it out on but the police. They finally said we weren't doing enough.
``I always hoped someday she'd call and say `Mr. Rigler, this is Virginia Carpenter. I just wanted you to know I'm all right,'' the 83-year-old Ranger said.
``By God, I'd like that to happen before I die.''
