Possible Florida Connection

DALLAS MORNING NEWS OCT 12, 1946 Florida Deaths Eyed for Clues TEXARKANA, Oct.11 - Police of this city looked Friday toward Fort Lauderdale, Florida for possible clues to five brutal murders and three assaults committed here within 8 months. There was a possibility, it was believed , that the slayer of a young couple in a car parked near the sea at Fort Lauderdale may have been the Texarkana Phantom. Sheriff W.H. Presley of Bowie County, site of two double murders last March and April, and Sheriff W.E. Davis of Miller County, Ark., where the last mystery slaying took place on May 4, announced that they were checking with Fort Lauderdale police in an effort to connect the local crimes with the Wednesday morning slaying of Lawrence Hogan, 23 and Elaine Eldridge, 24 whose bodies were found near Hogan's parked car on Dania Beach. Officers noted the similarity between the phantom slayings here and the Florida murders. All of the victims here, Richard Griffin, 29; Polly Ann Moore, 17; Betty Jo Booker, 15; and Virgil Starks, 36, were shot in the head with a .32 caliber automatic. Florida police reported that a .32 caliber automatic was used in the Fort Lauderdale slayings.

The Texas Dept. of Public Safety and Texas Rangers, having seen a newspaper clipping of the October 8th shooting of Elaine Eldridge of South Chatham, Mass. and Lawrence O. Hogan of Miami Beach, Florida wrote a letter to Sheriff Walter Clark of Broward County, Florida to request more information and possibly latent fingerprints from the crime scene. They were informed by Sheriff Clark that these two young people were killed by a gun believed to be a .32 Savage Automatic pistol or some foreign make gun, patterned after the Savage. The lethal bullet was fired from a gun having six lands and grooves with a right hand twist. The projectile weighed 70.65 grains. A fired cartridge case was found which proved to be Remington Ammunition. It was also learned that there were no latent prints found at the scene and the gun used was quite different from the one used in Texarkana.

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