The city of Texarkana is located in two states, Arkansas and Texas. Each side is a separate municipal government. Texarkana, Arkansas is located in Miller County, Arkansas while adjoining Texarkana, Texas is located in Bowie County. Stateline Avenue marks the line between the two states.

For months in the spring of 1946, the city’s residents went to bed each night in fear. Would anyone be murdered on this night?

The city’s nightmare began just before midnight on the night of Friday, February 22, 1946. Twenty-four year old insurance agent, Jimmy Hollis and his girlfriend, nineteen year-old Mary Jeanne Larey were parked in a secluded lover’s lane near Richmond Road in Bowie County, Texas. At approximately 11:55 p.m. someone shined a flashlight through the drivers side window. Hollis looked up to see a man wearing a hood with holes cut in it for his eyes and mouth. The man pulled a pistol and ordered the two out of the car. The couple got out of the car through the drivers side. The intruder ordered Hollis to remove his pants; Hollis refused and Mary began to encourage him to remove them thinking they would not be harmed if he did. She picked up Hollis’ wallet and handed it to the intruder, explaining that Hollis had no money on him. Immediately the intruder began to beat Hollis with the pistol. With Hollis disabled, the assailant told Mary to give him her purse. She explained that she had no purse. With that, he struck her on the head.

When Mary got up, the assailant ordered her to start running. She started running in spite of wearing high heel shoes and in the background she could hear the sounds of the intruder beating Hollis. After a few moments, the assailant began to chase Mary, who had run past an older parked car that had nobody inside. She continued to run until the criminal caught here. He asked her why she had run and she told him that he ordered her to do so. He called her a liar and this time Mary assumed she was going to be killed. He hit her again and she fell to the ground. As she lay there, the assailant brutally sexually assaulted her using the barrel of his pistol! She finally got up and told him to just go ahead and kill her and get it over with; she started running again. She ran for about a half mile, not realizing that the assailant wasn’t chasing her.

In spite of being disoriented and in horrendous pain, she finally made it to a residence at 805 Blanton Street, where she awoke the homeowners who called the police.

As the assailant turned his attention toward Mary and began to chase her, Jimmy managed to find his way to Richmond Road and flag down a motorist. The motorist quickly went to a nearby funeral home that had an ambulance and soon an ambulance was on the scene. Mary thinks it was the headlights of the motorist car that made the assailant abandon the chase.

In a short time Bowie County, Texas Sheriff W. H. Presley arrived with three other law enforcement officers, but the assailant was gone.

The hooded man was believed by Jimmy to be a dark complected white man about six feet tall, but Mary thought he was probably a light complected black man, due to the way he pronounced words.

Mary was taken to the local hospital, where she was treated and given stitches for her head wounds. She was released without being admitted.

Jimmy on the other hand, was admitted to the hospital with several skull fractures; he remained there for several months.

Upon investigating the case, law enforcement officers could not find a suspect and finally assumed it was an isolated incident, perpetrated by an extremely violent and brutal person.

The residents of Texarkana were naturally shocked by the news of the attempted murders and the fact that nobody was in custody. But, it was assumed that it was a one-time occurrence that would probably not happen again.