Fiction is full of spooky weird stories that will give you chills, but truth is stranger than fiction. There are plenty of cold cases from the past in which the murder was never determined, but some stand out for their complete weirdness. Some leave evidence that doesn’t make sense, some have several possible explanations, and some are the stuff horror films are made of, like the series of five murders and three near-murders in 1946 in Texarkana.
The first attack came on February 22, when the killer ambushed Jimmy Hollis, 25, and Mary Jeanne Larey, 19, in their car. Pointing a flashlight at the couple's faces, he ordered Hollis out of the car, told him to remove his pants, and proceeded to beat and stomp him so badly that he would spend days in a coma. In a way, Larey was even less fortunate: The attacker ordered her to run, and soon chased her down, beat her, and assaulted her with the barrel of a gun. She managed to escape this deadly game of cat and mouse, and in true horror movie style, ended up pleading for help at the door of a house half a mile away, sure to the last second that she was being followed.
A few weeks after the first attack, another young couple was attacked in their car. This time, after an unknown sequence of events, the Phantom shot both victims execution-style. Another couple of weeks later, yet another two kids were found dead. They had made it out of the car (or had been forced to leave it), attempted to struggle and perhaps escape the murderer, but were shot several times nevertheless. The final victims were farmer couple Virgil and Katie Starks, and for them, the killer significantly changed his modus operandi, straight-up gunning them down through their window. Despite taking two shots in the head, Mrs. Starks didn't die in the attack. After a terrifying chase with the killer inside the farmhouse, she managed to escape to the neighbors' house before collapsing. A trail of blood and pieces of teeth marked her trail.
While the case spawned a movie and an entire genre of slasher films, the case has never been quite solved, although there were a couple of suspects. Read about that case and four others at Cracked.