The Chilling History Of Texas' Oldest Cold Case

"Officers Seek Missing Girl," the Amarillo Globe-Times read on June 9, 1948. The very terse article explained the basic facts of the missing person in question. The 21-year-old Virginia Carpenter had disappeared about a week earlier on June 1 after arriving on the campus at Texas State College for Women, now Texas Woman's University, in Denton. A cab driver had dropped her off near her dorm, but she never registered for class. He said she left the taxi and began "talking to two young men in a convertible." No one can account for her whereabouts after that. She just vanished.

As far as cold cases go, few could run colder. The disappearance of Mary Virginia Carpenter (her full name) stands out from a multitude of other missing persons cases not just because it was Texas' first recorded cold case but because of the absolute dearth of anything approaching real leads. As The Lineup outlines, we've got loads of details related to her activities leading up to her arrival on campus, and then: poof. A woman matching her description did show up at a bus terminal in DeQueen, Arkansas on June 11, two days after the Amarillo Globe-Times article hit the news, but the sighting remains unconfirmed no matter how compelling. 

Carpenter was declared legally dead in 1955. Bogus leads have cropped up since then, but nothing substantive. Then there's Carpenter's potential connection to the Texarkana Moonlight Murders that saw five people murdered through spring 1946. The killer was never caught.

We know plenty of details about Mary Virginia Carpenter's movements before she disappeared on June 1, 1948. She took the train to Denton that day, by all accounts expecting nothing more than signing up for class at the Texas State College for Women and starting her summer courses. Described as "happy-go-lucky and polite," per The Lineup, she had an interest in the sciences and wanted to become a laboratory technician. 

Carpenter took a taxi from Denton train station directly to the campus' Brackenridge Hall and arrived at about 9:30 p.m. She gave the taxi driver a dollar to go back to the station the following day to pick up her luggage, which was apparently sent separately. Then, before he could pull away, The Doe Network says Carpenter walked up to two young men sitting in a convertible nearby and said, "Well, hi. What are you doing here?" Note the familiar introduction: It seemed like she knew them. The taxi driver did his job and dropped off Carpenter's luggage the next day. Then it just sat there, unclaimed. The 21-year-old Carpenter was gone, and no one knew a thing. By June 5, her mother had reported her missing.

At the time Carpenter disappeared, The Doe Network says that she was wearing a "striped chambray dress, white hat and red platform shoes." She had long brown hair and brown eyes and was a petite 5-feet-3-inches and 120 pounds. Such descriptions do more than memorialize Carpenter — they're the markers that some claimed to have seen after she vanished. 

[Featured image by The Waco News-Tribune via Wikimedia Commons | Cropped and scaled]

Police investigations uncovered two main suspects related to Mary Virginia Carpenter's disappearance, and they're both pretty obvious: The taxi driver who drove her from Denton station to campus, and her boyfriend, whom we know little about. It was the boyfriend, Kenny Branham, who'd contacted Carpenter's mom on June 4 because he couldn't get ahold of her. That's the day before her mom reported her missing. The police wound up questioning Branham no less than 12 times to no avail and gave him a polygraph test, which he passed. That's it for him. 

The taxi driver — Edgar Ray "Jack" Zachary — provides a bit more of a complex, even suspicious case. According to The Doe Network, Zachary was apparently a rough guy who was prone to violence and was described by Denton police as a "bootlegger, part-time mechanic and automobile trader." The police investigated him, but they found nothing. 

Nine years later, in 1957, his the-ex-wife stepped forward with some bizarre information. She stated that contrary to her original statement to police, on the night when Carpenter went missing, June 1, her husband returned home later than usual. Usually he was home by 10:00 p.m., which is when she originally told police he got back. But that night, she said he actually got home between 2:00 and 3:00 a.m. Also, she said he took a drive to Denton every following June 1, like an anniversary, to apparently buy a newspaper. Without hard evidence, this is potentially just a tall tale, and there's no telling how Zachary's ex-wife could have remembered the time her husband got home on one night nine years earlier, besides. But it's a disturbing possibility to consider, nonetheless. 

There was one key sighting of Mary Virginia Carpenter shortly after her disappearance, which we mentioned before. A ticket agent at the DeQueen, Arkansas bus station reported a girl matching Carpenter's appearance buying a ticket on June 11, 10 days after Carpenter took a taxi to Texas State College for Women and vanished. According to The Lineup, the witness said Carpenter (if it was her) "seemed nervous, as she paced about, chewed her lip, and inquired about local hotels." Most critically, she was then joined by a young man and the two took off. Multiple sources mention multiple sightings of Carpenter after this, but no specifics.

In 1959, someone found a box of human bones about 200 miles from Denton in Jefferson, Texas. The bones looked like a match for Carpenter's height, gender, etc., but the teeth didn't match. There are also reports of bones found around Denton in 1960 and even in 1949, shortly after she disappeared, but none of those were a match, either. Later, in 1998, an older man in his 70s told the police that Carpenter was buried on the grounds of Texas State College for Women, but the tip proved bogus. This person also gave the names of two other people supposedly involved in Carpenter's disappearance, but those individuals were already dead by then, meaning the police have never released their names. In the end, every possible lead into Carpenter's disappearance went nowhere.

The case of Mary Virginia Carpenter's disappearance comes equipped with another very strange component that seems like a stretch on the surface but sounds more feasible the deeper we go. That is: Carpenter's possible connection to the Texarkana Moonlight Murders. In the spring of 1946, an unknown murderer stalked the little Texas town of Texarkana, which straddles the state border with Arkansas. Dubbed the Phantom Killer because he was never found, he murdered five people and wounded three others, usually with a .32 revolver and often targeting isolated couples or people hanging out in pairs at night — men and women both. One survivor described something straight out of a horror film: The killer wearing a burlap mask over his head with little slits cut for eyes. And indeed, the cover for 1976's "The Town That Dreaded Sundown" depicts this exact look on its movie poster. The media of the time dubbed the creepy murder mystery the "Texarkana Moonlight Murders."

Even though the Phantom Killer finished killing 2.5 years before Carpenter went missing, Carpenter would have been personally acquainted with what happened when she was younger. After all, she knew three of the killer's eight victims and was from the very town he committed his crimes, Texarkana. This isn't anything approaching a smoking gun, and if true, it would render Carpenter's death a strange, one-off killing in the Phantom Killer's pattern of behavior. Nonetheless, it's a weird, notable connection that only adds to the mystery surrounding Carpenter's disappearance.

As mentioned, Mary Virginia Carpenter was declared dead in 1955. After seven years of investigation, she was simply gone. Carpenter's mother, Hazel, believed that her daughter had gotten struck with amnesia and wandered off somewhere. She hunted down whatever clues she could find and died in 1980 without any answers. Carpenter's father, Floyd, died in 1942, six years before she went missing. Both of her parents are buried in Rose Hill Cemetery in the town of her birth, Texarkana, although it's not clear if she has any kind of memorial grave anywhere.

That being said, plenty of people still remember Carpenter over 75 years after she vanished. Her virtual grave on Find a Grave contains flowers left as recently as August 2024, with the message, "I'm sorry there was no justice for you." Carpenter is also the subject of numerous podcasts and true crime outings, including "Sipping on Some Crime," "Small Town Missing," and "Murder! Mystery! Monday!" She's also logged in missing persons databases like The Doe Network and The Charley Project, and on more unofficial lists like Missing Please Find Us. Officially, her case is still open. If Carpenter is still somehow alive, she'd be 98 years old. Realistically, however, it would take quite a breakthrough to make any headway into a case that went cold long, long ago.