CRIME INVESTIGATION Who is the freeway phantom serial killer?
Nearly 50 years after the murders, WHO talks to the victims’ families and investigators still desperate to track down a sadistic madman on the run
Thirteen-year-old Carol Spinks knew she was not supposed to leave her Washington, DC, apartment when her mum wasn’t there. Still, the seventh grader thought she could get to the corner 7-Eleven – just four blocks away – and back before her mother, Allenteen, returned from visiting her sister on the evening of Sunday, April 25, 1971. But her scheme fell apart when she bumped into her mum on the street. A surprised Allenteen reluctantly gave her daughter permission to continue on to the store, but ordered her to come straight home afterwards.
Carol never made it home. Six days later an 11-year-old boy spotted the teen’s body, fully clothed but missing her blue tennis shoes, face down on an embankment. She’d been strangled and sexually assaulted. Her identical twin, Carolyn Morris, now 61, recalls the ride to the police station, where their mother learned of her daughter’s horrifying fate. “I could hear her screams,” says Morris. “Never really ever did I see my mother smile again.”
Carol was the first of six young black girls, ages 10 to 18, to disappear and later be found murdered in
Washington DC between April 1971 and September 1972. The murders terrified area residents and filled the pages of the local newspapers, who dubbed the killer the Freeway Phantom because of the way he left the girls’ bodies strewn along the sides of the roads in and around the DC area. But over the next five decades, the case remained unsolved.
Now, more than 47 years after the last victim, 17-year-old Diane Williams, was found on September 6, 1972, DC’s Metropolitan Police Department says the case files have been purged and their investigation is no longer active.
“I know she’s resting in peace, and it doesn’t matter to her anymore,” says Williams’ 85-year-old mother, Margaret, who still lives in the home where she waited for the daughter who never returned from a night out with a friend. “But I would like to know who did it and why. That’s the big question: ‘Why?’ ”
The question haunts more than just the families. Two former DC homicide detectives, now retired, conducted years-long exhaustive reviews of the murders. One of those detectives, Jim Trainum, 64, last looked at the mystery in 2009 and says solving it “gets more unlikely as time goes on, but in cold cases you live for the long shot”. The other, Romaine Jenkins, 77, keeps copies of the purged case files in her DC home and digs through them with each new hunch. “This is a mission,” says Jenkins, who was a 28-year-old homicide detective with the DC police when Carol Spinks’ body was found on May 1, 1971. Initially assigned to interview Carol’s relatives and neighbours, Jenkins was soon reassigned as anti-Vietnam War protests engulfed the city.
But she quietly returned to it on her own in 1987. She discounts any suggestion that the race of the victims made the case a lower priority for police; at one point, she notes, a 100-member taskforce searched for answers. Whoever killed the girls was “very shrewd”, dumping some of the bodies in different jurisdictions to hinder finding a connection, she says. “The police department, the FBI, Prince George’s County, the national park police, they all did what was humanly possible at the time,” she says.
She and Trainum both speculate that one man – likely African-American as he was able to blend in to the predominantly black neighbourhoods the girls were taken from
– committed the crimes. “This person is able to go from place to place and fit in,” says Jenkins. “All these ladies were taken from heavily trafficked and densely populated areas. Nothing they did caused them to be victims. He came to them.”
The murder of Carol Spinks jolted her tight-knit neighbourhood. Although six days passed before Carol’s body was found, an autopsy revealed she’d been dead just two to three days, indicating her abductor had briefly kept her captive.
Then, when a second girl, Darlenia Johnson, 16, vanished on July 8 from the same neighbourhood while walking to her job at a recreational centre, terror set in.
“Everybody was immediately saying it’s the same person,” says another of Carol’s sisters, Evander Spinks Belk, 63. “I was scared to death.” Police recovered Darlenia’s body 11 days later, about 4.5m from where they found Carol.
The third victim, Brenda Faye Crockett, 10, was taken on July 27 while walking barefoot and in pink hair curlers to the store for dog food and typing paper. In what police now think was a chilling deception by her captor, Brenda called home a little more than an hour after leaving, telling her sister a “white man” had picked her up and driven to his house in Virginia. He promised to send her home in a cab, she said. Minutes later she called back, asking her mother’s boyfriend, “Did my mother see me?” Trainum believes it was an attempt by the suspect to confirm that he hadn’t been spotted with Brenda. When the boyfriend asked to speak to the man, Brenda whispered, “I’ll see you” before the line went dead; eight hours later a hitchhiker spotted her body.
The fourth victim, Nenomoshia Yates, 12, was abducted on October 1, also on a trip to a store. Her body turned up just two hours after she’d left home.
Only the fifth victim, Brenda Woodard, 18, taken while she was walking home from night school, showed signs of a fight; in addition to being strangled, she’d been stabbed three times.
Perhaps more significantly, the killer had shoved a handwritten note in Brenda’s coat pocket, taunting police to find him.
“This is tantamount to my insensititivity [sic] to people especially women. I will admit the others when you catch me if you can!” it said, signed “Free-way Phantom.” The note was in Brenda’s own handwriting, without any sign of stress – leading police to think she knew her killer. And it gave them another clue as well: The use of the word “tantamount” reminded them of a local ex-con named Robert Askins, who had been known to use the word frequently in conversations with authorities.
Askins had been previously convicted of poisoning a prostitute – and later, of two unrelated abductions and rapes – but police found no evidence to connect him to the Freeway Phantom murders.
“I always thought if you solved the Brenda Woodard case, the others would fall in line,” says Jenkins.
Instead, the Freeway Phantom, perhaps unnerved by the added violence of Woodard’s death, waited almost a year before killing Williams, the last victim police tied to his spree. “And then he just stopped,” Jenkins says of the killer. Was he jailed for something else? Did he die or move away?
“There definitely is an explanation,” says Trainum. “We just haven’t figured it out.”
As they wait for answers, the families of the victims have struggled to find ways to get on with their lives. “It made me real protective of my sisters and brothers,” says Carol Spinks’ sister Evander. “I got mean, mad and bad. If anybody even looked at anybody funny, I was fighting.”
“I will not be surprised that I will die not knowing who killed my sister,” says Diane Williams’ sister Patricia, 62. “But I’m never going to stop praying that I do.” •
“Justice still has to be served. There’s no closure”
– victim Diane Williams’ sister Patricia