He was the faceless predator who hunted children on the streets of Washington D.C., snatching, raping, and strangling at least six little girls during his 17-month reign of terror.
The serial killer, who called himself the Freeway Phantom, tortured and murdered his young victims – one just ten years old – before dumping their bodies on the side of the freeway.
From April 1971 to September 1972, he terrorized the nation’s capital and to this day has never been identified. His heinous crimes should place him among America’s most notorious serial murderers: Son of Sam, the Zodiac killer, the Boston Strangler or now the Gilgo Beach killer.
Yet outside of D.C., very few people have even heard of the mystery murderer or his killing spree.
The reason, investigators now admit, is as disturbing as the murders themselves: the killer’s victims were poor black girls from neglected neighborhoods, and didn’t matter to law enforcement at the time.
‘Those black girls didn’t mean anything to anybody – I’m talking about on the police department,’ Tommy Musgrove, who had once headed the D.C. homicide unit, told the Washington Post in 2018.
‘If those girls had been white, they would have put more manpower on it, there’s no doubt about that.’
Now more than half a century after the murders America chose to forget, the case has been dragged into the spotlight thanks to a podcast, Monster: Freeway Phantom, which explores the shocking failures of the investigation.
From April 1971 to September 1972, the Freeway Phantom serial killer terrorized Washington D.C., murdering six young girls between the ages of 10 and 18, in a case that has never been solved
The Phantom’s killing spree began on April 25, 1971, when 13-year-old Carol Spinks walked to a 7-Eleven convenience store to buy groceries.
She never returned home and her body was found six days later on an embankment next to the I-295.
Post mortem tests showed she had been sexually assaulted before being strangled.
Just three months later, 16-year-old Darlenia Johnson vanished on her way to a summer job. Her body lay undiscovered for 11 days, just 15 feet from where Sparks was found.
Less than three weeks later the Phantom struck again in a particularly chilling case.
Ten-year-old Brenda Crockett called home to tell her family she had been abducted.
‘A white man picked me up and I’m heading home in a cab,’ she said, before calling again minutes later to relay the same message.
Her body was found the next day by a hitchhiker by the I-50.
The Freeway Phantom killer’s spree began with the murder of 13-year-old Carol Spinks, who went missing while walking to get groceries at a 7-Eleven in Washington, D.C. on April 25, 1971
Romaine Jenkins, the first female homicide detective in the D.C. police department later reopened the Freeway Phantom cold case in the mid-1980s, a decade before her retirement
The killer targeted two more victims within October and November that year.
Nenomoshia Yates, 12, was kidnapped, raped and strangled, followed by fifth victim, 18-year-old Brenda Woodard.
The Phantom wouldn’t claim his final victim, Diane Williams, a 17-year-old high school senior, until almost a year later in September 1972, when the teen’s body was found strangled and dumped – again along the I-295.
Disturbingly, the six victims had several similarities.
All were petite, all but one were found barefoot, and strangely, four of them, Spinks, Johnson, Woodard and Williams, all shared the same middle name – Denise.
It was only after the first four victims were found that police realized the murders were linked and they were dealing with a serial killer. They began to call the case, ‘The Little Girl Murders’.
That soon changed when victim number five, Brenda Woodard was found in November 1971.
Police discovered a handwritten note from the killer in her coat pocket challenging investigators and giving himself a new nickname.
The case became known among law enforcement as ‘the little girl murders’, until the November 1971 discovery of fifth victim, Brenda Woodward, who was found with a note in her pocket
The killer taunted investigators in a handwritten note signed ‘Free-way Phantom’
‘This is tantamount to my insensititivity (sic) to people especial women. I will admit the others when you catch me if you can!’ it read, signed, ‘Free-way Phantom’.
Despite leaving behind a tangible piece of evidence, he was never caught.
Whatever public attention the case had receive quickly faded.
By the early 1980s, after a decade of dead ends and no solid evidence leading to the killer, the investigation was quietly called off.
At the same time, disagreements had arisen in the office of Earl Silbert, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia on how to proceed with the case.
Though Silbert had failed in capturing the Freeway Phantom, he gained national attention for leading the prosecution of the Watergate burglars, which resulted in President Nixon’s resignation.
For a time, there was one suspect, a computer technician who had served time for fatally poisoning a D.C. prostitute in 1938, but there was not enough evidence to charge him.
In 2023, retired FBI profiler Jim Clemente was brought in to investigate the long-dormant case for the eight-part podcast.
Jenkins with case files in her home in January 2018. The retired detective was committed to solving the case before her death last year at the age of 81
The freeway near the northbound lanes of I-295, where the bodies of Carol Spinks and Darlenia Johnson were discovered
Monster: Freeway Phantom is hosted and co-written by longtime public radio correspondent and investigative reporter Celeste Headlee.
Working from FBI reports and files preserved by retired D.C. police detectives who originally worked on the case Clemente has been able to piece together a new profile of the serial killer.
Clemente is convinced that the killer is black, was in his 20s or 30s, and from the D.C. neighborhoods where the victims lived.
But he is ‘invisible as someone part of the neighborhood.’
He described the Phantom as what he called ‘a preferential child sex offender’ who saw in his victims ‘vulnerability, accessibility, and desirability,’ and who had a specific sexual preference for the victims he chose.
‘There was a reason why he chose these particular victims – petite girls, young teen,’ Clemente said. ‘This guy decided I’m going to actually act on my desires.’
Clemente believes the killer chose freeways to drop off his victims’ bodies because rarely does anyone walk along them, and with traffic whizzing by, it makes the sides of freeways easy to conceal bodies.
Regarding the eerie note the killer left in victim Brenda Woodard’s coat pocket, Clemente believes he knew it would receive media attention, and ‘he’s obviously loving the moniker.’
Brenda Crockett was the youngest of the six victims at just 10 years old. She was also the only one to contact her family after being kidnapped but was found dead the following day by a hitchhiker
There was a near 12-month gap between the Phantom’s penultimate and final victim, Diane Williams, a 17-year-old high school senior, whose body was found strangled and dumped – again along the I-295 in September 1972
He believes the Phantom wanted to revel in getting a nickname that ‘fed his ego.’
Still, there was no evidence for Clemente to point to a specific suspect.
Romaine Jenkins, the first female homicide detective in the D.C. police department, who worked with Clemente and the podcast to develop the profile, had, on her own, reopened the Freeway Phantom cold case in the mid-1980s, a decade before her retirement.
Podcast host Headlee called Jenkins ‘the core to the story’ because she was ‘driven by a need’ to close the Freeway Phantom cases.
But Jenkins said her fellow detectives had been ‘blindsided’ by the serial killings.
She admitted they were ‘totally, totally unprepared’ to know how to investigate such a crime.
‘The term serial killer was not even thought of at the time,’ she said in an interview before her death last year at the age of 81.
Moreover, the nation’s capital at the time of the first murder was ‘in total uproar’ because of anti-Vietnam War demonstrations.
‘If you wanted to be a criminal,’ she noted, ‘this was the time to do it because all the police were pretty much tied up.’
At the start of the investigation, she revealed, ‘everybody was a suspect – priests, four-star generals.
‘But they were looking at the wrong suspects because females were murdered, but they had a bunch of men investigating.’
And because the victims were black, Jenkins believed the case wasn’t enough of a priority to fully investigate.
Worse still, she stated, evidence had been lost or destroyed, and she thought, ‘Well, that’s D.C.’
With the Freeway Phantom cold case still officially open, there’s a reward of up to $300,000 for any information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person or persons responsible for the murders.
