Freeway Phantom

What the record shows

The Freeway Phantom is the press's name for the unidentified killer of six Black girls and young women, aged 10 to 18, abducted in Washington, D.C., between April 1971 and September 1972. Their bodies were left beside roads in the District and in Prince George's County, Maryland, several along Interstate 295. No one has ever been charged. The Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) lists the six killings as open cold cases, with a reward of up to $150,000.

According to Wikipedia and a 2025 history by WETA's Boundary Stones, Carol Denise Spinks, 13, left home in Southeast Washington for a 7-Eleven on April 25, 1971, and was found strangled on May 1 behind St. Elizabeths Hospital near I-295. Darlenia Denise Johnson, 16, disappeared on July 8, 1971, and was found on July 19 about fifteen feet from where Spinks had lain. Brenda Faye Crockett, 10, was sent to a store on July 27, 1971, and found the next morning along U.S. Route 50 in Prince George's County. Nenomoshia Yates, 12, vanished walking home from a Safeway on October 1, 1971, and was found within hours off Pennsylvania Avenue in Prince George's County. Most had been strangled and sexually assaulted, and most were missing their shoes.

Brenda Denise Woodard, 18, boarded a bus late on November 15, 1971, and was found hours later on a Baltimore-Washington Parkway ramp near Prince George's County Hospital, stabbed and strangled. A note in her coat pocket read, in part, "this is tAntAmount to my insensititivity to people especiAlly women. I will Admit the others wheN you cAtch me iF you cAn! FRee-wAy PhanTom." According to Wikipedia, authorities concluded from handwriting that Woodard wrote it herself at the killer's dictation. The last victim, Diane Denise Williams, 17, boarded a bus on Martin Luther King Avenue late on September 5, 1972; the Washington Examiner reported she was found strangled the next morning beside southbound I-295 just outside the District line.

The investigation involved MPD homicide and sex-squad detectives, Prince George's and Montgomery County investigators, the Maryland State Police and the FBI, which joined a task force after the fourth killing, according to Boundary Stones. Hairs not belonging to the victims were recovered from three of them, and investigators concluded one offender was likely responsible. Boundary Stones also reported that police at first treated Spinks as a runaway and that in 1974 a Virginia inmate claimed to know the killer's identity but the FBI found his account inconsistent. Wikipedia, citing Washington Post reporting, says detectives interviewed members of a group of convicted rapists at Lorton prison and, in the late 1970s, searched the home of a man with earlier murder charges who had been arrested for an unrelated rape. No evidence was found and he was never charged; he died in federal custody in 2010.

The case files did not survive intact. According to Boundary Stones, when Sergeant Romaine Jenkins reopened the cases in 1987 she found that files and physical evidence had been destroyed or lost; she and the FBI reconstructed part of the record, and in 1990 FBI analysts produced a behavioral profile. The D.C. Council afterward required evidence in unsolved homicides to be kept for 65 years. In 2006 MPD offered a reward of up to $150,000, and in February 2009 the Washington Examiner reported that a DNA discovery could help solve the Williams killing.

The investigation remains formally open. In a December 2017 Freedom of Information Act response released by MPD, the department said the records "pertain to an open investigation" that is "ongoing and active," and that only Spinks and Johnson were found in the District and investigated by MPD, while Prince George's County police are investigating the other four murders. In January 2021 the Mayor's Office of Legal Counsel affirmed MPD's refusal to release the files because disclosure would interfere with an enforcement proceeding. On February 28, 2023, MPD published two sets of FOIA records, mostly correspondence. Boundary Stones, citing a May 2024 Washington City Paper report, noted that a 1974 FBI report could not be located.

The victims were schoolgirls and teenagers from Southeast Washington, most taken within blocks of home. Diane Williams's sister told Boundary Stones, "There is no closure."