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Speaker 2: Prior to these killings start happenings, Freeway fan, you didn't
Speaker 2: hear a lot of killings of black kids per se
Speaker 2: in the district of Columbia, and not like that that
Speaker 2: one behind of a behind of an unresult. You didn't
Speaker 2: hear that. So the community was in shock and it
Speaker 2: put them on caution. People were scared. I mean parents
Speaker 2: were scared, children were scared. They wanted to know what
Speaker 2: more police could do. What were they doing? All that
Speaker 2: conversation was coming up, People were keeping an EyeT on things,
Speaker 2: anything that may have seen unusual. People were more visual
Speaker 2: I think during that time because it was hitting close
Speaker 2: to home, right in the community, close especially over here.
Speaker 2: I'm Derek Davis, I'm co owner of Davis. Barbara Service
Speaker 2: Uh been here fifty three years, right here in the
Speaker 2: same location. I was actually in high school myself in
Speaker 2: seventy two. I was in eleventh grade, so it was
Speaker 2: close in that regard because the girl that went blue
Speaker 2: was in the eleventh grade too, with the girl named Denise,
Speaker 2: even though I didn't personally know her. A lot of
Speaker 2: this the kids, you know, they came down and get
Speaker 2: the haircut at the shop, were talking about it and
Speaker 2: how they were, you know, depressed or saddened about what
Speaker 2: had happened to her. And then a lot of the
Speaker 2: customers had talked about it in terms of, you know,
Speaker 2: the crime going on in the city.
Speaker 3: And how they couldn't test this person. So it was
Speaker 3: a Saturday for DC. I do know that, but you
Speaker 3: don't really want to know what somebody was telling me
Speaker 3: the other date, Lord BERSI woo. They were giving me
Speaker 3: some deep stuff about this phantom stuff where if some
Speaker 3: people that was close to that person's family may have
Speaker 3: been tied up into that, and possibility it.
Speaker 2: Could have been a police officer involved.
Speaker 3: I said, do you want to go on record with that?
Speaker 4: Now?
Speaker 3: I don't know how true that is, but the way
Speaker 3: she was laying that out, said you need to come
Speaker 3: on camera and say what you got to say.
Speaker 2: But they won't talk. They're not gonna tell the police.
Speaker 2: They're not gonna tell the camera, the media. They're not
Speaker 2: gonna do it.
Speaker 4: The homicide detectives termed the cases the little girl case.
Speaker 4: This child was laying on the side of the road.
Speaker 1: I won't go no way.
Speaker 3: I would call my house.
Speaker 5: Those first five murders should have been a huge warning
Speaker 5: bell for the police.
Speaker 6: We just want to know what happened. This person must
Speaker 6: have saw that.
Speaker 4: They were thinking that maybe it's just one person, and
Speaker 4: he says, they need to know.
Speaker 7: This is me.
Speaker 8: I thought that they would catch him.
Speaker 9: I thought it was just a.
Speaker 10: Matter of time.
Speaker 7: I'm Celeste Hedley and this is Freeway Phantom. On the
Speaker 7: last episode, we covered the background of the Freeway Phantom murders.
Speaker 7: Six victims, all young black girls, all of them snatched
Speaker 7: off the streets of Washington, d C. Between April nineteen
Speaker 7: seventy one and September nineteen seventy two. Their bodies were
Speaker 7: all dumped by the side of the freeway. And we
Speaker 7: know that all six murders were committed by the same
Speaker 7: person and never solved. The first victim was thirteen year
Speaker 7: old Carol Spinks, who went missing on April twenty fifth,
Speaker 7: nineteen seventy one. In episode one, we heard from Carrol's sisters,
Speaker 7: Carolyn and Evander as they described the horror of losing
Speaker 7: their sister. Today, we'll dig into what happened after Carol
Speaker 7: was found, or at the least what we know from
Speaker 7: the official investigation. As you heard last episode, we were
Speaker 7: able to obtain the official police report. Here's what it
Speaker 7: said about Carol's known whereabouts leading up to the murder.
Speaker 9: Sunday, April twenty fifth, nineteen seventy one, at round seven pm,
Speaker 9: Carol Denise Spink's female black thirteen years of age, was
Speaker 9: sent to the seven to eleven store located on Wheeler
Speaker 9: Road and Southern Avenue. She was last seen in the
Speaker 9: vicinity of Wheeler and Southern Avenue by her mother, at
Speaker 9: which time she was reprimanded for being out of the house.
Speaker 9: Her older sister had sent her to the store. Later
Speaker 9: the same day, she was reported missing by her mother
Speaker 9: to the sixth District Police.
Speaker 7: It wouldn't be until almost a week later that Carrol
Speaker 7: Spinks's body was found. Here's another excerpt from the police report.
Speaker 9: On Saturday May one, nineteen seventy one, Carol Denise Spinks
Speaker 9: was found in the grass area of the northbound lane
Speaker 9: of Route two ninety five near Suitland Parkway by children playing.
Speaker 9: The children hailed a Traffic division officer who was traveling
Speaker 9: north on Route two ninety.
Speaker 7: Five now known as Interstate two ninety five or the
Speaker 7: Anacostia Freeway. The road was a major thoroughfare which cut
Speaker 7: right through the city. As we heard, the police report says,
Speaker 7: some children playing near the highway spotted the body and
Speaker 7: then one of them either called or flagged down a
Speaker 7: police officer. Here's how the report describes Carroll's body at
Speaker 7: the scene.
Speaker 9: Tennis usemissy cold to the touch, rigor evident in the
Speaker 9: right knee and left arm. Dried blood around the nose
Speaker 9: and mouth, right arm across the chest and left bent
Speaker 9: under the torso. Grass embedded in left leg and thigh.
Speaker 9: Crushed cardboard, milk carton pressed against the area of the
Speaker 9: right eye. Laceration to lower lip, several marks on body, throat, knees,
Speaker 9: and arms.
Speaker 7: Aside from her missing shoes, Carol was fully clothed. In
Speaker 7: one handwritten note by a police officer. It was said
Speaker 7: that her second and third snap on pants buttons were unfastened.
Speaker 7: Preliminary testing showed Carol had blood under her fingernails, but
Speaker 7: the amount was too small for any conclusive testing or grouping.
Speaker 7: No seamen was found anywhere on her body. However, the
Speaker 7: police did find negroid hairs unlike her own, on her shorts,
Speaker 7: sweater panties, and hair burrett and also on her sweater
Speaker 7: and underwear. Investigators found some mysterious synthetic green fibers.
Speaker 11: She did have a ligature mark on her some small
Speaker 11: crescent shape marks on cyber neck that indicated it could
Speaker 11: have been somebody who was strangling her. Her nose was bloodied,
Speaker 11: her lower lip was split open, and she had been sodomized.
Speaker 7: That's writer Blaine Pardo, who investigated and co wrote a
Speaker 7: book on the Freeway Phantom murders.
Speaker 11: What is really interesting about Carol Spinkx that I think
Speaker 11: is the creepiest factor of hers despite the gruesomeness of
Speaker 11: how she died, was that she had been kept alive
Speaker 11: for at least three days according to the authorities. You know,
Speaker 11: she had only been dead for two days, and they
Speaker 11: actually found that her murderer had fed her. They had
Speaker 11: given her citrus screw during that period, So whoever the
Speaker 11: killer was, it wasn't just a matter of kidnapping the girl,
Speaker 11: taking her to his place where he was going to
Speaker 11: do what he was going to do, dumping the body.
Speaker 11: He kept her for several days as a prisoner. It
Speaker 11: tells you a lot about the killer because it tells you,
Speaker 11: you know, he had to have a place where you
Speaker 11: could do that, He had to have the means of
Speaker 11: doing it. She didn't have any marks where it looked
Speaker 11: like she was tied up, so how did he keep her?
Speaker 11: It really gets you start thinking a little bit about
Speaker 11: the environment that she had to have or the killer
Speaker 11: had to have in order to keep her as a hostage.
Speaker 7: Police also interviewed a number of potential witnesses, including seventeen
Speaker 7: year old Vanessa Alice Copeland, who was near the seven
Speaker 7: eleven the day Carol went missing. Copeland said that between
Speaker 7: three point thirty and four pm, she saw a man
Speaker 7: exposing himself in a burned out building by the store.
Speaker 7: She also saw Carol walking behind her towards the Maryland
Speaker 7: state line, but when she looked back a minute later,
Speaker 7: Carol was gone. Another witness, twelve year old Cecilia Edith Diggs,
Speaker 7: says she saw Carol in the seven eleven parking lot
Speaker 7: that day between six thirty and seven pm with a
Speaker 7: girl named Deborah Harrison. Diggs was riding passenger in a
Speaker 7: car going north on Wheeler Road. While sitting at the
Speaker 7: traffic light on Wheeler and Mississippi, she claims to have
Speaker 7: seen two men, both black, jump out of a car
Speaker 7: to grab Carol and put her in the car. Then
Speaker 7: the car went south on Wheeler. The police then interviewed
Speaker 7: Deborah Harrison, the seventeen year old reportedly with Carol at
Speaker 7: the seven eleven. Harrison said that she walked with Carroll
Speaker 7: to the store, but left without her. When she was
Speaker 7: leaving the store, she looked back and noticed that Carol
Speaker 7: was walking towards a burned out building near the store,
Speaker 7: and this, she says, is the last time she saw Carol.
Speaker 7: But then Harrison says that the next day the phone
Speaker 7: started ringing at her home and when she picked up
Speaker 7: the line, she heard a man's voice. Harrison would say
Speaker 7: that at the time she didn't know Carol was missing
Speaker 7: or who had called her. Lastly, police interviewed Dorothy Wheeler,
Speaker 7: who'd helped organize a search party for Carol. Wheeler told
Speaker 7: police she also received threatening phone calls from a mail
Speaker 7: with a deep voice, and then Wheeler says she started
Speaker 7: receiving letters at work, one of which said the following.
Speaker 12: You have daughters and if you don't want them raped and.
Speaker 5: Dropped on the side of the road, you'll keep your
Speaker 5: nose out of this.
Speaker 7: The police report says these letters were handed to investigators,
Speaker 7: but there's no record of the notes themselves, and some
Speaker 7: believe that the testimony of Wheeler and the other witnesses
Speaker 7: were not credible.
Speaker 4: You follow a lead until it takes you no way,
Speaker 4: and they got all kinds of leads.
Speaker 6: I mean, everybody was a suspect.
Speaker 7: This is retired Metropolitan Police Department Sergeant Romainne Jenkins, who
Speaker 7: you met in episode one. She investigated the Freeway Phantom murders.
Speaker 7: Years after the case went At the time of Carol's murder,
Speaker 7: she was assigned to work elsewhere, but she remembers hearing
Speaker 7: about the investigation.
Speaker 4: Everybody became a suspect because people were calling in tips,
Speaker 4: and sometimes the information that people phoned in would lead
Speaker 4: you on a merry ghost chase, you know so, but
Speaker 4: you had to follow the lead until you couldn't follow
Speaker 4: it anymore. And then some of the people eventually admitted
Speaker 4: that they lied. They never saw the girls being abducted
Speaker 4: or anything that they lied.
Speaker 7: Romayne fully believes that those witness statements for Carol were
Speaker 7: completely false and that might explain why investigators made no
Speaker 7: progress with those leads. Eventually, there was an autopsy. According
Speaker 7: to the autopsy reports, they collected specimens from pubic hair,
Speaker 7: vaginal spears, rectal smears, and stomach contents. But remember this
Speaker 7: was pre DNA technology, so at the time police had
Speaker 7: no way of making connections through those specimens, and so
Speaker 7: the police ran out of leeds and thus Carol's case
Speaker 7: went cold. But many believed the police could have done
Speaker 7: more and chose not to. Here again is Evander Spinks,
Speaker 7: the older sister of Carol Spinks.
Speaker 13: As a young teenager, I don't think the police did
Speaker 13: a good job. I didn't feel as though they actually
Speaker 13: cared during that time, and as an adult, I know
Speaker 13: they didn't do a good job and I know down
Speaker 13: where they didn't care.
Speaker 7: Romayne believes this may have been due to a disconnect
Speaker 7: between white officers and the black communities in and around DC.
Speaker 4: People bring their own prejudices and biases to the job.
Speaker 4: I read information in the files with some of the detectives.
Speaker 4: The white ones said, well, they wore tight clothes that
Speaker 4: Carl Spinx had on tight clothes Carl Spring had on
Speaker 4: DC Public School Jim Shorts. If you know anything about
Speaker 4: DC Public School Jim Shorts, they balloon out, ain't nothing
Speaker 4: tight about them Shorts, instead of reviewing the whole case.
Speaker 4: And that's the number one problem most on these tasks force.
Speaker 4: They are given assignments to do. Look, I want you
Speaker 4: to cover the forty nine hundred block of C Street,
Speaker 4: I want you to cover fourteenth in you and you
Speaker 4: give an assignment and that's what you do.
Speaker 6: You have no idea what the other.
Speaker 4: Nine hundred and ninety nine pages in this investigation has revealed. Okay,
Speaker 4: but see, I'm not like that. I'm going to read
Speaker 4: everything I was taught. If you want to know something,
Speaker 4: you must read it. There's nothing that you don't know
Speaker 4: that you can't find out isn't written somewhere. So I
Speaker 4: read everything and sad to say, they didn't have a
Speaker 4: female on the team.
Speaker 7: Romayne believes there may have been some wilful neglect when
Speaker 7: it came to investigating Carroll's murder, and she wasn't the
Speaker 7: only one.
Speaker 14: When the first victims went missing, there was a really
Speaker 14: kind of a muted police response.
Speaker 7: This is Jim Trenham, a retired detective from the Metropolitan
Speaker 7: Police Department.
Speaker 14: But also during that time, there just wasn't the attention
Speaker 14: that was being paid, especially when these girls haven't been
Speaker 14: found yet. You know of just a young black girl runaway,
Speaker 14: or she probably at a relative's house, you know that
Speaker 14: sort of thing. There wasn't the full court press that
Speaker 14: you would often see with a John Benet Ramsey or
Speaker 14: something along that line.
Speaker 6: You know.
Speaker 14: To be honest, that's unfortunately, has been a fact of
Speaker 14: life for god knows hundreds of years, but even today.
Speaker 7: Jim started reviewing the case when he launched an initiative
Speaker 7: called the Violent Crime Case Review Project.
Speaker 14: Our goal was to go back and look at old
Speaker 14: homicide cases to see if we could take advantage of
Speaker 14: any the new technology that was coming out, such as DNA.
Speaker 14: And as I was doing so, I was pulling these
Speaker 14: case files up and looking at them, I kept hearing
Speaker 14: about this one case that was kind of a legend
Speaker 14: in DC back in the seventies, and that was referred
Speaker 14: to as the Freeway Phantom case. So one of my
Speaker 14: first goals was to see what I could find on
Speaker 14: that case, what evidence was available, and could we take
Speaker 14: advantage of especially DNA technology today.
Speaker 7: Jim says he quickly realized that the original investigators did
Speaker 7: a subpar job of maintaining documents and preserving the evidence.
Speaker 14: When we first started looking at the Freeway Phantom case,
Speaker 14: the most frustrating thing was that just about all of
Speaker 14: the files were gone. We didn't really have anything, and
Speaker 14: so we were trying to dig up whatever we could
Speaker 14: through newspaper accounts and things like that. The other frustrating
Speaker 14: thing is as we were going going through the evidence
Speaker 14: in all we were finding out that the evidence was
Speaker 14: also missing, not only in DC but also in PG County,
Speaker 14: And in fact, the PG County detectives who had done
Speaker 14: their own independent re examination of some of the cases,
Speaker 14: had only found evidence in one and that was evidence
Speaker 14: that having kept at the medical examiner's office. When the
Speaker 14: medical examiner back then would do a sexual assault kit
Speaker 14: on a body, they would take the swabs and they
Speaker 14: would smear them on a slide, look at the slide
Speaker 14: and see whether or not there was any sperm visible,
Speaker 14: and if it was, they would send the kit over
Speaker 14: to the FBI or to whatever lab they were using
Speaker 14: at the time. But they kept the slide, and so
Speaker 14: in one case they actually found the slide, they sent
Speaker 14: it in for testing, hoping that it had enough on
Speaker 14: there to extract a suspect profile. However, at that time
Speaker 14: DNA testing wasn't as advanced as it is now, and
Speaker 14: unfortunately they used up all of the sample and they
Speaker 14: were not able to get a useful.
Speaker 7: Profile, and so any hope of finding Carol's killer through
Speaker 7: DNA was officially lost. Anything the seven eleven used to be,
Speaker 7: it was only a point two miles of the whole
Speaker 7: point two yet, yeah, that was probably right at the book.
Speaker 5: Right at the corner.
Speaker 7: I was curious to see the neighborhood where Carrol Spinks
Speaker 7: lived last summer. I found where the Spinx house used
Speaker 7: to be, and I brought along my producers, Jamie and Tremors.
Speaker 7: As of letting my fid, I.
Speaker 11: Wanted to hide street.
Speaker 7: Today, I wouldn't hide it. I would absolutely send my child.
Speaker 5: He was a tired squirrel.
Speaker 7: The complex where the Sphinx family lived was torn down
Speaker 7: decades ago. Today the neighborhood is densely populated, yet quiet,
Speaker 7: single family houses, duplexes, and row homes with narrow, tidy
Speaker 7: lawns out front. There's a mix of old and newer buildings.
Speaker 7: When the weather is nice, people still sit outside of
Speaker 7: their homes and watch the activity on the streets. The
Speaker 7: Congress Heights neighborhood is still overwhelmingly black, but like so
Speaker 7: many urban neighborhoods in the twenty first century, there's surely
Speaker 7: been some gentrification since the nineteen seventies. Back then, this
Speaker 7: was a working class, tight knit black community. Tell us
Speaker 7: what you remember about that particular time, Derek, Oh.
Speaker 2: I thought it was more family or Yeah.
Speaker 7: This is Derek Davis, who's run a barber shop in
Speaker 7: the neighborhood for decades. You heard from him at the
Speaker 7: very top of this episode. Also sitting down with us
Speaker 7: is his friend, Reverend Anthony Motley.
Speaker 2: They called us Chocolate City, Chocolate City, the Bump Parliament,
Speaker 2: Funker delic. I mean, we had to go black leadership,
Speaker 2: black superintendent, black police, black city councils, black mayor.
Speaker 8: We had a lot of pride in the day. Back
Speaker 8: in the day, we were from DC. You know, it
Speaker 8: wasn't a knock on DC. It was you from DC.
Speaker 4: Man.
Speaker 8: You must be you know, you must be on the ball.
Speaker 2: Right, you know. There were a lot of bustling businesses
Speaker 2: we had in the total Ward eight. I think we
Speaker 2: probably had about maybe five movie.
Speaker 3: Theaters that we no longer have even won.
Speaker 2: We used to have a roller skating ring. Things kids could.
Speaker 3: Do, had boys club, bowling alley right, boys club, girls club.
Speaker 3: We had all these type of activities.
Speaker 15: Sit down restaurants, sit down restaurants. Yeah, we had all
Speaker 15: those things, restaurants. It was really community oriented. I mean
Speaker 15: people were friendlier, they helped out. Did it seem like
Speaker 15: a lot of anger like sometimes I see today, I
Speaker 15: see a lot of anger.
Speaker 2: Or frustration or stuff like that. It was just more
Speaker 2: community Definitely.
Speaker 8: The community felt safe. People could keep their doors open. Yes,
Speaker 8: your child could go to the store right by herself.
Speaker 8: We used to say, everybody come in when the street
Speaker 8: lights come right, come on right, But then they off
Speaker 8: the block. Don't come off the block, you know. But
Speaker 8: there wasn't nobody, nobody surveilling you.
Speaker 2: And then the adults had more say the adults had
Speaker 2: more control where if Reverie Motley saw my son or
Speaker 2: daughter out there, they said, I'm.
Speaker 3: Gonna talk to your daddy or I'm talk to your
Speaker 3: mama or whatever. That kid would listen or straighten up.
Speaker 3: The day you'll get cursed out. You might get shot
Speaker 3: or killed if you approach somebody's kid. So we had
Speaker 3: more family, more structure back in the early seventies.
Speaker 7: Did you think of this as a as a safe
Speaker 7: place for families and children at that time?
Speaker 2: Oh?
Speaker 8: Yeah, you know this was this was a family oriented.
Speaker 8: My mother and father, they were right up the street.
Speaker 8: Like Derek said, you know, you looked out for each other.
Speaker 4: In the black community, we always say nothing goes on
Speaker 4: that somebody didn't see.
Speaker 7: Here's Romaine Jenkins.
Speaker 4: Again, there's always you have a certain portion of the neighborhood,
Speaker 4: then hang out. Some of the older guys who'd like
Speaker 4: to drink liquor. They would sit outside three hundred and
Speaker 4: sixty five days a year, but they're there so if
Speaker 4: something happened, they would see it. Then you had the
Speaker 4: older people like my mother and her posse. They would
Speaker 4: sit in their window and they saw everything that went down.
Speaker 4: So if you were around the corner acting up, your
Speaker 4: mother got a call, or your grandmother says she's around
Speaker 4: there showing off. Oh yes, And when you got home,
Speaker 4: you got it. But they looked out for each other.
Speaker 4: You felt safe, you know, you felt safe in your neighborhood.
Speaker 4: Nobody was gonna bother you.
Speaker 7: This is why it's strange that supposedly no credible witnesses
Speaker 7: actually saw what happened to Carol. And it's exactly why
Speaker 7: when she went missing, the neighborhood was in full gear
Speaker 7: to find her.
Speaker 4: The community was kind of upset at the very beginning
Speaker 4: because there were lots of people out looking for Carol Sphinx,
Speaker 4: because it was not like her not to come back home.
Speaker 4: She should have been headed home, and she was seen
Speaker 4: headed home in the.
Speaker 6: Direction of her house.
Speaker 4: They had lots of search parties, people looking, but to
Speaker 4: no avail.
Speaker 7: I mean, I was born in nineteen seventy in La
Speaker 7: They sounds very much like it was here. There was
Speaker 7: always somebody out there is a you know, somebody's uncle
Speaker 7: in a tank top drinking a forty and somebody's auntie
Speaker 7: down the street sitting on their front porch, fanning themselves
Speaker 7: with their church fans. And I keep wondering as I
Speaker 7: read about these cases, how did nobody see anything?
Speaker 6: Because whoever did the cases fit right into the community,
Speaker 6: never raised any suspicion at all, and that's how he
Speaker 6: was able to do what he did. Nobody would would
Speaker 6: question if they saw him talking to a little girl
Speaker 6: or anything. They wouldn't They wouldn't question it. That's my
Speaker 6: personal feeling on it.
Speaker 4: You know, like you said, there's always somebody out.
Speaker 7: While many in the community felt the police didn't protect
Speaker 7: them and their neighbors as well as they could, officers
Speaker 7: on the force in the district have a very different perspective.
Speaker 16: Very protective in our neighborhoods, even though we know we
Speaker 16: hurt each other. We know about the guy in the neighborhood.
Speaker 16: This is a weirdo, you know. We know about these
Speaker 16: things in our families, even but let's something happen to them. Oh,
Speaker 16: you know, we need to be real and that's the
Speaker 16: only way we can heal. My name is Rita McCoy.
Speaker 16: I'm a retired DC homicide detective. I was on the
Speaker 16: Metropolitan Police Department, Washington, d C. I'm a Washingtonian. I'm
Speaker 16: presently single. I don't even want to talk about all
Speaker 16: them husbands I had. But I had a rack of husbands,
Speaker 16: four to be exact, and three were police officers.
Speaker 7: Rita says that folks in the community tend to know
Speaker 7: more than they're willing to tell, and for a police officer,
Speaker 7: that's tricky to navigate.
Speaker 16: We had people all the time, the new family members,
Speaker 16: people that knew and would not I ain't know snitch snitches,
Speaker 16: get stitches and all that foolishness. This is your neighborhood,
Speaker 16: you know. We had to start giving away money to
Speaker 16: get people. And I'm telling you that the talk what
Speaker 16: do you want?
Speaker 5: You know?
Speaker 16: And that's the hard part about us. We hate the police,
Speaker 16: but yet the police call them to our neighborhoods more
Speaker 16: than anywhere else. So what are you gonna do. You
Speaker 16: gotta find it, you know that that area, you know
Speaker 16: where you work with the police or whatever to get
Speaker 16: what you want so you can have a safety.
Speaker 7: But Rita says there just wasn't enough trust between black
Speaker 7: neighborhoods and white police officers.
Speaker 16: When I was a child, I remember the police being
Speaker 16: called in the community. You know, it was all black
Speaker 16: and the corps were white. They were white, and they
Speaker 16: were just physically, like assault the two guys that had
Speaker 16: been fighting or whatever, and sometimes didn't lock up anybody,
Speaker 16: just beat them up and get back in the car.
Speaker 9: Leave.
Speaker 16: People take advantage of their authority. I saw a lot
Speaker 16: of prejudice and racism on this department. I saw prejudice.
Speaker 16: I say it was because it was black people. And
Speaker 16: then racism I saw from the white officers. And a
Speaker 16: lot of them did not grow up in this area.
Speaker 16: They're from all over the place, from West Virginia, Southern Virginia.
Speaker 6: Whatever.
Speaker 16: They chewed, tobacco or you know, the things that were
Speaker 16: not accustomed to in our community. But then I will
Speaker 16: say that some of them, when they saw that you
Speaker 16: were good, real police, they changed with you. But you know,
Speaker 16: and it's like us too when we around all white people,
Speaker 16: and you know, we are initially uncomfortable if you not
Speaker 16: weren't raised around them, until you find that they are
Speaker 16: like you.
Speaker 7: Comments like this suggest that somebody in the community likely
Speaker 7: knew something about Carol, but wouldn't come forward to tell
Speaker 7: the police, and with no lead, it seemed like the
Speaker 7: story was over. But then less than three months later,
Speaker 7: in July of nineteen seventy one, yet another girl went missing.
Speaker 7: Darlina Denise Johnson was sixteen years old. She grew up
Speaker 7: in a large family with five brothers and five sisters.
Speaker 7: Darlinia was petite, about five feet two inches and one
Speaker 7: hundred ten pounds. She lived in the same neighborhood as
Speaker 7: Carol Spinks. Their homes were only three blocks apart. Darlinia
Speaker 7: had a boyfriend and a job at the local rec
Speaker 7: center a half mile or so from her apartment. Most
Speaker 7: days she'd walk to and from work, and that was
Speaker 7: her plan. On the morning of July eighth, nineteen seventy one,
Speaker 7: in the stack of boxes at Detective Romayne Jenkins house,
Speaker 7: we found a police report detailing statements given by Darlenia's mother,
Speaker 7: Helen McNeil. She gave this account to police about the
Speaker 7: day that Darlina went missing.
Speaker 17: On Thursday, July eighth, nineteen seventy one. I had to
Speaker 17: be at d C General Hospital eight o'clock in the morning.
Speaker 17: Before I left, I looked in and saw Darlina sleep.
Speaker 12: In her room.
Speaker 17: I told my son Nick to be sure that he
Speaker 17: got her up to go to work at the Oxen
Speaker 17: Hill Recreation Center. I came home from the clinic at
Speaker 17: twelve noon, and she had gone that night. I didn't
Speaker 17: look for her to come home on Friday. I expected
Speaker 17: her in about five o'clock PM. I got home from
Speaker 17: the store about six ten pm and asked the kids
Speaker 17: if Darlena had been home, and they said they hadn't
Speaker 17: seen her. I sent the kids around in the next
Speaker 17: court and they asked the people if they had seen Darlina,
Speaker 17: and they said no. Round about ten or ten thirty
Speaker 17: PM on Friday, I called the precinct and they sent
Speaker 17: two two police officers around. I told them everything and
Speaker 17: they took down all the information. The next day the
Speaker 17: police came back and got a picture of her. The
Speaker 17: first thing Monday morning, I called Miss Ankor at the
Speaker 17: Oxen Hill Playground. She said Darlena was supposed to go
Speaker 17: on the camping trip, but that she didn't show. Then
Speaker 17: Miss Anker says, do you know about a black car
Speaker 17: that picks her up in the evening. She said that
Speaker 17: this black car picked up Darlenia and another girl on Wednesday.
Speaker 17: She said that the other girl said Darlenia acted like
Speaker 17: she knew the fellow pretty well. The other girl insisted
Speaker 17: that they let her out of the car and she
Speaker 17: didn't know where they went after that. After I talked
Speaker 17: to Miss Anker, I went across the hall and talked
Speaker 17: to Miss Allan. I told Miss Allan that I had
Speaker 17: called the recreation center and that Miss Anker had told
Speaker 17: me about Darlenia getting in the black car. Her daughter,
Speaker 17: Sylvia Allan told me that a fellow called Alfred drove
Speaker 17: the black car and he hangs around Alabama Avenue.
Speaker 7: It seemed like Helen was on to something, but this
Speaker 7: promising lead about a guy named Alfred in a black
Speaker 7: car led nowhere. We know that at some point the
Speaker 7: police did question Alfred. They even gave him sodium pentathal,
Speaker 7: the so called truth serum, but he didn't crack, and
Speaker 7: so they moved on. For the rest of that first week,
Speaker 7: Helen was more or less on her own, calling around
Speaker 7: asking people in the neighborhood if they'd seen Darlenia. She
Speaker 7: called police stations and morgues in DC and in Prince
Speaker 7: George's County. Some kids said they found Darlinia's body in
Speaker 7: the nearby Oxen Hill high Rise apartment complex, but that
Speaker 7: was also a dead end. The police reports showed that
Speaker 7: something horrifying happened next, McNeil started to receive unsettling phone calls.
Speaker 7: According to McNeil, one afternoon, she answered the phone and
Speaker 7: a man spoke uh her daughter. Was this a message
Speaker 7: from the killer or was it just a prank call?
Speaker 7: We don't know. Of course, there was no caller. I
Speaker 7: d in nineteen seventy one, and the record suggests that
Speaker 7: the police didn't take those phone calls seriously. They had
Speaker 7: very few follow up questions to McNeil's story, and they
Speaker 7: never bring it up again in the police reports. Meanwhile,
Speaker 7: there were rumors floating around the neighborhood about a dead
Speaker 7: body left near the side of the two ninety five freeway,
Speaker 7: and on July nineteenth, her body was officially found. One
Speaker 7: man who found the body was Curtis Vincent, who worked
Speaker 7: for the DC Department of Highways and Traffic. On July
Speaker 7: twenty first, nineteen seventy one, he gave this statement to police.
Speaker 12: On Friday, July sixteenth, nineteen seventy one, I was on
Speaker 12: duty and was at the highway garage at Second in
Speaker 12: Bryant Streets, Northeast. I was working with Bill Ferrell. We
Speaker 12: were looking at the lawnmower shop there, which is supervised
Speaker 12: by mister Roy Tyler, and we were chatting with him.
Speaker 12: Mister Roy Tyler asked us if we'd been out around
Speaker 12: Firth Sterling and Route two ninety five lately. We asked why,
Speaker 12: and Roy said that there was a body of a
Speaker 12: dead lady out there, and he described the location to us.
Speaker 12: He told us that he'd notified the police, but the
Speaker 12: body was still out there, if I remember correctly, he
Speaker 12: told us that the body had been out there about
Speaker 12: a week. On Monday, July nineteenth, nineteen seventy one, I
Speaker 12: was working with Bill and about one pm or so
Speaker 12: we got to talking about what Roy had said about
Speaker 12: the body, and we decided to go to the location
Speaker 12: he described and see if we could locate the body
Speaker 12: on two ninety five, about one hundred yards south of
Speaker 12: Firth Sterling, on the north side of two ninety five,
Speaker 12: I guess about ten feet from the embankment, we found
Speaker 12: the body. I got the impression from the dress that
Speaker 12: the body was that of a female. The body was
Speaker 12: lying on the stomach with the head down the embankment
Speaker 12: and the feet up toward Route two ninety five. As
Speaker 12: far as I could tell, the body was clothed and
Speaker 12: I definitely remember that she was wearing blue shorts. Other
Speaker 12: than that, I recall a blouse. I do not remember
Speaker 12: any other clothing.
Speaker 7: In the end, it was his coworker Bill, who had
Speaker 7: a connection at the Metropolitan Police Department. Bill called his friend,
Speaker 7: a police sergeant named Charles Baden, and only then, after
Speaker 7: the body had been outside for over a week, did
Speaker 7: the police finally recover it.
Speaker 10: The sad part about this is that there was actually
Speaker 10: motorists that drove by on the super Busy Highway on
Speaker 10: July twelfth, seven days prior to when her body was
Speaker 10: actually recovered, and reported there's a body on the side
Speaker 10: of the road. Multiple times people called in saying that
Speaker 10: before she was finally removed days later, So if the
Speaker 10: police had actually found her body, it may have not
Speaker 10: been that decomposed five days prior.
Speaker 7: This is author Victoria Hester, who he heard from last episode.
Speaker 7: She and her father Blaine, have written extensively on the
Speaker 7: Freeway phantom case.
Speaker 11: We actually saw the autopsy photos of this, and all
Speaker 11: of them are very disturbing. These are young girls, but
Speaker 11: hers was very disturbing, just because she almost looked mummified.
Speaker 11: It's July and Washington, d C. She's laying out exposed.
Speaker 11: You know, the temperatures are all always in the eighties
Speaker 11: ninety degrees. You know, it's just it was terrible. It
Speaker 11: was just horrible.
Speaker 7: We found transcripts of the nine to one one calls
Speaker 7: reporting Darlinia's body. This call came in at six fifty
Speaker 7: am on July twelfth, a full week before she was
Speaker 7: picked up.
Speaker 5: I think I got it uncontient in a mineral that
Speaker 5: time in the morning. I hope everybody had their breakun
Speaker 5: it that Tarling and Nive at the intersection. Oh, it
Speaker 5: went over an embankment or laying over on the thigh
Speaker 5: ant Purling and two ninety five. Yeah, oh, I'll bet
Speaker 5: it's just an unconscious or just a man down.
Speaker 7: Forty minutes later, at seven thirty am, police received a
Speaker 7: second call about the body.
Speaker 5: I help you, Yeah, I broke down on Route two
Speaker 5: ninety five right opposite.
Speaker 3: Boiling Field Photo Center this morning.
Speaker 5: Yeah, sir, and there's a dead woman. I think it's
Speaker 5: a woman. It could be a man lying in the bushes.
Speaker 5: It's northbound on two ninety five, right opposite the photo
Speaker 5: center of boiling Field. Okay, is it a pretty obvious thing? No,
Speaker 5: it's in the bushes. You couldn't see it from the road. Okay, sir,
Speaker 5: We'll send somebody else find it.
Speaker 7: As Blaine tells us, police followed up on these first
Speaker 7: few reports about the body, but they couldn't have looked
Speaker 7: very hard.
Speaker 11: Police did drive by, you know, they did a slow
Speaker 11: drive by and looked and didn't see the body. But
Speaker 11: people kept saying they're out there, and it was a
Speaker 11: real embarrassment I think for law enforcement. And the body
Speaker 11: was found fifteen feet from where Carol Spink's body had
Speaker 11: been found, So you know, at the time, that was
Speaker 11: the link that really tied these two together.
Speaker 7: That was perhaps the most shocking detail. Darlinia was found
Speaker 7: only fifteen feet from where Carol Spinks had been found.
Speaker 7: But still police didn't officially connect the two murders. We did, however,
Speaker 7: find one police report where an officer interviewed a suspect
Speaker 7: in Darlinia's murder named Alfred Henry Holmes. The officer asked
Speaker 7: Holmes if he also knew about Carol Spinks, to which
Speaker 7: he answered no. But other than this question, there's little
Speaker 7: to suggest that the police department considered them connected. Meanwhile,
Speaker 7: investigators were still trying to piece together what had actually
Speaker 7: happened to Darlinia.
Speaker 10: There's lots of stories of meeting up with a boyfriend
Speaker 10: or going to stay somewhere else, but in a time
Speaker 10: before cell phones and ways to contact kid when they're
Speaker 10: off doing whatever they're doing, it's hard to tell what happened.
Speaker 10: There's not a whole lot of information about her specifically,
Speaker 10: just because her body was so far decomposed.
Speaker 4: I think Darlenia went to meet the killer because she
Speaker 4: she's the one who was decomposed, and we have nothing
Speaker 4: on her case, nothing per see. But at this point
Speaker 4: when this was read and she was still missing, right.
Speaker 7: This is Romayne Jenkins. We're sitting in her living room
Speaker 7: going through boxes of evidence and discussing Darlinia Denise Johnson.
Speaker 7: Romayne was especially frustrated by this murder.
Speaker 4: The police department was truly incompetent. I mean, let's face it.
Speaker 4: She leaves home on July the eighth. The remains a
Speaker 4: found I think July the twelfth. The guy who worked
Speaker 4: for Department of DC Highways in traffic, he calls the police.
Speaker 4: When his coworkers pick him up, he shows them the body.
Speaker 4: They call the police and if you look at the
Speaker 4: radio runs trans script of the radio runs. Every scout
Speaker 4: car that was dispatched came back in ten eight nothing found. Well,
Speaker 4: you're not gonna see about it if you don't stop
Speaker 4: the car. If you're going sixty five miles an hour
Speaker 4: down two ninety five, trying to keep up with traffic,
Speaker 4: you're not going to look. So that was incompetence on
Speaker 4: their part, totally incomfident because it might have been something,
Speaker 4: some evidence that we missed because we did not have
Speaker 4: a cause of death or her you know.
Speaker 7: So Darlinia's case was a dead end. But then just
Speaker 7: a few weeks later, the killer would strike again. On
Speaker 7: July twenty seventh, a ten year old girl named Brenda
Speaker 7: Crockett went missing, and later that night, Brenda called home
Speaker 7: and talked to her stepdad.
Speaker 5: I'm many Christian in.
Speaker 7: A white man's house to witness.
Speaker 13: Came the car and turned me to this.
Speaker 7: House my mother next time on Freeway Phantom.
Speaker 11: When I got there, I guess there was a crowd
Speaker 11: starting to come out.
Speaker 4: Arriving on a scene. I was directed to where this
Speaker 4: child was laying on the side of the road.
Speaker 6: She was the child of God.
Speaker 8: She loved church.
Speaker 13: She was going to refrigerate to eat raw bacon, but
Speaker 13: you know the pigs were better back then.
Speaker 6: Asked her again, tell the man to come to the phone.
Speaker 7: I heard someone walk in heaven.
Speaker 3: She said, really low, I'll see you, and someone just
Speaker 3: cut the phone.
Speaker 11: So the killer had kind of shifted at least from
Speaker 11: the first case. He's not spending as much time with
Speaker 11: the victims. He's killing them and now just dumping them.
Speaker 6: Whoever grabbed these young ladies grab them right in their
Speaker 6: own Neighborhook.
Speaker 1: Freeway Fantom is a production of iHeartRadio, Tenderfoot TV, and
Speaker 1: Black bar Mitzvah. Our host is Selese Hiley. The show
Speaker 1: is written by Trevor Young, Jamie Albright and CELESE.
Speaker 16: Hilly.
Speaker 1: Executive producers on behalf of iHeart Radio include Matt Frederick
Speaker 1: and Alex Williams, with supervising producer Trevor Young. Executive producers
Speaker 1: on behalf of Tenderfoot TV include Donald Albright and Payne Lindsay,
Speaker 1: with producers Jamie Albright and Tracy Kaplan. Executive producers on
Speaker 1: behalf of Black bar Mitzvah include myself, Jay Ellis and
Speaker 1: Aaron Bergman, with producer Sidney Fools. Lead researcher is Jamie Albright.
Speaker 1: Artwork by Mister Soul two one six, original music by
Speaker 1: Makeup and Vanity Set special thanks to a teammate, Uta
Speaker 1: Beck Media and Marketing and the Nord Group. Tenderfoot TV
Speaker 1: and iHeartMedia, as well as Black Bar Mitzvah, have increased
Speaker 1: the reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction
Speaker 1: of the person or persons responsible for their freeway phantom murders.
Speaker 1: The previous reward of up to one hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: thousand dollars offered by the Metropolitan Police Department has been matched.
Speaker 1: A new total reward of up to three hundred thousand
Speaker 1: dollars is now being offered. If you have any information
Speaker 1: relating to these unsolved crimes, contact the Metropolitan Police Department
Speaker 1: at area code two zero two seven two seven nine
Speaker 1: zero ninety nine. For more information, please visit Freeway dashfanom
Speaker 1: dot com. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio and Tenderfoot TV,
Speaker 1: visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen
Speaker 1: to your favorite shows. Thanks for listening.