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Speaker 2: I'm just a guy who grew up in DC saw
Speaker 2: a lot of things. I wanted to make a difference.
Speaker 2: I wanted to do better. I wanted to help families.
Speaker 2: I know how I feel to be out there, you know,
Speaker 2: searching for your loved one. It's heartbreaking, especially when the
Speaker 2: little girls go missing and daddy looking for him, and
Speaker 2: you know, mama looking for him, and you know, they
Speaker 2: feel like the police ain't doing nothing.
Speaker 3: You know what are y'all doing? Because they don't see anything.
Speaker 3: It's heartbreaking.
Speaker 2: The homicide detectives termed the cases the little Girl case.
Speaker 2: This child was laying on the side of the road.
Speaker 1: I wouldn't go no way.
Speaker 2: I would call my house. Those first five murders should
Speaker 2: have been a huge warning bell for the police.
Speaker 4: We just want to know what happened.
Speaker 3: This person must 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 3: This is me.
Speaker 1: I thought that they would catch him.
Speaker 3: I thought it was just a matter of time.
Speaker 4: I'm Celeste Headley and this is Freeway Phantom. In the
Speaker 4: early stages of our Freeway Phantom investigation, we consulted Henderson,
Speaker 4: long of DC's Missing Voice. Henderson helped us understand the
Speaker 4: systemic and regional issues that affected the Freeway fantas investigations
Speaker 4: in the nineteen seventies and current cases of missing and
Speaker 4: murdered children.
Speaker 2: The foundation never changes with any kind of investigative work
Speaker 2: through roots of it and.
Speaker 3: What it's about, the core stuff. Never it's still it'll
Speaker 3: never changed.
Speaker 4: As a DC native with deep roots in the community
Speaker 4: and years spent building relationships, Henderson is an invaluable source
Speaker 4: of support and expertise for the families who are searching
Speaker 4: for answers or coping with loss. For this bonus episode,
Speaker 4: we dig into his story to learn more about what
Speaker 4: led him to the work he does today and the
Speaker 4: hard fought battle for change in DC's justice system.
Speaker 2: Basically, what I do is I work right alongside with
Speaker 2: the lead detective that's working to find a missing person
Speaker 2: here in DC. I'm actually going behind him or sometimes
Speaker 2: ahead of him to interview witnesses. Is to do self
Speaker 2: owned traces, to do surveillance, to take singer friends and
Speaker 2: DNA and all this kind of stuff to make sure
Speaker 2: it's submitted.
Speaker 3: It's very rewarding.
Speaker 2: Whatever the case may be, whatever we're looking for, that's
Speaker 2: our number one objective is to stay on that track
Speaker 2: to look for missing people. So what I'm learning about
Speaker 2: investigating cases, you have to have a certain character to
Speaker 2: do this work because it can be very frustrating.
Speaker 3: You have to kiss a little bit of behind sometime
Speaker 3: to get the information you want.
Speaker 4: Henderson's nonprofit works on missing persons cases in Washington, DC,
Speaker 4: and he often acts as a liaison between the Metropolitan
Speaker 4: Police and black communities. The work is hard. It's taken
Speaker 4: years of emotional and physical labor to establish the trust
Speaker 4: Henderson now enjoys. But this work is personal. It's directly
Speaker 4: connected to his upbringing in DC and tragedies within his family.
Speaker 2: I was born in nineteen sixty eight open Southeast Washington,
Speaker 2: d C. The Warding sector of Washington, d C. We
Speaker 2: all lived in a like a little one bedroom apartment
Speaker 2: with my grandmother, my mother's mother, and my father got
Speaker 2: a good job and we moved over to ward Fire,
Speaker 2: which is another northeast sector of DC, and that's where
Speaker 2: I grew up. My father still lives in the same house.
Speaker 2: As a kid, I grew up in the crack era
Speaker 2: of d C. I grew up here where crackhead came
Speaker 2: into our communities in the eighties and the.
Speaker 3: Late seventies is when it was starting.
Speaker 2: So as a kid, I got a chance to kind
Speaker 2: of see all that at a low level, you know,
Speaker 2: just from my eyes seeing it. I never was involved
Speaker 2: in it, never got involved with nothing like that as
Speaker 2: far as no homicide or nothing, but I saw it.
Speaker 2: I saw my friends get involved growing up. I saw
Speaker 2: a lot of my friends who are dead now or
Speaker 2: most of them are in car.
Speaker 3: I just saw a lot of death here in DC.
Speaker 2: I'll be quite frankly, quite honest with if you was
Speaker 2: a lot of violence here in DC trying to control
Speaker 2: the drug trade. Everybody wanted to get a piece of it,
Speaker 2: and as a result, we saw a rise in homicides.
Speaker 2: As a kid growing up, I got a chance to
Speaker 2: lose loved ones. I'm probably a seven time loser. I've
Speaker 2: lost seven or eight people to homicide. And when I
Speaker 2: tell you I seen violence, I saw it with my
Speaker 2: own eyes. I lost my kid, my oldest son. His
Speaker 2: mother was murdered by a fifteen year old back in
Speaker 2: nineteen ninety two, ninety three. I know about death's firsthand
Speaker 2: and violent crimes. I know how I feel for the
Speaker 2: community to have information on your homicide, but won't nobody
Speaker 2: come forward. So as a person, this kind of motivated
Speaker 2: me to do the work I'm doing.
Speaker 3: And also being in the military.
Speaker 4: Growing up surrounded by violence, and Henderson wasn't always sure
Speaker 4: he would make it out. He thanks his father for
Speaker 4: emphasizing the importance of structure and discipline.
Speaker 3: He was tough.
Speaker 2: My father was really tough, and he laid the law
Speaker 2: down in the house. Immediately after high school, after graduating,
Speaker 2: you know, my father told me I had to get out.
Speaker 2: I had to either go to work or I had
Speaker 2: to go to school. And I didn't really want to
Speaker 2: go to college. So I went to the military and
Speaker 2: I did about seven years, and I came back home
Speaker 2: I got a chance to work with different people and
Speaker 2: meet different people and see the goodness in people, because
Speaker 2: most people are good people, you know. For the most part,
Speaker 2: my main aspect of my story was the core was
Speaker 2: my father and my grandmother. They were at the core
Speaker 2: of me growing up because you know, sometimes you need
Speaker 2: a man to tell a man how to be a man,
Speaker 2: and so my father was probably the biggest example that
Speaker 2: I had growing up and the reason why I was
Speaker 2: able to make the decisions that I made.
Speaker 4: Henderson decided he wanted to be that kind of example
Speaker 4: for his community too. He eventually established DC's Missing Voice
Speaker 4: with a focus on finding missing and exploited persons, another
Speaker 4: issue that hits painfully close to home. In nineteen ninety nine,
Speaker 4: his aunt Aileen went missing.
Speaker 2: My aunt was last seeing September fifteenth, nineteen ninety nine.
Speaker 2: Family couldn't reach her, you know, they kept calling her
Speaker 2: and calling her and calling her with no answer.
Speaker 3: So we called.
Speaker 2: We got the rental office to do a wellness check,
Speaker 2: and when we got to the apartment, my little cousin
Speaker 2: was there in the apartment alone, Drone and his baby
Speaker 2: Sea because he was a baby at the time and
Speaker 2: he was strapped in. He had been there for a
Speaker 2: couple of hours, and you know, my family knew something
Speaker 2: was wrong. We called the police, and the police got
Speaker 2: involved to no avail, researched her, search and search, and
Speaker 2: at the time, we weren't where we are now with
Speaker 2: missing persons. In nineteen ninety nine, we didn't have social
Speaker 2: media like we have social media now.
Speaker 3: We didn't have some of the tools we have now.
Speaker 2: My family was they just thought that the police was
Speaker 2: gonna take care of it.
Speaker 3: The police know, the police got you to allow on.
Speaker 2: The police come to find out a lot of things
Speaker 2: probably could have been done better by the police department.
Speaker 3: They never asked them for DNA, never asked.
Speaker 2: All this time, my family told me, look, don't talk
Speaker 2: about this no more. We're not getting no answers. Just
Speaker 2: don't talk about it. It was just so painful.
Speaker 4: When Aileen went missing in the nineties, the federally funded
Speaker 4: databased National Missing and Unidentified Person System or NEMUS had
Speaker 4: not yet been established, and the Combined DNA Index System
Speaker 4: or CODIS was brand new. Henderson uses both systems in
Speaker 4: his work today. He said that had they been available
Speaker 4: earlier on, it could have saved his family years of
Speaker 4: pain and uncertainty.
Speaker 2: We had three unidentified remains found here in DC, and
Speaker 2: we just knew one of them probably was a Leen
Speaker 2: because it was in the same street that she would
Speaker 2: frequent I told my family, you know, we got to
Speaker 2: get our DNA and if we're going to have approve
Speaker 2: that that's her and get some kind of closure. Well,
Speaker 2: in the process when we put our DNA in, we
Speaker 2: got a hit on a body that was found in
Speaker 2: two thousand, So she had been in the Moore from
Speaker 2: two thousand to twenty and nineteen before she was identified.
Speaker 2: Now we tell you about good detective work. My detective
Speaker 2: took a shot in the dark. He had some remains
Speaker 2: up there at the Maryland Cortner's office. They kind of
Speaker 2: fit the same description height of her. He asked them
Speaker 2: test those bones. Went and test the bones. It turned
Speaker 2: up a snake.
Speaker 3: It was her.
Speaker 2: So my family went through a lot of hearted because
Speaker 2: we didn't know about all the different technology that was
Speaker 2: available and what we should be using to solve her case.
Speaker 3: And they quite frankly didn't want to talk about it.
Speaker 2: They didn't even want This woe was so deep and
Speaker 2: so painful. It was still wide open, but we just
Speaker 2: ignored it. We still wanted answers. We still we was
Speaker 2: the more desperate for the answers. So they had to
Speaker 2: go ahead and they went on and they put their
Speaker 2: DNA in. They got a match, and then we convinced
Speaker 2: the sun drone to put his in and that was
Speaker 2: a real match. Then they were positive that it was her,
Speaker 2: and that's how we got the answers.
Speaker 4: Even though Henderson found an answer to his ant's mystery,
Speaker 4: his personal tragedies didn't end there. His niece went missing
Speaker 4: around twenty twelve, and at that point Henderson was fed
Speaker 4: up with the cycle of searching and waiting for answers.
Speaker 4: He decided to get involved with the investigation.
Speaker 3: I had a niece twelve years old.
Speaker 2: She kept running away from home, and you know, the
Speaker 2: police were working on it, and you know, they got
Speaker 2: eighty million kids that's missing. So I was out there
Speaker 2: on the ground talking with dope dealers. What was going
Speaker 2: through my head was that this is what the police
Speaker 2: go through, and they probably go through it worse than
Speaker 2: what I'm saying. She was missing off and on, I say,
Speaker 2: about three or four years. She's twenty one now.
Speaker 3: She got four kids.
Speaker 2: But the trauma that she went through, the domestic violence,
Speaker 2: you know, leaving names out, the domestic violence and all
Speaker 2: that stuff that she went through. You know, did they suffer?
Speaker 2: They suffer? It changed.
Speaker 4: After this his mission was clear.
Speaker 3: Looking for her.
Speaker 2: Is what got me involved in is I saw how
Speaker 2: hard it was for investigators to acquire and get information,
Speaker 2: to get information that they need to solve these cases.
Speaker 2: And it really drove me to do more and to
Speaker 2: want to do more to assist them. So I realized
Speaker 2: I had to learn more about the logistics of investigating cases,
Speaker 2: and I had to know. You got to know what
Speaker 2: you're doing because sometimes you really can mess up a
Speaker 2: case unintentionally. So I had to learn. I had to
Speaker 2: I had to ask a lot of questions from to
Speaker 2: on law enforcement officers that are investigators and sit down
Speaker 2: with them talk with them. I had to do my
Speaker 2: own study, and I had to go through various courses
Speaker 2: to learn how.
Speaker 3: To do this in a professional man and not just
Speaker 3: as a citizen.
Speaker 4: Henderson began working part time as a Trace investigator. He
Speaker 4: now offers his services to families at no cost.
Speaker 3: You don't want any money. This is all pro bona
Speaker 3: work I did, and all the materials and stuff.
Speaker 2: Some of the stuff is from the police department, some
Speaker 2: of us from But you do all this out of
Speaker 2: your own pocket, because you know what it's like. I
Speaker 2: don't really want to work by contract because I don't
Speaker 2: want to charge no family to look for a missing person.
Speaker 3: Unless they're rich, they can pay.
Speaker 2: But nobody's test driving me. I'm doing this without funding.
Speaker 4: Part of his work includes running platforms to publicize cases
Speaker 4: in DC.
Speaker 3: Platforms are important when they come to missing people.
Speaker 2: I have DC's Missing Boys and Missing expl the East
Speaker 2: of the River Missing ex for the East of the
Speaker 2: River gives focus to East of the River residents where
Speaker 2: they can just focus on they missing people because they
Speaker 2: hit me up when they told me, look, we getting
Speaker 2: tired of here about all these missing people. It's happened
Speaker 2: all over here when we got the highest number of
Speaker 2: missing people east of the River. So I created that
Speaker 2: page to get more eyes on the street in that area.
Speaker 2: The more eyes you have, the more you can get
Speaker 2: that call. Then now DC's missing voice is all of
Speaker 2: the missing people in DC. When you talk about an
Speaker 2: investigative tool, we're in the modern world now in this
Speaker 2: Internet is something It can be very powerful when you're
Speaker 2: doing these public inquiries. When you're asking the public, the
Speaker 2: Metropolitan Police Department is seeking the public's assistance locating so
Speaker 2: and so, so and so. Eighty million people may see that.
Speaker 2: So that's now a public inquiry and we get a
Speaker 2: lot of chips. We have a lot of chips that
Speaker 2: we follow up on. That's why we have them. For
Speaker 2: the main reason, that's to promote and to publicize and
Speaker 2: to give MPD a greater reach in terms of audience
Speaker 2: to their missing people in Washington DC.
Speaker 4: As we've talked about throughout the season, an investigation has
Speaker 4: many moving parts. It's complicated and constantly moving, like a
Speaker 4: clockwork mechanism. Details can get lost or overlooked. Henderson wanted
Speaker 4: to get the best training he could to make sure
Speaker 4: he was on top of his game.
Speaker 2: A god named that name is Palmer and Great Britain
Speaker 2: created a professional course for regular people to go through
Speaker 2: to learn how to operate within the private sector to
Speaker 2: do trace investigation.
Speaker 3: All the necessary paperwork that you need to fill out.
Speaker 2: Like if you're my client, I need to know what
Speaker 2: paperwork to fill out, because that's what separate the regular
Speaker 2: citizen from the private professional investigator. He has documentation meaning
Speaker 2: he has an intake for him, he has a contract,
Speaker 2: he knows all the lead considerations when he's doing surveillance,
Speaker 2: so he doesn't violate anybody's constitutional rights. If you out
Speaker 2: to investigating the case, and let's just say it's a
Speaker 2: case that this criminal malice involved, if you know the
Speaker 2: aspects of the law, you can protect that data from
Speaker 2: being disqualified and thrown out.
Speaker 3: If you know what you're doing.
Speaker 2: You know, so certain things you have to know in
Speaker 2: terms of the legal considerations.
Speaker 3: And these are just some of the things you learn.
Speaker 2: How to promptly interview people, what questions to ask, you know,
Speaker 2: the theory behind an interview, for example, when you go
Speaker 2: into before you even go in the door, you got
Speaker 2: to have an objective. You got if you want a confession,
Speaker 2: if you want to just build some rapport with him
Speaker 2: and hit him up back up later again.
Speaker 3: Knowing all this before.
Speaker 2: You go in, it's a part of your preparation to
Speaker 2: be an investigator.
Speaker 3: You know, there's certain principles that we operate off of.
Speaker 2: You know, before we go in, we've tried to learn
Speaker 2: all these different things before we go and start formally
Speaker 2: interviewing people.
Speaker 4: Much of Henderson's work as a trace investigator involves gathering
Speaker 4: information and he's had to hone his skills in interviewing
Speaker 4: and note taking, even organizing data.
Speaker 2: You can't just jump out and these are some of
Speaker 2: the things you learn when you go through this certification.
Speaker 3: How to document your paperwork.
Speaker 2: You know, how to make sure it's in order, how
Speaker 2: to write up a report to submit the law enforcement.
Speaker 2: What's the fabric of it would that sworn officer need
Speaker 2: to have?
Speaker 3: What is he looking for?
Speaker 2: You're supposed to know the basic stuff so there's something
Speaker 2: useful when it comes in. You learn all this going
Speaker 2: through this certification, and it's an international certification, meaning all
Speaker 2: the trades investigators got together and they started compowering methods
Speaker 2: and stuff like that. For the guy who may not
Speaker 2: be working in law enforcementer who may want to go
Speaker 2: into the private sector. He can understand how to do
Speaker 2: it and they can't with a manual. You know, you
Speaker 2: have online tutoring, you can call it, you can ask questions.
Speaker 2: Your gold mine when you're any investigator, it's staying in
Speaker 2: contact with senior investigators. I've learned that you want to
Speaker 2: call them, you want to say hey, I got this,
Speaker 2: and they usually not going to give you the answer,
Speaker 2: but they'll point you in the right direction. They'll help you.
Speaker 2: They've been there before, they've already done it. Your case
Speaker 2: ain't the first case under the sun.
Speaker 4: He got into this work because of his passion for
Speaker 4: service and its emotional work. But after a decade of experience,
Speaker 4: there's also a familiar pattern.
Speaker 1: To the job.
Speaker 2: Well, I might get off from work, i might get
Speaker 2: a call and I might go in through a general
Speaker 2: intake with a family. It may be over the internet,
Speaker 2: it might be over the phone. They'll throw me some
Speaker 2: known location with the person frequent We'll go there with
Speaker 2: set surveillance because we're all creatures, are habit and we
Speaker 2: may head out. I might do some reverse phone checks.
Speaker 2: They may be getting calls from their loved one from
Speaker 2: a given number, and they may want me to find
Speaker 2: out what's the location, where are they at? So we'll
Speaker 2: go and try to figure out where they are. We'll
Speaker 2: use social media to look at the background or where
Speaker 2: they took a picture at, and we'll try to figure
Speaker 2: out where they are, where they may be hanging out
Speaker 2: at a lot of my work involves surveillance. Because you
Speaker 2: got the lead detective to sworn law enforce an officer.
Speaker 2: He's lived doing the heavy lifting in the office. I
Speaker 2: might go out there day to day and I might
Speaker 2: just be sitting at a location and our positivity ID
Speaker 2: to missing person. They never see me or know anything
Speaker 2: about I'm there. I call nine one one MPD Patrol Services,
Speaker 2: come contact the missing person, bring them back in if
Speaker 2: they're under eighteen. If they're over eighteen, they'll notify the
Speaker 2: family and missing person has been located. So a lot
Speaker 2: of it is surveillance and and light investigating work.
Speaker 4: Henderson took us on a ride along through his patrol routine.
Speaker 4: My producer Jamie and I sat in his suv as
Speaker 4: Henderson drove around the neighborhoods doing standard surveillance.
Speaker 2: So we're just gonna ride there and you know, you
Speaker 2: guys can take a look. This is every day what
Speaker 2: you're gonna see every single day, sun up the sundown.
Speaker 2: This is what's going on in the community, and it's perpetuating.
Speaker 3: Our most severe cases.
Speaker 4: Are, Henderson long says, the tasks and become routine, but
Speaker 4: every case is different. There are abductions like the case
Speaker 4: of Relitia Rudd, an eight year old girl who went
Speaker 4: missing in twenty fourteen and runaways like Henderson's niece. On
Speaker 4: our ride along, he talked about other cases he's worked on.
Speaker 2: Right now, we at nineteenth and Benning Road. Between nineteenth
Speaker 2: and Benning Road and fifteenth and Benning Road, it's kind
Speaker 2: of like an area where we have a lot of
Speaker 2: missing persons that we find In this area, there's a
Speaker 2: lot of drugs, a lot of heroin. I don't know
Speaker 2: whether you guys know about K two and PCP. K
Speaker 2: two is a drug that's killing.
Speaker 3: A lot of people.
Speaker 2: When I know you might know about PCP, it makes
Speaker 2: you hallucinate, and so it's a lot of the usage
Speaker 2: of that drug here and that's prompting some of the
Speaker 2: missing person's cases. It's prompting some of the violence assaults
Speaker 2: because sometimes they think things are happening that are not
Speaker 2: happening because they're hallucinating. Just the fact that they're out
Speaker 2: here unsupervised. It's a big can of worms. You never know,
Speaker 2: snake eyes. It could turn up snake eyes and we
Speaker 2: find a young person either in jail or dead. I
Speaker 2: had another missing person's case, Dominique Franklin. He was murdered,
Speaker 2: he was missing, and he was located. He went before
Speaker 2: the judge and judged gave him some orders to do something.
Speaker 2: He said, screw the judge and screw everybody and walked off.
Speaker 3: And the day later he was found dead, shot in
Speaker 3: the head. He left on his own.
Speaker 2: Nobody targeted him, but in the end he still wound
Speaker 2: up losing and he was sixteen.
Speaker 3: So Dominique Franklin is another.
Speaker 2: Case that I kind of worked in the end of it,
Speaker 2: the last part of it. I kind of got involved
Speaker 2: with it a little bit. But missing persons can lead
Speaker 2: to anything. It could turn up them getting arrested for
Speaker 2: something for the rest of their life, or them loosing
Speaker 2: their life or taking somebody else's life.
Speaker 4: The discrepancy between the number of cases and the resources
Speaker 4: available to solve them mean many slip through the cracks.
Speaker 4: In episode ten, we talked about Relasia Rudd. She was
Speaker 4: missing for weeks before her case received any media attention,
Speaker 4: and she has still not been found. Henderson says publicity
Speaker 4: can bring children home safely.
Speaker 2: Keeping the cases out there and the public's eye educating
Speaker 2: them about it. That's what really expired, and put the
Speaker 2: pressure on the police to do something them.
Speaker 3: Families have to pressure.
Speaker 2: The police, you know, they have to continue to press
Speaker 2: the police and anybody who can help publicize their case.
Speaker 3: That's what keep your case alive. I mean, you know,
Speaker 3: that's what keep these cases alive.
Speaker 2: That's why we the way we all with relaship uds
Speaker 2: because we don't want the community to go to sleep
Speaker 2: on people will forget about the start them. You don't
Speaker 2: say nothing, and you don't keep making noise about it,
Speaker 2: they'll forget.
Speaker 3: They will forget.
Speaker 4: There's a big question that hangs over Henderson's work. What
Speaker 4: issues in the community are contributing to the more than
Speaker 4: two thousand cases of missing children each year in DC?
Speaker 4: Why do so many cases slip through the cracks, and
Speaker 4: how can we begin to solve the socioeconomic issues at play.
Speaker 2: You do have people who've become victim of their circumstance,
Speaker 2: whatever's around them. That there's drugs, if it was domestic
Speaker 2: violence in the home, if it was poverty in general,
Speaker 2: because poverty is our motivating factor here when we start
Speaker 2: talking about these issues. The Mayor of Washington, DC formed
Speaker 2: a task force that we was examining and we started
Speaker 2: looking at missing persons and we started looking at solutions,
Speaker 2: and we couldn't find it. Cookie cutter one fits all
Speaker 2: because we've realized, Man, you talking about a great, big
Speaker 2: social issue. The family structure is the number one pre
Speaker 2: person and what drives that generational wealth gaps shoot domestic
Speaker 2: violence in the home. Maybe the new boyfriend is touching
Speaker 2: the daughter, or maybe the new boyfriend is hitting the mother,
Speaker 2: or maybe it's lack of affordable houses. We got eighty
Speaker 2: people living in one home. Somebody going out of there
Speaker 2: and use as the kids. It's a lot of stress,
Speaker 2: you know. We don't have a lot of hardcore solutions
Speaker 2: and real outreach in terms of services for mental health.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: So you see crazy cases you get out of here,
Speaker 2: like Militia Rudd, and you start wondering, how could the
Speaker 2: mama do this?
Speaker 3: Not when you look at the family.
Speaker 4: Henderson says, sometimes kids run away from home because something
Speaker 4: drives them away, domestic violence, drug use. Sometimes they're lured
Speaker 4: away by predators like the freeway phantom. But he says,
Speaker 4: no matter the reason why they left home, all missing
Speaker 4: persons cases need to be treated with the same level
Speaker 4: of seriousness.
Speaker 3: Sometimes it's a lot of coercion, you know.
Speaker 2: Sometimes it's a lot of dynamics within the person walking
Speaker 2: out the door on their own, Just because they left
Speaker 2: on their own.
Speaker 3: I got another case for you.
Speaker 2: Jolie Musa from Virginia voluntarily walked out of her home
Speaker 2: to go meet a young man and never return. Now,
Speaker 2: just because she voluntarily left, we don't need to down
Speaker 2: play her case and think that she's a runaway, see
Speaker 2: because at that point, when you do that, a lot
Speaker 2: of the action that's supposed to be taken isn't taken. Now,
Speaker 2: have we started looking for her sooner? Could we have
Speaker 2: found her alive and maybe saved her.
Speaker 3: We'll never know.
Speaker 4: Begins at home. It's staying in touch with our communities.
Speaker 2: When someone goes missing, especially a child, is chaos. You
Speaker 2: don't know how to put your left shoe on from
Speaker 2: the right. Y're some things you think you will remember,
Speaker 2: you won't remember. We should know our patterns, our loved
Speaker 2: ones patterns. We should check up on them. You know,
Speaker 2: we shouldn't be so distant. And you know the technology
Speaker 2: now on the phones and everybody email, and you know
Speaker 2: you got to give people a call and see, you know,
Speaker 2: just how they're doing. I got the older sister and
Speaker 2: you know, she called me and let me know she home,
Speaker 2: you know, and stuff like that. So we got to
Speaker 2: check on each other. We have to take care of
Speaker 2: each other.
Speaker 3: In the communities and our families.
Speaker 2: This is important because you we have some cases where
Speaker 2: the missing person wasn't reported missing for oh they were
Speaker 2: last seeing one year ago, by the families being so
Speaker 2: estranged times of the essence and the missing person's case,
Speaker 2: getting that report in and getting the investigation going early
Speaker 2: to trace going.
Speaker 4: When we attended one of Henderson's community outreach events in
Speaker 4: Southeast DC, he laid out the Metropolitan Police Department's five
Speaker 4: steps to prepare you in the event your loved one
Speaker 4: goes missing.
Speaker 2: The biggest problem with having in the District of Columbia
Speaker 2: they not being reported in a timely manner.
Speaker 3: So much time elapsed.
Speaker 2: The case of Karan Jones, it was two days the
Speaker 2: dumpster was gone on to China. So that, I mean,
Speaker 2: that's the first step, is just reporting them.
Speaker 4: In episode nine, we mentioned the case of Kayon Jones,
Speaker 4: a two month old whose mother confessed that she rolled
Speaker 4: over on Chaon and he stopped breathing. She later placed
Speaker 4: his body in a dumpster. Kayon's remains were sadly never recovered.
Speaker 2: What we're trying to do is trying to get people
Speaker 2: to understand, call for help, call the police, because seeing
Speaker 2: after the medical examiner it came out and examined his
Speaker 2: body and realized there was no trauma to the body.
Speaker 2: Everything jobs that we had just been an accident, but
Speaker 2: by him being thrown into a dumpster and they never
Speaker 2: been able to find him to do any kind of
Speaker 2: examination or determine anything with any kind of medical certainty.
Speaker 2: It just looks suspicious. And then you give us eighty
Speaker 2: ninety different stories and we don't know what to believe.
Speaker 2: And then you know, you throw a little bit of
Speaker 2: substance abuse in there, and you know, the social things,
Speaker 2: and then you got yeah, man, you got some stuff.
Speaker 4: As for Henderson's future in this line of work, he
Speaker 4: told us he's looking to transition into doing it full time.
Speaker 2: Well, I always had a vision that that DC would
Speaker 2: lead the country and take the leadership role on missing persons.
Speaker 3: That it should.
Speaker 2: We're going to continue to work and work and work
Speaker 2: and never be complacent about missing person and what more
Speaker 2: we can do to.
Speaker 3: Locate missing persons quickly?
Speaker 2: You know we can We can never rest, you can
Speaker 2: never rest on this stuff. There's never a situation of complacency.
Speaker 2: The more you go through it, you learn because every case,
Speaker 2: every single case got a different twist in it, which
Speaker 2: requires certain level of readiness. So talking about all these
Speaker 2: different things and implementing all these different tools that we
Speaker 2: can use. It's so much work to be done. But
Speaker 2: I'm hoping that DC will continue on. I'm gonna keep
Speaker 2: pushing legislators to get legislation. Going back to initial investigations, obstruction,
Speaker 2: lying to investigators, I think that there should be a
Speaker 2: penalty for that if we find out your line or
Speaker 2: you don't provide correct information, And in Washington, DC, there's
Speaker 2: really no penalty for that.
Speaker 3: In Maryland, if.
Speaker 2: Your child is missing and they under the age of
Speaker 2: eighteen or thirteen, you better be.
Speaker 3: Reporting and within twenty four hours if.
Speaker 2: They investigate and they find out you knew and as
Speaker 2: a result of your negligence, the child suffers trauma cal
Speaker 2: on the felony.
Speaker 3: And here in DC they don't have that. So we
Speaker 3: hope in DC will step it up legislatively.
Speaker 2: Were hoping they'll step it up from a law enforcement perspective,
Speaker 2: and definitely the community.
Speaker 3: Community is huge, way bigger than law enforcement.
Speaker 2: Get the community involved and active in the use of
Speaker 2: the technology and the tools and stuff.
Speaker 3: Are we cooking with gas then that's what I'm hoping.
Speaker 4: We want to give special thanks to Henderson Long for
Speaker 4: all his work on the Freeway Phantom case and his
Speaker 4: support of this podcast. He's been instrumental in helping us
Speaker 4: tell the story of these young girls, both from the
Speaker 4: nineteen seventies and today. Henderson's work in the community is vital.
Speaker 4: His organization, DC's Missing Voice, is an official five oh
Speaker 4: one C three nonprofit. If you want to support the
Speaker 4: work he does, reach out at Henderson dot Long twenty
Speaker 4: two at iCloud dot com, or you can find the
Speaker 4: DC's Missing Voice Facebook page and stay up to date
Speaker 4: on current missing persons cases.
Speaker 1: Freeway Fantom is a production of iHeartRadio, Tenderfoot TV, and
Speaker 1: Black Bar MITZVAH. Our host is Celese Hidley. This episode
Speaker 1: was written and produced by no Amy Griffin. The show
Speaker 1: is written by Trevor Young, Jamie Albright, and Celese Hidley.
Speaker 1: Executive producers on Behalf of Ourheart 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, j Ellis and
Speaker 1: Aaron Bergman with producer Sidney Foos. 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 team at
Speaker 1: Uta Beck Media and Marketing and the Nord Group Tender
Speaker 1: for TV and iHeartMedia, as well as Black Bar Mitzvah
Speaker 1: have increased the reward for information leading to the arrest
Speaker 1: and conviction of the person or persons responsible for their
Speaker 1: Freeway Fan of murders. The previous reward of up to
Speaker 1: one hundred and fifty thousand dollars offered by the Metropolitan
Speaker 1: Police Department has been matched. A new total reward of
Speaker 1: up to three hundred thousand dollars is now being offered.
Speaker 1: If you have any information relating to these unsolved crimes,
Speaker 1: contact the Metropolitan Police Department at area code two zero
Speaker 1: two seven two seven nine zero ninety nine. For more information,
Speaker 1: Please visit freewayanom dot com for more podcasts from iHeartRadio
Speaker 1: and Tenderfoot TV. Visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or
Speaker 1: wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Thanks for listening.