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Speaker 2: Freeways are interesting because millions of people use them, but
Speaker 2: very few people walk along the sides of them. They're
Speaker 2: very accessible, but they're also not generally used for foot traffic,
Speaker 2: and so it's very easy to conceal someone just off
Speaker 2: of a very very busy highway because nobody usually walks
Speaker 2: along there. It means that he one has a car,
Speaker 2: two knows when he can get on and off that
Speaker 2: road without being detected. Most likely has a job or
Speaker 2: family situation which allows him to be out at any hour.
Speaker 3: Of the day or night.
Speaker 2: Because, believe me, choosing these victims and abducting these victims
Speaker 2: took a long time. He had to be out there
Speaker 2: a long time to get access.
Speaker 3: To these particular victims.
Speaker 2: They weren't doing things that they did every day at
Speaker 2: that time. That means he has to be available to
Speaker 2: wait for them to show up and to follow them,
Speaker 2: and then to be vulnerable. So they're not vulnerable while
Speaker 2: they're inside a.
Speaker 3: Store or with other people. They're vulnerable when they're alone.
Speaker 2: This is exactly who he wanted, and he was willing
Speaker 2: to take a great risk to get her.
Speaker 4: The homicide detectives termed the cases the little girl cases.
Speaker 5: This child was laying on the side of the road.
Speaker 5: I wouldn't go no way.
Speaker 6: I would call up my house.
Speaker 7: Those first five murders should have been a huge warning
Speaker 7: bell for the police.
Speaker 4: We just want to know what happened. This person must
Speaker 4: have saw that They was thinking that maybe it's just
Speaker 4: one person, and he says, uh, they need to know.
Speaker 4: This is me.
Speaker 5: I thought that they would catch him. I thought it
Speaker 5: was just a matter of time.
Speaker 8: I'm Celeste Headley and this is Freeway Phantom. In the
Speaker 8: previous seven episodes, we covered the murders of eight young
Speaker 8: black girls, ranging in age from ten to eighteen years old,
Speaker 8: that occurred in DC from nineteen seventy one to nineteen
Speaker 8: seventy two. There were six confirmed victims of the Freeway Phantom.
Speaker 8: And then there was the case of Angela Barnes, originally
Speaker 8: co ittered victim number three, whose case was closed after
Speaker 8: two police officers were convicted of the crime. Then there
Speaker 8: was Tera Bryant, originally considered the final victim, who was
Speaker 8: eventually removed from the Freeway Phantom victim list. And two
Speaker 8: things are unclear about TERA's case. Who removed her from
Speaker 8: the investigation and why. Fifty years later, Detective Romaine Jenkins
Speaker 8: still believes that Tara was yet another victim of the
Speaker 8: Freeway Phantom, although her family believes otherwise. As we learned
Speaker 8: in the last episode, law enforcement turned their attention to
Speaker 8: the Green Vega Gang in nineteen seventy four, and although
Speaker 8: they were officially ruled out as suspects in the Freeway
Speaker 8: Phantom murders, many in law enforcement assumed they were responsible.
Speaker 8: Others thought Robert Askins was the likely killer, a suspect
Speaker 8: we talked about in episode six. All of this led
Speaker 8: the majority of the Metropolitan Police Department to conclude that
Speaker 8: the cases were solved, but not Detective Romayn Jenkins.
Speaker 4: Were looking for the wrong person. They didn't know about profiling,
Speaker 4: and all of that They're not looking for the guy
Speaker 4: who hides behind a tree, you know, this dastardly guy
Speaker 4: who's gonna grab a woman, some psycho. That's not what
Speaker 4: they were looking for, and that's what they went after.
Speaker 8: For ten years, the case files sat there called untouched,
Speaker 8: until Romayne took over the case in nineteen eighty four.
Speaker 4: So I had at my disposal, I had seven senior
Speaker 4: homicide detectives, and I decided, I said, why not use them?
Speaker 4: And some of them had actually worked on the cases traitionally, yeah, originally,
Speaker 4: And they gave me their notebooks and so forth, and they,
Speaker 4: you know, could you read all their handwriting? Uh huh. See,
Speaker 4: back then, we were the carbon paper typewriter folks. There
Speaker 4: were no computers. We didn't have computers. You had to
Speaker 4: type everything and man ooh, you had to be detailed.
Speaker 4: And we work closely with the medical exams this office,
Speaker 4: so you know, we learned a lot about anatomy and
Speaker 4: causes of death and things like that. We investigated causes
Speaker 4: of death.
Speaker 8: Although she was now leading a team, many in the
Speaker 8: police department weren't too happy about having a black female supervisor.
Speaker 8: Romayne says that throughout the nineteen seventies and eighties, racism
Speaker 8: was alive and well in the MPD racism.
Speaker 4: You talk about racism, Oh yes, I just signed black
Speaker 4: officers to a scout car and I'm riding along in
Speaker 4: the area and I see the black officer walking the footb.
Speaker 4: Is what you're doing walking up footb? The lieutenant took
Speaker 4: me out the car and put officers on. So and
Speaker 4: those are the things that they did back then, you know.
Speaker 4: So racism hadn't gone away, you know, sexism and sexism
Speaker 4: because because the women were mistreated by the officers they were,
Speaker 4: they tried to intimidate some of them, you know, and
Speaker 4: some of the women, some of the women just said,
Speaker 4: you know what, this is not for me, and they
Speaker 4: left the job. You know, they actually left the job.
Speaker 4: And as a supervisor on the job, you know, I
Speaker 4: thought I would have some power, but no, I really didn't.
Speaker 4: And I know one time my lieutenant asked me, he said,
Speaker 4: Sergeant Jenkins, do you think I'm a racist? And I said, yes, sir,
Speaker 4: you are. And he says, I'm not a racist. My
Speaker 4: next door neighbor is black. I said, Lieutenant, the only
Speaker 4: reason your next door neighbor is black is because you
Speaker 4: don't have enough money to move out the neighborhood. See.
Speaker 4: I was like that because my husband was president of
Speaker 4: the Afro American Police Association, so there was a militantcy.
Speaker 4: I had an instance where two of my officers, one
Speaker 4: white and one black, they saved a little three year
Speaker 4: old who had been left in the car and the
Speaker 4: car burst out in flames, and officers went in and
Speaker 4: got that child. I wrote the officers up to the
Speaker 4: awards committee, only the white officer's name went. I mean,
Speaker 4: they would do things like that, and so I was
Speaker 4: always constantly, you know, in battle with them. And I said,
Speaker 4: you know what, I'd enjoined the police department to go
Speaker 4: through us. I mean, these are the things that I
Speaker 4: had to face out there. The commander at that time,
Speaker 4: I went to him, I said, sir, we have a
Speaker 4: problem over here. He said, what's wrong. I said, you know,
Speaker 4: the policewomen, these black police women are being harassed, They're
Speaker 4: being mistreated. I said, I think we only had like
Speaker 4: one or two white females. And the white girl who
Speaker 4: came from Connecticut who had never seen a black person before.
Speaker 4: They gave her a short beat around the station. That
Speaker 4: was her assignment. She had to walk around the station
Speaker 4: for the tour of duty. I mean, this actually happened.
Speaker 4: And so I said, you know, we're having a problem
Speaker 4: and something has to be done. He said, well, you
Speaker 4: know what, and he was white. He said, we're not
Speaker 4: going to tolerate. He said, I want you to do
Speaker 4: an investigation and let the chips fall where they may.
Speaker 4: And so I said okay. And in the end room,
Speaker 4: a black officer came there and say, look, Sorge, and
Speaker 4: be careful because the white officers gonna get you. He said,
Speaker 4: I don't know what they planning, but they plotting something.
Speaker 4: He said. I was in the locker room and I
Speaker 4: got bits and pieces of the conversation. They're gonna do
Speaker 4: something to you because they upset that you initiated this
Speaker 4: investigation of the things they did to the black police swiomen.
Speaker 4: So I said, thank you. And it wasn't no longer
Speaker 4: than a day or so later. Whenever my troops went
Speaker 4: on a run, I'm just a supervisor. I'm out there
Speaker 4: riding up and down in a scoutcar. I go and
Speaker 4: see how they handle it. I'd go park in the
Speaker 4: neighborhood and watch how they handle how they interact with people,
Speaker 4: and I got out the car and I was walking
Speaker 4: towards them. Well by then they had cleared the runs
Speaker 4: at ten eight nothing found or whatever it was. And
Speaker 4: so as I was walking back to my to my
Speaker 4: scout car, they got in the car and the officer
Speaker 4: gunn in the car. I had to jump up on
Speaker 4: a citizen's car to keep from getting hit. I was, Oh,
Speaker 4: was I hot? I was hot? So I didn't say anything.
Speaker 4: When I got in my scout car, I went over
Speaker 4: the air and asked the dispatcher to locate that unit
Speaker 4: for me and have them meet me at there. Stand
Speaker 4: by their location. I'm responding. They stood by. I went
Speaker 4: to their location and I told it was two white
Speaker 4: officers and I told them, whatever you applied and to
Speaker 4: get me, make sure that you don't miss the next time,
Speaker 4: or else I'm going to kick your you know, and
Speaker 4: I use the word you can use it, yeah ass.
Speaker 4: And if I can't whip your ass, I have a
Speaker 4: husband up in three D Whu's six foot two, and
Speaker 4: he will do it. But don't miss the next time.
Speaker 4: They didn't say nothing. They went on back and got
Speaker 4: in the scout car and drove off.
Speaker 8: It is so difficult for me to hear you tell
Speaker 8: these stories about the way the police force was in
Speaker 8: the nineteen seventies and think that that prejudice, that racism
Speaker 8: didn't hamper the investigation. That they may have invested a
Speaker 8: lot of officers hours and energy and focus and time
Speaker 8: into the investigation. But how were these detectives not let
Speaker 8: us stray by their own prejudices.
Speaker 4: Oh, they had to be. They had to be because
Speaker 4: first of all, they didn't understand the community that they
Speaker 4: were investigating. I say, you know, police are representative of
Speaker 4: the communities that they police. If the citizens act wild
Speaker 4: and crazy, the police are the same thing. That's that's
Speaker 4: the same kind of thing you're possibly be going to get.
Speaker 4: Here is the thing. Sometimes, as a police officer, you
Speaker 4: have you've got to put aside your personal feelings. The
Speaker 4: only person who ever tried to kill me on the
Speaker 4: Metropolitan Police Department was a black police officer. Okay, you know,
Speaker 4: a black police officer tried to kill me and he
Speaker 4: ended up getting arrested. So you can't say all the
Speaker 4: white police officers bad. There's some black ones just the same.
Speaker 9: You know.
Speaker 8: By the mid eighties, Romaine and her team were entirely
Speaker 8: focused on the Freeway phantom case, and Romayne had her
Speaker 8: work cut out for her.
Speaker 4: When I first started, one of the first things I
Speaker 4: did was's tried to find the evidence. When I checked
Speaker 4: with the Metropolitan Police Department and I found that the
Speaker 4: evidence had been destroyed. The officer took me to the
Speaker 4: property book where the evidence was and said evidence has
Speaker 4: been destroyed. So say, oh, that's a DC for me.
Speaker 4: So then I contacted PG County. PG County found the
Speaker 4: evidence in their cases, and I got a technician from
Speaker 4: the FBI to meet me and another detective over in
Speaker 4: their property office and we went over the evidence. Conclusion
Speaker 4: was they hadn't preserved it well enough that they could
Speaker 4: get any type of DNA, but that was back then.
Speaker 4: They have made advances now now whatever happened to that evidence,
Speaker 4: I don't know.
Speaker 8: But Romayne was able to start making some connections with
Speaker 8: the evidence she did have.
Speaker 4: That's when I saw the report about the green fibers.
Speaker 4: That's what really piqued my I said, nobody never mentioned
Speaker 4: anything about green synthetic fibers. And I asked a couple
Speaker 4: of the people who I knew who had worked on
Speaker 4: the investigation, and they said didn't know anything about green fibers.
Speaker 8: Well, investigators did initially identify the green fibers on each
Speaker 8: of the victims. Somehow they failed to connect them or
Speaker 8: analyze them conclusively. Remain decided it was time to make
Speaker 8: that happen.
Speaker 4: Well, see what happened is no one knew about the
Speaker 4: green synthetic fibers until Detective Lloyd Davis developed Askings as
Speaker 4: a suspect. When Davis had requested that all the evidence
Speaker 4: be sent to the FBI, that's when they came back
Speaker 4: about the green synthetic fibers, which aren't really green if
Speaker 4: you see them visuals. Now, this is what the FBI
Speaker 4: technician told me, the guy who handled the cases to
Speaker 4: the naked eye, they are different color. They're only green
Speaker 4: if you look at them under a microscopt What are
Speaker 4: the sources of the fibers? That's that's what I wanted
Speaker 4: to know about the fiber evidence. And he did the
Speaker 4: fiber evidence in the Wayne Williams Atlanta murders. So I
Speaker 4: figured he's gonna have some credibility which was also green.
Speaker 8: Actually, yeah, coincidentally.
Speaker 4: So I asked him, I said, well, you know, what's
Speaker 4: the source of the fibers? He said he thought they
Speaker 4: came from an auto. But I talked to Detective Lloyd Davis,
Speaker 4: who had all the evidence submitted. He said he was
Speaker 4: told that the fibers came from a bathroom. Mate like
Speaker 4: a bath mat and a bathroom, and that goes along
Speaker 4: with these victims being washed and cleaned. I said, that
Speaker 4: sounds about right as far as I'm concerned.
Speaker 8: One of the most important things that remain did was
Speaker 8: submit evidence to the FBI to get the first official
Speaker 8: profile of the killer, and they came up with some
Speaker 8: intriguing conclusions.
Speaker 4: They felt that this person was in the military. Well,
Speaker 4: at that time, you had all these military people coming
Speaker 4: back from Vietnam who were in hospitals here and installations here,
Speaker 4: so you had a lot of that going on. But
Speaker 4: that was really interesting. And the reason why I thought
Speaker 4: it was so interesting was because when I showed the
Speaker 4: note to the FBI, they said, this is military. This
Speaker 4: person was in the military. I showed the same note
Speaker 4: to the investigator at Naval Investigated Service. He said, oh,
Speaker 4: whoever wrote this note? This military? So I had two
Speaker 4: different brains saying the same thing. You know that this
Speaker 4: person was in the military.
Speaker 8: Romaine eventually retired from the police force, and with her retirement,
Speaker 8: the case essentially went cold. That was until it was
Speaker 8: picked up in the early two thousands by former DC
Speaker 8: homicide detective Jim Trainam, who stumbled into it almost by accident.
Speaker 9: That kind of took over a project where we were
Speaker 9: looking at all of these unsolved cases involving women in DC,
Speaker 9: like one hundred had been identified over a ten year
Speaker 9: period by the Washington Post. And that was also during
Speaker 9: the time period where they first started the coda's database.
Speaker 9: You know, before you really couldn't do anything with DNA
Speaker 9: unless you had a named suspect to do a one
Speaker 9: to one comparison to. But with codas, she could put
Speaker 9: the information into a database, it would run it against
Speaker 9: other cases, it would run it against a database or
Speaker 9: a collection of suspects. So it was during that time
Speaker 9: when I was first getting started somebody came to me
Speaker 9: and asking me about the Freeway phantom case, and I
Speaker 9: really didn't know anything about it at the time. I
Speaker 9: began to do research and poll what I could, and
Speaker 9: basically I found the very minimal paperwork, just entries in
Speaker 9: our homicide log book, and that was pretty much it.
Speaker 9: We didn't have any files we didn't have any evidence.
Speaker 9: And the more I looked, the more I realized, like
Speaker 9: you know, all the cases that were out in PG,
Speaker 9: they really didn't have any files. They had some evidence
Speaker 9: that they were looking at in the Wooded case, but
Speaker 9: everything had pretty much been destroyed, and so I was
Speaker 9: just trying to build what I could based on these
Speaker 9: paper accounts and things along that.
Speaker 8: Line, much like Romayne decades before him, Jim train And
Speaker 8: discovered that the evidence in the case had been poorly maintained,
Speaker 8: either damaged or mysteriously missing. But he slowly started to
Speaker 8: connect some dots.
Speaker 9: So I was able to some stuff from Prince George's county.
Speaker 9: And then we found out that the FBI had gotten
Speaker 9: involved in the Worder case and they had quite an
Speaker 9: extensive file. I was able to get that and make
Speaker 9: a copy of it as well. I was continuing to
Speaker 9: look for evidence during that time, kept finding nothing, nothing, nothing.
Speaker 9: And after we got the FBI file and we learned
Speaker 9: about people like, let say, Romaine Jenkins who had information
Speaker 9: as well. I was approached by Dale Wilbur of the
Speaker 9: Washington Post, and you know, he wanted to do some
Speaker 9: work on cold cases, and so he was asking me
Speaker 9: about cases that I thought would be interesting, and I
Speaker 9: had mentioned the Freeway Phantom to him, and so he
Speaker 9: thought that was going to be a good case to
Speaker 9: the feature, And so we pretty much gave him open
Speaker 9: access to our files that we had at the time
Speaker 9: because it was so old, we figured it wasn't going
Speaker 9: to do any harm.
Speaker 3: So he did.
Speaker 9: What I really wanted to do was that he actually
Speaker 9: went out and knocked on the doors of the detectives
Speaker 9: who actually worked on the case originally, and they would
Speaker 9: invite them in and they would say, yeah, I know
Speaker 9: all about it. I'll talk to you about it. Come
Speaker 9: on in, and by the way, would you'd like to
Speaker 9: see my file. It turns out that a lot of
Speaker 9: them missing files had been taken home by the original
Speaker 9: case detectives for later that back in the eighties, they
Speaker 9: were packing up a lot of those files. Because of
Speaker 9: the way that files were retained back then, they were
Speaker 9: throwing out a lot of things like crime scene reports, photographs,
Speaker 9: witness statements and all of that on all these cases,
Speaker 9: including the Freeway Phantom case. And that's been changed because
Speaker 9: of the law, they can't do that anymore.
Speaker 8: One of those people was Romaine Jenkins, who kept most
Speaker 8: of the files from the Freeway Phantom case in boxes
Speaker 8: in our house. These are the very same boxes that
Speaker 8: we sifted through when we visited her home.
Speaker 10: Well, here's some of that carbon paper you're talking about.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 4: That all I had to do was okay, See the
Speaker 4: police department likes to throw away stuff. Yeah, and I
Speaker 4: don't throw away nothing because you never know when you're
Speaker 4: going to see it again.
Speaker 8: Oh, it looks like it's from the memorial service.
Speaker 9: That the memorial.
Speaker 10: This is Ninemosia's autopsy reports or foot tall and one.
Speaker 9: Hundred pounds.
Speaker 8: Student at Kelly Miller Junior High School in the sixth grade.
Speaker 3: That's tough.
Speaker 8: Photos are not here, but.
Speaker 9: I think the ends.
Speaker 11: The thing.
Speaker 9: She realized that a lot of the files were being purged,
Speaker 9: so she actually took all the purge material and kept
Speaker 9: it herself. So between her and her institutional knowledge and
Speaker 9: what Dell was able to gather for us, we were
Speaker 9: able to recreate a lot of the original files, and
Speaker 9: so we had a good foundation to work on from there.
Speaker 8: Jim Treeham says Roman was instrumental in his reinvestigation of
Speaker 8: the Freeway Phantom case.
Speaker 3: She is wonderful.
Speaker 9: I mean, her memory of this case. Anything that I
Speaker 9: say that is contradicted by her, go with what she says,
Speaker 9: because where I have, you know, files and reports that
Speaker 9: I am working off of and all that. She has
Speaker 9: a great institutional memory about what was actually going on
Speaker 9: during that time, which is so important because she knows,
Speaker 9: you know, what, not only what the department was like,
Speaker 9: but what was those neighborhoods were like, what the relationships
Speaker 9: were between the department and the neighborhoods and the media
Speaker 9: and all of that. And just talking with her, I
Speaker 9: always learned something new. We talked several times, you know,
Speaker 9: during that time period, and we've actually talked several times
Speaker 9: since where we've discussed various issues.
Speaker 3: On the case and all of that.
Speaker 9: And you know, she was able to help us out,
Speaker 9: you know, quite a lot, because even with what we
Speaker 9: were able to gather, when you're digging through these old
Speaker 9: files and stuff, you're almost like an archaeologist. You're trying
Speaker 9: to kind of piece together little things, and some of
Speaker 9: the documents that you would come across, they would make
Speaker 9: reference to things that you would go, well, where is that?
Speaker 9: Where is that in another document? And you can't find it,
Speaker 9: So you know that at some point something existed.
Speaker 8: After some digging, Jim and his team were able to
Speaker 8: identify some new evidence that hadn't been thoroughly looked at before.
Speaker 5: During the time that we were working on this, we
Speaker 5: basically learned that there was evidence available from two of
Speaker 5: the different scenes. One was that PG County had evidence
Speaker 5: from the Brenda Woodard case. It was part of the
Speaker 5: sex kit that they submitted to the Maryland State Police lab.
Speaker 5: And at that time the technology is in advance as
Speaker 5: it is now, they weren't able to get a DNA
Speaker 5: profile off of the material that was left, and there
Speaker 5: was so little material left that they actually used it
Speaker 5: all up, and so we pretty much hit a data
Speaker 5: end right there. The second evidence actually came because of
Speaker 5: our work. We were trying to promote the case and
Speaker 5: get information out there about it, and I was doing
Speaker 5: a presentation on it to the mid Atlantic Cold Case
Speaker 5: Homicide Investigators Association when a cold case investigator from the
Speaker 5: Maryland State Police said, wait a minute, the last victim, Williams,
Speaker 5: that's our case. And it turns out we didn't know that,
Speaker 5: but because of where her body was found, the Maryland
Speaker 5: State Police had actually become involved in her case. And
Speaker 5: so they actually had more case files that we weren't
Speaker 5: aware of at the time, and they had a box
Speaker 5: of some of her clothing, which was pretty exciting for us.
Speaker 5: And it turns out that, you know, her underwear was
Speaker 5: in there, and there was a possibility that there were
Speaker 5: some seamen stains, and so that was eventually submitted back
Speaker 5: to the Maryland State Police Lab. But a follow up
Speaker 5: investigation that was also being done by the National Center
Speaker 5: for Missing and Exploited Children they were helping out as well.
Speaker 5: It turns out that that was a boyfriend. She had
Speaker 5: been with her boyfriend earlier that evening. He had dropped
Speaker 5: her off with the bus stop, and he definitely had
Speaker 5: an alibi, so he wasn't involved. And so unfortunately we
Speaker 5: hit dead ends on both accounts. But at least we now.
Speaker 6: Know that we feel pretty comfortable that we've tracked down
Speaker 6: what is out there. Not to say that something might
Speaker 6: not pop up in the future sometime, but hopefully it will,
Speaker 6: but you know, we've pretty much covered those bases, we think.
Speaker 8: Trainham says that by far the most success they had
Speaker 8: was with the profiles. They developed a new geographic profile,
Speaker 8: which we talked about at length during episode six. They
Speaker 8: also followed up on the original psychological profiles, including the
Speaker 8: one commissioned by Romaine Jenkins and completed by the FBI,
Speaker 8: but he says the track record of profiling throughout this
Speaker 8: case had been sketchy at best.
Speaker 9: At the time that the case was ongoing. At first,
Speaker 9: what was actually happening. They went to several different psychiatrists
Speaker 9: psychologists in the area, and they talked to them and
Speaker 9: got various very different profiles.
Speaker 3: I mean, some were.
Speaker 9: Talking about how the persons psychotic, we're talking about No,
Speaker 9: he's more like a normal person. Some talked about how
Speaker 9: he would be triggered by the name Denise. Others disagreed
Speaker 9: with that, and so they were all over the charts.
Speaker 9: The FBI did do a profile several years later, where
Speaker 9: I think they were much more grounded in the case.
Speaker 9: Plus they had more experience working with this type of
Speaker 9: personality or at least reviewing cases that were committed by
Speaker 9: this type of person, and so they had a more
Speaker 9: factual background.
Speaker 8: Training believes that psychological profiles can be dangerous for investigators.
Speaker 9: Profile is only as good as the information. Plus it's
Speaker 9: not going to point to one person. The profile is
Speaker 9: going to help you prioritize who you look at over
Speaker 9: other people. And you know, the profiles that I've worked
Speaker 9: with in the past, you know basically tell you don't
Speaker 9: eliminate somebody simply because of the profile, you know, just
Speaker 9: put them lower on the list to investigate. And I
Speaker 9: had mentioned it is only as good as the information
Speaker 9: that they're given. And a lot of times what we
Speaker 9: do is we would go ask.
Speaker 3: For a profile. Here, miss the profile.
Speaker 9: Here's our case file, look at it. Tell me what
Speaker 9: you think. We get the profile back. Six months later,
Speaker 9: my case follows down this and I lock up somebody
Speaker 9: or identify somebody as a suspect who doesn't even come
Speaker 9: close to this, and I'm going out a profile still good.
Speaker 9: But if I had kept them abreast of all the
Speaker 9: incoming information at the time, then they could have modified
Speaker 9: their thoughts and given me better investigative leads as new
Speaker 9: information became available. So that's how we don't take advantage
Speaker 9: of this information.
Speaker 8: Tretam warns that profiles, especially inaccurate ones, can lead to
Speaker 8: what he calls tunnel vision.
Speaker 9: The tunnel vision is basically focusing in on a suspect
Speaker 9: or a theory to the exclusion of any other. Now,
Speaker 9: at some point in an investigation, you have to kind
Speaker 9: of start doing that, because once you start to identify
Speaker 9: your suspect, then you begin to build a case against them.
Speaker 9: It goes from being an evidence based investigation to not
Speaker 9: a suspect based investigation. The danger is is that you
Speaker 9: get confirmation biased. The confirmation bias is that you now
Speaker 9: have tunnel vision, but you're only going to seek information
Speaker 9: that confirms what you believe to be true and you're
Speaker 9: going to ignore information that contradicts that. So, you know,
Speaker 9: tunnel vision is not that bad. You just have to
Speaker 9: be able to have somebody say, hey, wait a minute,
Speaker 9: you know, tap you on the shoulder. Did you think
Speaker 9: about this? Oh no, I didn't.
Speaker 3: Let's go look at that. That sort of thing.
Speaker 9: So oftentimes somebody may get a profile or may focus
Speaker 9: in on this is who we think it is because
Speaker 9: of this, and then they will start trying to make
Speaker 9: the person fit the evidence, rather than seeing where the
Speaker 9: evidence takes them to the person. But we also have
Speaker 9: a tendency to focusing on people who we don't think
Speaker 9: are acting appropriately. You know, the strange guy and all that.
Speaker 9: But you know, people act the way they do, and
Speaker 9: when we project. That's not the way I would act
Speaker 9: onto somebody. We've gotten off track many times by doing
Speaker 9: that sort of thing, rather than recognizing that no people
Speaker 9: can act all sorts of ways and it.
Speaker 3: Can be normal.
Speaker 8: Triam says this sort of tunnel vision was evident in
Speaker 8: the Freeway Phantom case. Their original profile of a mentally
Speaker 8: ill man is what convinced so many people in law
Speaker 8: enforcement that Robert Askins was the case.
Speaker 9: And here, just like with all the profiles that they
Speaker 9: were getting from all of these psychiatrists and everything, the
Speaker 9: reason they were going to these people is that they
Speaker 9: thought this escot was mentally insane. He was, you know,
Speaker 9: somebody who should stand out in the psychiatric community as
Speaker 9: having been treated for whatever ailments he had. And that's
Speaker 9: not necessarily the case.
Speaker 8: Train and Stress is that it's crucial profiles be constantly
Speaker 8: updated with new information. If a profile is years or
Speaker 8: even months out of date, it can lead investigators in
Speaker 8: the wrong direction. However, Jim is optimistic that with modern
Speaker 8: technology and our current understanding of profiling, we can and
Speaker 8: should continue working on the Freeway Phantom profile.
Speaker 9: Things have come a long way since the seventies and eighties,
Speaker 9: so I would be very interested to hear any updates
Speaker 9: that anybody might have.
Speaker 8: That's exactly why we decided it was time for a
Speaker 8: new profile, something that hasn't been done since the mid
Speaker 8: two thousands, and we found the perfect person to do it,
Speaker 8: the former FBI profiler who cracked the DC Sniper case
Speaker 8: and blew the lid off the Whitewater investigation.
Speaker 3: I'm Jim Clemente.
Speaker 2: I'm a retired FBIS Supervisory special Agent and profiler, and
Speaker 2: I'm also the co founder of XG Productions and so
Speaker 2: I write and produce and developed content for all platforms.
Speaker 8: Our team first discovered Jim Clemente a few years ago
Speaker 8: during the production of Monster DC Sniper. Jim played an
Speaker 8: instrumental role in developing the criminal profile in that case.
Speaker 8: He spent years as a profiler with the FBI, and
Speaker 8: after leaving, he went on to produce multiple seasons of
Speaker 8: the show Criminal Minds. We thought there's no one better
Speaker 8: to make a new profile for the Freeway Phantom, and
Speaker 8: we started by asking him about the foundations of criminal
Speaker 8: profiling and how it's come to prove such a success.
Speaker 10: So how does one become a profiler?
Speaker 2: Well, in the FBI, you have to first become an
Speaker 2: FBI Special Agent and then go through the FBI Academy
Speaker 2: and then work about ten years at least on major cases,
Speaker 2: cooperating with local police departments, state police departments, and other
Speaker 2: federal agencies and get enough experience on major cases that
Speaker 2: you have something to bring to the Behavioral Analysis Unit.
Speaker 2: So the Behavioral Analysis Unit is housed in the National
Speaker 2: Center for the Analysis of Violent Crimes in Virginia at
Speaker 2: the FBI Academy, and the Behavioral and EUSIS unit is
Speaker 2: where the profilers are trained and they work. It basically
Speaker 2: descended from the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit, and that was
Speaker 2: started by Howard Teaton in the early seventies, and it
Speaker 2: evolved from a unit that had a few people to
Speaker 2: one now that has five or six separate units and
Speaker 2: twenty five to thirty five active FBI profilers.
Speaker 8: You know, the case as you know that we're working
Speaker 8: on is from the nineteen seventies when we didn't even
Speaker 8: say serial killer. So I have to imagine that the
Speaker 8: science of profiling has evolved a lot. You know, at
Speaker 8: the time, if you read some of the early accounts
Speaker 8: of trying to figure out what makes a serial killer
Speaker 8: and you see some of these the early attempts, right,
Speaker 8: trying to figure out what distinguishes a serial killer from
Speaker 8: another type of murderer.
Speaker 10: That seems to have really evolved over the years.
Speaker 8: And part of that, I think was because in the
Speaker 8: very early years they were dealing with a very small
Speaker 8: number of people that they could interview, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they interviewed thirty five or thirty eight people, and
Speaker 2: when I left, it was up to fifteen hundred, So
Speaker 2: we had a much broader base or foundation to the
Speaker 2: information that we were basing our profiles on.
Speaker 3: So basically, what.
Speaker 2: We found was that there are a number of different
Speaker 2: ways that people become serial killers and a number of
Speaker 2: different ways that that manifests itself.
Speaker 3: It's not one size of fis all.
Speaker 2: You can't simply say, Okay, this is what motivates a
Speaker 2: serial killer. There's a spectrum of behavior. There's a tremendous
Speaker 2: amount of diversity among offenders, and that is evidenced in
Speaker 2: how they do what they do, why they do what
Speaker 2: they do, and how long they get away with it.
Speaker 8: When we asked Jim Clemente to look into the Freeway
Speaker 8: Fantom case, he said, the best place to begin is
Speaker 8: to analyze everything we know about the killer.
Speaker 2: We always start with picktimology, because looking at the victim
Speaker 2: and understanding everything about the victims is like holding up
Speaker 2: a mirror to the offender. There's a reason why he
Speaker 2: chooses these particular victims, and in this case, seeing the
Speaker 2: overwhelming similarities between these victims tells me that he had
Speaker 2: a very very strong preference and he offended mainly against children.
Speaker 2: They're petite girls too, and there's a reason for it.
Speaker 2: He didn't randomly pick these girls. He picked them specifically
Speaker 2: for that reason. Now, whether this was desire in him
Speaker 2: that was conscious or subconscious, I don't know whether he
Speaker 2: felt a certain way whenever he saw somebody he targeted
Speaker 2: as a victim, or whether he specifically laid out the plans.
Speaker 2: I'm going to wait for this kind of person to
Speaker 2: come into my sites, and then I'm going to wait.
Speaker 3: For the opportunity to take that person.
Speaker 2: I'm not sure about that, but the consistency with which
Speaker 2: he operated tells me this was an incredibly important thing
Speaker 2: to him.
Speaker 3: So that's the first thing.
Speaker 2: Second thing is I would absolutely categorize him as a
Speaker 2: preferential child sex offender. And what does that mean, Well,
Speaker 2: people throw around the term pedophile all the time, but
Speaker 2: what they don't understand is pedophilia is actually a diagnosis.
Speaker 2: You go to the DSM and you can look up
Speaker 2: the criterion to be diagnosed as a pedophile. But it's
Speaker 2: somebody who is sexually aroused by pre pubescent children. And
Speaker 2: this guy may be a pedophile, but the broader term
Speaker 2: is preferential child sex offender, meaning that he had a
Speaker 2: specific sexual preference.
Speaker 3: And this can include the age, the.
Speaker 2: Gender, the body type, the personality type, the circumstances, all
Speaker 2: of those things surrounding his victim choice. Because when he's
Speaker 2: hunting for victims, he's looking for vulnerability, accessibility, and desirability.
Speaker 2: And sometimes when the desirability factor isn't there, in other words,
Speaker 2: the person doesn't absolutely fit into that desirability factor.
Speaker 3: He'll settle for whatever is available.
Speaker 2: But in this case, because he picked patitue girls and
Speaker 2: most of them were young teens, that.
Speaker 3: Was most likely his preference.
Speaker 2: It's a criminal sexual preference and it's something that he
Speaker 2: has embraced in his life. In other words, many people
Speaker 2: have dark thoughts and desires, but this guy decided I'm.
Speaker 3: Going to pursue them. I'm going to hide it.
Speaker 2: I'm going to do everything I can to set up
Speaker 2: and be prepared for it. I'm going to fantasize about
Speaker 2: doing it over and over and over again, and eventually
Speaker 2: I'm going to actually be able to actually act on
Speaker 2: my desires. And that's what he did at least these
Speaker 2: six times, maybe more.
Speaker 8: Clemente says. The next victimology factors to analyze are the
Speaker 8: different times and places where he actually abducted these girls.
Speaker 2: He's clearly all over the map on that, but he's
Speaker 2: in a fairly small geographic location, and his body disposal
Speaker 2: sites are as well. And this tells me right away
Speaker 2: that this child preferential sex offender is from this area.
Speaker 2: He's not somebody who just passed through and doesn't really
Speaker 2: know the area. He's somebody who is actually invisible in
Speaker 2: this neighborhood. Nobody sees him as out of place. Everybody
Speaker 2: sees him as belonging, and so it doesn't raise the
Speaker 2: alarm that he's there. So he's able to operate with
Speaker 2: impunity in these neighborhoods. And that leads me to believe,
Speaker 2: if the demographics there are highly concentrated with minorities, that
Speaker 2: he is also a minority, and that means he could
Speaker 2: be African American, he could be mixed, but he's definitely
Speaker 2: seen as someone who is just part of the neighborhood,
Speaker 2: doesn't stick out like a sore thumb.
Speaker 8: What about the location where he left the victims. Is
Speaker 8: it significant that he was leaving them by the side
Speaker 8: of the freeway.
Speaker 2: It is significant, And freeways are interesting because millions of
Speaker 2: people use them, but very few people walk along the
Speaker 2: sides of them, right, so they're very accessible. But they're
Speaker 2: also not generally used for foot traffic, and so it's
Speaker 2: very easy to conceal someone just off of a very
Speaker 2: very busy highway because nobody usually walks along there. It
Speaker 2: means that he one has a car, two knows when
Speaker 2: he can get on and off that road without being detected.
Speaker 2: Most likely has a job or family situation which allows
Speaker 2: him to be out at any hour of the day
Speaker 2: or night. Because, believe me, choosing these victims and abducting
Speaker 2: these victims took a long time. He had to be
Speaker 2: out there a long time to get access.
Speaker 3: To these particular victims.
Speaker 2: They weren't doing things that they did every day at
Speaker 2: that time. That means he has to be available to
Speaker 2: wait for them to show up and to follow them,
Speaker 2: and then to be vulnerable. So they're not vulnerable while
Speaker 2: they're inside a store or with other people. They're vulnerable
Speaker 2: when they're alone. And in one case, for example, where
Speaker 2: he abducted a girl coming right outside of a corner
Speaker 2: grocery store, he had to be pretty bold because there
Speaker 2: were obviously other people around.
Speaker 3: It said the.
Speaker 2: Packages and things that she bought were right in front
Speaker 2: of the store, but that it doesn't say if it's
Speaker 2: on the sidewalk right outside the glass door, or on
Speaker 2: the street, you know, fifty feet away or around the corner.
Speaker 3: I don't know what the.
Speaker 2: Actual facts are, but he definitely took a risk with
Speaker 2: that one. And when you see someone take a great
Speaker 2: risk like that, that means the desirability factor is through
Speaker 2: the roof. This is exactly who he wanted, and he
Speaker 2: was willing to take a great risk to get her.
Speaker 3: So this is important.
Speaker 2: That tells me something in terms of how highly she
Speaker 2: might be ranked on his desirability factor.
Speaker 10: Meaning that this is sort of his ideal.
Speaker 2: Yes, it's closest to his ideal. The highest risk that
Speaker 2: he took is going to tell you what he wanted.
Speaker 3: The most.
Speaker 8: The next detail we looked at was the length of
Speaker 8: time that the killer kept each victim before dumping their bodies.
Speaker 3: The first two were the ones that he kept the longest.
Speaker 10: Yeah, Carol and Darlinia, right.
Speaker 2: And so the first one, I would think it had
Speaker 2: the most planning involved. This is something he led up
Speaker 2: to for a very long period of time. He was
Speaker 2: fantasizing about doing this. Everything was in place, and he
Speaker 2: did what he did, and he planned to keep them
Speaker 2: probably for an extended period of time. But it never
Speaker 2: goes as well as they plan. Never, And so when
Speaker 2: he gets down to the third victim, it's eight hours later.
Speaker 2: The fourth victim, it's three hours later, the fifth victim
Speaker 2: it's six hours later, the seventh victim it's eight hours later.
Speaker 2: I think what he found was it's difficult to keep
Speaker 2: someone alive for a time and keep them hidden. He
Speaker 2: may have had some change in his circumstances, his relationship
Speaker 2: or his living circumstances, or wherever he kept these girls.
Speaker 2: But also he wasn't a killer until he killed his
Speaker 2: first victim. It may have taken him longer to form
Speaker 2: the intent to actually take their lives. And we see
Speaker 2: with Brenda Woodard that she received a tremendous amount of
Speaker 2: violence and anger from the offender, and she happened to be.
Speaker 3: The only eighteen year old, the only adult.
Speaker 2: She may have had more wits about her, She may
Speaker 2: have been stronger willed, and she must have fought more
Speaker 2: than the other. And I think because there was a
Speaker 2: ten month gap after that offense, she really affected him
Speaker 2: what she was able to do and maybe how close
Speaker 2: she was to being able to get away and.
Speaker 3: Then ruin everything for him.
Speaker 2: I think that really made him go underground for a
Speaker 2: period of time.
Speaker 8: So what are we to make of the note that
Speaker 8: was found with Brenda Denise Woodard? This is tantamount to
Speaker 8: my insensitivity misspelled to people, especially women. I will admit
Speaker 8: the others when you catch me if you can freeway Phantom.
Speaker 3: Well, there are a couple of things about it.
Speaker 2: One is that he's obviously loving the moniker. This is
Speaker 2: why we tell media outlets do not nickname offenders.
Speaker 3: We don't do it at the FBI, but we.
Speaker 2: Do encourage the media to not name offenders, just like
Speaker 2: we tell them not to put a picture and the
Speaker 2: name a school shooter up after they've been caught or killed,
Speaker 2: because What it does is it gives other people who
Speaker 2: are like minded the idea that they can become famous too,
Speaker 2: Because many of these offenders don't have a good self image.
Speaker 3: They're actually they feel.
Speaker 2: Terrible about themselves and they're trying to feel more powerful.
Speaker 2: Particularly when you have this kind of offender who's attacking
Speaker 2: petite girls. This guy feels powerless and he wants to
Speaker 2: feel powerful. So this guy wanted to communicate because he
Speaker 2: wanted to sort of revel in the fact that he'd
Speaker 2: been given a moniker by the media. You won't hear
Speaker 2: me say it, because that is not something I encourage
Speaker 2: at all. Giving him a moniker only feeds his ego
Speaker 2: and can actually embolden him to kill more.
Speaker 3: The next thing I'll say, and this is part of
Speaker 3: the profile.
Speaker 2: Is that it's clear that he had a fairly correct
Speaker 2: use of the word tantamount.
Speaker 3: I believe he used the word because he wanted to
Speaker 3: impress the readers.
Speaker 2: He wanted to show off, and this is something that
Speaker 2: he will do in his real life all the time
Speaker 2: because of his.
Speaker 3: Poor self image.
Speaker 2: He feels the need to prove his greatness, and whether
Speaker 2: that's in his vocabulary that he uses or in the
Speaker 2: quote conquests that he makes. He wants to prove how
Speaker 2: much of a man he is, and this letter, especially
Speaker 2: when he has used these multi syllabic words to show
Speaker 2: off and he gets one of them wrong. So I
Speaker 2: think I should just launch into the profile.
Speaker 10: Yeah, let's do it.
Speaker 8: Next time.
Speaker 7: On Freeway Phantom, I believe that he's likely short himself,
Speaker 7: although he has very powerful hands, probably due to the
Speaker 7: kind of work he does.
Speaker 2: But I believe he's not scary. He's able to get
Speaker 2: close enough to these victims to not scare them away
Speaker 2: before he can control them.
Speaker 11: One of the things that he said that really made
Speaker 11: sense to me is the fact that he believes that
Speaker 11: this person fantasized about this, especially with the first VIC,
Speaker 11: and planned it, and that's why he was able to
Speaker 11: keep her.
Speaker 3: A lot of variables play in the closure rate. We
Speaker 3: live and die. Some people by the street code, some
Speaker 3: people out there. They know who murdered this person, they
Speaker 3: know who committed this armed robbery, but they won't come forward.
Speaker 1: Freeway Fantom is a production of iHeart Radio, Tenderfoot TV
Speaker 1: and Black Bar MITZVAH. Our host is CELESE.
Speaker 3: Hilly.
Speaker 1: The show is written by Trevor Young, Jamie Albright, and
Speaker 1: Celess Hilly. Executive producers on behalf of Our Heart Radio
Speaker 1: include Matt Frederick and Alex Williams, with supervising producer Trevor Young.
Speaker 1: Executive producers on behalf of Tenderfoot TV include Donald Albright
Speaker 1: and Payne Lindsay, with producers Jamie Albright and Tracy Kaplan.
Speaker 1: Executive producers on behalf of Black Bar Mitzvah include myself,
Speaker 1: j Ellis and Aaron Bergman, with producer Sidney Fools. Lead
Speaker 1: researcher is Jamie Albright. Artwork by Mister Soul two one six,
Speaker 1: original music by Makeup and Vanity Set special thanks to
Speaker 1: a teammate, Uta Beck Media and Marketing and the Nord Group.
Speaker 1: Tenderfoot 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 freeway dashfanom dot com. For more podcasts from
Speaker 1: iHeartRadio and Tenderfoot TV, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Thanks for listening.