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Speaker 2: It began that evening. She had cooked dinner that afternoon
Speaker 2: and had done her little chores and what have you,
Speaker 2: and so she asked us she could go and visit
Speaker 2: her boyfriend. She had a boyfriend at the time who
Speaker 2: lived near the recreation center where she worked at. And so,
Speaker 2: because you know, she had done all of that, my
Speaker 2: parents allowed her to go and visit him, which meant
Speaker 2: she had had to take one bus and go straight
Speaker 2: up Martin Luther King to get to his house. And
Speaker 2: so I remember Diane going there, and I remember my
Speaker 2: parents telling her, you have to be back home by
Speaker 2: ten o'clock. We used to have a strict rule that
Speaker 2: when the street lights came on, we had to come inside.
Speaker 2: It's now after ten o'clock. My father worked at Lorton
Speaker 2: Reformatory in Norton, Virginia at the time, and he worked
Speaker 2: the graveyard shift, so he had gone to work, but
Speaker 2: my mom was home and she had noticed that, you know,
Speaker 2: it's ten o'clock, eleven o'clock and twelve o'clock and Diane's
Speaker 2: still not home. All I remember is, boy, is dying
Speaker 2: going to get in trouble when she come home, because
Speaker 2: it was, you know, after the time she was supposed
Speaker 2: to be there, and I was just thinking that, you know,
Speaker 2: she stayed out late. I never ever, ever thought that
Speaker 2: anything happened to her. So I was able to eventually
Speaker 2: doze off to sleep. And the next morning when my
Speaker 2: father came home and my mother said that Diane never
Speaker 2: came home. So that morning they wind up calling the police.
Speaker 2: They took a police report, and at one point my
Speaker 2: mother was trying to remember what Diane had on, and
Speaker 2: she had given them a description of her clothing, and
Speaker 2: I remember Dabora, my sister, intervening and saying, no, she
Speaker 2: had changed and she put on a gold shirt and
Speaker 2: the blue jeans. Police took the report and they left
Speaker 2: later that morning. I remember my sister and I. We
Speaker 2: went to the corner of South Capitol and montin Luther
Speaker 2: King Avenue. There's a bus stop just in that block,
Speaker 2: in front of a bank of trees, and so we thought,
Speaker 2: what if she got off the bus and got hurt.
Speaker 2: We went in the woods seeing if we could find Diane.
Speaker 2: We didn't find her, but when I got back to
Speaker 2: the house, my parents had been notified that there had
Speaker 2: been a young female found and they wanted to have
Speaker 2: them go down to Baltimore to the Medical Examiner's office
Speaker 2: so they can see if that was die In. So
Speaker 2: while they were in Baltimore to identify the body that
Speaker 2: they found, the Evening Star newspaper came out and we
Speaker 2: were reading in the newspaper that there was a body found.
Speaker 2: And when they gave the description of what the person
Speaker 2: was wearing, it was a gold shirt and blue jeans,
Speaker 2: and without seeing anything more, we just knew that that
Speaker 2: was die In.
Speaker 3: The homicide detectives termed the cases the little girl cases.
Speaker 4: This child was laying on the side of the road.
Speaker 4: I wouldn't go no way, I would call up my house.
Speaker 5: Those first five murders should have been a huge warning
Speaker 5: bell for the police.
Speaker 3: We just want to know what happened. This person must
Speaker 3: have saw that. They were thinking that maybe it's just
Speaker 3: one person, and he says, oh, they need to know.
Speaker 6: This is me.
Speaker 4: I thought that they would catch him. I thought it
Speaker 4: was just a matter of time.
Speaker 7: I'm Celeste Hedley and this is Freeway Phantom.
Speaker 2: My family had just moved to Washington, d C. From
Speaker 2: al Passo, Texas in nineteen sixty nine, so we were
Speaker 2: movies in DC.
Speaker 7: This is Patricia Williams, sister of Diane Williams, who would
Speaker 7: be the sixth confirmed victim of the Freeway Fantom.
Speaker 2: Having to uproute and move to Washington, d C. I
Speaker 2: was still trying to get acclimated to living in the
Speaker 2: city and living in an area where it wasn't to
Speaker 2: me as safe as it was when we were living
Speaker 2: in Outpass of Texas. But by the time nineteen seventy
Speaker 2: two came along, we were pretty much Washingtonians.
Speaker 6: You know.
Speaker 2: We went to school, we all worked at the recreation
Speaker 2: centers during the summertime. We had friends and we would
Speaker 2: go to back then they had house parties. That's what
Speaker 2: reminds me of seventy one. In seventy two, earth wind
Speaker 2: and fire going to the outdoor concerts that they would
Speaker 2: have during the summertime for kids. And intertwined in that
Speaker 2: era was you know, the Freeway Phantom, because while we
Speaker 2: were young and still having fun, I knew, We knew,
Speaker 2: Diane knew that there was a serial killer in Washington,
Speaker 2: d C. By the time nineteen seventy two came around,
Speaker 2: we were all aware that some girls had been murdered
Speaker 2: and it was attributed to the Freeway Phantom.
Speaker 7: By this point, the Freeway fandom had killed five young
Speaker 7: black girls across the DC area, but there had been
Speaker 7: no activity since November of the previous year. Still, Patricia
Speaker 7: says that those murders hung eerily over her family.
Speaker 2: So the feeling was almost atypical because I believe it
Speaker 2: took three, possibly even four girls to be murdered before
Speaker 2: they got any kind of recognition that Houston we have
Speaker 2: a problem. The community was upset about that and that
Speaker 2: maybe they had been made aware sooner that there's a
Speaker 2: potential killer out there of young girls to watch your
Speaker 2: orders quickly, maybe we would have had less tragedy. But
Speaker 2: it took them too long to bring the public or
Speaker 2: make the public aware that there was a killer out there.
Speaker 2: And so a lot of people in the community were
Speaker 2: upset about it.
Speaker 7: But Patricia says that the best her family could do
Speaker 7: was to keep living their lives.
Speaker 2: As far as myself and even you know, like my
Speaker 2: sisters and stuff, we were aware of it. If it
Speaker 2: doesn't happen right in your negative woods, you may be
Speaker 2: aware of it, but it doesn't affect you. So we
Speaker 2: weren't so frightened that we stayed inside and behind locked doors.
Speaker 2: We weren't cautious, you know, there's never believing that anything
Speaker 2: like that could happen to us.
Speaker 7: Patricia had a large family, but she says she was
Speaker 7: closest with her sister Diane.
Speaker 2: There were six of us, six siblings. Diane was the oldest,
Speaker 2: she was seventeen. Of course, being the oldest, we looked
Speaker 2: up to her. We would always go to church, and
Speaker 2: she actually said she was going to get baptized, and
Speaker 2: we followed her and we were all baptized following Diane's lead.
Speaker 2: Diane and I were very close. We actually shared the
Speaker 2: same bedroom, so we were always close. But at seventeen
Speaker 2: years old, Diane was starting to date, and so even
Speaker 2: though we were close, we weren't as close as we
Speaker 2: used to be because I'm a younger sister. Some oldest sisters,
Speaker 2: you know, they don't want to be around that not
Speaker 2: they don't want to be around. But I was younger,
Speaker 2: and what do I know?
Speaker 7: But then on September fifth, nineteen seventy two, seventeen year
Speaker 7: old Diane Williams went missing. It had been ten months
Speaker 7: since the Freeway fandom had killed his fifth victim, Brenda Woodard,
Speaker 7: but now it seemed as though he had returned.
Speaker 8: She had visited her boyfriend, which was a pretty normal
Speaker 8: thing for her to do, and was told to be
Speaker 8: home by tenth the night before.
Speaker 7: This is writer Victoria Hester, who co wrote a book
Speaker 7: on the Freeway Phantom with her father Blaine Pardo.
Speaker 8: Her boyfriend escorted her to the bus stop, so we
Speaker 8: know that she got at least to the bus. The
Speaker 8: bus driver did confirm that she got off at a
Speaker 8: bus stop, which was at nineteenth Street in Benning Road.
Speaker 8: It really didn't make any sense how she ended up
Speaker 8: where she ended up. We have no idea how she
Speaker 8: got where she was based on where she was dropped off,
Speaker 8: whether she got a ride from someone else, or whether
Speaker 8: she walked a different way home. It was just odd,
Speaker 8: especially that late at night.
Speaker 9: Yeah, it wasn't the bus stop that you would get
Speaker 9: off at to go home. It was earlier, and it
Speaker 9: made no sense.
Speaker 7: This is Blaine Pardo.
Speaker 9: The bus driver was fairly certain of where she got off,
Speaker 9: and then she got off alone. But it doesn't make
Speaker 9: sense that she would get off the bus there. There's
Speaker 9: a reason she got off, and we'll never know what
Speaker 9: that was. But the killer wasn't with her then, So
Speaker 9: it's confusing. But it also tells me that he wasn't
Speaker 9: stalking these girls. If you think about it, so many
Speaker 9: of them are caught going to a grocery store running
Speaker 9: an errand it's not like something that's a routine where
Speaker 9: he's following them for several days and knows their pattern
Speaker 9: and how to intercept them. These are all victims of opportunity.
Speaker 8: Her body was found the very next day. She was
Speaker 8: reported missing by her father when he came home at
Speaker 8: eight am that morning. Her father actually ended up driving
Speaker 8: by her body on his way home from work. He
Speaker 8: was a corrections officer at Lorton Prison. I didn't realize
Speaker 8: that he had driven right past his own daughter's body.
Speaker 8: He didn't know at that point that she was even missing.
Speaker 8: Since he worked the night shift. He was just going
Speaker 8: straight home and that's when he realized she wasn't there.
Speaker 7: At about seven am that day, the body had been
Speaker 7: found by a trucker who had pulled off the highway.
Speaker 7: It was alongside it two ninety five, just south of
Speaker 7: the Maryland d C Line. Diane's parents went to Baltimore
Speaker 7: to identify her body, and while they were gone, Patricia
Speaker 7: and her siblings saw the news of their sister's death
Speaker 7: in the evening Star newspaper.
Speaker 2: I remember all of us screaming and crying and just
Speaker 2: really breaking down because we found out that, you know,
Speaker 2: our sister had been murdered. I remember the next door
Speaker 2: neighbors they later had said that they heard all this
Speaker 2: commotion going on next door. They didn't know what was
Speaker 2: going on, but obviously we were upset enough that we
Speaker 2: calls concern with the neighbors because of our reaction to
Speaker 2: reading that. So when our parents did come home, they
Speaker 2: of course told us that yes, that in fact was
Speaker 2: Diane that was murdered. At that time, our parents didn't
Speaker 2: share a lot of information with us, so I didn't
Speaker 2: know a lot. But at that time, because Diane's body
Speaker 2: was found along a freeway they had almost immediately linked
Speaker 2: to the freeway phantom. I don't even know if they
Speaker 2: had evidence other than her body being found on the
Speaker 2: freeway to say that she was in fact a victim,
Speaker 2: but the media had pretty much linked her to that
Speaker 2: as being a victim.
Speaker 7: But there was evidence linking Diane to the previous murders.
Speaker 7: The bus stop where she was last seen was just
Speaker 7: down the street from the location of Carol Spink's and
Speaker 7: Darlinia Johnson's abduction sites, and she was found just off
Speaker 7: the I two ninety five freeway, about two miles from
Speaker 7: where she lived. According to the police report, Diane was
Speaker 7: wearing the clothes that she went missing in. Like previous victims,
Speaker 7: her shoes were removed, but this time they were carefully
Speaker 7: placed next to her body. The name Diane was also
Speaker 7: written in one of her white sneakers, and police found
Speaker 7: a dollar and twenty six cents in the pocket of
Speaker 7: her genes. According to the autopsy report, the official cause
Speaker 7: of death was strangulation. There was no sign of sexual assault,
Speaker 7: but semen was found on her clothing. Police believed this
Speaker 7: was because Diana had had sex with her boyfriend the
Speaker 7: night before, but the boyfriend told authorities they didn't have
Speaker 7: sex that evening. Despite this, police chose to not have
Speaker 7: the semen officially tested.
Speaker 8: The interesting thing about Diane is that her shoes were
Speaker 8: not missing from her body, unlike the other victims where
Speaker 8: one shoe was missing or bow shoes, but her shoelaces
Speaker 8: were missing, which is interesting because that's deliberate.
Speaker 7: Here's Victoria Hester again.
Speaker 8: You don't just run out of your shoelaces or they
Speaker 8: just disappear. You deliberately have to take the shoelaces out.
Speaker 8: So was that done to tie her up at some
Speaker 8: point and he forgot about it, or was this done
Speaker 8: as a souvenir to take home and remember it by
Speaker 8: It kind of seems like little things like shoes or
Speaker 8: books are missing from each of the girls, and it
Speaker 8: does kind of seem like a souvenir type deal for
Speaker 8: the killer, which is another creepy factor that there's a
Speaker 8: box sitting in someone's basement somewhere that they may not
Speaker 8: know why these random things are there. And the other
Speaker 8: thing about her was that she had money in her
Speaker 8: pocket of her genes, so we know that the motivation
Speaker 8: here was definitely not money in it was to kill her.
Speaker 8: Her cause of death was strangulation as well, and she
Speaker 8: did have bruises on a ribcage, a scrape on her elbow,
Speaker 8: and fingernail marks on her neck.
Speaker 7: The police report suggests that this evidence was submitted to
Speaker 7: the FBI. However, the FBI had just been handed another
Speaker 7: significant case.
Speaker 10: Richard Nixon's future as the President of the United States
Speaker 10: has now apparently moved beyond his control on Capitol Hill.
Speaker 10: The House Judiciary Committee has started a formal inquiry into
Speaker 10: whether it should approve the impeachment of the president. The
Speaker 10: Senate Judiciary Committee is hearing proposals that would shift control
Speaker 10: of the Watergate investigation from the White House to a
Speaker 10: court appointed prosecutor who could investigate the president himself.
Speaker 7: In June of that year, the Watergate scandal broke, and
Speaker 7: this diverted the FBI's attention and manpower away from the
Speaker 7: Freeway phantom case, which meant that the investigation, while technically ongoing,
Speaker 7: was relegated to not obscurity, just the shadows. The case
Speaker 7: was not forgotten, but it was also not top of
Speaker 7: mind for law enforcement, and that's putting it lightly.
Speaker 2: There were things that happened where the Freeway Phantom and
Speaker 2: also other murdered victims, their cases were not a priority
Speaker 2: over something else that may have been going on in Washington, DC.
Speaker 2: Everybody knows that the code of the case gets the
Speaker 2: less chance of your actually closing the case.
Speaker 7: The fallout from Diane Williams murder was even more chaotic
Speaker 7: than the previous five murders. Community member Wilma Harper wrote
Speaker 7: about this in her book The Mystery of the Freeway Phantom.
Speaker 7: In fact, she had some relation to Diane Williams.
Speaker 11: As she writes, on September sixth, nineteen seventy two, my
Speaker 11: brother Leon Williams had promised to come to my house
Speaker 11: and help plant tulip bulbs. At five o'clock PM, the
Speaker 11: telephone rang. It was Leon. He said, the girl that
Speaker 11: was reported missing is my Diane and she is dead.
Speaker 11: My reply, I'll come over immediately.
Speaker 7: Wilma says. The media frenzy around Diane's death was also
Speaker 7: bigger than it had been for previous victims.
Speaker 11: Circumstances surrounding Diane's death were similar to those present in
Speaker 11: the other murders committed, giving much rise to much publicity
Speaker 11: and media headlines blaring. After ten months freeway phantom strikes again.
Speaker 11: Within a period of eighteen months, six black girls had
Speaker 11: been killed and their bodies placed on the freeways around Washington,
Speaker 11: d C. None of the murder cases had been solved.
Speaker 11: Who is this mysterious person? Is there a freeway phantom?
Speaker 7: As a result of this frenzy, the Williams family was
Speaker 7: bombarded with strange calls and visitors.
Speaker 11: The family also had to deal with the lunatic fringe.
Speaker 11: Some people with sadistic tendencies presented extreme anguish to the
Speaker 11: family by telephone. Calls came in around the clock, increasing
Speaker 11: their anxiety during the day and disturbing their sleep at night.
Speaker 11: They received four particularly sadistic calls, obviously from the same
Speaker 11: person at two o'clock am, who said in a sinister voice,
Speaker 11: I killed your daughter. Others asked for Diane by name.
Speaker 11: Some of the messages were obscene.
Speaker 7: Lastly, wilmah Harper writes that while Diane's body was being
Speaker 7: prepared for the funeral, the family became aware of evidence
Speaker 7: that had been ignored by the mayor lnd Coroner's office.
Speaker 11: There seems to have been no end to the horrors
Speaker 11: that confronted the family during that time. When the funeral
Speaker 11: arrangements were being made. When Diane's body was taken in
Speaker 11: Mason's funeral parlor, the mortician found certain evidence that she
Speaker 11: thought was worthy of police scrutiny. She insisted that a
Speaker 11: pathology test be made that night before evidence was destroyed
Speaker 11: by embalming fluids. Seamen and hair of a certain color
Speaker 11: and texture were found in the mouth of the deceased.
Speaker 11: The autopsy conducted the coroner in Maryland had not revealed
Speaker 11: these facts, had there been gross negligence on the part
Speaker 11: of the persons in the coroner's office. Was forensic medicine
Speaker 11: the most fascinating field of police work neglected. How did
Speaker 11: the hare get inside of the mouth of the corpse?
Speaker 11: Was this a clue planted or left by the Freeway phantom.
Speaker 7: We don't know the answer to these questions, but we
Speaker 7: do know that Diane Williams was the last confirmed victim
Speaker 7: of the Freeway fan. With no new murders and federal
Speaker 7: authorities occupied with Watergate, it seemed like the investigation had
Speaker 7: hit a wall. However, a small team of investigators continued
Speaker 7: on the case for the next few years, including now
Speaker 7: retired FBI special Agent Barry culvert, who says that those
Speaker 7: years after the murders stopped were particularly difficult.
Speaker 12: The main thing you were hoping, sometime at one of
Speaker 12: these crime scenes that the assailant would drop something, he
Speaker 12: would lose something that was his, and you didn't do it.
Speaker 12: We just didn't have it. We couldn't find anything like that,
Speaker 12: even a confession with no backup evidence. They could come
Speaker 12: to court and retract their statement, and you're really kind
Speaker 12: of at a loss. We just didn't have that many
Speaker 12: witnesses that saw a victim with somebody and then they
Speaker 12: never saw him again.
Speaker 7: Barry says that the best they could do was to
Speaker 7: start building a profile of their suspect. The first thing
Speaker 7: most people agreed on, Barry tells us, is that the
Speaker 7: killer was likely someone from the neighborhood.
Speaker 12: I think these girls, if they got in a car
Speaker 12: and went with somebody, I think they would have seen them.
Speaker 12: They would have recognized them. May not know them by name,
Speaker 12: but they've seen them where they hang out, where they go,
Speaker 12: and if he said we out tonight and let me
Speaker 12: give you a ride, they might get in the car
Speaker 12: with him. As far as getting in a car with
Speaker 12: a stranger, something tells me that that may not have happened.
Speaker 12: We were looking for someone that there would be some familiarity.
Speaker 12: It's somebody that they've seen from Oxen Hill Athletic Club.
Speaker 12: It could be a coach, it could be a basketball coach.
Speaker 12: It could be somebody that, oh, I know him, we
Speaker 12: see him at rec center, or we see him when
Speaker 12: we go up here to school at night.
Speaker 7: This was a sentiment shared by a former NPD detective
Speaker 7: from Jenkins. The lead investigator on.
Speaker 3: This case, whoever did the cases, fit right into the community,
Speaker 3: never raised any suspicion at all, and that's how he
Speaker 3: was able to do what he did. Nobody would would
Speaker 3: question if they saw him talking to a little girl
Speaker 3: or anything. They wouldn't question it.
Speaker 7: Because of this and other evidence, many felt that the
Speaker 7: killer had to be a black male, most likely in
Speaker 7: his thirties.
Speaker 3: I concluded from looking at the reports from the FBI,
Speaker 3: negroid head hairs unlike the victims, were found on the victims.
Speaker 3: When you look at the crime scenes, there were no
Speaker 3: black detectives on the scenes close enough that their head
Speaker 3: could have dropped on these victims. So where did the
Speaker 3: black head hair which was not the victims?
Speaker 7: You know?
Speaker 3: So that is what I was basing it on, you know.
Speaker 7: And they had to have fit into the community without.
Speaker 3: Right, and it wasn't unusual for white males to be
Speaker 3: in the neighborhood. And you know who was a white
Speaker 3: male who came to the neighborhood almost every week, the
Speaker 3: assurance man. Everybody had a grandmother had a nickel pile, see,
Speaker 3: and he come there every week and collect his money,
Speaker 3: and nobody never robbed him or anything every week, so
Speaker 3: nobody said anything about him.
Speaker 7: In your opinion, it wouldn't be a white person.
Speaker 3: Forensically, I would say that's correct. It was not a Caucasian.
Speaker 3: It wasn't a white person.
Speaker 13: No.
Speaker 7: Romayne concedes that some of the official suspects were white,
Speaker 7: but she never believed it.
Speaker 3: They had some white guys who were over in the
Speaker 3: forty nine hundred block of Benning Road Southeast, picking up
Speaker 3: black females off the street and stuff like that. But
Speaker 3: if you go by the forensic evidence, and that's that's
Speaker 3: the problem, if it doesn't match, you know, if it's
Speaker 3: negro headhairs, why would nigro head has be on the
Speaker 3: victim's underclothes if some black male hadn't been close to her,
Speaker 3: you see what I'm saying. So, and I think Brenda
Speaker 3: Wood it is the only one where substantial Caucasian has
Speaker 3: were found, but they weren't able to do anything with
Speaker 3: them because I think in one case, some of the
Speaker 3: has were dyed red. You know how many white males
Speaker 3: you know dye they hair red. You know, So we
Speaker 3: don't know whether it's cross contamination or not. We don't know.
Speaker 7: However, someone else who reviewed the case had a different
Speaker 7: perspective on the suspect. Former PG County homicide Detective Hillary
Speaker 7: Zukolowski believes it may not have been someone from within
Speaker 7: the community.
Speaker 4: Well, you know, typically you'll have a conversation with the
Speaker 4: people you work with, and you know, everybody has their
Speaker 4: own series, as I did, and I kind of agree
Speaker 4: with everybody else. We thought perhaps that it may have
Speaker 4: been somebody that was transient. That area is highly transient.
Speaker 4: People are coming though and out of the time. Thought
Speaker 4: perhaps it could have been somebody there temporarily working for
Speaker 4: the government or even perhaps a military person because they're
Speaker 4: always coming and going to that area. And we thought
Speaker 4: it's a good possibility that somebody was there for a
Speaker 4: period of time. And since they stopped so abruptly we
Speaker 4: thought that was a possibility that somebody may have been
Speaker 4: transferred out of that area. I mean, it was off speculation.
Speaker 4: Nobody really knew anything at the time. It was just
Speaker 4: nothing but guesswork.
Speaker 7: To some degree, the transient idea makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 7: It was very common for serial killers in the seventies
Speaker 7: to travel, leaving behind bodies in various places. Some examples
Speaker 7: include Samuel Little and the Golden State Killer. And even
Speaker 7: though she still believes it was a blackmail from the community,
Speaker 7: Romayne Jenkins admits that the FBI did investigate similar cases
Speaker 7: across the country, looking anywhere for a connection.
Speaker 3: So if you look at all the submissions, I mean
Speaker 3: they traveled to Connecticut because Connecticut had some cases similar,
Speaker 3: not the exact, but similar. They went to Connecticut, they
Speaker 3: went to upstate New York, they went to New Jersey,
Speaker 3: they went everywhere that there was a series of pattern
Speaker 3: cases where females were raped and strangled and thrown on
Speaker 3: the highway. And some of these cases were solved. They
Speaker 3: even interviewed the suspect in those cases, so lots of
Speaker 3: work was done.
Speaker 7: It was but then how to explain the fact that
Speaker 7: the freeway phantom stopped killing. Romayne has an idea about
Speaker 7: that as well.
Speaker 3: I think he was upset. He felt he had vindicated himself,
Speaker 3: he had gotten authorities or whoever to see that he
Speaker 3: meant business. It was no need. How often do you
Speaker 3: find serial killers who killed women for years and they
Speaker 3: get married, they become what is it? One guy? Was
Speaker 3: it a bek btk? Yeah? You know these people return
Speaker 3: to society and act like they hadn't done a thing.
Speaker 7: When trying to determine the characteristics of your suspect, what
Speaker 7: you're doing is creating what's usually called a psychological profile,
Speaker 7: but there's another type of profile to consider, the geographic profile.
Speaker 5: It's a technique used in criminal investigations to help detect
Speaker 5: this focus on the offender. Even though these are often
Speaker 5: stranger crimes, like a serial murder or a serial rape,
Speaker 5: it's typical to generate a lot of suspects, like literally hundreds,
Speaker 5: if not thousands, or tens of thousands of suspects, So
Speaker 5: finding who you're looking for is like trying to find
Speaker 5: a needle in a haystack. Geographic profiling provides a way
Speaker 5: to prioritize suspects hundreds or thousands. It gives you a
Speaker 5: place to start looking for the needle in that haystack.
Speaker 7: This is doctor Kim Rossmo, a professor of criminology at
Speaker 7: Texas State University. He worked with law enforcement to help
Speaker 7: develop the geographic profile.
Speaker 5: What we do with geographic profiling is we take the
Speaker 5: locations of a connected series of crime. So by a
Speaker 5: connected series of crimes, I mean crimes that it's clear
Speaker 5: the same offender has committed them. The role of geographic
Speaker 5: profiling is to analyze the locations. It gives us a
Speaker 5: map of where to start our search. Doesn't give you
Speaker 5: an X that marks the spot if you're looking for
Speaker 5: a place to start. Geography is a very powerful tool.
Speaker 7: One of the people who worked closely with doctor Rossmo
Speaker 7: was Jim Treinham, a retired detective from the Metropolitan Police Department.
Speaker 7: Years after the murder stopped, they tried using the geographic profile.
Speaker 13: I had worked a lot with doctor Kim Rossmo. He's
Speaker 13: about the most brilliant of police officers that I know.
Speaker 13: But he developed this process called geographic profiling where you
Speaker 13: actually look at the different crime scenes. The more crime
Speaker 13: scenes you have, the more that you can work with
Speaker 13: his program and what he does is he's able to
Speaker 13: feed all of these, like the abduction site, the body
Speaker 13: recovery site, you know, things like that into the program.
Speaker 14: You come up with what he calls anchor points, and.
Speaker 6: These are areas not like a specific point, but like
Speaker 6: an area of the city that the suspect has some
Speaker 6: sort of significant connection to either his employer, his residents,
Speaker 6: things like that.
Speaker 7: The process essentially narrows down a location where the killer
Speaker 7: likely resides based on a map of the murders. It's
Speaker 7: much more complicated than that, but it was very impressive
Speaker 7: to writers Victoria Hester and Blame Pardo.
Speaker 9: One of the things Jim Train of Dead when he
Speaker 9: did this was he did what's called geographic profiling, and
Speaker 9: they look at where the victims lived, where were they
Speaker 9: picked up, where they have the encounter with the killer,
Speaker 9: where were the bodies dumped. He looks at traffic patterns
Speaker 9: at the time and roads and everything else. They narrowed
Speaker 9: it down that the killer had some sort of a
Speaker 9: connection to Seint Elizabeth's Hospital, whereas we call it the
Speaker 9: DC area CTS.
Speaker 8: I guess right now they're in the middle of demolishing
Speaker 8: it slash changing it into like townhouses. Very creepy mental hospital,
Speaker 8: and it's got very psych vibes to it, like it's
Speaker 8: a very old multiple buildings kind of. It's very condemned looking.
Speaker 9: You know, if you were going to film a horror movie,
Speaker 9: this would be a place to film a horror movie.
Speaker 3: It just the.
Speaker 9: Windows have bars, and the bars are rusting. Even in
Speaker 9: broad daylight. It is a creepy place to be and
Speaker 9: you're standing here and you realize, Okay, the killer had
Speaker 9: some sort of connection to this. The first two victims
Speaker 9: were found on the other side of the fence from
Speaker 9: Saint Elizabeths on the highway. I mean it's literally within
Speaker 9: forty feet of the fence of Saint Elizabeths. So this guy,
Speaker 9: he had some sort of a connection to it. Now,
Speaker 9: it could be that he worked there, could be it
Speaker 9: was patient there. He had something that tied him to that.
Speaker 9: It's an anchor point, they call it. You don't know
Speaker 9: what that is because we don't know who the killer was,
Speaker 9: but there's definitely at least one suspect that has a
Speaker 9: Saint Elizabeth's connection and some creepy coincidences that tie in
Speaker 9: to a lot of this.
Speaker 7: The geographic profile done by doctor Kim Rossmo triangulated areas
Speaker 7: of interest in DC based on certain types of evidence
Speaker 7: and the locations of various murder sites, and as he
Speaker 7: tells us, the profile seemed to work.
Speaker 5: It was interesting because there's one specific location that showed
Speaker 5: up very high in the profile that we all thought
Speaker 5: was interesting. Maybe had nothing to do with it, you know,
Speaker 5: maybe just a coincidence, but it was certainly something that
Speaker 5: would be worth following up on in some sort of
Speaker 5: later efforts. And that particular location was State Elizabeth Hospital.
Speaker 5: I believe it was the oldest mental health hospital in
Speaker 5: the United States. I think it goes back to the
Speaker 5: Civil War, and it was located at twenty seven hundred
Speaker 5: Martin Luther King Avenue, East Washington, and it was ranked
Speaker 5: very highly. Now, given that the offender's behavior in these
Speaker 5: crimes was somewhat bizarre, not what we would consider good
Speaker 5: behavior or healthy behavior, you have to think at least
Speaker 5: about maybe he had served time there and knew that location.
Speaker 5: Other possibilities maybe he worked there, maybe he visited somebody there.
Speaker 5: So you don't know. But the idea is, if you
Speaker 5: had a list of suspects, you could see anyone with
Speaker 5: a connection to the hospital would be worth exploring and
Speaker 5: then seeing if DNA or fingerprints or something else matched.
Speaker 7: Years later, in nineteen seventy seven, investigators did make a match.
Speaker 7: They were able to identify one suspect with ties to
Speaker 7: the hospital, and his name was Robert Askins.
Speaker 9: Haskins had ties to Saint Elizabeth. He spent decades there
Speaker 9: as patient.
Speaker 7: Here's writer Blaine Pardo again, Askins was.
Speaker 9: A creepy individual on so many levels. He tried to
Speaker 9: kill several prostitutes by poisoning them and did kill one
Speaker 9: of them. Was confined for years at that location and
Speaker 9: then released later killed another woman was tried for that.
Speaker 9: Spent more time at CDEs.
Speaker 7: As Blaine says, Askins was convicted for the nineteen thirty
Speaker 7: eight murder of a sex worker named Ruth MacDonald. He
Speaker 7: was admitted to Saint Elizabeth's Hospital sometime in the nineteen
Speaker 7: fifties and then the following decade went to work there
Speaker 7: as a computer technician.
Speaker 9: And then in the late nineteen seventies he attacked two women,
Speaker 9: kidnapped them, posing as a police officer, took them back
Speaker 9: to his place, held them hostage, sexually assaulted them, bathed them,
Speaker 9: and in one case, the woman got away, and the
Speaker 9: other one he drove her out and let her go,
Speaker 9: which was kind of creepy asking if you think about
Speaker 9: he's capturing women, bringing him to his place bathing them,
Speaker 9: which is just a creepy little thing all on its own.
Speaker 9: And in his apartment they found one of his legal
Speaker 9: documents when police searched it in nineteen seventy eight, which
Speaker 9: is a half decade after all of this. They did
Speaker 9: find a court document with the word tantamount in it,
Speaker 9: and he was said to have used that word often
Speaker 9: at work. He was gifted person. He was an intellectual person,
Speaker 9: but he had very little control emotionally. He literally spent
Speaker 9: the rest of his life in jail, but he had
Speaker 9: distinct ties to see.
Speaker 7: Elizabeths Askins is largely considered to be one of the
Speaker 7: strongest suspects. He mostly fit the profile. He was a
Speaker 7: black male who lived and worked in the region. He
Speaker 7: was high school educated and employed at a key location.
Speaker 7: And most of all, he also had a prior history
Speaker 7: of violence and sexual abuse of women. When they searched
Speaker 7: his home, police discovered a number of peculiar things. As
Speaker 7: Blaine said, they found a court document where a judge
Speaker 7: described Askin's behavior as quote tantamount. But they also found
Speaker 7: soiled women's scarves and a knife used in a prior crime. However,
Speaker 7: none of it was direct evidence that could implicate him
Speaker 7: in the Freeway phantom murders.
Speaker 9: In this case, it happens to match up. That doesn't
Speaker 9: mean he did it. They never found any physical evidence,
Speaker 9: no source for the green rayon fibers that could tie
Speaker 9: him back to that. I gotta tell you, at one point,
Speaker 9: I was tempted to get some fentanyl and go to
Speaker 9: his house and ask the owners there if I could
Speaker 9: go on the basement and spray around to see if
Speaker 9: there's traces of blood. But you know, there's no way
Speaker 9: to introduce that conversation without sounding a bit crazy yourself.
Speaker 9: And there's a part of me that wonders. You know,
Speaker 9: he had a house that was fenced, It had a
Speaker 9: garage he could pull in the back, it had a basement.
Speaker 9: There's so many little things that it works for him.
Speaker 9: But just because he matches the profile doesn't mean he
Speaker 9: did it. It just means he happens to coincidentally match
Speaker 9: the profile. If you watch any of the true crime
Speaker 9: stuff on TV, you'll see all the time where they go,
Speaker 9: this guy matches the profile and he's got an iron
Speaker 9: clad alibi, you know, And it happens a lot. If
Speaker 9: you look at the psychological profile. They said the killer
Speaker 9: was probably in his thirties, Haskins was older. He was
Speaker 9: in his forties at the time of the freeway Fanom killings.
Speaker 9: Does that mean he didn't do it? Can you exclude it? No,
Speaker 9: it just means he doesn't one hundred percent fit the profile,
Speaker 9: but every other aspect he kind of does. So there's
Speaker 9: a lot of objectivity that you have to kind of
Speaker 9: step back and challenge yourself. Yeah, I'd love to tell
Speaker 9: everybody I know for sure it's Robert Elwood Askins. I
Speaker 9: know for a fact he did it, but we don't
Speaker 9: have any physical evidence yet that can tie him to it.
Speaker 9: I say yeah, because you know, DC has thrown out
Speaker 9: a lout of their evidence, but there is some evidence
Speaker 9: I still think in Maryland that could DNA wise be
Speaker 9: tied to him or to the killer.
Speaker 8: Another interesting thing about Askins is his not only history
Speaker 8: but known issues with women, which kind of stand out.
Speaker 7: Here's writer Victoria Hester.
Speaker 12: Again.
Speaker 8: He had a real issue with prostitutes, so much so
Speaker 8: they started poisoning them, and he had an interesting relationship
Speaker 8: with his mother that kind of shaped his hatred for women,
Speaker 8: but he would always seek them out, obviously with the
Speaker 8: poisoning of the prostitutes and the abduction of the other women.
Speaker 8: So he kind of fits the profile in this case too.
Speaker 8: Just for his insensitivity to people, especially women, it's just creepy.
Speaker 9: The one thing it always stood out with me is
Speaker 9: his mother remarried and he was living with his mother
Speaker 9: and he wouldn't allow his stepfather to move in to
Speaker 9: the house.
Speaker 8: But she let him have that kind of control.
Speaker 9: She let him have that degree of control, And I'm like,
Speaker 9: how abnormal is that because people get married all the
Speaker 9: time and remarry. If you imagine somebody going, well, no,
Speaker 9: you can't have him move in to the point where
Speaker 9: you'd go, okay, I'm not going to do it. Yeah,
Speaker 9: until he was locked up and then she did. There's
Speaker 9: parts of this that to me, it almost screams Askins.
Speaker 9: But until somebody can find that physical connection, I'm struggling.
Speaker 7: Retired MPD detective ROMAINN. Jingins had a lot to say
Speaker 7: about Robert Askins as a suspect.
Speaker 3: No, I didn't like Robin Askins, and I felt Robert
Speaker 3: Askins was too old. I don't think that these young
Speaker 3: girls would even have gone up to him. What would
Speaker 3: be the conversation that he had, Maybe if he had
Speaker 3: a gun, he said, get in the car. But then
Speaker 3: you go back to Crockett. The first time she sounds
Speaker 3: like she's upset, and.
Speaker 7: You're talking about the first phone call she made.
Speaker 3: He had the first phone call she made, the second one,
Speaker 3: she doesn't seem to be upset. And if Askins had
Speaker 3: grabbed her and she didn't know them, how would the
Speaker 3: suspect know if her mother had seen them or not?
Speaker 3: If he didn't recognize her mother because he knew him. See,
Speaker 3: he knew these.
Speaker 7: Victims because she asked on the phone, do you know
Speaker 7: if my mother saw me?
Speaker 3: Yes? Yes, yes, yes, And he allowed them to make contact.
Speaker 3: Missus McNeil. Darlena Johnson's mother said that she got a
Speaker 3: strange phone call, I killed your daughter, Brenda Woodard. Her
Speaker 3: body is left on the grounds out there where her
Speaker 3: mama worked at the hospital. So was it just his.
Speaker 7: Age that made you think it wasn't Robert Askins?
Speaker 3: Yes, it was his age. And I know in reading
Speaker 3: the FBI evidence reports, his hairs did not match the
Speaker 3: negroid head hairs. None of the fiber evidence that was
Speaker 3: removed in a search warrant at his house matched. They
Speaker 3: could not find any type of green synthetic fibers that
Speaker 3: matched these. But he did know about the word tantamount
Speaker 3: because it was used quite often in describing him.
Speaker 7: And in his court proceedings.
Speaker 3: Yeah, judges, and generally that's where it comes from. You know,
Speaker 3: if you look at the note, there's a saying now
Speaker 3: that if somebody tells you who they are the first time,
Speaker 3: you best believe it. That person told us who he was.
Speaker 3: Somebody else called him insensitive. You don't call yourself insensitive, Okay,
Speaker 3: somebody else in some document made him the insensitive person.
Speaker 7: Detective Jim Trainham agreed with the Romaine Jenkins. He believes
Speaker 7: investigators were blinded by the word tantamount when.
Speaker 14: You started looking at some of the suspect biology. You
Speaker 14: see that coming up. Oh, he uses the word tanamou
Speaker 14: in this document or that document.
Speaker 13: In reading the search warrants and the investigation into him,
Speaker 13: it was like the detective was really obsessed with him,
Speaker 13: and he was really trying to push a square peg
Speaker 13: into a round hole in my opinion. I mean, some
Speaker 13: of the leaps that he was making to try to
Speaker 13: connect Askins to these girls was pretty kind of eye rolling.
Speaker 13: Askins is now dead. He's never admitted to anything. When
Speaker 13: some detectives did go down to question him, he was
Speaker 13: extremely paranoid.
Speaker 14: But then again, I think I would be due if
Speaker 14: I'm in prison, somebody's trying to put the murder of
Speaker 14: five girls on me. I don't think that's abnormal behavior,
Speaker 14: though they thought it was.
Speaker 7: Askins was given a life sentence for the kidnapping and
Speaker 7: sexual assault of two women. He died on April thirtieth,
Speaker 7: twenty ten, at the age of ninety one. One of
Speaker 7: the detectives communicated with Askins until his death, and he
Speaker 7: continued to deny any involvement in the murders. Whether or
Speaker 7: not Askins was the killer, the fact remains that Saint
Speaker 7: Elizabeth's Hospital is a significant location in this case. I
Speaker 7: visited the grounds last year with my producers Jamie and Trevor,
Speaker 7: so we're standing here at the place where Saint Elizabeth's
Speaker 7: Hospital stood in nineteen seventy one. This was the place
Speaker 7: where one of the prime suspects, Robert Askins, was treated
Speaker 7: for years, held actually, and because of its proximity to
Speaker 7: so many important locations in the freeway phantom cases. That's
Speaker 7: one of the reasons why people felt Robert Askins was
Speaker 7: a good suspect because the geographic profile landed on this
Speaker 7: location where we're standing as sort of the hub of
Speaker 7: this killer's life, is that this would be an incredibly
Speaker 7: important location for him, and Askins was held here for years.
Speaker 7: And again, it's close. It's close to everything. I mean,
Speaker 7: we haven't gone far from that neighborhood where Carol Spinks
Speaker 7: lived and where Darlinia lived. It's close. It's all in
Speaker 7: the same I mean, for me, it's walkable. The hunt
Speaker 7: for suspects throughout the seventies was mostly unsuccessful, but in
Speaker 7: a strange turn of events, investigators briefly determined that it
Speaker 7: wasn't one person who was responsible, but an entire gang.
Speaker 7: Here's Jim training again.
Speaker 14: One of the things that happened right about this time
Speaker 14: period was there was a series of rapes of adult women,
Speaker 14: of kidnappings and rapes of adult women that were done
Speaker 14: by this group of men called the Green Vega Rapist
Speaker 14: and they were basically, I guess the best way to
Speaker 14: describe them is like a rape club.
Speaker 15: I mean some of them would go out some knights,
Speaker 15: others would go out other knights, and they would drive
Speaker 15: a green vega around and they would kidnap women off
Speaker 15: the street, look at bus stops and things like that,
Speaker 15: take them to someplace, rape them, sodomize them, and then
Speaker 15: let them go.
Speaker 14: Some of the rapes were pretty brutal, and when they
Speaker 14: finally got captured, one of them started making noise and saying, well,
Speaker 14: I know who the Freeway Phantom is.
Speaker 7: Next time on Freeway Phantom.
Speaker 12: It was a gang that were going around abducting young
Speaker 12: women in raping them.
Speaker 9: The investigators for Freeway Fans said, well, maybe these guys
Speaker 9: are the same guys, and they opened a multi jurisdictional
Speaker 9: task for us that involved the FBI, the park police.
Speaker 7: I think it got covered up.
Speaker 3: As an adult, I see it differently than when I
Speaker 3: was a kid.
Speaker 2: Plus as a kid, I didn't know a lot of
Speaker 2: stuff that had happened.
Speaker 7: So why was she not included among the Freeway Phantom victims.
Speaker 3: I have no idea. I guess mainly because she was
Speaker 3: only victim found in the water.
Speaker 9: And sometimes I get the feeling that police officers get
Speaker 9: in their mind who they think did it, and in
Speaker 9: their mind the cases are closed, even though nobody was
Speaker 9: ever brought to.
Speaker 4: Tryal for it.
Speaker 1: Freeway Fantom is a production of iHeartRadio, Tenderfoot TV and
Speaker 1: Black BARMETSVA. Our host is Selese Hilly. The show is
Speaker 1: written by Trevor Young, Jamie Albright and Celess Hiley. Executive
Speaker 1: producers on behalf of iHeartRadio include Matt Frederick and Alex Williams,
Speaker 1: with supervising producer Trevor Young. Executive producers on behalf of
Speaker 1: Tenderfoot TV include Donald Albright and Payne Lindsay, with producers
Speaker 1: Jamie Albright and Tracy Kaplan. Executive producers on behalf of
Speaker 1: Black bar Mitzvah include myself, Jay Ellis and Aaron Bergman,
Speaker 1: with producer Sidney Fools. Lead researcher is Jamie Albright. Artwork
Speaker 1: by Mister Soul two one six, original music by Makeup
Speaker 1: and Vanity Set special thanks to a teammate, Uta Beck
Speaker 1: Media and Marketing and the Nord Group. Tenderfoot TV and iHeartMedia,
Speaker 1: as well as Black bar Mitzvah have increased the reward
Speaker 1: for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the
Speaker 1: person or persons responsible for their Freeway Fan of 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. You 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
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