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Speaker 2: There was a series of rapes of adult women, of
Speaker 2: kidnappings and rapes of adult women that were done by
Speaker 2: this group of men called the Green Vega Rapist and
Speaker 2: they were basically, I guess the best way to describe
Speaker 2: them is like a rape club. I mean, some of
Speaker 2: them would go out some nights, others would go out
Speaker 2: other knights, and they would drive a green Vega around
Speaker 2: and they would kidnap women off the street, look at
Speaker 2: bus stops and things like that, take them to someplace,
Speaker 2: rape them, sodomize them, and then let them go. Well,
Speaker 2: some of the rapes were pretty brutal, and when they
Speaker 2: finally got captured, one of them started making noise and saying, well,
Speaker 2: I know who the Freeway Phantom is and he starts
Speaker 2: naming people within the group and starts talking about how
Speaker 2: he knew about the different murders and stuff like that.
Speaker 2: We call him Joel House snitches or informists. He's desperate
Speaker 2: because if he can give up information that that increases
Speaker 2: this chance of getting a deal and getting out from
Speaker 2: under this. We're desperate because you know, of course we
Speaker 2: want to solve this case. Joe House's informants are really
Speaker 2: good as suckering us as detectives because we want to
Speaker 2: believe and that's exactly what happened.
Speaker 3: The homicide detectives termed the cases the little girl case.
Speaker 4: This child was laying on the side of the road.
Speaker 4: I wouldn't go no way. I would call out my house.
Speaker 5: Those first five murders should have been a huge warning
Speaker 5: bell for the police.
Speaker 6: We just want to know what happened.
Speaker 7: This person must have saw that.
Speaker 3: They were thinking that maybe it's just one person, and
Speaker 3: he says, oh, they need to know this is me.
Speaker 4: I thought that they would catch him.
Speaker 2: I thought it was just.
Speaker 4: A matter of time.
Speaker 6: I'm Celeste Hedley and this is Freeway Phantom. In nineteen
Speaker 6: seventy four, two years after the last confirmed Freeway Phantom murder,
Speaker 6: investigators turned their attention to the Green Vega Gang, also
Speaker 6: known as the Green Vega Rapists. This group of five
Speaker 6: or six men were known to drive a green Chevy
Speaker 6: Vega around the DC Maryland area. They were collectively responsible
Speaker 6: for numerous rapes and abductions that occurred near the Washington Beltway,
Speaker 6: but through somewhat strange circumstances, they became prime suspects in
Speaker 6: the Freeway Phantom case. It started when a few of
Speaker 6: the Green Vega members had been arrested and put on
Speaker 6: trial for a case involving two gang rapes.
Speaker 8: And when they were brought into court, the lawyer made
Speaker 8: the comment of well, they weren't even looking for the
Speaker 8: Green Bega guys, they were looking for the freeway fanom Well,
Speaker 8: the investigators for a freeway fan said, well, maybe these
Speaker 8: guys are the same guys.
Speaker 6: This is writer Blaine Pardo, As he says, an offhanded
Speaker 6: mention of the Freeway Phantom case during this trial sparked
Speaker 6: the idea that the two cases were connected.
Speaker 8: And they opened a multi jurisdictional task force that involved
Speaker 8: the FBI, the Park Police, Washington DC Metropolitan Police, Maryland
Speaker 8: State Police, the Prince George's County Police, etc. They all
Speaker 8: began to crawl into this, and unfortunately, these Green Vega
Speaker 8: guys saw this as a bargaining chip. In other words,
Speaker 8: if we flip on our fellows and say they did
Speaker 8: the Freeway phantom murders, maybe I'll get a lighter sentence
Speaker 8: or get some benefits on the side of doing this.
Speaker 8: So several of the members flipped.
Speaker 6: The Green Vega Gang members were individually interviewed by the
Speaker 6: Metropolitan Police Department at Lorton Prison between nineteen seventy four
Speaker 6: and nineteen seventy five. One of the members provided a
Speaker 6: statement implicating another member. His testimony substantiated the investigator's belief
Speaker 6: that the Green Vega Gang was responsible for the Freeway
Speaker 6: phantom murders, and that's because the informant provided signature details
Speaker 6: of the crimes that were not released to the public.
Speaker 6: Police took the informant to sites where he said the
Speaker 6: victims were abducted, assaulted, murdered and disposed of, and he
Speaker 6: provided a concrete alibi ruling himself out as a suspect.
Speaker 6: This informant asked to remain anonymous. Then information that a
Speaker 6: Green Vega member at Lorton Prison had provided a break
Speaker 6: in the case was leaked to the media by a
Speaker 6: political candidate in Maryland.
Speaker 8: It literally consumed the case for months.
Speaker 6: One of the investigators looking into the Green Vega Gang
Speaker 6: was former FBI Special Agent Barry Culvert.
Speaker 9: The thing that came to our attention with the Green
Speaker 9: Vega cases, it was a gang that were going around
Speaker 9: abducting young women and raping them. That might be the
Speaker 9: way to solve it. That there was something in common
Speaker 9: with our Freeway Phantom cases in these Vega rape cases.
Speaker 9: I think Lou Richardson, he was one that continued from
Speaker 9: the Freeway Phantom cases to that case. He thought that
Speaker 9: might be the same people that our girls were killed
Speaker 9: by the Vega rape people.
Speaker 6: Lou Richardson was one of Colvert's partners on the Freeway
Speaker 6: Phantom case, but Colvert says he had his doubts during
Speaker 6: the investigation. He says most of the eyewitness accounts placing
Speaker 6: the Green Vega Gang near the murder sites were unreliable.
Speaker 9: People described cars in the damnedest ways, and what they
Speaker 9: think was the Green Vega may have been a Chevy
Speaker 9: Chevelle or something. They just don't always get it. Right,
Speaker 9: unless you get a guy or a woman. We've had
Speaker 9: a couple of women. Man, they knew their cars. If
Speaker 9: they said it with a Green Vega, probably sixty nine
Speaker 9: because they had a spoiler up here and this kind
Speaker 9: of hoodcap. Don't count on that me in your car.
Speaker 9: If it was green and small and tudor go with that,
Speaker 9: that's what you probably had.
Speaker 6: As investigators looked deeper into the Green Vega gang, things
Speaker 6: only got weirder. Here's blein Pardo again.
Speaker 8: Remarkably what stug me was as they were going through
Speaker 8: these cases, they started realizing the confessions didn't match the
Speaker 8: physical evidence. No way could they they describe and they
Speaker 8: didn't know about the green rayon fibers, but none of
Speaker 8: them could describe that. We took the victims to the
Speaker 8: same place each time. They always sat in the same
Speaker 8: vehicle in the same place. There's no consistency with this end.
Speaker 8: They described the deaths of these girls very differently. It
Speaker 8: doesn't match physical evidence to the point where they described
Speaker 8: one of the ten year old victim as being dressed provocatively,
Speaker 8: you know, and sexy, and no, she was dressed like
Speaker 8: a ten year old girl, you know, and just the
Speaker 8: stuff just didn't match up. But unfortunately the police were
Speaker 8: under such pressure to close these cases. When we talked
Speaker 8: with Jim Trenum, he brought that up.
Speaker 6: Detective Jim Trainum, who you heard at the very top
Speaker 6: of the episode, never believed the Green Vegas could be responsible.
Speaker 6: He says, the informant was a complete fraud.
Speaker 2: So what happened was they took him to some of
Speaker 2: the crime scenes and things like that, and he was
Speaker 2: pointing out stuff and all. And later as all of
Speaker 2: this unfolded, it turns out and he admitted, and other
Speaker 2: people admitted that he was just playing these these detectives.
Speaker 2: He would kind of gather bits and pieces of information
Speaker 2: from them. If they took them to a crime he
Speaker 2: would kind of like watch them and see what they
Speaker 2: would want him to maybe point to. He would get
Speaker 2: clues from them. It's kind of like a false confession
Speaker 2: in that, Okay, I want to confess to a crime
Speaker 2: that I didn't commit, how do I get the information
Speaker 2: about it? And so, you know, those guys, they really
Speaker 2: didn't fit. They're victims were all adult women. These were
Speaker 2: not adult women, I mean totally different. And also the
Speaker 2: fact that this guy really didn't have any information, and in.
Speaker 6: Fact, there were no charges brought against any members of
Speaker 6: the Green Vega Gang for the Freeway phantom murders. There
Speaker 6: was reportedly a grand jury hearing, but the evidence was
Speaker 6: insufficient to reach a conviction. Willma Harper wrote about this
Speaker 6: in her book The Mystery of the Freeway Fandom.
Speaker 10: Sources close to the investigation who asked for anonymity independently
Speaker 10: told The Star that the probe was closed after a
Speaker 10: disagreement in the US Attorney Earl Silbert's office about how
Speaker 10: to proceed. One source said the dispute involved two opposing groups,
Speaker 10: one wanted to submit free a phantom evidence to the
Speaker 10: grand jury and the other that argued that the evidence
Speaker 10: was insufficient to go before.
Speaker 6: The grand jury.
Speaker 10: On August third, nineteen eighty, the Washington Posts published an
Speaker 10: article that summarized what occurred after the grand jury made
Speaker 10: a decision on the Green Vega rape suspects, saying, quote,
Speaker 10: law enforcement officials involved with the cases believed that four
Speaker 10: men involved in hundreds of brutal rapes in the city
Speaker 10: from nineteen sixty nine to nineteen seventy three were implicated
Speaker 10: in the child murders, but the men were not convicted.
Speaker 10: It is difficult for the families to come to grips
Speaker 10: with the fact that eight or nine years later the
Speaker 10: deaths have not been solved.
Speaker 6: As this article mentions, many investigators still believed the Green
Speaker 6: Vegas were responsible for the Freeway phantom murders. Here's Blaine Pardowick.
Speaker 8: Despite the fact that they never filed charges against the
Speaker 8: Green Vega guys, there's this prevailing attitude that even exists
Speaker 8: today in Washington, DC that well, we know who did it.
Speaker 8: It was the Green Vega guys, we just couldn't prove it.
Speaker 6: Blaine recalls that Jim Trenam even struggled with this decades
Speaker 6: later when he tried.
Speaker 8: To reopen the case in two thousand and six. There
Speaker 8: was a lot of pressure of why are you doing this.
Speaker 8: We already know who did it. It was the Green Vega guys,
Speaker 8: and he was like, no, Green Mega guys. They recanted,
Speaker 8: all of them recanted their confessions, and the confessions never
Speaker 8: held water. They just didn't hold against the physical evidence,
Speaker 8: and that was a huge distraction.
Speaker 6: Retired MPD homicide detective Romaine Jenkins agrees.
Speaker 3: A lot of time was wasted, especially when they got
Speaker 3: to the Green Vega guys.
Speaker 7: That really was a waste of time.
Speaker 6: Romayne says, even before she was assigned to the case,
Speaker 6: she was paying attention to the suspects, and she found
Speaker 6: it strange that the investigators at the time were so convinced.
Speaker 3: What piqued my curiosity because I knew many of the investigators,
Speaker 3: and especially the lead investigators on the cases, and I
Speaker 3: asked them, well, how you make it out with the case?
Speaker 3: What is going on?
Speaker 7: You know that?
Speaker 3: And that's when they started talking about the Green Vega guys.
Speaker 3: And one day I was sitting in sex squad. Like
Speaker 3: I said, I like to read everything, and I came
Speaker 3: across this this document which was about almost the size
Speaker 3: of a telephone book, and it was on the investigation
Speaker 3: of the freeway phantom cases. And I started reading it,
Speaker 3: and the more I read, the angrier I got, because
Speaker 3: it showed that the Green Vega cases were a hoax.
Speaker 3: When it came to the freeway cases, they had nothing
Speaker 3: to do with each other.
Speaker 7: And I mean, now, why do you say that?
Speaker 6: Because the police, multiple times officials said that the reason
Speaker 6: they thought this could be realists because one of them
Speaker 6: had information that no one else had. So what you're
Speaker 6: laughing already. Why did you think this is a red herring?
Speaker 3: Because they you know what, the FBI went back and
Speaker 3: they reinterviewed a lot of these suspects, the people involved,
Speaker 3: and they admitted that it was a hoax. The witnesses
Speaker 3: said that, hey, they planned this thing because some of
Speaker 3: the guys. One of the guys wanted immunity from prosecution.
Speaker 3: Now I'm not saying they're not rapists, because they should
Speaker 3: have been in jail, under the jail probably, but they
Speaker 3: didn't do these cases. Okay, they did not do these cases.
Speaker 3: And this is in plain black and white.
Speaker 6: While writer Blaine Pardo agreed with Romayne, he was still
Speaker 6: curious about the Green Vegas suspects, particularly the informant, who
Speaker 6: we now know was named Morris J. Warren. Blaine tells
Speaker 6: us he communicated with Warren via letters from prison.
Speaker 8: His curse finance was kind of rambling. I took the
Speaker 8: approach when I wrote him of I know what your
Speaker 8: involvement in these cases are. I just need to hear
Speaker 8: it from you. And he thought I was implying he
Speaker 8: was involved in the cases, so he vehemently denied it.
Speaker 8: A lot of religious texts woven into it, which I
Speaker 8: always find interesting how convicts find Jesus and God when
Speaker 8: they get to prison, and you know, he was like, no, no, no,
Speaker 8: you're on the wrong track. Didn't have anything to do
Speaker 8: with me, wasn't me, didn't do it, and he really
Speaker 8: wanted us to come visit him, which we were unable
Speaker 8: to do. The authorities wouldn't put us on the list
Speaker 8: for him. And he admits, I never had anything to
Speaker 8: do with this. You know, I did it on a
Speaker 8: spite and revenge. He came right out and said it,
Speaker 8: and yeah, I believe it. They were trying to cut
Speaker 8: deals for themselves and once they realized, oh my god,
Speaker 8: we're going to be brought up on murder charges, multiple
Speaker 8: murder charges, I think at that point they said forget it.
Speaker 8: Were not were not the guys that did best, and
Speaker 8: they knew it.
Speaker 6: The reality is the Green Vega Gang was a major distraction,
Speaker 6: one that potentially had significant repercussions on the freeway phantom investigation.
Speaker 8: Unfortunately, when you get a huge task force put together
Speaker 8: of all these officers and investigators and they're focused on this,
Speaker 8: that's time that the real killer wasn't being investigated. And unfortunately,
Speaker 8: there were very few people that bucked the system at
Speaker 8: the time, So there's this weird twisted thought of we already.
Speaker 6: Know who did it to most of the people we
Speaker 6: talked to. That tunnel vision is just one more reason
Speaker 6: why this case was never solved. However, the same year
Speaker 6: the Green Vegas were investigated, another suspect cropped up, actually
Speaker 6: a pair of suspects. To police officers, there were six
Speaker 6: confirmed victims in the Freeway Phantom case, Carol Spinks, Darlinia Johnson,
Speaker 6: Brenda Crockett, Nenemotia Yates, Brenda Woodard, and Diane Williams. However,
Speaker 6: early on in the case, there was another suspected victim,
Speaker 6: and her name was Angela Barnes. On July twelfth, nineteen
Speaker 6: seventy one, just a few days after Darlinia Johnson went missing,
Speaker 6: Angela Barnes also disappeared. She was walking home from a
Speaker 6: friend's house when she was kidnapped. The next day, her
Speaker 6: body was found in Waldorf, Maryland. Her cause of death
Speaker 6: was a gunshot wound to her head, and her murder
Speaker 6: was initially attributed to the Freeway Phantom.
Speaker 8: Young girl same profile is one of the victims. So
Speaker 8: by the time you get to the second and third
Speaker 8: Freeway Phantom victims, the real Freeway Fanom victims. Her name
Speaker 8: gets thrown in with those victims.
Speaker 6: Here's writer Blaine Pardo.
Speaker 8: Again, it made no sense and it definitely muddied the
Speaker 8: investigation because, of course the other officers in the Metropolitan
Speaker 8: Police didn't know that she wasn't connected, So they're wondering,
Speaker 8: did the Freeway Fantom now have an mo where he
Speaker 8: used a gun, ligature, strangulation, etc. To kill his victims.
Speaker 8: The gun didn't make sense, you know, from an investigative perspective,
Speaker 8: it totally did, because a gun would be a great
Speaker 8: way to force young victims into a car. You pull
Speaker 8: up alongside them, window down, you aim the gun to
Speaker 8: get in the car. It makes total sense from a
Speaker 8: control perspective, and it could be that the Freeway Fantom
Speaker 8: did use a gun to get his victims into the vehicle.
Speaker 8: It made very little sense though, when you look at
Speaker 8: in the context of all the other victims, you only
Speaker 8: have one that was stabbed. Clearly that was someone who
Speaker 8: resisted him and was stabbed. The rest were all strangled,
Speaker 8: and while there were evidence of fighting or resisting, it
Speaker 8: was all more manual than anything else. There wasn't the
Speaker 8: use of a weapon like that. The only other weapon
Speaker 8: that the Freeway Phantom used was a knife, and it
Speaker 8: was only on one victim.
Speaker 6: Willma Harper wrote about the curious case of Angela Barnes
Speaker 6: in her book The Mystery of the Freeway Phantom.
Speaker 10: One view was that Angela was not a Freeway Phantom victim.
Speaker 10: She was the only one of the girls that had
Speaker 10: been shot. Based on the fact that the bullet that
Speaker 10: killed Angela had ricocheted, it was the opinion of Detective
Speaker 10: Simpson that Angela's death had been accidental.
Speaker 6: Police would eventually determine that Angela wasn't connected. Sometime during
Speaker 6: the Freeway Phantom investigation, her name was removed from the
Speaker 6: victim list, But years later, in nineteen seventy four, someone
Speaker 6: was arrested for the murder of Angela Barnes.
Speaker 8: It was actually they found out a police officer who
Speaker 8: killed her, and it was a real creepy circumstance. He
Speaker 8: and his partner abducted her, got her in the car,
Speaker 8: performed sexual acts with her, and inadvertently shot her in
Speaker 8: the car. And the way they caught them was one
Speaker 8: of the police officer's wife was involved with cleaning up
Speaker 8: the car, and they had kind of played it off
Speaker 8: that it had nothing to do with them killing anyone.
Speaker 8: That was the blood from one of their suspects that
Speaker 8: they brought in. But she was like, it's all over
Speaker 8: the front seat, which didn't make sense. And after a
Speaker 8: while she slowly pieced it together and actually reached out
Speaker 8: to law enforcement and they got a full.
Speaker 6: The two police officers were named Edward Sullivan and Tommy Simmons.
Speaker 6: They were both convicted and sent to prison for barnes murder,
Speaker 6: but an investigators said they were not responsible for the
Speaker 6: other six Freeway phantom murders. Still, the murder of Angela
Speaker 6: Barnes brought up some troubling implications. Many families in the
Speaker 6: area started to believe that a police officer could very
Speaker 6: well have been responsible for the freeway phantom murders. You
Speaker 6: may remember that when we talked with Evander Spinks, older
Speaker 6: sister of Carol Spinks, she revealed her biggest.
Speaker 11: Suspect it probably was the police, was somebody at work
Speaker 11: with the police. That's the only thing really made sense
Speaker 11: to me. I think it got covered up. As an adult,
Speaker 11: I see it differently than when I was a kid.
Speaker 11: Plus as a kid, I didn't know a lot of
Speaker 11: stuff that had happened, how the police was handling things
Speaker 11: because we weren't privy to that.
Speaker 8: There was definitely a feeling and what it really contributed to,
Speaker 8: I think was, and you read the interviews with the
Speaker 8: families at the time, they really then begin to suspect
Speaker 8: the police department or someone in the police department was involved,
Speaker 8: because the minute you get one young girl who's killed
Speaker 8: by police, you start wondering, while are other cops out
Speaker 8: there killing young girls? And is that what's really feeding this?
Speaker 8: And it really added to what I would call the
Speaker 8: extreme distrust the family started developing towards the police department.
Speaker 8: And it was, by the way, completely earned. You know,
Speaker 8: when you've got something like that happening in a community
Speaker 8: like that, you're not going to shake that. And there's
Speaker 8: no amount of goodwill you can put out that's going
Speaker 8: to change people's perceptions of that. And I don't blame
Speaker 8: the families at all. I would still be kind of
Speaker 8: wondering were the police involved.
Speaker 6: When I spoke with Carolyn Spinks, the twin sister of
Speaker 6: Carol Spinks, she revealed some haunting thoughts about who she
Speaker 6: believed killed her sister. Have you had thoughts about who
Speaker 6: you think was responsible?
Speaker 4: Yes, I mean who do you think might.
Speaker 12: Have done it?
Speaker 4: I thought that it was a white man in a
Speaker 4: police car. Why because this may sound crazy to you all,
Speaker 4: but because one day I was at the store where
Speaker 4: my mom was, because my mother was the last person
Speaker 4: to see her alive. And right there at the store
Speaker 4: where my mom was, it used to be a phone
Speaker 4: booth right there. So one day, this was years later,
Speaker 4: I was at that phone booth and a vision came
Speaker 4: over me. I don't know where it came from, but
Speaker 4: it was a white police but he was in a
Speaker 4: police car. But I don't know if he was a
Speaker 4: police where he was just like one. And he was
Speaker 4: in a police car, and he heard my mother tell
Speaker 4: her that she was going to get her when she
Speaker 4: get home, because he told her not to come out
Speaker 4: of the house and she was walking home and he
Speaker 4: followed her. This is in your vision, yes, And then
Speaker 4: the day of my sister funeral, afterwards, we went to
Speaker 4: my aunt house and we was outside and I looked
Speaker 4: across the street and there was a police officer but
Speaker 4: he had that helmet thing with a big glass black
Speaker 4: thing across his face. And he was in that motorcycle
Speaker 4: thing that looked like where one could ride aside it
Speaker 4: that's made with the thing on the side. And he
Speaker 4: was just staring at me. But he was across the
Speaker 4: street way across from my aunt house. But I could
Speaker 4: see him looking at me. And I got scanned and
Speaker 4: ran in the house. And I tell my mother that
Speaker 4: police keep looking at me.
Speaker 8: What did she say when they came out?
Speaker 4: He was gone, do you feel.
Speaker 6: Like you trust police?
Speaker 4: No?
Speaker 6: I mean, have you ever or it's just since that
Speaker 6: time when your sister was murdered? Was that the end
Speaker 6: of your trust for law enforcement?
Speaker 4: I never had any get into it law enforcement, you know,
Speaker 4: at that time, so I didn't know. But as I
Speaker 4: got older, I was like, no, I don't trust them
Speaker 4: because you know some police deduced they do underhanded, you know,
Speaker 4: unhanded stuff, and I guess you can't trust them. I
Speaker 4: don't trust no man.
Speaker 6: Author Wilma Harper wrote about this theory as well.
Speaker 10: Questions continued to be asked but not answered, like why
Speaker 10: no one ever saw the girls picked up? Was the
Speaker 10: killer someone so utterly trustworthy like a policeman that a
Speaker 10: bystander would take no notice. Was he someone they knew?
Speaker 10: Did the killer know the freeways, the neighborhood, and what
Speaker 10: were the chances that he lived among them? A person
Speaker 10: of normal appearances stalking and killing adolescent girls.
Speaker 6: We asked Blaine Pardo if he thought a police officer
Speaker 6: could feasibly pull off these murders.
Speaker 8: There's a feeling that the police department is either involved
Speaker 8: simply because these girls are so easily pulled off the
Speaker 8: streets and a policeman pulling up and a police car
Speaker 8: could do that. You know, he could say get in
Speaker 8: the car. So many of these are in broad daylight
Speaker 8: and the streets are so busy. To me, that's the
Speaker 8: one thing that this whoever this killer was, had a
Speaker 8: technique for securing these young women in his vehicle. We
Speaker 8: need to know what that is. Because he did it
Speaker 8: on streets where everybody knew everybody where, people were out
Speaker 8: and these girls simply vanish. So how he did it
Speaker 8: without raising attention? A policeman could easily do that.
Speaker 6: Despite this, Blaine ultimately doesn't think the freeway fandom is
Speaker 6: a police officer.
Speaker 8: I don't get that vibe, especially with the leaving of
Speaker 8: a note. A police officer is going to go, look,
Speaker 8: I'm not going to do anything at all to leave evidence,
Speaker 8: even evidence where I've got the victim writing out a note,
Speaker 8: why taught police? If you're in the police department, they're
Speaker 8: not going to do that. And that note still sticks
Speaker 8: with me. That's someone who's literally flipping the finger off
Speaker 8: at the police department. You know, he's saying, catch me
Speaker 8: if you can, and I'll confess the others when you do.
Speaker 8: If this was a police officer, I just can't picture
Speaker 8: him being diabolical enough to go I'll throw the scent
Speaker 8: off by pretending I'm a craze killer. And it's something
Speaker 8: that's very rare among serial killers to actually communicate to
Speaker 8: the authorities. They just don't do that. There's too much
Speaker 8: risk involved, and I think even in that time, I
Speaker 8: don't think a police officer would do it.
Speaker 6: But the tragedy of Angela Barnes proved that not everything
Speaker 6: was as it seemed. Her inclusion in the Freeway Phantom
Speaker 6: case skewed perceptions of what was possible, and she wasn't
Speaker 6: the only one. As it turns out, there was yet
Speaker 6: another unofficial Freeway Phantom victim, and her case is even
Speaker 6: more terrifying. Angela Barnes wasn't the only unconfirmed victim of
Speaker 6: the Freeway Phantom. In November of nineteen seventy two, just
Speaker 6: two months after the last confirmed victim, Diane Williams, was killed,
Speaker 6: police found the body of eighteen year old Terrace Bryant.
Speaker 6: To many investigators, Tara Bryant is considered the seventh victim
Speaker 6: of the Freeway Phantom, but she was ultimately ruled out
Speaker 6: for a number of reasons which we'll get into. Still,
Speaker 6: we and others believe the similarities are too striking to ignore.
Speaker 6: Tara was a young mother with a one year old
Speaker 6: son at home on Sunday, November twenty sixth, nineteen seventy two,
Speaker 6: just three days after enjoying a Thanksgiving with her family.
Speaker 6: Tara's mother dropped her off at Leland Memorial Hospital for
Speaker 6: a medical appointment. She was wearing a shiny red jacket
Speaker 6: over a striped red, white and black dress, along with
Speaker 6: white knee high socks and brown loafers. Her mother gave
Speaker 6: her bus fare so she could ride the bus home
Speaker 6: after her appointment. According to a relative, Tara called home
Speaker 6: just after five pm and spoke to her brother Terence.
Speaker 6: She checked in on her son and said she decided
Speaker 6: to use her bus fair to purchase Duncan doughnuts and
Speaker 6: was walking home instead. They said goodbye, and unfortunately that
Speaker 6: was the last time that anyone heard from Tara. When
Speaker 6: Tara didn't return home, her mother contacted the Prince George's
Speaker 6: County Police Department, but according to the relative that we
Speaker 6: spoke to, law enforcement didn't respond very swiftly. Since Tara
Speaker 6: was an adult. The police told her mother there was
Speaker 6: nothing they could do. At the time, Tara's family knew
Speaker 6: that something was wrong. They believed she would not run
Speaker 6: away and would definitely not leave her young son behind.
Speaker 6: That night, the Bryant family conducted their own search. Tara's
Speaker 6: one and a half mile walk from the hospital took
Speaker 6: her south on Rhode Island Avenue, so her family retraced
Speaker 6: her steps. One relative recalled seeing a suspicious man walking
Speaker 6: alongside the road in a dark long coat, but there
Speaker 6: was no sign of Tara. Two agonizing days later, on
Speaker 6: November twenty eighth, at nine a m. Tara's body was
Speaker 6: found floating in shallow water in the Anacostia River, one
Speaker 6: mile downstream from where she was less When police discovered
Speaker 6: her one of her shoes was missing.
Speaker 8: Police did an investigation along the banks and they found
Speaker 8: just two hundred yards from her house the other shoe,
Speaker 8: So she was very close to being at home when
Speaker 8: she was attacked and apparently killed.
Speaker 6: Here's writer Blaine Pardo.
Speaker 8: Again, what we don't know is was she killed there
Speaker 8: or taken somewhere and dumped back there. And that's the
Speaker 8: tricky part with this, and having driven the area, you
Speaker 8: could almost see both scenarios playing out. But it certainly
Speaker 8: you've got a strangulation, You've got a body being dumped,
Speaker 8: you know, along that borderline with Washington, d C. And
Speaker 8: the surrounding communities. You know, this one was a little different.
Speaker 8: She was dumped in water, you know, in a river,
Speaker 8: but it's also further out from any of the the
Speaker 8: other Freeway phantom victims, so it would make her the
Speaker 8: final victim of all this.
Speaker 6: According to the FBI, Tara's autopsy report determined that her
Speaker 6: cause of death was asphyxia due to strangulation. Her neck
Speaker 6: bone was intact and there was no damage to the
Speaker 6: cartilage around her neck. The autopsy couldn't determine if the
Speaker 6: strangulation was manual or ligature. The examination also couldn't determine
Speaker 6: if Tara was sexually assaulted, but noted there was no
Speaker 6: evidence of injury to her vagina or presence of seamen,
Speaker 6: but since Tara had been in the water for several days,
Speaker 6: it's possible that evidence may have washed away. The FBI
Speaker 6: analysis stated that sexual assault was probable since TERA's panties
Speaker 6: were located at the site where the assault most likely occurred,
Speaker 6: and the teddy that Tara had on under her dress
Speaker 6: was unsnapped between her legs. Officially, sexual motivation for her
Speaker 6: murder was not ruled out, and there were no defensive
Speaker 6: wounds on her body. A wash Rington Post News article
Speaker 6: entitled quote police seeking help in slaying of girl was
Speaker 6: published following the discovery of Tara's body. The article included
Speaker 6: a photo of Tara and urged the public to contact
Speaker 6: the Homicide Division with tips. An excerpt of the article.
Speaker 12: Stated Prince George's County Police today appealed for help from
Speaker 12: anyone who might have seen Tara and Bryan eighteen near
Speaker 12: home in North Brentwood on Sunday before she was slain.
Speaker 12: Police say they believed the girl met her assailing as
Speaker 12: she walked south on Rhode Island Avenue between the five
Speaker 12: thousand block and Hyattsville and her home at forty five
Speaker 12: twenty two on Rhode Island Avenue in North Bredwood between
Speaker 12: five thirty and six thirty pm on Sunday.
Speaker 6: In November of nineteen seventy three, a year after Tara
Speaker 6: was killed, a letter was published in The Washington Evening Star,
Speaker 6: written by Tara's brother, Terrence Bryant.
Speaker 13: In loving memory of my sister who passed away one
Speaker 13: year ago today, November twenty sixth, nineteen seventy two, as
Speaker 13: flowers rest upon your May the Lord be with you
Speaker 13: through the day. It seems like yesterday when you passed away.
Speaker 13: We think about you every day, your loving brother, Terrence Bryant.
Speaker 6: Sadly, the investigation into Terror's murder never bore much fruit.
Speaker 6: Here's blame Pardo again.
Speaker 8: There were no charges ever filed against anybody for this,
Speaker 8: so it's still considered a cold case. I requested copies
Speaker 8: of the case file and was told no, it's still
Speaker 8: an open investigation, which after nineteen seventy two, I'm curious
Speaker 8: what actual investigating they're doing, But you guys know how
Speaker 8: that goes. It was very fascinating for me because to me,
Speaker 8: I wonder was this the last of the Freeway Fantom's
Speaker 8: true victims. She fits the profile in so many ways.
Speaker 8: There was nothing in the police reports about her being
Speaker 8: sexually assaulted that I've been able to find, which might
Speaker 8: be the telling clue in all of this. But for
Speaker 8: the FBI to consider her on the Freeway Phantom victims
Speaker 8: is probably good enough for me at this point in time.
Speaker 6: The question of whether Tara Bryant was in fact the
Speaker 6: seventh victim of the Freeway Phantom is a hotly contested
Speaker 6: issue in this case. When we spoke with MPD Detective
Speaker 6: Romayne Jenkins, she fully believed that Tara was killed by
Speaker 6: the Freeway Phantom. So why was she not included among
Speaker 6: the Freeway Phantom victims?
Speaker 7: I have no idea.
Speaker 3: Some people did, because I see where there were submissions
Speaker 3: made to the FBI to examine fiber evidence and so forth,
Speaker 3: and they included her case with it. Some did, some didn't.
Speaker 3: I can't tell you why. I guess mainly because she
Speaker 3: was the only victim found in the water.
Speaker 6: Why are you so sure that she is the seventh victim?
Speaker 7: Because on the periphery it's the same.
Speaker 3: You have an eighteen year old petitue, young black female.
Speaker 3: She's dropped off at the hospital by her mother. Her
Speaker 3: mother says, I'll come back and pick you up. A
Speaker 3: few hours later, she calls home and says, tell my mother,
Speaker 3: don't pick me up. I'm going to catch the bus home.
Speaker 3: She's walking on US one Rhode Island Avenue, which is
Speaker 3: heavily traveled. People see her walking towards her house. She's
Speaker 3: headed home and she doesn't make it. And that's the
Speaker 3: same thing with these victims. Also the fact that she's
Speaker 3: in the water. Her underpants have been removed. There was
Speaker 3: no sign of forced vaginal entry, so they couldn't say
Speaker 3: that she had been raped. But she's in the water,
Speaker 3: so any fiber evidence or anything is gone. And like
Speaker 3: I said, she's headed home and she's only like forty
Speaker 3: yards from her house is where she's attacked.
Speaker 7: And the same thing with these girls.
Speaker 3: They are snatched in their neighborhoods and they're depositive back
Speaker 3: in their neighborhood so to speak.
Speaker 6: You know, we were able to contact a relative of
Speaker 6: Tara Bryant. They believe she was not a victim of
Speaker 6: the freeway fandom. According to the relative. The Bryant family
Speaker 6: shared this information with law enforcement, even telling them who
Speaker 6: killed Tara. They believed it was one of Tara's former boyfriends.
Speaker 6: The relative we spoke to said the ex boyfriend bore
Speaker 6: visible scratches and marks the day following her disappearance. We
Speaker 6: asked Blaine Pardo about this and if he thought it
Speaker 6: could possibly be the ex boyfriend.
Speaker 8: You know, I don't know what the motivation would be
Speaker 8: and if they think the boyfriend did it, then charge
Speaker 8: him with that. To me, it just doesn't make sense.
Speaker 8: There had to be something that was an impetus for this,
Speaker 8: And how would the boyfriend know that she'd be walking
Speaker 8: home from the hospital, you know, in the early evening hours.
Speaker 8: You know, if the boyfriend was going to intercept her,
Speaker 8: how would he know where she is. Her mother didn't
Speaker 8: even know she was walking home. Her mother gave her
Speaker 8: a dollar to ride the bus home. So the concept
Speaker 8: that he was driving by, saw her and decided now's
Speaker 8: the time I'm going to kill her just doesn't make sense.
Speaker 8: I'm not saying that there weren't terrible relations between her
Speaker 8: and her boyfriend. I just don't see what the connection is.
Speaker 8: And if the family believes he did it by all means,
Speaker 8: then the police should be investigating him in charging with
Speaker 8: the crat.
Speaker 6: According to the relative we spoke to, the unnamed ex
Speaker 6: boyfriend was never investigated. The relative says this forced the
Speaker 6: family to live in the same community with the person
Speaker 6: they believed to be Tara's killer. According to the relative,
Speaker 6: that individual went to prison for other violent crimes and
Speaker 6: is now deceased. We reached out to Prince George's County
Speaker 6: for comment on Tara's case and to date have not
Speaker 6: heard back. Blaine Pardo says the investigation of Tara Bryant
Speaker 6: speaks to a bigger issue within the Prince George's County
Speaker 6: Homicide department, and he compares it to another case that
Speaker 6: occurred almost a decade after the Freeway Phantom murders.
Speaker 8: There were a whole number of murders that took place
Speaker 8: in the nineteen eighties as well, called the suitland Slaves.
Speaker 8: A number of bodies found right across the DC line
Speaker 8: in a park, all women sexually assaulted, strangled, etc. And
Speaker 8: dumped in this very small area. It was clearly a
Speaker 8: dumping ground for a serial killer. The suitland Slaves. They
Speaker 8: tried to attribute to somebody else, but they never charged
Speaker 8: him for the crimes. But he was arrested for kidnapping
Speaker 8: a young woman in the district, so they said, well,
Speaker 8: he must have been the one that did all of these.
Speaker 8: There was absolutely nothing that I ever saw that connected
Speaker 8: him to these victims. But the Suitland slangs all remain
Speaker 8: open at this time, and Prince George's County will not
Speaker 8: release anything on a cold case at all, nor will
Speaker 8: their public relations people even pick up the phone and
Speaker 8: call you back. That's really weird. Even the Metropolitan Police
Speaker 8: Department actually communicates with me openly still to this day
Speaker 8: on the freeway phantom stuff, which I expected the Washington
Speaker 8: d c. Police to be a lot more rigid than
Speaker 8: anybody else. But Prince George's County won't even return phone calls.
Speaker 8: They don't want to talk about it. And sometimes I
Speaker 8: get the feeling that police officers get in their mind
Speaker 8: who they think did it, and in their mind the
Speaker 8: cases are closed, even though nobody was ever brought to
Speaker 8: trial for it.
Speaker 6: Blaine says both Tara's murder and the Suitland slings add
Speaker 6: to a larger picture of how investigations are handled depending
Speaker 6: on who the victim is, or what the victim looks like.
Speaker 8: You're talking the nineteen seventies and in the Suitland cases
Speaker 8: the nineteen eighties, early eighties. You know, there tends to
Speaker 8: be this approach that I've seen with large scale police departments,
Speaker 8: so that if they can't get an immediate hey we
Speaker 8: figured out who did it, got the evidence, let's put
Speaker 8: them to trial. If it goes, they let them stay cold.
Speaker 8: They don't focus on them, et cetera. And some of
Speaker 8: that's budgetary now, you know, the focus is very much
Speaker 8: on how much money are you spending and things along
Speaker 8: those lines. And I think cold cases are just as important.
Speaker 8: There's still victims' families, there's still somebody who's dead. It
Speaker 8: doesn't matter that it took place fifty years ago or
Speaker 8: forty years ago or ten years ago. They need the
Speaker 8: same level and attention. They probably need more because they
Speaker 8: haven't been completely resolved yet.
Speaker 6: Like Terra's case and the Suitland slangs, the rest of
Speaker 6: the Freeway Phantom murders went unsolved. With the Green Viga
Speaker 6: gang ruled out as well as Robert Askins, the case
Speaker 6: went dark until it was picked up again by Romaine
Speaker 6: Jenkins in the nineteen.
Speaker 7: Eighties, I was transferred.
Speaker 3: I guess after ten years, I ended up being transferred
Speaker 3: over to the US Attorney's office, and there I supervised
Speaker 3: seven former homicide detectives because they had a new division
Speaker 3: command and he didn't like any of these old investigations,
Speaker 3: so he put them under the career criminal unit and
Speaker 3: they made me the supervisor.
Speaker 7: I said, oh good, now.
Speaker 3: I can get into my freeway phantom cases. So I
Speaker 3: had at my disposal, I had seven senior hormicide detectives
Speaker 3: and they said, Sorge, we're gonna work on this case,
Speaker 3: but we're not going to do Jack the Ripper.
Speaker 7: I said, don't worry about Jack the Ripper. We're gonna
Speaker 7: work on these and we did it.
Speaker 6: Now that the FBI's criminal profiling unit was more advanced,
Speaker 6: the first thing Romayne wanted to do was create an
Speaker 6: official profile of the potential killer. What did you think
Speaker 6: of the FBI profile that they did back then?
Speaker 3: They did The first one they did was mine was
Speaker 3: for me, and I thought they did a pretty good
Speaker 3: job considering the circumstances, you know.
Speaker 6: You mean, considering how little we all knew.
Speaker 3: About it, right, But they did come up with some
Speaker 3: things that had to be keyed in on they felt
Speaker 3: that this person was in the military. Well, at that time,
Speaker 3: you had all these military people coming back from Vietnam
Speaker 3: who were in hospitals here and installations here, so you
Speaker 3: had a lot of that going on. But that was
Speaker 3: really interesting. And the reason why I thought it was
Speaker 3: so interesting was because when I showed the note to
Speaker 3: the FBI, they said, this is military.
Speaker 7: This person was in the military.
Speaker 3: I showed the same note to the investigator at Naval
Speaker 3: Investigated Service. He said, oh, whoever wrote this note? This military?
Speaker 3: I had two different brains saying the same thing. You
Speaker 3: know that this person was in the military.
Speaker 6: In February of twenty twenty two, a new profile of
Speaker 6: the killer was made and that idea came up once again.
Speaker 5: I believe this was the beginning of his offending career,
Speaker 5: and I think something significant happened right after this that
Speaker 5: could have been he moved, was arrested, went into the military.
Speaker 6: Next time on Freeway Phantom.
Speaker 5: This is exactly who we wanted, and he was willing
Speaker 5: to take a great risk to get her.
Speaker 3: A black officer came to say, look, Sargeant, be careful,
Speaker 3: the white offices will get you and said I don't
Speaker 3: know what they planning, but they plotted something. He said,
Speaker 3: I was in the locker room and I got bits
Speaker 3: and pieces of the conversation.
Speaker 2: He actually went out and knocked on the doors of
Speaker 2: the detectives who actually worked on the case originally. It
Speaker 2: turns out that a lot of the missing files had
Speaker 2: been taken home by the original case detectives.
Speaker 5: He's obviously loving the moniker. This is why we tell
Speaker 5: media outlets to not nickname offenders. What it does is
Speaker 5: it gives other people who are like minded the idea
Speaker 5: that they can become famous too.
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 CELESE.
Speaker 2: Hilly.
Speaker 1: Executive producers on behalf of iHeart Radio include Matt Frederick
Speaker 1: and Alex Williams, with supervising producer Trevor Young. Executive producers
Speaker 1: on behalf of Tenderfoot TV include Donald Albright and Payne Lindsay,
Speaker 1: with producers Jamie Albright and Tracy Kaplan. Executive producers on
Speaker 1: behalf of Black Bar Mitzvah include myself, Jay Ellis and
Speaker 1: Aaron Bergman, with producer Sidney Fools. Lead researcher is Jamie Albright.
Speaker 1: Artwork by Mister Soul two one six, original music by
Speaker 1: Makeup and Vanity Set Special Thanks to a team at
Speaker 1: Uta Beck Media and Marketing and the Nord Group, Tenderfoot
Speaker 1: TV and iHeartMedia, as well as Black Bar Mitzvah, have
Speaker 1: increased the reward for information leading to the arrest and
Speaker 1: conviction of the person or persons responsible for their Freeway
Speaker 1: phantom murders. The previous reward of up to one hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty thousand dollars offered by the Metropolitan Police Department
Speaker 1: has been matched. A new total reward of up to
Speaker 1: three hundred thousand dollars is now being offered. If you
Speaker 1: have any information relating to these unsolved crimes, contact the
Speaker 1: Metropolitan Police Department at area code two zero two seven
Speaker 1: two seven nine zero ninety nine. For more information, please
Speaker 1: visit Freeway dashfanom dot com. For more podcasts from Ihar
Speaker 1: Radio and Tenderfoot TV, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Thanks for listening.