The Freeway Phantom Murders

between april 1971 and september 1972, six young Black girls disappeared from southeast washington, d.c. they were ten to eighteen years old. they were walking home from the store. going to work. going to night class. coming home from a boyfriend's house. their bodies were found along highways in and around d.c. and maryland. Carol Spinks. Darlenia Johnson. Brenda Crockett. Nenomoshia Yates. Brenda Woodard. Diane Williams. at first the murders were not connected. different detectives worked different cases in a city overwhelmed by homicides. the media barely covered it. by the time investigators recognized the pattern, most of the girls were already dead. the killer named himself. a note torn from brenda woodard's own school notebook was signed "free-way phantom." handwriting analysis determined she had been forced to write it before she died. in this episode we go through all six cases. the phone calls made to the victims' families. the semen that was never tested. the reports of a body in the grass that police did not act on for a week. the missing shoes and shoelaces. and the two theories that were never closed: robert askins and the green vega gang. neither was ever charged. we also talk about Romaine Jenkins, the homicide investigator who built the largest private collection of records on this case, and the reinvestigation that found what the original one lost. the case is still open. the reward is $300,000. more than fifty years later, no one has been charged