Between April 1971 and September 1972, six Black girls and young women were taken from the streets of Washington, D.C. The youngest was 10 and the oldest 18. Each was found dead within hours or days, most of them beside Interstate 295 in Southeast Washington or along roads just over the line in Prince George's County, Maryland. Because the bodies were left near busy highways, local reporters began calling the unknown killer the Freeway Phantom, and a note signed with that name was later found with the fifth victim.
No one has ever been charged. The Metropolitan Police Department still lists the case on its appeal for information, naming its Major Case/Cold Case Unit and the Prince George's County Police Homicide Unit, and a police poster offers a reward of up to $150,000. Over five decades the case has passed through a task force joined by the FBI, a reopening by a determined detective, a cold case review, a box of evidence found years later, a book and a podcast. Along the way much of what investigators gathered in the 1970s was lost.
The killings began at an uneasy moment for the city and its police. In the first days of May 1971, antiwar protesters arrived in Washington intending to shut down the federal government. The Metropolitan Police were swamped by what became the May Day protests, and WETA's local history site, Boundary Stones, records that about 12,000 people were arrested. Romaine Jenkins, a homicide detective who would later spend years on the case, recalled that she was blocked from following up on the death of the first girl, Carol Spinks, because the entire department, homicide squad included, had been placed on prisoner alert.
Relations between police and Black residents of Southeast Washington were strained. In a 2023 interview with Washingtonian, the journalist Celeste Headlee said many residents felt that law enforcement brought little urgency to the disappearances. Parents, she said, were questioned about whether their daughters had run off with boyfriends, when in nearly every case the girl had been sent to a nearby store or was on her way home from class. Headlee believes that lack of trust may have hurt the investigation, because the community did not come forward with information the way it might have.
Carol Spinks was 13. She lived in Southeast Washington with her mother and seven brothers and sisters, according to Boundary Stones. On April 25, 1971, she walked to a convenience store not far from home and did not come back. The Metropolitan Police Department's appeal gives that date for her abduction; an earlier police poster, dated April 2006, gives April 21.
When the family reported her missing, they were told that she had probably run away. They did not believe it, and they searched for her themselves with the help of neighbors and friends. Six days after she disappeared, on May 1, her body was found beside Interstate 295 in Southeast Washington. She had been strangled.
Headlee told Washingtonian that Carol had been wearing her school gym clothes, and that police nonetheless described what she had on as provocative, an example of the assumptions she said the families faced. Carol's sister, quoted by Boundary Stones, put the family's lesson simply: if this could happen to her sister, it could happen to anybody. "And it did," she said.
Darlenia Johnson was 16 and also lived in Southeast Washington. On July 8, 1971, she left home for her summer job and never arrived. Over the next two weeks her mother received a series of telephone calls in which the caller said nothing at all. Then came a last call, in which a man said that he had killed her daughter. The police had no way to trace it.
On July 19 her body was found in the same area beside Interstate 295 where Carol had been found. No cause of death could be determined, Boundary Stones reports. A WUSA9 report on the case said that two people had reported seeing her body before it was recovered, and that it was not found for 11 days. Blaine Pardoe, a writer who later co-wrote a book on the case, told the station that two patrol officers had driven past the place, seen nothing and reported nothing found.
One of the girls was last seen in an old black car driven by a Black man, according to a WUSA9 cold case report, which did not say which of the six it was.
Brenda Crockett was 10 and lived in Northwest Washington. On July 27, 1971, her mother sent her to a grocery store about a block and a half from home. She did not come back.
Later the telephone rang at the family's home. Brenda's sister, who was 7, answered. Brenda told her that a white man had picked her up and would send her home in a cab. She called again a little later and said she was in Virginia. Neither call could be traced. Detectives came to believe that the calls had been scripted for her, to buy time and to send the search in the wrong direction.
James Trainum, a Metropolitan Police detective who later worked the case as a cold case, read the calls the same way. He told WUSA9 that he believed the killer had made Brenda phone home to find out whether the police were already looking for her and whether he was safe. From the calls he concluded that the man was probably neither white nor from Virginia.
Brenda's body was found on July 28 in Prince George's County, Maryland. She had been strangled.
As the killings went on, parents in Southeast Washington were warning their children and keeping them close. Investigators came to believe that the killer responded by looking for victims elsewhere, WUSA9 reported. The next girl was taken in Northeast Washington.
Nenomoshia Yates was 12. On October 1, 1971, her father sent her to a grocery store a block from home. Witnesses saw her shopping in the store, but no one saw what happened after she left. Less than three hours later her body was found in Prince George's County. She had been strangled.
According to Boundary Stones, it was after the fourth killing that the FBI joined the Metropolitan Police in a task force on the murders. Reporters had meanwhile been working the girls' neighborhoods on their own, and the families felt that the news often told them more than the police did.
Examining the evidence, analysts found hairs from an African American person on three of the victims, and investigators concluded that the killings were probably the work of one man, most likely a Black man, Boundary Stones reports. Green carpet fibers were found on four of the girls, WUSA9 reported; investigators thought they might have come from a car or a bathroom rug.
The tips that came in pointed in every direction. Priests, police officers and doctors were all named at one time or another. "Every male that you could think of ended up being a suspect at one time," Jenkins said.
Brenda Woodard was 18. On November 15, 1971, she was last seen at a bus stop in Northeast Washington, police said, as she headed home. On November 16 her body was found in Prince George's County. She had been stabbed as well as strangled, Boundary Stones reports.
Investigators found a handwritten note with her, signed with the name the press had already given the killer; they believed he had dictated it, WUSA9 reported.
The next killing came in September 1972. On September 5, Diane Williams, 17, left the home of her boyfriend in Southeast Washington and set off for her own home. She did not get there. The next morning her body was found near Interstate 295, just outside the District in Prince George's County. She had been strangled.
Boundary Stones describes her as the presumed last victim rather than a certain one. The Metropolitan Police Department counts her among the six on its reward poster, and evidence from her case would later be the focus of hopes for DNA testing.
Her sister later joined the Metropolitan Police and rose to the rank of lieutenant. Interviewed by WUSA9 in 2008, she said she wanted the killer to admit what he had done.
The six names appear together on the police reward poster: Carol Spinks, Darlenia Johnson, Brenda Crockett, Nenomoshia Yates, Brenda Woodard and Diane Williams. Carol lived with her mother and seven brothers and sisters in Southeast Washington. Darlenia had a summer job and was on her way to it. Brenda Crockett and Nenomoshia were running errands for their parents. Brenda Woodard was a young woman on her way home, and Diane had been visiting her boyfriend.
Headlee, who spent two years on the case for her podcast, said in 2023 that the victims were doing ordinary things, going to the store or coming home from class, and that their families were not careless. The most urgent need, she told Black Enterprise, was to find some measure of justice, or at least closure, for the families.
The task force received many offers of help, and at least one was a dead end that reached the courts. In the spring of 1974, the government approached Morris Warren, a man already convicted in 1973 in a separate set of kidnapping and sexual-assault cases known as the green Vega cases. According to a 1977 opinion of the District of Columbia Court of Appeals, the government hoped to develop him as a source of information about what the court called the widely publicized "freeway phantom homicides," and he agreed to provide information in return for immunity.
He cooperated from May 1 to June 4, 1974, the court said, and then repudiated the arrangement and refused to go on. The court found that he had on various occasions deliberately given misleading or inaccurate information about the killings, so that he had not kept his side of the bargain on them. Boundary Stones, describing the same episode, reports that his account was full of inconsistencies and that intercepted letters showed he had lied in the hope of winning his release.
The case before the appeals court was not about the killings. It concerned a separate indictment against Warren for kidnapping and sexual assault, which a trial judge had dismissed on the ground that what he said while cooperating had led investigators to him. The Court of Appeals affirmed the dismissal on May 5, 1977. Boundary Stones reports that no suspect has ever been arrested or charged in the six deaths.
Without an arrest, the task force eventually broke up and the case faded from attention, Boundary Stones reports.
In 1987, after she was promoted to sergeant, Romaine Jenkins reopened the case. What she found, Boundary Stones reports, was that case files and forensic evidence had been destroyed or lost, some of it in a warehouse. Carol's sister summed up the loss in a single line: "And now, it's gone!"
Jenkins rebuilt the files as well as she could, with help from the FBI and from other detectives who had worked the original cases. The physical evidence, Boundary Stones concludes, was probably gone for good.
In 1990 FBI analysts drew up a profile of the killer from what survived. They described a misogynist, probably between 27 and 32 years old at the time of the killings, who may have lived or worked in Southeast Washington. Some of the girls, the analysts thought, may have known him and trusted him enough to go with him.
Jenkins retired in 1994 without seeing the case solved. She did not let go of it. In 2023 Washingtonian reported that she had gathered evidence from several law enforcement agencies while at the Metropolitan Police and that it was being kept in boxes at her home; she and Headlee both believed the case could be solved.
Boundary Stones also reports that the D.C. Council later required evidence in unsolved homicide cases to be kept for at least 65 years.
In later years the case passed to the Metropolitan Police cold case unit and to Detective James Trainum. WUSA9 followed him as he drove the routes the killer had used. Trainum said the man had treated the area around Interstate 295 as his own territory, a place where he felt safe both to commit his crimes and to get away.
Police described the man they were looking for as socially inept, holding a menial job, and driven by a need to control his victims. A geographic profile suggested that he had first struck close to where he lived. Men like that, Trainum told the station, blend in and go unnoticed.
The evidence Trainum inherited was thin. Washingtonian reported in July 2009 that D.C. police had lost the entire case file, and that none of the case's evidence could be found in the police evidence warehouse. Trainum, by then the director of the cold case unit, and a group of interns had rebuilt the files from information supplied by retired D.C. detectives, the FBI and the Prince George's County police, and the rebuilt files filled a row of binders in his office. He allowed that the missing evidence might still turn up. "Maybe it's over there in some box and we haven't stumbled across it," he said. "Who knows?"
Something did turn up. In a WUSA9 cold case report, Trainum said that a box of evidence found the previous year contained clothing from Diane Williams, the last victim, which might hold the killer's DNA. He was hopeful and careful at the same time; other clothing and hair evidence in the case had deteriorated or disappeared.
Washingtonian reported in 2009 that material on Diane's clothing could identify the killer, but that testing was on hold. Like most of the District's cold case DNA work at the time, it depended on the FBI's overloaded laboratory at Quantico, and cold cases went to the back of the queue. Trainum admitted that the unit had been "sitting on a lot of stuff." A new D.C. police laboratory was expected to ease the backlog.
Pardoe and his daughter, Victoria Hester, later published a book on the case, Tantamount: The Pursuit of the Freeway Phantom Serial Killer, after two years of research. Speaking to WUSA9, Hester said she believed the case could be solved and that someone knew something. The authors said the killer had kept small items from several of the girls, among them textbooks, curlers and shoelaces, and Pardoe suggested that a relative of the killer might still recognize them.
The authors found that the geographic center of the crimes lay at St. Elizabeths, the psychiatric hospital in Southeast Washington, and Hester argued that the killer must have known the neighborhood well. They discussed several possible suspects and said they considered one, a former patient at the hospital with a record of violence against women going back to the 1930s, the most likely. WUSA9 reported that police never gathered enough evidence to charge him and that he died in prison. He was never charged with any of the six killings.
The same WUSA9 report recorded the two police departments describing the case differently. Jennifer Donelan, a spokeswoman for the Prince George's County Police Department, said the department was still actively investigating. Alaina Gertz, a spokeswoman for the Metropolitan Police Department, said the District's cases had been purged years earlier and were no longer active investigations. Retired investigators told the station that so much evidence had been lost or misfiled that it was unclear whether enough remained to recover the killer's DNA.
The Metropolitan Police appeal remains online. It describes six young African American girls taken from their neighborhoods in Washington and killed between April 1971 and September 1972, says their bodies were found in the District and in Prince George's County, and asks anyone with information to contact the department.
Headlee has argued that race shaped how the case was handled. When her ten-part podcast on the case launched in May 2023, produced by iHeartPodcasts, Tenderfoot TV and Black Bar Mitzvah, she said the problems that hampered the 1970s investigation, among them racist assumptions about the victims and their families and mistrust between police and Black communities, still stood in the way of efforts to protect the public. "This story is both decades old and painfully current," she told Black Enterprise.
Donald Albright, the chief executive of Tenderfoot TV, called the lack of coverage of the six murders, then and since, shameful. The actor Jay Ellis, whose company Black Bar Mitzvah co-produced the series, said he had been struck by how long the families had lived with the loss and by the parallels with missing Black and Brown girls today. Headlee called the case possibly the first serial killings in the District, and said it may have involved at least as many killings as the Son of Sam case in New York, though few people had heard of it.
Headlee said the podcast had already produced a tip or two from listeners. She also said that a scientific profile commissioned for the series did not match the man law enforcement had focused on in the 1970s, and that her own suspicion was that the killer was a Black man who was probably now dead. She held back some of the details.
The families have lived with the case for more than half a century. Carol's sister told WUSA9 that she thought about Carol constantly and still spoke to her, hoping she was all right, and that she dreamed of one day being able to tell her that they knew who had killed her. Another WUSA9 report said she still talked to her sister every day.
Diane Williams's sister, the police lieutenant, told the station she wanted the killer to admit what he had done. Boundary Stones, summing up the case in 2025, wrote that the families never felt the police had done everything they could.
Who the killer was. No one has been identified or charged. The FBI profile, the cold case investigators' description, the authors of Tantamount and the 2023 podcast each offer a picture of the man, and they do not all agree. The authors of Tantamount pointed to a former St. Elizabeths patient with a long record of violence, while Headlee said her commissioned profile did not fit the suspect of the 1970s. None of these views has been tested in court.
How many victims. The Metropolitan Police Department lists six. WUSA9 described the killer as having murdered at least six girls and young women, and Headlee suggested there may have been more. No further killing has been publicly attributed to the same person by police.
Whether Diane Williams belongs in the series. Police include her, and her case produced the evidence later hoped to hold DNA. Boundary Stones calls her the presumed final victim.
The date Carol Spinks was taken. The current police appeal page gives April 25, 1971; a police poster dated April 2006 gives April 21.
The note. Investigators believed that Brenda Woodard was made to write the note at the killer's dictation. The police appeal does not reproduce it.
The ages. Most sources give the range as 10 to 18. A 2023 Black Enterprise announcement gave 12 to 18, which leaves out Brenda Crockett, who was 10.
Which victim was stabbed. Boundary Stones reports that Brenda Woodard had been stabbed. One WUSA9 report instead linked a stabbing to Diane Williams.
Whether the case is open. Prince George's County police described it as an active investigation; a D.C. police spokeswoman said the District's cases had been purged and were no longer active, even as the District's appeal and reward remained online.
As of October 2026 the case is unsolved and no one has been charged. The Metropolitan Police Department's appeal, naming its Major Case/Cold Case Unit and the Prince George's County Police Homicide Unit, is still published, and the department's poster offers a reward of up to $150,000. The reward poster asks anyone with information to call the department or to email its unsolved murder address, unsolved.murder@dc.gov.
Retired investigators have said that much of the evidence gathered in the 1970s was lost or misfiled. What remains depends on the files rebuilt by Jenkins and later by Trainum, on whatever survives of Diane Williams's clothing, and on the chance that someone who knew the killer decides to speak. Trainum said he hoped someone would finally come forward and confess. Hester said the same thing in different words: someone knows something.
April 25, 1971: Carol Spinks, 13, is taken in Southeast Washington (April 21 on a 2006 police poster).
May 1, 1971: Carol's body is found beside Interstate 295 in Southeast Washington.
Early May 1971: May Day antiwar protests; the police department is placed on prisoner alert.
July 8, 1971: Darlenia Johnson, 16, disappears on her way to her summer job.
July 19, 1971: Darlenia's body is found beside Interstate 295 in Southeast Washington.
July 27, 1971: Brenda Crockett, 10, is taken in Northwest Washington; she calls home twice that night.
July 28, 1971: Brenda's body is found in Prince George's County, Maryland.
October 1, 1971: Nenomoshia Yates, 12, is taken in Northeast Washington and found within hours in Prince George's County.
After the fourth killing: the FBI joins the Metropolitan Police in a task force.
November 15, 1971: Brenda Woodard, 18, is last seen at a bus stop in Northeast Washington.
November 16, 1971: Brenda's body is found in Prince George's County, with a note signed with the press nickname.
September 5, 1972: Diane Williams, 17, is taken after visiting her boyfriend in Southeast Washington.
September 6, 1972: Diane's body is found near Interstate 295 in Prince George's County.
May 1 to June 4, 1974: Morris Warren cooperates with the government under an immunity agreement, then repudiates it; the court later finds he gave misleading information about the killings.
May 5, 1977: The D.C. Court of Appeals decides United States v. Warren, affirming the dismissal of a separate indictment.
1987: Romaine Jenkins, newly promoted to sergeant, reopens the case and finds files and evidence lost or destroyed.
1990: FBI analysts produce a profile of the killer.
1994: Jenkins retires.
April 2006: Date on the Metropolitan Police reward poster (up to $150,000).
2008: Relatives of Carol Spinks and Diane Williams speak to WUSA9.
July 2009: Washingtonian reports that the case file was lost, rebuilt by the cold case unit, and that testing of evidence from Diane Williams's clothing was on hold.
After the publication of Tantamount: Prince George's County police say they are actively investigating; D.C. police say the District's cases were purged.
March to May 2023: The Freeway Phantom podcast is announced and launched.
May 27, 2025: WETA's Boundary Stones publishes a history of the case.
October 2026: The case remains unsolved; no one has been charged.