Between April 1971 and September 1972 six girls and young women were taken off the streets of south-east Washington DC and Prince George's County, strangled, and left beside highways and access roads. Carol Spinks was thirteen. Darlenia Johnson was sixteen. Brenda Crockett was ten. Nenomoshia Yates was twelve. Brenda Woodard was eighteen. Diane Williams was seventeen. All were Black.
The killer left a note in the coat pocket of Brenda Woodard, written on paper she had brought home from school, in which he called himself the Freeway Phantom and dared the police to catch him. Brenda Crockett was made to telephone home before she was killed and tell her family a story about a white man in a car.
The investigation was large and produced nothing that held. Files were subsequently lost. Successive reviews have complained about the standard of the original work and about how little attention the case received in the city at large, in a period in which six Black children disappearing from one part of Washington did not become a national story.
It was reopened in 2018 and again in 2023, with congressional interest and a re-examination of surviving evidence for DNA. It remains the oldest unsolved serial murder case in the District of Columbia.