On the evening of July 27, 1971, ten-year-old Brenda Faye Crockett was sent to the store by her mother and did not come back. At about 9:20 the phone rang at the family's home in Northwest Washington, and her seven-year-old sister, waiting alone while the rest of the family searched the neighborhood, answered. Brenda was crying. "A white man picked me up, and I'm heading home in a cab," she said, and that she thought she was in Virginia, and hung up. She called again a short time later and her stepfather answered. She repeated the story, asked, "Did my mother see me?" and said she was alone in a house with a white man. When her stepfather asked her to put the man on, heavy footsteps sounded in the background, and Brenda said, "I'll see you," and hung up. At 5:50 the next morning a hitchhiker found her body on U.S. Route 50 near the Baltimore-Washington Parkway in Prince George's County, Maryland. She had been raped and strangled, a scarf was knotted around her neck, and her shoes were gone. Investigators concluded that the killer had fed her the story to buy time and to mislead them.
She was the third. On April 25, 1971, Carol Denise Spinks, thirteen, was sent by an older sister to a 7-Eleven half a mile from their home in Southeast, just across the Maryland line, and was taken on the way back. Six days later her body was found on a grassy embankment beside the northbound lanes of Interstate 295 behind St. Elizabeths Hospital. She had been beaten, sexually assaulted and strangled, and she was dressed but missing her shoes. On July 8 Darlenia Denise Johnson, sixteen, of Congress Heights, was abducted on the way to her summer job at the Oxon Hill Recreation Center; a witness saw her in an old black car driven by a Black man. Eleven days later she was found fifteen feet from where Carol Spinks had lain, although police had been told of the body nearly a week earlier by an anonymous caller with details only her killer could have known. She had no shoes, and there was evidence of strangulation.
At about seven on the evening of October 1, 1971, Nenomoshia Yates, twelve, was walking home from a Safeway in Northeast when she was kidnapped, raped and strangled. Her body was found within three hours off the shoulder of Pennsylvania Avenue in Prince George's County, shoeless, with unidentified green fibers on her clothes. A witness said she had got into a blue Volkswagen, and the lead went nowhere. After her death the Daily News first used the name Freeway Phantom.
On November 15, 1971, Brenda Denise Woodard, eighteen, had dinner with a high school classmate and caught a city bus at about 11:30 to go home to Maryland Avenue. Six hours later a police officer found her in a grassy area near Prince George's County Hospital, beside an access ramp from the Baltimore-Washington Parkway to Route 202. She had been stabbed many times and strangled. Unlike the others she still had her shoes on, and a coat had been laid over her chest. In its pocket was a note written on paper cut from her school notebook, in her own hand, which investigators believed the killer had dictated to her: "this is tAntAmount to my insensititivity to people especiAlly women. I will Admit the others wheN you cAtch me iF you cAn! FRee-wAy PhanTom." Because the writing showed no sign of duress, they speculated that she may have known him.
The last came almost a year later. On September 5, 1972, Diane Denise Williams, seventeen, a senior at Ballou High School, cooked dinner for her family, visited her boyfriend and was last seen boarding a bus near his house at 11:20 at night. A few hours later she was found strangled beside Interstate 295 just south of the District line, without her shoes.
A task force of detectives from the Metropolitan Police homicide and sex squads, Prince George's and Montgomery County investigators, the Maryland State Police and the FBI ran the case. Detectives interviewed members of the Green Vega gang, a group convicted of rapes and abductions around the Beltway, at Lorton prison. One inmate named another as having told him of one of the killings and gave a detail known only to the killer and the detectives; then a Maryland candidate announced during an election that there had been a break involving a Lorton inmate, and the informant refused to talk again and denied having said anything. In 1977 police questioned Robert Elwood Askins, a fifty-eight-year-old computer technician charged with abduction and rape, who had poisoned and stabbed women in 1938 and strangled a woman in 1952; court papers in his desk used the unusual word tantamount, and colleagues said it was a word he used often. His yard was dug up and nothing was found. He was never charged, denied any part, and died in federal prison in 2010 at ninety-one.
It was the practice then for detectives to keep their own case files, and parts of the Freeway Phantom file have been discarded or lost along with evidence and notes. Every original investigator has retired or died. The case has been closed and reopened several times and is open as a cold case in the Metropolitan Police homicide division, with a reward of up to $150,000.