May 17, 2023 • 41 mins
In early July of 1971, multiple drivers reported seeing a dead body just off a freeway in D.C. Only weeks later was the cadaver recovered. Police eventually discovered it was the body of 16-year-old Darlenia Johnson, who had gone missing weeks earlier. The killer had struck again...
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
You're listening to the Freeway Phanom, a production of iHeartRadio,
Tenderfoot TV, and black bar Mitzvah. The views and opinions
expressed in this podcast are solely those of the podcast
author or individuals participating in the podcast, and do not
represent those of iHeartMedia, Tenderfoot TV, Black bar Mitzvah, or
their employees. This podcast also contains subject matter that may
(00:23):
not be suitable for everyone. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
Prior to these killings start happenings, Freeway fan, you didn't
hear a lot of killings of black kids per se
in the district of Columbia, and not like that that
one behind of a behind of an unresult. You didn't
hear that. So the community was in shock and it
put them on caution. People were scared. I mean parents
(00:54):
were scared, children were scared. They wanted to know what
more police could do. What were they doing? All that
conversation was coming up, People were keeping an EyeT on things,
anything that may have seen unusual. People were more visual
I think during that time because it was hitting close
to home, right in the community, close especially over here.
(01:18):
I'm Derek Davis, I'm co owner of Davis. Barbara Service
Uh been here fifty three years, right here in the
same location. I was actually in high school myself in
seventy two. I was in eleventh grade, so it was
close in that regard because the girl that went blue
was in the eleventh grade too, with the girl named Denise,
(01:41):
even though I didn't personally know her. A lot of
this the kids, you know, they came down and get
the haircut at the shop, were talking about it and
how they were, you know, depressed or saddened about what
had happened to her. And then a lot of the
customers had talked about it in terms of, you know,
the crime going on in the city.
Speaker 3 (02:02):
And how they couldn't test this person. So it was
a Saturday for DC. I do know that, but you
don't really want to know what somebody was telling me
the other date, Lord BERSI woo. They were giving me
some deep stuff about this phantom stuff where if some
(02:26):
people that was close to that person's family may have
been tied up into that, and possibility it.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
Could have been a police officer involved.
Speaker 3 (02:38):
I said, do you want to go on record with that?
Speaker 4 (02:41):
Now?
Speaker 3 (02:41):
I don't know how true that is, but the way
she was laying that out, said you need to come
on camera and say what you got to say.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
But they won't talk. They're not gonna tell the police.
They're not gonna tell the camera, the media. They're not
gonna do it.
Speaker 4 (03:02):
The homicide detectives termed the cases the little girl case.
This child was laying on the side of the road.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
I won't go no way.
Speaker 3 (03:13):
I would call my house.
Speaker 5 (03:14):
Those first five murders should have been a huge warning
bell for the police.
Speaker 6 (03:19):
We just want to know what happened. This person must
have saw that.
Speaker 4 (03:23):
They were thinking that maybe it's just one person, and
he says, they need to know.
Speaker 7 (03:27):
This is me.
Speaker 8 (03:29):
I thought that they would catch him.
Speaker 9 (03:31):
I thought it was just a.
Speaker 10 (03:32):
Matter of time.
Speaker 7 (03:34):
I'm Celeste Hedley and this is Freeway Phantom. On the
last episode, we covered the background of the Freeway Phantom murders.
Six victims, all young black girls, all of them snatched
off the streets of Washington, d C. Between April nineteen
seventy one and September nineteen seventy two. Their bodies were
(03:57):
all dumped by the side of the freeway. And we
know that all six murders were committed by the same
person and never solved. The first victim was thirteen year
old Carol Spinks, who went missing on April twenty fifth,
nineteen seventy one. In episode one, we heard from Carrol's sisters,
Carolyn and Evander as they described the horror of losing
(04:19):
their sister. Today, we'll dig into what happened after Carol
was found, or at the least what we know from
the official investigation. As you heard last episode, we were
able to obtain the official police report. Here's what it
said about Carol's known whereabouts leading up to the murder.
Speaker 9 (04:39):
Sunday, April twenty fifth, nineteen seventy one, at round seven pm,
Carol Denise Spink's female black thirteen years of age, was
sent to the seven to eleven store located on Wheeler
Road and Southern Avenue. She was last seen in the
vicinity of Wheeler and Southern Avenue by her mother, at
which time she was reprimanded for being out of the house.
(05:01):
Her older sister had sent her to the store. Later
the same day, she was reported missing by her mother
to the sixth District Police.
Speaker 7 (05:11):
It wouldn't be until almost a week later that Carrol
Spinks's body was found. Here's another excerpt from the police report.
Speaker 9 (05:19):
On Saturday May one, nineteen seventy one, Carol Denise Spinks
was found in the grass area of the northbound lane
of Route two ninety five near Suitland Parkway by children playing.
The children hailed a Traffic division officer who was traveling
north on Route two ninety.
Speaker 7 (05:36):
Five now known as Interstate two ninety five or the
Anacostia Freeway. The road was a major thoroughfare which cut
right through the city. As we heard, the police report says,
some children playing near the highway spotted the body and
then one of them either called or flagged down a
police officer. Here's how the report describes Carroll's body at
(05:57):
the scene.
Speaker 9 (05:59):
Tennis usemissy cold to the touch, rigor evident in the
right knee and left arm. Dried blood around the nose
and mouth, right arm across the chest and left bent
under the torso. Grass embedded in left leg and thigh.
Crushed cardboard, milk carton pressed against the area of the
right eye. Laceration to lower lip, several marks on body, throat, knees,
(06:25):
and arms.
Speaker 7 (06:27):
Aside from her missing shoes, Carol was fully clothed. In
one handwritten note by a police officer. It was said
that her second and third snap on pants buttons were unfastened.
Preliminary testing showed Carol had blood under her fingernails, but
the amount was too small for any conclusive testing or grouping.
No seamen was found anywhere on her body. However, the
(06:50):
police did find negroid hairs unlike her own, on her shorts,
sweater panties, and hair burrett and also on her sweater
and underwear. Investigators found some mysterious synthetic green fibers.
Speaker 11 (07:05):
She did have a ligature mark on her some small
crescent shape marks on cyber neck that indicated it could
have been somebody who was strangling her. Her nose was bloodied,
her lower lip was split open, and she had been sodomized.
Speaker 7 (07:21):
That's writer Blaine Pardo, who investigated and co wrote a
book on the Freeway Phantom murders.
Speaker 11 (07:27):
What is really interesting about Carol Spinkx that I think
is the creepiest factor of hers despite the gruesomeness of
how she died, was that she had been kept alive
for at least three days according to the authorities. You know,
she had only been dead for two days, and they
actually found that her murderer had fed her. They had
(07:47):
given her citrus screw during that period, So whoever the
killer was, it wasn't just a matter of kidnapping the girl,
taking her to his place where he was going to
do what he was going to do, dumping the body.
He kept her for several days as a prisoner. It
tells you a lot about the killer because it tells you,
you know, he had to have a place where you
(08:08):
could do that, He had to have the means of
doing it. She didn't have any marks where it looked
like she was tied up, so how did he keep her?
It really gets you start thinking a little bit about
the environment that she had to have or the killer
had to have in order to keep her as a hostage.
Speaker 7 (08:26):
Police also interviewed a number of potential witnesses, including seventeen
year old Vanessa Alice Copeland, who was near the seven
eleven the day Carol went missing. Copeland said that between
three point thirty and four pm, she saw a man
exposing himself in a burned out building by the store.
She also saw Carol walking behind her towards the Maryland
(08:46):
state line, but when she looked back a minute later,
Carol was gone. Another witness, twelve year old Cecilia Edith Diggs,
says she saw Carol in the seven eleven parking lot
that day between six thirty and seven pm with a
girl named Deborah Harrison. Diggs was riding passenger in a
car going north on Wheeler Road. While sitting at the
(09:07):
traffic light on Wheeler and Mississippi, she claims to have
seen two men, both black, jump out of a car
to grab Carol and put her in the car. Then
the car went south on Wheeler. The police then interviewed
Deborah Harrison, the seventeen year old reportedly with Carol at
the seven eleven. Harrison said that she walked with Carroll
(09:29):
to the store, but left without her. When she was
leaving the store, she looked back and noticed that Carol
was walking towards a burned out building near the store,
and this, she says, is the last time she saw Carol.
But then Harrison says that the next day the phone
started ringing at her home and when she picked up
the line, she heard a man's voice. Harrison would say
(09:56):
that at the time she didn't know Carol was missing
or who had called her. Lastly, police interviewed Dorothy Wheeler,
who'd helped organize a search party for Carol. Wheeler told
police she also received threatening phone calls from a mail
with a deep voice, and then Wheeler says she started
receiving letters at work, one of which said the following.
Speaker 12 (10:20):
You have daughters and if you don't want them raped and.
Speaker 5 (10:23):
Dropped on the side of the road, you'll keep your
nose out of this.
Speaker 7 (10:28):
The police report says these letters were handed to investigators,
but there's no record of the notes themselves, and some
believe that the testimony of Wheeler and the other witnesses
were not credible.
Speaker 4 (10:41):
You follow a lead until it takes you no way,
and they got all kinds of leads.
Speaker 6 (10:46):
I mean, everybody was a suspect.
Speaker 7 (10:50):
This is retired Metropolitan Police Department Sergeant Romainne Jenkins, who
you met in episode one. She investigated the Freeway Phantom murders.
Years after the case went At the time of Carol's murder,
she was assigned to work elsewhere, but she remembers hearing
about the investigation.
Speaker 4 (11:08):
Everybody became a suspect because people were calling in tips,
and sometimes the information that people phoned in would lead
you on a merry ghost chase, you know so, but
you had to follow the lead until you couldn't follow
it anymore. And then some of the people eventually admitted
that they lied. They never saw the girls being abducted
(11:28):
or anything that they lied.
Speaker 7 (11:31):
Romayne fully believes that those witness statements for Carol were
completely false and that might explain why investigators made no
progress with those leads. Eventually, there was an autopsy. According
to the autopsy reports, they collected specimens from pubic hair,
vaginal spears, rectal smears, and stomach contents. But remember this
(11:51):
was pre DNA technology, so at the time police had
no way of making connections through those specimens, and so
the police ran out of leeds and thus Carol's case
went cold. But many believed the police could have done
more and chose not to. Here again is Evander Spinks,
(12:13):
the older sister of Carol Spinks.
Speaker 13 (12:16):
As a young teenager, I don't think the police did
a good job. I didn't feel as though they actually
cared during that time, and as an adult, I know
they didn't do a good job and I know down
where they didn't care.
Speaker 7 (12:35):
Romayne believes this may have been due to a disconnect
between white officers and the black communities in and around DC.
Speaker 4 (12:43):
People bring their own prejudices and biases to the job.
I read information in the files with some of the detectives.
The white ones said, well, they wore tight clothes that
Carl Spinx had on tight clothes Carl Spring had on
DC Public School Jim Shorts. If you know anything about
(13:04):
DC Public School Jim Shorts, they balloon out, ain't nothing
tight about them Shorts, instead of reviewing the whole case.
And that's the number one problem most on these tasks force.
They are given assignments to do. Look, I want you
to cover the forty nine hundred block of C Street,
(13:24):
I want you to cover fourteenth in you and you
give an assignment and that's what you do.
Speaker 6 (13:29):
You have no idea what the other.
Speaker 4 (13:31):
Nine hundred and ninety nine pages in this investigation has revealed. Okay,
but see, I'm not like that. I'm going to read
everything I was taught. If you want to know something,
you must read it. There's nothing that you don't know
that you can't find out isn't written somewhere. So I
read everything and sad to say, they didn't have a
(13:52):
female on the team.
Speaker 7 (13:57):
Romayne believes there may have been some wilful neglect when
it came to investigating Carroll's murder, and she wasn't the
only one.
Speaker 14 (14:05):
When the first victims went missing, there was a really
kind of a muted police response.
Speaker 7 (14:12):
This is Jim Trenham, a retired detective from the Metropolitan
Police Department.
Speaker 14 (14:17):
But also during that time, there just wasn't the attention
that was being paid, especially when these girls haven't been
found yet. You know of just a young black girl runaway,
or she probably at a relative's house, you know that
sort of thing. There wasn't the full court press that
you would often see with a John Benet Ramsey or
something along that line.
Speaker 6 (14:38):
You know.
Speaker 14 (14:39):
To be honest, that's unfortunately, has been a fact of
life for god knows hundreds of years, but even today.
Speaker 7 (14:48):
Jim started reviewing the case when he launched an initiative
called the Violent Crime Case Review Project.
Speaker 14 (14:54):
Our goal was to go back and look at old
homicide cases to see if we could take advantage of
any the new technology that was coming out, such as DNA.
And as I was doing so, I was pulling these
case files up and looking at them, I kept hearing
about this one case that was kind of a legend
(15:15):
in DC back in the seventies, and that was referred
to as the Freeway Phantom case. So one of my
first goals was to see what I could find on
that case, what evidence was available, and could we take
advantage of especially DNA technology today.
Speaker 7 (15:32):
Jim says he quickly realized that the original investigators did
a subpar job of maintaining documents and preserving the evidence.
Speaker 14 (15:41):
When we first started looking at the Freeway Phantom case,
the most frustrating thing was that just about all of
the files were gone. We didn't really have anything, and
so we were trying to dig up whatever we could
through newspaper accounts and things like that. The other frustrating
thing is as we were going going through the evidence
(16:02):
in all we were finding out that the evidence was
also missing, not only in DC but also in PG County,
And in fact, the PG County detectives who had done
their own independent re examination of some of the cases,
had only found evidence in one and that was evidence
that having kept at the medical examiner's office. When the
(16:25):
medical examiner back then would do a sexual assault kit
on a body, they would take the swabs and they
would smear them on a slide, look at the slide
and see whether or not there was any sperm visible,
and if it was, they would send the kit over
to the FBI or to whatever lab they were using
at the time. But they kept the slide, and so
(16:48):
in one case they actually found the slide, they sent
it in for testing, hoping that it had enough on
there to extract a suspect profile. However, at that time
DNA testing wasn't as advanced as it is now, and
unfortunately they used up all of the sample and they
(17:08):
were not able to get a useful.
Speaker 7 (17:11):
Profile, and so any hope of finding Carol's killer through
DNA was officially lost. Anything the seven eleven used to be,
(17:40):
it was only a point two miles of the whole
point two yet, yeah, that was probably right at the book.
Speaker 5 (17:45):
Right at the corner.
Speaker 7 (17:48):
I was curious to see the neighborhood where Carrol Spinks
lived last summer. I found where the Spinx house used
to be, and I brought along my producers, Jamie and Tremors.
As of letting my fid, I.
Speaker 11 (18:00):
Wanted to hide street.
Speaker 7 (18:00):
Today, I wouldn't hide it. I would absolutely send my child.
Speaker 5 (18:06):
He was a tired squirrel.
Speaker 7 (18:08):
The complex where the Sphinx family lived was torn down
decades ago. Today the neighborhood is densely populated, yet quiet,
single family houses, duplexes, and row homes with narrow, tidy
lawns out front. There's a mix of old and newer buildings.
When the weather is nice, people still sit outside of
their homes and watch the activity on the streets. The
(18:30):
Congress Heights neighborhood is still overwhelmingly black, but like so
many urban neighborhoods in the twenty first century, there's surely
been some gentrification since the nineteen seventies. Back then, this
was a working class, tight knit black community. Tell us
what you remember about that particular time, Derek, Oh.
Speaker 2 (18:50):
I thought it was more family or Yeah.
Speaker 7 (18:53):
This is Derek Davis, who's run a barber shop in
the neighborhood for decades. You heard from him at the
very top of this episode. Also sitting down with us
is his friend, Reverend Anthony Motley.
Speaker 2 (19:05):
They called us Chocolate City, Chocolate City, the Bump Parliament,
Funker delic. I mean, we had to go black leadership,
black superintendent, black police, black city councils, black mayor.
Speaker 8 (19:22):
We had a lot of pride in the day. Back
in the day, we were from DC. You know, it
wasn't a knock on DC. It was you from DC.
Speaker 4 (19:33):
Man.
Speaker 8 (19:33):
You must be you know, you must be on the ball.
Speaker 2 (19:36):
Right, you know. There were a lot of bustling businesses
we had in the total Ward eight. I think we
probably had about maybe five movie.
Speaker 3 (19:44):
Theaters that we no longer have even won.
Speaker 2 (19:48):
We used to have a roller skating ring. Things kids could.
Speaker 3 (19:51):
Do, had boys club, bowling alley right, boys club, girls club.
We had all these type of activities.
Speaker 15 (20:00):
Sit down restaurants, sit down restaurants. Yeah, we had all
those things, restaurants. It was really community oriented. I mean
people were friendlier, they helped out. Did it seem like
a lot of anger like sometimes I see today, I
see a lot of anger.
Speaker 2 (20:15):
Or frustration or stuff like that. It was just more
community Definitely.
Speaker 8 (20:21):
The community felt safe. People could keep their doors open. Yes,
your child could go to the store right by herself.
We used to say, everybody come in when the street
lights come right, come on right, But then they off
the block. Don't come off the block, you know. But
(20:42):
there wasn't nobody, nobody surveilling you.
Speaker 2 (20:46):
And then the adults had more say the adults had
more control where if Reverie Motley saw my son or
daughter out there, they said, I'm.
Speaker 3 (20:58):
Gonna talk to your daddy or I'm talk to your
mama or whatever. That kid would listen or straighten up.
The day you'll get cursed out. You might get shot
or killed if you approach somebody's kid. So we had
more family, more structure back in the early seventies.
Speaker 7 (21:16):
Did you think of this as a as a safe
place for families and children at that time?
Speaker 2 (21:20):
Oh?
Speaker 8 (21:21):
Yeah, you know this was this was a family oriented.
My mother and father, they were right up the street.
Like Derek said, you know, you looked out for each other.
Speaker 4 (21:37):
In the black community, we always say nothing goes on
that somebody didn't see.
Speaker 7 (21:43):
Here's Romaine Jenkins.
Speaker 4 (21:44):
Again, there's always you have a certain portion of the neighborhood,
then hang out. Some of the older guys who'd like
to drink liquor. They would sit outside three hundred and
sixty five days a year, but they're there so if
something happened, they would see it. Then you had the
older people like my mother and her posse. They would
(22:06):
sit in their window and they saw everything that went down.
So if you were around the corner acting up, your
mother got a call, or your grandmother says she's around
there showing off. Oh yes, And when you got home,
you got it. But they looked out for each other.
You felt safe, you know, you felt safe in your neighborhood.
Nobody was gonna bother you.
Speaker 7 (22:27):
This is why it's strange that supposedly no credible witnesses
actually saw what happened to Carol. And it's exactly why
when she went missing, the neighborhood was in full gear
to find her.
Speaker 4 (22:39):
The community was kind of upset at the very beginning
because there were lots of people out looking for Carol Sphinx,
because it was not like her not to come back home.
She should have been headed home, and she was seen
headed home in the.
Speaker 6 (22:53):
Direction of her house.
Speaker 4 (22:55):
They had lots of search parties, people looking, but to
no avail.
Speaker 7 (23:00):
I mean, I was born in nineteen seventy in La
They sounds very much like it was here. There was
always somebody out there is a you know, somebody's uncle
in a tank top drinking a forty and somebody's auntie
down the street sitting on their front porch, fanning themselves
with their church fans. And I keep wondering as I
read about these cases, how did nobody see anything?
Speaker 6 (23:22):
Because whoever did the cases fit right into the community,
never raised any suspicion at all, and that's how he
was able to do what he did. Nobody would would
question if they saw him talking to a little girl
or anything. They wouldn't They wouldn't question it. That's my
(23:42):
personal feeling on it.
Speaker 4 (23:44):
You know, like you said, there's always somebody out.
Speaker 7 (23:49):
While many in the community felt the police didn't protect
them and their neighbors as well as they could, officers
on the force in the district have a very different perspective.
Speaker 16 (24:00):
Very protective in our neighborhoods, even though we know we
hurt each other. We know about the guy in the neighborhood.
This is a weirdo, you know. We know about these
things in our families, even but let's something happen to them. Oh,
you know, we need to be real and that's the
only way we can heal. My name is Rita McCoy.
I'm a retired DC homicide detective. I was on the
(24:22):
Metropolitan Police Department, Washington, d C. I'm a Washingtonian. I'm
presently single. I don't even want to talk about all
them husbands I had. But I had a rack of husbands,
four to be exact, and three were police officers.
Speaker 7 (24:37):
Rita says that folks in the community tend to know
more than they're willing to tell, and for a police officer,
that's tricky to navigate.
Speaker 16 (24:45):
We had people all the time, the new family members,
people that knew and would not I ain't know snitch snitches,
get stitches and all that foolishness. This is your neighborhood,
you know. We had to start giving away money to
get people. And I'm telling you that the talk what
do you want?
Speaker 5 (25:05):
You know?
Speaker 16 (25:05):
And that's the hard part about us. We hate the police,
but yet the police call them to our neighborhoods more
than anywhere else. So what are you gonna do. You
gotta find it, you know that that area, you know
where you work with the police or whatever to get
what you want so you can have a safety.
Speaker 7 (25:23):
But Rita says there just wasn't enough trust between black
neighborhoods and white police officers.
Speaker 16 (25:29):
When I was a child, I remember the police being
called in the community. You know, it was all black
and the corps were white. They were white, and they
were just physically, like assault the two guys that had
been fighting or whatever, and sometimes didn't lock up anybody,
just beat them up and get back in the car.
Speaker 9 (25:51):
Leave.
Speaker 16 (25:52):
People take advantage of their authority. I saw a lot
of prejudice and racism on this department. I saw prejudice.
I say it was because it was black people. And
then racism I saw from the white officers. And a
lot of them did not grow up in this area.
(26:14):
They're from all over the place, from West Virginia, Southern Virginia.
Speaker 6 (26:19):
Whatever.
Speaker 16 (26:20):
They chewed, tobacco or you know, the things that were
not accustomed to in our community. But then I will
say that some of them, when they saw that you
were good, real police, they changed with you. But you know,
and it's like us too when we around all white people,
and you know, we are initially uncomfortable if you not
(26:44):
weren't raised around them, until you find that they are
like you.
Speaker 7 (26:51):
Comments like this suggest that somebody in the community likely
knew something about Carol, but wouldn't come forward to tell
the police, and with no lead, it seemed like the
story was over. But then less than three months later,
in July of nineteen seventy one, yet another girl went missing.
(27:29):
Darlina Denise Johnson was sixteen years old. She grew up
in a large family with five brothers and five sisters.
Darlinia was petite, about five feet two inches and one
hundred ten pounds. She lived in the same neighborhood as
Carol Spinks. Their homes were only three blocks apart. Darlinia
had a boyfriend and a job at the local rec
(27:49):
center a half mile or so from her apartment. Most
days she'd walk to and from work, and that was
her plan. On the morning of July eighth, nineteen seventy one,
in the stack of boxes at Detective Romayne Jenkins house,
we found a police report detailing statements given by Darlenia's mother,
Helen McNeil. She gave this account to police about the
(28:10):
day that Darlina went missing.
Speaker 17 (28:14):
On Thursday, July eighth, nineteen seventy one. I had to
be at d C General Hospital eight o'clock in the morning.
Before I left, I looked in and saw Darlina sleep.
Speaker 12 (28:23):
In her room.
Speaker 17 (28:25):
I told my son Nick to be sure that he
got her up to go to work at the Oxen
Hill Recreation Center. I came home from the clinic at
twelve noon, and she had gone that night. I didn't
look for her to come home on Friday. I expected
her in about five o'clock PM. I got home from
the store about six ten pm and asked the kids
if Darlena had been home, and they said they hadn't
(28:47):
seen her. I sent the kids around in the next
court and they asked the people if they had seen Darlina,
and they said no. Round about ten or ten thirty
PM on Friday, I called the precinct and they sent
two two police officers around. I told them everything and
they took down all the information. The next day the
police came back and got a picture of her. The
(29:10):
first thing Monday morning, I called Miss Ankor at the
Oxen Hill Playground. She said Darlena was supposed to go
on the camping trip, but that she didn't show. Then
Miss Anker says, do you know about a black car
that picks her up in the evening. She said that
this black car picked up Darlenia and another girl on Wednesday.
(29:30):
She said that the other girl said Darlenia acted like
she knew the fellow pretty well. The other girl insisted
that they let her out of the car and she
didn't know where they went after that. After I talked
to Miss Anker, I went across the hall and talked
to Miss Allan. I told Miss Allan that I had
called the recreation center and that Miss Anker had told
me about Darlenia getting in the black car. Her daughter,
(29:52):
Sylvia Allan told me that a fellow called Alfred drove
the black car and he hangs around Alabama Avenue.
Speaker 7 (30:00):
It seemed like Helen was on to something, but this
promising lead about a guy named Alfred in a black
car led nowhere. We know that at some point the
police did question Alfred. They even gave him sodium pentathal,
the so called truth serum, but he didn't crack, and
so they moved on. For the rest of that first week,
(30:20):
Helen was more or less on her own, calling around
asking people in the neighborhood if they'd seen Darlenia. She
called police stations and morgues in DC and in Prince
George's County. Some kids said they found Darlinia's body in
the nearby Oxen Hill high Rise apartment complex, but that
was also a dead end. The police reports showed that
(30:40):
something horrifying happened next, McNeil started to receive unsettling phone calls.
According to McNeil, one afternoon, she answered the phone and
a man spoke uh her daughter. Was this a message
from the killer or was it just a prank call?
We don't know. Of course, there was no caller. I
(31:02):
d in nineteen seventy one, and the record suggests that
the police didn't take those phone calls seriously. They had
very few follow up questions to McNeil's story, and they
never bring it up again in the police reports. Meanwhile,
there were rumors floating around the neighborhood about a dead
body left near the side of the two ninety five freeway,
(31:23):
and on July nineteenth, her body was officially found. One
man who found the body was Curtis Vincent, who worked
for the DC Department of Highways and Traffic. On July
twenty first, nineteen seventy one, he gave this statement to police.
Speaker 12 (31:38):
On Friday, July sixteenth, nineteen seventy one, I was on
duty and was at the highway garage at Second in
Bryant Streets, Northeast. I was working with Bill Ferrell. We
were looking at the lawnmower shop there, which is supervised
by mister Roy Tyler, and we were chatting with him.
Mister Roy Tyler asked us if we'd been out around
(31:59):
Firth Sterling and Route two ninety five lately. We asked why,
and Roy said that there was a body of a
dead lady out there, and he described the location to us.
He told us that he'd notified the police, but the
body was still out there, if I remember correctly, he
told us that the body had been out there about
a week. On Monday, July nineteenth, nineteen seventy one, I
(32:21):
was working with Bill and about one pm or so
we got to talking about what Roy had said about
the body, and we decided to go to the location
he described and see if we could locate the body
on two ninety five, about one hundred yards south of
Firth Sterling, on the north side of two ninety five,
I guess about ten feet from the embankment, we found
(32:43):
the body. I got the impression from the dress that
the body was that of a female. The body was
lying on the stomach with the head down the embankment
and the feet up toward Route two ninety five. As
far as I could tell, the body was clothed and
I definitely remember that she was wearing blue shorts. Other
than that, I recall a blouse. I do not remember
(33:07):
any other clothing.
Speaker 7 (33:09):
In the end, it was his coworker Bill, who had
a connection at the Metropolitan Police Department. Bill called his friend,
a police sergeant named Charles Baden, and only then, after
the body had been outside for over a week, did
the police finally recover it.
Speaker 10 (33:27):
The sad part about this is that there was actually
motorists that drove by on the super Busy Highway on
July twelfth, seven days prior to when her body was
actually recovered, and reported there's a body on the side
of the road. Multiple times people called in saying that
before she was finally removed days later, So if the
(33:49):
police had actually found her body, it may have not
been that decomposed five days prior.
Speaker 7 (33:56):
This is author Victoria Hester, who he heard from last episode.
She and her father Blaine, have written extensively on the
Freeway phantom case.
Speaker 11 (34:05):
We actually saw the autopsy photos of this, and all
of them are very disturbing. These are young girls, but
hers was very disturbing, just because she almost looked mummified.
It's July and Washington, d C. She's laying out exposed.
You know, the temperatures are all always in the eighties
ninety degrees. You know, it's just it was terrible. It
(34:27):
was just horrible.
Speaker 7 (34:29):
We found transcripts of the nine to one one calls
reporting Darlinia's body. This call came in at six fifty
am on July twelfth, a full week before she was
picked up.
Speaker 5 (34:41):
I think I got it uncontient in a mineral that
time in the morning. I hope everybody had their breakun
it that Tarling and Nive at the intersection. Oh, it
went over an embankment or laying over on the thigh
ant Purling and two ninety five. Yeah, oh, I'll bet
it's just an unconscious or just a man down.
Speaker 7 (35:05):
Forty minutes later, at seven thirty am, police received a
second call about the body.
Speaker 5 (35:11):
I help you, Yeah, I broke down on Route two
ninety five right opposite.
Speaker 3 (35:15):
Boiling Field Photo Center this morning.
Speaker 5 (35:18):
Yeah, sir, and there's a dead woman. I think it's
a woman. It could be a man lying in the bushes.
It's northbound on two ninety five, right opposite the photo
center of boiling Field. Okay, is it a pretty obvious thing? No,
it's in the bushes. You couldn't see it from the road. Okay, sir,
We'll send somebody else find it.
Speaker 7 (35:38):
As Blaine tells us, police followed up on these first
few reports about the body, but they couldn't have looked
very hard.
Speaker 11 (35:46):
Police did drive by, you know, they did a slow
drive by and looked and didn't see the body. But
people kept saying they're out there, and it was a
real embarrassment I think for law enforcement. And the body
was found fifteen feet from where Carol Spink's body had
been found, So you know, at the time, that was
(36:07):
the link that really tied these two together.
Speaker 7 (36:13):
That was perhaps the most shocking detail. Darlinia was found
only fifteen feet from where Carol Spinks had been found.
But still police didn't officially connect the two murders. We did, however,
find one police report where an officer interviewed a suspect
in Darlinia's murder named Alfred Henry Holmes. The officer asked
(36:34):
Holmes if he also knew about Carol Spinks, to which
he answered no. But other than this question, there's little
to suggest that the police department considered them connected. Meanwhile,
investigators were still trying to piece together what had actually
happened to Darlinia.
Speaker 10 (36:52):
There's lots of stories of meeting up with a boyfriend
or going to stay somewhere else, but in a time
before cell phones and ways to contact kid when they're
off doing whatever they're doing, it's hard to tell what happened.
There's not a whole lot of information about her specifically,
just because her body was so far decomposed.
Speaker 4 (37:10):
I think Darlenia went to meet the killer because she
she's the one who was decomposed, and we have nothing
on her case, nothing per see. But at this point
when this was read and she was still missing, right.
Speaker 7 (37:23):
This is Romayne Jenkins. We're sitting in her living room
going through boxes of evidence and discussing Darlinia Denise Johnson.
Romayne was especially frustrated by this murder.
Speaker 4 (37:34):
The police department was truly incompetent. I mean, let's face it.
She leaves home on July the eighth. The remains a
found I think July the twelfth. The guy who worked
for Department of DC Highways in traffic, he calls the police.
When his coworkers pick him up, he shows them the body.
(37:56):
They call the police and if you look at the
radio runs trans script of the radio runs. Every scout
car that was dispatched came back in ten eight nothing found. Well,
you're not gonna see about it if you don't stop
the car. If you're going sixty five miles an hour
down two ninety five, trying to keep up with traffic,
you're not going to look. So that was incompetence on
(38:16):
their part, totally incomfident because it might have been something,
some evidence that we missed because we did not have
a cause of death or her you know.
Speaker 7 (38:28):
So Darlinia's case was a dead end. But then just
a few weeks later, the killer would strike again. On
July twenty seventh, a ten year old girl named Brenda
Crockett went missing, and later that night, Brenda called home
and talked to her stepdad.
Speaker 5 (38:50):
I'm many Christian in.
Speaker 7 (38:52):
A white man's house to witness.
Speaker 13 (38:55):
Came the car and turned me to this.
Speaker 7 (38:57):
House my mother next time on Freeway Phantom.
Speaker 11 (39:15):
When I got there, I guess there was a crowd
starting to come out.
Speaker 4 (39:20):
Arriving on a scene. I was directed to where this
child was laying on the side of the road.
Speaker 6 (39:26):
She was the child of God.
Speaker 8 (39:28):
She loved church.
Speaker 13 (39:29):
She was going to refrigerate to eat raw bacon, but
you know the pigs were better back then.
Speaker 6 (39:37):
Asked her again, tell the man to come to the phone.
Speaker 7 (39:40):
I heard someone walk in heaven.
Speaker 3 (39:41):
She said, really low, I'll see you, and someone just
cut the phone.
Speaker 11 (39:46):
So the killer had kind of shifted at least from
the first case. He's not spending as much time with
the victims. He's killing them and now just dumping them.
Speaker 6 (39:55):
Whoever grabbed these young ladies grab them right in their
own Neighborhook.
Speaker 1 (40:08):
Freeway Fantom is a production of iHeartRadio, Tenderfoot TV, and
Black bar Mitzvah. Our host is Selese Hiley. The show
is written by Trevor Young, Jamie Albright and CELESE.
Speaker 16 (40:19):
Hilly.
Speaker 1 (40:19):
Executive producers on behalf of iHeart Radio include Matt Frederick
and Alex Williams, with supervising producer Trevor Young. Executive producers
on behalf of Tenderfoot TV include Donald Albright and Payne Lindsay,
with producers Jamie Albright and Tracy Kaplan. Executive producers on
behalf of Black bar Mitzvah include myself, Jay Ellis and
(40:39):
Aaron Bergman, with producer Sidney Fools. Lead researcher is Jamie Albright.
Artwork by Mister Soul two one six, original music by
Makeup and Vanity Set special thanks to a teammate, Uta
Beck Media and Marketing and the Nord Group. Tenderfoot TV
and iHeartMedia, as well as Black Bar Mitzvah, have increased
(41:00):
the reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction
of the person or persons responsible for their freeway phantom murders.
The previous reward of up to one hundred and fifty
thousand dollars offered by the Metropolitan Police Department has been matched.
A new total reward of up to three hundred thousand
dollars is now being offered. If you have any information
(41:20):
relating to these unsolved crimes, contact the Metropolitan Police Department
at area code two zero two seven two seven nine
zero ninety nine. For more information, please visit Freeway dashfanom
dot com. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio and Tenderfoot TV,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen
(41:41):
to your favorite shows. Thanks for listening.
You're listening to the Freeway Phanom, a production of iHeartRadio,
Tenderfoot TV, and black bar Mitzvah. The views and opinions
expressed in this podcast are solely those of the podcast
author or individuals participating in the podcast, and do not
represent those of iHeartMedia, Tenderfoot TV, Black bar Mitzvah, or
their employees. This podcast also contains subject matter that may
(00:23):
not be suitable for everyone. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
Prior to these killings start happenings, Freeway fan, you didn't
hear a lot of killings of black kids per se
in the district of Columbia, and not like that that
one behind of a behind of an unresult. You didn't
hear that. So the community was in shock and it
put them on caution. People were scared. I mean parents
(00:54):
were scared, children were scared. They wanted to know what
more police could do. What were they doing? All that
conversation was coming up, People were keeping an EyeT on things,
anything that may have seen unusual. People were more visual
I think during that time because it was hitting close
to home, right in the community, close especially over here.
(01:18):
I'm Derek Davis, I'm co owner of Davis. Barbara Service
Uh been here fifty three years, right here in the
same location. I was actually in high school myself in
seventy two. I was in eleventh grade, so it was
close in that regard because the girl that went blue
was in the eleventh grade too, with the girl named Denise,
(01:41):
even though I didn't personally know her. A lot of
this the kids, you know, they came down and get
the haircut at the shop, were talking about it and
how they were, you know, depressed or saddened about what
had happened to her. And then a lot of the
customers had talked about it in terms of, you know,
the crime going on in the city.
Speaker 3 (02:02):
And how they couldn't test this person. So it was
a Saturday for DC. I do know that, but you
don't really want to know what somebody was telling me
the other date, Lord BERSI woo. They were giving me
some deep stuff about this phantom stuff where if some
(02:26):
people that was close to that person's family may have
been tied up into that, and possibility it.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
Could have been a police officer involved.
Speaker 3 (02:38):
I said, do you want to go on record with that?
Speaker 4 (02:41):
Now?
Speaker 3 (02:41):
I don't know how true that is, but the way
she was laying that out, said you need to come
on camera and say what you got to say.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
But they won't talk. They're not gonna tell the police.
They're not gonna tell the camera, the media. They're not
gonna do it.
Speaker 4 (03:02):
The homicide detectives termed the cases the little girl case.
This child was laying on the side of the road.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
I won't go no way.
Speaker 3 (03:13):
I would call my house.
Speaker 5 (03:14):
Those first five murders should have been a huge warning
bell for the police.
Speaker 6 (03:19):
We just want to know what happened. This person must
have saw that.
Speaker 4 (03:23):
They were thinking that maybe it's just one person, and
he says, they need to know.
Speaker 7 (03:27):
This is me.
Speaker 8 (03:29):
I thought that they would catch him.
Speaker 9 (03:31):
I thought it was just a.
Speaker 10 (03:32):
Matter of time.
Speaker 7 (03:34):
I'm Celeste Hedley and this is Freeway Phantom. On the
last episode, we covered the background of the Freeway Phantom murders.
Six victims, all young black girls, all of them snatched
off the streets of Washington, d C. Between April nineteen
seventy one and September nineteen seventy two. Their bodies were
(03:57):
all dumped by the side of the freeway. And we
know that all six murders were committed by the same
person and never solved. The first victim was thirteen year
old Carol Spinks, who went missing on April twenty fifth,
nineteen seventy one. In episode one, we heard from Carrol's sisters,
Carolyn and Evander as they described the horror of losing
(04:19):
their sister. Today, we'll dig into what happened after Carol
was found, or at the least what we know from
the official investigation. As you heard last episode, we were
able to obtain the official police report. Here's what it
said about Carol's known whereabouts leading up to the murder.
Speaker 9 (04:39):
Sunday, April twenty fifth, nineteen seventy one, at round seven pm,
Carol Denise Spink's female black thirteen years of age, was
sent to the seven to eleven store located on Wheeler
Road and Southern Avenue. She was last seen in the
vicinity of Wheeler and Southern Avenue by her mother, at
which time she was reprimanded for being out of the house.
(05:01):
Her older sister had sent her to the store. Later
the same day, she was reported missing by her mother
to the sixth District Police.
Speaker 7 (05:11):
It wouldn't be until almost a week later that Carrol
Spinks's body was found. Here's another excerpt from the police report.
Speaker 9 (05:19):
On Saturday May one, nineteen seventy one, Carol Denise Spinks
was found in the grass area of the northbound lane
of Route two ninety five near Suitland Parkway by children playing.
The children hailed a Traffic division officer who was traveling
north on Route two ninety.
Speaker 7 (05:36):
Five now known as Interstate two ninety five or the
Anacostia Freeway. The road was a major thoroughfare which cut
right through the city. As we heard, the police report says,
some children playing near the highway spotted the body and
then one of them either called or flagged down a
police officer. Here's how the report describes Carroll's body at
(05:57):
the scene.
Speaker 9 (05:59):
Tennis usemissy cold to the touch, rigor evident in the
right knee and left arm. Dried blood around the nose
and mouth, right arm across the chest and left bent
under the torso. Grass embedded in left leg and thigh.
Crushed cardboard, milk carton pressed against the area of the
right eye. Laceration to lower lip, several marks on body, throat, knees,
(06:25):
and arms.
Speaker 7 (06:27):
Aside from her missing shoes, Carol was fully clothed. In
one handwritten note by a police officer. It was said
that her second and third snap on pants buttons were unfastened.
Preliminary testing showed Carol had blood under her fingernails, but
the amount was too small for any conclusive testing or grouping.
No seamen was found anywhere on her body. However, the
(06:50):
police did find negroid hairs unlike her own, on her shorts,
sweater panties, and hair burrett and also on her sweater
and underwear. Investigators found some mysterious synthetic green fibers.
Speaker 11 (07:05):
She did have a ligature mark on her some small
crescent shape marks on cyber neck that indicated it could
have been somebody who was strangling her. Her nose was bloodied,
her lower lip was split open, and she had been sodomized.
Speaker 7 (07:21):
That's writer Blaine Pardo, who investigated and co wrote a
book on the Freeway Phantom murders.
Speaker 11 (07:27):
What is really interesting about Carol Spinkx that I think
is the creepiest factor of hers despite the gruesomeness of
how she died, was that she had been kept alive
for at least three days according to the authorities. You know,
she had only been dead for two days, and they
actually found that her murderer had fed her. They had
(07:47):
given her citrus screw during that period, So whoever the
killer was, it wasn't just a matter of kidnapping the girl,
taking her to his place where he was going to
do what he was going to do, dumping the body.
He kept her for several days as a prisoner. It
tells you a lot about the killer because it tells you,
you know, he had to have a place where you
(08:08):
could do that, He had to have the means of
doing it. She didn't have any marks where it looked
like she was tied up, so how did he keep her?
It really gets you start thinking a little bit about
the environment that she had to have or the killer
had to have in order to keep her as a hostage.
Speaker 7 (08:26):
Police also interviewed a number of potential witnesses, including seventeen
year old Vanessa Alice Copeland, who was near the seven
eleven the day Carol went missing. Copeland said that between
three point thirty and four pm, she saw a man
exposing himself in a burned out building by the store.
She also saw Carol walking behind her towards the Maryland
(08:46):
state line, but when she looked back a minute later,
Carol was gone. Another witness, twelve year old Cecilia Edith Diggs,
says she saw Carol in the seven eleven parking lot
that day between six thirty and seven pm with a
girl named Deborah Harrison. Diggs was riding passenger in a
car going north on Wheeler Road. While sitting at the
(09:07):
traffic light on Wheeler and Mississippi, she claims to have
seen two men, both black, jump out of a car
to grab Carol and put her in the car. Then
the car went south on Wheeler. The police then interviewed
Deborah Harrison, the seventeen year old reportedly with Carol at
the seven eleven. Harrison said that she walked with Carroll
(09:29):
to the store, but left without her. When she was
leaving the store, she looked back and noticed that Carol
was walking towards a burned out building near the store,
and this, she says, is the last time she saw Carol.
But then Harrison says that the next day the phone
started ringing at her home and when she picked up
the line, she heard a man's voice. Harrison would say
(09:56):
that at the time she didn't know Carol was missing
or who had called her. Lastly, police interviewed Dorothy Wheeler,
who'd helped organize a search party for Carol. Wheeler told
police she also received threatening phone calls from a mail
with a deep voice, and then Wheeler says she started
receiving letters at work, one of which said the following.
Speaker 12 (10:20):
You have daughters and if you don't want them raped and.
Speaker 5 (10:23):
Dropped on the side of the road, you'll keep your
nose out of this.
Speaker 7 (10:28):
The police report says these letters were handed to investigators,
but there's no record of the notes themselves, and some
believe that the testimony of Wheeler and the other witnesses
were not credible.
Speaker 4 (10:41):
You follow a lead until it takes you no way,
and they got all kinds of leads.
Speaker 6 (10:46):
I mean, everybody was a suspect.
Speaker 7 (10:50):
This is retired Metropolitan Police Department Sergeant Romainne Jenkins, who
you met in episode one. She investigated the Freeway Phantom murders.
Years after the case went At the time of Carol's murder,
she was assigned to work elsewhere, but she remembers hearing
about the investigation.
Speaker 4 (11:08):
Everybody became a suspect because people were calling in tips,
and sometimes the information that people phoned in would lead
you on a merry ghost chase, you know so, but
you had to follow the lead until you couldn't follow
it anymore. And then some of the people eventually admitted
that they lied. They never saw the girls being abducted
(11:28):
or anything that they lied.
Speaker 7 (11:31):
Romayne fully believes that those witness statements for Carol were
completely false and that might explain why investigators made no
progress with those leads. Eventually, there was an autopsy. According
to the autopsy reports, they collected specimens from pubic hair,
vaginal spears, rectal smears, and stomach contents. But remember this
(11:51):
was pre DNA technology, so at the time police had
no way of making connections through those specimens, and so
the police ran out of leeds and thus Carol's case
went cold. But many believed the police could have done
more and chose not to. Here again is Evander Spinks,
(12:13):
the older sister of Carol Spinks.
Speaker 13 (12:16):
As a young teenager, I don't think the police did
a good job. I didn't feel as though they actually
cared during that time, and as an adult, I know
they didn't do a good job and I know down
where they didn't care.
Speaker 7 (12:35):
Romayne believes this may have been due to a disconnect
between white officers and the black communities in and around DC.
Speaker 4 (12:43):
People bring their own prejudices and biases to the job.
I read information in the files with some of the detectives.
The white ones said, well, they wore tight clothes that
Carl Spinx had on tight clothes Carl Spring had on
DC Public School Jim Shorts. If you know anything about
(13:04):
DC Public School Jim Shorts, they balloon out, ain't nothing
tight about them Shorts, instead of reviewing the whole case.
And that's the number one problem most on these tasks force.
They are given assignments to do. Look, I want you
to cover the forty nine hundred block of C Street,
(13:24):
I want you to cover fourteenth in you and you
give an assignment and that's what you do.
Speaker 6 (13:29):
You have no idea what the other.
Speaker 4 (13:31):
Nine hundred and ninety nine pages in this investigation has revealed. Okay,
but see, I'm not like that. I'm going to read
everything I was taught. If you want to know something,
you must read it. There's nothing that you don't know
that you can't find out isn't written somewhere. So I
read everything and sad to say, they didn't have a
(13:52):
female on the team.
Speaker 7 (13:57):
Romayne believes there may have been some wilful neglect when
it came to investigating Carroll's murder, and she wasn't the
only one.
Speaker 14 (14:05):
When the first victims went missing, there was a really
kind of a muted police response.
Speaker 7 (14:12):
This is Jim Trenham, a retired detective from the Metropolitan
Police Department.
Speaker 14 (14:17):
But also during that time, there just wasn't the attention
that was being paid, especially when these girls haven't been
found yet. You know of just a young black girl runaway,
or she probably at a relative's house, you know that
sort of thing. There wasn't the full court press that
you would often see with a John Benet Ramsey or
something along that line.
Speaker 6 (14:38):
You know.
Speaker 14 (14:39):
To be honest, that's unfortunately, has been a fact of
life for god knows hundreds of years, but even today.
Speaker 7 (14:48):
Jim started reviewing the case when he launched an initiative
called the Violent Crime Case Review Project.
Speaker 14 (14:54):
Our goal was to go back and look at old
homicide cases to see if we could take advantage of
any the new technology that was coming out, such as DNA.
And as I was doing so, I was pulling these
case files up and looking at them, I kept hearing
about this one case that was kind of a legend
(15:15):
in DC back in the seventies, and that was referred
to as the Freeway Phantom case. So one of my
first goals was to see what I could find on
that case, what evidence was available, and could we take
advantage of especially DNA technology today.
Speaker 7 (15:32):
Jim says he quickly realized that the original investigators did
a subpar job of maintaining documents and preserving the evidence.
Speaker 14 (15:41):
When we first started looking at the Freeway Phantom case,
the most frustrating thing was that just about all of
the files were gone. We didn't really have anything, and
so we were trying to dig up whatever we could
through newspaper accounts and things like that. The other frustrating
thing is as we were going going through the evidence
(16:02):
in all we were finding out that the evidence was
also missing, not only in DC but also in PG County,
And in fact, the PG County detectives who had done
their own independent re examination of some of the cases,
had only found evidence in one and that was evidence
that having kept at the medical examiner's office. When the
(16:25):
medical examiner back then would do a sexual assault kit
on a body, they would take the swabs and they
would smear them on a slide, look at the slide
and see whether or not there was any sperm visible,
and if it was, they would send the kit over
to the FBI or to whatever lab they were using
at the time. But they kept the slide, and so
(16:48):
in one case they actually found the slide, they sent
it in for testing, hoping that it had enough on
there to extract a suspect profile. However, at that time
DNA testing wasn't as advanced as it is now, and
unfortunately they used up all of the sample and they
(17:08):
were not able to get a useful.
Speaker 7 (17:11):
Profile, and so any hope of finding Carol's killer through
DNA was officially lost. Anything the seven eleven used to be,
(17:40):
it was only a point two miles of the whole
point two yet, yeah, that was probably right at the book.
Speaker 5 (17:45):
Right at the corner.
Speaker 7 (17:48):
I was curious to see the neighborhood where Carrol Spinks
lived last summer. I found where the Spinx house used
to be, and I brought along my producers, Jamie and Tremors.
As of letting my fid, I.
Speaker 11 (18:00):
Wanted to hide street.
Speaker 7 (18:00):
Today, I wouldn't hide it. I would absolutely send my child.
Speaker 5 (18:06):
He was a tired squirrel.
Speaker 7 (18:08):
The complex where the Sphinx family lived was torn down
decades ago. Today the neighborhood is densely populated, yet quiet,
single family houses, duplexes, and row homes with narrow, tidy
lawns out front. There's a mix of old and newer buildings.
When the weather is nice, people still sit outside of
their homes and watch the activity on the streets. The
(18:30):
Congress Heights neighborhood is still overwhelmingly black, but like so
many urban neighborhoods in the twenty first century, there's surely
been some gentrification since the nineteen seventies. Back then, this
was a working class, tight knit black community. Tell us
what you remember about that particular time, Derek, Oh.
Speaker 2 (18:50):
I thought it was more family or Yeah.
Speaker 7 (18:53):
This is Derek Davis, who's run a barber shop in
the neighborhood for decades. You heard from him at the
very top of this episode. Also sitting down with us
is his friend, Reverend Anthony Motley.
Speaker 2 (19:05):
They called us Chocolate City, Chocolate City, the Bump Parliament,
Funker delic. I mean, we had to go black leadership,
black superintendent, black police, black city councils, black mayor.
Speaker 8 (19:22):
We had a lot of pride in the day. Back
in the day, we were from DC. You know, it
wasn't a knock on DC. It was you from DC.
Speaker 4 (19:33):
Man.
Speaker 8 (19:33):
You must be you know, you must be on the ball.
Speaker 2 (19:36):
Right, you know. There were a lot of bustling businesses
we had in the total Ward eight. I think we
probably had about maybe five movie.
Speaker 3 (19:44):
Theaters that we no longer have even won.
Speaker 2 (19:48):
We used to have a roller skating ring. Things kids could.
Speaker 3 (19:51):
Do, had boys club, bowling alley right, boys club, girls club.
We had all these type of activities.
Speaker 15 (20:00):
Sit down restaurants, sit down restaurants. Yeah, we had all
those things, restaurants. It was really community oriented. I mean
people were friendlier, they helped out. Did it seem like
a lot of anger like sometimes I see today, I
see a lot of anger.
Speaker 2 (20:15):
Or frustration or stuff like that. It was just more
community Definitely.
Speaker 8 (20:21):
The community felt safe. People could keep their doors open. Yes,
your child could go to the store right by herself.
We used to say, everybody come in when the street
lights come right, come on right, But then they off
the block. Don't come off the block, you know. But
(20:42):
there wasn't nobody, nobody surveilling you.
Speaker 2 (20:46):
And then the adults had more say the adults had
more control where if Reverie Motley saw my son or
daughter out there, they said, I'm.
Speaker 3 (20:58):
Gonna talk to your daddy or I'm talk to your
mama or whatever. That kid would listen or straighten up.
The day you'll get cursed out. You might get shot
or killed if you approach somebody's kid. So we had
more family, more structure back in the early seventies.
Speaker 7 (21:16):
Did you think of this as a as a safe
place for families and children at that time?
Speaker 2 (21:20):
Oh?
Speaker 8 (21:21):
Yeah, you know this was this was a family oriented.
My mother and father, they were right up the street.
Like Derek said, you know, you looked out for each other.
Speaker 4 (21:37):
In the black community, we always say nothing goes on
that somebody didn't see.
Speaker 7 (21:43):
Here's Romaine Jenkins.
Speaker 4 (21:44):
Again, there's always you have a certain portion of the neighborhood,
then hang out. Some of the older guys who'd like
to drink liquor. They would sit outside three hundred and
sixty five days a year, but they're there so if
something happened, they would see it. Then you had the
older people like my mother and her posse. They would
(22:06):
sit in their window and they saw everything that went down.
So if you were around the corner acting up, your
mother got a call, or your grandmother says she's around
there showing off. Oh yes, And when you got home,
you got it. But they looked out for each other.
You felt safe, you know, you felt safe in your neighborhood.
Nobody was gonna bother you.
Speaker 7 (22:27):
This is why it's strange that supposedly no credible witnesses
actually saw what happened to Carol. And it's exactly why
when she went missing, the neighborhood was in full gear
to find her.
Speaker 4 (22:39):
The community was kind of upset at the very beginning
because there were lots of people out looking for Carol Sphinx,
because it was not like her not to come back home.
She should have been headed home, and she was seen
headed home in the.
Speaker 6 (22:53):
Direction of her house.
Speaker 4 (22:55):
They had lots of search parties, people looking, but to
no avail.
Speaker 7 (23:00):
I mean, I was born in nineteen seventy in La
They sounds very much like it was here. There was
always somebody out there is a you know, somebody's uncle
in a tank top drinking a forty and somebody's auntie
down the street sitting on their front porch, fanning themselves
with their church fans. And I keep wondering as I
read about these cases, how did nobody see anything?
Speaker 6 (23:22):
Because whoever did the cases fit right into the community,
never raised any suspicion at all, and that's how he
was able to do what he did. Nobody would would
question if they saw him talking to a little girl
or anything. They wouldn't They wouldn't question it. That's my
(23:42):
personal feeling on it.
Speaker 4 (23:44):
You know, like you said, there's always somebody out.
Speaker 7 (23:49):
While many in the community felt the police didn't protect
them and their neighbors as well as they could, officers
on the force in the district have a very different perspective.
Speaker 16 (24:00):
Very protective in our neighborhoods, even though we know we
hurt each other. We know about the guy in the neighborhood.
This is a weirdo, you know. We know about these
things in our families, even but let's something happen to them. Oh,
you know, we need to be real and that's the
only way we can heal. My name is Rita McCoy.
I'm a retired DC homicide detective. I was on the
(24:22):
Metropolitan Police Department, Washington, d C. I'm a Washingtonian. I'm
presently single. I don't even want to talk about all
them husbands I had. But I had a rack of husbands,
four to be exact, and three were police officers.
Speaker 7 (24:37):
Rita says that folks in the community tend to know
more than they're willing to tell, and for a police officer,
that's tricky to navigate.
Speaker 16 (24:45):
We had people all the time, the new family members,
people that knew and would not I ain't know snitch snitches,
get stitches and all that foolishness. This is your neighborhood,
you know. We had to start giving away money to
get people. And I'm telling you that the talk what
do you want?
Speaker 5 (25:05):
You know?
Speaker 16 (25:05):
And that's the hard part about us. We hate the police,
but yet the police call them to our neighborhoods more
than anywhere else. So what are you gonna do. You
gotta find it, you know that that area, you know
where you work with the police or whatever to get
what you want so you can have a safety.
Speaker 7 (25:23):
But Rita says there just wasn't enough trust between black
neighborhoods and white police officers.
Speaker 16 (25:29):
When I was a child, I remember the police being
called in the community. You know, it was all black
and the corps were white. They were white, and they
were just physically, like assault the two guys that had
been fighting or whatever, and sometimes didn't lock up anybody,
just beat them up and get back in the car.
Speaker 9 (25:51):
Leave.
Speaker 16 (25:52):
People take advantage of their authority. I saw a lot
of prejudice and racism on this department. I saw prejudice.
I say it was because it was black people. And
then racism I saw from the white officers. And a
lot of them did not grow up in this area.
(26:14):
They're from all over the place, from West Virginia, Southern Virginia.
Speaker 6 (26:19):
Whatever.
Speaker 16 (26:20):
They chewed, tobacco or you know, the things that were
not accustomed to in our community. But then I will
say that some of them, when they saw that you
were good, real police, they changed with you. But you know,
and it's like us too when we around all white people,
and you know, we are initially uncomfortable if you not
(26:44):
weren't raised around them, until you find that they are
like you.
Speaker 7 (26:51):
Comments like this suggest that somebody in the community likely
knew something about Carol, but wouldn't come forward to tell
the police, and with no lead, it seemed like the
story was over. But then less than three months later,
in July of nineteen seventy one, yet another girl went missing.
(27:29):
Darlina Denise Johnson was sixteen years old. She grew up
in a large family with five brothers and five sisters.
Darlinia was petite, about five feet two inches and one
hundred ten pounds. She lived in the same neighborhood as
Carol Spinks. Their homes were only three blocks apart. Darlinia
had a boyfriend and a job at the local rec
(27:49):
center a half mile or so from her apartment. Most
days she'd walk to and from work, and that was
her plan. On the morning of July eighth, nineteen seventy one,
in the stack of boxes at Detective Romayne Jenkins house,
we found a police report detailing statements given by Darlenia's mother,
Helen McNeil. She gave this account to police about the
(28:10):
day that Darlina went missing.
Speaker 17 (28:14):
On Thursday, July eighth, nineteen seventy one. I had to
be at d C General Hospital eight o'clock in the morning.
Before I left, I looked in and saw Darlina sleep.
Speaker 12 (28:23):
In her room.
Speaker 17 (28:25):
I told my son Nick to be sure that he
got her up to go to work at the Oxen
Hill Recreation Center. I came home from the clinic at
twelve noon, and she had gone that night. I didn't
look for her to come home on Friday. I expected
her in about five o'clock PM. I got home from
the store about six ten pm and asked the kids
if Darlena had been home, and they said they hadn't
(28:47):
seen her. I sent the kids around in the next
court and they asked the people if they had seen Darlina,
and they said no. Round about ten or ten thirty
PM on Friday, I called the precinct and they sent
two two police officers around. I told them everything and
they took down all the information. The next day the
police came back and got a picture of her. The
(29:10):
first thing Monday morning, I called Miss Ankor at the
Oxen Hill Playground. She said Darlena was supposed to go
on the camping trip, but that she didn't show. Then
Miss Anker says, do you know about a black car
that picks her up in the evening. She said that
this black car picked up Darlenia and another girl on Wednesday.
(29:30):
She said that the other girl said Darlenia acted like
she knew the fellow pretty well. The other girl insisted
that they let her out of the car and she
didn't know where they went after that. After I talked
to Miss Anker, I went across the hall and talked
to Miss Allan. I told Miss Allan that I had
called the recreation center and that Miss Anker had told
me about Darlenia getting in the black car. Her daughter,
(29:52):
Sylvia Allan told me that a fellow called Alfred drove
the black car and he hangs around Alabama Avenue.
Speaker 7 (30:00):
It seemed like Helen was on to something, but this
promising lead about a guy named Alfred in a black
car led nowhere. We know that at some point the
police did question Alfred. They even gave him sodium pentathal,
the so called truth serum, but he didn't crack, and
so they moved on. For the rest of that first week,
(30:20):
Helen was more or less on her own, calling around
asking people in the neighborhood if they'd seen Darlenia. She
called police stations and morgues in DC and in Prince
George's County. Some kids said they found Darlinia's body in
the nearby Oxen Hill high Rise apartment complex, but that
was also a dead end. The police reports showed that
(30:40):
something horrifying happened next, McNeil started to receive unsettling phone calls.
According to McNeil, one afternoon, she answered the phone and
a man spoke uh her daughter. Was this a message
from the killer or was it just a prank call?
We don't know. Of course, there was no caller. I
(31:02):
d in nineteen seventy one, and the record suggests that
the police didn't take those phone calls seriously. They had
very few follow up questions to McNeil's story, and they
never bring it up again in the police reports. Meanwhile,
there were rumors floating around the neighborhood about a dead
body left near the side of the two ninety five freeway,
(31:23):
and on July nineteenth, her body was officially found. One
man who found the body was Curtis Vincent, who worked
for the DC Department of Highways and Traffic. On July
twenty first, nineteen seventy one, he gave this statement to police.
Speaker 12 (31:38):
On Friday, July sixteenth, nineteen seventy one, I was on
duty and was at the highway garage at Second in
Bryant Streets, Northeast. I was working with Bill Ferrell. We
were looking at the lawnmower shop there, which is supervised
by mister Roy Tyler, and we were chatting with him.
Mister Roy Tyler asked us if we'd been out around
(31:59):
Firth Sterling and Route two ninety five lately. We asked why,
and Roy said that there was a body of a
dead lady out there, and he described the location to us.
He told us that he'd notified the police, but the
body was still out there, if I remember correctly, he
told us that the body had been out there about
a week. On Monday, July nineteenth, nineteen seventy one, I
(32:21):
was working with Bill and about one pm or so
we got to talking about what Roy had said about
the body, and we decided to go to the location
he described and see if we could locate the body
on two ninety five, about one hundred yards south of
Firth Sterling, on the north side of two ninety five,
I guess about ten feet from the embankment, we found
(32:43):
the body. I got the impression from the dress that
the body was that of a female. The body was
lying on the stomach with the head down the embankment
and the feet up toward Route two ninety five. As
far as I could tell, the body was clothed and
I definitely remember that she was wearing blue shorts. Other
than that, I recall a blouse. I do not remember
(33:07):
any other clothing.
Speaker 7 (33:09):
In the end, it was his coworker Bill, who had
a connection at the Metropolitan Police Department. Bill called his friend,
a police sergeant named Charles Baden, and only then, after
the body had been outside for over a week, did
the police finally recover it.
Speaker 10 (33:27):
The sad part about this is that there was actually
motorists that drove by on the super Busy Highway on
July twelfth, seven days prior to when her body was
actually recovered, and reported there's a body on the side
of the road. Multiple times people called in saying that
before she was finally removed days later, So if the
(33:49):
police had actually found her body, it may have not
been that decomposed five days prior.
Speaker 7 (33:56):
This is author Victoria Hester, who he heard from last episode.
She and her father Blaine, have written extensively on the
Freeway phantom case.
Speaker 11 (34:05):
We actually saw the autopsy photos of this, and all
of them are very disturbing. These are young girls, but
hers was very disturbing, just because she almost looked mummified.
It's July and Washington, d C. She's laying out exposed.
You know, the temperatures are all always in the eighties
ninety degrees. You know, it's just it was terrible. It
(34:27):
was just horrible.
Speaker 7 (34:29):
We found transcripts of the nine to one one calls
reporting Darlinia's body. This call came in at six fifty
am on July twelfth, a full week before she was
picked up.
Speaker 5 (34:41):
I think I got it uncontient in a mineral that
time in the morning. I hope everybody had their breakun
it that Tarling and Nive at the intersection. Oh, it
went over an embankment or laying over on the thigh
ant Purling and two ninety five. Yeah, oh, I'll bet
it's just an unconscious or just a man down.
Speaker 7 (35:05):
Forty minutes later, at seven thirty am, police received a
second call about the body.
Speaker 5 (35:11):
I help you, Yeah, I broke down on Route two
ninety five right opposite.
Speaker 3 (35:15):
Boiling Field Photo Center this morning.
Speaker 5 (35:18):
Yeah, sir, and there's a dead woman. I think it's
a woman. It could be a man lying in the bushes.
It's northbound on two ninety five, right opposite the photo
center of boiling Field. Okay, is it a pretty obvious thing? No,
it's in the bushes. You couldn't see it from the road. Okay, sir,
We'll send somebody else find it.
Speaker 7 (35:38):
As Blaine tells us, police followed up on these first
few reports about the body, but they couldn't have looked
very hard.
Speaker 11 (35:46):
Police did drive by, you know, they did a slow
drive by and looked and didn't see the body. But
people kept saying they're out there, and it was a
real embarrassment I think for law enforcement. And the body
was found fifteen feet from where Carol Spink's body had
been found, So you know, at the time, that was
(36:07):
the link that really tied these two together.
Speaker 7 (36:13):
That was perhaps the most shocking detail. Darlinia was found
only fifteen feet from where Carol Spinks had been found.
But still police didn't officially connect the two murders. We did, however,
find one police report where an officer interviewed a suspect
in Darlinia's murder named Alfred Henry Holmes. The officer asked
(36:34):
Holmes if he also knew about Carol Spinks, to which
he answered no. But other than this question, there's little
to suggest that the police department considered them connected. Meanwhile,
investigators were still trying to piece together what had actually
happened to Darlinia.
Speaker 10 (36:52):
There's lots of stories of meeting up with a boyfriend
or going to stay somewhere else, but in a time
before cell phones and ways to contact kid when they're
off doing whatever they're doing, it's hard to tell what happened.
There's not a whole lot of information about her specifically,
just because her body was so far decomposed.
Speaker 4 (37:10):
I think Darlenia went to meet the killer because she
she's the one who was decomposed, and we have nothing
on her case, nothing per see. But at this point
when this was read and she was still missing, right.
Speaker 7 (37:23):
This is Romayne Jenkins. We're sitting in her living room
going through boxes of evidence and discussing Darlinia Denise Johnson.
Romayne was especially frustrated by this murder.
Speaker 4 (37:34):
The police department was truly incompetent. I mean, let's face it.
She leaves home on July the eighth. The remains a
found I think July the twelfth. The guy who worked
for Department of DC Highways in traffic, he calls the police.
When his coworkers pick him up, he shows them the body.
(37:56):
They call the police and if you look at the
radio runs trans script of the radio runs. Every scout
car that was dispatched came back in ten eight nothing found. Well,
you're not gonna see about it if you don't stop
the car. If you're going sixty five miles an hour
down two ninety five, trying to keep up with traffic,
you're not going to look. So that was incompetence on
(38:16):
their part, totally incomfident because it might have been something,
some evidence that we missed because we did not have
a cause of death or her you know.
Speaker 7 (38:28):
So Darlinia's case was a dead end. But then just
a few weeks later, the killer would strike again. On
July twenty seventh, a ten year old girl named Brenda
Crockett went missing, and later that night, Brenda called home
and talked to her stepdad.
Speaker 5 (38:50):
I'm many Christian in.
Speaker 7 (38:52):
A white man's house to witness.
Speaker 13 (38:55):
Came the car and turned me to this.
Speaker 7 (38:57):
House my mother next time on Freeway Phantom.
Speaker 11 (39:15):
When I got there, I guess there was a crowd
starting to come out.
Speaker 4 (39:20):
Arriving on a scene. I was directed to where this
child was laying on the side of the road.
Speaker 6 (39:26):
She was the child of God.
Speaker 8 (39:28):
She loved church.
Speaker 13 (39:29):
She was going to refrigerate to eat raw bacon, but
you know the pigs were better back then.
Speaker 6 (39:37):
Asked her again, tell the man to come to the phone.
Speaker 7 (39:40):
I heard someone walk in heaven.
Speaker 3 (39:41):
She said, really low, I'll see you, and someone just
cut the phone.
Speaker 11 (39:46):
So the killer had kind of shifted at least from
the first case. He's not spending as much time with
the victims. He's killing them and now just dumping them.
Speaker 6 (39:55):
Whoever grabbed these young ladies grab them right in their
own Neighborhook.
Speaker 1 (40:08):
Freeway Fantom is a production of iHeartRadio, Tenderfoot TV, and
Black bar Mitzvah. Our host is Selese Hiley. The show
is written by Trevor Young, Jamie Albright and CELESE.
Speaker 16 (40:19):
Hilly.
Speaker 1 (40:19):
Executive producers on behalf of iHeart Radio include Matt Frederick
and Alex Williams, with supervising producer Trevor Young. Executive producers
on behalf of Tenderfoot TV include Donald Albright and Payne Lindsay,
with producers Jamie Albright and Tracy Kaplan. Executive producers on
behalf of Black bar Mitzvah include myself, Jay Ellis and
(40:39):
Aaron Bergman, with producer Sidney Fools. Lead researcher is Jamie Albright.
Artwork by Mister Soul two one six, original music by
Makeup and Vanity Set special thanks to a teammate, Uta
Beck Media and Marketing and the Nord Group. Tenderfoot TV
and iHeartMedia, as well as Black Bar Mitzvah, have increased
(41:00):
the reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction
of the person or persons responsible for their freeway phantom murders.
The previous reward of up to one hundred and fifty
thousand dollars offered by the Metropolitan Police Department has been matched.
A new total reward of up to three hundred thousand
dollars is now being offered. If you have any information
(41:20):
relating to these unsolved crimes, contact the Metropolitan Police Department
at area code two zero two seven two seven nine
zero ninety nine. For more information, please visit Freeway dashfanom
dot com. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio and Tenderfoot TV,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen
(41:41):
to your favorite shows. Thanks for listening.
Host
Celeste Headlee
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