May 17, 2023 • 50 mins
On April 25th, 1971, 13-year-old Carol Spinks mysteriously disappeared from her neighborhood in southeast Washington D.C. Six days later, her body was discovered off a nearby freeway. Investigators assumed this was a one-off murder. Little did they know, Carol was the first victim of D.C.'s first serial killer.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Freeway Phantom is available each week on Wednesdays. To hear
each episode ad free and one week early, check out
tenderfoot Plus at tenderfootplus dot com.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
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
(00:36):
not be suitable for everyone. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 3 (00:47):
My mother was very strict with us. So the rule
is when she leaves, the doll is closed and locked,
and you don't come out that doll. And her favorite
saying was, I don't care if Jesus Christ knock on
that door and say open it, you better not open it.
(01:08):
So that was the rue. We didn't open the door
for anybody. We were playing around, we were watching TV.
Everybody else was playing around where my sister Valerie knocked
on the door. I think I told them at first,
don't say anything. She knocked harder and I was like what.
(01:32):
She was like, open the door and I was like, no,
Mama not home. Open the door and I was like,
what do you want? She said, I want one of
y'all to go to the store for me. I said, Mama
not home, we can't come out. Baby said no, i'm'a go.
Ho'm'a go. Ho, i'm'a go, cause she didn't want us
to start a fight. Her and Valerie went out. I
(01:54):
guess about twenty thirty minutes. I'm like, she ain't back yet.
So I went across a hall where I knew my
sister was Valerie to see if she was back, and
she was like no. Now I'm getting scared cause she
not home and my mother gonna be coming soon. And
I'm go'a get the worst of it cause I'm the oldest.
(02:14):
I told them to stay in the house. I'm gonna
run up to the store. So I took the short
cut to go to the store and made it back.
She still wasn't at the house. I was hollering at
Valerie because I was upset and I was scared because
she hadn't gotten back home, and she sent her to
the store. I don't know what to do, and the
(02:37):
next thing I know, was getting late in the evening.
People just started coming around, you know, from the neighborhood
and the neighbors, and then somebody was like, Okay, we're
gonna just go searching. Everybody was like in groups of
fours and five out looking and I don't remember when
(02:59):
the post but I remember that night detectives came. I
didn't really think about the police. But when the detectives came,
I really realized.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
This was big.
Speaker 4 (03:12):
You know, it was serious.
Speaker 3 (03:14):
They never spoke to us, they talked to my mother.
You know, I didn't really know what was happening, what
was going on. It didn't make sense. And the only
thing that I was not understanding period was what is
my sister? Why nobody found her? What's going on?
Speaker 1 (03:43):
If you look up Freeway Phantom, you might find out
a little bit about this strange and tragic case, but
in all likelihood you're not going to find out much.
You'll learn that during the early nineteen seventies, a serial
killer murdered at least six young black girls in the Washington,
DC area. You might learn their names. You might hear
about a strange note left by the killer. You may
(04:05):
even come across a few suspects, but not much else,
and that's what makes the case of the Freeway phantom
so very, very strange. My name is Celeste Hedley. I'm
a journalist, author, and longtime public radio host based in Washington, DC.
Over the years, I've covered many stories of people of
(04:26):
color going missing in this city, a phenomenon that absorbed
the public consciousness in twenty seventeen on social media, when the.
Speaker 5 (04:34):
Washington DC Police Department tried to raise awareness about missing
children and teenagers by posting their images on social media,
the campaign backfired, sparking some national outrage and fears of
an epidemic of missing children of color.
Speaker 6 (04:50):
One of the most popular stories on our NBC app
this week is about missing girls. Our story debunks of
fake reports that fourteen girls went missing from DC in
just one day. DC police told us there are simply
sharing missing person cases more often on social media.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
It all started when a post went viral all over
social media saying young black girls were going missing at
an alarming rate in DC, and admits the firestorm that
particular post was proven to be untrue. However, behind the
social media frenzy was a certain reality that for decades,
people of color, particularly women, have been abducted or killed
(05:31):
across the Capital region, and their cases rarely resolved or
even fully investigated. That fact may be why most people
have never heard of the Freeway Phantom case, a case
that involved six young black girls who were all kidnapped, killed,
and discarded along the DC freeways in the early nineteen seventies,
(05:53):
A case that was never solved and sadly quickly forgotten.
But in the wake of the DC Missing Girl's Calm Conversation,
people started thinking about this case again. One of those
people was fellow DC journalist Cheryl Thompson, who used to
write for The Washington Post.
Speaker 7 (06:10):
While I was actually working on another story at the Post,
I stumbled across this press release of these six little
black girls. And the photo struck me because it was
in black and white, and so the first thing I
thought of, Oh my god, this is old, Like what
is this?
Speaker 8 (06:28):
And they just.
Speaker 7 (06:29):
Saw these six faces of these six little black girls,
and you could tell by their hairstyle and you know,
the bows and their hair, and it sort of gave
me pause, and I was like, what is this and
why are these murders unsolved? And so that's what sort
of prompted me.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
In twenty eighteen, Cheryl published a groundbreaking article about this
seemingly uncovered story, and that's how we and thousands of
others found out about the Freeway Phantom case. She says
the process was both difficult and significant.
Speaker 7 (07:00):
What it was about it again was the fact that, like,
how could this be, like six little black girls murdered
in the nation's capital. And so then I started researching
it and saw that there had been stories, some stories
over the years, but it it mainly faded from public view.
I asked one of our researchers at the Washington Post
to go back. I said, can you find some stories,
(07:22):
some microfish from you know, back in the early seventies
when this happened, And there were stories, but we were
really hard pressed to find stories that focused just on
these girls. In the early nineteen seventies, it was the
Vietnam War, and you know, DC was the place where
protesters came. There was a lot going on in the
nation's capital during that time. So when murders happened, when
(07:46):
killings happened, it made the news. But there were so
many killings at the time that they just didn't get
the individual attention like, when I found one of the cases,
it was lumped in with some other homicides in the district.
That's just the way it was. I mean, this was
the murder capital of the country back in the day.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
Cheryl decided to reach out to some people, and she
says her best sources have always been the detectives who
worked on the case.
Speaker 7 (08:13):
I have called some of my sources over the years
for stuff that might have happened thirty years ago, and
they remembered details, right, how do you remember this stuff?
So I then reached out to Detective Jenkins, Romaine Jenkins,
because I figured, man, this is a woman, a black woman,
and I know she had to take an interest in
(08:35):
this for a lot of reasons, and some of which
were the very ones that I mentioned. These kids could
have been her daughters.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
Detective Romayne Jenkins was a name that we kept hearing.
Speaker 9 (08:48):
We spoke with one of the investigators, Romaine Jenkins, and
she was like, if there.
Speaker 2 (08:52):
Was there was also another woman by the name of
Romayne Jenkins who was a sex squad detective.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
One of our pick Aparthose files that Romayne's God, it
would be an exciting.
Speaker 10 (09:03):
Interview Romayne Jenkins. She was one of the best.
Speaker 3 (09:07):
She knew all adult dealers, She knew all they girlfriends,
she was friends with all of them.
Speaker 9 (09:12):
She got the latest school.
Speaker 7 (09:14):
She knew who pulled the trigger.
Speaker 1 (09:16):
We decided to give Romayne Jenkins a call Hello, Yes,
and we soon realized just how much she knew about
this case.
Speaker 11 (09:28):
I investigated many serial rate cases, and none of them
are like to these today. Is this sum of a
pattern somewhere, But the only pattern you have with these
cases is the fact that they were young black females.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
As it turns out, Romayne was the lead investigator on
the Freeway Phantom case in the nineteen eighties. That was
almost ten years after the case went cold, and she
was the right person for the job. Romayne had an
impressive resume up to that point as a sergeant in
the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, DC back in the seventies.
She was the first woman and the only woman for
(10:05):
a long time in homicide. We told Romayne that we
were looking into the Freeway Phantom case and she agreed
to sit down with us. But before we made a
trip to DC to see her, we wanted to learn
more about her life and how she eventually came to
investigate this case.
Speaker 12 (10:22):
I am a native person from Washington, d C. I
attended school here. I joined the Metropolitan Police Department June
twenty first, nineteen sixty five, and at that time there
were only about maybe thirty police females on the department
(10:42):
and they were housed at something called the Woman's Bureau,
and they did mostly social work, abandoned children, missing children.
Then they joined us with something called the Youth Division,
and that was the male counterpart of the Women's Bureau.
And I stayed there for two years and I basically
(11:02):
investigated cases involving battered children, juvenile offenders. We did missing
persons and things like that. And then homicide decided they
needed a female to handle their baby death and abortion
cases because at that time abortion was illegal in the
District of Columbia.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
So Romayne went to work in homicide. She was there
for approximately four years investigating battered children and abortion cases.
Speaker 12 (11:30):
After about four years in the homicide squad, I went
to the seventh District because at that time they decided
they wanted to put policewomen in uniform and put them
in the patrol division. And at that time I was
a supervised I was a sergeant because I made sergeant
when I was in homicide, so they wanted to see
(11:51):
if females could supervise males in the prol division. I
went to the seventh District and that was quite an experience.
Everything was totally new to me, but I made it suit.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
During this time, Romayne got married and started a family.
She eventually decided being a patrol officer wasn't what she wanted,
so she applied for Sex Squad, which investigates sexually heinous crimes,
and I stayed.
Speaker 12 (12:17):
There ten years as a supervisor. And from there I
went to the US Attorney's Office, where I supervised seven
detectives and we handled cases. We worked up cases for
the US Attorney's Office, and that's basically what I did.
That's basically my career.
Speaker 1 (12:34):
It was will in homicide in the early seventies that
Romayne first heard about the so called Freeway Phantom murders.
Though other officers were assigned to the case, she helped
canvas neighborhoods and became intimately familiar with the case details.
Years passed and remain heard little about the Freeway Phantom.
Fifteen years after the murders in nineteen eighty seven, Romayne
(12:55):
decided to reopen the case herself while working in the
US Attorney's offic us, and it ended up becoming the
case that would consume Romayne's career and life to this day.
When we told Romayne we were investigating the Freeway Phantom case,
she revealed to us that she had held onto boxes
and boxes of evidence, case files, and other documents. Even
(13:20):
after retiring from the MPD. Now, at eighty years old,
Romayne still has those stacks of boxes sitting in her
bedroom or scattered across her living room floor. We asked
her if we could talk to her in person and
look through some of the boxes. At first, she was hesitant,
but after we talked about our mutual desire to solve
(13:40):
these murders, she started to open up, and eventually she
agreed to an in person interview. So the Tenderfoot team
met up with me in DC and we headed to
our house.
Speaker 4 (14:11):
Oh, he brings me two at a ten.
Speaker 9 (14:13):
Okay, we got you and we can take him back up.
Speaker 4 (14:16):
If that's no, you can leave man that you got
him back, okay, because they'll either go downstairs. They'll probably
end up going downstairs.
Speaker 1 (14:26):
Okay, you wanted to sit at the table.
Speaker 12 (14:27):
No, set him idea on the floor.
Speaker 1 (14:29):
Okay, I'm in Romayne Jenkins home in Washington, DC, not
far from where I live. In her home, Romayne has
what's likely the largest collection of documents on the freeway
Phantom case.
Speaker 4 (14:42):
Open, open up.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
I'm gonna open him up for you, all right, I
will just pull him out and we can take a
look at what's here.
Speaker 10 (14:52):
And this is Brenda Crockett.
Speaker 1 (14:56):
Oh my god, she looks This is the one that
was she the one that was barefoot.
Speaker 4 (15:00):
That's a ten year old.
Speaker 1 (15:01):
She's tiny, just a tiny baby. She was the one
that went to the store barefoot.
Speaker 12 (15:09):
And the only way she was identified with her mother
identified with the clothing.
Speaker 4 (15:14):
That's all they had.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
The amount of information we came across was astounding. She
had crime scene photos, original police reports, suspect lists. Most
of this we had never seen before. We asked Romain
how she came to acquire all of these documents.
Speaker 4 (15:35):
Basically by talking to detectives who were on the actual
scenes of the cases. A lot of them gave me
their notebooks, their notes, some had copies of files. They
gave me that going to the police department, like Prince
Georgia's county. They turned over all their files to me
because they micro fished the file so they didn't need
(15:55):
the hard copies and they were going to dispose of them,
so I said, well, I'll take them. So that's how
I inherited a lot of that information. Then, with the
cooperation of the FBI, they assigned a case agent to
work with me and I was allowed to go into
their files.
Speaker 8 (16:12):
Well.
Speaker 4 (16:12):
They assigned me an office at a desk and one
of their investigators and I would go to the FBI
building every day and read through documents and they'd make
copies of whatever I needed. Also, with Naval Investigative Services,
they were getting ready to get rid of some files,
so I was able to make copies of the things
(16:33):
that they had and nobody told me no, even the
Metropolitan Police Department. There were people who still had information
and they turned it over to me. So that's how
a mass information in the files.
Speaker 1 (16:45):
As Romayne said, law enforcement was disposing of the original
case files. Had Romayne not tracked down and preserved these files,
we would have no original documents to view today. This
is significant because information in those boxes may provide new
insight into the case. Throughout this podcast, we're going to
(17:07):
reveal what we found in those boxes and maybe get
one step closer to finding the Freeway Phantom. But first
we need to take a step back to talk about
the basics. What were the Freeway Phantom murders, What happened?
We need to go back to the beginning to fully
understand this story. The truth is there's not a ton
(17:30):
of existing scholarship on this case. In our research, we
came across only two books written about the Freeway Phantom
most people have never heard of. The first book called
The Mystery of the Freeway Fantom, published in nineteen eighty
three by Wilma W.
Speaker 8 (17:45):
Harper.
Speaker 1 (17:46):
Miss Harper is closely related to these cases, which you'll
hear about later. In the book's preface, Harper explains why
she wrote it, saying, quote, when I first undertook the
task of writing a social study of the families and
friends associated with the Freeway Phantom cases in September nineteen
seventy two, my one objective was to assist the police
(18:07):
department in apprehending the killer or killers of the seven
black girls who'd been raped, murdered, and their bodies placed
on the various highways around the city of Washington, d C.
It was my belief that the secret of who had
killed the girls could be found in one or more
of the social institutions frequented by these girls or by
their parents. Throughout this podcast, Harper's words will take us
(18:32):
back in time and provide us with a first hand
account of what it was like to live through these
serial murders. The second book we found was called Tantamount,
The Pursuit of the Freeway Phantom serial Killer, published in
twenty nineteen. This book was written by a father daughter
team of true crime authors.
Speaker 9 (18:54):
I'm Blamed Pardo. I've written over eighty books. I'd write
primarily as science fiction, true crime, military history, political thrillers,
things along those lines. This is a topic we've been
writing a lot about, which is true crimes, and we
tend to focus on the unsolved cases, especially surreal killing
pieces that remain open over the years.
Speaker 13 (19:17):
And I'm Victoria Hester. I've written a total of four
true crime books alongside my dad and co author Blaine.
The thing that really got me into true crime was
actually my dad. Growing up. Our bonding moment was over
the Zodiac, which go figure, that's a normal father daughter thing.
But ever since then, I've been kind of hooked on
true crime and it's fun to research. We enjoy the
(19:40):
journey of research and then putting it all onto paper.
Speaker 9 (19:43):
We had just finished our book on the Colonial Parkway
murders and we were looking for the next project to
get into. And it was really a matter of let's
look in the local vicinity because we like dealing with
people we can go interview and spend time with. So
we started looking in Virginia, Maryland, Washington, DC to see
(20:06):
if what open cold cases were out there, and there's
a lot of them. I outlined a number of them
for Victoria and said, okay, you get to pick this one.
Was kind of an easy one to do in the
case of the freeway fantom. Looking at this one, it
was like, Okay, this one's got some meat to it.
This is an interesting case.
Speaker 1 (20:24):
We asked Blaine in Victoria to walk us through the
basics of the case, starting with the first victim.
Speaker 9 (20:31):
First one that disappeared was a thirteen year old Carol
Dionze Things. She disappeared on April twenty fifth, nineteen seventy one.
She's found on the Anacostia Freeway, which is IWO ninety five.
She's about two hundred yards south of the Suitland Parkway
and her body's found by a.
Speaker 10 (20:48):
Group of children.
Speaker 9 (20:49):
It's a major freeway cutting right through the city. She
had disappeared on the twenty fifth, but wasn't found until
April thirtieth.
Speaker 13 (20:59):
Soh The next victim is Darlinia Denise Johnson. The reason
why we put the middle names in with each girl
is because it does play a huge role down the
role in the investigation of the middle named Denise. So
that's why we make a point to mention that she
was sixteen when she disappeared on July eighth, nineteen seventy one.
(21:20):
Her body was found July nineteenth, nineteen seventy one in
the evening. Her mother filed a missing persons report and
her body was actually found on the Anacostia Freeway, so
the same freeway that Carol Spinkx was found off of.
Speaker 10 (21:36):
We're inda fake.
Speaker 9 (21:37):
Krockett was ten years old. She disappeared on July twy seventh,
nineteen seventy one. Her body was found off of Route fifty,
which is one of the major thoroughfares in Chevrolet. She
had been sexually assaulted and strangled. She had been left
on the grassy shoulder of John Hanson Highway. She was
(21:57):
found face up, and it was really only a short
period of time after she had disappeared, 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 1 (22:14):
Just over two months later, the fourth victim was discovered.
Her name was Nina Moosha Yates.
Speaker 13 (22:21):
She was twelve years old and she was found on
October first, nineteen seventy one. She was a seventh grader
and she was a very quiet and well behaved child.
In the evening, she went to the safeway that was
a few blocks away from her home to buy a
bag of sugar at eight forty five pm.
Speaker 1 (22:41):
Then a month and a half later, the fifth.
Speaker 9 (22:44):
Victim, Brenda Denise Woodard, was eighteen years old. November fifteenth,
nineteen seventy one. She disappeared in the evening. She had
gone to a night class, left with a young man.
They went to Ben's Chili Bowl in DC, which is
this iconic restaurant, and she rode the bus to go
(23:04):
home and she was last scene around the eighth and
H Street intersections, but her roommate reported by eleven thirty
that she hadn't come home. She was found along the
Baltimore Washington Parkway as well by a Chevrolet police officer.
She had been strangled, and what was different with her
(23:26):
is she had also been stabbed.
Speaker 1 (23:29):
And finally the following year. The sixth and last confirmed victim.
Speaker 13 (23:35):
Diane Williams, is seventeen. She was found on September fifth,
nineteen seventy two, ten months after the last case with Brenda.
Her body was found the very next day. She was
reported missing by her father when he came home at
eight am that morning. She had visited her boyfriend, which
(23:57):
was pretty normal thing for her to do, and was
told to be home by ten thirty. The night before,
her boyfriend escorted her to the bus stop, so we
know that she got at least.
Speaker 10 (24:08):
To the bus.
Speaker 9 (24:10):
If you think about it, so many of them are
caught going to a grocery store running an errand it's
not like something that's a routine where he's following them
for several days and knows their pattern and how to
intercept them. These are all victims of opportunity.
Speaker 1 (24:29):
Six victims all young black girls from around the same area,
all disposed of in identical ways. When we sat down
with Romainne Jenkins, we asked her about her first involvement
in the case.
Speaker 4 (24:42):
Well, at the time when Carol Spinks was murdered, I
was in the homicide unit, and at that time I
was the only female in the unit. I was interested
in the case. But what happened was we were inundated
with the Mayai demonstrations.
Speaker 1 (25:01):
From May first to May fifth, nineteen seventy one, thousands
of people gathered in Washington, d C. To protest the
Vietnam War. This would become the May Day Protests.
Speaker 14 (25:11):
Some one hundred and seventy five thousand people from all
walks of life, with differing ideologies and purposes, marched from
the White House to the Capitol.
Speaker 1 (25:21):
More than five thousand Metropolitan Police Department officers, including Romaine,
were tasked with shutting down the demonstrations. By the end
of the week, over twelve thousand protesters had been arrested
to this day, the largest mass arrest in US history.
Speaker 4 (25:36):
And so I never got the chance to go and
dig into the investigation like I could have. The first
day I recalled, we were going out on the case,
and a division command to stop me and said where
are you going. I said, well, we had a little
girl murdered over in southeast and we're going to the
neighborhood and we're going to work on the case. He says, not,
(25:57):
this is May Day demonstrations. This is a red alert
for the police department. You will get involved in the demonstrations.
Speaker 1 (26:05):
But Romayne went home that night and thought more about
Carol Spinks. She was familiar with the neighborhood and something
just didn't add up.
Speaker 4 (26:14):
The girls come from neighborhoods that are densely populated with
black people, their kids in and out, their cars going
up and down Wheeler Road. You know, there's never a
time it's not busy. So you could send you a
child to the store. Nobody's gonna bother your child or what.
The neighborhood never even thought like that.
Speaker 1 (26:34):
No, they were even safer because there's always somebody somebody.
Speaker 4 (26:36):
Right, that's right, And everybody knew everybody, you know, they said, oh,
that's miss so and So's daughter, it's time to be
in the house. It's close and dark, I mean, and
people looked out for each other, you know.
Speaker 1 (26:54):
I've spent my entire career working in public media as
a radio journalist and national talks. One of the things
that I love about working for public radio is that
I rarely have to report on crime. While we never
neglect a story about terrorism, mass shootings, or corporate malfeasance,
individual crime stories don't generally get coverage, and I like that.
(27:19):
I like that I don't have to dig into personal
stories of infidelity or rage or greed, or interview family
members who've just lost a loved one to a drive
by shooting. So you might wonder what I'm doing hosting
a podcast series about a string of murders in Washington,
d C. A city that had so many homicides in
the early nineteen nineties that it was known as the
(27:40):
murder capital of the United States. There's one easy answer
to that question and one more complicated answer. The easy
answer is that I'm so afraid of serial killers that
I'm fascinated by them. They terrify me. I simply can't
understand the kind of mind that would take a stranger's
(28:03):
life for no reason other than because they enjoy it.
That seems more than deranged to me. It seems inhuman
serial killers are incredibly rare. According to the FBI, less
than one percent of murders are committed by a serial killer,
but were also not very good at catching them. The
(28:24):
founder of the Murder Accountability Project, a nonprofit that collects
information about murders, believes that a good number of unsolved
homicides may have been committed by serial killers. So the
chance to dig into both the mindset of such a
killer and the techniques for finding them was very tempting.
(28:44):
More importantly, though, I couldn't understand why the Freeway Phantom
had never been caught and why most people have never
heard of him. The Phantom killed at least six young girls,
probably more. The so called Son of s Sam also
killed six people, and there are a bunch of movies
about him, and even an episode of Seinfeld ed Gean,
(29:07):
the Plainfield ghoul who inspired the killers in Psycho, Silence
of the Lambs and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, was convicted
of killing two people and may have killed as many
as seven. This is not admiration for perpetrators with high
body counts, but a legitimate question. How could someone kill
so many young girls and be forgotten? The Freeway Phantom
(29:30):
is worth talking about because the larger issues that surrounded
his killing spree still endanger the lives of girls, and
especially black girls. And before we go any further, we
want to make an important announcement. After over fifty years
of waiting, we believe the victims' families deserve answers. That's
(29:51):
why Tenderfoot TV and iHeartMedia are matching the one hundred
and fifty thousand dollars reward offered by the Metropolitan Police Department.
This brings the total reward for information leading to the
arrest and conviction of the person or persons responsible for
these murders to three hundred thousand dollars. If you have
information that may lead to the identification of the Freeway Phantom,
(30:14):
it's time to speak up. Tips can be provided to
MPD or Tenderfoot TV at tips at tenderfoot dot TV.
With all of that said, it's time we dig deep
into this case. So to fully understand these murders, we
need to examine the crimes individually, starting with the very
first victim, Carol Spinks.
Speaker 3 (30:56):
We grew up at ten thirty four while to place
Southeast Water Place is on the top part of Valley
Green infamous Valley Green, very well known for a lot
of activity, negative activity, but they're good people in the
worst of places.
Speaker 1 (31:18):
This is Evander Spinks, the older sister of Carol Spinks,
the first victim. At the top of the episode, you
heard Evander talk about the night that her sister Carol
went missing.
Speaker 3 (31:29):
I can't say my mother was the best person in
the world, but my mother took care of us. We
could not rip and run the street. We could not
go anywhere. You better not talk about no, boy, you
stay very close to home. We played outside like any
normal kids have, races in the street, played kickball, double
(31:53):
dutch boy games outside. Water Place was a well known street,
but there were a lot of good families on that street.
Things happened on that street that were bad, but we
never witnessed anything because we weren't out at night. Whatever happened,
we would find out the next day or through your
(32:15):
friends if they saw something, or their parents saw something
and they was discussing it with their girlfriend and boyfriend,
or do you know how adults talk. There's always one
or two kids hanging around listening getting to school, so
that everybody else couldn't know what was going on. But
That's how we found out things. Never that we were
(32:36):
involved around or near, because my mother didn't play that.
Speaker 1 (32:41):
On April twenty fifth, nineteen seventy one, the day Carol
would go missing, the entire Sphinx family, with the exception
of their mother, was home.
Speaker 3 (32:50):
I was home fourteen, Carl and Carling was home thirteen,
Tanya was home twelve, One was home eleven, and Joseph
was home one or two years.
Speaker 1 (33:06):
So Carol and Carolyn Spinks were twin sisters. Their nicknames
were Babe and Yayay, respectively.
Speaker 3 (33:15):
They looked identical, they were identical. They could sometimes fool us,
but me not that much because they had different personalities Baybe.
Carol was more laid back and quiet. Carolyn Yaya a
(33:36):
mouthpiece and a social butterfly. But they stuck together. You
wouldn't see one ten feet further from the other one.
They were always together. My mom and all that.
Speaker 8 (33:53):
Brothers and sisters. They knew us apart, but of our
own friends that we had outside of the house, some
of them didn't. Now. We dressed it like you could
forget it.
Speaker 1 (34:04):
This is Carolyn Spinx. She was incredibly close with her
twin sister, Carol.
Speaker 14 (34:09):
Oh we did okay.
Speaker 8 (34:11):
We of course played dogs at each other's hair. We
dressed it like we food the teachers.
Speaker 14 (34:16):
We jumped double dutch, played Jack's, all kinds of stuff.
We did everything together.
Speaker 8 (34:22):
She was smart. She was very smart. She wasn't a
smart mouth as I was. Then she was smart. It
was funny then she was. She was my friend. That
was my left hand because I'm right here, so she
was my left hand.
Speaker 14 (34:37):
That day.
Speaker 8 (34:37):
I wish, Oh my god, I wish I could take
it back.
Speaker 14 (34:41):
Wish I could take that day back.
Speaker 8 (34:45):
That day, my mom told us do not go outside.
So we al was in the house. I don't even
know what we were doing, but I know it was me,
event and baby, and my baby brother was home because
he was a baby, and my other brother. All of us,
all six of us, was in the house. And I
remember when battery knocked on the door. I said, see
(35:07):
when somebody go to the store, and was like no,
Mom said no, Mom said, don't go out. I don't
know what made her say I'll go. I don't know,
but I was like, I ain't gone, No, I'm gonna
get us. I ain't getting no beating. And my mother
didn't play.
Speaker 1 (35:24):
But for whatever reason, Carol volunteered to go to the store,
and so off she went.
Speaker 8 (35:31):
Didn't think nothing of it right then and there. The
next thing I knew, I was like, ain't even renut.
Speaker 11 (35:38):
She didn't come back.
Speaker 8 (35:40):
And I remember I said that I went out that door.
I'm like, no, I gotta go to a vatamy. She
ain't come back. We got to go to the store,
and I remember me and Batteries went to the store
and we asked the man did he see it? And
he said, yeah, he seen the girl look just like me,
and she had her she got her stuff, and that
was it. We came back home. We called my mother
and she came home and then she called the police.
(36:03):
I remember she called the police and they said they
can't do nothing.
Speaker 10 (36:08):
Do you remember why they said they couldn't do anything.
Speaker 8 (36:11):
Because they said you gotta be twenty four hours. I
remember that well, in like a couple of hours. Nah,
something ain't right. Mm hm. I knew something was wrong.
I knew it. I told her I'd be something wrong,
something wrong. Mm hmm.
Speaker 10 (36:28):
During that time when you didn't know what had happened
to her, when she was just missing, what were you
thinking had happened?
Speaker 8 (36:36):
I thought somebody had got her or did something to her.
Speaker 10 (36:39):
You did.
Speaker 8 (36:40):
I knew something had happened to her. I knew it
did because she wouldn't run away. We never ran away
from home. We never did any of that. So I
already knew something was wrong. I knew something bad had happened.
I knew that, I just didn't know what. But after
like the second day, that's when I started feeling the pains.
And I used to sit on the bottom months event
(37:00):
in this rock, and I would get pained and I'll
be in and out. Oh my god, it was terrible.
It was Oh god, it was the worst. It was
the worst. I still feel pain to this day.
Speaker 1 (37:15):
Search parties were dispatched, the community was determined to find Carol,
but they never did. And then, according to the official reports,
five days after Carol Spinks's disappearance, a group of kids
were playing by the side of Interstate two ninety five
when they discovered Carol's body. But Romayne Jenkins has always
been skeptical of this report. Here's how she described it
(37:38):
when we talked to her over the phone.
Speaker 12 (37:40):
There's no indication how her body was discovered. No after
the crowds get say of course they called the police,
But what initially caused somebody to say there's a body
on two ninety five. I don't understand it. Why would
the kids, even kids wouldn't even be playing on two
ninety five. There's nothing, There's no reason for them to
(38:01):
have been there unless they were told there was a
body and they want to see what it was, you know,
But who said who started it? Even though when she
was missing, you know, they had locks of group out
searching for her and so forth, but there was just
nothing but for someone to jump over the rail and
turn that body over. Man. People just don't do that.
(38:24):
Most people don't even want to see a dead body.
My mind questions a lot of things.
Speaker 1 (38:31):
We were curious to see what Romayne was talking about,
so we found the coordinates for where Carol's body had
been found, right off the Itune ninety five highway just
to our right you can see in the distant Suitland Parkway,
and the police reports say that Carol Spink's body was
found about fifteen hundred feet south of Suitland, which is
(38:51):
about where we are. The thing is is that, you know,
Romayne brought up the idea that why were there people
near here? To find the body. And I gotta say
she has a point. I mean, even fifty years ago,
this would have still been an industrial park. There's nothing here.
There's no stores, there's no homes. This is clearly an
(39:13):
highway access road with nothing but industrial buildings. And you
can look at these buildings and even though Verizon is
in them now, these buildings have been here for fifty years.
So what were they doing here? Why were they walking
along the highway? And again, remember we're talking about a
highway that didn't have these lights. It would have been dark,
(39:35):
and I just she really has a point. How could
they have stumbled on this body? It just over and
over in this case, you think somebody knew something, someone
did It seems impossible. But here we are, and you
have to imagine as you're standing at I two ninety five,
and obviously I two ninety five did not have this
(39:56):
many lanes back then. We saw the photos. But you
have to imagine someon and just driving up this highway
with a dead girl's body in their car, stopping the
car right here, pulling her body out of his car,
and then placing it. It's distressing and incomprehensible. Yeah, Carolyn,
(40:20):
Spinks says she doesn't remember much about hearing that Carol
was dead, only that she remembers feeling it.
Speaker 14 (40:27):
I'm feeling he was killing her. Wris, she was gone
on him days. I felt everything.
Speaker 10 (40:31):
What did your family say to you?
Speaker 8 (40:33):
They know something was wrong with me.
Speaker 14 (40:35):
They knew something was wrong because I used to sit
and roll, just sit on the bait and rock and
rock and cry and hold myself, and then something is wrong,
something was hurting.
Speaker 1 (40:49):
A few days later, the family held a public funeral
for Carol.
Speaker 8 (40:53):
Oh my god, that was the worst day of her life.
Speaker 14 (40:57):
I didn't know what it was.
Speaker 8 (40:58):
They had never been to a field before, because we did.
I didn't know what it was. We went to this
funeral home first.
Speaker 14 (41:07):
I remember they took us to get these white dresses
and shoes and stuff.
Speaker 8 (41:13):
And then we went in this funeral home and they
had this noise.
Speaker 14 (41:16):
I guess it was the piano or whatever it is,
and that noise Ooh, it was curb. And then they
had the big gray casket. I di ain't know what
it was, but it was closed. I remember that it
was closed, and I remember all these people. It was
so many people. I remember there was so many people
(41:37):
and then we opened the casket and I said, I
asked them who was that? Then they said, that's musaid.
I said, no, it's not. When I looked at that face,
I was like, oh my god, who was that?
Speaker 8 (41:50):
He looked like a monster.
Speaker 14 (41:52):
And they said I passed out of something. Something happened
to me. I don't know what happened. Well, when I
woke up the next time, I remember we was back
at home. I don't remember anything else.
Speaker 10 (42:05):
So you said your family never talked about it after
the funeral, nobody even mentioned her.
Speaker 14 (42:13):
They did, but I'd never want to hear it. I
didn't want to hear it.
Speaker 10 (42:17):
And you think that it was an until you were
an adult that you were able to hear about her
or talk about her.
Speaker 8 (42:25):
Yeah, Actually it was after I got married to my husband,
who lived on our block. He knew my sister. When
he told me one day we talked about it, because
we never even talked about it for a long time,
but he told me he carried my sister Casky, And
I said, no, you didn't.
Speaker 14 (42:43):
He said, yes, I did.
Speaker 8 (42:44):
My mother had a book, a whole book of the funeral,
and I was always I never wanted to look at it,
but this one my mother was still living.
Speaker 14 (42:53):
So one day I just went over went to look
at the book and I saw him current her casket
and when he told me, that's what I said, I
need to talk. I needed to talk to somebody because
I just can't.
Speaker 8 (43:05):
Couldn't keep hold of it because I know it was hurting.
It was hurting me.
Speaker 14 (43:10):
After a while, after I had my kids and my
sister told my kids, that's when ITHER just started to
try to talk about it.
Speaker 8 (43:16):
Me and my husband talking a little bit from time
to time, but I didn't want to talk about it.
It was nothing to talk about.
Speaker 10 (43:22):
You have you talked with others in your family since then?
Speaker 8 (43:27):
Yes, most of me and my sister Evan talk about
it more than anybody, but not nobody else really.
Speaker 1 (43:35):
Yvan Is Evander spinks.
Speaker 3 (43:39):
My brothers have never mentioned one way to other caroling
it hurts her. She says, never wanted to talk about it,
and I've always wanted to talk about.
Speaker 10 (43:50):
It because I can't forget.
Speaker 3 (43:53):
My sister Valerie is never talked or spoke about it
that I know of, so I had to over the
years keep talking, yeah, yay, carling about it, and I
know she can't forget, but I know she hurts behind it.
(44:13):
That's why her entire life changed, and it wasn't for
the better, totally the wrong way. I think the first
time all of us got together it was a couple
of years ago because it bothered me all my life
that I could go and sit where I knew my
(44:37):
sister's body was, but there was nothing there to show
me that she was there. So we got to talk
about it. It's a hurtful thing, but we gotta do it,
and you just never know. Something could pop up. Something
just might get triggered, or you may have seen something
(44:58):
or heard something. We don't want to do it. It's
not like we want to be recognized, because we still
get recognized as soon as somebody hear the name Spinx.
Speaker 2 (45:11):
Oh, Spink, Spinks.
Speaker 3 (45:13):
Oh, I know about the Spinx family. You don't know
about the Spins family. You don't even know about the
incident that happened to the Spins family. My sister was
an innocent little girl. People say, you know, these kids
fast they grow. She was out there having sex, not
(45:33):
with my mother, that's a no. She was an innocent
little girl that was taken from her family and abused.
We want to know why. As a young teenager, I
(45:55):
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. And today
I'll be sixty five years old this month and I
(46:19):
still feel like they don't give a damn. It probably
was the police, was somebody that worked with the police.
That's the only thing really made sense to me. People
are everywhere. Somebody saw it, and we still want to know,
and it still hurts. We just want to know why
(46:43):
and what happened.
Speaker 4 (46:52):
The homicide detectives termed the cases the little girl cases.
Speaker 14 (46:57):
This child was laying on the side of the road.
Speaker 8 (47:00):
I wouldn't go no way. I would call up my house.
Speaker 1 (47:04):
Those first five murders should have been a huge warning
bell for the police.
Speaker 3 (47:09):
We just want to know what happened.
Speaker 4 (47:10):
This person must have saw that. They were thinking that
maybe it's just one person, and he says, they need
to know. This is me.
Speaker 8 (47:18):
I thought that they would catch him. I thought it
was just a matter of time.
Speaker 1 (47:23):
I'm Celeste Headley and this is Freeway Phantom Next time
on Freeway Phantom.
Speaker 13 (47:33):
People were scared, I mean, Price was scared.
Speaker 8 (47:36):
Children were scared. They wanted to know what more police
could do.
Speaker 14 (47:40):
What were they doing?
Speaker 9 (47:42):
He kept her for several days as prisoner.
Speaker 12 (47:45):
I don't know.
Speaker 9 (47:48):
When the first victims went missing.
Speaker 10 (47:50):
There was a really kind of a muted police response.
Speaker 4 (47:54):
You follow a lead until it takes you nowhere. They
got all kinds of leads. Everybody was a suspect.
Speaker 15 (48:01):
I got home from the store about six ' ten
pm and asked the kids if Darlenia had been home,
and they said they hadn't 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.
Speaker 2 (48:13):
Roy said that.
Speaker 10 (48:13):
There was a body of a dead lady out there.
Speaker 2 (48:16):
He told us that he'd notified the police, but the
body was still out there. Freeway Fantom is a production
of iHeartRadio, Tenderfoot TV and Black Bar MITZVAH. Our host
is CELESE.
Speaker 14 (48:32):
Hiley.
Speaker 2 (48:33):
The show is written by Trevor Young, Jamie Albright and CELESE.
Speaker 8 (48:36):
Hiley.
Speaker 2 (48:37):
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
(48:57):
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
Beckmedia and Marketing and the Nord Group. Tenderfoot TV and iHeartMedia,
as well as Black Bar Mitzvah have increased the reward
(49:18):
for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the
person or persons responsible for their Freeway phanom 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
relating to these unsolved crimes, contact the Metropolitan Police Department
(49:41):
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
to your favorite shows. Thanks for listening.
Freeway Phantom is available each week on Wednesdays. To hear
each episode ad free and one week early, check out
tenderfoot Plus at tenderfootplus dot com.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
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
(00:36):
not be suitable for everyone. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 3 (00:47):
My mother was very strict with us. So the rule
is when she leaves, the doll is closed and locked,
and you don't come out that doll. And her favorite
saying was, I don't care if Jesus Christ knock on
that door and say open it, you better not open it.
(01:08):
So that was the rue. We didn't open the door
for anybody. We were playing around, we were watching TV.
Everybody else was playing around where my sister Valerie knocked
on the door. I think I told them at first,
don't say anything. She knocked harder and I was like what.
(01:32):
She was like, open the door and I was like, no,
Mama not home. Open the door and I was like,
what do you want? She said, I want one of
y'all to go to the store for me. I said, Mama
not home, we can't come out. Baby said no, i'm'a go.
Ho'm'a go. Ho, i'm'a go, cause she didn't want us
to start a fight. Her and Valerie went out. I
(01:54):
guess about twenty thirty minutes. I'm like, she ain't back yet.
So I went across a hall where I knew my
sister was Valerie to see if she was back, and
she was like no. Now I'm getting scared cause she
not home and my mother gonna be coming soon. And
I'm go'a get the worst of it cause I'm the oldest.
(02:14):
I told them to stay in the house. I'm gonna
run up to the store. So I took the short
cut to go to the store and made it back.
She still wasn't at the house. I was hollering at
Valerie because I was upset and I was scared because
she hadn't gotten back home, and she sent her to
the store. I don't know what to do, and the
(02:37):
next thing I know, was getting late in the evening.
People just started coming around, you know, from the neighborhood
and the neighbors, and then somebody was like, Okay, we're
gonna just go searching. Everybody was like in groups of
fours and five out looking and I don't remember when
(02:59):
the post but I remember that night detectives came. I
didn't really think about the police. But when the detectives came,
I really realized.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
This was big.
Speaker 4 (03:12):
You know, it was serious.
Speaker 3 (03:14):
They never spoke to us, they talked to my mother.
You know, I didn't really know what was happening, what
was going on. It didn't make sense. And the only
thing that I was not understanding period was what is
my sister? Why nobody found her? What's going on?
Speaker 1 (03:43):
If you look up Freeway Phantom, you might find out
a little bit about this strange and tragic case, but
in all likelihood you're not going to find out much.
You'll learn that during the early nineteen seventies, a serial
killer murdered at least six young black girls in the Washington,
DC area. You might learn their names. You might hear
about a strange note left by the killer. You may
(04:05):
even come across a few suspects, but not much else,
and that's what makes the case of the Freeway phantom
so very, very strange. My name is Celeste Hedley. I'm
a journalist, author, and longtime public radio host based in Washington, DC.
Over the years, I've covered many stories of people of
(04:26):
color going missing in this city, a phenomenon that absorbed
the public consciousness in twenty seventeen on social media, when the.
Speaker 5 (04:34):
Washington DC Police Department tried to raise awareness about missing
children and teenagers by posting their images on social media,
the campaign backfired, sparking some national outrage and fears of
an epidemic of missing children of color.
Speaker 6 (04:50):
One of the most popular stories on our NBC app
this week is about missing girls. Our story debunks of
fake reports that fourteen girls went missing from DC in
just one day. DC police told us there are simply
sharing missing person cases more often on social media.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
It all started when a post went viral all over
social media saying young black girls were going missing at
an alarming rate in DC, and admits the firestorm that
particular post was proven to be untrue. However, behind the
social media frenzy was a certain reality that for decades,
people of color, particularly women, have been abducted or killed
(05:31):
across the Capital region, and their cases rarely resolved or
even fully investigated. That fact may be why most people
have never heard of the Freeway Phantom case, a case
that involved six young black girls who were all kidnapped, killed,
and discarded along the DC freeways in the early nineteen seventies,
(05:53):
A case that was never solved and sadly quickly forgotten.
But in the wake of the DC Missing Girl's Calm Conversation,
people started thinking about this case again. One of those
people was fellow DC journalist Cheryl Thompson, who used to
write for The Washington Post.
Speaker 7 (06:10):
While I was actually working on another story at the Post,
I stumbled across this press release of these six little
black girls. And the photo struck me because it was
in black and white, and so the first thing I
thought of, Oh my god, this is old, Like what
is this?
Speaker 8 (06:28):
And they just.
Speaker 7 (06:29):
Saw these six faces of these six little black girls,
and you could tell by their hairstyle and you know,
the bows and their hair, and it sort of gave
me pause, and I was like, what is this and
why are these murders unsolved? And so that's what sort
of prompted me.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
In twenty eighteen, Cheryl published a groundbreaking article about this
seemingly uncovered story, and that's how we and thousands of
others found out about the Freeway Phantom case. She says
the process was both difficult and significant.
Speaker 7 (07:00):
What it was about it again was the fact that, like,
how could this be, like six little black girls murdered
in the nation's capital. And so then I started researching
it and saw that there had been stories, some stories
over the years, but it it mainly faded from public view.
I asked one of our researchers at the Washington Post
to go back. I said, can you find some stories,
(07:22):
some microfish from you know, back in the early seventies
when this happened, And there were stories, but we were
really hard pressed to find stories that focused just on
these girls. In the early nineteen seventies, it was the
Vietnam War, and you know, DC was the place where
protesters came. There was a lot going on in the
nation's capital during that time. So when murders happened, when
(07:46):
killings happened, it made the news. But there were so
many killings at the time that they just didn't get
the individual attention like, when I found one of the cases,
it was lumped in with some other homicides in the district.
That's just the way it was. I mean, this was
the murder capital of the country back in the day.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
Cheryl decided to reach out to some people, and she
says her best sources have always been the detectives who
worked on the case.
Speaker 7 (08:13):
I have called some of my sources over the years
for stuff that might have happened thirty years ago, and
they remembered details, right, how do you remember this stuff?
So I then reached out to Detective Jenkins, Romaine Jenkins,
because I figured, man, this is a woman, a black woman,
and I know she had to take an interest in
(08:35):
this for a lot of reasons, and some of which
were the very ones that I mentioned. These kids could
have been her daughters.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
Detective Romayne Jenkins was a name that we kept hearing.
Speaker 9 (08:48):
We spoke with one of the investigators, Romaine Jenkins, and
she was like, if there.
Speaker 2 (08:52):
Was there was also another woman by the name of
Romayne Jenkins who was a sex squad detective.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
One of our pick Aparthose files that Romayne's God, it
would be an exciting.
Speaker 10 (09:03):
Interview Romayne Jenkins. She was one of the best.
Speaker 3 (09:07):
She knew all adult dealers, She knew all they girlfriends,
she was friends with all of them.
Speaker 9 (09:12):
She got the latest school.
Speaker 7 (09:14):
She knew who pulled the trigger.
Speaker 1 (09:16):
We decided to give Romayne Jenkins a call Hello, Yes,
and we soon realized just how much she knew about
this case.
Speaker 11 (09:28):
I investigated many serial rate cases, and none of them
are like to these today. Is this sum of a
pattern somewhere, But the only pattern you have with these
cases is the fact that they were young black females.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
As it turns out, Romayne was the lead investigator on
the Freeway Phantom case in the nineteen eighties. That was
almost ten years after the case went cold, and she
was the right person for the job. Romayne had an
impressive resume up to that point as a sergeant in
the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, DC back in the seventies.
She was the first woman and the only woman for
(10:05):
a long time in homicide. We told Romayne that we
were looking into the Freeway Phantom case and she agreed
to sit down with us. But before we made a
trip to DC to see her, we wanted to learn
more about her life and how she eventually came to
investigate this case.
Speaker 12 (10:22):
I am a native person from Washington, d C. I
attended school here. I joined the Metropolitan Police Department June
twenty first, nineteen sixty five, and at that time there
were only about maybe thirty police females on the department
(10:42):
and they were housed at something called the Woman's Bureau,
and they did mostly social work, abandoned children, missing children.
Then they joined us with something called the Youth Division,
and that was the male counterpart of the Women's Bureau.
And I stayed there for two years and I basically
(11:02):
investigated cases involving battered children, juvenile offenders. We did missing
persons and things like that. And then homicide decided they
needed a female to handle their baby death and abortion
cases because at that time abortion was illegal in the
District of Columbia.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
So Romayne went to work in homicide. She was there
for approximately four years investigating battered children and abortion cases.
Speaker 12 (11:30):
After about four years in the homicide squad, I went
to the seventh District because at that time they decided
they wanted to put policewomen in uniform and put them
in the patrol division. And at that time I was
a supervised I was a sergeant because I made sergeant
when I was in homicide, so they wanted to see
(11:51):
if females could supervise males in the prol division. I
went to the seventh District and that was quite an experience.
Everything was totally new to me, but I made it suit.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
During this time, Romayne got married and started a family.
She eventually decided being a patrol officer wasn't what she wanted,
so she applied for Sex Squad, which investigates sexually heinous crimes,
and I stayed.
Speaker 12 (12:17):
There ten years as a supervisor. And from there I
went to the US Attorney's Office, where I supervised seven
detectives and we handled cases. We worked up cases for
the US Attorney's Office, and that's basically what I did.
That's basically my career.
Speaker 1 (12:34):
It was will in homicide in the early seventies that
Romayne first heard about the so called Freeway Phantom murders.
Though other officers were assigned to the case, she helped
canvas neighborhoods and became intimately familiar with the case details.
Years passed and remain heard little about the Freeway Phantom.
Fifteen years after the murders in nineteen eighty seven, Romayne
(12:55):
decided to reopen the case herself while working in the
US Attorney's offic us, and it ended up becoming the
case that would consume Romayne's career and life to this day.
When we told Romayne we were investigating the Freeway Phantom case,
she revealed to us that she had held onto boxes
and boxes of evidence, case files, and other documents. Even
(13:20):
after retiring from the MPD. Now, at eighty years old,
Romayne still has those stacks of boxes sitting in her
bedroom or scattered across her living room floor. We asked
her if we could talk to her in person and
look through some of the boxes. At first, she was hesitant,
but after we talked about our mutual desire to solve
(13:40):
these murders, she started to open up, and eventually she
agreed to an in person interview. So the Tenderfoot team
met up with me in DC and we headed to
our house.
Speaker 4 (14:11):
Oh, he brings me two at a ten.
Speaker 9 (14:13):
Okay, we got you and we can take him back up.
Speaker 4 (14:16):
If that's no, you can leave man that you got
him back, okay, because they'll either go downstairs. They'll probably
end up going downstairs.
Speaker 1 (14:26):
Okay, you wanted to sit at the table.
Speaker 12 (14:27):
No, set him idea on the floor.
Speaker 1 (14:29):
Okay, I'm in Romayne Jenkins home in Washington, DC, not
far from where I live. In her home, Romayne has
what's likely the largest collection of documents on the freeway
Phantom case.
Speaker 4 (14:42):
Open, open up.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
I'm gonna open him up for you, all right, I
will just pull him out and we can take a
look at what's here.
Speaker 10 (14:52):
And this is Brenda Crockett.
Speaker 1 (14:56):
Oh my god, she looks This is the one that
was she the one that was barefoot.
Speaker 4 (15:00):
That's a ten year old.
Speaker 1 (15:01):
She's tiny, just a tiny baby. She was the one
that went to the store barefoot.
Speaker 12 (15:09):
And the only way she was identified with her mother
identified with the clothing.
Speaker 4 (15:14):
That's all they had.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
The amount of information we came across was astounding. She
had crime scene photos, original police reports, suspect lists. Most
of this we had never seen before. We asked Romain
how she came to acquire all of these documents.
Speaker 4 (15:35):
Basically by talking to detectives who were on the actual
scenes of the cases. A lot of them gave me
their notebooks, their notes, some had copies of files. They
gave me that going to the police department, like Prince
Georgia's county. They turned over all their files to me
because they micro fished the file so they didn't need
(15:55):
the hard copies and they were going to dispose of them,
so I said, well, I'll take them. So that's how
I inherited a lot of that information. Then, with the
cooperation of the FBI, they assigned a case agent to
work with me and I was allowed to go into
their files.
Speaker 8 (16:12):
Well.
Speaker 4 (16:12):
They assigned me an office at a desk and one
of their investigators and I would go to the FBI
building every day and read through documents and they'd make
copies of whatever I needed. Also, with Naval Investigative Services,
they were getting ready to get rid of some files,
so I was able to make copies of the things
(16:33):
that they had and nobody told me no, even the
Metropolitan Police Department. There were people who still had information
and they turned it over to me. So that's how
a mass information in the files.
Speaker 1 (16:45):
As Romayne said, law enforcement was disposing of the original
case files. Had Romayne not tracked down and preserved these files,
we would have no original documents to view today. This
is significant because information in those boxes may provide new
insight into the case. Throughout this podcast, we're going to
(17:07):
reveal what we found in those boxes and maybe get
one step closer to finding the Freeway Phantom. But first
we need to take a step back to talk about
the basics. What were the Freeway Phantom murders, What happened?
We need to go back to the beginning to fully
understand this story. The truth is there's not a ton
(17:30):
of existing scholarship on this case. In our research, we
came across only two books written about the Freeway Phantom
most people have never heard of. The first book called
The Mystery of the Freeway Fantom, published in nineteen eighty
three by Wilma W.
Speaker 8 (17:45):
Harper.
Speaker 1 (17:46):
Miss Harper is closely related to these cases, which you'll
hear about later. In the book's preface, Harper explains why
she wrote it, saying, quote, when I first undertook the
task of writing a social study of the families and
friends associated with the Freeway Phantom cases in September nineteen
seventy two, my one objective was to assist the police
(18:07):
department in apprehending the killer or killers of the seven
black girls who'd been raped, murdered, and their bodies placed
on the various highways around the city of Washington, d C.
It was my belief that the secret of who had
killed the girls could be found in one or more
of the social institutions frequented by these girls or by
their parents. Throughout this podcast, Harper's words will take us
(18:32):
back in time and provide us with a first hand
account of what it was like to live through these
serial murders. The second book we found was called Tantamount,
The Pursuit of the Freeway Phantom serial Killer, published in
twenty nineteen. This book was written by a father daughter
team of true crime authors.
Speaker 9 (18:54):
I'm Blamed Pardo. I've written over eighty books. I'd write
primarily as science fiction, true crime, military history, political thrillers,
things along those lines. This is a topic we've been
writing a lot about, which is true crimes, and we
tend to focus on the unsolved cases, especially surreal killing
pieces that remain open over the years.
Speaker 13 (19:17):
And I'm Victoria Hester. I've written a total of four
true crime books alongside my dad and co author Blaine.
The thing that really got me into true crime was
actually my dad. Growing up. Our bonding moment was over
the Zodiac, which go figure, that's a normal father daughter thing.
But ever since then, I've been kind of hooked on
true crime and it's fun to research. We enjoy the
(19:40):
journey of research and then putting it all onto paper.
Speaker 9 (19:43):
We had just finished our book on the Colonial Parkway
murders and we were looking for the next project to
get into. And it was really a matter of let's
look in the local vicinity because we like dealing with
people we can go interview and spend time with. So
we started looking in Virginia, Maryland, Washington, DC to see
(20:06):
if what open cold cases were out there, and there's
a lot of them. I outlined a number of them
for Victoria and said, okay, you get to pick this one.
Was kind of an easy one to do in the
case of the freeway fantom. Looking at this one, it
was like, Okay, this one's got some meat to it.
This is an interesting case.
Speaker 1 (20:24):
We asked Blaine in Victoria to walk us through the
basics of the case, starting with the first victim.
Speaker 9 (20:31):
First one that disappeared was a thirteen year old Carol
Dionze Things. She disappeared on April twenty fifth, nineteen seventy one.
She's found on the Anacostia Freeway, which is IWO ninety five.
She's about two hundred yards south of the Suitland Parkway
and her body's found by a.
Speaker 10 (20:48):
Group of children.
Speaker 9 (20:49):
It's a major freeway cutting right through the city. She
had disappeared on the twenty fifth, but wasn't found until
April thirtieth.
Speaker 13 (20:59):
Soh The next victim is Darlinia Denise Johnson. The reason
why we put the middle names in with each girl
is because it does play a huge role down the
role in the investigation of the middle named Denise. So
that's why we make a point to mention that she
was sixteen when she disappeared on July eighth, nineteen seventy one.
(21:20):
Her body was found July nineteenth, nineteen seventy one in
the evening. Her mother filed a missing persons report and
her body was actually found on the Anacostia Freeway, so
the same freeway that Carol Spinkx was found off of.
Speaker 10 (21:36):
We're inda fake.
Speaker 9 (21:37):
Krockett was ten years old. She disappeared on July twy seventh,
nineteen seventy one. Her body was found off of Route fifty,
which is one of the major thoroughfares in Chevrolet. She
had been sexually assaulted and strangled. She had been left
on the grassy shoulder of John Hanson Highway. She was
(21:57):
found face up, and it was really only a short
period of time after she had disappeared, 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 1 (22:14):
Just over two months later, the fourth victim was discovered.
Her name was Nina Moosha Yates.
Speaker 13 (22:21):
She was twelve years old and she was found on
October first, nineteen seventy one. She was a seventh grader
and she was a very quiet and well behaved child.
In the evening, she went to the safeway that was
a few blocks away from her home to buy a
bag of sugar at eight forty five pm.
Speaker 1 (22:41):
Then a month and a half later, the fifth.
Speaker 9 (22:44):
Victim, Brenda Denise Woodard, was eighteen years old. November fifteenth,
nineteen seventy one. She disappeared in the evening. She had
gone to a night class, left with a young man.
They went to Ben's Chili Bowl in DC, which is
this iconic restaurant, and she rode the bus to go
(23:04):
home and she was last scene around the eighth and
H Street intersections, but her roommate reported by eleven thirty
that she hadn't come home. She was found along the
Baltimore Washington Parkway as well by a Chevrolet police officer.
She had been strangled, and what was different with her
(23:26):
is she had also been stabbed.
Speaker 1 (23:29):
And finally the following year. The sixth and last confirmed victim.
Speaker 13 (23:35):
Diane Williams, is seventeen. She was found on September fifth,
nineteen seventy two, ten months after the last case with Brenda.
Her body was found the very next day. She was
reported missing by her father when he came home at
eight am that morning. She had visited her boyfriend, which
(23:57):
was pretty normal thing for her to do, and was
told to be home by ten thirty. The night before,
her boyfriend escorted her to the bus stop, so we
know that she got at least.
Speaker 10 (24:08):
To the bus.
Speaker 9 (24:10):
If you think about it, so many of them are
caught going to a grocery store running an errand it's
not like something that's a routine where he's following them
for several days and knows their pattern and how to
intercept them. These are all victims of opportunity.
Speaker 1 (24:29):
Six victims all young black girls from around the same area,
all disposed of in identical ways. When we sat down
with Romainne Jenkins, we asked her about her first involvement
in the case.
Speaker 4 (24:42):
Well, at the time when Carol Spinks was murdered, I
was in the homicide unit, and at that time I
was the only female in the unit. I was interested
in the case. But what happened was we were inundated
with the Mayai demonstrations.
Speaker 1 (25:01):
From May first to May fifth, nineteen seventy one, thousands
of people gathered in Washington, d C. To protest the
Vietnam War. This would become the May Day Protests.
Speaker 14 (25:11):
Some one hundred and seventy five thousand people from all
walks of life, with differing ideologies and purposes, marched from
the White House to the Capitol.
Speaker 1 (25:21):
More than five thousand Metropolitan Police Department officers, including Romaine,
were tasked with shutting down the demonstrations. By the end
of the week, over twelve thousand protesters had been arrested
to this day, the largest mass arrest in US history.
Speaker 4 (25:36):
And so I never got the chance to go and
dig into the investigation like I could have. The first
day I recalled, we were going out on the case,
and a division command to stop me and said where
are you going. I said, well, we had a little
girl murdered over in southeast and we're going to the
neighborhood and we're going to work on the case. He says, not,
(25:57):
this is May Day demonstrations. This is a red alert
for the police department. You will get involved in the demonstrations.
Speaker 1 (26:05):
But Romayne went home that night and thought more about
Carol Spinks. She was familiar with the neighborhood and something
just didn't add up.
Speaker 4 (26:14):
The girls come from neighborhoods that are densely populated with
black people, their kids in and out, their cars going
up and down Wheeler Road. You know, there's never a
time it's not busy. So you could send you a
child to the store. Nobody's gonna bother your child or what.
The neighborhood never even thought like that.
Speaker 1 (26:34):
No, they were even safer because there's always somebody somebody.
Speaker 4 (26:36):
Right, that's right, And everybody knew everybody, you know, they said, oh,
that's miss so and So's daughter, it's time to be
in the house. It's close and dark, I mean, and
people looked out for each other, you know.
Speaker 1 (26:54):
I've spent my entire career working in public media as
a radio journalist and national talks. One of the things
that I love about working for public radio is that
I rarely have to report on crime. While we never
neglect a story about terrorism, mass shootings, or corporate malfeasance,
individual crime stories don't generally get coverage, and I like that.
(27:19):
I like that I don't have to dig into personal
stories of infidelity or rage or greed, or interview family
members who've just lost a loved one to a drive
by shooting. So you might wonder what I'm doing hosting
a podcast series about a string of murders in Washington,
d C. A city that had so many homicides in
the early nineteen nineties that it was known as the
(27:40):
murder capital of the United States. There's one easy answer
to that question and one more complicated answer. The easy
answer is that I'm so afraid of serial killers that
I'm fascinated by them. They terrify me. I simply can't
understand the kind of mind that would take a stranger's
(28:03):
life for no reason other than because they enjoy it.
That seems more than deranged to me. It seems inhuman
serial killers are incredibly rare. According to the FBI, less
than one percent of murders are committed by a serial killer,
but were also not very good at catching them. The
(28:24):
founder of the Murder Accountability Project, a nonprofit that collects
information about murders, believes that a good number of unsolved
homicides may have been committed by serial killers. So the
chance to dig into both the mindset of such a
killer and the techniques for finding them was very tempting.
(28:44):
More importantly, though, I couldn't understand why the Freeway Phantom
had never been caught and why most people have never
heard of him. The Phantom killed at least six young girls,
probably more. The so called Son of s Sam also
killed six people, and there are a bunch of movies
about him, and even an episode of Seinfeld ed Gean,
(29:07):
the Plainfield ghoul who inspired the killers in Psycho, Silence
of the Lambs and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, was convicted
of killing two people and may have killed as many
as seven. This is not admiration for perpetrators with high
body counts, but a legitimate question. How could someone kill
so many young girls and be forgotten? The Freeway Phantom
(29:30):
is worth talking about because the larger issues that surrounded
his killing spree still endanger the lives of girls, and
especially black girls. And before we go any further, we
want to make an important announcement. After over fifty years
of waiting, we believe the victims' families deserve answers. That's
(29:51):
why Tenderfoot TV and iHeartMedia are matching the one hundred
and fifty thousand dollars reward offered by the Metropolitan Police Department.
This brings the total reward for information leading to the
arrest and conviction of the person or persons responsible for
these murders to three hundred thousand dollars. If you have
information that may lead to the identification of the Freeway Phantom,
(30:14):
it's time to speak up. Tips can be provided to
MPD or Tenderfoot TV at tips at tenderfoot dot TV.
With all of that said, it's time we dig deep
into this case. So to fully understand these murders, we
need to examine the crimes individually, starting with the very
first victim, Carol Spinks.
Speaker 3 (30:56):
We grew up at ten thirty four while to place
Southeast Water Place is on the top part of Valley
Green infamous Valley Green, very well known for a lot
of activity, negative activity, but they're good people in the
worst of places.
Speaker 1 (31:18):
This is Evander Spinks, the older sister of Carol Spinks,
the first victim. At the top of the episode, you
heard Evander talk about the night that her sister Carol
went missing.
Speaker 3 (31:29):
I can't say my mother was the best person in
the world, but my mother took care of us. We
could not rip and run the street. We could not
go anywhere. You better not talk about no, boy, you
stay very close to home. We played outside like any
normal kids have, races in the street, played kickball, double
(31:53):
dutch boy games outside. Water Place was a well known street,
but there were a lot of good families on that street.
Things happened on that street that were bad, but we
never witnessed anything because we weren't out at night. Whatever happened,
we would find out the next day or through your
(32:15):
friends if they saw something, or their parents saw something
and they was discussing it with their girlfriend and boyfriend,
or do you know how adults talk. There's always one
or two kids hanging around listening getting to school, so
that everybody else couldn't know what was going on. But
That's how we found out things. Never that we were
(32:36):
involved around or near, because my mother didn't play that.
Speaker 1 (32:41):
On April twenty fifth, nineteen seventy one, the day Carol
would go missing, the entire Sphinx family, with the exception
of their mother, was home.
Speaker 3 (32:50):
I was home fourteen, Carl and Carling was home thirteen,
Tanya was home twelve, One was home eleven, and Joseph
was home one or two years.
Speaker 1 (33:06):
So Carol and Carolyn Spinks were twin sisters. Their nicknames
were Babe and Yayay, respectively.
Speaker 3 (33:15):
They looked identical, they were identical. They could sometimes fool us,
but me not that much because they had different personalities Baybe.
Carol was more laid back and quiet. Carolyn Yaya a
(33:36):
mouthpiece and a social butterfly. But they stuck together. You
wouldn't see one ten feet further from the other one.
They were always together. My mom and all that.
Speaker 8 (33:53):
Brothers and sisters. They knew us apart, but of our
own friends that we had outside of the house, some
of them didn't. Now. We dressed it like you could
forget it.
Speaker 1 (34:04):
This is Carolyn Spinx. She was incredibly close with her
twin sister, Carol.
Speaker 14 (34:09):
Oh we did okay.
Speaker 8 (34:11):
We of course played dogs at each other's hair. We
dressed it like we food the teachers.
Speaker 14 (34:16):
We jumped double dutch, played Jack's, all kinds of stuff.
We did everything together.
Speaker 8 (34:22):
She was smart. She was very smart. She wasn't a
smart mouth as I was. Then she was smart. It
was funny then she was. She was my friend. That
was my left hand because I'm right here, so she
was my left hand.
Speaker 14 (34:37):
That day.
Speaker 8 (34:37):
I wish, Oh my god, I wish I could take
it back.
Speaker 14 (34:41):
Wish I could take that day back.
Speaker 8 (34:45):
That day, my mom told us do not go outside.
So we al was in the house. I don't even
know what we were doing, but I know it was me,
event and baby, and my baby brother was home because
he was a baby, and my other brother. All of us,
all six of us, was in the house. And I
remember when battery knocked on the door. I said, see
(35:07):
when somebody go to the store, and was like no,
Mom said no, Mom said, don't go out. I don't
know what made her say I'll go. I don't know,
but I was like, I ain't gone, No, I'm gonna
get us. I ain't getting no beating. And my mother
didn't play.
Speaker 1 (35:24):
But for whatever reason, Carol volunteered to go to the store,
and so off she went.
Speaker 8 (35:31):
Didn't think nothing of it right then and there. The
next thing I knew, I was like, ain't even renut.
Speaker 11 (35:38):
She didn't come back.
Speaker 8 (35:40):
And I remember I said that I went out that door.
I'm like, no, I gotta go to a vatamy. She
ain't come back. We got to go to the store,
and I remember me and Batteries went to the store
and we asked the man did he see it? And
he said, yeah, he seen the girl look just like me,
and she had her she got her stuff, and that
was it. We came back home. We called my mother
and she came home and then she called the police.
(36:03):
I remember she called the police and they said they
can't do nothing.
Speaker 10 (36:08):
Do you remember why they said they couldn't do anything.
Speaker 8 (36:11):
Because they said you gotta be twenty four hours. I
remember that well, in like a couple of hours. Nah,
something ain't right. Mm hm. I knew something was wrong.
I knew it. I told her I'd be something wrong,
something wrong. Mm hmm.
Speaker 10 (36:28):
During that time when you didn't know what had happened
to her, when she was just missing, what were you
thinking had happened?
Speaker 8 (36:36):
I thought somebody had got her or did something to her.
Speaker 10 (36:39):
You did.
Speaker 8 (36:40):
I knew something had happened to her. I knew it
did because she wouldn't run away. We never ran away
from home. We never did any of that. So I
already knew something was wrong. I knew something bad had happened.
I knew that, I just didn't know what. But after
like the second day, that's when I started feeling the pains.
And I used to sit on the bottom months event
(37:00):
in this rock, and I would get pained and I'll
be in and out. Oh my god, it was terrible.
It was Oh god, it was the worst. It was
the worst. I still feel pain to this day.
Speaker 1 (37:15):
Search parties were dispatched, the community was determined to find Carol,
but they never did. And then, according to the official reports,
five days after Carol Spinks's disappearance, a group of kids
were playing by the side of Interstate two ninety five
when they discovered Carol's body. But Romayne Jenkins has always
been skeptical of this report. Here's how she described it
(37:38):
when we talked to her over the phone.
Speaker 12 (37:40):
There's no indication how her body was discovered. No after
the crowds get say of course they called the police,
But what initially caused somebody to say there's a body
on two ninety five. I don't understand it. Why would
the kids, even kids wouldn't even be playing on two
ninety five. There's nothing, There's no reason for them to
(38:01):
have been there unless they were told there was a
body and they want to see what it was, you know,
But who said who started it? Even though when she
was missing, you know, they had locks of group out
searching for her and so forth, but there was just
nothing but for someone to jump over the rail and
turn that body over. Man. People just don't do that.
(38:24):
Most people don't even want to see a dead body.
My mind questions a lot of things.
Speaker 1 (38:31):
We were curious to see what Romayne was talking about,
so we found the coordinates for where Carol's body had
been found, right off the Itune ninety five highway just
to our right you can see in the distant Suitland Parkway,
and the police reports say that Carol Spink's body was
found about fifteen hundred feet south of Suitland, which is
(38:51):
about where we are. The thing is is that, you know,
Romayne brought up the idea that why were there people
near here? To find the body. And I gotta say
she has a point. I mean, even fifty years ago,
this would have still been an industrial park. There's nothing here.
There's no stores, there's no homes. This is clearly an
(39:13):
highway access road with nothing but industrial buildings. And you
can look at these buildings and even though Verizon is
in them now, these buildings have been here for fifty years.
So what were they doing here? Why were they walking
along the highway? And again, remember we're talking about a
highway that didn't have these lights. It would have been dark,
(39:35):
and I just she really has a point. How could
they have stumbled on this body? It just over and
over in this case, you think somebody knew something, someone
did It seems impossible. But here we are, and you
have to imagine as you're standing at I two ninety five,
and obviously I two ninety five did not have this
(39:56):
many lanes back then. We saw the photos. But you
have to imagine someon and just driving up this highway
with a dead girl's body in their car, stopping the
car right here, pulling her body out of his car,
and then placing it. It's distressing and incomprehensible. Yeah, Carolyn,
(40:20):
Spinks says she doesn't remember much about hearing that Carol
was dead, only that she remembers feeling it.
Speaker 14 (40:27):
I'm feeling he was killing her. Wris, she was gone
on him days. I felt everything.
Speaker 10 (40:31):
What did your family say to you?
Speaker 8 (40:33):
They know something was wrong with me.
Speaker 14 (40:35):
They knew something was wrong because I used to sit
and roll, just sit on the bait and rock and
rock and cry and hold myself, and then something is wrong,
something was hurting.
Speaker 1 (40:49):
A few days later, the family held a public funeral
for Carol.
Speaker 8 (40:53):
Oh my god, that was the worst day of her life.
Speaker 14 (40:57):
I didn't know what it was.
Speaker 8 (40:58):
They had never been to a field before, because we did.
I didn't know what it was. We went to this
funeral home first.
Speaker 14 (41:07):
I remember they took us to get these white dresses
and shoes and stuff.
Speaker 8 (41:13):
And then we went in this funeral home and they
had this noise.
Speaker 14 (41:16):
I guess it was the piano or whatever it is,
and that noise Ooh, it was curb. And then they
had the big gray casket. I di ain't know what
it was, but it was closed. I remember that it
was closed, and I remember all these people. It was
so many people. I remember there was so many people
(41:37):
and then we opened the casket and I said, I
asked them who was that? Then they said, that's musaid.
I said, no, it's not. When I looked at that face,
I was like, oh my god, who was that?
Speaker 8 (41:50):
He looked like a monster.
Speaker 14 (41:52):
And they said I passed out of something. Something happened
to me. I don't know what happened. Well, when I
woke up the next time, I remember we was back
at home. I don't remember anything else.
Speaker 10 (42:05):
So you said your family never talked about it after
the funeral, nobody even mentioned her.
Speaker 14 (42:13):
They did, but I'd never want to hear it. I
didn't want to hear it.
Speaker 10 (42:17):
And you think that it was an until you were
an adult that you were able to hear about her
or talk about her.
Speaker 8 (42:25):
Yeah, Actually it was after I got married to my husband,
who lived on our block. He knew my sister. When
he told me one day we talked about it, because
we never even talked about it for a long time,
but he told me he carried my sister Casky, And
I said, no, you didn't.
Speaker 14 (42:43):
He said, yes, I did.
Speaker 8 (42:44):
My mother had a book, a whole book of the funeral,
and I was always I never wanted to look at it,
but this one my mother was still living.
Speaker 14 (42:53):
So one day I just went over went to look
at the book and I saw him current her casket
and when he told me, that's what I said, I
need to talk. I needed to talk to somebody because
I just can't.
Speaker 8 (43:05):
Couldn't keep hold of it because I know it was hurting.
It was hurting me.
Speaker 14 (43:10):
After a while, after I had my kids and my
sister told my kids, that's when ITHER just started to
try to talk about it.
Speaker 8 (43:16):
Me and my husband talking a little bit from time
to time, but I didn't want to talk about it.
It was nothing to talk about.
Speaker 10 (43:22):
You have you talked with others in your family since then?
Speaker 8 (43:27):
Yes, most of me and my sister Evan talk about
it more than anybody, but not nobody else really.
Speaker 1 (43:35):
Yvan Is Evander spinks.
Speaker 3 (43:39):
My brothers have never mentioned one way to other caroling
it hurts her. She says, never wanted to talk about it,
and I've always wanted to talk about.
Speaker 10 (43:50):
It because I can't forget.
Speaker 3 (43:53):
My sister Valerie is never talked or spoke about it
that I know of, so I had to over the
years keep talking, yeah, yay, carling about it, and I
know she can't forget, but I know she hurts behind it.
(44:13):
That's why her entire life changed, and it wasn't for
the better, totally the wrong way. I think the first
time all of us got together it was a couple
of years ago because it bothered me all my life
that I could go and sit where I knew my
(44:37):
sister's body was, but there was nothing there to show
me that she was there. So we got to talk
about it. It's a hurtful thing, but we gotta do it,
and you just never know. Something could pop up. Something
just might get triggered, or you may have seen something
(44:58):
or heard something. We don't want to do it. It's
not like we want to be recognized, because we still
get recognized as soon as somebody hear the name Spinx.
Speaker 2 (45:11):
Oh, Spink, Spinks.
Speaker 3 (45:13):
Oh, I know about the Spinx family. You don't know
about the Spins family. You don't even know about the
incident that happened to the Spins family. My sister was
an innocent little girl. People say, you know, these kids
fast they grow. She was out there having sex, not
(45:33):
with my mother, that's a no. She was an innocent
little girl that was taken from her family and abused.
We want to know why. As a young teenager, I
(45:55):
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. And today
I'll be sixty five years old this month and I
(46:19):
still feel like they don't give a damn. It probably
was the police, was somebody that worked with the police.
That's the only thing really made sense to me. People
are everywhere. Somebody saw it, and we still want to know,
and it still hurts. We just want to know why
(46:43):
and what happened.
Speaker 4 (46:52):
The homicide detectives termed the cases the little girl cases.
Speaker 14 (46:57):
This child was laying on the side of the road.
Speaker 8 (47:00):
I wouldn't go no way. I would call up my house.
Speaker 1 (47:04):
Those first five murders should have been a huge warning
bell for the police.
Speaker 3 (47:09):
We just want to know what happened.
Speaker 4 (47:10):
This person must have saw that. They were thinking that
maybe it's just one person, and he says, they need
to know. This is me.
Speaker 8 (47:18):
I thought that they would catch him. I thought it
was just a matter of time.
Speaker 1 (47:23):
I'm Celeste Headley and this is Freeway Phantom Next time
on Freeway Phantom.
Speaker 13 (47:33):
People were scared, I mean, Price was scared.
Speaker 8 (47:36):
Children were scared. They wanted to know what more police
could do.
Speaker 14 (47:40):
What were they doing?
Speaker 9 (47:42):
He kept her for several days as prisoner.
Speaker 12 (47:45):
I don't know.
Speaker 9 (47:48):
When the first victims went missing.
Speaker 10 (47:50):
There was a really kind of a muted police response.
Speaker 4 (47:54):
You follow a lead until it takes you nowhere. They
got all kinds of leads. Everybody was a suspect.
Speaker 15 (48:01):
I got home from the store about six ' ten
pm and asked the kids if Darlenia had been home,
and they said they hadn't 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.
Speaker 2 (48:13):
Roy said that.
Speaker 10 (48:13):
There was a body of a dead lady out there.
Speaker 2 (48:16):
He told us that he'd notified the police, but the
body was still out there. Freeway Fantom is a production
of iHeartRadio, Tenderfoot TV and Black Bar MITZVAH. Our host
is CELESE.
Speaker 14 (48:32):
Hiley.
Speaker 2 (48:33):
The show is written by Trevor Young, Jamie Albright and CELESE.
Speaker 8 (48:36):
Hiley.
Speaker 2 (48:37):
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
(48:57):
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
Beckmedia and Marketing and the Nord Group. Tenderfoot TV and iHeartMedia,
as well as Black Bar Mitzvah have increased the reward
(49:18):
for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the
person or persons responsible for their Freeway phanom 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
relating to these unsolved crimes, contact the Metropolitan Police Department
(49:41):
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
to your favorite shows. Thanks for listening.
Popular Podcasts
Good Game with Sarah Spain
Good Game is your one-stop shop for the biggest stories in women’s sports. Every day, host Sarah Spain gives you the stories, stakes, stars and stats to keep up with your favorite women’s teams, leagues and athletes. Through thoughtful insight, witty banter, and an all around good time, Sarah and friends break down the latest news, talk about the games you can’t miss, and debate the issues of the day. Don’t miss interviews with the people of the moment, whether they be athletes, coaches, reporters, or celebrity fans.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations.
Crime Junkie
If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people.