June 28, 2023 • 47 mins
Why was the Phantom never caught? Is it possible he's still alive, walking freely? We explore all evidence pointing to his identity. And we ask: what hope is left?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
You're listening to the Freeway Phanom, a production of iHeartRadio,
Tenderfoot TV, and Black bar Mitzvah. The views and opinions
expressed in this podcast are solely those of the podcast
author or individuals participating in the podcast, and do not
represent those of iHeartMedia, Tenderfoot TV, Black bar Mitzvah, or
their employees. This podcast also contains subject matter that may
(00:24):
not be suitable for everyone. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Freeways are interesting because millions of people use them, but
very few people walk along the sides of them. They're
very accessible, but they're also not generally used for foot traffic,
and so it's very easy to conceal someone just off
(00:52):
of a very very busy highway because nobody usually walks
along there. It means that he one has a car,
two knows when he can get on and off that
road without being detected. Most likely has a job or
(01:13):
family situation which allows him to be out at any hour.
Speaker 3 (01:17):
Of the day or night.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
Because, believe me, choosing these victims and abducting these victims
took a long time. He had to be out there
a long time to get access.
Speaker 3 (01:28):
To these particular victims.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
They weren't doing things that they did every day at
that time. That means he has to be available to
wait for them to show up and to follow them,
and then to be vulnerable. So they're not vulnerable while
they're inside a.
Speaker 3 (01:45):
Store or with other people. They're vulnerable when they're alone.
Speaker 2 (01:50):
This is exactly who he wanted, and he was willing
to take a great risk to get her.
Speaker 4 (02:02):
The homicide detectives termed the cases the little girl cases.
Speaker 5 (02:07):
This child was laying on the side of the road.
I wouldn't go no way.
Speaker 6 (02:12):
I would call up my house.
Speaker 7 (02:14):
Those first five murders should have been a huge warning
bell for the police.
Speaker 4 (02:18):
We just want to know what happened. This person must
have saw that They was thinking that maybe it's just
one person, and he says, uh, they need to know.
This is me.
Speaker 5 (02:28):
I thought that they would catch him. I thought it
was just a matter of time.
Speaker 8 (02:33):
I'm Celeste Headley and this is Freeway Phantom. In the
previous seven episodes, we covered the murders of eight young
black girls, ranging in age from ten to eighteen years old,
that occurred in DC from nineteen seventy one to nineteen
seventy two. There were six confirmed victims of the Freeway Phantom.
(02:57):
And then there was the case of Angela Barnes, originally
co ittered victim number three, whose case was closed after
two police officers were convicted of the crime. Then there
was Tera Bryant, originally considered the final victim, who was
eventually removed from the Freeway Phantom victim list. And two
things are unclear about TERA's case. Who removed her from
(03:18):
the investigation and why. Fifty years later, Detective Romaine Jenkins
still believes that Tara was yet another victim of the
Freeway Phantom, although her family believes otherwise. As we learned
in the last episode, law enforcement turned their attention to
the Green Vega Gang in nineteen seventy four, and although
they were officially ruled out as suspects in the Freeway
(03:40):
Phantom murders, many in law enforcement assumed they were responsible.
Others thought Robert Askins was the likely killer, a suspect
we talked about in episode six. All of this led
the majority of the Metropolitan Police Department to conclude that
the cases were solved, but not Detective Romayn Jenkins.
Speaker 4 (04:00):
Were looking for the wrong person. They didn't know about profiling,
and all of that They're not looking for the guy
who hides behind a tree, you know, this dastardly guy
who's gonna grab a woman, some psycho. That's not what
they were looking for, and that's what they went after.
Speaker 8 (04:17):
For ten years, the case files sat there called untouched,
until Romayne took over the case in nineteen eighty four.
Speaker 4 (04:25):
So I had at my disposal, I had seven senior
homicide detectives, and I decided, I said, why not use them?
And some of them had actually worked on the cases traitionally, yeah, originally,
And they gave me their notebooks and so forth, and they,
you know, could you read all their handwriting? Uh huh. See,
(04:46):
back then, we were the carbon paper typewriter folks. There
were no computers. We didn't have computers. You had to
type everything and man ooh, you had to be detailed.
And we work closely with the medical exams this office,
so you know, we learned a lot about anatomy and
causes of death and things like that. We investigated causes
(05:07):
of death.
Speaker 8 (05:08):
Although she was now leading a team, many in the
police department weren't too happy about having a black female supervisor.
Romayne says that throughout the nineteen seventies and eighties, racism
was alive and well in the MPD racism.
Speaker 4 (05:23):
You talk about racism, Oh yes, I just signed black
officers to a scout car and I'm riding along in
the area and I see the black officer walking the footb.
Is what you're doing walking up footb? The lieutenant took
me out the car and put officers on. So and
those are the things that they did back then, you know.
So racism hadn't gone away, you know, sexism and sexism
(05:48):
because because the women were mistreated by the officers they were,
they tried to intimidate some of them, you know, and
some of the women, some of the women just said,
you know what, this is not for me, and they
left the job. You know, they actually left the job.
And as a supervisor on the job, you know, I
thought I would have some power, but no, I really didn't.
(06:11):
And I know one time my lieutenant asked me, he said,
Sergeant Jenkins, do you think I'm a racist? And I said, yes, sir,
you are. And he says, I'm not a racist. My
next door neighbor is black. I said, Lieutenant, the only
reason your next door neighbor is black is because you
don't have enough money to move out the neighborhood. See.
(06:32):
I was like that because my husband was president of
the Afro American Police Association, so there was a militantcy.
I had an instance where two of my officers, one
white and one black, they saved a little three year
old who had been left in the car and the
car burst out in flames, and officers went in and
got that child. I wrote the officers up to the
(06:54):
awards committee, only the white officer's name went. I mean,
they would do things like that, and so I was
always constantly, you know, in battle with them. And I said,
you know what, I'd enjoined the police department to go
through us. I mean, these are the things that I
had to face out there. The commander at that time,
(07:15):
I went to him, I said, sir, we have a
problem over here. He said, what's wrong. I said, you know,
the policewomen, these black police women are being harassed, They're
being mistreated. I said, I think we only had like
one or two white females. And the white girl who
came from Connecticut who had never seen a black person before.
They gave her a short beat around the station. That
(07:37):
was her assignment. She had to walk around the station
for the tour of duty. I mean, this actually happened.
And so I said, you know, we're having a problem
and something has to be done. He said, well, you
know what, and he was white. He said, we're not
going to tolerate. He said, I want you to do
an investigation and let the chips fall where they may.
And so I said okay. And in the end room,
(08:00):
a black officer came there and say, look, Sorge, and
be careful because the white officers gonna get you. He said,
I don't know what they planning, but they plotting something.
He said. I was in the locker room and I
got bits and pieces of the conversation. They're gonna do
something to you because they upset that you initiated this
investigation of the things they did to the black police swiomen.
(08:20):
So I said, thank you. And it wasn't no longer
than a day or so later. Whenever my troops went
on a run, I'm just a supervisor. I'm out there
riding up and down in a scoutcar. I go and
see how they handle it. I'd go park in the
neighborhood and watch how they handle how they interact with people,
and I got out the car and I was walking
towards them. Well by then they had cleared the runs
(08:43):
at ten eight nothing found or whatever it was. And
so as I was walking back to my to my
scout car, they got in the car and the officer
gunn in the car. I had to jump up on
a citizen's car to keep from getting hit. I was, Oh,
was I hot? I was hot? So I didn't say anything.
(09:04):
When I got in my scout car, I went over
the air and asked the dispatcher to locate that unit
for me and have them meet me at there. Stand
by their location. I'm responding. They stood by. I went
to their location and I told it was two white
officers and I told them, whatever you applied and to
get me, make sure that you don't miss the next time,
(09:25):
or else I'm going to kick your you know, and
I use the word you can use it, yeah ass.
And if I can't whip your ass, I have a
husband up in three D Whu's six foot two, and
he will do it. But don't miss the next time.
They didn't say nothing. They went on back and got
in the scout car and drove off.
Speaker 8 (09:45):
It is so difficult for me to hear you tell
these stories about the way the police force was in
the nineteen seventies and think that that prejudice, that racism
didn't hamper the investigation. That they may have invested a
lot of officers hours and energy and focus and time
into the investigation. But how were these detectives not let
(10:09):
us stray by their own prejudices.
Speaker 4 (10:10):
Oh, they had to be. They had to be because
first of all, they didn't understand the community that they
were investigating. I say, you know, police are representative of
the communities that they police. If the citizens act wild
and crazy, the police are the same thing. That's that's
the same kind of thing you're possibly be going to get.
(10:31):
Here is the thing. Sometimes, as a police officer, you
have you've got to put aside your personal feelings. The
only person who ever tried to kill me on the
Metropolitan Police Department was a black police officer. Okay, you know,
a black police officer tried to kill me and he
ended up getting arrested. So you can't say all the
(10:54):
white police officers bad. There's some black ones just the same.
Speaker 9 (10:57):
You know.
Speaker 8 (10:59):
By the mid eighties, Romaine and her team were entirely
focused on the Freeway phantom case, and Romayne had her
work cut out for her.
Speaker 4 (11:07):
When I first started, one of the first things I
did was's tried to find the evidence. When I checked
with the Metropolitan Police Department and I found that the
evidence had been destroyed. The officer took me to the
property book where the evidence was and said evidence has
been destroyed. So say, oh, that's a DC for me.
So then I contacted PG County. PG County found the
(11:31):
evidence in their cases, and I got a technician from
the FBI to meet me and another detective over in
their property office and we went over the evidence. Conclusion
was they hadn't preserved it well enough that they could
get any type of DNA, but that was back then.
They have made advances now now whatever happened to that evidence,
(11:55):
I don't know.
Speaker 8 (11:57):
But Romayne was able to start making some connections with
the evidence she did have.
Speaker 4 (12:02):
That's when I saw the report about the green fibers.
That's what really piqued my I said, nobody never mentioned
anything about green synthetic fibers. And I asked a couple
of the people who I knew who had worked on
the investigation, and they said didn't know anything about green fibers.
Speaker 8 (12:21):
Well, investigators did initially identify the green fibers on each
of the victims. Somehow they failed to connect them or
analyze them conclusively. Remain decided it was time to make
that happen.
Speaker 4 (12:33):
Well, see what happened is no one knew about the
green synthetic fibers until Detective Lloyd Davis developed Askings as
a suspect. When Davis had requested that all the evidence
be sent to the FBI, that's when they came back
about the green synthetic fibers, which aren't really green if
(12:56):
you see them visuals. Now, this is what the FBI
technician told me, the guy who handled the cases to
the naked eye, they are different color. They're only green
if you look at them under a microscopt What are
the sources of the fibers? That's that's what I wanted
to know about the fiber evidence. And he did the
fiber evidence in the Wayne Williams Atlanta murders. So I
(13:19):
figured he's gonna have some credibility which was also green.
Speaker 8 (13:21):
Actually, yeah, coincidentally.
Speaker 4 (13:24):
So I asked him, I said, well, you know, what's
the source of the fibers? He said he thought they
came from an auto. But I talked to Detective Lloyd Davis,
who had all the evidence submitted. He said he was
told that the fibers came from a bathroom. Mate like
a bath mat and a bathroom, and that goes along
(13:44):
with these victims being washed and cleaned. I said, that
sounds about right as far as I'm concerned.
Speaker 8 (13:52):
One of the most important things that remain did was
submit evidence to the FBI to get the first official
profile of the killer, and they came up with some
intriguing conclusions.
Speaker 4 (14:04):
They felt that this person was in the military. Well,
at that time, you had all these military people coming
back from Vietnam who were in hospitals here and installations here,
so you had a lot of that going on. But
that was really interesting. And the reason why I thought
it was so interesting was because when I showed the
note to the FBI, they said, this is military. This
(14:25):
person was in the military. I showed the same note
to the investigator at Naval Investigated Service. He said, oh,
whoever wrote this note? This military? So I had two
different brains saying the same thing. You know that this
person was in the military.
Speaker 8 (15:05):
Romaine eventually retired from the police force, and with her retirement,
the case essentially went cold. That was until it was
picked up in the early two thousands by former DC
homicide detective Jim Trainam, who stumbled into it almost by accident.
Speaker 9 (15:21):
That kind of took over a project where we were
looking at all of these unsolved cases involving women in DC,
like one hundred had been identified over a ten year
period by the Washington Post. And that was also during
the time period where they first started the coda's database.
(15:42):
You know, before you really couldn't do anything with DNA
unless you had a named suspect to do a one
to one comparison to. But with codas, she could put
the information into a database, it would run it against
other cases, it would run it against a database or
a collection of suspects. So it was during that time
when I was first getting started somebody came to me
(16:03):
and asking me about the Freeway phantom case, and I
really didn't know anything about it at the time. I
began to do research and poll what I could, and
basically I found the very minimal paperwork, just entries in
our homicide log book, and that was pretty much it.
We didn't have any files we didn't have any evidence.
And the more I looked, the more I realized, like
(16:26):
you know, all the cases that were out in PG,
they really didn't have any files. They had some evidence
that they were looking at in the Wooded case, but
everything had pretty much been destroyed, and so I was
just trying to build what I could based on these
paper accounts and things along that.
Speaker 8 (16:44):
Line, much like Romayne decades before him, Jim train And
discovered that the evidence in the case had been poorly maintained,
either damaged or mysteriously missing. But he slowly started to
connect some dots.
Speaker 9 (16:59):
So I was able to some stuff from Prince George's county.
And then we found out that the FBI had gotten
involved in the Worder case and they had quite an
extensive file. I was able to get that and make
a copy of it as well. I was continuing to
look for evidence during that time, kept finding nothing, nothing, nothing.
(17:19):
And after we got the FBI file and we learned
about people like, let say, Romaine Jenkins who had information
as well. I was approached by Dale Wilbur of the
Washington Post, and you know, he wanted to do some
work on cold cases, and so he was asking me
about cases that I thought would be interesting, and I
had mentioned the Freeway Phantom to him, and so he
(17:42):
thought that was going to be a good case to
the feature, And so we pretty much gave him open
access to our files that we had at the time
because it was so old, we figured it wasn't going
to do any harm.
Speaker 3 (17:52):
So he did.
Speaker 9 (17:53):
What I really wanted to do was that he actually
went out and knocked on the doors of the detectives
who actually worked on the case originally, and they would
invite them in and they would say, yeah, I know
all about it. I'll talk to you about it. Come
on in, and by the way, would you'd like to
see my file. It turns out that a lot of
them missing files had been taken home by the original
(18:15):
case detectives for later that back in the eighties, they
were packing up a lot of those files. Because of
the way that files were retained back then, they were
throwing out a lot of things like crime scene reports, photographs,
witness statements and all of that on all these cases,
including the Freeway Phantom case. And that's been changed because
(18:37):
of the law, they can't do that anymore.
Speaker 8 (18:40):
One of those people was Romaine Jenkins, who kept most
of the files from the Freeway Phantom case in boxes
in our house. These are the very same boxes that
we sifted through when we visited her home.
Speaker 10 (18:52):
Well, here's some of that carbon paper you're talking about.
Speaker 9 (18:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (18:56):
That all I had to do was okay, See the
police department likes to throw away stuff. Yeah, and I
don't throw away nothing because you never know when you're
going to see it again.
Speaker 8 (19:06):
Oh, it looks like it's from the memorial service.
Speaker 9 (19:10):
That the memorial.
Speaker 10 (19:13):
This is Ninemosia's autopsy reports or foot tall and one.
Speaker 9 (19:18):
Hundred pounds.
Speaker 8 (19:21):
Student at Kelly Miller Junior High School in the sixth grade.
Speaker 3 (19:24):
That's tough.
Speaker 8 (19:27):
Photos are not here, but.
Speaker 9 (19:31):
I think the ends.
Speaker 11 (19:34):
The thing.
Speaker 9 (19:35):
She realized that a lot of the files were being purged,
so she actually took all the purge material and kept
it herself. So between her and her institutional knowledge and
what Dell was able to gather for us, we were
able to recreate a lot of the original files, and
so we had a good foundation to work on from there.
Speaker 8 (19:58):
Jim Treeham says Roman was instrumental in his reinvestigation of
the Freeway Phantom case.
Speaker 3 (20:05):
She is wonderful.
Speaker 9 (20:06):
I mean, her memory of this case. Anything that I
say that is contradicted by her, go with what she says,
because where I have, you know, files and reports that
I am working off of and all that. She has
a great institutional memory about what was actually going on
during that time, which is so important because she knows,
(20:27):
you know, what, not only what the department was like,
but what was those neighborhoods were like, what the relationships
were between the department and the neighborhoods and the media
and all of that. And just talking with her, I
always learned something new. We talked several times, you know,
during that time period, and we've actually talked several times
since where we've discussed various issues.
Speaker 3 (20:49):
On the case and all of that.
Speaker 9 (20:51):
And you know, she was able to help us out,
you know, quite a lot, because even with what we
were able to gather, when you're digging through these old
files and stuff, you're almost like an archaeologist. You're trying
to kind of piece together little things, and some of
the documents that you would come across, they would make
reference to things that you would go, well, where is that?
Where is that in another document? And you can't find it,
(21:14):
So you know that at some point something existed.
Speaker 8 (21:18):
After some digging, Jim and his team were able to
identify some new evidence that hadn't been thoroughly looked at before.
Speaker 5 (21:27):
During the time that we were working on this, we
basically learned that there was evidence available from two of
the different scenes. One was that PG County had evidence
from the Brenda Woodard case. It was part of the
sex kit that they submitted to the Maryland State Police lab.
And at that time the technology is in advance as
(21:48):
it is now, they weren't able to get a DNA
profile off of the material that was left, and there
was so little material left that they actually used it
all up, and so we pretty much hit a data
end right there. The second evidence actually came because of
our work. We were trying to promote the case and
(22:09):
get information out there about it, and I was doing
a presentation on it to the mid Atlantic Cold Case
Homicide Investigators Association when a cold case investigator from the
Maryland State Police said, wait a minute, the last victim, Williams,
that's our case. And it turns out we didn't know that,
but because of where her body was found, the Maryland
State Police had actually become involved in her case. And
(22:33):
so they actually had more case files that we weren't
aware of at the time, and they had a box
of some of her clothing, which was pretty exciting for us.
And it turns out that, you know, her underwear was
in there, and there was a possibility that there were
some seamen stains, and so that was eventually submitted back
(22:53):
to the Maryland State Police Lab. But a follow up
investigation that was also being done by the National Center
for Missing and Exploited Children they were helping out as well.
It turns out that that was a boyfriend. She had
been with her boyfriend earlier that evening. He had dropped
her off with the bus stop, and he definitely had
an alibi, so he wasn't involved. And so unfortunately we
(23:16):
hit dead ends on both accounts. But at least we now.
Speaker 6 (23:20):
Know that we feel pretty comfortable that we've tracked down
what is out there. Not to say that something might
not pop up in the future sometime, but hopefully it will,
but you know, we've pretty much covered those bases, we think.
Speaker 8 (23:36):
Trainham says that by far the most success they had
was with the profiles. They developed a new geographic profile,
which we talked about at length during episode six. They
also followed up on the original psychological profiles, including the
one commissioned by Romaine Jenkins and completed by the FBI,
but he says the track record of profiling throughout this
(23:57):
case had been sketchy at best.
Speaker 9 (24:00):
At the time that the case was ongoing. At first,
what was actually happening. They went to several different psychiatrists
psychologists in the area, and they talked to them and
got various very different profiles.
Speaker 3 (24:15):
I mean, some were.
Speaker 9 (24:17):
Talking about how the persons psychotic, we're talking about No,
he's more like a normal person. Some talked about how
he would be triggered by the name Denise. Others disagreed
with that, and so they were all over the charts.
The FBI did do a profile several years later, where
I think they were much more grounded in the case.
(24:38):
Plus they had more experience working with this type of
personality or at least reviewing cases that were committed by
this type of person, and so they had a more
factual background.
Speaker 8 (24:50):
Training believes that psychological profiles can be dangerous for investigators.
Speaker 9 (24:55):
Profile is only as good as the information. Plus it's
not going to point to one person. The profile is
going to help you prioritize who you look at over
other people. And you know, the profiles that I've worked
with in the past, you know basically tell you don't
eliminate somebody simply because of the profile, you know, just
put them lower on the list to investigate. And I
(25:19):
had mentioned it is only as good as the information
that they're given. And a lot of times what we
do is we would go ask.
Speaker 3 (25:25):
For a profile. Here, miss the profile.
Speaker 9 (25:27):
Here's our case file, look at it. Tell me what
you think. We get the profile back. Six months later,
my case follows down this and I lock up somebody
or identify somebody as a suspect who doesn't even come
close to this, and I'm going out a profile still good.
But if I had kept them abreast of all the
(25:47):
incoming information at the time, then they could have modified
their thoughts and given me better investigative leads as new
information became available. So that's how we don't take advantage
of this information.
Speaker 8 (26:02):
Tretam warns that profiles, especially inaccurate ones, can lead to
what he calls tunnel vision.
Speaker 9 (26:09):
The tunnel vision is basically focusing in on a suspect
or a theory to the exclusion of any other. Now,
at some point in an investigation, you have to kind
of start doing that, because once you start to identify
your suspect, then you begin to build a case against them.
It goes from being an evidence based investigation to not
(26:29):
a suspect based investigation. The danger is is that you
get confirmation biased. The confirmation bias is that you now
have tunnel vision, but you're only going to seek information
that confirms what you believe to be true and you're
going to ignore information that contradicts that. So, you know,
(26:50):
tunnel vision is not that bad. You just have to
be able to have somebody say, hey, wait a minute,
you know, tap you on the shoulder. Did you think
about this? Oh no, I didn't.
Speaker 3 (27:00):
Let's go look at that. That sort of thing.
Speaker 9 (27:02):
So oftentimes somebody may get a profile or may focus
in on this is who we think it is because
of this, and then they will start trying to make
the person fit the evidence, rather than seeing where the
evidence takes them to the person. But we also have
a tendency to focusing on people who we don't think
(27:24):
are acting appropriately. You know, the strange guy and all that.
But you know, people act the way they do, and
when we project. That's not the way I would act
onto somebody. We've gotten off track many times by doing
that sort of thing, rather than recognizing that no people
can act all sorts of ways and it.
Speaker 3 (27:46):
Can be normal.
Speaker 8 (27:48):
Triam says this sort of tunnel vision was evident in
the Freeway Phantom case. Their original profile of a mentally
ill man is what convinced so many people in law
enforcement that Robert Askins was the case.
Speaker 9 (28:01):
And here, just like with all the profiles that they
were getting from all of these psychiatrists and everything, the
reason they were going to these people is that they
thought this escot was mentally insane. He was, you know,
somebody who should stand out in the psychiatric community as
having been treated for whatever ailments he had. And that's
not necessarily the case.
Speaker 8 (28:24):
Train and Stress is that it's crucial profiles be constantly
updated with new information. If a profile is years or
even months out of date, it can lead investigators in
the wrong direction. However, Jim is optimistic that with modern
technology and our current understanding of profiling, we can and
should continue working on the Freeway Phantom profile.
Speaker 9 (28:46):
Things have come a long way since the seventies and eighties,
so I would be very interested to hear any updates
that anybody might have.
Speaker 8 (28:56):
That's exactly why we decided it was time for a
new profile, something that hasn't been done since the mid
two thousands, and we found the perfect person to do it,
the former FBI profiler who cracked the DC Sniper case
and blew the lid off the Whitewater investigation.
Speaker 3 (29:33):
I'm Jim Clemente.
Speaker 2 (29:34):
I'm a retired FBIS Supervisory special Agent and profiler, and
I'm also the co founder of XG Productions and so
I write and produce and developed content for all platforms.
Speaker 8 (29:49):
Our team first discovered Jim Clemente a few years ago
during the production of Monster DC Sniper. Jim played an
instrumental role in developing the criminal profile in that case.
He spent years as a profiler with the FBI, and
after leaving, he went on to produce multiple seasons of
the show Criminal Minds. We thought there's no one better
to make a new profile for the Freeway Phantom, and
(30:11):
we started by asking him about the foundations of criminal
profiling and how it's come to prove such a success.
Speaker 10 (30:20):
So how does one become a profiler?
Speaker 2 (30:22):
Well, in the FBI, you have to first become an
FBI Special Agent and then go through the FBI Academy
and then work about ten years at least on major cases,
cooperating with local police departments, state police departments, and other
federal agencies and get enough experience on major cases that
(30:45):
you have something to bring to the Behavioral Analysis Unit.
So the Behavioral Analysis Unit is housed in the National
Center for the Analysis of Violent Crimes in Virginia at
the FBI Academy, and the Behavioral and EUSIS unit is
where the profilers are trained and they work. It basically
(31:06):
descended from the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit, and that was
started by Howard Teaton in the early seventies, and it
evolved from a unit that had a few people to
one now that has five or six separate units and
(31:26):
twenty five to thirty five active FBI profilers.
Speaker 8 (31:31):
You know, the case as you know that we're working
on is from the nineteen seventies when we didn't even
say serial killer. So I have to imagine that the
science of profiling has evolved a lot. You know, at
the time, if you read some of the early accounts
of trying to figure out what makes a serial killer
and you see some of these the early attempts, right,
(31:51):
trying to figure out what distinguishes a serial killer from
another type of murderer.
Speaker 10 (31:57):
That seems to have really evolved over the years.
Speaker 8 (32:00):
And part of that, I think was because in the
very early years they were dealing with a very small
number of people that they could interview, right.
Speaker 2 (32:07):
Yeah, they interviewed thirty five or thirty eight people, and
when I left, it was up to fifteen hundred, So
we had a much broader base or foundation to the
information that we were basing our profiles on.
Speaker 3 (32:21):
So basically, what.
Speaker 2 (32:22):
We found was that there are a number of different
ways that people become serial killers and a number of
different ways that that manifests itself.
Speaker 3 (32:33):
It's not one size of fis all.
Speaker 2 (32:35):
You can't simply say, Okay, this is what motivates a
serial killer. There's a spectrum of behavior. There's a tremendous
amount of diversity among offenders, and that is evidenced in
how they do what they do, why they do what
they do, and how long they get away with it.
Speaker 8 (32:57):
When we asked Jim Clemente to look into the Freeway
Fantom case, he said, the best place to begin is
to analyze everything we know about the killer.
Speaker 2 (33:08):
We always start with picktimology, because looking at the victim
and understanding everything about the victims is like holding up
a mirror to the offender. There's a reason why he
chooses these particular victims, and in this case, seeing the
overwhelming similarities between these victims tells me that he had
(33:29):
a very very strong preference and he offended mainly against children.
They're petite girls too, and there's a reason for it.
He didn't randomly pick these girls. He picked them specifically
for that reason. Now, whether this was desire in him
(33:50):
that was conscious or subconscious, I don't know whether he
felt a certain way whenever he saw somebody he targeted
as a victim, or whether he specifically laid out the plans.
I'm going to wait for this kind of person to
come into my sites, and then I'm going to wait.
Speaker 3 (34:10):
For the opportunity to take that person.
Speaker 2 (34:12):
I'm not sure about that, but the consistency with which
he operated tells me this was an incredibly important thing
to him.
Speaker 3 (34:22):
So that's the first thing.
Speaker 2 (34:24):
Second thing is I would absolutely categorize him as a
preferential child sex offender. And what does that mean, Well,
people throw around the term pedophile all the time, but
what they don't understand is pedophilia is actually a diagnosis.
You go to the DSM and you can look up
the criterion to be diagnosed as a pedophile. But it's
(34:44):
somebody who is sexually aroused by pre pubescent children. And
this guy may be a pedophile, but the broader term
is preferential child sex offender, meaning that he had a
specific sexual preference.
Speaker 3 (35:01):
And this can include the age, the.
Speaker 2 (35:04):
Gender, the body type, the personality type, the circumstances, all
of those things surrounding his victim choice. Because when he's
hunting for victims, he's looking for vulnerability, accessibility, and desirability.
And sometimes when the desirability factor isn't there, in other words,
(35:27):
the person doesn't absolutely fit into that desirability factor.
Speaker 3 (35:31):
He'll settle for whatever is available.
Speaker 2 (35:34):
But in this case, because he picked patitue girls and
most of them were young teens, that.
Speaker 3 (35:42):
Was most likely his preference.
Speaker 2 (35:45):
It's a criminal sexual preference and it's something that he
has embraced in his life. In other words, many people
have dark thoughts and desires, but this guy decided I'm.
Speaker 3 (36:00):
Going to pursue them. I'm going to hide it.
Speaker 2 (36:03):
I'm going to do everything I can to set up
and be prepared for it. I'm going to fantasize about
doing it over and over and over again, and eventually
I'm going to actually be able to actually act on
my desires. And that's what he did at least these
six times, maybe more.
Speaker 8 (36:25):
Clemente says. The next victimology factors to analyze are the
different times and places where he actually abducted these girls.
Speaker 2 (36:34):
He's clearly all over the map on that, but he's
in a fairly small geographic location, and his body disposal
sites are as well. And this tells me right away
that this child preferential sex offender is from this area.
(36:55):
He's not somebody who just passed through and doesn't really
know the area. He's somebody who is actually invisible in
this neighborhood. Nobody sees him as out of place. Everybody
sees him as belonging, and so it doesn't raise the
alarm that he's there. So he's able to operate with
(37:17):
impunity in these neighborhoods. And that leads me to believe,
if the demographics there are highly concentrated with minorities, that
he is also a minority, and that means he could
be African American, he could be mixed, but he's definitely
seen as someone who is just part of the neighborhood,
(37:41):
doesn't stick out like a sore thumb.
Speaker 8 (37:43):
What about the location where he left the victims. Is
it significant that he was leaving them by the side
of the freeway.
Speaker 2 (37:50):
It is significant, And freeways are interesting because millions of
people use them, but very few people walk along the
sides of them, right, so they're very accessible. But they're
also not generally used for foot traffic, and so it's
very easy to conceal someone just off of a very
(38:15):
very busy highway because nobody usually walks along there. It
means that he one has a car, two knows when
he can get on and off that road without being detected.
Most likely has a job or family situation which allows
(38:37):
him to be out at any hour of the day
or night. Because, believe me, choosing these victims and abducting
these victims took a long time. He had to be
out there a long time to get access.
Speaker 3 (38:50):
To these particular victims.
Speaker 2 (38:52):
They weren't doing things that they did every day at
that time. That means he has to be available to
wait for them to show up and to follow them,
and then to be vulnerable. So they're not vulnerable while
they're inside a store or with other people. They're vulnerable
when they're alone. And in one case, for example, where
(39:14):
he abducted a girl coming right outside of a corner
grocery store, he had to be pretty bold because there
were obviously other people around.
Speaker 3 (39:25):
It said the.
Speaker 2 (39:26):
Packages and things that she bought were right in front
of the store, but that it doesn't say if it's
on the sidewalk right outside the glass door, or on
the street, you know, fifty feet away or around the corner.
Speaker 3 (39:38):
I don't know what the.
Speaker 2 (39:39):
Actual facts are, but he definitely took a risk with
that one. And when you see someone take a great
risk like that, that means the desirability factor is through
the roof. This is exactly who he wanted, and he
was willing to take a great risk to get her.
Speaker 3 (39:57):
So this is important.
Speaker 2 (39:59):
That tells me something in terms of how highly she
might be ranked on his desirability factor.
Speaker 10 (40:06):
Meaning that this is sort of his ideal.
Speaker 2 (40:09):
Yes, it's closest to his ideal. The highest risk that
he took is going to tell you what he wanted.
Speaker 3 (40:15):
The most.
Speaker 8 (40:16):
The next detail we looked at was the length of
time that the killer kept each victim before dumping their bodies.
Speaker 3 (40:23):
The first two were the ones that he kept the longest.
Speaker 10 (40:26):
Yeah, Carol and Darlinia, right.
Speaker 2 (40:29):
And so the first one, I would think it had
the most planning involved. This is something he led up
to for a very long period of time. He was
fantasizing about doing this. Everything was in place, and he
did what he did, and he planned to keep them
probably for an extended period of time. But it never
goes as well as they plan. Never, And so when
(40:53):
he gets down to the third victim, it's eight hours later.
The fourth victim, it's three hours later, the fifth victim
it's six hours later, the seventh victim it's eight hours later.
I think what he found was it's difficult to keep
someone alive for a time and keep them hidden. He
(41:13):
may have had some change in his circumstances, his relationship
or his living circumstances, or wherever he kept these girls.
But also he wasn't a killer until he killed his
first victim. It may have taken him longer to form
the intent to actually take their lives. And we see
(41:35):
with Brenda Woodard that she received a tremendous amount of
violence and anger from the offender, and she happened to be.
Speaker 3 (41:48):
The only eighteen year old, the only adult.
Speaker 2 (41:51):
She may have had more wits about her, She may
have been stronger willed, and she must have fought more
than the other. And I think because there was a
ten month gap after that offense, she really affected him
what she was able to do and maybe how close
she was to being able to get away and.
Speaker 3 (42:13):
Then ruin everything for him.
Speaker 2 (42:15):
I think that really made him go underground for a
period of time.
Speaker 8 (42:19):
So what are we to make of the note that
was found with Brenda Denise Woodard? This is tantamount to
my insensitivity misspelled to people, especially women. I will admit
the others when you catch me if you can freeway Phantom.
Speaker 3 (42:35):
Well, there are a couple of things about it.
Speaker 2 (42:36):
One is that he's obviously loving the moniker. This is
why we tell media outlets do not nickname offenders.
Speaker 3 (42:47):
We don't do it at the FBI, but we.
Speaker 2 (42:50):
Do encourage the media to not name offenders, just like
we tell them not to put a picture and the
name a school shooter up after they've been caught or killed,
because What it does is it gives other people who
are like minded the idea that they can become famous too,
(43:12):
Because many of these offenders don't have a good self image.
Speaker 3 (43:16):
They're actually they feel.
Speaker 2 (43:17):
Terrible about themselves and they're trying to feel more powerful.
Particularly when you have this kind of offender who's attacking
petite girls. This guy feels powerless and he wants to
feel powerful. So this guy wanted to communicate because he
wanted to sort of revel in the fact that he'd
(43:38):
been given a moniker by the media. You won't hear
me say it, because that is not something I encourage
at all. Giving him a moniker only feeds his ego
and can actually embolden him to kill more.
Speaker 3 (43:54):
The next thing I'll say, and this is part of
the profile.
Speaker 2 (43:56):
Is that it's clear that he had a fairly correct
use of the word tantamount.
Speaker 3 (44:03):
I believe he used the word because he wanted to
impress the readers.
Speaker 2 (44:07):
He wanted to show off, and this is something that
he will do in his real life all the time
because of his.
Speaker 3 (44:13):
Poor self image.
Speaker 2 (44:15):
He feels the need to prove his greatness, and whether
that's in his vocabulary that he uses or in the
quote conquests that he makes. He wants to prove how
much of a man he is, and this letter, especially
when he has used these multi syllabic words to show
(44:37):
off and he gets one of them wrong. So I
think I should just launch into the profile.
Speaker 10 (44:43):
Yeah, let's do it.
Speaker 8 (44:50):
Next time.
Speaker 7 (44:51):
On Freeway Phantom, I believe that he's likely short himself,
although he has very powerful hands, probably due to the
kind of work he does.
Speaker 2 (45:02):
But I believe he's not scary. He's able to get
close enough to these victims to not scare them away
before he can control them.
Speaker 11 (45:11):
One of the things that he said that really made
sense to me is the fact that he believes that
this person fantasized about this, especially with the first VIC,
and planned it, and that's why he was able to
keep her.
Speaker 3 (45:25):
A lot of variables play in the closure rate. We
live and die. Some people by the street code, some
people out there. They know who murdered this person, they
know who committed this armed robbery, but they won't come forward.
Speaker 1 (45:45):
Freeway Fantom is a production of iHeart Radio, Tenderfoot TV
and Black Bar MITZVAH. Our host is CELESE.
Speaker 3 (45:51):
Hilly.
Speaker 1 (45:52):
The show is written by Trevor Young, Jamie Albright, and
Celess Hilly. Executive producers on behalf of Our Heart 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,
(46:15):
j Ellis and Aaron Bergman, with producer Sidney Fools. Lead
researcher is Jamie Albright. Artwork by Mister Soul two one six,
original music by Makeup and Vanity Set special thanks to
a teammate, Uta Beck Media and Marketing and the Nord Group.
Tenderfoot TV and iHeartMedia, as well as Black Bar Mitzvah
(46:36):
have increased the reward for information leading to the arrest
and conviction of the person or persons responsible for their
freeway fan of 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,
(46:59):
contact the Metropolitan Police Department at area code two zero
two seven two seven nine zero ninety nine. For more information,
please visit freeway dashfanom dot com. For more podcasts from
iHeartRadio and Tenderfoot TV, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Thanks for listening.
You're listening to the Freeway Phanom, a production of iHeartRadio,
Tenderfoot TV, and Black bar Mitzvah. The views and opinions
expressed in this podcast are solely those of the podcast
author or individuals participating in the podcast, and do not
represent those of iHeartMedia, Tenderfoot TV, Black bar Mitzvah, or
their employees. This podcast also contains subject matter that may
(00:24):
not be suitable for everyone. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Freeways are interesting because millions of people use them, but
very few people walk along the sides of them. They're
very accessible, but they're also not generally used for foot traffic,
and so it's very easy to conceal someone just off
(00:52):
of a very very busy highway because nobody usually walks
along there. It means that he one has a car,
two knows when he can get on and off that
road without being detected. Most likely has a job or
(01:13):
family situation which allows him to be out at any hour.
Speaker 3 (01:17):
Of the day or night.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
Because, believe me, choosing these victims and abducting these victims
took a long time. He had to be out there
a long time to get access.
Speaker 3 (01:28):
To these particular victims.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
They weren't doing things that they did every day at
that time. That means he has to be available to
wait for them to show up and to follow them,
and then to be vulnerable. So they're not vulnerable while
they're inside a.
Speaker 3 (01:45):
Store or with other people. They're vulnerable when they're alone.
Speaker 2 (01:50):
This is exactly who he wanted, and he was willing
to take a great risk to get her.
Speaker 4 (02:02):
The homicide detectives termed the cases the little girl cases.
Speaker 5 (02:07):
This child was laying on the side of the road.
I wouldn't go no way.
Speaker 6 (02:12):
I would call up my house.
Speaker 7 (02:14):
Those first five murders should have been a huge warning
bell for the police.
Speaker 4 (02:18):
We just want to know what happened. This person must
have saw that They was thinking that maybe it's just
one person, and he says, uh, they need to know.
This is me.
Speaker 5 (02:28):
I thought that they would catch him. I thought it
was just a matter of time.
Speaker 8 (02:33):
I'm Celeste Headley and this is Freeway Phantom. In the
previous seven episodes, we covered the murders of eight young
black girls, ranging in age from ten to eighteen years old,
that occurred in DC from nineteen seventy one to nineteen
seventy two. There were six confirmed victims of the Freeway Phantom.
(02:57):
And then there was the case of Angela Barnes, originally
co ittered victim number three, whose case was closed after
two police officers were convicted of the crime. Then there
was Tera Bryant, originally considered the final victim, who was
eventually removed from the Freeway Phantom victim list. And two
things are unclear about TERA's case. Who removed her from
(03:18):
the investigation and why. Fifty years later, Detective Romaine Jenkins
still believes that Tara was yet another victim of the
Freeway Phantom, although her family believes otherwise. As we learned
in the last episode, law enforcement turned their attention to
the Green Vega Gang in nineteen seventy four, and although
they were officially ruled out as suspects in the Freeway
(03:40):
Phantom murders, many in law enforcement assumed they were responsible.
Others thought Robert Askins was the likely killer, a suspect
we talked about in episode six. All of this led
the majority of the Metropolitan Police Department to conclude that
the cases were solved, but not Detective Romayn Jenkins.
Speaker 4 (04:00):
Were looking for the wrong person. They didn't know about profiling,
and all of that They're not looking for the guy
who hides behind a tree, you know, this dastardly guy
who's gonna grab a woman, some psycho. That's not what
they were looking for, and that's what they went after.
Speaker 8 (04:17):
For ten years, the case files sat there called untouched,
until Romayne took over the case in nineteen eighty four.
Speaker 4 (04:25):
So I had at my disposal, I had seven senior
homicide detectives, and I decided, I said, why not use them?
And some of them had actually worked on the cases traitionally, yeah, originally,
And they gave me their notebooks and so forth, and they,
you know, could you read all their handwriting? Uh huh. See,
(04:46):
back then, we were the carbon paper typewriter folks. There
were no computers. We didn't have computers. You had to
type everything and man ooh, you had to be detailed.
And we work closely with the medical exams this office,
so you know, we learned a lot about anatomy and
causes of death and things like that. We investigated causes
(05:07):
of death.
Speaker 8 (05:08):
Although she was now leading a team, many in the
police department weren't too happy about having a black female supervisor.
Romayne says that throughout the nineteen seventies and eighties, racism
was alive and well in the MPD racism.
Speaker 4 (05:23):
You talk about racism, Oh yes, I just signed black
officers to a scout car and I'm riding along in
the area and I see the black officer walking the footb.
Is what you're doing walking up footb? The lieutenant took
me out the car and put officers on. So and
those are the things that they did back then, you know.
So racism hadn't gone away, you know, sexism and sexism
(05:48):
because because the women were mistreated by the officers they were,
they tried to intimidate some of them, you know, and
some of the women, some of the women just said,
you know what, this is not for me, and they
left the job. You know, they actually left the job.
And as a supervisor on the job, you know, I
thought I would have some power, but no, I really didn't.
(06:11):
And I know one time my lieutenant asked me, he said,
Sergeant Jenkins, do you think I'm a racist? And I said, yes, sir,
you are. And he says, I'm not a racist. My
next door neighbor is black. I said, Lieutenant, the only
reason your next door neighbor is black is because you
don't have enough money to move out the neighborhood. See.
(06:32):
I was like that because my husband was president of
the Afro American Police Association, so there was a militantcy.
I had an instance where two of my officers, one
white and one black, they saved a little three year
old who had been left in the car and the
car burst out in flames, and officers went in and
got that child. I wrote the officers up to the
(06:54):
awards committee, only the white officer's name went. I mean,
they would do things like that, and so I was
always constantly, you know, in battle with them. And I said,
you know what, I'd enjoined the police department to go
through us. I mean, these are the things that I
had to face out there. The commander at that time,
(07:15):
I went to him, I said, sir, we have a
problem over here. He said, what's wrong. I said, you know,
the policewomen, these black police women are being harassed, They're
being mistreated. I said, I think we only had like
one or two white females. And the white girl who
came from Connecticut who had never seen a black person before.
They gave her a short beat around the station. That
(07:37):
was her assignment. She had to walk around the station
for the tour of duty. I mean, this actually happened.
And so I said, you know, we're having a problem
and something has to be done. He said, well, you
know what, and he was white. He said, we're not
going to tolerate. He said, I want you to do
an investigation and let the chips fall where they may.
And so I said okay. And in the end room,
(08:00):
a black officer came there and say, look, Sorge, and
be careful because the white officers gonna get you. He said,
I don't know what they planning, but they plotting something.
He said. I was in the locker room and I
got bits and pieces of the conversation. They're gonna do
something to you because they upset that you initiated this
investigation of the things they did to the black police swiomen.
(08:20):
So I said, thank you. And it wasn't no longer
than a day or so later. Whenever my troops went
on a run, I'm just a supervisor. I'm out there
riding up and down in a scoutcar. I go and
see how they handle it. I'd go park in the
neighborhood and watch how they handle how they interact with people,
and I got out the car and I was walking
towards them. Well by then they had cleared the runs
(08:43):
at ten eight nothing found or whatever it was. And
so as I was walking back to my to my
scout car, they got in the car and the officer
gunn in the car. I had to jump up on
a citizen's car to keep from getting hit. I was, Oh,
was I hot? I was hot? So I didn't say anything.
(09:04):
When I got in my scout car, I went over
the air and asked the dispatcher to locate that unit
for me and have them meet me at there. Stand
by their location. I'm responding. They stood by. I went
to their location and I told it was two white
officers and I told them, whatever you applied and to
get me, make sure that you don't miss the next time,
(09:25):
or else I'm going to kick your you know, and
I use the word you can use it, yeah ass.
And if I can't whip your ass, I have a
husband up in three D Whu's six foot two, and
he will do it. But don't miss the next time.
They didn't say nothing. They went on back and got
in the scout car and drove off.
Speaker 8 (09:45):
It is so difficult for me to hear you tell
these stories about the way the police force was in
the nineteen seventies and think that that prejudice, that racism
didn't hamper the investigation. That they may have invested a
lot of officers hours and energy and focus and time
into the investigation. But how were these detectives not let
(10:09):
us stray by their own prejudices.
Speaker 4 (10:10):
Oh, they had to be. They had to be because
first of all, they didn't understand the community that they
were investigating. I say, you know, police are representative of
the communities that they police. If the citizens act wild
and crazy, the police are the same thing. That's that's
the same kind of thing you're possibly be going to get.
(10:31):
Here is the thing. Sometimes, as a police officer, you
have you've got to put aside your personal feelings. The
only person who ever tried to kill me on the
Metropolitan Police Department was a black police officer. Okay, you know,
a black police officer tried to kill me and he
ended up getting arrested. So you can't say all the
(10:54):
white police officers bad. There's some black ones just the same.
Speaker 9 (10:57):
You know.
Speaker 8 (10:59):
By the mid eighties, Romaine and her team were entirely
focused on the Freeway phantom case, and Romayne had her
work cut out for her.
Speaker 4 (11:07):
When I first started, one of the first things I
did was's tried to find the evidence. When I checked
with the Metropolitan Police Department and I found that the
evidence had been destroyed. The officer took me to the
property book where the evidence was and said evidence has
been destroyed. So say, oh, that's a DC for me.
So then I contacted PG County. PG County found the
(11:31):
evidence in their cases, and I got a technician from
the FBI to meet me and another detective over in
their property office and we went over the evidence. Conclusion
was they hadn't preserved it well enough that they could
get any type of DNA, but that was back then.
They have made advances now now whatever happened to that evidence,
(11:55):
I don't know.
Speaker 8 (11:57):
But Romayne was able to start making some connections with
the evidence she did have.
Speaker 4 (12:02):
That's when I saw the report about the green fibers.
That's what really piqued my I said, nobody never mentioned
anything about green synthetic fibers. And I asked a couple
of the people who I knew who had worked on
the investigation, and they said didn't know anything about green fibers.
Speaker 8 (12:21):
Well, investigators did initially identify the green fibers on each
of the victims. Somehow they failed to connect them or
analyze them conclusively. Remain decided it was time to make
that happen.
Speaker 4 (12:33):
Well, see what happened is no one knew about the
green synthetic fibers until Detective Lloyd Davis developed Askings as
a suspect. When Davis had requested that all the evidence
be sent to the FBI, that's when they came back
about the green synthetic fibers, which aren't really green if
(12:56):
you see them visuals. Now, this is what the FBI
technician told me, the guy who handled the cases to
the naked eye, they are different color. They're only green
if you look at them under a microscopt What are
the sources of the fibers? That's that's what I wanted
to know about the fiber evidence. And he did the
fiber evidence in the Wayne Williams Atlanta murders. So I
(13:19):
figured he's gonna have some credibility which was also green.
Speaker 8 (13:21):
Actually, yeah, coincidentally.
Speaker 4 (13:24):
So I asked him, I said, well, you know, what's
the source of the fibers? He said he thought they
came from an auto. But I talked to Detective Lloyd Davis,
who had all the evidence submitted. He said he was
told that the fibers came from a bathroom. Mate like
a bath mat and a bathroom, and that goes along
(13:44):
with these victims being washed and cleaned. I said, that
sounds about right as far as I'm concerned.
Speaker 8 (13:52):
One of the most important things that remain did was
submit evidence to the FBI to get the first official
profile of the killer, and they came up with some
intriguing conclusions.
Speaker 4 (14:04):
They felt that this person was in the military. Well,
at that time, you had all these military people coming
back from Vietnam who were in hospitals here and installations here,
so you had a lot of that going on. But
that was really interesting. And the reason why I thought
it was so interesting was because when I showed the
note to the FBI, they said, this is military. This
(14:25):
person was in the military. I showed the same note
to the investigator at Naval Investigated Service. He said, oh,
whoever wrote this note? This military? So I had two
different brains saying the same thing. You know that this
person was in the military.
Speaker 8 (15:05):
Romaine eventually retired from the police force, and with her retirement,
the case essentially went cold. That was until it was
picked up in the early two thousands by former DC
homicide detective Jim Trainam, who stumbled into it almost by accident.
Speaker 9 (15:21):
That kind of took over a project where we were
looking at all of these unsolved cases involving women in DC,
like one hundred had been identified over a ten year
period by the Washington Post. And that was also during
the time period where they first started the coda's database.
(15:42):
You know, before you really couldn't do anything with DNA
unless you had a named suspect to do a one
to one comparison to. But with codas, she could put
the information into a database, it would run it against
other cases, it would run it against a database or
a collection of suspects. So it was during that time
when I was first getting started somebody came to me
(16:03):
and asking me about the Freeway phantom case, and I
really didn't know anything about it at the time. I
began to do research and poll what I could, and
basically I found the very minimal paperwork, just entries in
our homicide log book, and that was pretty much it.
We didn't have any files we didn't have any evidence.
And the more I looked, the more I realized, like
(16:26):
you know, all the cases that were out in PG,
they really didn't have any files. They had some evidence
that they were looking at in the Wooded case, but
everything had pretty much been destroyed, and so I was
just trying to build what I could based on these
paper accounts and things along that.
Speaker 8 (16:44):
Line, much like Romayne decades before him, Jim train And
discovered that the evidence in the case had been poorly maintained,
either damaged or mysteriously missing. But he slowly started to
connect some dots.
Speaker 9 (16:59):
So I was able to some stuff from Prince George's county.
And then we found out that the FBI had gotten
involved in the Worder case and they had quite an
extensive file. I was able to get that and make
a copy of it as well. I was continuing to
look for evidence during that time, kept finding nothing, nothing, nothing.
(17:19):
And after we got the FBI file and we learned
about people like, let say, Romaine Jenkins who had information
as well. I was approached by Dale Wilbur of the
Washington Post, and you know, he wanted to do some
work on cold cases, and so he was asking me
about cases that I thought would be interesting, and I
had mentioned the Freeway Phantom to him, and so he
(17:42):
thought that was going to be a good case to
the feature, And so we pretty much gave him open
access to our files that we had at the time
because it was so old, we figured it wasn't going
to do any harm.
Speaker 3 (17:52):
So he did.
Speaker 9 (17:53):
What I really wanted to do was that he actually
went out and knocked on the doors of the detectives
who actually worked on the case originally, and they would
invite them in and they would say, yeah, I know
all about it. I'll talk to you about it. Come
on in, and by the way, would you'd like to
see my file. It turns out that a lot of
them missing files had been taken home by the original
(18:15):
case detectives for later that back in the eighties, they
were packing up a lot of those files. Because of
the way that files were retained back then, they were
throwing out a lot of things like crime scene reports, photographs,
witness statements and all of that on all these cases,
including the Freeway Phantom case. And that's been changed because
(18:37):
of the law, they can't do that anymore.
Speaker 8 (18:40):
One of those people was Romaine Jenkins, who kept most
of the files from the Freeway Phantom case in boxes
in our house. These are the very same boxes that
we sifted through when we visited her home.
Speaker 10 (18:52):
Well, here's some of that carbon paper you're talking about.
Speaker 9 (18:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (18:56):
That all I had to do was okay, See the
police department likes to throw away stuff. Yeah, and I
don't throw away nothing because you never know when you're
going to see it again.
Speaker 8 (19:06):
Oh, it looks like it's from the memorial service.
Speaker 9 (19:10):
That the memorial.
Speaker 10 (19:13):
This is Ninemosia's autopsy reports or foot tall and one.
Speaker 9 (19:18):
Hundred pounds.
Speaker 8 (19:21):
Student at Kelly Miller Junior High School in the sixth grade.
Speaker 3 (19:24):
That's tough.
Speaker 8 (19:27):
Photos are not here, but.
Speaker 9 (19:31):
I think the ends.
Speaker 11 (19:34):
The thing.
Speaker 9 (19:35):
She realized that a lot of the files were being purged,
so she actually took all the purge material and kept
it herself. So between her and her institutional knowledge and
what Dell was able to gather for us, we were
able to recreate a lot of the original files, and
so we had a good foundation to work on from there.
Speaker 8 (19:58):
Jim Treeham says Roman was instrumental in his reinvestigation of
the Freeway Phantom case.
Speaker 3 (20:05):
She is wonderful.
Speaker 9 (20:06):
I mean, her memory of this case. Anything that I
say that is contradicted by her, go with what she says,
because where I have, you know, files and reports that
I am working off of and all that. She has
a great institutional memory about what was actually going on
during that time, which is so important because she knows,
(20:27):
you know, what, not only what the department was like,
but what was those neighborhoods were like, what the relationships
were between the department and the neighborhoods and the media
and all of that. And just talking with her, I
always learned something new. We talked several times, you know,
during that time period, and we've actually talked several times
since where we've discussed various issues.
Speaker 3 (20:49):
On the case and all of that.
Speaker 9 (20:51):
And you know, she was able to help us out,
you know, quite a lot, because even with what we
were able to gather, when you're digging through these old
files and stuff, you're almost like an archaeologist. You're trying
to kind of piece together little things, and some of
the documents that you would come across, they would make
reference to things that you would go, well, where is that?
Where is that in another document? And you can't find it,
(21:14):
So you know that at some point something existed.
Speaker 8 (21:18):
After some digging, Jim and his team were able to
identify some new evidence that hadn't been thoroughly looked at before.
Speaker 5 (21:27):
During the time that we were working on this, we
basically learned that there was evidence available from two of
the different scenes. One was that PG County had evidence
from the Brenda Woodard case. It was part of the
sex kit that they submitted to the Maryland State Police lab.
And at that time the technology is in advance as
(21:48):
it is now, they weren't able to get a DNA
profile off of the material that was left, and there
was so little material left that they actually used it
all up, and so we pretty much hit a data
end right there. The second evidence actually came because of
our work. We were trying to promote the case and
(22:09):
get information out there about it, and I was doing
a presentation on it to the mid Atlantic Cold Case
Homicide Investigators Association when a cold case investigator from the
Maryland State Police said, wait a minute, the last victim, Williams,
that's our case. And it turns out we didn't know that,
but because of where her body was found, the Maryland
State Police had actually become involved in her case. And
(22:33):
so they actually had more case files that we weren't
aware of at the time, and they had a box
of some of her clothing, which was pretty exciting for us.
And it turns out that, you know, her underwear was
in there, and there was a possibility that there were
some seamen stains, and so that was eventually submitted back
(22:53):
to the Maryland State Police Lab. But a follow up
investigation that was also being done by the National Center
for Missing and Exploited Children they were helping out as well.
It turns out that that was a boyfriend. She had
been with her boyfriend earlier that evening. He had dropped
her off with the bus stop, and he definitely had
an alibi, so he wasn't involved. And so unfortunately we
(23:16):
hit dead ends on both accounts. But at least we now.
Speaker 6 (23:20):
Know that we feel pretty comfortable that we've tracked down
what is out there. Not to say that something might
not pop up in the future sometime, but hopefully it will,
but you know, we've pretty much covered those bases, we think.
Speaker 8 (23:36):
Trainham says that by far the most success they had
was with the profiles. They developed a new geographic profile,
which we talked about at length during episode six. They
also followed up on the original psychological profiles, including the
one commissioned by Romaine Jenkins and completed by the FBI,
but he says the track record of profiling throughout this
(23:57):
case had been sketchy at best.
Speaker 9 (24:00):
At the time that the case was ongoing. At first,
what was actually happening. They went to several different psychiatrists
psychologists in the area, and they talked to them and
got various very different profiles.
Speaker 3 (24:15):
I mean, some were.
Speaker 9 (24:17):
Talking about how the persons psychotic, we're talking about No,
he's more like a normal person. Some talked about how
he would be triggered by the name Denise. Others disagreed
with that, and so they were all over the charts.
The FBI did do a profile several years later, where
I think they were much more grounded in the case.
(24:38):
Plus they had more experience working with this type of
personality or at least reviewing cases that were committed by
this type of person, and so they had a more
factual background.
Speaker 8 (24:50):
Training believes that psychological profiles can be dangerous for investigators.
Speaker 9 (24:55):
Profile is only as good as the information. Plus it's
not going to point to one person. The profile is
going to help you prioritize who you look at over
other people. And you know, the profiles that I've worked
with in the past, you know basically tell you don't
eliminate somebody simply because of the profile, you know, just
put them lower on the list to investigate. And I
(25:19):
had mentioned it is only as good as the information
that they're given. And a lot of times what we
do is we would go ask.
Speaker 3 (25:25):
For a profile. Here, miss the profile.
Speaker 9 (25:27):
Here's our case file, look at it. Tell me what
you think. We get the profile back. Six months later,
my case follows down this and I lock up somebody
or identify somebody as a suspect who doesn't even come
close to this, and I'm going out a profile still good.
But if I had kept them abreast of all the
(25:47):
incoming information at the time, then they could have modified
their thoughts and given me better investigative leads as new
information became available. So that's how we don't take advantage
of this information.
Speaker 8 (26:02):
Tretam warns that profiles, especially inaccurate ones, can lead to
what he calls tunnel vision.
Speaker 9 (26:09):
The tunnel vision is basically focusing in on a suspect
or a theory to the exclusion of any other. Now,
at some point in an investigation, you have to kind
of start doing that, because once you start to identify
your suspect, then you begin to build a case against them.
It goes from being an evidence based investigation to not
(26:29):
a suspect based investigation. The danger is is that you
get confirmation biased. The confirmation bias is that you now
have tunnel vision, but you're only going to seek information
that confirms what you believe to be true and you're
going to ignore information that contradicts that. So, you know,
(26:50):
tunnel vision is not that bad. You just have to
be able to have somebody say, hey, wait a minute,
you know, tap you on the shoulder. Did you think
about this? Oh no, I didn't.
Speaker 3 (27:00):
Let's go look at that. That sort of thing.
Speaker 9 (27:02):
So oftentimes somebody may get a profile or may focus
in on this is who we think it is because
of this, and then they will start trying to make
the person fit the evidence, rather than seeing where the
evidence takes them to the person. But we also have
a tendency to focusing on people who we don't think
(27:24):
are acting appropriately. You know, the strange guy and all that.
But you know, people act the way they do, and
when we project. That's not the way I would act
onto somebody. We've gotten off track many times by doing
that sort of thing, rather than recognizing that no people
can act all sorts of ways and it.
Speaker 3 (27:46):
Can be normal.
Speaker 8 (27:48):
Triam says this sort of tunnel vision was evident in
the Freeway Phantom case. Their original profile of a mentally
ill man is what convinced so many people in law
enforcement that Robert Askins was the case.
Speaker 9 (28:01):
And here, just like with all the profiles that they
were getting from all of these psychiatrists and everything, the
reason they were going to these people is that they
thought this escot was mentally insane. He was, you know,
somebody who should stand out in the psychiatric community as
having been treated for whatever ailments he had. And that's
not necessarily the case.
Speaker 8 (28:24):
Train and Stress is that it's crucial profiles be constantly
updated with new information. If a profile is years or
even months out of date, it can lead investigators in
the wrong direction. However, Jim is optimistic that with modern
technology and our current understanding of profiling, we can and
should continue working on the Freeway Phantom profile.
Speaker 9 (28:46):
Things have come a long way since the seventies and eighties,
so I would be very interested to hear any updates
that anybody might have.
Speaker 8 (28:56):
That's exactly why we decided it was time for a
new profile, something that hasn't been done since the mid
two thousands, and we found the perfect person to do it,
the former FBI profiler who cracked the DC Sniper case
and blew the lid off the Whitewater investigation.
Speaker 3 (29:33):
I'm Jim Clemente.
Speaker 2 (29:34):
I'm a retired FBIS Supervisory special Agent and profiler, and
I'm also the co founder of XG Productions and so
I write and produce and developed content for all platforms.
Speaker 8 (29:49):
Our team first discovered Jim Clemente a few years ago
during the production of Monster DC Sniper. Jim played an
instrumental role in developing the criminal profile in that case.
He spent years as a profiler with the FBI, and
after leaving, he went on to produce multiple seasons of
the show Criminal Minds. We thought there's no one better
to make a new profile for the Freeway Phantom, and
(30:11):
we started by asking him about the foundations of criminal
profiling and how it's come to prove such a success.
Speaker 10 (30:20):
So how does one become a profiler?
Speaker 2 (30:22):
Well, in the FBI, you have to first become an
FBI Special Agent and then go through the FBI Academy
and then work about ten years at least on major cases,
cooperating with local police departments, state police departments, and other
federal agencies and get enough experience on major cases that
(30:45):
you have something to bring to the Behavioral Analysis Unit.
So the Behavioral Analysis Unit is housed in the National
Center for the Analysis of Violent Crimes in Virginia at
the FBI Academy, and the Behavioral and EUSIS unit is
where the profilers are trained and they work. It basically
(31:06):
descended from the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit, and that was
started by Howard Teaton in the early seventies, and it
evolved from a unit that had a few people to
one now that has five or six separate units and
(31:26):
twenty five to thirty five active FBI profilers.
Speaker 8 (31:31):
You know, the case as you know that we're working
on is from the nineteen seventies when we didn't even
say serial killer. So I have to imagine that the
science of profiling has evolved a lot. You know, at
the time, if you read some of the early accounts
of trying to figure out what makes a serial killer
and you see some of these the early attempts, right,
(31:51):
trying to figure out what distinguishes a serial killer from
another type of murderer.
Speaker 10 (31:57):
That seems to have really evolved over the years.
Speaker 8 (32:00):
And part of that, I think was because in the
very early years they were dealing with a very small
number of people that they could interview, right.
Speaker 2 (32:07):
Yeah, they interviewed thirty five or thirty eight people, and
when I left, it was up to fifteen hundred, So
we had a much broader base or foundation to the
information that we were basing our profiles on.
Speaker 3 (32:21):
So basically, what.
Speaker 2 (32:22):
We found was that there are a number of different
ways that people become serial killers and a number of
different ways that that manifests itself.
Speaker 3 (32:33):
It's not one size of fis all.
Speaker 2 (32:35):
You can't simply say, Okay, this is what motivates a
serial killer. There's a spectrum of behavior. There's a tremendous
amount of diversity among offenders, and that is evidenced in
how they do what they do, why they do what
they do, and how long they get away with it.
Speaker 8 (32:57):
When we asked Jim Clemente to look into the Freeway
Fantom case, he said, the best place to begin is
to analyze everything we know about the killer.
Speaker 2 (33:08):
We always start with picktimology, because looking at the victim
and understanding everything about the victims is like holding up
a mirror to the offender. There's a reason why he
chooses these particular victims, and in this case, seeing the
overwhelming similarities between these victims tells me that he had
(33:29):
a very very strong preference and he offended mainly against children.
They're petite girls too, and there's a reason for it.
He didn't randomly pick these girls. He picked them specifically
for that reason. Now, whether this was desire in him
(33:50):
that was conscious or subconscious, I don't know whether he
felt a certain way whenever he saw somebody he targeted
as a victim, or whether he specifically laid out the plans.
I'm going to wait for this kind of person to
come into my sites, and then I'm going to wait.
Speaker 3 (34:10):
For the opportunity to take that person.
Speaker 2 (34:12):
I'm not sure about that, but the consistency with which
he operated tells me this was an incredibly important thing
to him.
Speaker 3 (34:22):
So that's the first thing.
Speaker 2 (34:24):
Second thing is I would absolutely categorize him as a
preferential child sex offender. And what does that mean, Well,
people throw around the term pedophile all the time, but
what they don't understand is pedophilia is actually a diagnosis.
You go to the DSM and you can look up
the criterion to be diagnosed as a pedophile. But it's
(34:44):
somebody who is sexually aroused by pre pubescent children. And
this guy may be a pedophile, but the broader term
is preferential child sex offender, meaning that he had a
specific sexual preference.
Speaker 3 (35:01):
And this can include the age, the.
Speaker 2 (35:04):
Gender, the body type, the personality type, the circumstances, all
of those things surrounding his victim choice. Because when he's
hunting for victims, he's looking for vulnerability, accessibility, and desirability.
And sometimes when the desirability factor isn't there, in other words,
(35:27):
the person doesn't absolutely fit into that desirability factor.
Speaker 3 (35:31):
He'll settle for whatever is available.
Speaker 2 (35:34):
But in this case, because he picked patitue girls and
most of them were young teens, that.
Speaker 3 (35:42):
Was most likely his preference.
Speaker 2 (35:45):
It's a criminal sexual preference and it's something that he
has embraced in his life. In other words, many people
have dark thoughts and desires, but this guy decided I'm.
Speaker 3 (36:00):
Going to pursue them. I'm going to hide it.
Speaker 2 (36:03):
I'm going to do everything I can to set up
and be prepared for it. I'm going to fantasize about
doing it over and over and over again, and eventually
I'm going to actually be able to actually act on
my desires. And that's what he did at least these
six times, maybe more.
Speaker 8 (36:25):
Clemente says. The next victimology factors to analyze are the
different times and places where he actually abducted these girls.
Speaker 2 (36:34):
He's clearly all over the map on that, but he's
in a fairly small geographic location, and his body disposal
sites are as well. And this tells me right away
that this child preferential sex offender is from this area.
(36:55):
He's not somebody who just passed through and doesn't really
know the area. He's somebody who is actually invisible in
this neighborhood. Nobody sees him as out of place. Everybody
sees him as belonging, and so it doesn't raise the
alarm that he's there. So he's able to operate with
(37:17):
impunity in these neighborhoods. And that leads me to believe,
if the demographics there are highly concentrated with minorities, that
he is also a minority, and that means he could
be African American, he could be mixed, but he's definitely
seen as someone who is just part of the neighborhood,
(37:41):
doesn't stick out like a sore thumb.
Speaker 8 (37:43):
What about the location where he left the victims. Is
it significant that he was leaving them by the side
of the freeway.
Speaker 2 (37:50):
It is significant, And freeways are interesting because millions of
people use them, but very few people walk along the
sides of them, right, so they're very accessible. But they're
also not generally used for foot traffic, and so it's
very easy to conceal someone just off of a very
(38:15):
very busy highway because nobody usually walks along there. It
means that he one has a car, two knows when
he can get on and off that road without being detected.
Most likely has a job or family situation which allows
(38:37):
him to be out at any hour of the day
or night. Because, believe me, choosing these victims and abducting
these victims took a long time. He had to be
out there a long time to get access.
Speaker 3 (38:50):
To these particular victims.
Speaker 2 (38:52):
They weren't doing things that they did every day at
that time. That means he has to be available to
wait for them to show up and to follow them,
and then to be vulnerable. So they're not vulnerable while
they're inside a store or with other people. They're vulnerable
when they're alone. And in one case, for example, where
(39:14):
he abducted a girl coming right outside of a corner
grocery store, he had to be pretty bold because there
were obviously other people around.
Speaker 3 (39:25):
It said the.
Speaker 2 (39:26):
Packages and things that she bought were right in front
of the store, but that it doesn't say if it's
on the sidewalk right outside the glass door, or on
the street, you know, fifty feet away or around the corner.
Speaker 3 (39:38):
I don't know what the.
Speaker 2 (39:39):
Actual facts are, but he definitely took a risk with
that one. And when you see someone take a great
risk like that, that means the desirability factor is through
the roof. This is exactly who he wanted, and he
was willing to take a great risk to get her.
Speaker 3 (39:57):
So this is important.
Speaker 2 (39:59):
That tells me something in terms of how highly she
might be ranked on his desirability factor.
Speaker 10 (40:06):
Meaning that this is sort of his ideal.
Speaker 2 (40:09):
Yes, it's closest to his ideal. The highest risk that
he took is going to tell you what he wanted.
Speaker 3 (40:15):
The most.
Speaker 8 (40:16):
The next detail we looked at was the length of
time that the killer kept each victim before dumping their bodies.
Speaker 3 (40:23):
The first two were the ones that he kept the longest.
Speaker 10 (40:26):
Yeah, Carol and Darlinia, right.
Speaker 2 (40:29):
And so the first one, I would think it had
the most planning involved. This is something he led up
to for a very long period of time. He was
fantasizing about doing this. Everything was in place, and he
did what he did, and he planned to keep them
probably for an extended period of time. But it never
goes as well as they plan. Never, And so when
(40:53):
he gets down to the third victim, it's eight hours later.
The fourth victim, it's three hours later, the fifth victim
it's six hours later, the seventh victim it's eight hours later.
I think what he found was it's difficult to keep
someone alive for a time and keep them hidden. He
(41:13):
may have had some change in his circumstances, his relationship
or his living circumstances, or wherever he kept these girls.
But also he wasn't a killer until he killed his
first victim. It may have taken him longer to form
the intent to actually take their lives. And we see
(41:35):
with Brenda Woodard that she received a tremendous amount of
violence and anger from the offender, and she happened to be.
Speaker 3 (41:48):
The only eighteen year old, the only adult.
Speaker 2 (41:51):
She may have had more wits about her, She may
have been stronger willed, and she must have fought more
than the other. And I think because there was a
ten month gap after that offense, she really affected him
what she was able to do and maybe how close
she was to being able to get away and.
Speaker 3 (42:13):
Then ruin everything for him.
Speaker 2 (42:15):
I think that really made him go underground for a
period of time.
Speaker 8 (42:19):
So what are we to make of the note that
was found with Brenda Denise Woodard? This is tantamount to
my insensitivity misspelled to people, especially women. I will admit
the others when you catch me if you can freeway Phantom.
Speaker 3 (42:35):
Well, there are a couple of things about it.
Speaker 2 (42:36):
One is that he's obviously loving the moniker. This is
why we tell media outlets do not nickname offenders.
Speaker 3 (42:47):
We don't do it at the FBI, but we.
Speaker 2 (42:50):
Do encourage the media to not name offenders, just like
we tell them not to put a picture and the
name a school shooter up after they've been caught or killed,
because What it does is it gives other people who
are like minded the idea that they can become famous too,
(43:12):
Because many of these offenders don't have a good self image.
Speaker 3 (43:16):
They're actually they feel.
Speaker 2 (43:17):
Terrible about themselves and they're trying to feel more powerful.
Particularly when you have this kind of offender who's attacking
petite girls. This guy feels powerless and he wants to
feel powerful. So this guy wanted to communicate because he
wanted to sort of revel in the fact that he'd
(43:38):
been given a moniker by the media. You won't hear
me say it, because that is not something I encourage
at all. Giving him a moniker only feeds his ego
and can actually embolden him to kill more.
Speaker 3 (43:54):
The next thing I'll say, and this is part of
the profile.
Speaker 2 (43:56):
Is that it's clear that he had a fairly correct
use of the word tantamount.
Speaker 3 (44:03):
I believe he used the word because he wanted to
impress the readers.
Speaker 2 (44:07):
He wanted to show off, and this is something that
he will do in his real life all the time
because of his.
Speaker 3 (44:13):
Poor self image.
Speaker 2 (44:15):
He feels the need to prove his greatness, and whether
that's in his vocabulary that he uses or in the
quote conquests that he makes. He wants to prove how
much of a man he is, and this letter, especially
when he has used these multi syllabic words to show
(44:37):
off and he gets one of them wrong. So I
think I should just launch into the profile.
Speaker 10 (44:43):
Yeah, let's do it.
Speaker 8 (44:50):
Next time.
Speaker 7 (44:51):
On Freeway Phantom, I believe that he's likely short himself,
although he has very powerful hands, probably due to the
kind of work he does.
Speaker 2 (45:02):
But I believe he's not scary. He's able to get
close enough to these victims to not scare them away
before he can control them.
Speaker 11 (45:11):
One of the things that he said that really made
sense to me is the fact that he believes that
this person fantasized about this, especially with the first VIC,
and planned it, and that's why he was able to
keep her.
Speaker 3 (45:25):
A lot of variables play in the closure rate. We
live and die. Some people by the street code, some
people out there. They know who murdered this person, they
know who committed this armed robbery, but they won't come forward.
Speaker 1 (45:45):
Freeway Fantom is a production of iHeart Radio, Tenderfoot TV
and Black Bar MITZVAH. Our host is CELESE.
Speaker 3 (45:51):
Hilly.
Speaker 1 (45:52):
The show is written by Trevor Young, Jamie Albright, and
Celess Hilly. Executive producers on behalf of Our Heart 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,
(46:15):
j Ellis and Aaron Bergman, with producer Sidney Fools. Lead
researcher is Jamie Albright. Artwork by Mister Soul two one six,
original music by Makeup and Vanity Set special thanks to
a teammate, Uta Beck Media and Marketing and the Nord Group.
Tenderfoot TV and iHeartMedia, as well as Black Bar Mitzvah
(46:36):
have increased the reward for information leading to the arrest
and conviction of the person or persons responsible for their
freeway fan of 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,
(46:59):
contact the Metropolitan Police Department at area code two zero
two seven two seven nine zero ninety nine. For more information,
please visit freeway dashfanom dot com. For more podcasts from
iHeartRadio and Tenderfoot TV, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Thanks for listening.
Host
Celeste Headlee
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