Six black girls were brutally murdered in the

early ’70s. Why was this case never solved?

Retired D.C. police detective Romaine Jenkins with case files in her home. (Pete
Marovich/For The Washington Post)
 By Cheryl W. ThompsonMay 22

Retired D.C. police detective Romaine Jenkins doesn’t remember many of the
cases she handled during her four years in homicide. It was the late 1960s and
early ’70s, and the unit was overwhelmed with murders. She was in her 20s
then, and the first woman to make it to homicide. She’d been sent there by the
department’s top brass to investigate baby deaths, including abortions, which
were illegal at the time. Some of the male detectives, particularly those who
were fathers, didn’t particularly like investigating the deaths of children. Such
cases hit too close to home. But Jenkins, then single and childless, didn’t mind.

That’s how she encountered the set of cases she will never forget: the slayings of
six black girls, ages 10 to 18, snatched from D.C. streets, strangled and discarded
near heavily traveled roads. Three of the girls were raped, one was sodomized,
and one was so badly decomposed that it was impossible to determine how she
died.

The homicides — believed to be the first serial killings in Washington — began

in April 1971 and came to be known as the “Freeway Phantom Murders.” For
nearly a half-century, they’ve haunted Jenkins. Retired now for 24 years, she still
wakes up in the night thinking about them and occasionally scribbles notes to
herself: How did the freshly straightened hair of one of the girls end up drawn
and curly? Did her killer wash her to erase evidence before dumping her body? If
Jenkins hears a reference to a serial killing on television, she doesn’t hesitate to
retrieve one of the case files she keeps in her D.C. home — stored in 10 boxes —
to “see if I see something.”

Jenkins spends many of her days tending to her perfectly manicured yard or
talking on the phone with her 44-year-old son, Lenard, a police officer just like
his mom and his dad (who died in 2012). She looks a decade younger than her
75 years, and her mind is still sharp: She remembers that a button was missing
from the black-and-white checkered skirt one of the girls was wearing when her
remains were found, and that another donned a green ribbon in her dark brown
Afro wig. She even recalls that the tennis shoes missing from a third victim were
blue — size 8½ . “I am truly obsessed with this,” she says. “No time ever goes by
that I don’t think about it.”

The murders stopped 17 months after they started, and when the years brought
no arrests, they largely faded from headlines and memories. Several years ago,
while working on another story, I stumbled across a police department news
release featuring snapshots of the six victims. Their innocence was haunting.
How could the killings of these girls go unsolved? With the exception of Jenkins
and another homicide detective, James Trainum, who last investigated the case
in 2009, no one other than the victims’ families seemed to care.

Jenkins, then 28, was milling around the homicide unit at police headquarters
around 2 p.m. on May 1, 1971, when a call came in. Children playing in a grassy
area along Interstate 295 behind St. Elizabeths Hospital had stumbled upon the
body of a young girl and flagged down a police officer. Detectives John Moriarty
and Roy Lamb went to the scene. A supervisor told Jenkins and two others to
follow up by going to the victim’s neighborhood and talking to relatives,
neighbors — anyone who might know something.
As they headed out, the district commander demanded to know where they
were going. The department was inundated with war protesters and he needed
them to patrol the streets, help with prison control and be on standby. “That
was unusual,” Jenkins recalls, “because murder, as far as we were concerned,
took precedence.”
But she obeyed the commander’s orders while other detectives followed up on
the case. The victim, it turned out, was Carol Spinks, a shy seventh-grader at
Johnson Junior High School. She was an identical twin whose passions were
jumping double Dutch rope, playing jacks with her sisters and showing off her
hula-hooping skills. Spinks had been abducted six days earlier after walking four
blocks from her family’s apartment on Wahler Place SE to a 7-Eleven. Her older
sister, Valerie, 24, who lived across the hall, gave her $5 and coaxed her to go
buy TV dinners, bread and soda, even though she knew their mother, Allenteen,
had told the younger children not to leave the house while she visited an aunt in
Brentwood, Md. They were aware of the consequences of disobeying the strict
single parent of eight: a whipping with a switch or a belt or sometimes an
extension cord.
Spinks took the risk. Along the way, her mother spotted her, ordered her to go
straight home after buying the items, and vowed to give her that whipping
when she returned. But the youth, barely 5 feet tall and 100 pounds, never made
it home. Her distraught mother filed a missing-person report that night after she
and others scoured the neighborhood for her.
When authorities recovered her body, she had been strangled and sodomized,
and had suffered cuts to her face, neck, chest and both hands. Her nose was
bloodied. Green synthetic fibers were found on her clothing, and her shoes were
missing.

Carol Spinks, a seventh-grader at Johnson Junior High School, was missing for
nearly a week in April 1971 after she left home to walk four blocks to a 7-Eleven.
Her body was found May 1 along Interstate 295 behind St. Elizabeths Hospital.
(D.C. police)

Jenkins has read the police report so many times that she can easily rattle off
the specifics: The body was found on a Saturday. She was wearing the same
blue gym shorts, red sweater and brown socks as when she had left home nearly
a week prior. The medical examiner found citrus fruit in her stomach. Her killer
must have fed her, Jenkins surmises, and kept her alive for a few days, because
authorities said she had been dead for two to three days when they found her.
The 7-Eleven clerk told police he saw Spinks leave with her merchandise. A 14-
year-old on the way to the same store with her mother and sister recalled
passing Spinks carrying a grocery bag.

Though Moriarty, who died in 2005, and Lamb, who died in 2013, led the
investigation, Jenkins familiarized herself with every aspect of the case. She
wanted to be able to jump into the mix if they were off duty or tied up on
another case. That’s just what good homicide detectives did.
Ten weeks later, the body of a second girl was found by a D.C. Department of
Highways and Traffic employee along 295. He had car trouble and pulled off the
road. When he got out, he saw a body and called D.C. police. It was the second
call police got that morning about the same discovery.

Dispatchers sent officers, who radioed a “10-8” back, meaning that they had
found nothing and were moving on. “The officers didn’t get out and look for the
remains,” Jenkins says. “They just drove by.”
A week later, on July 19, one of the callers returned to the site and saw that the
body was still there, rotting in the sweltering heat. Angry at the inaction by
police, the man told his boss, who drove by, saw it and phoned his friend,
Charles Baden, a D.C. police sergeant. Baden was off duty that day. “He told me
exactly where it was on the freeway opposite 295, just north of Bolling Air Force
Base,” Baden, now 77, recalls. “I asked him if he called police and he said, ‘Yeah,
but nobody came.’ ” Baden rode there on his motorcycle and drove along the
shoulder until he found the corpse.
The body was just 15 feet from where Spinks’s remains had been discovered.
The victim this time was Darlenia Johnson, 16, who had been reported missing
on July 9, a day after telling her mom, Helen, that she was going to work at the
Oxon Run Recreation Center. Johnson said she planned to stay the night at a
sleepover the center was having for kids, but she never showed up.

She was found 11 days later — her face and body so badly decomposed that the
medical examiner had to cut off her fingers to identify her. (Back then, there
was no DNA testing, so authorities used fingerprints.) How she had died couldn’t
be determined. “Maybe,” says Jenkins, “if they had located the body sooner, we
could have had a cause of death.”

Darlenia Johnson, 16, was going to the Oxon Run Recreation Center in July 1971,
but never showed up. Eleven days later, her badly decomposed body was found
just 15 feet from where Spinks’s remains were discovered. (D.C. police)

Nine days after the discovery of Johnson, a hitchhiker happened upon a body on
Route 50 in Cheverly, just across the District line. The victim was Brenda Faye
Crockett, a dimpled 10-year-old girl from Washington who had scads of friends
and loved mugging for the camera and attending church.

Prince George’s County homicide detective Hilary Szukalowski, then 27, was the
first detective on the scene and remembers the little girl sprawled alongside the
road, clad in blue-and-white print shorts and a matching halter top. She had
been strangled and raped. Like Spinks, she had green synthetic fibers on her
clothing.

“I remember everything vividly,” Szukalowski told me last year by phone from

his Kentucky home. He put clear plastic bags on Crockett’s tiny hands to
preserve any evidence before placing her 4-foot-6-inch, 75-pound frame in a
black plastic body bag for the drive to the Prince George’s Hospital morgue.

Crockett, who left home barefoot and with pink foam hair curlers, had been
kidnapped while walking to the Safeway near 14th and U streets in Northwest
to buy bread and pet food for the family’s three dogs, Ringo, Rex and Romeo.
Her mom, Reatha, sent her out around 8 p.m., as the neighborhood kids were
settling in for movie night on their street. Reatha thought her daughter took a
friend with her.
In July 1971, Brenda Faye Crockett, 10, who had gone to the grocery store, called
and told her family that a white man had “snatched” her and taken her to
Virginia but was sending her home in a taxi. Her body was found hours later.
(D.C. police)

When she didn’t return after an hour, her mother went looking for her, while
Crockett’s only sister, Bertha, 7, stayed at the house with their mother’s
boyfriend. The phone rang at 9:20 p.m. It was Brenda. She told her sister that a
white man “snatched” her up and took her somewhere in Virginia but was
sending her home in a taxi. She was crying, Bertha recalls.

Brenda called again 25 minutes later and talked to her mother’s boyfriend, who
asked if she knew where she was in Virginia, police records show.

“No,” she said. “Did my mother see me?”

“How could your mother see you if you’re in Virginia?”

The boyfriend told her to put the man on the phone. “Well, I’ll see you,” she
whispered before the line went dead. Her body was found less than eight hours
later. Her bare feet were pristine, like someone had washed them, Jenkins
recalls.

Sitting on a blue microfiber love seat in her spacious Northeast D.C. home and
surrounded by four of her 35 black baby dolls, which she collects, Jenkins
struggles to make sense of the slaying. “What is so appealing about a little 10-
year-old that you would snatch her off the street and rape and kill her?” she
asks, as if trying to get into the attacker’s head. “Why her?”

She has a theory about the call: Perhaps the killer knew Brenda Crockett’s
mother and wanted to find out if she saw him with the little girl. “Why would
you let her call home, not once, but twice?” Jenkins asks. “He had to make sure
that the mother didn’t see her.”

On Oct. 1, 1971, Nenomoshia Yates, age 12, disappeared. Yates had gone to the
Safeway a block from her family’s apartment in the 4900 block of Benning Road
SE around 7 p.m. to buy sugar, flour and paper plates. Her stepmother had just
had a baby, and Yates’s dad needed to be with his wife and the newborn at the
hospital.

She vanished on her way home. A 16-year-old boy found her still-warm 104-
pound body two hours later along Pennsylvania Avenue, just east of the District.
The Kelly Miller Junior High School sixth-grader had been strangled and raped.
Jenkins was the night supervisor and dispatched two detectives, Otis Fickling,
who died in 1988, and Ronald Ervin, who died in 2015. Authorities found green
synthetic fibers on Yates’s clothing, as in two of the three other cases.

Nenomoshia Yates, 12, vanished in October 1971 on her way back to her
family’s apartment after a trip to the grocery store. Her still-warm body was
found two hours later along Pennsylvania Avenue, just east of the District. (D.C.
police)

It was after the discovery of Yates that the media pressed the police about
whether the homicides were connected — and began referring to the killer as
the Freeway Phantom. Police, too, now thought there might be a serial killer on
the loose. “I thought there could be, but we had never had anything like that
before,” Jenkins says.

Six weeks later, a fifth victim was found. Brenda Woodard, 18, went missing on
Nov. 15 after stopping at Ben’s Chili Bowl with a classmate from Cardozo High
School in Northwest, where she attended night classes to hone her typing and
shorthand skills. The classmate usually drove her home, but his car was in the
shop, so the pair took the bus. Woodard got off at Eighth and H streets NE and
transferred to another bus while her classmate continued on.

Cheverly police officer David Norman, then 22, spotted Woodard’s body on
Hospital Drive, just south of Route 202 near Prince George’s Hospital, while on
patrol shortly before 5 a.m. the next morning. “I shine my flashlight into her
eyes to see if there was life,” recalls Norman, now 69 and living in Florida. “She
didn’t blink. She didn’t do anything.”
Woodard’s burgundy crushed velvet coat was draped over her. Her black
turtleneck was inside out. Buttons were missing from her coat and skirt. She had
been raped, strangled and stabbed four times. Defensive wounds on her hands
confirmed that she fought her killer, Jenkins says.

Brenda Woodard, 18, had stopped for a bite at Ben’s Chili Bowl in November
1971 before taking a bus to Eighth and H streets NE and transferring to another
bus. Her body was discovered the next morning near Prince George’s Hospital. A
puzzling note was in her pocket. (D.C. police)

A puzzling note written in pencil was stuffed in Woodard’s pocket: “This is

tantamount to my insensititivity [sic] to people especially women. I will admit
the others when you catch me if you can!” It was signed, “Free-way Phantom!”

Authorities are certain Woodard wrote the note as dictated by the killer,
because the FBI matched it to other writings by the teen. And because it was in
Woodard’s “normal” handwriting — and with punctuation — Jenkins thinks she
knew her killer. “There were no signs that she was nervous when she wrote the
note,” Jenkins says. “You don’t think calmly like that if someone has kidnapped
and assaulted you.”

Jenkins also thinks someone in Woodard’s tightknit Northeast community “saw

something or heard something,” because folks often sat outside or socialized on
street corners. Jenkins knows because she grew up there. She and Woodard
attended the same high school, Spingarn; she had cousins who knew of
Woodard.

Ten months passed, leading Jenkins and other police to believe the Freeway
Phantom had left the area or gotten locked up for other crimes. But on Sept. 6,
1972, the body of Diane Williams, 17, was found by a trucker who had pulled off
the road. A junior at Ballou Senior High School, Williams had spent the evening
with her boyfriend, who walked her to the bus stop for her trip home to Halley
Terrace in Southeast. She had been strangled and left along I-295, about 200
yards south of the D.C. line. “DIANE” was written on one of her white sneakers,
and $1.26 was in the hip pocket of her jeans.
After the killings stopped, Jenkins became a supervisor in the patrol division. But
she continued to think about the freeway murders. And she was pleased when,
in 1974, the FBI created a task force to investigate. At one time, it boasted 100
detectives and federal agents from D.C., Prince George’s County, the Maryland
State Police and others, she says.

“They ran down every lead,” she recalls. “I have to give them credit.” The task
force developed hundreds of suspects, including a four-star general, a St.
Elizabeths psychiatrist and a wealthy Prince George’s developer who owned
property in Southeast. They questioned a man who owned a teen club where
Darlenia Johnson hung out and another who someone allegedly saw in a car
with Johnson after she was reported missing. Police used sodium Pentothal on
him, the first time the department used the truth serum, Jenkins believes. He
was cleared.

In September 1972, Diane Williams, 17, had spent the evening with her
boyfriend, who walked her to the bus stop for her trip home to Southeast
Washington. Her body was found by a trucker along Interstate 295. (D.C. police)

The strongest suspect was Robert Askins, a computer technician and former
patient at St. Elizabeths who had served time for the 1938 poisoning death of a
D.C. prostitute. He was freed in 1958 after his sentence was overturned on a
legal technicality. D.C. police detective Lloyd Davis, who died in 2014,
interviewed Askins about his involvement in unrelated rapes and learned about
his prison time. In March 1977, Davis got a D.C. Superior Court judge to sign a
search warrant. Police searched Askins’s rowhouse and found the appellate
court’s opinion from his conviction, which used the word “tantamount,” the
same word used in the note found in Woodard’s pocket — and an odd word for
someone to use, Davis told The Washington Post in 2006. “Askins is known to
use the word ... when attempting to stress the importance of matters related to
his work,” according to the warrant.

They also found soiled women’s scarves, photos of girls and young women, a
knife used in another crime and an essay from a girl. Another warrant was
issued a month later, allowing police to search Askins’s vehicle. They found two
buttons and a gold earring under his back seat, records show.
But police didn’t have the evidence to tie him to the deaths of any of the six
girls. The green fibers found on five of the six victims didn’t match the fibers
found in his home or car, and hairs found on them came back negative. Instead,
Askins was convicted of kidnapping and raping two women in the District
several years after the freeway killings and received a life sentence. He died in
prison on April 30, 2010, at age 91.

“Was he capable of doing this?” Jenkins asks. “God, yes. But you’ve got to be
able to prove these things.” Indeed, Jenkins doesn’t believe Askins was the
Freeway Phantom. And Trainum, the D.C. detective who revisited the case in
2009, says that police “tried to squeeze him into the box they created, and it just
wasn’t working.”

Trainum’s theory is that the killer lived in the same neighborhood near Wheeler
Road and Southern Avenue as his first two victims, because they were abducted
within blocks of each other. He surmises that the killer then went outside the
neighborhood because someone might have suspected him of untoward
behavior. “The police weren’t paying attention, but the neighborhood was,”
Trainum says.
Jenkins believes he may have been in the military or a transient. She wonders
whether it was a returning Vietnam veteran who suffered from post-traumatic
stress disorder or someone who was angry with the police. Both detectives
believe that the killer was in his 20s or 30s and black. (Askins was black, but was
52 at the time.)

An FBI crime analysis asserted that the killer had at least a high school
education and “average or above-average intelligence,” and was employed. He
knew how to start conversations with women but not how to “maintain healthy
relationships.” He either lived alone or with an older woman, and knew the
neighborhoods where he abducted and disposed of the girls.

In 1979, Jenkins ran across a file as thick as the Yellow Pages. It contained
information about the “Green Vega” case, in which two men had been convicted
five years earlier of kidnapping and raping young women in the D.C. area —
around the time the six girls were abducted and killed. They and three others
drove around in a green Chevrolet Vega.

According to the file, a tipster had alleged that the Freeway Phantom was a
member of this gang, and law enforcement devoted countless hours to
investigating the allegation. D.C. homicide investigator Louis Richardson was
certain the men were responsible because they took police to the scene, told
them how the girls were killed and provided other details. “How can a man tell
you about a crime, the scene, clothing the girls wore, how she was killed, if he
wasn’t there?” Richardson, who died in 2016, told The Post in 1980.

“Louie Richardson went to his deathbed believing they were responsible,”

Jenkins recalls. But she and Trainum both say that a consensus developed that
this couldn’t be right because the information the men provided police came
straight from news reports. They also knew nothing about the note found on
Woodard and none of the hair samples from the men matched the hairs found
on the victims, Trainum says.

The thought that authorities devoted so much manpower to going after the
wrong people catapulted Jenkins’s curiosity into obsession. She reopened the
case in 1987 while assigned to the U.S. attorney’s office, where she finally had
the resources to vigorously investigate it, she recalls. She got cooperation from
former investigators who turned over their notebooks, and the FBI opened its
files. She visited the crime scenes, interviewed witnesses and talked to the
victims’ relatives to see if the real suspect may have been overlooked.

Retired D.C. police detective James Trainum at one of the areas where the
Freeway Phantom dumped the bodies of victims. (Pete Marovich/For The
Washington Post)
Jenkins requested the missing-person report on Johnson from the police
department’s youth division, telling them that she was reopening the case. A
young officer, Patricia Williams, brought it to her, along with a bombshell: Her
sister, Diane, was one of the victims.

During her reinvestigation, Jenkins learned that Johnson’s mother got odd
phone calls during the time her daughter was missing. Williams’s parents also
received a call, with the caller saying, “I killed your daughter.” Police
determined that Johnson likely was with her boyfriend before she vanished, but
his mother refused to let police interview him. “That’s a little-known fact,”
Jenkins says.

In 1990, Jenkins saw the hairs, fibers and handwritten note found in Woodard’s
pocket, and wanted the forensic evidence tested. DNA testing, which didn’t exist
in the 1970s, was now available. But law enforcement had done a poor job
preserving all of it, so nothing could be done, she explains. Now, “no one knows
where [the evidence] is,” she says, reducing the already slim chances that the
cases will be solved.

“Those black girls didn’t mean anything to anybody — I’m talking about on the
police department,” says Tommy Musgrove, who joined the D.C. police in 1972
and later headed the homicide unit. “If those girls had been white, they would
have put more manpower on it, there’s no doubt about that.”
Musgrove compared it with the case of two white Montgomery County girls
who went missing at Wheaton Plaza mall in 1975. The bodies of sisters
Katherine and Sheila Lyon have never been found, but authorities pursued the
case relentlessly until 2015, when they charged Lloyd Welch, an imprisoned sex
offender, with two counts of first-degree murder. He pleaded guilty in
September 2017.
Jenkins thinks the murders of these African American girls weren’t enough of a
priority, but she is also quick to point out that D.C. police’s mishandling of the
case was “not totally guided by race.” For instance, police often misplaced or
lost case files when a new administration took over. She recalls opening a
storage closet in the homicide unit and seeing “case files thrown all over the
place.” (“That’s probably true, to be honest with you,” says Assistant Chief
Michael Anzallo, who oversees the Investigative Services Bureau.)

The inability to find the girls’ killer has caused lasting heartache for the families.
Carolyn Spinks Morris, Carol’s identical twin, remembers the day three
detectives knocked on the door, and the bloodcurdling scream from her mother
after learning of Carol’s fate. Carolyn eventually turned to drugs and
prostitution. “It was terrible,” Morris, 60, recalls while sitting on an olive-green
sofa surrounded by a dozen family members at a relative’s home in Prince
George’s County. “I couldn’t get it together. I thought I was losing my mind.”

Valerie Moore, Spinks’s oldest sister, who sent her to the store that fateful
evening, carries guilt. After the killing, Moore says, she would walk along
Southern Avenue and Wheeler Road in Southeast, the same path Carol took to
the store, to see if someone would approach her. “I was afraid, but I just wanted
to know who would do this,” says Moore, now 71.

Bertha Crockett, 54, still gets emotional when she remembers her sister, Brenda,
calling home asking if their mother saw her. “Why didn’t I go to the store with
her?” she asked when I interviewed her, dabbing her moist eyes with a tissue.
“Maybe things would have turned out different.”

She describes the day she learned her sister was killed as “the most devastating
time in my life.” Growing up, she wasn’t allowed to have boyfriends, and her
mother didn’t let her or her two brothers leave the house much, other than to go
to school. “She kept a tight noose on us after that,” she says. “I became
rebellious, defiant and impossible.”

Crockett started smoking, didn’t go to college and became a single mom a

month before her 18th birthday. “If Brenda was living, I would have done things
differently,” she says. “I wish I would have grown up with her. We could have
encouraged each other to be better women.”

Lewis Crockett, Brenda’s dad, says he has never emotionally recovered from her
death. The last time he saw her she handed him a picture of her in her Easter
outfit and made him promise not to lose it. Six days later, his ex-wife called with
the news. “I think about her all the time,” says Crockett, 82, a retired truck
driver who lives in South Carolina. “She was a sweet kid.”

Patricia Williams became less trusting of people. She was 15 at the time of
Diane’s death. She later joined the D.C. police and managed the child abuse
squad in the youth division. Now 61, retired and living in Florida, she says her
sister’s death made her “more cautious about everything.” “I always wished
that while I was in the police department that the case could have been solved
and I could have played some kind of role in closing it,” says Williams, who later
married and had three children, including a girl whose middle name is Diane.
Her mother, Margaret Williams, now 83, still lives in the Halley Terrace home.
Margaret told me she has never been the same. “It took everything out of me,”
she says.

The inability to solve the cases took something out of Jenkins, too. Though she
retired in 1994, the girls are still with her. And she declares that she will search
for answers as long as her heart continues to beat. "What happens when people
like me and the families are gone?" she asks. "This will be forgotten."
Cheryl W. Thompson is an associate professor in the School of Media and Public
Affairs at George Washington University and writes investigative stories for The
Washington Post. Alice Crites and Eddy Palanzo contributed to this story.
Posted by Thavam