How Racial Disparities May Have Impacted the 'Freeway Phantom' Case

Since the 1960s, U.S. authorities have steadily been closing fewer and fewer homicide cases, from more than 90%in the 1960s to only closing cases roughly half the time in 2020. The main driver of these unsolved cases are homicides involving Black victims.

Black communities and criminal justice advocates have long been aware of the racial disparities between how Black people are policed and how their deaths are handled. 

“They deserve more somber, respectful consideration than they get,” Jill Leovy, a Los Angeles Times reporter who covered how Black communities are both over- and under-policed, told The Marshall Project.

These racial disparities could be why the story of one serial killer has gone largely forgotten, even in the community where it happened. Known as the “Freeway Phantom,” he killed six girls—three of whom shared the name “Denise”—during a 17-month period in the 1970s in Washington, D.C., and Maryland.

Part of that failure by local police may be attributed to its response to the May Day protests of 1971. Thousands had stormed the streets in May 1971 in protest of the Vietnam War. They had blocked intersections and bridges to frustrate the government, and in response, the Nixon administration waged the largest mass arrest in American history, rounding up more than 13,000 people in just three days.

But families still remember what happened, and they still hope to one day know who took their girls from them.

The murders began with Carol Denise Spinks, a 13-year-old girl, during the spring of 1971. She was one of eight children, with a twin sister, living with her mother Allenteen Van Thompson Reeves on the border between Southeast D.C. and Maryland. She liked hula hooping and playing with her sisters. On April 25, one of them gave her money to buy food at a local 7-Eleven.

But she never made it home.

Reeves went to the police, but they dismissed her, suggesting Carol must have run away from home. But Reeves knew better and started her own search party instead.

Six days later, on May 1, police found Carol’s body near the interstate. She had been sexually assaulted and strangled, and her shoes were missing.

Instead of investigating the crime, homicide detectives were reassigned, like all D.C. Metro police at the time, to the May Day protests. That included Romaine Jenkins, the bureau’s first female homicide detective, who was pulled off Carol’s case.

“If you wanted to be a criminal, this was the time to do it,” she told A&E’s The Case I Can’t Forget decades later.

In the same neighborhood, the killer struck again on the morning of July 8, when 16-year-old Darlenia Denise Johnson left home for her summer job. She never returned, and her mother, Helen, began receiving mysterious phone calls of someone breathing into a phone.

Two weeks later, on the final call, the person on the other end of the line said: “I killed your daughter.”

Police found her body on July 19, badly decomposed, 15 feet from where Carol was found. Nine days later, they found another: 10-year-old Brenda Crockett, who was sent by her mother to the grocery store and never came back. She, too, had been sexually assaulted and strangled, left on the roadside.

A pattern started to form in October, when 12-year-old Nenomoshia Yates, too, was sent to the grocery store, and she, too, was later found dead on the roadside, sexually assaulted and strangled with her shoes missing.

The community went into a panic. Newspapers began to speculate about the culprit, and The Daily News was the first to dub the killer “the Freeway Phantom.” The police were skeptical that this was indeed the work of a serial killer, but the media attention was overwhelming. They collaborated with the FBI for more resources.

In November, 18-year-old Brenda Denise Woodard was found on the roadside in Maryland, sexually assaulted, strangled and stabbed. Her body had a note from the killer: “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.”

Then the murders stopped, almost as soon as the FBI had gotten involved in the case, using its forensics team to find more evidence connecting the five cases.

However, the killer made one last move. In September 1972, 17-year-old Diane Williams went to visit her boyfriend who lived in the area, but never returned. They found her body the next morning: strangled, but not sexually assaulted.

When Mary Woodward, Brenda’s mother, heard the news, she rushed to support the Williams family. 

“I wasn't the only one,” Diane’s mother Margaret Williams said.

Over the decades, investigators occasionally returned to the Freeway Phantom case, coming up with several theories around his identity. Retired D.C. police Sgt. Louis Richardson was convinced it was the “Green Vega” gang, a group of men who had been convicted in other sexual assaults in the city. But disagreements between the different departments involved in the cases and the politics of the time made it difficult to get credible witnesses on the record.

To make matters worse, much of the case's evidence has been destroyed or lost.

"There were all sorts of bargains being made and things got fouled up,” one former detective said. “We all had the same objective in mind, but there was glory-seeking.”

No arrests related to the Freeway Phantom cases have been made.