Freeway Phantom: Victims, the Note, and the FBI Profile

The Freeway Phantom is the unidentified serial killer who murdered six young Black girls and women in the Washington, D.C., area between April 1971 and September 1972. The victims, ages 10 to 18, were taken from Southeast D.C. neighborhoods and their bodies left along Interstate 295 and other major roads, which gave the killer his name. No one has ever been arrested. The case is still open, and a reward of up to $150,000 is offered for information leading to an arrest.¹

The Six Victims

All six victims were young Black females who lived in or near Southeast Washington. Most were taken while running short errands close to home. Most were sexually assaulted and strangled.²

Carol Spinks, 13, disappeared on April 25, 1971, after being sent to a nearby store. Her body was found on May 1 behind St. Elizabeths Hospital, near I-295. Undigested food in her stomach indicated she had been held alive and fed for several days. Her shoes were missing.
Darlenia Johnson, 16, vanished on July 8, 1971. Her body was found on July 19 along I-295, roughly 15 feet from where Carol Spinks had been found.
Brenda Crockett, 10, was abducted on July 27, 1971. Her body was found the next day along U.S. Route 50 near the Baltimore-Washington Parkway in Prince George’s County, Maryland. She was the youngest victim.
Nenomoshia Yates, 12, was taken on October 1, 1971, and found dead less than three hours later on the shoulder of Pennsylvania Avenue in Prince George’s County. Her shoes were also missing, which investigators believed the killer kept as trophies.
Brenda Woodard, 18, was found on November 16, 1971, on an access ramp to the Baltimore-Washington Parkway near Prince George’s County Hospital. Hers was the most physically violent of the murders and the only one with a written communication from the killer.
Diane Williams, 17, disappeared on September 5, 1972, after a gap of nearly ten months. Her body was found the following morning near I-295. She had been strangled, but unlike earlier victims she had not been sexually assaulted and no personal items were missing.

The Taunting Note

Brenda Woodard’s murder stood apart. She had been strangled and stabbed, and her arms and hands showed defensive wounds. A velvet coat had been placed over her body, and in one of its pockets investigators found a handwritten note that read: “this is tAntAmount to to my insensititivity to people especially women. I will Admit the others whEn you cAtch me iF you cAn! FRee -WAY PhanTom!”² The odd capitalization and misspellings appeared designed to taunt police.

Woodard’s wig was found about 350 yards from her body, along with pages from a three-page Export-Import Bank press release. Two handwritten phone numbers in the margins were later traced to the American Automobile Association’s 24-hour hotline and a service station in Northeast D.C.³ What those numbers meant, or whether they connected to the killer at all, has never been established.

Why the Case Was Never Solved

The investigation was compromised almost from the moment Carol Spinks’s body was found. Her murder happened during the May Day 1971 anti-war protests, when roughly 12,000 people were arrested in Washington in the largest mass arrest in American history. The entire D.C. police force was pulled onto prisoner-alert duty, and homicide detectives lost the critical first days of the case.² As the killings continued, Southeast residents said reporters were telling them more about the case than the police were.

The Metropolitan Police Department had no sophisticated forensics lab at the time and could not trace threatening phone calls the killer made to victims’ families. Detectives believed the caller’s claims, including about his own race and the victims’ whereabouts, were scripted to mislead them.²

Because the victims were D.C. residents but several bodies were found in Maryland, the case crossed the lines of the Metropolitan Police Department, the Prince George’s County Police Department, and the U.S. Park Police, creating friction over who ran what.³

Destroyed and Missing Evidence

The most damaging blow came years later. In 1987, MPD Sergeant Romaine Jenkins discovered that many of the original case files and forensic evidence had been destroyed or lost from a warehouse after detectives deemed the cases “obsolete,” a serious breach of department protocol.² The loss eliminated the chance to apply modern forensic techniques to the physical evidence, which had included hairs recovered from the underwear of three victims that were attributed to an African American individual. The public embarrassment led the D.C. City Council to require that evidence in unsolved homicide cases be preserved for a minimum of 65 years.

An FBI “running resume” documenting key investigative leads has also gone missing. An MPD investigator told the Washington City Paper in 2024 that they had possessed the document, but it vanished after journalist and former FBI profiler Mary Ellen O’Toole and her team scanned the investigator’s files. Its contents survive only because an investigator was recorded reading the report aloud before it disappeared.³ The FBI reported in 2020 that its files on the case totaled more than 20,747 pages; MPD maintained four boxes of records.

Suspects Investigated Over the Years

Fear in Southeast D.C. was so high that residents called in “every male that you could think of” as a possible suspect, from priests to police officers to doctors.² Two leads drew more sustained attention.

In 1974, a Virginia prison inmate named Morris Warren, a convicted rapist, claimed he knew the Phantom’s identity. The FBI conducted ride-alongs with him but discredited him after learning he had written letters admitting he fabricated the information hoping to get out of prison.

A separate lead centered on what investigators called the “Torino Man.” An October 1974 FBI running resume documented a late-night crash in November 1971 involving a light green, black-striped 1968 Ford Gran Torino on the same road where Brenda Woodard’s body was later recovered. Police found a bloodstained boning knife inside the vehicle with dimensions consistent with the instrument that caused Woodard’s fatal wounds. The vehicle’s owner was treated as a witness rather than a suspect. According to the FBI report, a Bladensburg police officer held the knife for three days before contacting a Prince George’s County detective, after which the evidence was mishandled or lost.³

What the FBI Profile Said

In 1990, FBI analysts Michael Prodan and R. Stephen Mardigian built a behavioral profile of the killer. They concluded the Freeway Phantom was driven by “misogynistic sadism” and “sexual control” rather than extreme anger, and described him as a psychopath between the ages of 27 and 32 at the time of the murders. They believed he likely lived or worked in Southeast D.C.³²

Victims appeared to have entered the killer’s vehicle voluntarily, which suggested they may have known or trusted him. That, together with his familiarity with the highway system and the neighborhoods where the girls lived, led investigators to believe he was someone embedded in the community rather than an outsider passing through.

The Case Today

The Freeway Phantom murders remain unsolved. The case is handled jointly by the Major Case/Cold Case Unit of the Metropolitan Police Department and the Prince George’s County Police Homicide Unit.¹ A reward of up to $150,000 is offered for information about the murders. Anyone with information can contact MPD’s Synchronized Operations Command Center at (202) 727-9099 or email unsolved.murder@dc.gov. If the killer was in the 27-to-32 age range the FBI profile suggested, he would be in his early to mid-80s today.

1
DC Metropolitan Police Department. Freeway Phantom Cold Case Information
2
WETA Boundary Stones. Gruesome Murder Spree: The Freeway Phantom, D.C.’s First Serial Killer
3
Washington City Paper. Mysteriously Missing FBI Report Could Have Helped Solve the Freeway Phantom Cold Case Murders