Congress Heights [2]

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Prior to these killings start happenings, Freeway fan, you didn't hear a lot of killings of black kids per se in the district of Columbia, and not like that that one behind of a behind of an unresult. You didn't hear that. So the community was in shock and it put them on caution. People were scared. I mean parents were scared, children were scared. They wanted to know what more police could do. What were they doing? All that conversation was coming up, People were keeping an EyeT on things,

And how they couldn't test this person. So it was a Saturday for DC. I do know that, but you don't really want to know what somebody was telling me the other date, Lord BERSI woo. They were giving me some deep stuff about this phantom stuff where if some people that was close to that person's family may have been tied up into that, and possibility it.

Could have been a police officer involved.

I said, do you want to go on record with that?

Now?

I don't know how true that is, but the way she was laying that out, said you need to come on camera and say what you got to say.

But they won't talk. They're not gonna tell the police. They're not gonna tell the camera, the media. They're not gonna do it.

The homicide detectives termed the cases the little girl case. This child was laying on the side of the road.

I won't go no way.

I would call my house.

Those first five murders should have been a huge warning bell for the police.

We just want to know what happened. This person must have saw that.

They were thinking that maybe it's just one person, and he says, they need to know.

This is me.

I thought that they would catch him.

I thought it was just a.

Matter of time.

I'm Celeste Hedley and this is Freeway Phantom. On the last episode, we covered the background of the Freeway Phantom murders. Six victims, all young black girls, all of them snatched off the streets of Washington, d C. Between April nineteen seventy one and September nineteen seventy two. Their bodies were all dumped by the side of the freeway. And we know that all six murders were committed by the same

Sunday, April twenty fifth, nineteen seventy one, at round seven pm, Carol Denise Spink's female black thirteen years of age, was sent to the seven to eleven store located on Wheeler Road and Southern Avenue. She was last seen in the vicinity of Wheeler and Southern Avenue by her mother, at which time she was reprimanded for being out of the house. Her older sister had sent her to the store. Later the same day, she was reported missing by her mother to the sixth District Police.

It wouldn't be until almost a week later that Carrol Spinks's body was found. Here's another excerpt from the police report.

On Saturday May one, nineteen seventy one, Carol Denise Spinks was found in the grass area of the northbound lane of Route two ninety five near Suitland Parkway by children playing. The children hailed a Traffic division officer who was traveling north on Route two ninety.

Five now known as Interstate two ninety five or the Anacostia Freeway. The road was a major thoroughfare which cut right through the city. As we heard, the police report says, some children playing near the highway spotted the body and then one of them either called or flagged down a police officer. Here's how the report describes Carroll's body at the scene.

Tennis usemissy cold to the touch, rigor evident in the right knee and left arm. Dried blood around the nose and mouth, right arm across the chest and left bent under the torso. Grass embedded in left leg and thigh. Crushed cardboard, milk carton pressed against the area of the right eye. Laceration to lower lip, several marks on body, throat, knees, and arms.

Aside from her missing shoes, Carol was fully clothed. In one handwritten note by a police officer. It was said that her second and third snap on pants buttons were unfastened. Preliminary testing showed Carol had blood under her fingernails, but the amount was too small for any conclusive testing or grouping. No seamen was found anywhere on her body. However, the police did find negroid hairs unlike her own, on her shorts, sweater panties, and hair burrett and also on her sweater

She did have a ligature mark on her some small crescent shape marks on cyber neck that indicated it could have been somebody who was strangling her. Her nose was bloodied, her lower lip was split open, and she had been sodomized.

That's writer Blaine Pardo, who investigated and co wrote a book on the Freeway Phantom murders.

What is really interesting about Carol Spinkx that I think is the creepiest factor of hers despite the gruesomeness of how she died, was that she had been kept alive for at least three days according to the authorities. You know, she had only been dead for two days, and they

Police also interviewed a number of potential witnesses, including seventeen year old Vanessa Alice Copeland, who was near the seven eleven the day Carol went missing. Copeland said that between three point thirty and four pm, she saw a man exposing himself in a burned out building by the store. She also saw Carol walking behind her towards the Maryland state line, but when she looked back a minute later,

You have daughters and if you don't want them raped and.

Dropped on the side of the road, you'll keep your nose out of this.

The police report says these letters were handed to investigators, but there's no record of the notes themselves, and some believe that the testimony of Wheeler and the other witnesses were not credible.

You follow a lead until it takes you no way, and they got all kinds of leads.

I mean, everybody was a suspect.

This is retired Metropolitan Police Department Sergeant Romainne Jenkins, who you met in episode one. She investigated the Freeway Phantom murders. Years after the case went At the time of Carol's murder, she was assigned to work elsewhere, but she remembers hearing about the investigation.

Everybody became a suspect because people were calling in tips, and sometimes the information that people phoned in would lead you on a merry ghost chase, you know so, but you had to follow the lead until you couldn't follow it anymore. And then some of the people eventually admitted that they lied. They never saw the girls being abducted or anything that they lied.

Romayne fully believes that those witness statements for Carol were completely false and that might explain why investigators made no progress with those leads. Eventually, there was an autopsy. According to the autopsy reports, they collected specimens from pubic hair,

As a young teenager, I don't think the police did a good job. I didn't feel as though they actually cared during that time, and as an adult, I know they didn't do a good job and I know down where they didn't care.

Romayne believes this may have been due to a disconnect between white officers and the black communities in and around DC.

People bring their own prejudices and biases to the job. I read information in the files with some of the detectives. The white ones said, well, they wore tight clothes that Carl Spinx had on tight clothes Carl Spring had on DC Public School Jim Shorts. If you know anything about DC Public School Jim Shorts, they balloon out, ain't nothing tight about them Shorts, instead of reviewing the whole case. And that's the number one problem most on these tasks force.

You have no idea what the other.

Nine hundred and ninety nine pages in this investigation has revealed. Okay, but see, I'm not like that. I'm going to read everything I was taught. If you want to know something, you must read it. There's nothing that you don't know that you can't find out isn't written somewhere. So I read everything and sad to say, they didn't have a female on the team.

Romayne believes there may have been some wilful neglect when it came to investigating Carroll's murder, and she wasn't the only one.

When the first victims went missing, there was a really kind of a muted police response.

This is Jim Trenham, a retired detective from the Metropolitan Police Department.

But also during that time, there just wasn't the attention that was being paid, especially when these girls haven't been found yet. You know of just a young black girl runaway, or she probably at a relative's house, you know that sort of thing. There wasn't the full court press that you would often see with a John Benet Ramsey or something along that line.

You know.

To be honest, that's unfortunately, has been a fact of life for god knows hundreds of years, but even today.

Jim started reviewing the case when he launched an initiative called the Violent Crime Case Review Project.

Our goal was to go back and look at old homicide cases to see if we could take advantage of any the new technology that was coming out, such as DNA. And as I was doing so, I was pulling these case files up and looking at them, I kept hearing about this one case that was kind of a legend in DC back in the seventies, and that was referred

Jim says he quickly realized that the original investigators did a subpar job of maintaining documents and preserving the evidence.

When we first started looking at the Freeway Phantom case, the most frustrating thing was that just about all of the files were gone. We didn't really have anything, and so we were trying to dig up whatever we could

Profile, and so any hope of finding Carol's killer through DNA was officially lost. Anything the seven eleven used to be, it was only a point two miles of the whole point two yet, yeah, that was probably right at the book.

Right at the corner.

I was curious to see the neighborhood where Carrol Spinks lived last summer. I found where the Spinx house used to be, and I brought along my producers, Jamie and Tremors. As of letting my fid, I.

Wanted to hide street.

Today, I wouldn't hide it. I would absolutely send my child.

He was a tired squirrel.

The complex where the Sphinx family lived was torn down decades ago. Today the neighborhood is densely populated, yet quiet, single family houses, duplexes, and row homes with narrow, tidy lawns out front. There's a mix of old and newer buildings. When the weather is nice, people still sit outside of their homes and watch the activity on the streets. The Congress Heights neighborhood is still overwhelmingly black, but like so many urban neighborhoods in the twenty first century, there's surely

I thought it was more family or Yeah.

This is Derek Davis, who's run a barber shop in the neighborhood for decades. You heard from him at the very top of this episode. Also sitting down with us is his friend, Reverend Anthony Motley.

They called us Chocolate City, Chocolate City, the Bump Parliament, Funker delic. I mean, we had to go black leadership, black superintendent, black police, black city councils, black mayor.

We had a lot of pride in the day. Back in the day, we were from DC. You know, it wasn't a knock on DC. It was you from DC.

Man.

You must be you know, you must be on the ball.

Right, you know. There were a lot of bustling businesses we had in the total Ward eight. I think we probably had about maybe five movie.

Theaters that we no longer have even won.

We used to have a roller skating ring. Things kids could.

Do, had boys club, bowling alley right, boys club, girls club. We had all these type of activities.

Sit down restaurants, sit down restaurants. Yeah, we had all those things, restaurants. It was really community oriented. I mean people were friendlier, they helped out. Did it seem like a lot of anger like sometimes I see today, I see a lot of anger.

Or frustration or stuff like that. It was just more community Definitely.

The community felt safe. People could keep their doors open. Yes, your child could go to the store right by herself. We used to say, everybody come in when the street lights come right, come on right, But then they off the block. Don't come off the block, you know. But there wasn't nobody, nobody surveilling you.

And then the adults had more say the adults had more control where if Reverie Motley saw my son or daughter out there, they said, I'm.

Gonna talk to your daddy or I'm talk to your mama or whatever. That kid would listen or straighten up. The day you'll get cursed out. You might get shot or killed if you approach somebody's kid. So we had more family, more structure back in the early seventies.

Did you think of this as a as a safe place for families and children at that time?

Oh?

Yeah, you know this was this was a family oriented. My mother and father, they were right up the street. Like Derek said, you know, you looked out for each other.

In the black community, we always say nothing goes on that somebody didn't see.

Here's Romaine Jenkins.

Again, there's always you have a certain portion of the neighborhood, then hang out. Some of the older guys who'd like to drink liquor. They would sit outside three hundred and sixty five days a year, but they're there so if something happened, they would see it. Then you had the older people like my mother and her posse. They would sit in their window and they saw everything that went down. So if you were around the corner acting up, your mother got a call, or your grandmother says she's around

This is why it's strange that supposedly no credible witnesses actually saw what happened to Carol. And it's exactly why when she went missing, the neighborhood was in full gear to find her.

The community was kind of upset at the very beginning because there were lots of people out looking for Carol Sphinx, because it was not like her not to come back home. She should have been headed home, and she was seen headed home in the.

Direction of her house.

They had lots of search parties, people looking, but to no avail.

I mean, I was born in nineteen seventy in La They sounds very much like it was here. There was always somebody out there is a you know, somebody's uncle in a tank top drinking a forty and somebody's auntie down the street sitting on their front porch, fanning themselves with their church fans. And I keep wondering as I read about these cases, how did nobody see anything?

Because whoever did the cases fit right into the community, never raised any suspicion at all, and that's how he was able to do what he did. Nobody would would question if they saw him talking to a little girl or anything. They wouldn't They wouldn't question it. That's my personal feeling on it.

You know, like you said, there's always somebody out.

While many in the community felt the police didn't protect them and their neighbors as well as they could, officers on the force in the district have a very different perspective.

Very protective in our neighborhoods, even though we know we hurt each other. We know about the guy in the neighborhood. This is a weirdo, you know. We know about these things in our families, even but let's something happen to them. Oh, you know, we need to be real and that's the only way we can heal. My name is Rita McCoy. I'm a retired DC homicide detective. I was on the Metropolitan Police Department, Washington, d C. I'm a Washingtonian. I'm

Rita says that folks in the community tend to know more than they're willing to tell, and for a police officer, that's tricky to navigate.

We had people all the time, the new family members, people that knew and would not I ain't know snitch snitches, get stitches and all that foolishness. This is your neighborhood, you know. We had to start giving away money to get people. And I'm telling you that the talk what do you want?

You know?

And that's the hard part about us. We hate the police, but yet the police call them to our neighborhoods more than anywhere else. So what are you gonna do. You gotta find it, you know that that area, you know where you work with the police or whatever to get what you want so you can have a safety.

But Rita says there just wasn't enough trust between black neighborhoods and white police officers.

When I was a child, I remember the police being called in the community. You know, it was all black and the corps were white. They were white, and they were just physically, like assault the two guys that had been fighting or whatever, and sometimes didn't lock up anybody, just beat them up and get back in the car.

Leave.

People take advantage of their authority. I saw a lot of prejudice and racism on this department. I saw prejudice. I say it was because it was black people. And then racism I saw from the white officers. And a lot of them did not grow up in this area. They're from all over the place, from West Virginia, Southern Virginia.

Whatever.

They chewed, tobacco or you know, the things that were not accustomed to in our community. But then I will say that some of them, when they saw that you were good, real police, they changed with you. But you know, and it's like us too when we around all white people, and you know, we are initially uncomfortable if you not weren't raised around them, until you find that they are like you.

Comments like this suggest that somebody in the community likely knew something about Carol, but wouldn't come forward to tell the police, and with no lead, it seemed like the story was over. But then less than three months later, in July of nineteen seventy one, yet another girl went missing. Darlina Denise Johnson was sixteen years old. She grew up in a large family with five brothers and five sisters. Darlinia was petite, about five feet two inches and one

On Thursday, July eighth, nineteen seventy one. I had to be at d C General Hospital eight o'clock in the morning. Before I left, I looked in and saw Darlina sleep.

In her room.

I told my son Nick to be sure that he got her up to go to work at the Oxen Hill Recreation Center. I came home from the clinic at twelve noon, and she had gone that night. I didn't look for her to come home on Friday. I expected her in about five o'clock PM. I got home from the store about six ten pm and asked the kids if Darlena had been home, and they said they hadn't

It seemed like Helen was on to something, but this promising lead about a guy named Alfred in a black car led nowhere. We know that at some point the police did question Alfred. They even gave him sodium pentathal, the so called truth serum, but he didn't crack, and so they moved on. For the rest of that first week, Helen was more or less on her own, calling around asking people in the neighborhood if they'd seen Darlenia. She called police stations and morgues in DC and in Prince

On Friday, July sixteenth, nineteen seventy one, I was on duty and was at the highway garage at Second in Bryant Streets, Northeast. I was working with Bill Ferrell. We were looking at the lawnmower shop there, which is supervised by mister Roy Tyler, and we were chatting with him. Mister Roy Tyler asked us if we'd been out around Firth Sterling and Route two ninety five lately. We asked why, and Roy said that there was a body of a dead lady out there, and he described the location to us.

In the end, it was his coworker Bill, who had a connection at the Metropolitan Police Department. Bill called his friend, a police sergeant named Charles Baden, and only then, after the body had been outside for over a week, did the police finally recover it.

The sad part about this is that there was actually motorists that drove by on the super Busy Highway on July twelfth, seven days prior to when her body was actually recovered, and reported there's a body on the side of the road. Multiple times people called in saying that before she was finally removed days later, So if the police had actually found her body, it may have not been that decomposed five days prior.

This is author Victoria Hester, who he heard from last episode. She and her father Blaine, have written extensively on the Freeway phantom case.

We actually saw the autopsy photos of this, and all of them are very disturbing. These are young girls, but hers was very disturbing, just because she almost looked mummified. It's July and Washington, d C. She's laying out exposed. You know, the temperatures are all always in the eighties ninety degrees. You know, it's just it was terrible. It was just horrible.

We found transcripts of the nine to one one calls reporting Darlinia's body. This call came in at six fifty am on July twelfth, a full week before she was picked up.

I think I got it uncontient in a mineral that time in the morning. I hope everybody had their breakun it that Tarling and Nive at the intersection. Oh, it went over an embankment or laying over on the thigh ant Purling and two ninety five. Yeah, oh, I'll bet it's just an unconscious or just a man down.

Forty minutes later, at seven thirty am, police received a second call about the body.

I help you, Yeah, I broke down on Route two ninety five right opposite.

Boiling Field Photo Center this morning.

Yeah, sir, and there's a dead woman. I think it's a woman. It could be a man lying in the bushes. It's northbound on two ninety five, right opposite the photo center of boiling Field. Okay, is it a pretty obvious thing? No, it's in the bushes. You couldn't see it from the road. Okay, sir, We'll send somebody else find it.

As Blaine tells us, police followed up on these first few reports about the body, but they couldn't have looked very hard.

Police did drive by, you know, they did a slow drive by and looked and didn't see the body. But people kept saying they're out there, and it was a real embarrassment I think for law enforcement. And the body was found fifteen feet from where Carol Spink's body had been found, So you know, at the time, that was the link that really tied these two together.

That was perhaps the most shocking detail. Darlinia was found only fifteen feet from where Carol Spinks had been found. But still police didn't officially connect the two murders. We did, however, find one police report where an officer interviewed a suspect in Darlinia's murder named Alfred Henry Holmes. The officer asked Holmes if he also knew about Carol Spinks, to which he answered no. But other than this question, there's little

There's lots of stories of meeting up with a boyfriend or going to stay somewhere else, but in a time before cell phones and ways to contact kid when they're off doing whatever they're doing, it's hard to tell what happened. There's not a whole lot of information about her specifically, just because her body was so far decomposed.

I think Darlenia went to meet the killer because she she's the one who was decomposed, and we have nothing on her case, nothing per see. But at this point when this was read and she was still missing, right.

This is Romayne Jenkins. We're sitting in her living room going through boxes of evidence and discussing Darlinia Denise Johnson. Romayne was especially frustrated by this murder.

The police department was truly incompetent. I mean, let's face it. She leaves home on July the eighth. The remains a found I think July the twelfth. The guy who worked for Department of DC Highways in traffic, he calls the police. When his coworkers pick him up, he shows them the body. They call the police and if you look at the radio runs trans script of the radio runs. Every scout

So Darlinia's case was a dead end. But then just a few weeks later, the killer would strike again. On July twenty seventh, a ten year old girl named Brenda Crockett went missing, and later that night, Brenda called home and talked to her stepdad.

I'm many Christian in.

A white man's house to witness.

Came the car and turned me to this.

House my mother next time on Freeway Phantom.

When I got there, I guess there was a crowd starting to come out.

Arriving on a scene. I was directed to where this child was laying on the side of the road.

She was the child of God.

She loved church.

She was going to refrigerate to eat raw bacon, but you know the pigs were better back then.

Asked her again, tell the man to come to the phone.

I heard someone walk in heaven.

She said, really low, I'll see you, and someone just cut the phone.

So the killer had kind of shifted at least from the first case. He's not spending as much time with the victims. He's killing them and now just dumping them.

Whoever grabbed these young ladies grab them right in their own Neighborhook.

Freeway Fantom is a production of iHeartRadio, Tenderfoot TV, and Black bar Mitzvah. Our host is Selese Hiley. The show is written by Trevor Young, Jamie Albright and CELESE.

Hilly.

Executive producers on behalf of iHeart Radio include Matt Frederick and Alex Williams, with supervising producer Trevor Young. Executive producers on behalf of Tenderfoot TV include Donald Albright and Payne Lindsay, with producers Jamie Albright and Tracy Kaplan. Executive producers on behalf of Black bar Mitzvah include myself, Jay Ellis and Aaron Bergman, with producer Sidney Fools. Lead researcher is Jamie Albright.