Nenomoshia “Neno” Yates was snatched off Benning Road in Northeast Washington while walking home from a Safeway store at about 7 p.m. Her body was discovered within a few hours, on the shoulder of Pennsylvania Avenue, just over the state line in Prince George’s County, Maryland. She, too, had been raped and strangled.
It was then that the moniker “Freeway Phantom” appeared in a headline on the story describing Nenomoshia’s death in the now-defunct Washington tabloid, the
At 18, Brenda Denise Woodward was the Freeway Phantom’s oldest victim. On the night of Monday 15 November, she left night school at Cardozo High with a male friend and went to eat at Ben’s Chili Bowl on U Street in Northwest D.C. By 10.25 p.m., they were on a bus heading to Northeast Washington. At Eighth and H Streets NE, she got off the bus to catch another to her home on Maryland Avenue NE. She seems to have been abducted from the bus stop.
About six hours later, a police officer spotted Brenda Woodward’s body on the grass by an access ramp to Route 202 from the Baltimore-Washington Parkway near Prince George’s County Hospital. Her coat had been draped over her chest. She had been stabbed and strangled.
The police found a mocking note in her coat pocket. Its contents are still unpublished, but it was signed: “The Freeway Phantom.” Plainly the perpetrator enjoyed reading about his activities in the press. However FBI experts concluded that Woodward had written the note herself, possibly under the coercion of the killer. Nevertheless it was in a steady hand and betrayed no hint of fear or tension.
It was clear to the police that a serial killer was at work. All the victims were young black females. All of them had been abducted from the same geographical area and their bodies dumped near the same location. Most had been raped and strangled. Curiously, four of them had the middle name Denise. But this brought them no nearer to an arrest.
In the tense political atmosphere of the early 1970s—after the city had been torn part by race riots in 1968 following the assassination of Martin Luther King—the fact that all the victims were black led to a furore. More than 70 percent of the D.C.’s 757,000 residents were black, and there was widespread distrust of the police department, which was more than 60 percent white.
“You better bet that if these had been white girls, the police would have solved the cases,” says Evander Spinks, a sister of the Phantom’s first victim. “They didn’t care about us. All the cases involving white girls still get publicity. But ours have been forgotten.”
Black Washington was up in arms and, because of the phone calls in the Crocketts’ case, they wanted to prove that a white man was to blame, but angry political rhetoric did nothing to advance the murder investigation. Meanwhile the Freeway Phantom lay low.
It was ten months before he claimed his final victim. On 5 September 1972, 17-year-old Diane Williams, a senior at Ballou High School, cooked dinner for her family, then went to visit her boyfriend’s house. She was last seen boarding a bus on her way home. A few hours later, her body was found on the side of I–295 just south of the District line, just five miles from the point where Carole Spinks was discovered in May 1971. Again, police noted striking similarities with the other cases—and again, found no evidence that would identify a suspect.
In late March, the Maryland State Police arrested two black suspects—30-year-old Edward Leon Sellman and 26-year-old Tommie Bernard Simmons. They were charged with the murder of Angela Barnes. Both suspects were ex-Washington policemen, though both had dropped out early in 1971, before completing their mandatory probation periods. They were also charged with the abduction and rape of a Maryland waitress in February 1971. Convicted of murder in 1974, both defendants were sentenced to life.
In the other case, the police had received thousand of tips, but did not have the manpower to handle them as the FBI had been recalled from the case to investigate the Watergate break-in and the subsequent scandal that forced President Nixon from office. Nevertheless D.C. detectives combed the rosters of the area’s mental health facilities, examined the employment roles at city recreation centres and did background checks on substitute teachers who might have known the girls. In all, they developed more than 100 potential suspects, including dozens of convicted sex offenders, a real estate developer and a US Air Force colonel stationed at Bolling Air Force Base, across the I–295 from St Elizabeth’s Hospital. None panned out.
Meanwhile, a federal grand jury examining the Phantom murders focused its spotlight on “a loosely-knit group of persons” suspected of luring girls and young women into cars—sometimes rented for the hunt—then raping their victims for sport. In 1974, the FBI returned to the case and began investigating the gang known as the Green Vega Rapists, some of whom claimed to have participated in the Phantom killings.
Suspects John N. Davis, aged 28, and Morris Warren, 27, were already serving life for previous rapes when a series of new indictments were handed down in December 1974. Turning state’s evidence, Warren received a grant of limited immunity in return for testimony against Davis and another defendant, 27-year-old Melvyn Sylvester Gray. However, Davis recanted, no charges were filed and the investigation went no further. As a government spokesman explained, “The ends of justice can be served just as well if a person is convicted and sentenced to life for kidnapping, than if he is jailed for the same term for murder.”
In court filings and in comments to reporters, authorities indicated that they felt that the Green Vega Rapists were responsible for the killings. However investigators now are not so sure, especially in the light of the Suitland murders 13 years later. Once again, the victims were young, female and black, and abducted and discarded in a manner reminiscent of the Freeway Phantom’s style and in places not far from his patch. However, authorities refused to speculate upon a link between the crimes, and so both cases are considered “open”, with the killers still at large.
In the late 1970s, D.C. homicide Detective Lloyd Davis developed a new Phantom suspect. One day in 1977 Davis had questioned Robert Askins, who had been charged with raping a 24-year-old woman in his house. At that time, the Phantom case was still active and homicide detectives routinely questioned rape suspects as part of the investigation.
Davis learned that 58-year-old Askins had been charged with homicide three times. He had spent time in St Elizabeth’s Hospital and had later been convicted of killing a prostitute with cyanide in 1938. His sentence had been overturned on a legal technicality concerning the statute of limitations and he was freed in 1958.
When police searched Askins’ house in the 1700 block of M Street in Northwest Washington after his arrest in 1977, Davis found the appellate court papers in a desk drawer. His eyes were immediately drawn to the word “tantamount” that the judges used in a footnote. That same word appeared in the note found in Phantom victim Brenda Woodward’s coat pocket, where it seemed strangely out of place. Later, Davis discovered that Askins often used this old-fashioned word at the National Science Foundation, where he worked as a computer technician.
Davis worked the case for nearly three years. He retrieved evidence from the early cases from storage and shipped it to the FBI labs for the latest forensic analysis. Experts found the same green synthetic carpet fibre on all but one of the victims’ clothing, for the first time linking five of the six Phantom’s murders. Davis then got a search warrant and began digging up Askins’ back yard. Despite Davis’ best effort, he never recovered any physical evidence linking Askins to the crimes and Askins was never charged with the Phantom murders. However he was sentenced to life for kidnapping and raping two women in Washington, D.C. in the mid-1970s.
Davis retired in 1981, but he was unable to let go of the case. In 2005, he wrote to Askins in a North Carolina federal penitentiary, asking him to confess. Askins promptly wrote back, denying any role in the killings. The
“I know he did it,” Davis says. “I just know it.”
D.C. homicide Detective Romaine Jenkins reviewed the Freeway Phantom cases in the late 1980s. Years after she retired, the Phantom’s victims still haunt her.
“I always think of these young ladies,” she says. “How did he keep these girls? How did he do it without anyone knowing? How did he select them?”
Another officer who took an interest in the Freeway Phantom was Sergeant Rick Fulginiti, a long-time Prince George’s County detective. He was working in the cold-case department when he received a tip about a potential suspect.
Fulginiti learned that authorities had located a semen sample taken from a victim during the post mortem that had been kept at the Maryland medical examiner’s. So he flew to Utah to get DNA samples from his suspect’s relatives and from an old envelope, but when the samples were tested in 2002 technicians were unable to extract any comparable DNA from the sample.
