In 2006, D.C. police Detective James Trainum got the task of reviewing the bulging Freeway Phantom files. He employed the geographic profiling technique of ex-Canadian cop Kim Rossmo and the computer system that Rossmo developed to plot the crimes on a map and work out the suspect’s “anchor point”—his home, workplace or other significant location.
Together Trainum and Rossmo spent weeks scouring the reports and visiting crime scenes. From the abduction points and the locations where the bodies had been dumped, they worked out that the Phantom’s anchor point was in Congress Heights, just south of St Elizabeth’s Hospital. Trainum now plans to take an old phone book and reverse directory and plot names onto the geographic profile map. Police also plan to blanket the area with fliers announcing a $150,000 reward for witnesses who call Trainum at 202–727–5037 or 202–727–9099 with information.
Trainum has also contacted the relatives of the victims to tell them that he is, once again, looking into the Phantom killings. One of the people he contacted was Carolyn Morris, Carol Spinks’ identical twin, who says the Freeway Phantom wrecked her life. She was overprotective of her four children and was unable to relax if they were out of eyeshot. She could not hold down a job and fell into alcoholism and drug addiction. It was only when they were grown that she found the courage to tell them what had happened 35 years before to the aunt they never knew.
The lives of other relatives of the victims have also been changed irrevocably. One victim’s aunt wrote a self-published book, called
Patricia Williams, younger sister of Diane Williams, the Freeway Phantom’s last known victim, joined the D.C. police in 1982. It had not been her ambition to be a police officer, but after the death of her sister, with whom she once shared a bed, she felt compelled to sign up. She still keeps a push-pin map showing the locations of random attacks on juveniles by adults in her office.
“I’m sure, subconsciously, that I know that if I wasn’t able to help Diane, then I can help other children,” she told
She rarely goes days without thinking about catching the killer, to find out why he picked her sister and put a human face on the killer.
“I think that would help my healing process,” she says.
Like Carolyn Morris and other relatives of Freeway Phantom victims, Patricia Williams has vivid nightmares about her dead sister. In Williams’ dreams, she always asks her sister the same question, one that she also would love to ask the Freeway Phantom: “Where have you been all these years?”
Washington State Serial Killers
The Pacific Northwest has had more than its fair share of serial killers. Ted Bundy began his career in Washington State and Green River Killer Gary Ridgway operated there. The murder of 29 women and the disappearance of 12 others in the counties of King, Pierce and Snohomish in Washington State since 1985 are thought to be the work of another killer who is still at large. However, the perpetrator does share some of the Green River Killer’s profile. He mainly abducts prostitutes, kills them and dumps their bodies in rural areas.
There are other serial killers at large in the area. One killer’s grisly signature is his dismemberment of the bodies. He seems to be responsible for three murders where the victims’ bodies were cut up and scattered in remote areas in Snohomish County. One victim was a Bulgarian involved in organized crime whose body was found in 1987, but was not identified for ten years. Another was a Korean immigrant from Bothell on the outskirts of Seattle who had a record for prostitution. Her body was found in 1991 with the remains of a man who has never been identified.
There was another cluster of killings around the area of the town of Index in the Cascades. The bodies of two Seattle women were dumped there in 1988. Both victims were known prostitutes and drug users. They had been stabbed. Three other women—two found dead nearby and a 14-year-old runaway last seen with one of the dead women—may also be victims of the same killer.
Another unknown killer is thought to be responsible for five murders and disappearances in the area of Clarkston and Lewiston on the Idaho border between 1979 and 1982. Some of the victims were dismembered and dumped in a river. Victims include three young women, a girl and a man. Two of their bodies have never been found. Although investigators had a suspect, they have never made an arrest.
A child killer was also at large in Washington State in the 1980s. On 7 September 1983, seven-year-old Lea Kimball vanished after leaving her school bus in rural King County, Washington. Two years later, 12-year-old Brenda Gere disappeared in similar circumstances in Clearview, in neighbouring Snohomish County. However, Brenda Gere apparently arrived home before she was abducted. Her school books were found in the house, but her fate remains a mystery. No trace of her has ever been found. However, Lea Kimball’s case officially became a homicide on 7 March 1986, when her skeletal remains were found near Ellensburg, in the southeast of the state. No suspect has been named in Brenda Gere’s abduction or in the death of Lea Kimball, but the police are convinced that there is a connection between the two cases.
Random slayings continue in Washington State. On 11 July 2006, 56-year-old Mary Cooper, a Seattle Public Schools librarian, and her 27-year-old daughter Susanna Stodden went hiking a wooded trail in the Mount Baker- Snoqualmie National Forest, near Seattle. They were last seen at around 10 a.m. near Mount Pilchuck in Snohomish County. A hiker found their bodies along the trail to Pinnacle Lake, 20 miles east of Granite Falls at around 2.30 p.m. They had been shot. Police quickly ruled out a murder-suicide. Robbery does not seem to be a motive as Mary and Susanna’s wallets, keys and IDs were found in their backpacks. Both women had a passion for the outdoors.
Two weeks later, Snohomish County Sheriff’s office said they had “persons of interest”, though they have not identified any suspects and they do not have anyone in custody.
There is a heavy methamphetamine problem in the nearby town, there was speculation that the perpetrator could have been a “meth-head”. There was a similar case in Portland, Oregon in 4 July 2005, where two hikers were found shot to death on a trail. Again the killer or killers have not been caught. And there is a similar unsolved murder in California, leading investigators to believe that there is a serial killer at work.
PART II
Killers Stalk the Globe
Where America leads, the rest of the world surely follows. The Earth, now, is overflowing with killers at large. Britain, which has always prided itself on the quality of its crime, if not its quantity, is still full of unapprehended murderers. In the 1960s, London produced Jack the Stripper, a rival to Jack the Ripper, who killed six women, but was never caught.
In England and Wales, the 43 police authorities launched Operation Enigma, looking into over 200 unsolved murder cases involving young women. In Glasgow, the police are searching for a current killer who has been butchering prostitutes, while a cold-case unit is still trying to identify Bible John, a killer from the late 1960s who has yet to be caught. Even sleepy old Ireland has a serial killer on the loose.
But then nowhere is safe these days. Canada has pig-farmer Robert Pickton. He denies all charges against him, and he has only been charged with a fraction of the murders he is suspected of, and even those are a fraction of the outstanding murders in Vancouver, let alone the whole of British Columbia. There are certainly more killers at large. Particularly vulnerable are “First Nations”—that is, Inuit and Native American—women. There are allegations of racism—first by the killers who do not value Inuit and Indian lives, then by the authorities who do not investigate the cases with quite the alacrity they exhibit when the victim is white. This mirrors the situation in the United States, where it is possible to murder African-American prostitutes—particularly those lured into the sex industry by drug addiction—seemingly with impunity. Many are not even identified.
