Today on CityCastDC,
Just a heads up that this is going to be a heavier episode than usual.
And that's because from 1971 to 1972,
a serial killer who called himself the Freeway Phantom
killed at least six black girls in DC
and terrorized their families and communities.
He was never caught, but veteran journalist Celeste Headley
thinks that someone out there knows something,
and she's trying to get justice.
♪♪♪
Today is Wednesday, May 24th.
I'm Brigitte Todd, and here's what DC is talking about.
♪♪♪
Thanks so much for being here Celeste.
So I know you've just come out with this podcast called the Freeway Phantom.
New episodes drop every Wednesday.
So for folks who might not know, who was the Freeway Phantom?
We don't literally know who the Freeway Phantom is,
but that's the name given to a serial killer
who was operating in the early 1970s in DC,
who killed at least six, most likely more young black girls
all within the same area, and he left their bodies all along the highways,
the local highways, which is why he got the moniker of Freeway Phantom.
He was never caught.
They never really had a perfect suspect even,
so we don't know who he was.
I know some of the places that they found these bodies of victims were 295, 50,
all pretty big highways in the area, right?
Yeah, even back then, they were quite large.
Like, if you look at the crime scene photos,
there were multiple lanes even in the early 1970s.
You know, it's alarming to me that he would have just been able to get out of his car and drag.
A young girl's body out of his car and leave it there,
but you know, there's some alarming details in reference to that.
Like, in one particular case, there was a young girl who was on the side of the road.
Nobody reported her body.
There, she was there for days.
Somebody called it in and said, hey, there's a body on the side of the road,
and these police officers drove by, never slowed down or got out of their car,
and said, nope, there's nothing there.
And a couple days later, the same person was called back,
his own supervisor was like, look, somebody needs to get out there.
So, you know, I'm not sure what that means about human nature, but it's not good.
Do you think it says something about the vibe in DC at the time?
We are talking about a period of time that was pretty chaotic.
This is about the same time when all of the Vietnam protests were beginning,
and if you look at footage of the time, they were large and massive and chaotic,
and there was tons of law enforcement, and so it could be understandable why some people might
get distracted.
But look, we're talking about somebody who pulled six, probably seven, perhaps more
young girls off the street in broad daylight and murdered them.
So, I just, there's other stuff going.
There's other reasons why this case didn't get the attention that it deserved,
and it wasn't just because people were distracted.
What are some of those reasons?
I mean, this is what brought us to this story, why we wanted to bring it back,
right? Even though it's half a century old, it's because these are still going on today.
Like, first of all, the reason Black Lives Matter is a phrase is because Black lives are often
treated like they don't matter.
So, you cannot look at this case in which all of these girls were dragged off the street.
People have never even heard this name of Freeway Phantom.
Like, how many movies do we have about these other serial killers who have killed
some competition, but sometimes fewer victims?
And there's multiple dot just documentaries, but then fictional, you know, recreation movies,
and no one has ever heard about the Freeway Phantom.
How is that possible?
Well, obviously, it's because A, these were young Black girls,
and B, they were in a lower socioeconomic status.
I mean, if you read some of the police reports,
these police officers were asking about like a 12 year old,
maybe, you know, if she went off with her boyfriend.
They were saying in their police reports that they were dressed provocatively
when they were in their school uniform.
So that's one thing.
The other thing is that no surprise, Black neighborhoods don't trust the police.
So much of safely returning children home has to do with neighborhoods and getting those
reports from people who have seen something and may not realize it,
getting people to be honest about what is going on.
That requires a level of trust that didn't exist in the 1970s and certainly doesn't exist today.
Something that I found really chilling about looking into the details of this case were
the way that the killer interacted with police and sometimes the family of the victims.
What's going on there?
Like, can you continue to break down those details for me?
So, you know, he left a note on one of the victims that was really taunting.
It kind of reminded me of some of the notes that Jack the Ripper would use to taunt police
in the UK.
So he left a note attached to one of the girls' bodies.
He also would call the families.
And I mean, I just can't even can you imagine?
I can't even imagine what that must have been like for these poor families.
In one case, he had one of the little girls call her own family,
ask for her mother, tell them that a white man had picked her up and she was in Virginia,
which police say those were probably were specifically not true, but he was trying to
mislead police.
So it's very clear he really liked it when he got the name of freeway phantom.
He used that name when he signed his note.
It's very clear he liked the attention and was feeding off that attention.
And it's also clear that there is more than a little sadism there because he was not only
murdering these girls sometimes in horrific ways, but he was also getting off on torturing
emotionally torturing the families.
You know, I know that oftentimes when it comes to serial killers,
there's some common thread or pattern or detail about the victims.
Was there anything that connects the victims in this case?
Yeah, they were all basic, a very, very similar type.
They were all young black girls.
More than one of them was in a school uniform of some kind.
They were all very small, like petite, both slender and short stature.
They were all from these particular neighborhoods that were in the same area of DC.
All of them, we would call it transitional neighborhood.
It just means these are people that are clinging into the middle class, right?
And several of them had a green fiber on their bodies somewhere.
The police ended up thinking it may have come from the person's trunk,
but we know that some of them he kept for a long period of time.
We know that some of them he washed their hair because one of the girls, for example,
the mother said that her hair had been pressed.
But then you look at the crime scene photos, her hair is really frizzy.
That's been in water.
We know that he fed some of them.
So that means that this is not somebody living in an apartment right next door to somebody else,
right? This person probably has a home and they probably have some measure of privacy
in their home.
So yeah, there's actually quite a few things that connect them together.
It's just, it just took them so long to realize that this was a serial killer,
that they were all killed by the same person.
Why do you think he was never caught?
You know, there's a lot of reasons.
I mean, in addition to the two that I've just mentioned,
there's also the fact that the crimes themselves were often in different jurisdictions.
So some of them were the jurisdiction of the Metropolitan Police in DC.
Some of them were the jurisdiction of Prince George's County.
Then the FBI came in and if you think that law enforcement doesn't work well together
in different departments, now it was infinitely worse in 1971.
So they didn't often share information.
Well, you know, there's that communication problem.
There's an other issue which is that we didn't really know anything about serial
killers back in. They didn't even have that phrase, right?
They called them pattern killers.
There was no such thing as scientific profiling.
Like if you see, watch that show, Mindhunter,
which is a thing goes on Netflix, which is at the about the beginning of behavioral
science profiling at the FBI.
That hadn't happened that yet.
This all predates that.
We actually got the very first scientific profile of this killer for this podcast.
It had never been done before.
So there's a lot of different reasons for it.
And you know, again, I have to go back to the fact that the loss of their lives,
I don't think was taken as seriously as it needed to be.
You know, people, they weren't asking about whether they ran away.
These are girls with perfect attendance writers and straight A's and very attentive parents,
but it was assumed that the parents were not attentive, that they were lax,
that they were allowed to just run everywhere and they might run off or whatever.
Maybe all these assumptions that were made about the character of these kids,
about the character of these parents that really, I think,
prevented them from even realizing a serial killer was at play until several girls had been murdered.
Well, I think it speaks to, you know, the danger of really having a narrow understanding of
what black women and girls can be and how not only is that wrong,
because it's bad to put people in such a narrow box, but also it's dangerous.
It allows for somebody who is an actual killer and an abuser to continue doing that
because you're so trapped by those narrow understandings of what black women and girls can be.
Oh, yeah, absolutely. It's on the nose.
And in addition, this assumption about what black parents are like,
and especially black parents who may come from a lower middle class or lower class neighborhood,
whose income is lower, the assumption that somehow they're not good parents
is again a dangerous assumption. And, you know, we heard again and again from
Metropolitan Police Officers and Commanders who work on finding missing children today
about how important it is to work with the neighborhoods, how neighborhoods keep these kids safe, right?
And so if you're making assumptions about these neighborhoods,
if you're making assumptions about their parents, you are wasting time.
And, you know, we've all watched all the TV shows, CSI or whatever.
We know how important those first 24 hours are.
And so if you're wasting time saying, oh, give it a few hours and wait in case they left with
their boyfriend, a 12-year-old, then, you know, there's a good chance you're really, like you said,
putting that child into more danger.
Well, that comes up in a lot of the episodes that the DC community kind of had this camaraderie
then that maybe we don't have now and that this guy was able to really use that to his advantage
and evade being caught. Yeah, I mean, even the profiler said that it's very likely this person
was known in the community. He was familiar and therefore people didn't take note of the fact that
he pulled up in his car. He didn't cause comment. It's one of the reasons why we know it probably
wasn't a white guy and it almost certainly wasn't a cop. If a white cop pulls up in a black neighborhood,
people notice even today. But back then, it was a very, as you say, tight-knit neighborhood.
You know, we went and visited these neighborhoods even today and we were noticed immediately.
Like, yes, the neighborhoods were more tight-knit at the time. That absolutely seems to be the case.
But even today, people are on their front porches. You know, there's an auntie sitting on her
front porch having tea in the heat and there's somebody else working on their car in front of
their house and people notice you and they see things. It's just that you have to create trust
with them so that they'll tell you what they've seen. What do you think this case says about DC
psyche and how did it impact DC psyche? A couple things about that. I mean, first of all,
the communities themselves were terrorized, obviously. They were obviously extremely afraid
for the safety of their girls. But there was also this assumption that they were the only ones that
were going to keep their girls safe. That there was nobody in a white hat that was going to come in
and somehow protect these girls. That that was on the parents and on the communities themselves.
I think it really caused a lot of, I think it deepened the distrust in these communities. I
think it deepened the idea that you're kind of on your own and it further ingrained the idea that
your kids are in danger. This is in a safe world for you, especially if you are female,
especially if you are black. One of the things that really struck me about the series is when you
spoke to Romaine Jenkins, who was kind of this trailblazer in her day as one of the districts
only female police detectives, much less on black female detectives at that time. And she was lead
on this case. Does it haunt her? Does it keep her up at night? How is she doing?
Yeah, it does. She's retired, but she went to all of the different law enforcement agencies
and collected every bit of evidence that was left. They handed it to her. We spent a lot of time
at her house and started going through her boxes. She has just boxes upon boxes upon boxes of this
evidence. Some of it is literally physical evidence where there's an envelope that says,
don't open, do not unseal. There's a chain of custody issue. There's all the crime scene
photos is all the reports from the people that they interviewed. This is part of her personal
landscape, right? Yeah, it haunts her. She so wants to find out who did this for the
benefit of these families. And this has clearly been her just a driving force in her life for
decades. She was the one that reopened it. It closed off. They lost attention. It went cold
because of all the Vietnam protests and all of law enforcement attention went there to the capital.
She a few years later reopened it because she wanted to actually find out who did this.
I know you lived in DC for a long time. The city is where you consider to be your home.
What is it been like for you, digging through all of these documents as you rehash this
decades old case? It was so weird to me. I got to tell you, Bridget, we went and we walked
the path of this killer. We visited the places where these girls disappeared. And then we visited
the places where he left their bodies like garbage on the side of the highway. And when you pass
by those places every day and they're just part of your drive or whatever, and then you visit them
again and you see them through the light of the fact that this is the last that anybody saw of
this young girl who had her whole life ahead of her. This is where her body was left. I don't
know. It just gives that part. Those areas a different character for me. I mean, I love DC.
I love DC. But we all know that the city is not always as kind to those who love her
as it could be. And this is one of those cases. Our city had a responsibility to protect these
girls. And maybe you can't protect them, all of them from being harmed. But did we have to let
six or seven of them get killed? We couldn't marshal our forces after the first or second one
to protect all of the others. I mean, I don't know. It was surreal for me visiting those spots in
this area, the spots that I drive by all the time. So I know that there were kind of three
main suspects. Do you feel that it was probably one of those suspects who was the culprit here?
I don't. You know, one of the biggest suspects was Robert Askins, who ended up dying in detention.
But there was a lot of assumptions made about the freeway phantom in terms of the profile
that didn't end up bearing out when we got an actual scientific profiler to take a look. And
one of them was the fact that this person must have been in a mental facility at some point.
Robert Askins, for example, did have the classic aggression against women, but he had been convicted
of attacking grown women. And that's a different mindset from somebody who attacks children.
They also suspected a couple cops who had been convicted of rape. Again, probably wasn't a cop,
I don't think. And they suspected a gang. And I again, I just I just don't think so. I think
there's somebody else out there and I'll tell you something else, Bridget. I know there is still
somebody alive who knows something. And they may not realize they know something, but it may be
someone who, you know, they write a barbecue or whatever. And somebody said something. Somebody
knows something. And we just got to shake that loose. We got it. We got to have that drop down
out of that tree and they just got to come for it. Do you think that the killer will be caught or
that it will at least find out who he is? And are you hopeful that opening this up with the show
can sort of provide that pathway? Yeah, I mean, that's the main hope for the show.
I heart radio and Tenderfoot TV have upped the reward, even though I probably I suspect
the actual murderer is dead. That was half a century ago. But I do think we could find out who it was.
I think the information is out there. And there is a size of a reward, if anybody knows it. So
if that's a motivator, awesome. But yes, I think we could solve this. I think we could absolutely
bring some kind of justice to these families. Right now they deserve to have their questions
answered. When you start to hear their voices and we interviewed several of them for the podcast,
you'll hear what I heard. Just the pain, like the tearing sound in these people's psyches
at the loss over these girls. And I bet you your reaction will be like mine. It's like,
you know, they deserved better. The girls deserved better. These families deserve better.
And we can do this. We can solve this.
Slust, thank you so much for what you're doing. Thanks for being here.
My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
And before you go, here's some quick news.
Honda owners beware. Airbag thieves struck 20 Hondas in Arlington this past weekend,
breaking in through windows. Defbed of airbags, particularly in Hondas,
has been a nagging problem in the area. Police recommend parking in well-lit populated areas.
Also, RIP to Kevin Tian's moon rabbit. The Vietnamese restaurant on the
wharf abruptly shut down after service on Monday night. Now it's rumored that the intercontinental
hotel suddenly closed the wildly popular spot because of its fledgling union. Tian and moon rabbit
are nominated for multiple Rami Awards, including chef of the year and upscale casual restaurant of
the year. And lastly, a Virginia federal appeals court ruled in favor of a public elite high school
that had been accused of discriminating against Asian Americans. The school had revamped its
admissions policy a few years ago to promote diversity. And critics said those changes
came at the expense of Asian American students in the area.
That's all for today here on Citycast DC. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a
review and subscribe to our morning newsletter. And be sure to check out the Freeway Phantom podcast.
New episodes drop every Wednesday, and they're a chilling but eye-opening listen.
We'll be back tomorrow morning with even more news from around the city. Talk to you then.
♪♪♪♪
.
.