The Mammoth Book of Killers at Large (43 page)

Darryl D. Turner was convicted for first-degree murder. He is now on death row and is soliciting for pen pals via the internet. But as the other murders remain unsolved, there is always the possibility that there is another killer or killers out there.

Washington, D.C.’s Suitland Slayings

In 1986 and 1987, a serial killer was stalking the black community of Washington, D.C. He had murdered eight young black females, before disappearing. He has never been identified or caught.

On 13 December 1986, the body of 20-year-old Dorothy Miller was found in the woods near the Bradbury Recreation Center in Suitland, a suburb just outside the district of Columbia in Maryland. Although she had seemingly died of a drug overdose she was thought to be the killer’s first victim because four more bodies were found in the same woods the following month. And, like the others, Dorothy Miller had been violently sodomized.

On 11 January 1987, the kids using the recreation centre noticed a woman’s clothes hanging on nearby trees. When they went to investigate, they found the body of 25-year-old Pamela Malcolm, who had been missing from her home in Suitland since 22 October. There was no doubt that she was a murder victim because she had been stabbed to death.

The day after Malcolm’s corpse had been recovered, a team of 50 police were combing through the wood for clues when they found two more bodies to the north of the headquarters of the US Census Bureau. They belonged to 22-year-old Cynthia Westbury, who had been missing since mid-November, and 26-year-old Juanita Walls. Both been sodomized and stabbed to death, and both had gone missing from D.C.

The very next day the body of 22-year-old Angela Wilkerson, another D.C. resident, was found near Suitland. Four of the victims had lived within a mile of each other in Southeast Washington. The D.C. residents were all unemployed and at least two of them frequented the same restaurant on Good Hope Road.

There followed three more murders that did not conform to exactly the same pattern, but were thought to have been perpetrated by the same killer.

On 15 January, the naked body of 20-year-old Janice Morton was found in an alley in Northeast Washington. She had been beaten and strangled. On 5 April, the naked body of an unidentified woman was found in a secluded driveway near Euclid and 13th Street, in Northwest Washington.

A 31-year-old suspect, Alton Alonzo Best, was indicted for Morton’s murder on 7 April. He confessed to the crime on 9 June. The police maintained that Best knew two of the victims found in Suitland, making him a prime suspect in their killings. However, his arrest did not stop the attacks. On 10 April, with Best behind bars, an unidentified van driver attempted to abduct a 25-year-old woman, just one block from the home of Suitland victim Pamela Malcolm. Five days later, Donna Nichols was beaten to death in a Washington alleyway. On 24 June, Cheryl Henderson, aged 21, was found in a wooded area of Southeast Washington, not more than two miles from Suitland. Her throat was slashed from ear to ear. Then on 21 September another unidentified African-American female was found dead at a Southeast Washington apartment complex. The cause of death was not released and the police refuse to discuss any connection her death might have to the other unsolved cases.

Best has never been charged with any of the other killings and the killer or killers are still at large. The culprit’s preference for killing African-American women has led to speculation that the “Freeway Phantom” may have resurfaced, after 15 years of inactivity, but homicide detectives have revealed no evidence of a connection to the earlier unsolved crimes.

Washington, D.C.’s Freeway Phantom

The Freeway Phantom’s first victim was 13-year-old Carole Denise Spinks, who was abducted on 25 April 1971. She lived in a quiet block of Wahler Place in Southeast Washington. That Sunday evening it was warm and her older sister sent her to the 7-Eleven half-a-mile away on Wheeler Road, just across the Maryland line in Prince George’s County, to buy bread, TV dinners and sodas. She paid for the items, left the store and disappeared. Her body was recovered six days later, a mile and a half from home, lying on the grass embankment of the northbound Interstate 295, one of several freeways passing through Washington east of the Anacostia River, 500 yards south of Suitland Parkway. She had been strangled and, probably, raped.

Ten weeks later 16-year-old Darlenia Denise Johnson disappeared. At 10.30 a.m., on 8 July, she left her apartment to go to her summer job at a recreation centre. Eleven days later her body was found on the side of the I–295, within 15 feet of the spot where Carol Spinks was had been found on 1 May. Her remains were so badly decomposed that the coroner could not determine the cause of death, though it was thought that she had been strangled. Both bodies had been tossed down the hill from above.

Meanwhile, a third victim, 14-year-old Angela Denise Barnes, had been abducted from Southeast Washington on 13 July, shot dead and dumped the same day just over the state line near Waldorf, Maryland. As the method of murder was different, one cannot be sure that Angela Barnes was the victim of the Freeway Phantom, though much of the rest of the MO is the same.

On 27 July, ten-year-old Brenda Crockett was sent to the store by her mother. There was no reason to fear for her safety. The Crocketts lived in a quiet neighbourhood of terraced houses at 12th and W streets in Northwest Washington, about a block from Cardozo High School.

Her sister Bertha, then seven, recalled that Brenda was very responsible for her age, but when she did not return within an hour, the family grew anxious. While Bertha waited at home, other family members searched the neighbourhood.

“Even at that young age,” said Bertha, “I knew something was wrong.”

Three hours after Brenda had left, the phone rang in the living room. Bertha answered. It was Brenda on the line. She was crying.

“Momma is going looking for you,” Bertha told her sister.

“A white man picked me up,” said Brenda, “and I’m heading home in a cab.”

She added that she thought she was in Virginia.

Then Brenda quickly said, “Bye” before hanging up. The police believe that Brenda had been forced to make the call and provide a misleading description of her abductor and the location.

Minutes later, the phone rang again. This time, Bertha’s mother’s boyfriend answered. Brenda told him what she had told her sister, and said that she was alone in a house with a man.

“Tell him to come to the phone and tell me where you’re at,” said the boyfriend, “and I’ll come and get you.”

“Did my mother see me?” Brenda asked.

“How could she see you when you’re in Virginia?” the boyfriend replied. “Tell the man to come to the phone.”

The boyfriend then heard heavy footsteps in the background.

“I’ll see you,” said Brenda, and the line went dead.

A few hours later, Brenda’s body was found by a hitchhiker on US Highway 50 near I–295 in Prince George’s Country, in a place where she could not be missed. A knotted scarf was tied around her neck. She had been raped and strangled.

The killer took a two-month summer break in August and September. Then on 1 October, 12-year-old 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
Daily News
.

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.