'Freeway Phantom' Slayings Haunt Police, Families

Starting From Scratch

Trainum, 51, wears rumpled shirts and slacks and has a mass of messy hair. A member of the D.C. police department for 23 years, he has long been intrigued by the Phantom killings. How could it be that the city's most fabled serial killings had gone unsolved?

The Phantom was cunning, former detectives said, so smart that he eluded one of the biggest federal and local police dragnets assembled in the area. But Trainum, an iconoclast who helped solve the 1997 triple slayings inside a District Starbucks, doesn't believe in myths.

"Part of my goal is to separate the fact from the fiction here," he says, sitting in his dusty office, where stacks of files are perched precariously on cabinets. "I think this guy just got lucky."

Because most of the D.C. police reports and all the evidence in the cases had been lost or destroyed, Trainum, who started working the case in late 2004, first had to go outside his department to build a record of the police investigation. He found a trove of FBI reports at the bureau's Washington field office and about 200 pages of scattered Prince George's County police files. But even the reports he obtained were missing pages, including basic notations about whether suspects had been ruled out.

Maya Long, an intern in Trainum's office, organized the reports, news clippings and investigative notes into a dozen blue-and-white binders. She often likens Trainum's efforts to someone trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle -- without the border pieces.

Using the incomplete files as a guide, Trainum went through the cases one by one.

The first girl, Carol Spinks, 13, was abducted April 25, 1971, a typical Sunday for her family on their quiet block of Wahler Place SE. It was a warm evening, and Carol was sent to the store by an older sister to buy TV dinners, bread and sodas.

Carol trekked the half-mile to a 7-Eleven on Wheeler Road, just across the Maryland line in Prince George's County. She paid for her items and left the store. Her body was discovered six days later on a grassy embankment next to the northbound lanes of I-295, about 1,500 feet south of Suitland Parkway.

Darlenia Johnson, who lived a few blocks from Carol, was next. The 16-year-old left her apartment about 10:30 a.m. July 8 for her summer job at a recreation center. Her body was found 11 days later on the side of I-295, 15 feet from where Spinks's body was found. It was too badly decomposed for the coroner to determine a cause of death.

Eight days after Darlenia's body was discovered, 10-year-old Brenda Crockett was sent to the store by her mother. The Crocketts lived in a quiet neighborhood of rowhouses at 12th and W streets in Northwest, about a block from Cardozo High School.

Brenda was very responsible for a 10-year-old, recalls her sister, Bertha, and when she didn't return in an hour, her family got anxious. Bertha, then 7, waited at home as other family members searched the neighborhood.

"Even at that young age," Bertha says, "I knew something was wrong."