'Freeway Phantom' Slayings Haunt Police, Families

Three hours after Brenda had left, the phone rang in the living room. Bertha answered.

Brenda was on the line. She was crying, according to Bertha's recollection and a reconstruction of the conversation contained in police files. "Momma is going looking for you," Bertha told her sister.

"A white man picked me up, and I'm heading home in a cab," Brenda answered, adding that she thought she was in Virginia. "Bye," Brenda said, before hanging up quickly. (Police believe that Brenda was forced to make the call and provide a misleading description of her abductor and location.)

A few minutes later, the phone rang again. This time, the mother's boyfriend answered. Brenda repeated what she had told her sister, that she was alone in a house with a man.

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

"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," Brenda said. The line went dead. A few hours later, Brenda was found by a hitchhiker on Route 50 near I-295 in Prince George's, in a place where she couldn't be missed.

A scarf was tied around her neck and knotted. She had been raped and strangled.

Two months later, on Oct. 1, Nenomoshia "Neno" Yates was snatched off Benning Road in Northeast about 7 p.m. while walking home from a Safeway store. Her body was discovered within a few hours, just off the shoulder of Pennsylvania Avenue in Prince George's. She had been raped and strangled. She was 12.

The exact genesis of the moniker Freeway Phantom remains unknown, but it appears to have first been used in a headline on a story describing Nenomoshia's death in the Daily News, a now-defunct city tabloid.

Brenda Woodard, 18, became the Phantom's eldest victim. On the night of Nov. 15, a Monday, Woodard and a male friend left night school at Cardozo High and went to eat at Ben's Chili Bowl on U Street NW. By 10:25 p.m., they were on a bus heading to Northeast. At Eighth and H streets NE, Woodard got off the bus to catch another to her home on Maryland Avenue NE.