'Freeway Phantom' Slayings Haunt Police, Families

About six hours later, a police officer spotted Woodard's body on the grass by an access ramp to Route 202 from the Baltimore-Washington Parkway. A coat was draped over her chest, as if gently placed on a child who fell asleep on the couch. She had been stabbed and strangled. Police found the first evidence that the Phantom wanted to communicate -- the note found in Woodard's coat pocket.

The Phantom struck again Sept. 5, 1972, when Diane Williams, 17, a senior at Ballou High School, became his last known victim. She was found strangled on the side of I-295 just south of the District line, just hours after she had cooked her family dinner and visited her boyfriend's house. She was last seen boarding a bus.

Reviewing the reports, Trainum learned that the investigation started slowly and gained size with each killing. By Woodard's death, the FBI was involved. Thousands of phone calls poured into police tip lines. The tips led nowhere.

Trainum knew he had to think about the killings in a fresh way, so he called on an expert who specializes in narrowing the field of suspects. Kim Rossmo, a former Canadian police officer and a professor at Texas State University, had developed a computer system that plots crime events on a map and helps determine where a suspect's "anchor point" -- home, workplace or other significant location -- might be. Trainum and Rossmo spent weeks looking through reports together. They visited the crime scenes.

Rossmo then developed a geographic profile of the killer's movements -- from abduction sites to where the bodies were found. He believes the Phantom had an anchor point in Congress Heights, just south of St. Elizabeths Hospital. Trainum 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 in coming days with fliers announcing a $150,000 reward for witnesses who call Trainum at 202-727-5037 or 202-727-9099 with information.

Coming Close

Former investigators live with the empty feeling of failure, of being unable to arrest a suspect in such a high-profile string of slayings. Some have spent much of their careers chasing this ghost.

Romaine Jenkins, a retired D.C. homicide detective, began to peck away at the killings in the late 1980s. More than a decade into retirement, she still sometimes flips through 15 legal pads of notes, hoping something will click for her.

"I always think of these young ladies," Jenkins says of the victims, posing questions about the Phantom that still race through her mind. "How did he keep these girls? How did he do it without anyone knowing? How did he select them?"

Sgt. Rick Fulginiti, a longtime Prince George's detective, was working in the department's cold case unit several years ago when he was assigned to investigate the Phantom cases. His department received a tip about a potential suspect.

Fulginiti felt he was close to solving the crimes, even flying to Utah to get DNA samples from his suspect's relatives and from an old envelope. He also learned that authorities had located a semen sample at the Maryland medical examiner's office. It had been taken at the autopsy of one of the Phantom's victims. Technicians were unable to extract any comparable DNA from the sample, which was tested in 2002.

"I was on pins and needles waiting for the results," Fulginiti recalls. "It was a real letdown, to come that close."