'Freeway Phantom' Slayings Haunt Police, Families

Over the years, detectives and federal agents combed the rosters of the area's mental health facilities and the employment roles at city recreation centers. They did background checks on substitute teachers who might have known the girls. They developed more than 100 potential suspects, including a real estate developer, an Air Force colonel and dozens of convicted sex offenders. None panned out.

In 1974, FBI agents, who had been sidetracked by the sprawling Watergate investigation, refocused their attention on the slayings. With local police, they concentrated on a gang of men who abducted and raped scores of women on D.C. streets about the same time the Freeway Phantom slayings were occurring. A member of the gang, known as the Green Vega Rapists, claimed to have participated in the killings of the Phantom victims and implicated others in the gang.

In court filings and in comments to reporters, authorities indicated that they felt that the Green Vega Rapists were responsible for the killings. But the cooperating gang member recanted, and no charges were filed. Today, investigators do not believe the Vega rapists were responsible.

In the late 1970s, D.C. homicide detective Lloyd Davis developed his own Phantom suspect. Davis recalls showing up to work at the homicide office one March day in 1977 and being told to question a rape suspect who had just been arrested. The suspect, Robert Askins, had been charged with raping a 24-year-old woman in his house. (Homicide detectives questioned rape suspects routinely then because they were trying to find the Phantom.)

Davis learned that Askins, 58, had been charged three times with homicide. He had spent time in St. Elizabeths Hospital and later had been convicted in the 1938 killing of a prostitute by cyanide poisoning. His sentence had been overturned on a legal technicality concerning the statute of limitations. He was freed in 1958.

When police searched Askins's house in the 1700 block of M Street NE shortly after his arrest in 1977, Davis found the appellate court opinion in a desk drawer.

For Davis, a single word leapt from the page. In a footnote, the judges had used the word "tantamount," the word in the note found in the coat pocket of Phantom victim Brenda Woodard.

It was not an ordinary word, as Davis saw it. Later, he would learn that Askins often used the word at the National Science Foundation, where he worked as a computer technician.

Davis worked the case for nearly three years. He retrieved evidence from crime labs and shipped it to the FBI for further analysis.

For the first time, experts linked five of the six Phantom killings; technicians found the same green synthetic carpet fiber on all but one of the six victims' clothing. Despite getting a search warrant that named Askins as a suspect in the Phantom killings and digging up the man's back yard with a shovel, Davis never recovered any physical evidence of the crimes, and Askins was not charged.

Now 87, Askins is serving a life sentence in a North Carolina federal prison for kidnapping and raping two women in the District in the mid-1970s. Davis retired in 1981.

Like other former investigators, he has been unable to put the Phantom cases behind him. He kept copies of all his notes and reports. They are in boxes stacked in his basement, and he digs through them from time to time. Last year, he suffered a massive heart attack. He worried about dying before the killer would be brought to justice.

"I only had four or five other unsolved homicides in my career," Davis said, describing his frustration at not being able to break the cases. "When I look through these files, I wonder about the stuff I wasn't able to track down. . . . I really wanted to solve the murders, for the families."

And so he had an idea. He wrote Askins a letter a few months ago, asking him to confess. Askins wrote back promptly, denying any role in the killings.

In letters exchanged with a Post reporter last year, Askins also denied being the Phantom, saying he did not have "the depravity of mind required to commit any of the crimes."

But Davis doesn't believe him.

"I know he did it," Davis says. "I just know it."

'Always Looking'

On a cold February night, Trainum drove into Prince George's to meet with the relatives of Carol Spinks to let them know he was digging into the Phantom killings. Sitting across the small living room was Carolyn Morris, Carol Spinks's identical twin.

Even now, 35 years after her sister was slain, Morris's grief is raw.

The killer lurks in her thoughts and dreams. She can feel his presence when she walks down the street. Morris, 48, says the Phantom wrecked her life. She fell into drug addiction and alcoholism and couldn't hold down a job. She consulted a psychic to find the killer.

She overprotected her four children, unable to relax when they were out of her sight. Only recently did she summon the courage to finally tell her kids what had happened to the aunt they never knew.

"I feel like there is something missing in me," Morris says. "That's how I feel. You are always looking for this thing, but you can't find it. It is still very scary."

Like Morris, other relatives remain tormented by the killings. Some have nightmares about what happened to their loved ones. Finding ways to ease the pain has been difficult but therapeutic. One victim's angry sister spent hours on street corners, wearing revealing clothing in the hopes of attracting and catching the Phantom. One victim's aunt wrote a self-published book, "The Mystery of the Freeway Phantom."

In 1982, Patricia Williams joined the D.C. police department. Now a lieutenant in the youth division, Patricia is the younger sister of Diane Williams, the Phantom's last known victim.

Patricia Williams didn't always want to be a police officer. But somehow she felt compelled. In her office is a push-pin map showing the locations of random attacks on juveniles by adults.

"I'm sure, subconsciously, that I know that if I wasn't able to help Diane, then I can help other children," she said.

Williams hasn't gone many days without thinking about catching the killer. She wants to help interrogate him, to learn why he chose her sister. She wants desperately to put a human face on someone who has become almost mythical.

"I think that would help my healing process," she says.

Like Morris and other relatives of Phantom victims, Patricia Williams has vivid dreams about her dead sister, the sister with whom she once shared a bed. In the dreams, she always asks her sister the same question, one that she also would love to pose to the Phantom: " 'Where have you been all these years?' "