[music playing]
[police radio chatter]
I am Romaine Jenkins, and the Freeway Phantom
cases will never leave me.
[music playing]
I was born in Washington, DC, Northeast.
I was a neglected infant.
My grandparents took me in because there
was no one else to care for me.
I joined the Metropolitan Police Department June 21, 1965.
I wanted to do social type work.
I did not join the police department to lock anybody up.
My first assignment was at the Womens' Bureau,
and there I worked on cases involving battered
and neglected children.
We were social workers with a gun.
We could go into a situation where kids' lives was
endangered, and we could remove these kids
without a court order.
[police chatter on radio]
After that, I was the first female homicide detective.
[music playing]
May of 1971, there were all kinds
of anti-war demonstrations.
So the city was in a total uproar.
If you wanted to be a criminal, this
was the time to do it because all the police
were pretty much tied up.
I was in homicide, and I remember when
Carol Spinks' case happened.
She was a 13-year-old black female.
April the 25th, she went to the grocery store.
Her mother watched her go into the store.
And on May the 1st, that's when her remains were found.
[music playing]
The autopsy showed that she had been strangled.
There is some type of sexual assault.
And whoever had her kept her alive for several days,
because there was food contents found in her stomach
by the medical examiner.
There were six cases.
Everybody is strangled.
There is some type of sexual assault in most of the cases.
Some of them are found on interstates.
Darlenia Johnson was a 16-year-old female.
She lived in the same neighborhood as Carol Spinks.
She's only found 15 feet from where Carol Spinks is.
So their bodies are basically in the same area.
Brenda Faye Crockett is a 10-year-old female.
She goes to the store alone.
She doesn't come back right away.
The next morning, her body is found
by a hitchhiker on Route 50.
Nemomoshia Yates was 13 years of age.
She was sent to the grocery store
by her father, which is a block from her house.
Same neighborhood, the store and her home.
Almost two hours later, her remains are found on Route 4.
Brenda Woodard, she was 18.
When she left night school, she caught the bus.
The next day, her body is found, Prince
George's Hospital, Route 202.
Inside her coat pocket, because her coat was draped over her,
there was a note from the killer.
"This is tantamount to my insensitivity
to people, especially women.
I'll admit the others if you catch me if you can!
Freeway Phantom."
[music playing]
Diane Williams, I believe, was 18.
She had gone to visit her boyfriend,
and she was coming home on the bus.
The next day, her body is found on Route
295 southbound inside the District of Columbia.
[music playing]
Those child deaths really, really touched me.
I was used to seeing things, but I had never been confronted
with anything like this before.
I realized somebody has to speak for these children.
You know what?
I'm going to be the one.
[music playing]
The press dubbed the cases the "Freeway Phantom" cases.
This was the first time we had ever had anything like this,
so we were totally, totally unprepared.
The term "serial killer" or "mass murderer,"
all this stuff, was not even thought of at that time.
[music playing]
Everybody was a suspect.
They had priests.
They had four-star generals.
I just think they were looking at the wrong suspects.
You have all females who are killed,
and who do they have working on the investigation?
A whole bunch of men.
And they looked at things totally different than I did.
[music playing]
In my opinion, the forensics on it show he was a black male.
He was in his early to mid-20s.
He had been in Vietnam.
Why did I say that?
When I showed the note to two separate people,
one was from the FBI, and one was from Naval Investigations.
And they both said, that note is military.
The guy from the FBI said, "I wrote orders like that.
That is military."
[music playing]
As a homicide detective, you have to almost
put a shield around you.
And sometimes you just ignore things.
They just pass by you, just like water running down the street.
You can't save the world.
But this case stuck with me as long as it has because I feel
a responsibility to the girls.
I always try to keep it in my mind
that I have to speak for these children.
[music playing]
I retired from the Metropolitan Police Department
December 1994.
The Freeway Phantom cases are still unsolved.
Not a week goes by that I don't think
about the girls in these cases.
Parents have died not knowing who killed their kids.
And to die like these girls, this is hard on the families.
And so if anybody has any information,
please just contact us.
[music playing]