Freeway Phantom - Who is the Phantom?

Episode Date: June 28, 2023

Why was the Phantom never caught? Is it possible he's still alive, walking freely? We explore all evidence pointing to his identity. And we ask: what hope is left?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a podcast that takes you inside undercover investigations. In the second season, we've got an alphabet soup with the DEA, the CIA, and the FBI all mixed up in the same case. So you do personal security all over the world and you have somebody call you and say, can you get grenades and guns for this guy in Colombia? No, no, no. It's a mystery wrapped around an international arm's deal. Alphabet Boys, on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's a mystery wrapped around an international arm deal. Alpha Bet Boys.

On the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So there is a ton of stuff they don't want you to know. Yeah, like does the US government really have alien technology? Or what about the future of AI? What happens when computers actually learn to think? Could there be a serial killer in your town? From UFOs to psychic powers and government cover-ups, from unsolved crimes to the bleeding edge of science, history is riddled with unexplained events.

Listen to stuff they don't want you to know on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you find your favorite shows. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ Freeway Phantom is available each week on Wednesdays. To hear each episode add free and one week early, check out TenderfootPlus at TenderfootPlus.com. You'll listen to Freeway Phantom, a production of I Heart Radio, Tender TV, and Black Bar Mitzvah. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast

are solely those of the podcast author or individuals participating in the podcast, and do not represent those of I Heart Media, Tinderfoot TV, Black Bar Mitzvah, or their employees. This podcast also contains subject matter that may not be suitable for everyone. Listener discretion is advised. Freeways are interesting because millions of people use them, but very few people walk along the sides of them. They're very accessible, but they're also not generally used for foot traffic.

And so it's very easy to conceal someone just off of a very, very busy highway because nobody usually walks along there. It means that he won has a car to nose when he can get on and off that road without being detected. Most likely has a job or family situation, which allows him to be out at any hour of the day or night, because believe me, choosing these victims and abducting these victims took a long time. He had to these victims took a long time.

He had to be out there a long time to get access to these particular victims. They weren't doing things that they did every day at that time. That means he has to be available to wait for them to show up and to follow them and then to be vulnerable. So they're not vulnerable while they're inside a store or with other people. They're vulnerable when they're alone. This is exactly who we wanted,

and he was willing to take a great risk to get her. The homicide detectives turned the cases to little girl cases. This child was laying on the side of the road. I wouldn't go, no way. I would come out of the house. Those first five murders should have been a huge warning bell for the police. We just want to know what happened.

This person must have saw that they were thinking that maybe it's just one person. He says, they need to know. This is me. I thought that they would catch him. I thought it was just a matter of time. I'm Celeste Headley, and this is Freeway Phantom. In the previous seven episodes, we covered the murders of eight young black girls ranging in age from 10 to 18 years old that occurred in DC from 1971 to 1972.

There were six confirmed victims of the freeway phantom, and then there was the case of Angela Barnes, originally considered victim number three, whose case was closed after two police officers were convicted of the crime. Then there was Tara Bryant, originally considered the final victim, who was eventually removed from the Freeway Phantom victim list. And two things are unclear about Tara's case, who removed her from the investigation, and why? 50 years later, Detective Romaine Jenkins still believes that Tara was yet another victim

of the Freeway Phantom, although her family believes otherwise. As we learned in the last episode, law enforcement turned their attention to the green Vega gang in 1974. And although they were officially ruled out as suspects in the Freeway Phantom murders, many in law enforcement assumed they were responsible. Others thought Robert Askins was the likely killer, a suspect we talked about in episode 6. All of this led the majority of the Metropolitan Police Department to conclude that the cases were solved, but not Detective Romaine Jenkins.

They were looking for the wrong person, they didn't know about profiling and all of that, they're not looking for the guy who hides behind a tree. It's the dastardly guy who's gonna grab a woman, some psycho, that's not what they were looking for, and that's what they were after. For 10 years, the case files sat there, called untouched, until Romaine took over the case in 1984. untouched until Romaine took over the case in 1984. So I had at my disposal, I had seven senior homicide detectives.

And I decided I said, why not use them? And some of them had actually worked on the cases, originally. Yeah, originally. And they gave me their notebooks and so forth. And they, you know, could you read all their handwriting? Uh-huh. See, back then, we were the carbon paper typewriter folks.

There were no computers. We didn't have computers. You had to type everything and man, you had to be detailed. And we were closely with the medical examiner's office. So you know, we learned a lot about anatomy and causes of death and things like that. We investigated causes of death. Although she was now leading a team, many in the police department were too happy

about having a black female supervisor. Remain says that throughout the 1970s and 80s, racism was alive and well in the MPD. Racism, you talk about racism. Oh, yes, I had a son, you talk about racism. Oh, yes. I had a son, black officers to a scout car, and I'm riding along in the area, and I see the black officer walking the footbeers,

what you're doing walking the footbeer. The lieutenant took me out the car and put the officer's on, and those are the things that they did back then. So racism had gone away. Or sexism. And sexism because the women were mistreated by the officers, they tried to intimidate some of them.

And some of the women just said, you know what, this is not for me. And they left the job. They actually left the job. And as a supervisor on the job, you know, I thought I would have some power, but no, I really didn't. And I know one time my lieutenant asked me,

he said, Sergeant Jenkins, do you think I'm a racist? And I said, yes, sir, you are. And he said, I'm not a racist. My next door neighbor is black. I said, Lieutenant, the only reason your next door neighbor is black. I said, Lieutenant, the only reason your next door neighbor is black is because you don't have enough money to move out the neighborhood. See, I was like that because my husband was president

of the Afro-American Police Association. So there was some militancy. I had an instance where two of my officers, one white and one black, they saved a little three-year-old who had been left in the car and the car burst out in flames and officers went in and got that child. I wrote the officers up to the awards committee. Only the white officers named when.

I mean, they would do things like that. And so I was always constantly, you know, in battle with them. And I said, you know what, I'd enjoy the police department. To go through this. I mean, these are the things that I had to face out there. The commander at that time, I went to him. I said, sir, we have a problem over here.

He said, what's wrong? I said, you know, the police, women, these black police women are being harassed. They're being mistreated. I said, I think we only had like one or two white females and the white girl who came from Connecticut who we've never seen a black person before. They gave her a short beat around the station.

That was her assignment. She had to walk around the station for the tour of duty. I mean, this actually happened. And so I said, you know know we're having a problem and something has to be done. He said well you know what and he was white. He said we're not going to tolerate. He said I want you to do an investigation and let the chips fall where they may. And so I said okay and in the interim a black officer came to him say look Sergeant be careful because the white officers can get you. He said I don't know what they're planning,

but they flattened something. He said, I was in the locker room, and I got bits and pieces of the conversation. They're going to do something to you, because they upset that you initiated this investigation of the things they did to the black police women. So I said, thank you. And it wasn't no longer there a day or so later.

Whenever my troops went on a run, I'm just a supervisor. I'm out there riding up and down in a sky car. I go and see how they handled it. I go parking in the neighborhood and watch how they handled it. How they interact with people. And I got out the car and I was walking towards them. Well, by then, they had cleared the runs at 10, 8, nothing found or whatever it was. And so as I was

walking back to my to my scout car they got in the car and the officer gunned the car. I had to I had to jump up on a citizen's car to keep from getting hit. I was always I was hot so I didn't say anything. I got in my scout car. I went over to air and asked the dispatcher to locate that unit for me and have them meet me at there. They're standing by their location. I'm responding. They stood by. I went to their location and I told it was two white officers and I told them whatever you applied in to get me. Make sure that you don't miss the next time. Or else I'm going to kick your, you know, and I use the word. You can use it? Yeah, ass. And if I can't whip your ass, I have a husband

up in 3D who's 6'2 and he will do it, but don't miss the next time. They didn't say nothing, they went on back and got in the sky car and drove off. It is so difficult for me to hear you tell these stories about the way the police force was in the 1970s. And think that that prejudice, that racism, didn't hamper the investigation. That they may have invested a lot of officer hours and energy and focus and time into the investigation. But how were these detectives not led astray by their own prejudices? Oh, they had to be.

They had to be because first of all, they didn't understand the community that they were investigating. I say, you know, police are representative of the communities that they police. If the citizens act wild and crazy, the police are the same thing, that's the same kind of thing you're possibly gonna get. Here's the thing, sometimes as a police officer, you've gotta put aside your personal feelings.

The only person who ever tried to kill me on the Metropolitan Police Department was a black police officer. Okay, you know was a black police officer. Okay, you know, a black police officer tried to kill me and he ended up getting arrested. So you can't say all the white police officers there, that's some black ones, just the same, you know. By the mid-80s,

Remain and her team were entirely focused on the Freeway Phantom case and Remain had her work cut out for her. When I first started, one of the first things I did was try to find the evidence. When I checked with the Metropolitan Police Department and I found that the evidence had been destroyed, the officer took me to the property book where the evidence was. The evidence has been destroyed. So that's DC for me.

So then I contacted PG County. PG County found the evidence in their cases. And I got a technician from the FBI to meet me and another detective over in their property office. And we went over the evidence. Conclusion was they had preserved it well enough that they could get any type of DNA but that was back then. They have made advances now. Now whatever happened to that evidence I

don't know. But Romaine was able to start making some connections with the evidence she did have. That's when I saw the report about the green fibers. That's what really picked my asset. Nobody had never mentioned anything about green synthetic fibers. And I asked a couple of people who I knew who had worked on the investigation. They said they didn't know anything about green fibers. While investigators did initially identify the green fibers on each of the victims, somehow they failed to connect them or analyze them conclusively.

Remain decided it was time to make that happen. Well, see what happened is no one knew about the green synthetic fibers until Detective Lloyd Davis developed asking as a suspect. When Davis had requested that all the evidence be sent to the FBI, that's when they came back about the green synthetic virus, which aren't really green if you see them visually. Now, this is what the FBI technician told me by who am the case.

To the naked eye, they are different colors. They're only green if you look at them under a microscope. What are the sources of the fibers? That's what I wanted to know about the fiber evidence. And he did the fiber evidence in the Wayne Wins at Lanham murders. So I figured he's going to have some credibility. Which was also green actually. Yeah.

Going to the Dennyle. So I asked him, I said, well, you know, what's the source of the fibers? He said he thought they came from an auto. But I talked to Detective Lloyd Davis, who had all the evidence submitted. He said he was told that the fibers came from a bathroom mat, like a bath mat in a bathroom,

and that goes along with these victims being washed, including that sounds about right as far as I'm concerned. One of the most important things that remained did was submit evidence to the FBI to get the first official profile of the killer, and they came up with some intriguing conclusions. They felt that this person was in the military. Well, at that time, you had all these military people coming back from Vietnam, who were in hospitals here

and in salations here, so you had a lot of that going on. But that was really interesting. And the reason why I thought it was so interesting was because when I showed the note to the FBI, they said, this is military. This person was in the military. I showed the same note to the investigator at Naval Investigative Service. He saw whoever wrote this note is military.

So I had two different brains saying the same thing. You know, that this person was in the military. In the podcast Alphabet Boys, we take you inside undercover investigations. I'm Trevor Aronson. And in our second season, we have an Alphabetabetsuit with the DEA, the CIA, and the FBI all mixed up in the same case. At the center of the story is Flavio. But who is Flavio? I see movies with arm dealers on TV. Okay, I'm going there for the AI, but I'm going to die.

When I land, there's Flavio in a suit. It's like, follow me. And he slams down his badge in my passport. And I'm like, uh, something's going on here. So you do personal security all over the world, and you have somebody call you and say, can you get grenades and guns for this guy in Colombia? Not, not specify grenades, a lot of ammunition. It's a mystery wrapped around an international arm steal, who are the cops?

Who are the criminals? And is anyone really who they claim to be? Listen to Alphabet Boys on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. There's a ton of stuff they don't want you to know. Does the US government really have alien technology? And what about the future of artificial intelligence, AI? What happens when computers learn to think?

Could there be a serial killer in your town? From UFOs to psychic powers and government cover-ups from unsolved crimes to the bleed-eed edge of science, history is riddled with unexplained events. We've spent a decade applying critical thinking to some of the most bizarre phenomenon civilization and beyond. Each week, we dive deep into unsolved mysteries, conspiracy theories and actual conspiracies. You've heard about these things, but what's the full story? Listen to stuff they don't want you to know on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or

wherever you find your favorite shows. Romain eventually retired from the police force, and with her retirement, the case essentially went cold. That was until it was picked up in the early 2000s by former DC homicide detective Jim Trainham, who stumbled into it almost by accident. I kind of took over a project where we were looking at all of these unsolved cases of involving women in DC. Like a hundred had been identified over a 10-year period by the Washington Post. And that was also during the time period where they first started the COTA's database. You know, before you really couldn't do anything with

DNA unless you had a name suspect to do a one-to-one comparison to. But with COTA, she could put the information into a database, it would run it against other cases, it would run it against a database or a collection of suspects. So it was during that time when I was first getting started. Somebody came to me and asked me about freeway fan-in-case, and I really didn't know anything about it at the time. I began to do research and pull what I could and basically I found the very minimal paperwork, just entries in our homicide log book and that was pretty much it. We didn't have any files, we didn't have any evidence and the more I looked, the more I realized like all the cases that were out in PG, they really didn't have any files. They had some evidence that they were looking at in the wooded case, but everything had pretty much been destroyed.

And so I was just trying to build what I could, based on these paper accounts and things along that line. Much like Romaine, Deck Cades before him, Jim Training discovered that the evidence in the case had been poorly maintained, either damaged or mysteriously missing. But he slowly started to connect some dots. So I was able to collect some stuff from Prince George's County, and then we found out that the FBI had gotten involved in the worded case, and they had quite an extensive file. I was able to get that and make a copy of it as well. It was continuing to look for evidence during that time to find nothing, nothing, nothing.

And after we got the FBI file, and we learned about people like, let's say, Roman Jinkins, who had information as well, I was approached by Del Wilber of the Washington Post. And he wanted to do some work on cold cases. And so he was asking me about cases that I thought would be interesting and I had mentioned Freeway Phantom Tomb. And so he thought that was a good case to the future.

And so we pretty much gave him open access to our files that we had at the time because it was so old we figured it wasn't going to do any harm. So he did what I really wanted to do was that he actually went out and knocked on the doors of the detectives who actually worked on the case originally and they would invite them in and they would say yeah I know all about it I'll talk to you about it come on in and by the way would you like to see my file? It turns out that a lot of the missing files have been taken home by the original case detectives. For note, later that back in the 80s, they were packing up a lot of those files because of the way that files were retained

back then. They were throwing out a lot of things like crime scene reports, photographs, witness statements and all of that, on all these cases, including the Freway Phantom case. And that's been changed because of the law. They can't do that anymore. One of those people was Remain Jenkins, who kept most of the files from the Freway Phantom case in boxes in her house. These are the very same boxes that we sifted through when we visited her home. Well, here's some of that carbon paper you're talking about. Yeah, you put all that, all that have to do with corn. Okay, see, the police department likes to throw away stuff.

Yeah. And I don't throw away nothing because you never know when you're going to see it again. Oh, it looks like it's from the memorial service. Yeah, that's the memorial service. This is Nina Mosias, autopsy report. Four foot tall and a hundred pounds. Student at Kelly Miller, junior high school, and sixth grade. That's tough.

Photos are not here. OK, I got tons of photos on the rubbic. But I got to know a little bit about that. But I think they end up with the other thing. She realized that a lot of the files were being purged. So, she actually took all the purge material and kept it herself. So, between her and her institutional knowledge and what Dell was able to gather for us, we were able to recreate a lot of the original files.

And so we had a good foundation to work on from there. Jim Trainham says remain was instrumental in his re-investigation of the Freeway Phantom case. She is wonderful. I mean, her memory of this case, anything that I say that is contradicted by her, go with what she says, you know, because I where I have, you know, files and reports that I am working off of and all that.

She has a great institutional memory about what was actually going on during that time, which is so important because she knows, you know, not only what the department was like, but what was those neighborhoods were like, what the relationships only what the department was like, but what those neighborhoods were like, what the relationships were between the department and the neighborhoods and the media and all of that, and just talking with her, I always learned something new. We talk several times during that time period, and we've actually talked several times since where we've discussed various issues on the case and all of that. And, you know, she was able to help us out, you know, quite a lot.

Because even with what we were able to gather, when you're digging through these old files and stuff, you're almost like an archaeologist. You're trying to kind of piece together little things and some of the documents that you would come across, they would make reference to things that you would go, well, where is that? Where is that in another document? And you can't find it. So you know that at some point something existed.

After some digging, Jim and his team were able to identify some new evidence that hadn't been thoroughly looked at before. During the time that we were working on this, we were basically learning that there was evidence available from two of the different saints. One was that PG County had evidence from the Brinder Woodard case. It was part of the sex kit that they submitted to the Maryland State Police Lab. that time the technology is in advance as it is now, they weren't able to get a DNA profile all for the material that was left, and there were so little material left that they actually used it all up. And so we pretty much hit a did in right there.

The second evidence actually came because of our work, we were trying to promote the case and get information out there about it, and I was doing a presentation audit through the Mid-Atlantic Col case homicide investigators association. When a Col case investigator from the Maryland State Police said, wait a minute, the last victim Williams, that's our case. And it turns out we didn't know that, but because of where her body was found, the Maryland

State Police have actually become involved in her case and so they actually had more case files that we weren't aware of at the time and they had a box of stuff of her clothing which was you know pretty exciting for us and it turns out that you know her underwear was in there and there was a possibility that there were some semen stains and so that was eventually submitted back to the Maryland State police lab but a follow-up investigation that was also being done by the National Center for missing and exploited children they were helping out as well it turns out that

that was a boyfriend she had been with her boyfriend earlier that evening he had dropped her off at the bus stop and he definitely had an alibi so he wasn't involved. And so unfortunately we hit did in on both accounts, but at least we now know that we feel pretty comfortable that we've tracked down what is out there. Not to say that something might not pop up in the future sometime, but hopefully it will, but you know we've pretty much covered those bases, we think. Trainham says that by far, the most success they had was with the profiles. They developed a new geographic profile, which we talked about at length during episode

6. They also followed up on the original psychological profiles, including the one commissioned by Romain Jenkins and completed by the FBI. But he says, the track record of profiling throughout this case had been sketchy at best. At the time that the case was ongoing at first, but it was actually happening,

they went to several different psychiatrists, psychologists in the area. And they talked to them and got various very different profiles. I mean, some were talking about how the person's psychotic were talking about, no, he's more like a normal person. Some talked about how he would be triggered by the name Denise. Others disagreed with that. And so they were all over the charts. The FBI did do a profile several years later where I think they were much more grounded in the case plus they had more experience working with this type of personality or at least reviewing cases that were committed by

this type of person and so they had a more you background. Training believes that psychological profiles can be dangerous for investigators. Profile is only as good as the information. Plus, it's not going to point to one person. The profile is going to help you prioritize who you look at over other people. And the profiles that I've worked with in the past basically tell you, don't eliminate somebody simply because of the profile.

You know, just put them lower on the list to investigate. And I had mentioned it's only as good as the information that they're given. And a lot of times what we do is we would go ask for a profile here, Mr. Profile, here's our case file. Look at it. Tell me what you think. We get the profile back. Six months later, my case file is down this and I lock up somebody or identify somebody as a suspect

who doesn't even come close to this and I'm going out to profile. It's still good. But if I had kept them abreast of all the incoming information at the time, then they could have modified their thoughts and given me better investigative leads as new information became available. So that's how we don't take advantage of this information. Trenum warns that profiles, especially inaccurate ones, can lead to what he calls tunnel vision.

Tunnel vision is basically focusing in on a suspect or a theory to the exclusion of any other. Now at some point in an investigation you have to kind of start doing that because once you start to identify your suspect then you begin to build a case against them. It goes from being an evidence-based investigation to not a suspect-based investigation. The danger is that you get confirmation bias. The confirmation bias is that you now have tunnel vision, but you're only going to seek information that confirms what you believe to be true.

And you're going to ignore information that contradicts that. So, you know, tunnel vision is not that bad. You just have to be able to have somebody say, hey, wait a minute, you know, tap you on the shoulder, did you think about this? Oh no, I didn't, let's go look at that. That sort of thing. So, oftentimes, somebody may get a profile

or may focus in on this is who we think it is because of this. And then they will start trying to make the person fit the evidence rather than seeing where the evidence takes them to the person. But we also have a tendency to focus in on people who we don't think are acting appropriately, the strange guy and all of that,

but people act the way they do and When we project that's not the way I would act onto somebody We've gotten off track many times by doing that sort of thing rather than recognizing that no people can act all sorts of ways and it can be normal Tram says this sort of tunnel vision was evident in the Freeway Phantom case. Their original profile of a mentally ill man is what convinced so many people in law enforcement that Robert Askins was the killer. And here, just like with all the profiles

that they were getting from all of these psychiatrists and everything, the reason they were going to these people is that they thought that this guy was mentally insane. He was somebody who should stand out in the psychiatric community as having been treated for whatever ailments he had, and that's not necessarily the case. Training stress is that its crucial profiles be constantly updated with new information. If a profile is years or even months out of date, it can lead investigators in the wrong direction. However, Jim is optimistic that with modern technology

and our current understanding of profiling, we can and should continue working on the freeway phantom profile. Things have come a long way since the 70s and 80s. So I would be very interested to hear any updates that anybody might have. That's exactly why we decided it was time for a new profile, something that hasn't been done since the mid 2000s, and we found the perfect person to do it. The former FBI profiler who cracked the DC sniper case and blew the lid off the white water investigation.

In the podcast Alphabet Boys, we take you inside undercover investigations. I'm Trevor Aronson. And in our second season, we have an alphabet soup with the DEA, the CIA, and the FBI all mixed up in the same case. At the center of this story is Flavio. But who is Flavio? I see movies with arm dealers on TV. Okay, I'm going there for the AI, but I'm gonna die. When I land, there's Flavio in a suit.

It's like, follow me. And he slams down his badge in my passport. And I'm like, uh, something's going on here. So you do personal security all over the world and you have somebody call you and say, can you get grenades and guns for this guy in Colombia? Not, not certified grenades is a lot of ammunition. It's a mystery wrapped around an international arm

deal. Who are the cops? Who are the criminals? And is anyone really who they claim to be? Listen to alphabet boys on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. There's a ton of stuff they don't want you to know. Does the US government really have alien technology?

And what about the future of artificial intelligence, AI? What happens when computers learn to think? Could there be a serial killer in your town? From UFOs to psychic powers and government cover-ups, from unsolved crimes to the bleeding edge of science, history is riddled with unexplained events. We spend a decade applying critical thinking to some of the most bizarre phenomenon civilization and beyond.

Each week, we dive deep into unsolved mysteries, conspiracy theories, and actual conspiracies. You've heard about these things, but what's the full story? Listen to stuff they don't want you to know on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Jim Clementi. I'm a retired FBI Supervisory Special Agent and profiler and I'm also the co-founder of XG Productions.

And so I write and produce and develop content for all platforms. Our team first discovered Jim Clemente a few years ago during the production of Monster DC Sniper. Jim played an instrumental role in developing the criminal profile in that case. He spent years as a profiler with the FBI, and after leaving, he went on to produce multiple seasons of the show, Criminal Minds. We thought there's no one better

to make a new profile for the freeway phantom. And we started by asking him about the foundations of criminal profiling and how it's come to prove such a success. So how does one become a profiler? Well, in FBI, you have to first become an FBI special agent and then go through the FBI Academy and then work about 10 years,

at least on major cases, cooperating with local police departments, state police departments and other federal agencies, and get enough experience on major cases that you have something to bring to the behavioral analysis unit. So the behavioral analysis unit is housed in the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime in Virginia at the FBI Academy. And the behavioral analysis unit is where the profilers are trained and they work.

It basically descended from the FBI's behavioral science unit and that was started by Howard Teton in the early 70s. And it evolved from a unit that had a few people to one now that has five or six separate units and 25 to 35 active FBI profilers. As you know, that we're working on this from the 1970s when we didn't even say serial killer. So I have to imagine that the science of profiling has evolved a lot. You know, at the time, if you read some of the early accounts of trying to figure out what makes a serial killer and you see some of these the earliest attempts, right? Trying to figure out what distinguishes a serial killer from another type of murderer.

That seems to have really evolved over the years. And part of that I think was because in the very early years they were dealing with a very small number of people that they could interview, right? Yeah, they interviewed 35 or 38 people. And when I left, it was up to 1500. So we had a much broader base or foundation to the information that we were basing our profiles on.

So basically what we found was that there are a number of different ways that people become serial killers and a number of different ways that that manifested. So it's not one size fits all. We can't simply say, okay, this is what motivates a serial killer. There's a spectrum of behavior. There's a tremendous amount of diversity among offenders, and that is evidenced in how they do what they do, why they do what they do, and how long they get away with it. When we asked Jim Clemente to look into the freeway fandom case, he said the best place to begin is to analyze everything we know about the killer.

We always start with victimology because looking at the victim and understanding everything about the victims is like holding up a mirror to the offender. There's a reason why he chooses these particular victims. And in this case, seeing the overwhelming similarities between these victims tells me that he had a very, very strong preference. And he offended mainly against children. They're petite girls too.

And there's a reason for it. He didn't randomly pick these girls. He picked them specifically for that reason. Now, whether this was desiring him that was conscious or subconscious, I don't know, whether he felt a certain way whenever he saw somebody he targeted as a victim or whether he specifically laid out the plans. I'm going to wait for this kind of person to come into my sights and then I'm going to wait for the opportunity to take that person.

Not sure about that, but the consistency with with which he operated tells me this was an incredibly important thing to him. So that's the first thing. Second thing is I would absolutely categorize him as a preferential child sex offender. And what does that mean? Well, people throw around the term pedophile all the time. But What they don't understand is pedophilia is actually a diagnosis. You go to the DSM and you can look up the criterion to be diagnosed as a pedophile, but it's somebody who is sexually aroused by pre-pubescent children. And this guy may be a pedophile, but the broader term is preferential child sex offender, meaning that he had a specific sexual preference. And this can include the age, the gender, the body type, the personality

type, the circumstances, all of those things surrounding his victim choice. Because when he's hunting for victims, he's looking for vulnerability, accessibility, and desirability. And sometimes when the desirability factor isn't there, in other words, the person doesn't absolutely fit into that desirability factor, he'll settle for whatever is available. But in this case, because he picked petite girls and most of them were young teens, that was most likely his preference. It's a criminal sexual preference, and it's something that he has embraced in his life. In other words, many people have dark thoughts and desires, but this guy decided I am going

to pursue them. I'm going to hide it, I'm going to do everything I can to set up and be prepared for it. I'm going to fantasize about doing it over and over and over again, and eventually I'm going to actually be able to actually act on my desires. And that's what he did. At least, these six times may be more. Cemente says the next victimology factors to analyze are the different times and places where he actually abducted these girls.

He's clearly all over the map on that, but he's in a fairly small geographic location and his body disposal sites are as well. And this tells me right away that this child preferential sex offender is from this area. He's not somebody who just passed through and doesn't really know the area. He's somebody who is actually invisible in this neighborhood. Nobody sees him as out of place. Everybody sees him as belonging, and so it doesn't raise the alarm that he's there. So he's able to operate with impunity in these neighborhoods.

And that leads me to believe if the demographics there are highly concentrated with minorities, that he is also a minority. And that means he could be African-American, he could be mixed. But he's definitely seen as someone who is just part of the neighborhood, doesn't stick out like a sore thumb. What about the location where he left the victims? Is it significant that he was leaving them by the side of the freeway? It is significant, and freeways are interesting because millions of people use them,

but very few people walk along the sides of them. So they're very accessible, but they're also not generally used for foot traffic. And so it's very easy to conceal someone just off of a very, very busy highway because nobody usually walks along there. It means that he won has a car, two, knows when he can get on and off that road without being detected. Most likely has a job or family situation which allows him to be out at any hour of the day or night because, believe me, choosing these victims and abducting these victims took a long time.

He had to be out there a long time to get access to these particular victims. They weren't doing things that they did every day at that time. That means he has to be available to wait for them to show up and to follow them and then to be vulnerable. So they're not vulnerable while they're inside a store or with other people. They're vulnerable when they're alone. And in one case, for example, where he abducted a girl coming right outside of a corner grocery store, he had to be pretty bold because there were obviously other people around. It said the packages and things that she bought

were right in front of the store, but that doesn't say if it's on the sidewalk, right outside the glass door, or on the street, 50 feet away, or around the corner. I don't know what the actual facts are, but he definitely took a risk with that one. And when you see someone take a great risk like that, that means the desirability factor is through the roof. This is exactly who he wanted and he was willing to take a great risk to get her. exactly who we wanted and he was willing to take a great risk to get her. So this is important.

That tells me something in terms of how highly she might be ranked on his desirability factor. Meaning that this is sort of his ideal? Yes, it's closest to his ideal. The highest risk that he took is going to tell you what he wanted the most. The next detail we looked at was the length of time that the killer kept each victim before dumping their bodies. The first two were the ones that he kept the longest.

Yeah, Carol and Darlenia. And so the first one, I would think, it had the most planning involved. This is something he led up to for a very long period of time. He was fantasizing about doing this. He everything was in place. And he did what he did. And he planned to keep them probably for an extended period of time. But it never goes as well as they planned, never.

And so when he gets down to the third victim, it's eight hours later. The fourth victim, it's three hours later, the fifth victim, it's six hours later, the seventh victim, it's eight hours later. I think what he found was it's difficult to keep someone alive for a time and keep them hidden. He may have had some change in his circumstances, his relationship or his living circumstances or wherever he kept these girls. But also, he wasn't a killer until he killed his first victim.

It may have taken him longer to form the intent to actually take their lives. And we see with Brenda Woodard that she received a tremendous amount of violence and anger from the offender. And she happened to be the only 18-year-old, the only adult she may have had, more wits about her, she may have been stronger willed and she must have fought more than the others. And I think because there was a ten-month gap after that offense, she really affected him. What she was able to do and maybe how close she was to being able to get away and then ruin everything for him. I think

that really made him go underground for a period of time. So what are we to make of the note that was found with Brenda Denise Woodard? This is tantamount to my insensitivity, misspelled, to people, especially women. I will admit the others when you catch me if you can, freeway Phantom. Well there are a couple of things about it. One is that he's obviously loving the moniker. This is why we tell media outlets do not nickname offenders. We don't do it at the FBI,

but we do encourage the media to not name offenders just like we tell them not to put a picture and the name of a school shooter up after they've been caught or killed. Because what it does is it gives other people who are like-minded the idea that they can become famous too. Because many of these offenders don't have a good self-image. They're actually, they feel terrible about themselves, and they're trying to feel more powerful. Particularly when you have this kind of offender who's attacking petite girls, this guy feels powerless, and he wants to feel powerful.

So, this guy wanted to communicate, because he wanted to sort of revel in fact that he'd been given a moniker by the media. You won't hear me say it because that is not something I encourage at all. Giving him a moniker only feeds his ego and can actually embolden him to kill more. The next thing I'll say, and this is part of the profile, is that it's clear that he had a fairly correct use of the word tantamount. I believe he used the word because he wanted to impress the readers. He wanted to show off. And this is something that he will do in his real life all the time. Because of his poor self-image,

life all the time. Because of his poor self-image, he feels the need to prove his greatness. And whether that's in his vocabulary that he uses, or in the quote, conquest that he makes, he wants to prove how much of a man he is. And this letter, especially when he has used these multiislavic words to show off and he gets one of them wrong. So I think I should just launch into the profile. Yeah, let's do it. Next time on Freeway Phantom, I believe that he's likely I believe that he's likely short himself, although he has very powerful hands, probably due to the kind of work he does. But I believe he's not scary. He's able to get close enough to these victims to not scare them away before he can control them. One of the things that he said that really made sense to me is the fact that he believes that this person fantasized about this, especially with the first stick, and planned it, and

that's why he was able to keep it. A lot of variables play into closure, right? We live and die, some people buy the street code, some people out there. They know who murdered this person. They know who committed this arm robbery, but they won't come forward. Fruei Phantom is a production of I Heart Radio, Tinderfoot TV and Black Bar Mitzvah. Our host is Celeste Hiddley. The show is written by Trevor Young, Jamie Arbrite, and Celeste Hiddley.

Executive producers on behalf of I Heart Radio include Matt Fredrick and Alex Williams with supervising producer Trevor Young. Executive producers on behalf of Tinderfoot TV include Donald Albright and Payne Lindsay with producers Jamie Albright and Tracy Kaplan. Executive producers on behalf of Black Bar Mitzfa include myself Jay Ellis and Aaron Bergman with producer Sydney Fooves. Lead researcher is Jamie Albright, artwork by Mr. Soul 216, original music by makeup and vanity set, special thanks to a team at UTA, Beck Media and Marketing and the Nord Group. Tundrafoot TV and I Heart Media as well as Black Bar

Mitzvva have increased the reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person or persons responsible for their freeway phantom murders. The previous reward of up to $150,000 offered by the Metropolitan Police Department has been matched. A new total reward of up to $300,000 is now being offered. If you have any information relating to these unsolved crimes, contact the Metropolitan Police Department at area code 202-727-9099. For more information, please visit freeway-fanon.com. For more podcasts from our radio and Tinder for TV, visit the IHR radio app, Apple podcast, or

or even listen to your favorite shows. Thanks for listening. Alphabet Boys is a podcast that takes you inside undercover investigations. In the second season, we've got an alphabet soup. With the DEA, the CIA, and the FBI all mixed up in the same case. So you do personal security all over the world and you have somebody call you and say can you get renamed and done for this guy in Colombia? No, no, no, no.

It's a mystery wrapped around an international arm steel, alphabet boys, on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. So there is a ton of stuff they don't want you to know. Yeah, like does the US government really have alien technology? Or what about the future of AI? What happens when computers actually learn to think? Could there be a serial killer in your town? From UFOs to psychic powers and government cover-ups, from unsolved crimes to the bleeding

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