Six Black girls and young women were murdered in and around Washington, D.C., over seventeen months. It took four of those deaths before investigators formally recognized a pattern, three more years before the FBI took jurisdiction, and nearly four decades before the department admitted the evidence that might have finally answered the question was simply gone.
Between April 1971 and September 1972, six Black girls and young women, ages 10 to 18, were abducted and murdered in and around Washington, D.C., their bodies left near major highways. Investigators did not formally connect the killings into a single pattern until four had already occurred. Local police remained lead investigators for three years before the FBI took over the case in 1974. The strongest suspect, Robert Askins, a documented violent predator with a disturbing set of circumstantial connections to the case, was never charged for any of the six murders because no physical evidence ever tied him to them. In 2009, D.C. police confirmed the case file, including material that could have contained DNA evidence, had been lost. The case remains unsolved.
Carol Spinks, 13, disappeared on April 25, 1971, the first of six victims. Her body, and that of the second victim, Darlenia Johnson, were found within 15 feet of each other near Suitland Parkway.
Despite the clear geographic and circumstantial overlap between the first killings, it took a fourth murder before investigators formally treated the cases as connected.
Local police remained the lead investigative agency for roughly three years after the killings began. The FBI did not take over the case until 1974, two years after the murders had already stopped.
Robert Askins, a convicted killer institutionalized for twelve years after multiple homicides, was investigated as the strongest suspect after items in his home included a reference to the unusual word “tantamount,” which had appeared in a note left in one victim’s pocket. No physical evidence ever connected him to the six murders.
In 2009, D.C. police confirmed the Freeway Phantom case file, including material that could have contained DNA evidence, had been lost.
Askins died in federal prison without ever being charged in the case. A 2019 book, Tantamount, renewed public attention and continues independent research into the killings.
An unidentified serial killer responsible for murdering six Black girls and young women in the Washington, D.C. area between April 1971 and September 1972.
Four murders occurred before investigators formally connected the killings, despite clear geographic and circumstantial overlap after just the first two.
Yes. In 2009, police confirmed the case file, including material that could have held DNA evidence, had been lost.
Robert Askins, a documented violent predator, was the strongest suspect, but no physical evidence ever connected him to the six murders before his death in prison.
It documents delayed pattern recognition, a slow jurisdictional handoff, and the eventual loss of the case’s physical evidence, closing off the kind of modern forensic resolution that has solved comparable cold cases elsewhere.
Trace the case from the first disappearance through the delayed pattern recognition to the 2009 loss of the evidence.
Four Murders Before Anyone Called It a Pattern.
This is the fact that should anchor how this case is read: the first two victims, Carol Spinks and Darlenia Johnson, were found within 15 feet of each other, near the same stretch of Suitland Parkway, both young Black girls abducted while walking alone. That overlap was not subtle. It still took two more killings before investigators formally treated the cases as connected and assembled a dedicated task force.
By the time that recognition occurred, four families had already lost a daughter to the same offender, operating in the same pattern, in the same part of the city.
Recognizing a serial pattern is not a forensic breakthrough. It is a basic act of institutional attention, and the documented delay here occurred despite geographic and circumstantial overlap that was apparent from the second killing onward.
The Suspect With a Documented History, and a Case That Never Reached Him.
Robert Elwood Askins had a violent history stretching back decades before he became a suspect. In 1938, at 19, he poisoned five sex workers with cyanide-laced whiskey, killing one, then stabbed another to death two days later. Found criminally insane, he was institutionalized for twelve years. Five months after his release, he strangled another woman to death.
When investigators searched Askins’s home in 1978, they found photographs of girls and young women, women’s scarves, a knife connected to a separate crime, and court documents in which a judge had used the word “tantamount,” an unusual choice of language that matched a note found in Freeway Phantom victim Brenda Woodard’s pocket. Colleagues confirmed Askins used the word frequently. None of it, individually or together, met the evidentiary threshold to charge him with any of the six murders. He was later convicted of an unrelated 1970s rape and abduction and died in federal prison without ever facing charges in this case.
Each button separates one distinct case-integrity issue from the case’s decades of dormancy.
Two bodies found 15 feet apart did not trigger a formal serial investigation until two more girls had already been killed.
The FBI did not assume the case until 1974, after local investigators had already reached a dead end and the killings themselves had already stopped.
By 2009, the physical record of the case, including material that could have contained DNA, was confirmed gone, foreclosing the kind of genealogy-based resolution that has solved comparable decades-old cases elsewhere.
All six victims were young Black girls and women from working-class D.C. families, a population whose disappearances some researchers and family members believe received less institutional urgency than the pattern warranted.
Grading distinct institutional decisions across the life of the case.
Clear geographic and circumstantial overlap after the second murder did not translate into a coordinated response until the fourth.
Federal involvement arrived years after local police had exhausted their leads, and after the killings had already ended.
Genuinely thorough given available tools, producing real circumstantial connections, but never enough physical evidence to charge him.
Decades of custody ended in a 2009 admission that the physical record, including potential DNA, was simply gone.
Civilian researchers and authors have kept the case active and public, work the original institutions largely abandoned.
The Counterargument: 1970s Investigative Tools Were Genuinely Limited.
A fair account has to acknowledge that 1971 policing lacked DNA analysis, digital case management, and the interagency coordination tools that exist today, and that a fast-moving serial offender targeting victims across jurisdictional lines was a genuinely difficult case to build even with full institutional attention.
That context explains the era’s forensic limits. It does not explain a documented four-murder delay in recognizing an obvious pattern, or a jurisdictional handoff that arrived only after the offender had already stopped killing, and it does not explain, at all, why a modern police department in 2009 could not locate its own case file for six unsolved child and young-adult homicides.
Why This Case Matters
The Freeway Phantom case matters because it documents institutional neglect operating in the opposite direction from cases where authorities closed files prematurely. Here, nothing was ever formally closed. The case simply went quiet, underserved by delayed pattern recognition, a slow federal handoff, and finally by evidence that vanished sometime during nearly four decades of ordinary institutional custody.
Six families have waited more than fifty years for an answer that modern forensic science might have been able to provide, had the material survived long enough to be tested. It did not. That loss, confirmed in 2009, is not a mystery. It is the last documented institutional failure in a case defined by them.
Blaine Pardoe and Victoria Hester, Tantamount: The Pursuit of the Freeway Phantom Serial Killer, 2019.
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