He was the faceless predator who hunted children on the streets of Washington D.C., snatching, raping, and strangling at least six little girls during his 17-month reign of terror.
The serial killer, who called himself the Freeway Phantom, tortured and murdered his young victims – one just ten years old – before dumping their bodies on the side of the freeway.
From April 1971 to September 1972, he terrorized the nation’s capital and to this day has never been identified. His heinous crimes should place him among America’s most notorious serial murderers: Son of Sam, the Zodiac killer, the Boston Strangler or now the Gilgo Beach killer.
Yet outside of D.C., very few people have even heard of the mystery murderer or his killing spree.
The reason, investigators now admit, is as disturbing as the murders themselves: the killer’s victims were poor black girls from neglected neighborhoods, and didn’t matter to law enforcement at the time.
‘Those black girls didn’t mean anything to anybody – I’m talking about on the police department,’ Tommy Musgrove, who had once headed the D.C. homicide unit, told the Washington Post in 2018.
‘If those girls had been white, they would have put more manpower on it, there’s no doubt about that.’
Now more than half a century after the murders America chose to forget, the case has been dragged into the spotlight thanks to a podcast, Monster: Freeway Phantom, which explores the shocking failures of the investigation.
Hellbound and Down 