freeway phantom

On the evening of 25 April 1971, 13-year-old Carol Denise Spinks went to her local 7-Eleven. The store was about half a mile from the Spink’s residence, just across the Washington border in Maryland. 

Her sister gave her $5 to buy bread and TV dinners and told Carol she could buy a soda with the change. 

Carol made her purchases and headed home. A local teenager, who was the last to see her alive, passed Carol on Wheeler Street shortly after she left the 7-Eleven.  She never made it home.

Children playing behind St. Elizabeth’s Hospital found her body six days later. She lay on a grassy embankment next to the northbound lanes of I-295, about 1,500 feet south of Suitland Parkway.

Someone had physically assaulted, sodomised and strangled her. Although she was fully dressed, her shoes were missing. The autopsy indicated she died a few days before her body was found and was alive for two to three days after her abduction.

The police found green fibres from a car or a rug on her body.