freeway phantom

The police and the FBI were wrong to discount the significance of the victims’ names. The killer rearranged the letters in the names to send messages, crack jokes and in some instances, to help shape the nature of his attack.

The best example of the killer’s technique occurred in the assault on Darlenia Denise Johnson where her name was transformed into the message: ‘DIRE – NO JOHNS: DENIES ANAL.’ I apologise for the crudity of the message, but it is worth repeating because it strongly suggests Ms Johnson was not sexually assaulted.

The killer’s technique is based on pattern recognition and replication. The eight letters in Darlenia are transformed into words which produce a striped pattern, while the six letters in Denise remain a uniform colour. Darlenia’s surname is transformed into four letters with a stripped pattern and three with the same colour. That is, the patterns in the first two names are replicated in the third, thereby establishing two 2:1 relationships.