Carol Denise Spinks was 13 when she left home on April 25, 1971, to run an errand at a nearby 7-Eleven and never returned. Her body was found six days later, on May 1, on a grassy embankment beside Interstate 295 in Washington, D.C. Autopsy findings showed she had been sexually assaulted and strangled, and investigators noted her shoes were missing; examiners also suggested she had been kept alive for a period before being killed.

Carol’s murder was the first in a series of similar abductions and killings of young Black girls and women over the following 18 months whose bodies were left near major roadways, a pattern that became linked in the press to the Freeway Phantom. Investigators named several persons of interest over the years, including a gang called the Green Vega Rapists and a man identified as Robert Askins, but no arrest was ever announced.

Does anyone have memories of Carol, her family, or that neighborhood in 1971 that might shed light on her last movements?