Congress Heights

Some of the sites, Anacostia, DuPont Circle, Logan Circle, Penn Avenue East, the Palisades, Shaw Road, Island Avenue.

Upper Bladensburg, Upper Georgia Ave, Van Ness, Uptown, Union Station, The Parks, U Street, Congress Heights, Deanwood, everywhere.

Foggy Bottom, Chevy Chase, Minnesota Ave. Yeah, I mean, but yeah, I'll be at the block party at MLK.

And some of the stuff goes through the middle of the night.

Anti-war demonstrations over Vietnam were intensifying, the homicide unit was overwhelmed, and many Black residents east of the Anacostia River already had a long history of distrust towards the police.

The Metropolitan Police Department was still majority white, while residents in neighborhoods such as Congress Heights often felt caught in an uncomfortable position, heavily policed in some circumstances, but poorly protected when they actually needed help.

The reasons behind that distrust was rather complicated and shaped by years of radical inequality of the time, with changing neighborhoods and difficult interactions between police and the communities that they served.

And it was there on Waller Place in Southeast Washington that 13-year-old Carol Denise Spinks lived with her mother, Allentine, and several siblings.

If someone wanted to commit a crime in Washington at that moment, it was an unusually good time to do it because so many police resources were tied up elsewhere.

And then on Thursday, July 8th, 1971, a little more than two months after Carol Spinks was found, another girl disappeared from almost the same area.

Darlenia Denise Johnson was 16 years old and lived with her family at 3922 Wheeler Road Southeast in Congress Heights, only a few blocks from Carol's home.

The girls had even attended the same school together, although there was no indication that they had been friends or anything like that, but they had certainly been at the same school.