I mean, it was like World War III hit our office up here, and she was screaming.
I mean, the door was closed, and I could hear her screaming.
And threatened to have my job, threatened to need a radio letter.
I'll never present another case in Colorado.
And I'm just thinking, I lost my job on this one.
I'm Scott Weinberger, investigative journalist and former deputy sheriff.
I'm Anastasia Nicolazzi, former New York City homicide prosecutor and host of Investigation.
Discovery's True Conviction.
And this is Anatomy of Murder.
So, before we get started, I wanted to mention if you want the most updated information on this podcast, follow us on social at AnasigaNigalazi and at Weinberger Media.
For today's story, we'll be going to Aurora, Colorado.
And Aurora, I can tell you, is pretty much a bedroom community of Denver.
Now, you might remember that my connection to Colorado is that I went to school there.
And it has grown a lot since then.
But one thing remains the same.
It is still a suburb of Denver.
And for today's interview, I spoke with Steve Connor who at the time was in the city of Aurora Police Department.
So on June 28, 2005, a 911 call comes in to the Aurora Police Dispatch.
We got a call from Richard Johnson, who at that time was living with his mom.
Aurora Emergency 911.
Yes, my name's Richard Johnson.
Uh-huh.
It's an older part of Aurora, single-family homes but very small, like cracker box or very.
They're probably 1000 square feet of that.
I was just moving some stuff.
There was a couple of Tupperware containers off the back porch toward the shed on the west side, which is close to the alley that separated his house from houses across the next street to the west.
When he's moving the boxes, one Tupperware container lit it cracked.
He could see a comforter with some flies on it.
So he opened up the container.
And as he opened up the container, he noticed something so alarming he had to notify the police right away.
Just as first officers arrive on scene, they exit their patrol cars and they quickly notice a pungent odor.
He told me that there had always been that aroma.
Not that strong, depending on which way the wind blew or the humidity in the air.
Probably for the past year or so, and he couldn't figure out where the aroma was coming from.
He always thought that the neighborhood cats were coming over to his yard and then using his window well, kind of like a litter box.
That's what he attributed the aroma to.
But now that that Tupperware box was open, the police could tell that the odor was not from cats.
In the backyard is where they had a patio with an overhang, and stored on the patio under the awning were all these boxes.
Richard Johnson leads them to a container, which is a 33-gallon Tupperware container.
It's white with a blue top.
It has industrial-sized duct tape sealing the top container to the base.
Remember, this is an actual Tupperware container, one of those heavy-duty containers, the one that I actually have sitting in my closet right now that you keep more long-term storage.
And it isn't just out in a field somewhere.
I mean this is in somebody's backyard.
They notice that that pungent smell is emanating from a crack in the corner of the container.
The aroma was pretty obnoxious.
I mean, it was probably the worst I've ever smelled.
Richard Johnson had already opened this, obviously, by the time he called the police.
Does it appear human?
Yeah, looks like human, curled up.
As he pulled out the comforter, he saw a hand and an arm and immediately Thought it was a human.
I can see a bracelet.
I can see long reddish or brown hair.
Obviously, first notifications, call outs were to detectives and crime scene technicians.
It was mostly skeletal.
There was some mummification in spots, but it was primarily skeletal.
There was still the hair that was visible.
And I don't know how else to put it, but it's kind of like a gelatinous mass, because it had been sealed up but it had been decaying at the same time.
And it was obviously in varying stages of decomposition.
This is a skeletal, clearly female, in the fetal position.
So clearly.
The next step, after gathering as much information at the scene, was to get that body to the ME's office for a forensic examination.
The coroner here in Colorado are also forensic pathologists and they have to make a determination on the cause and manner of death.
And in something like this you have a suspicious circumstance, but you have to be able to say that homicide is the manner in which he died.
Cause of death is more specifically how the person died, if they can tell if it was strangulation stabbing, gunshot wound.
But manner of death is whether it is, for our obvious purposes here, suspicious, homicide, natural, accidental.
And here again, while you might be saying well, of course, someone's body is stuffed into a Tupperware container.
Of course, that's homicide.
Well, maybe and most likely, but not definitely accidental.
You can't go to court to charge someone with homicide if the coroner says, well, I'm not sure.
Stranger things have happened than someone dying by natural or accidental causes.
And then for some other reason, while clearly ill-advised, they have been disposed of.
And I hate to use that term, but just that instead of buried in a container.
So more work is to be done before they can make that determination.
How did they get from being alive into this tub?
What's the mechanism?
The transition from a live living, breathing person into a tub where a toad that has their remains in it.
I always love.
This part about medical examiners or coroners is that they so often from the injuries that they find they really can start to paint the picture.
The forensic pathologist says if she was intoxicated, Potency for a drunk when they're that drunk is to fall backward, not forward.
And he says the amount of force necessary would be more than just a simple fall and hitting your head.
It would be applied externally by another individual.
A cause of death was quickly determined as a vertical skull fracture approximately three inches above the left eye, which occurred prior to the death.
So now they've determined that the fracture was likely a result of a lethal injury caused by a blunt impact to the head.
And as a result of that, the manner of death was classified a homicide.
But then also look at the other circumstances that I talked about, when they needed to start to put the pieces together differently.
They had the duct tape which is around the container and the lid, which means that someone actually placed the person there or at least taped the lid shut.
It is wrapped multiple times in a way that was... designed clearly to not make it easy to open.
So when they look at that and the fracture to the front, that's where they're able to say while we don't know who did this or exactly why it happened, we can tell you what happened.
And that equals homicide, which means that now Steve Conner and the police in Aurora are looking for a killer.
Absolutely have to figure out how that body got into that Tupperware and why was it sitting on Richard Johnson's property and how long had it been there.
So investigators would naturally have a lot of questions for Johnson.
Now I'd be asking first and foremost is this Tupperware container your property, something that you put out for storage?
And if not, who?
And of course, why?
Who do you believe could be inside?
So detectives quickly began learning all about Richard Johnson.
And when you think about disposal of bodies in homicides, people normally dispose of bodies in places that they're hoping they can't be found.
I mean, this is literally sitting in a occupied yard of a home where two people are living.
So you really have to start to wonder, is someone stashing the item there?
Or is there something about Richard Johnson that's making him decide to call it in?
But he has more to do with it than just finding these human remains.
He was kind of a recluse, a hoarder, a little eccentric, a Navy veteran of the Vietnam War.
His brother lived next door, the next house to the north of the address.
He collected a lot of things, and he was on, at that time, I think, disability retirement.
He couldn't work.
And while he was his mother's primary caretaker, he had been battling health issues himself.
And his struggle was with lupus.
He was a man that was clearly not in good health.
He couldn't work.
You could physically notice it in the way that he walked.
And he definitely had some oddities that made police decide they really needed to look further.
Everyone's looking at Richard Johnson.
I mean, it's his place.
But why would he report it if he stored the body back there to begin with and didn't ever in the past, however many years, take the time to take it to the alley side where the trash pickup was, put it in the trash can and have it taken to the dump?
You know Anasika, I know that I've been involved in a few cases where the call comes in from somebody who is obviously suspected of the crime off the top.
And most times they're not the bad guy, but sometimes they are.
How about you?
Well, there are certain type of cases that we almost anticipate this happening, right?
Domestic violence is the top of the ladder.
It happens all the time.
Killers call in literally saying, I just killed my loved one.
I killed my girlfriend, my boyfriend, my husband, my wife.
Happens all the time.
But it's also more common than you think in other cases, especially when it comes to certain categories of crimes like arsonists.
I mean, I have had more than one myself just in that category that the person who ultimately is found to have caused the fire is the person who actually called it in.
And while this doesn't necessarily fit into any specific category, you do have to wonder and look much further into Richard Johnson.
Back at the coroner's office, while investigators were preparing the body for an autopsy, they made a really important discovery, something that could lead to an ID of these remains.
She was wearing a class ring from Brighton High School.
Which is about 25 miles north of Aurora.
And more importantly, the class ring had the initials S.Y. inscribed.
The detectives at that time were focused in on the ring so they went to the yearbook at Brighton High School to match the initials with anybody that had gone to school there that year or graduated that year.
You know, this is one of those things that you see on television, but it's actually one of the fun parts of detective work.
You know, they literally have a ring and they need to deep dive in to figure out who.
So they're led to a yearbook and now they have this name, Sarah Yount.
So right away, is that body inside the container?
Is it Sarah Yount?
Well, to the surprise of everyone, when they looked for Sarah Yount, they found out she was alive.
Investigators tracked down the class ring on the victim to Sarah Yont, but Sarah was alive.
So who was the victim?
Sarah told them that she had given the ring to her mom, Carolyn Jansen, basically as a gift.
Carolyn Jansen had been missing for two years at this point, and she was the mother of six.
And one of her children was a woman by the name of Victoria.
Victoria Baker was such a staunch advocate, not only for her mom but at this point, finding her mom.
Carolyn Jansen, she had a full-time job and then she was selling Avon products.
The initial thing that caused concern for the family was she had an invitation to a wedding of one of the children, and that invitation came back as undeliverable.
That was a red flag for them.
So investigators don't know for sure, but it seems, at least initially, that the victim in the container is Carolyn Jansen.
She had these six children, but she had drifted away from her kids over the years, largely because of struggles in her own life and multiple abusive relationships.
At the time of her disappearance, Carolyn was working two jobs, trying to make a fresh start for herself.
She was kind of transient.
Carolyn would move around a lot, and I think that's probably why the family lost contact with her.
She had drug and alcohol issues.
She was trying to withdraw from that, but she'd also hook up with people with you know, same addiction issues.
Scott, when you hear that sort of thing, it really sounded like someone who's really trying to pull it all together and that the timing it just it almost makes you feel for her more when you hear that.
You know, I agree.
We've talked about so many other cases where someone is struggling with substance abuse and really has decided to turn their life around.
And we're on the upwards trend of making that happen.
And that appears where Carolyn was when she just disappeared.
And because of the issues in her life.
It wasn't someone that it was so easy to figure out that something happened right away, right.
I mean, she's been gone for two years.
Her kids think something's wrong.
However, she has drifted around.
She has moved around.
She has been transient.
She had a very messy divorce not too long before she had disappeared.
She was working two jobs and really that's where investigators went when they started to put the pieces together.
That likely this wasn't like she had just picked up and left town.
She worked at a restaurant called The Waffle House.
So we started doing the follow-up through our revenue, trying to determine when and where her last workday was.
And on February 6 2002 she clocked in for her last overnight shift.
We also were able to determine that she never did pick up her last paycheck.
And boy, this was a big red flag for me.
I mean, she never even picked up her paycheck.
And here's someone who's living paycheck to paycheck and really pulling herself out, as we've mentioned.
So why would she just not come for her pay?
And to me as an investigator, that would really be my starting point.
What I look for is if they worked consistently for a long period of time and all of a sudden just stop working.
Their social security number isn't active, there's no telephone number that is registered to them, no utilities registered to them, no vehicles registered to them, their driver's license expires.
All that stuff are indicators that that person is probably not only missing but is probably deceased.
So while investigators are compiling a list of possible suspects, they still need to do a positive ID on who is in this Tupperware container.
So after police speak with Sarayant, they now take a swab from her.
You know familial DNA.
Here we go.
And they end up saying, yep, that person in a barrel, that is one Carolyn Jansen.
And the question now is not if she's missing, it's who killed her.
Back in the early 2000s and probably up until a few years ago, they had a group called Family of Homicide Victims and Missing Persons that had an annual conference at different locations throughout Colorado.
And that's where my first contact with Victoria was.
Victoria Baker was one of Carolyn Jansen's children, and she was put up for adoption at an early age.
I'd never met her up to that point and until she told me who she was, then I thought okay, I could recall the case.
And when she told me, it's like, okay, yeah, I remember your mom's case.
By the age of 18, Victoria Baker had already faced her own fair share of hardships.
She had been born legally blind and put up for adoption, but Victoria refused to allow those traumatic events shape her life.
In fact, she had overcome every obstacle in her life, except for one, finding her birth mother.
She was successful on determining who her mother was, only to learn that her mother was a victim of a vicious murder.
It was required by the medical examiner's office for a family member to sign off on the death certificate.
Carolyn Jansen's death certificate.
And they turned to Victoria and when she went to sign it she noticed the signature line said 'Child'.
And it was an acknowledgement that she was Carolyn's daughter.
So now it was her mission to make sure that somebody paid the price and that she could bring justice for the entire family.
She was very active in her mom's case.
And I have to say the most active of the children that Carolyn had.
So investigators still want to go back to Richard Johnson and figure out how involved he is in the murder of Carolyn Jansen.
So, as they're going through their investigative techniques and speaking with him, they make a rather troubling discovery.
Police are understandably searching his home, and inside Richard Johnson's home they find something else quite troubling.
And it suggests that Richard may not be as innocent as he's suggesting.
They find hidden cameras in the bathroom.
He had women occasionally come over and he had a camera set up in the bathroom I think it was and would just videotape them in the bathroom.
So now investigators need to take a harder look at Richard Johnson.
And being a voyeur in this fashion is perverted, but could it lead to murder?
And the answer in general is yes.
Yes.
Many of them, fortunately, as bad as they are in and of themselves, they stop right there.
But then obviously you have the extreme.
You may remember an episode of Anatomy and Murder we featured just a few weeks ago.
That was the case of Alicia Bromfield, which really shows it at its worst just a piece of a deadly puzzle that needs to be figured out.
Is it that he is a voyeur and separate and apart from that, he now is a person who lives in the house and just found a barrel?
Or is it unfortunately someone who their proclivity for this type of behavior led them to something more sinister?
Everyone's looking at Richard Johnson.
I mean, it's his place.
Now, investigators really have a head scratcher.
You know, does it make sense that a man would call 911 to report a fine, like he did, and actually be the killer?
I believe that that is a real reason for investigators to step back and sort of take a 10000 foot view of all the evidence, which is not much so far that they've collected.
I'm going to get rid of the body.
I'm going to have some other entity do that for me.
And he never did.
He never called until it became an obvious issue.
You know, we always talk about this, Ana Siga, is to expect the unexpected in an investigation.
Here's another strange twist.
As they walked through his home they discovered a bizarre collection of trophies Carolyn had won through her direct sales business, displayed all throughout his home.
Apparently, she was doing fairly well with selling Avon products.
She had won a couple of smaller awards for that.
And now with so many unanswered questions, investigators pressed Johnson.
And that's when he said, I know who is responsible for that body in that Tupperware container.
Johnson claimed he was storing the container and other items for a friend.
He immediately pointed the finger at JD Harrington because Harrington had lived there on and off.
J.D.
Harrington was John David Harrington at the time he was a guy in his mid-30s.
JD was a I say transient, but I mean he held down jobs.
A variety of them usually worked through temp agencies.
He had issues with drugs and alcohol.
Richard said he was, you know, letting us stay there because J.D. had fallen on hard times.
And then that went south when Harrington stole Richard Johnson's mom's purse and car and went on a shopping spree and he crashes.
So they arrest him and charge him with a multitude of felonies.
Detective Steve Conner tracked him down at a halfway house where he was living, transitioning from prison where he was serving time for stealing Richard Johnson's mother's credit card and her car.
He had a criminal history that included burglary, theft.
He was on probation for several other violations, including forgery.
And the more you dig into Harrington, the more you find a connection between him and Carolyn.
At the time of the disappearance.
We've already mentioned in this podcast that she worked at a Waffle House and she never came back for her paycheck.
Turns out that Harrington also worked at that very same Waffle House.
But most interesting to investigators, at the time of Carolyn's disappearance, J.D.
Harrington and Carolyn Jansen were roommates.
Before he ever stayed with Richard, J.D.
Harrington had an apartment with Carolyn.
He supposedly got evicted from an apartment house in Northeast Aurora and Richard helped him move all this stuff from the apartment to the back patio to include the Tupperware container that contained the body.
Richard Johnson himself said he had tried to lift that container.
He said I went to pick that up and I could not pick it up.
It was too heavy for me.
J.D. was a very strong individual and just basically picked it up, tossed it through the window.
So, while Harrington was being questioned, the first red flag with him for investigators is when it seemed he was setting up a potential alibi, not for the crime but for why she had been missing.
He eventually said she stole his rent money and left town.
And that was pretty much the end of it.
She had a drug problem.
She had an alcohol problem.
She's the reason why I had to move out of the apartment and move in with Richard.
Investigators learned he had told workers at the Waffle House that he was mad at her for supposedly taking the rent money and running off.
And it seems that that may have worked, because in the coming months many of Carolyn's friends and co-workers didn't consider her missing.
Just taking Harrington's version of events.
So is what Richard's saying the truth, or is it just his way to shift the blame onto somebody else?
And we even offered him the opportunity of she could have slipped and fallen and you panicked and stuffed her in the container.
He goes, never touched her, never laid a hand on her.
I go, I'm not saying you did.
She fell and you picked her up and put her in the Tupperware container.
He goes, no, I didn't.
It wasn't me.
I imagine a lot of the listeners are hearing this and putting him at the top of their suspect list, and they might not be wrong.
What's your take, Anastasia?
At this point.
If I'm, in that case, I'm going back and forth because, while depending on who these two guys are, either one of them could be the one responsible in my mind.
I mean, I can go back and forth both ways and neither one of them yet is rising clearly to the top.
But when they sat down with Harrington and they began to question him, he was willing to talk.
But when he wanted to tell investigators that he wasn't the killer, the killer was actually the person who found the Tupperware container, Richard Johnson.
J.D.
Harrington initially was, who is this woman?
He goes, I have a lot of girlfriends.
I had a lot of girlfriends.
I said, come on, John, this is the one you lived with.
And finally, I got him to get to at least say her first name.
Because, you know, I can't remember her last name.
It was real brief.
We only were there for a month.
And no, I didn't have a relationship with her for long.
Well, maybe I did have a relationship with her.
According to Harrington, he did store the boxes at Johnson's home and he admitted that his fingerprints would be on the containers because he had taped the boxes knowing they may be stored outdoors.
But he denied Carolyn's body was in any of the boxes when he sealed it.
It wasn't me.
Stuff's in his property for years.
And I explained the duct tape away.
I'm sure he undid it and then resealed it.
When I did the lab request I had one of the CBI technicians down there go.
Is there any way to tell if it's been peeled off and then reapplied?
And he goes, no, not really.
To them.
It really comes down to common sense that what Harrington says just isn't as believable as Richard Johnson's scenario.
So investigators, they think they have enough to go out and arrest him.
And they want to, so they go to the DA's office and they're waiting for the answer.
Because in Colorado, like many other places, like here in New York, it's up to the DA to decide if an arrest for homicide can be made.
We have an odd arrangement here, because if I charge probable cause, the DA obviously can say yes or no or file reduced charges.
If I get a warrant, the same DA, or a representative from the DA's office, basically has to approve the warrant before it even goes to a judge.
Now, different jurisdictions do this differently, but in very many Colorado being one of them, just like New York it's ultimately up to the DA's office to decide whether or not an arrest can be made.
Now, the police can go out if they have probable cause and make the arrest.
However, very often they do that in conjunction with us, because we decide whether or not we're going to prosecute or not.
And the same was true in Colorado.
I can take the case to the judge and make a lot of enemies with the DA's office.
If the judge says, you have probable cause, I'm going to sign the warrant.
Because now that almost obligates the DA's office to prosecute.
And you know Scott, as a prosecutor, when I hear this, I'm going to go with at that point what the DA's office was deciding, which is that they just weren't ready to make that leap.
Because when I hear it right now, it's still very much in this case, he said versus he said.
That's true, but...
You've already built a fairly strong case of circumstantial evidence, which includes a pretty flushed out timeline.
You know, you always hope you have more.
You get to a certain point that someone is prepared to take, you know, what we call a leap of faith.
Some of the decision makers may lean one way, others may lean another.
But in the end, it normally works its way through.
And for all you out there.
You just got literally a bird's eye view of what happened in my office so many times.
And Scott, I mean we think about it even just the way that Scott, you said true, it's exactly how it is.
And again, I understand it.
We have very different perspectives for understandable reasons.
Yeah, we don't always have to agree on the process.
It's very often the detectives coming in to my office saying, look, this is how we see it.
And again, they have been down there literally in the trenches doing the work.
And then they come into us and there is those moments, often of tension, of them saying OK great, I get it.
But it's not enough for me to go into a courtroom because, while we never need enough to ensure a conviction, in fact there's no such thing.
We know we only have one shot, and so we have to think what is enough to at least potentially get us over the finish line if we walk into court.
And here there's a lot of circumstantial evidence, but there still is nothing for me that is going to make me say that I know that it is going to be Harrington versus Johnson.
In this case, it had been filed once by the original DA.
They didn't give her an answer.
In 2009, he actually went in to begin and start working in their cold case unit.
And he, when he looked at this, he's like, you know what?
Of course there's enough.
And I filed it again.
And they still, even after the roundtable and the PowerPoint presentation, will get back to you.
Never did.
Never would.
It's like, OK, there's nothing else I can do.
So I let it languish for probably a year and finally I said, screw this.
So I went to my boss and I said you know, the great thing about probable cause is it never diminishes.
It's always there or it isn't.
It doesn't change over time.
And of course they're in a panic because the DA at the time was getting several detectives and police officers writing letters on them so they couldn't testify.
I said, who cares?
So it went up the chain.
I actually had an interview with the chief.
And he goes, what's the problem?
I explained to him, he goes, make the arrest.
So I did, filed it over the weekend by Monday morning.
I mean, it was like World War III hit our office up here.
Really, it wasn't so much what they wanted to do, but was the way they went about it, really bucking the system that was put in place to make sure that everyone was on the same page?
They were doing a conference call from the DA's office to a conference call to the detective sergeants and lieutenants here and she was screaming.
I mean, the door was closed, and I could hear her screaming.
And threatened to have my job, threatened to give me a Brady letter.
I'll never present another case in Colorado.
And I'm just thinking, I lost my job on this one.
They ended up, after the obligatory 72 hours, dismissing the charges against them.
After they made that call, the case ultimately just continued to sit.
Basically, I put it on the shelf.
I cannot do any more work on this case right now because I don't have a DA that's receptive to charges being filed.
So the really big question here is what else can be done?
And are there any other avenues to get a probable cause affidavit, to get an arrest affidavit, to arrest Harrington for the murder of Carolyn Jansen?
There's no other options at that point except to wait.
But you know, one thing about DA's offices is that they are run by one district attorney, who's an elected official.
And you know I can tell you, having worked through three regime changes, if you will, during the course of my tenure at the Brooklyn DA's office the culture in office can dramatically change when you have a new DA brought in.
In 2012, there was a turnover in the district attorney's office.
They had a an election and George Brockler and his district attorneys that he had with him entered into office.
When a new district attorney comes in, they often have their own vision.
And while I'd like to think that most of these all have the best intentions, they're going to change things up.
You know, they want to land their own mark in an office.
And that really can affect the way cases are handled and different requirements.
And that certainly ultimately came true here.
I got a call from John Kellner.
In 2012, John Kellner was a prosecutor who headed up the office's cold case unit.
Interestingly, four years later, the DA counsel would name him prosecutor of the year.
And he goes, I understand you have a couple of cases you'd like to prosecute.
I go, yes.
And he goes, bring me down your top five.
So I took five down there, and Carolyn's case was one of them.
So here was a little bit of light at the end of the tunnel.
Detective Steve Conner really believes he is on a path forward to make an arrest.
But there was a condition that the new DA set out.
John asked I do additional testing using the new DNA methods that had come between 2005 to 2013.
He wanted a tape tested for any genetic material that might be on there.
Send it down to the state lab and see what they come up with.
So now they have these new tests and they get their results.
And while Steve Connor thinks he sees the light, unfortunately for Steve, these new test results are going to throw some serious doubt into his theories.
It's been so many years, the DNA is almost but all degraded.
But on the inside portion, where the sticky portion of the tape is, we're able to acquire some genetic markers.
Detective connor was concerned, not whether he was right about harrington, but would the dna hold up?
I get the cbi lab report back, but because it's so degraded they can only narrow it down to 30 chance that it's him.
I mean, they can't exclude him, but they also at the time can't exclude richard johnson.
This certainly is not what they were really hoping for, because you really can't exclude Richard Johnson now.
I mean, understandably, he's going to be on some of that tape.
Remember, he is the person who, at the very least, opened the tape originally when he went out there and smelled the odor, to then lead to the call which led to the discovery of Carolyn Jansen's body.
But hearing that basically, you get a 30 match.
That's not the type of match with prosecutors that we're saying hey, we've got this here.
When I hear 30%, I'm thinking 30% is better than nothing.
But in a sense, it really isn't good enough.
And DNA is such a specific science, as you all know.
You're used to getting these incredible results with these incredible numbers.
But when you get a number like 30% as far as what can be tested, it obviously wasn't a sure thing.
And now they've gone to the lengths of using newer technology and they got something.
And again, while nothing to be conclusive, it still was something that they could use in addition to the other circumstantial evidence.
And prosecutors at that point made the determination that now they were going to sign on the dotted line and say there was enough.
And we went out and arrested John Harrington.
Once in a while, you know, you have those cases that they're just not going to get better.
And we have to make a call whether at that point we're willing to roll the dice and take the chance.
And for Carolyn Jansen and her family.
Clearly, prosecutors decided here yep, let's march into court and give it our best shot.
Witnesses that came in, the officers, first responders, all that stuff, all did well.
And I'm thinking the whole time, just a piece of cake.
I know the DA would say, oh, yeah, we have to dot the I's, cross the T's.
But I had no doubt that they were going to find him guilty.
But at the same time I had a volunteer who was working in the DA's office as a clerk that helped administratively put some of the paperwork together.
And all the time, she kept saying, he's not guilty.
They're going to find him not guilty.
That, to me, was kind of disheartening because, hey, what's wrong with the case?
There's nothing wrong with it.
Could that be the same reaction as a member of the jury?
I mean, clearly she wasn't involved in the day-to-day portion of this investigation.
So she was an impartial person listening or knowing about some of the evidence involved.
So I'm sure in the back of his mind he was concerned whether her feelings could be the same as a member of the jury.
Now, every opinion is valuable.
Every person's perspective is valuable because that person like you said, Scott might be someone on the juries too.
So to me, it's like, OK, why did they say it?
I'm going to take that person's arguments about why they think he's going to be found not guilty and incorporate it into my ultimate summation to make sure I cover those points.
Because a lot of times in my experience it very often comes from someone from the outside again, who doesn't know every single moving part, sometimes get stuck on the branches without seeing the total tree.
And you just can't let it throw you off.
Juries are very finicky because I had another case where we had DNA.
We had everything necessary to convict.
And the jury found him not guilty.
And when they got Paul, they go, well, we have no doubt he was there.
We just didn't think he would kill him.
As we've said, the DNA test, not a sure thing.
No smoking gun.
And we always say you know, smoking gun is when you walk in as an investigator and the deceased is on the ground and the defendant standing over them with a weapon.
It was hard to prove that it was a homicide at all.
Yes, the medical examiner or the coroner's office did determine it based on the evidence of her injuries.
But the length of that the body was in this Tupperware container also became a concern to investigators and how that would play in to a jury's mind.
You know for me as a prosecutor, I say like yes, all those things existed, but I'm not worried about any of those.
What I really am worried about as the prosecutor in this case is what the defense is going to do with Richard Johnson.
And that's exactly where their biggest attack was made.
Because when Richard Johnson took the stand, they really went into every argument that all of us have been thinking all along.
Well, wait a second.
You know, he's the guy that found the body.
The body was on his property for all those years.
You know, he's the guy who has the cameras in the bathroom.
You know, he's the guy who is eccentric and a hoarder.
And you know it isn't making sense that he would never suspect or smell this very strong pungent odor for all these years.
So you know what, ladies and gentlemen?
Maybe you're not sure who it is, but not being sure is not beyond a reasonable doubt.
And if I'm the defense, that's exactly the hand that I'm playing.
And that's exactly what they did.
They attacked every aspect of his life, his quirks, his fetishes.
I mean, you know, he had a bunch of porn and all that.
And it's like, that's what they went after.
It's like, I get that.
Here's a guy that's physically deteriorating.
He has lupus and walks with a cane and doesn't process things very well mentally at times.
And he's being hammered away at, and he does, to me, excellent.
I have always been a believer that most often the truth finally shows itself for what it is.
And it sounds like that's exactly what happened here is that, the more he was pressed and the more that they pushed him on cross-examination, that Richard Johnson held his own because he was telling the truth.
And that certainly was how the jury ultimately was feeding into the dance, if you will, between witness and cross-examiner the defense during that portion of the trial.
His reasons were plausible.
And I think the jury really saw the fact that he did make that call.
And he was quick to tell investigators that, no, that is not my container, that it was Harrington's.
And he had every reason and every opportunity to tell them whatever information police was asking.
And he was very cooperative right from the beginning.
But in the end, on the witness stand, all of his honesty did come through.
And I believe the jury really saw that.
And that's why they came to their decision.
To me, there's a lot of tension going in.
It only takes one.
But guilty.
Second-degree murder.
And when I think about the trial and I've made it clear as we've talked about this case, I can go back and forth for so long.
But the piece of evidence that really put me over the top which is, quite frankly, how I would have probably started my summation in this case is that it just doesn't make sense that it is going to be Johnson and not Harrington.
And here's the piece that really stays with me is that by Harrington saying that Carolyn Jensen stole his rent money and took off.
Well, we know that's not true.
And remember, she didn't pick up her last paycheck.
So if the person that is being caught in the obvious lie is J.D.
Harrington, well, why is he lying?
And when you put all the pieces together, the answer to that is only one thing that Johnson was being honest about, that he just found the body and that the ultimate killer based in part by his own statements was JD.
Harrington.
Often it's said that juries really want to know what the motive of a murder is and why someone would do that.
And you know sometimes in these cases and sometimes in these stories that we do, we don't really get to know the motive because it's never learned through the investigation.
But Detective Steve Connor has his own feelings about why this may have happened.
What I think it was is John Harrington is the one that had the drug and alcohol issue and she's trying to get away from that.
And he ends up with the rent money, and he blows on drugs, and she confronts him.
I think it was what John had said, only in reverse.
Detective Steve Conner was on a mission from the beginning to get to the truth, to bring the person responsible for the murder of Carolyn Jansen to justice.
And that's exactly what happened in this case.
This particular one is a I want to call it a certain kind of evil, because it's one thing to kill somebody.
But this one, you pack the body away in a Tupperware container and the body stays there for years.
And to be that close to Carolyn while I'm staying at Richard's house, knowing she's on the back porch.
I mean, that's just, I try to wrap my head around that, but I can't.
You know, I never want us to remember the victims of these homicides for the way they were killed.
I don't want Carolyn to be remembered as the woman who's found inside a Tupperware container.
And it was something that I read about her, which I just really think is a lovely way for us all to think about her as we leave.
Her story was that she loved the great outdoors.
She loved building sandcastles and the color purple.
So I think when I choose to remember Carolyn Jansen, it's going to be as a woman building sandcastles and painting in the color purple.
Tune in next Wednesday when we'll dissect another new case on anatomy of murder.
Anatomy of Murder is an AudioChuck original, a Weinberger Media and Forseti Media production.
Sumit David is executive producer.
