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Today marks 20 years since emergency responders found a murdered woman inside of a burning home in Kill Devil Hills. The victim was 33-year-old Denise Johnson. You wouldn't know it looking at this home that something terrible happened here 20 years ago, a horrible crime that is yet to be solved. I remember seeing heavy black smoke up in the air. I just remember a pool of blood and her laying in it. We knew obviously something was way wrong. This wasn't just a routine call.
On July 13th, 1997, someone brutally murdered 33-year-old Denise Johnson inside her childhood home in North Carolina, then set it on fire. For 22 years, Johnson's killer has eluded police living among us undetected. This is CounterClock, the investigation into the unsolved murder of Denise Johnson. I'm your host, Delia D'Ambra.
If you were to look at it on a map, the town of Kill Devil Hills is about five and a half square miles. It's a beach town in the outer banks of North Carolina. On one side sits the Atlantic Ocean, and on the other is the Croatan Sound. It has a year-round population of about 6,000 people, and if you live there, you're going to make a living either fishing, building, or selling real estate. Or you might be working at a local restaurant or bar.
The area revolves entirely around tourist season, which typically starts in May and runs through October. I grew up there, and all of my family still lives there. Nine years ago, I moved away to study journalism and have become an investigative journalist. I've covered hundreds of crime stories, murders, and cold cases. I've been working as a news reporter for six years, first in Virginia, and now I'm working in the hub of some of America's worst crimes, Florida.
In 2018, I began reinvestigating this case. I just could not believe that no one had been caught for killing in cold blood a well-known woman from my hometown. The open-ended case ruined a lot of the perfect picture of how I saw my home. And creating this podcast to re-explore the case and complexities with listeners I think will benefit not only the public, but law enforcement.
On July 13th, 1997, my family had just moved into our new house on the Outer Banks. We lived about 20 minutes from Denise Johnson's home. And before daylight broke on that hot July morning and traffic started piling up headed to the beaches, emergency dispatchers chirped over police and fire radios. A house was on fire. I was a firefighter with the town of Kildovel Hills Fire Department.
A man by the name of Glenn Rainey was the first firefighter on scene to the Johnson home, located at the address of 2014 Norfolk Street. Small house, one story, but it had a pretty significant amount of smoke coming out of it. Coming around the corner, there was heavy smoke blowing across the road. It didn't take much time, and Rainey and the men on his fire engine were in the neighborhood. Norfolk Street sits just a few hundred yards from the ocean, and the house on fire was sandwiched between several others.
Kildevil Hills is actually a small town. It's only about four and a half square miles, so you tend to go in the same neighborhood frequently for calls. Right in the front yard, Glenn Rainey met first responding Kildevil Hills police officer Mark Evans.
Mark Evans, can I help you? Hey Mark, this is Delia D'Ambra. How are you? Hey, doing pretty good. How about you? I'm doing well. You got a few minutes this morning? Yeah, absolutely. My name is Mark Evans and I'm currently the police captain of Kill Devil Hills Police. Been here 23 years and back on the night of the incident, I was a patrol officer with the town of Kill Devil Hills Police.
On that morning, Evans was finishing his overnight patrol shift when he got the call to go to Norfolk Street. I remember seeing heavy black smoke up in the air.
Officer Evans handled assessing the outside of the house, and Glenn Rainey and his crew got to work putting out the fire glowing from inside the cottage. Time of day, which this was early, early in the morning, late at night, if you will, just when most people are asleep. When you don't have someone in the front yard meeting you from the home, there's always a good chance that maybe there's somebody still inside. We hit that fire immediately, dropped the hose, and then did the search.
What do you remember from entering the home? But it was locked?
Yes. Once we made entry, I went to the left to do just a routine search, just the way we were trained to do. My partner went to the right. The layout of this house was there were two bedrooms on the right side of the home. Immediately in was a common, like a living room, small kind of half kitchen space.
And as you went around further into the left of the home, it was also a small kitchenette, if you will, stove, refrigerator, almost like you would expect to see in a small home. I was able to make a really quick turn to go through there. My partner went to his right and searched both bedrooms, and when he got to the
bathroom, he found the victim, which was Denise, and he called out for me to come help him. Again, a small enough house, so it didn't take but just a moment to get to him. She was in the bathroom, in a tile bathroom, remember that? And there was a pretty large pool of blood. We took about three seconds to decide that it was time we needed to remove her from the smoky and hot environment to make sure if there's any chance of saving her that we could.
I grabbed her wrist and started backing out of the residence with her onto the front sidewalk and was going to administer CPR because she was unresponsive. When I went to take my mask off and to open her airway, it was obvious that that was not going to happen. Here's Mark Evans again.
The next thing I remember is looking through the house straight down into the front door. Straight in was the entrance to the back of this house was the bathroom. And I remember seeing, by the time the firefighters had located Ms. Johnson, I remember with my flashlight that it was heavy billowing smoke several feet off the ground. I remember seeing what appeared to be a person down. And by that time, as I'm yelling for them, they had grabbed her and had started to remove her from the structure.
And I remember them bringing it across the threshold of the front door, and they dropped her down to, I guess, to see if we could do any life-saving measurements. So again, like I said, I've been a medic for several years, EMT to that point, and they dropped her there, and one firefighter, maybe two firefighters, Glenn, Isaiah, and I, and we immediately, after a quick assessment of the body, we realized quickly there wasn't a lot of anything we could do. She had been down too long, and
And I remember that some of the skin, her flesh had started to melt off and parts of her flesh were peeling off due to the heat in the time that she had been inside of the house. I do remember that. And I also remember doing a quick examination of her body.
and what appeared to be, you know, some type of a struggle had gone on due to the wounds that were found on her quickly. I do remember immediately looking and doing an assessment of her and thinking, okay, you know, this is not right. This is not a normal house fire that somebody collapsed and went down in. This is turning into something more quickly. I realized that, you know, we've got a crime scene here. Realizing that, Glenn Rainey and the firefighters pulled back.
Mark Evans secured the crime scene, and he radioed for a homicide detective to get there quick.
We immediately secured the scene with crime scene tape and I recall how little bit of water was used and how quick these firefighters were instrumental in getting the fire out quickly and backing back to the scene. I think that had a lot to do with the fire captain as well being prior law enforcement and retired in law enforcement so we knew what we had. We started a log on who was coming across that crime scene tape.
And I remember I didn't let anybody, once we, this was my scene at that time until I was relieved by somebody of higher rank. Two decades have gone by by this point, and I was amazed by how much detail these men remembered. Details about the house. She was in, completely in the bathroom. Her feet were towards the wall. Her head was towards the door. Very small, very small house, very small everything, very small bedroom, small bathroom.
and details about the victim. What first drew my attention when they brought her out is that she had no clothes on. She was completely nude. Both Mark Evans and Glenn Rainey remember this call so vividly because it really was unlike anything they'd seen before. Homicide investigators later determined that in this case, someone set multiple fires inside the house. How long do you think that fire had been burning in your professional opinion?
How many were visibly seen in the home? Yeah.
There was also a fire started in a lingerie drawer in Denise's bedroom.
that did not, it also burned out. It didn't flare up. I don't know if the couch and the sofa were the product of the same fire or if it was one in one. I have no way of knowing that. And when I went back in to set the, open up the building and the back door was locked and the stove was on, all four eyes were on high on the electric stove.
These randomly placed fires, particularly the one that Glenn Rainey says was started in Denise's underwear drawer, piqued my interest. But it was how the kitchen looked at the crime scene that stood out to Rainey the most.
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On top of remembering that weird scene in the kitchen, Rainey mentioned something else that really made my ears perk up.
A robbery would explain a lot, except my big question was why someone started the fires. Arson to conceal a murder, posed as a robbery. It's an interesting theory and one that we'll look closer at a little later in this episode.
After my first interviews with both of these men, I couldn't help but think about a glaring piece of information that Glenn Rainey had mentioned to me. He moved Denise's body from where she was likely murdered. Remember, he said he carried her out of the crime scene and into the front yard. Now, anyone who's watched any kind of crime scene forensic show knows that's usually not the best idea. So I wanted to clarify with Glenn Rainey exactly why he did what he did.
When you picked Denise up and dragged her out of the home, at that point, did you believe she was still living? Yeah.
It made sense. Before first responders know for sure that a person is dead, they're going to do whatever they can to save them. It's their job. In Denise's case, the smoke from the fire made it difficult to see Denise's initial wounds inside the house. Putting out the fires with tons of water and then moving her body, that almost guaranteed evidence would get disturbed. It's a fact of the case that's been pretty much undeniable to investigators for 22 years. But it doesn't mean that anyone did anything wrong.
Denise's own sister, Donnie Johnson, wrestles with this reality. Donnie has made it her mission to be in the public eye whenever possible over the last 22 years. She's been trying to raise awareness about her younger sister's unsolved murder.
Donnie Johnson says she still has hopes that someday, even though it's been 20 years, someday someone will step forward and give the family the answers they've been looking for. If you have any information, give police a call. News stations in eastern North Carolina and up in Virginia, they run the same story about the cold case every year on the anniversary. Investigators say she had been stabbed. Their quick reports are just a reminder to Donnie that her sister's cold case remains cold and getting even colder.
To prevent that, Donnie has made herself available for interviews every time a reporter comes knocking. She immediately jumped on board with this podcast, and now her and I talk weekly to discuss the case and go over leads.
Well, I'm glad you're doing this because you've shown more interest than anybody ever, in my opinion. Well, I think, you know, any eyes that can try to help is a good thing, is what I think. The biggest thing I take away from our talks is that Donnie wants the people to remember her younger sister as more than just a murder victim. A hardworking girl, smile that would just light up the room, you know, everybody loved her.
Donnie says that summer she was killed. Denise was working as a waitress, and she kept a pretty close group of friends. In every way, Denise was your typical woman living at the beach in 1997. She and her golden retriever named K-Ridge, they were living the summer dream. That was her bud, I guess.
Because Denise was so well-known in the Outer Banks community, her case got a lot of attention when the murder occurred.
Local newspapers all watched the case closely. The mystery gripped everyone, but especially people who knew the Johnson family. Coincidentally, people like firefighter Glenn Rainey. After all this time has passed, consistent attention to Denise's case in the media has dropped off.
Really, these days, the people on the Outer Banks of North Carolina aren't the only ones that talk about it anymore. Oh, I guarantee you somebody in a bar somewhere has talked about it. I guarantee it. You know, people get loose when they're drinking a lot. I'm sure somebody's talked about it, and I'm sure there's people down there that know because of the lifestyle they live, they're too afraid to come forward.
From the moment she learned that someone had intentionally killed Denise, Donnie wanted to be involved in the case as much as possible. She'd been a firefighter in Kill Double Hills for years, and as more details about the use of fire in Denise's murder were revealed, Donnie couldn't help but develop her own theories. Donnie Johnson, Denise's sister, has developed her own theory of who took her sister's life 22 years ago.
Well, I've always thought there was a woman involved just by the way the fires were set. You know, being from a firefighter's perspective, I felt always that there was a woman involved. Yeah, a little dainty. You know, a man is going to do it quick and use an accelerant and just torch the place, you know. A woman is more scared of an accelerant and more scared of fire. So they're going to do it where they feel it's not going to be a big fire at first.
I wanted to feel that theory out more and compare it to what Glenn Rainey thought. After all, he'd been at the scene in 97 and put out the fires himself. After the murder, Rainey continued to work as a Kill Devil Hills firefighter, and now he's the fire chief in the neighboring town of Collington, North Carolina. Their profiles with different types of arsonists, they fall into certain categories regardless of who they are. Some people do it for glory. Some people do it, you know, out of revenge, revenge.
children have different profiles when they start setting fires as young you know could be up just a pile of leaves in the backyard without permission or something could be the security guard of a company that wants recognition a ignites and extinguishes a fire then reports it or something like that there is strict profile these people fall under and my captain had that he said almost immediately that this was a woman that did this and I believe him the reason
The reason is, turning on the electric stove does not do it anything, but not everybody knows that. Lighting a fire in a lingerie drawer, that's personal. That is very personal. The silk pillow in the roommate's bedroom, that's personal. I mean, that is, I don't know about the wound itself. I guess anybody can do that with a knife, but setting multiple fires and not sticking around to see if it's going to take, I would tend to agree with his opinion that it was a female that did this and started this fire.
Rainey explained to me that in an arson investigation, the point of origin is defined as the exact spot where flames ignited. In a structure that's been burned all over, it's a hard factor to determine. Inside Denise Johnson's house, the odds were in investigators' favor. We know there was at least three points of origin. That's not normal. Fire doesn't start that way. There was three areas. The main fire was in the couch, in the chair, in the living room, as soon as you came in the front door. This is a tiny house.
There was enough heat transfer that one probably ignited the other. The sofa was on the long wall and the chair was on the short wall. And then there was a pillow that had been burned in the roommate's bedroom, which it didn't go anywhere. It didn't extend. It went out. It burned down. It went out. And someone, whoever, the same person, had tried to burn the lingerie drawer in Denise's room. And that didn't do anything but melt.
The lingerie drawer was open. None of the other drawers were open. And that's where something gets dropped. And it melted. It didn't burn. It didn't ignite. It just melted. Lighting a fire in a lingerie drawer, that's personal. That is very personal.
I agreed. Setting a woman's underwear drawer on fire was super, super eerie and threw up a lot of red flags that meant the crime was possibly personal. But did the underwear drawer fire really indicate something about the killer or was it just a coincidence? For the answer, I enlisted the expertise of, well, an expert. Chris Morgan served on the Raleigh Police Department for 29 years.
I worked drugs. I worked homicide for the last eight years of my career. That's Chris Morgan, and he's worked dozens of homicides in the state of North Carolina, primarily for the Raleigh Police Department. He's been featured on television true crime documentaries across the country, and his resume made him the perfect brain to pick to better understand details in Denise's case, like the burned lingerie drawer.
The basic question is that, is that a chore that you would be, first chore you come to, is just a matter of convenience? Or is it something that, well, he had to do a little bit of maneuvering or about five or six chores because he was looking for one specific one that contained underwear. The question is, more combustible than other clothing that would be found in somebody's dress or chest or drawers.
I mean, if you're looking to set a fire naturally, you want a source of fuel, a source of combustion that's going to rapidly escalate, hopefully burn the piece of furniture and then burn. On the other hand, it could, you know, as far as burning the victim's underwear, it
He made a good point. Was there even a way to know if the underwear drawer was specifically chosen because it was personal to Denise? Morgan's response seemed to speak more to the state of the mind of the killer. Basically, two types of offenders when we talk about offender behavior. There are
organized and disorganized offenders. Organized offenders plan ahead, do things in a well-established and sequence that they bought a foresight and bought into, and up to a point, everything stays just as planned. Hard to catch those kind of people, but the majority of murders
committed by what we call disorganized offenders. They don't think things out in advance. They don't take steps to conceal their identity, to alleviate the possibility of leaving physical evidence that can be connected to them. And a lot of times the setting of a fire at the crime scene is with that. They don't think it out there and necessarily commit the crime.
though legally it makes very little difference because the definition of criminal intent as far as homicide goes can be formed in the twinkling of an eye, as the saying is. There's no difference in what I call the scale of evil between a homicide that's committed even though the original intent wasn't committed by homicide and one that's well planned out, thought out.
If whoever killed Denise is an organized offender, as Morgan said, they would have probably brought their own accelerants to start the fire. And it makes me think they would have had a plan. But the answer to whether accelerants like gasoline or lighter fluid were used is something Glenn Rainey says is highly unlikely. Honestly, I don't think there was an accelerant used in that. I think they lit, and it's whatever is available at the time. Like I said, throwing a match on a pillow and not hanging around to see if it's going to catch fire.
The sofa obviously caught, or the chair, one or the other. I don't recall there being talk of accelerants. I think, as it began, the whole thing's going to be lit off. These were spot fires. In your career, and this may be sort of an obvious question, but in your career, have you ever seen anything like this? Not murder and arson. I've seen people who have been shot before and stabbed and
unfortunately you do it a long time you're going to run into that it's rare but you're going to run into it but nothing nothing like that that was the rage-filled incident in my mind it was a very someone was very angry to do that whoever did that didn't stick around to make sure they were going to burn it was in my mind and my captain at the time was a fire investigator an experienced fire investigator and he would give us a little insight on every call we went to he's
I needed to get my hands on an official report, some sort of paperwork, something that could provide clarity about the fire. If there's one thing I've learned, it's that most important to a criminal investigation, other than solving it, is that there's a paper trail made to outline every step agencies take.
Documents, whether electronic or paper, they have a single source and location, somewhere on a computer or on a shelf. In 2018, I began hunting for the arson investigation report for Denise Johnson's case.
My first stop was emailing the Dare County Fire Marshal. The town of Kill Devil Hills is within the greater government entity of Dare County. A lot of public records, particularly for calls like involving house fires, will require a town's fire department write up a report, but the county fire marshal can also retain records. When I inquired, that department happened to be doing inventory of old files and revealed something very interesting.
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It took a couple weeks. The Dare County Fire Marshal responded to me and said the office didn't have any record of the Denise Johnson house fire in their archives. An arson report did not exist with Dare County. A report does exist with the town of Kill Devil Hills Clerk, but it's off limits as part of the murder case file with the police department. So I needed to find another way to get it. And I know there are larger agencies that typically oversee fire investigations, especially arson of a residential structure.
I went to the North Carolina State Fire Marshal's office, but in 1997, it says it was not the keeper of records for major arson investigations. The State Bureau of Investigation handled all of those records. I submitted a request with the NCSBI for anything and everything it had on Denise's case. Here's a friend to narrate the SBI attorney's response to my inquiry.
NCSBI investigative files are considered records of criminal investigations. Thus, the NCSBI criminal investigative files are not public records and can only be released to the prosecutor. However, the following information from the file is considered public record. On July 13, 1997, Chief Ray Davis of the Kill Devil Hills Police Department reported,
requested the SBI to conduct an investigation into a fire which occurred at approximately 3:30 at 2014 Norfolk Street, Kill Devil Hills, NC. The complaining witness was Chief Ray Davis of the Kill Devil Hills Police Department. The SBI's attorney wrote that the agency also did not have anything in its case file regarding 911 calls, names of suspects, information about the victim, or about the nature of the homicide.
It was asked to help Kill Devil Hills police in investigating a fire. That was it. So all of this meant I wasn't going to be able to see any arson investigation report for myself. It's just not available to the public. If I couldn't see it for myself, I wanted to find the person who did the arson investigation. And according to first responding firefighter Glenn Rainey, that job fell to one man the day of the murder.
a fire captain with the town of Kill Devil Hills and the man in charge of Glenn Rainey and his crew on July 13th. Here's Rainey again.
The town at the time had a certified fire investigator on staff, and he happened to be the captain that was working that night, Captain Horgan. He was an experienced investigator from the Pittsburgh area, had worked as a detective in fire investigations, had worked with the ATF, so he was the right guy to have for fire. Captain Horgan was very much on top of the fire investigation with the detective. I remember like Jim Mulford and some other people being there as it was unfolding.
Glenn Rainey told me Captain Denny Horgan is almost impossible to contact these days. He is a very, very private, he always was a private person. When he calls you, his cell number comes up as unlisted, so I never answer it, so I always have to call him back. I guarantee you he's not on social media in any way, shape, or form. He's a very, very, very private person. He's always been that way. He doesn't put his stuff out there for anybody.
It was definitely a long shot, but I gave Glenn Rainey my number to pass along to Horgan. And while I waited, I brought up Horgan to Donnie Johnson to see if she would have known him. He went with me afterwards, and we did a whole, you know, he was an arson investigator. He did a whole arson investigation with me. You know, we were drawing it all up and marking it and all that. We did a whole deal on it.
a mess, you know, when we went in, there were rubber gloves everywhere. I mean, we just knew. We knew that the scene had been really contaminated and it was going to be really hard. We knew what they did. We went all the way around the house and looked for anything we could see, you know, the perimeter search. And then we went in and pieced together. Fires were started. A lot of them were just started by clothes being pushed together.
papers, whatever could be found, you know, real quick, like, there were no accelerants used. They already assumed because, you know, the lighter thing, that that's what they used. They didn't find any evidence of matches or anything like that.
Donnie Johnson and Denny Horgan not finding evidence after the SBI crime scene tech had been through the house isn't exactly surprising. That tech would have collected everything of evidentiary value. Donnie says her and Denny Horgan's walkthrough was more for her peace of mind and curiosity. But there are many answers she didn't get and many things she remains forever curious about. Where's the murder weapon? And how did the killer overpower Denise in her own home?
So I feel like there was a man there because Denise was real strong. So it had to have be someone strong enough to overpower her. And believe me, growing up, you know, as kids, when we'd argue, you know, her deal was scratching your eyeballs out, you know. If she had any kind of chance, she would have called somebody. That's just how she thought.
Was Denise alone the entire night? Why was she naked?
Law enforcement has never released those answers to the public. Only investigators and the killer know that information. As I work on this podcast, I keep coming back to one critical detail. That's a point of debate between Denise's family and the first responders. Many first responders will tell you Denise was locked inside of her house. I specifically asked Glenn Rainey about this. The front door was locked. The back door was locked. And all of the windows were down and locked.
That's just interesting to me, you know, just because... That is. That's very odd. Yeah.
Donnie Johnson says the house's front door didn't lock. It had a lock, but it didn't work. The door required a few firm pushes to finally get it open.
Somebody could have come in that front door. Denise didn't think of putting a lock on that front door? Yeah.
Whether the front door was unlocked or not, the family, investigators, and police, they do agree on one thing. But I don't think that she invited him into her house.
First responding firefighter Glenn Rainey agrees. Early on in this investigation, everyone was hopeful someone Denise knew in the small town would provide clues, something that could help detectives. Here's Mark Evans.
Next time on CounterClock.
He said, what about the roommate? What do you think of the roommate? I said, well, I thought she was weird. And he said, well, I've got a few people saying something about the roommate. I remember trying to get the door open and this guy was banging on the windows and the doors trying to get somebody if there was anybody in there shouting to come out. I do remember that one gentleman. I got my fellow co-officer that was there that night to go and make sure he did not leave that we need to get a statement from him on what he saw.
Make sure you rate and subscribe to CounterClock on Apple Podcasts. If you're enjoying this series, please be sure to subscribe and follow us on social media. You'll get behind-the-scenes looks at the investigation. We're on Twitter at at CounterClockPod, and on Instagram, look for the handle CounterClockPodcast. CounterClock is an AudioChuck original podcast. Ashley Flowers is the executive producer, and all reporting and hosting is done by me, Delia D'Ambra.
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