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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. ♪♪
Over the years, Denise Johnson's case has been passed down through at least four detectives as people retired and eventually left the Kill Devil Hills Police Department. In 1997, there were just a couple of police officers on the entire force. Eventually, the cold case has landed on the desk of Captain John Towler. Towler is a veteran of the police department and was a patrol officer at the time of Denise's murder in 1997.
I break out the case and sit down with the guy and talk about it and say, you know, at some point, will I solve it or it's going to be handed down to the next person? So there's two guys now that are at least familiar with the outline of the case and would pick up the ball if something happened to me.
Seven years ago, Taller spearheaded a video campaign to stir up new leads and draw attention to the cold case. It is the 1997 unsolved murder of Denise Johnson that cast the longest shadow over the Outer Banks. That's Taller's voice introducing the 25-minute YouTube video that the police department released in 2012. And since then, that video has had more than 100,000 views. The hope is that people who have information about this case will come forward and answer the lingering questions surrounding this tragedy.
Now, I've watched the entire video several times through, start to finish. My reason is it has something that this podcast will never get firsthand, an interview with the first homicide detective on Denise's case, a man named Jim Mulford. Mulford was the lead investigator on the Johnson case from day one. He knew it probably the best of anyone, but unfortunately he died not long after the YouTube video came out in 2012. But I'm going to play a little bit of his interview for you.
There's some music playing underneath the clips, but for the most part, it's crystal clear what Mulford has to say. I'm Jim Mulford. I moved to the Outer Banks in 1974. And in July of '86, I started with the Kill Devil Hills Police Department, and I stayed with them for 20 years.
What Jim Mulford knows about the crime scene and everything that happened in the investigation after Mark Evans and Glenn Rainey discovered Denise murdered is critical to solving the case now. I was called at home sometime before 5 a.m. on July 13th. And the call I got, or the call I remember getting, was of a structure fire on Norfolk Street. So I get up and put shorts and a t-shirt on and go to a structure fire and find out that it's also a homicide.
Just like everyone else who responded to Denise's house the morning of the crime, Mulford wasn't anticipating what he'd find. Denise's case was different, being that it was a murder plus an arson combined. One appeared to, the arson apparently was trying to cover up the murder. My initial impression of the scene was that this was not going to be very difficult.
Denise Johnson was well known. She was working in a local restaurant. It was going to be simply find out who she was with that night or the night before. And it would be, I honestly felt like it would be done and wrapped up that day. I didn't think this would be a crime that would go on for so long unsolved.
As Mulford keeps answering questions in this taped interview, I can kind of sense the frustration he has about how little progress the investigation made in the first few days. After about three days, I realized we're not just me, but we all weren't making any headway. We didn't have any solid suspects. The police department treated this case as their number one priority. I was assigned solely to the case for as long as possible.
I needed and had all the resources of the department and the town and for whatever I needed or the manpower I needed or equipment that I needed. And we just stayed on it until everything, all our leads just ended. We had nothing to hold on to. Even in 2012, when this taped interview took place, Mulford still seemed really bothered that no leads ever went anywhere.
To help make me more familiar with Jim Mulford, I contacted his widow, Barbara. I wanted to better understand Mulford's approach to the homicide investigation. It consumed a great deal of his time and his thoughts. I believe that he followed every lead possible. How did those years ever wear on him, or did he ever feel any regret for anything? I can say definitely, yes, he felt regret about it.
not being able to close that case. It was something that haunted him that he could not get an answer to a lot of these questions. And just like her husband, Barbara remembers vividly the morning of Denise's murder. I do recall we got the call very early in the morning. He was the detective on call. You know, the phone rings. I can't remember exactly what. I'm thinking it was around 5 a.m.,
I didn't think too much about it at the time because this was more normal when they were on call. You get calls at all times of the night. It wasn't until later on in the day, I believe I called him to ask about, you know, what we were going to do for dinner. And he let me know that he'd probably not be home until late that night.
Jim didn't return home until the next day, and he was only there a short time before heading back out to work the case. Pretty much nothing shocked him. He'd been in law enforcement since the early 70s, so there wasn't too much that completely shocked him. It took me a long time in my relationship with Jim to get used to not being scared every time he left the
As Barbara and I talked and I learned more about the effort that her husband had put into trying to solve the case, from everything I was hearing from her, it seemed that it exhausted him right up until his death just a few years ago. I can say definitely, yes, he felt regret not being able to close that case. When we would be at social gatherings or other places where we would see other police officers sometimes,
You know, that case, the Johnson murder, you know, they would have conversations. Every once in a while, it seemed like they had a lead or they knew who did it. Get that information and try and follow it. It never led anywhere. That was the only murder that he had that was unsolved. I guess on the one side, it was solved now and he hadn't been around to help.
I know it would be a help to the family and in many ways a help to the whole community to know there isn't somebody out that committed this crime. Anybody think about someone that, you know, he would go and... So, litigation went as well and as complete as it could possibly be. Whoever did this went in the house and used the evidence. The bigs have prevented because of all the evidence that was destroyed in the fire.
The fire. It's a part of this homicide that we'll keep coming back to because even though it destroyed a lot of the scene, it can tell us so much.
This murder, combined with the fire, made the case too big for just one department. And Jim Mulford knew that. Kill Devil Hill's police department was and still is a small operation. Within hours of the murder, Jim Mulford called in help from a state law enforcement agency to help handle all of the complexities and chaos surrounding this case.
For 22 years, the investigation has remained in the hands of Kill Devil Hills police, but detectives from the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation, also known as the SBI, assisted the department. The lead agent from the SBI on the Johnson homicide back in 1997 is a man named Donnie Varnell.
Well, I was the lead agent. And I guess in a way, I would have been considered the lead investigator. I had worked with Jim, you know, the chief, everybody before. We were not only investigators, we were friends.
Varnell has recently worked as a full-time detective for the Dare County Sheriff's Office, the largest law enforcement agency in the Outer Banks of North Carolina. He retired from the SBI years after Denise's murder, but to this day, he still assists with the cold case he says when he can. Yeah.
I'm not used to that. I'm the guy that is able to always find the answer. And so that's one of the reasons this case has been. I mean, with me, this case never leaves. I always talk about it. If I run into the right detective, you know, we always brought this case up because it just always was very difficult to think that we couldn't find who was responsible. With a case of this size, I mean, we interviewed so many people. We ran down so many leads.
Part of the process is when you're able to, you put people together and you go through the entire thing again. You know, you try to read every interview again and especially bring it outside, eyes on to it. From day one and now looking at it now, what were some of the things to this day maybe that still stick out to you as to how or what?
I don't know, it went cold. I mean, you go where the evidence and the investigative actions are taking you. You know, you never try to go, okay, this person is the suspect and we can't look anywhere else. But if someone calls and says, Julia said she killed someone, well, you know, you got to go run that down. We hit the road running and we had...
I mean, there was literally, I'm sure, over a dozen people involved. There were multiple FBI agents involved. And so in every investigation, especially on this investigation, there is this flooding of attention to start with where you're trying to run down everything. And, of course, the longer it goes, the fewer people that are working the case. I mean, that is, you know, resources are finite.
It's extraordinarily frustrating as an investigator. I mean, especially an investigator that really, you know, that really thinks they do everything correctly. You know, you're trying as hard as you can, and sometimes you just felt like it's right here somewhere, you know.
When the crime happened, Varnell, like many major crimes detectives, was balancing a busy caseload and other active cases. So over time, Varnell and the SBI had to slide Denise's case further back on their desks. They were not the lead agency investigating it. They were just assisting Kill Devil Hills.
There comes a point that you've interviewed 100 people, you've run down every lead you can possibly find, and then you get another case and another case. And then you've got 20 years of that. And we never forget these cases. That's the problem. That's the part. We never forget these cases. But of course, you're always getting new cases and new cases. And once you get removed out of it, it gets into a process. Where does it fall in the process of your investigations? If I ride by that area, I
I assure you, it's the first thing on my mind. I mean, I always remember a certain gas station that I drive by. I always remember a certain road I ride down. I mean, I know that brings back that case because that's just a trigger for me. You know, the family, this is a tragedy that never leaves their mind. You know, that they think of it always because it is their tragedy. This is the worst thing in their life, and they're not supposed to forget.
Varnell, like Jim Mulford and Captain John Taller, believes that among the hundreds of hours of interviews and pieces of evidence, there's still a leaf left unturned or a person who knows something they're not saying. You're going anywhere that the information takes you. So the amount of work that was done, even for a murder case, was massive. Maybe we spoke to the person that was responsible and we couldn't put all the pieces together to prove it.
On July 13th, Jim Mulford and Agent Barnell ordered a full forensic sweep of the crime scene. They realized really quickly that, thanks to the fires, they had a big mess on their hands. The act of putting out a fire, in and of itself, of course, the
♪♪
All of the men tell me a renowned crime scene tech from the SBI processed the house. John Taller says the man leading that operation was specifically chosen because he was the best. There was an agent named Dennis Honeycutt who was their crime scene guru. And you talk about the best of the best, this guy, the sort of miss and miss, he could lift a fingerprint out of thin air. You know, he was that good.
Dennis Honeycutt, a man with a mind that could pick apart a crime scene. I knew I had to find him.
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I looked up crime scene tech Dennis Honeycutt and found out he retired from the North Carolina SBI years ago. He's now a current investigator for the Colorado State Bureau of Investigation. I called and emailed back and forth with his secretary for months. Eventually, Honeycutt declined to be interviewed for this podcast and this case. ♪
On the day of the crime, while detectives handled the crime scene and evidence, Denise's body went to the state medical examiner's office more than two hours away in Greenville, North Carolina, for a forensic autopsy. I made a call again to the first responding Kill Devil Hills police officer, Mark Evans. Coincidentally, in 1997, Evans says he was the representative for Kill Devil Hills police inside the room with the medical examiner on the day of Denise's autopsy.
I was in that room with the pathologist, and I helped him conduct the complete autopsy on Ms. Johnson. That's something I'm going to take with me as I retire and move into another career, having somebody held accountable for doing such a horrific crime. He was revealing a lot of stuff that led me to believe that this was a violent attack inside of that house. And, you know, she lived for several minutes inside of the house before the smoke and the heat took her life.
Because Denise's case is still technically active, the four-page document that I received in the mail is all that's available to anyone who's not law enforcement. And much of it is actually handwritten. It stated there were cut and stab wounds around Denise's head and neck.
Her official manner of death was homicide, with contributing factors of carbon monoxide poisoning. This was good information, but it was a note at the bottom section of the first page where it defined Denise's manner of death that really got my attention. It was marked as reviewed.
Handwriting on the page indicated that someone in the medical examiner's office reviewed the document on September 5th, 1997, weeks after the crime. And they made a scribbled note that they determined Denise had high levels of carbon monoxide in her lungs.
Carbon monoxide is a hazardous gas that results from incomplete burning of material containing carbon. Things like gas, kerosene, oil, propane or wood. In Denise's case, the fires inside her house burned, but not entirely. The finding in the autopsy report made me wonder.
Did Denise live long enough to inhale smoke after her initial stab wound? I gave first responding firefighter Glenn Rainey a call because I wanted to see what he thought about whether Denise could have still been alive when the fires were set.
Well, that indicates to me that she was still breathing at the time the fire was lit. But I question that. And I've heard the same thing from the detective and, you know, from the autopsy report to third hand. But with the incision in her throat, there was not much breathing going on after that. That was done. Just not possible unless the fire was lit and then the final act occurred.
This was a huge bombshell. Knowing that Denise could have been alive and inhaling smoke then been stabbed, it feels like it means something, but I don't know what yet. Other interesting notes on page two of the autopsy file were that Denise had jewelry on. A ring was found on her hand, meaning whoever killed her likely wasn't interested in robbing her. There was one finding I searched for in the report that was inexplicably absent.
The summary didn't include any information about whether or not Denise was sexually assaulted. Mark Evans doesn't know why that's unavailable. He told me that he saw no sign of an assault during the autopsy, and that had been noted in the full report.
I wanted a closer look at that for myself, so I also requested Denise's toxicology report from 1997. And Mark Evans was right. No alcohol or drugs were in Denise's system.
And armed with my own copy of the autopsy, I flew to North Carolina to talk with Mark Moore about it in person and work on the case from the ground in Kill Devil Hills. I arrived early in the morning to the police headquarters in Kill Devil Hills. Hey, how are you? Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you.
Mark was in the process of filing his last reports and cleaning up his office. His retirement was just around the corner. When we finally got to talking, he reflected on Denise's case and the weight it's been on him all these years. It's something that's still near and dear to me to have it solved. I mean, it's, you know, somebody has got to know something. Somebody should know something here in this area. We owe it to Denise and we owe it to her family. We owe it to a sister and
We won't stop until we get it solved. Time will continue to move. Different officers will come and go in this agency, but we won't stop until it's solved. While we talked, I pulled out my copy of the autopsy summary, and we got right into it.
Was there ever anything found under her nails that you remember from the autopsy? I do recall that from the autopsy. I went the next day and Dr. Hudson had mentioned because I helped hold her fingers as he was clipping her nails and putting her nails and such inside of the bag to check for anything. And I remember him stating how long her nails were.
I don't recall there was anything, any evidence that was at that moment, but I remember holding her fingers and as the doctor cut off her fingernails and put them inside of a small bag, he was answering questions as to why he was taking clippings from the fingers and to find potential, you know, DNA off of her. If Denise's fingernails were taken, that presented a good question. Where are they and what was underneath them?
If nothing was found in 1997, could that change in 2019? These were questions Donnie Johnson, Denise's sister, has been asking for years. I've learned three languages in my life: English, Spanish, and French. And I can tell you the most difficult part for me at times was when I was doing the classroom work. And even though I was having conversations with people in those languages, it wasn't the same as being immersed in that language.
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That's T-R-Y-F-I-R-S-T-L-E-A-F dot com slash counterclock. Tryfirstleaf.com slash counterclock. Donnie Johnson, Denise's sister, has had questions for more than two decades about what was retrieved from beneath Denise's fingernails.
I think all of this stuff needs to be re-tested. You know, they say they took a swab and a hair sample from everybody they interviewed. Well, they need to re-test all that. When I sat inside Kildivel Hills Police Department talking with Mark Evans, I couldn't help but wonder, was evidence for the case nearby and who kept track of it after 22 years? At one point, police released that detectives had collected 59 pieces of evidence from the crime scene.
I called Kill Devil Hills Police Captain John Taller to clarify. He's currently in charge of the cold case. As far as details of the case beyond what's already released, there's nothing really that is going to be new that I can talk about or any details that I can release that are case-specific facts. And again, that's to protect the integrity of the case and not stonewall anybody or just be, no, no, no, we know something that you don't know.
Has it ever been the police department's desire every five or ten years to come back and look at key pieces of evidence and try and retest? Or what would need to be the process for that to happen? Because it's still an active... We do review it. We do review what we have and look at things to see if they would be something that could be tested.
My curiosity about the forensic evidence sent me back to North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation Special Agent Donnie Varnell. I wanted to know how critical he believed retesting evidence could be in the Johnson murder.
There may be some advancement in evidence procedures that you might be able to take advantage of in these type of cases. If you're talking about a case that's over 20 years old, their ability to test evidence may have changed also. It is a matter of deciding what can be tested and getting that information or that evidence back into the system and that kind of stuff.
So, has anything ever been put back in the system as Varnell said? And more importantly, would it even matter? That's the question I asked John Towler to answer. The knowledge of how DNA degrades and is stored over time was completely different back then than it is now.
So they've gotten more sensitive, they're able to find DNA on smaller samples and it doesn't have to necessarily be fluid. I mean, they can pull DNA off of a fingerprint sometimes.
If you're like me, used to watching TV shows where DNA and science and people with test tubes wearing rubber gloves always seem to catch the killer, the answer to Denise's case seems pretty simple. Find the foreign DNA at her crime scene or under her nails and follow that. But there's one small problem.
You can have your DNA, but the question is, what are you comparing it to? And if you don't have anything to compare it to, then having their DNA doesn't serve any probative value. And I'm not saying that we don't have things to compare it to, but we would have to be able to successfully DNA extract from those items. See what I'm saying? Take everybody's DNA in the world, doesn't get you closer unless you have a match for their DNA at the scene.
At this point in our conversation, the question for Denise's case became obvious. Was there ever a DNA profile obtained from Denise's scene amongst everything that was there? No.
I think that's a big question in people's mind is, well, was there a single person of certain genetic code that was located there? So I'm going to leave that one unanswered because if I answer yes, then it goes one way. And if I answer no, then whoever killed her knows that we don't have their DNA and that takes off any pressure that they may have. So no comment on that one.
No comment. Those words said a lot of things. Either no one left DNA behind or the killer isn't in a criminal database and has never been arrested in 22 years. Or there's no longer enough DNA to test. DNA or not, Tyler is still convinced of one thing that will without a doubt identify a killer.
In a case like this where we do not have a suspect or someone who's been charged or anything like that, what's going to be critical to identifying them is they will have knowledge of the crime scene that nobody else will have.
So telling me too much, Taller says, could hurt more than help. It's a standard response from police, and to be honest, it makes sense. We all want to see Denise's killer caught, and I don't want to give out too much information that could let that person get away with it forever. But just because no one has been arrested doesn't mean investigators didn't question certain people more than others. 911, what's your emergency?
Before Glenn Rainey or Mark Evans ever saw Denise's house on that morning, there was someone else there, a man who reported he saw flames and smoke coming out of Denise's home. Mark Evans remembers him very well. For him to make that phone call like he did indicates to me he was either on that street or close by or several houses down for him to go by. He called and be there by the time I arrived.
The final page of Denise's autopsy summary mentions him too. Passerby saw smoke from residence. On arrival, fire department. Victim found nude lying on side, head in bathroom. Pulled outside on her back by fire department. Fire reportedly had been set in three locations in the house. I asked Denise's sister Donnie about this person. He was accidentally going to work, picking up somebody for work or something.
And he just happened to be driving by. Did he have any acquaintance with Denise ever that you know of? Next time on CounterClock. When they showed us these pieces of evidence, we were like, wait a minute, where did they come from? Because they were Denise's. And only she would have this. There was no reason for him to have that.
especially one of them anyway. If you're enjoying this series, follow us on social media to get the behind-the-scenes look 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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