Deep Dive
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I've based my investigation into Denise Johnson's cold case from where I currently work, Florida. The scenery surrounding me isn't very different from how the Outer Banks looks and feels in the summertime. While working on this series, I could never have imagined that part of this mystery would connect to where I now call home, years after moving away from North Carolina. But it has, and in this episode, you'll see just exactly what I mean.
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, leaving among us undetected. This is CounterClock, the investigation into the unsolved murder of Denise Johnson. I'm your host, Delia Diemra.
I would love to chat with you. I've been at a funeral all day in Wanchese. And yes, I'm very much on board with anything. Call me back or call me tonight. I'm here all night. All right. Bye. Bye.
That voicemail popped up on my phone almost six months into investigating this case. The message was from a woman named Lori Sellers. She was someone a newspaper article from 1997 had quoted as being Denise's good friend. I messaged her on Facebook months earlier. I'm devastated that this hasn't been solved. I mean, she was a very good friend of mine for a long time.
I was glad Lori wanted to talk because I'd been waiting to speak with someone who knew Denise well but wasn't a family member. Lori was someone Denise hung out with in the late 1990s, someone who knew her life and habits. Coincidentally, the same way I found Lori is how she discovered who I was and what I'd been doing in the case. I saw it in the paper and I read it and I was like just tone-tied. I'm so glad that somebody's bringing this back out.
She'd found my many Facebook messages buried in her inbox and called me. I've been at a funeral today in Wanchese at the Holy Roller Church. And you know how that goes. You can't get out of there. And I finally got home and I was exhausted by it. So I was like, what is this? I'm so excited that you're doing this because this is crazy. I was just telling my boyfriend and brought me to tears. I said it.
Lori told me that her and Denise's friendship went way back. She worked for my family's restaurant.
I don't know, it was 30 years ago, I guess. And we just really were good friends. And she was actually at my house like two weeks prior to the incident.
Lori says she had actually been around Denise in the days leading up to the murder, and something was off with her friend. Do you remember at any point her expressing to you that she was afraid of someone or anything like that? That was the thing that she wouldn't come out and say it directly, but that was the vibe I was kind of getting. That something was going on, and I don't know if it was illegal activity or something. No.
I never flat out said it, but it was definitely weird. And I was like, well, stay away from whoever. And she never said a name. She never said if it was a male or a female. It was just very disturbing. Lori says she grew more and more concerned for Denise each time she bumped into her. It was strange. I mean, because the two weeks before that,
She was at my house. She was saying she was going out of town to Virginia. And I'm saying this because I said it already to Jim Mulford. Now I'm like kind of trying to piece it together again because it's been so long. Yeah. There was things that she was saying that was kind of disturbing to me. Like it was sketchy.
Lori was one of the many people Kill Devil Hill's police interviewed after the murder, but not right away. I mean, it took probably six months before Jim Walford even came to my driveway that I sat in his car and asked me anything. I'm like, you know what is disturbing to me? You're interviewing total idiots that have known Denise for a half a minute, and I've known her forever.
Despite feeling it was a little too late, Lori told Kill Devil Hills Police Detective Jim Mulford about Denise's disturbing comments.
just seeing a guy from there but I know she was going out of town to Richmond substantially I mean when we did talk because we kind of just talked randomly I mean because you know we both went our separate ways and had different jobs and whatever I feel like there's some kind of connection there and I don't know how to tell you what the connection is because she never specifically said
Lori is sure of one thing: Denise had alluded to troubles with someone or something in Virginia. I thought that was interesting because that's something Denise's sister, Derissa Johnson, mentioned when I talked with her. The Thanksgiving before it all happened, Denise was really distraught. She was so upset about somebody in Richmond, Virginia, okay?
"Darisa Johnson and Lori Sellers don't know one another well. They don't talk on a daily basis, and they didn't talk with one another before they spoke with me. They each had conversations with Denise while she was alive, and those individual conversations occurred months apart and under completely different circumstances.
At a family Thanksgiving dinner in November 1996, Derisa remembers Denise complaining about Virginia problems. Two weeks before Denise was killed in late June, early July 1997, Lori says Denise spoke about that same issue or person.
It's an interesting overlap and what investigators usually call corroborating stories. These women didn't collude to verify one another, but independently they do, which means there might be something or someone worth looking at in Virginia. I kept wondering, what was in Denise's past that could help shed more light on these Virginia problems? Was it really a problem in Virginia or could it have been related to people there?
I didn't have much to go on other than the name of a state, so I knew that to get to the Virginia problems, I had to look deeper into Denise's past. I started researching all of the places Denise had lived, which it turns out was just more than North Carolina. I knew a lot about Kill Devil Hills and even more about Florida, which proved helpful because that's somewhere Denise called home for several years. Here's Donnie Johnson.
She lived in Florida for about 10 years, I guess. She lived with a guy for about eight of those years. And they were going to get married and blah, blah, blah. But anyway, they broke up. So she just kind of stayed there.
Florida was a great place for me to investigate. I'm right here, right now. Surprisingly, it's somewhere Kill Devil Hill's police has not spent a lot of time looking into as it relates to Denise, according to Kill Devil Hill's police captain, John Towler. Well, her Florida days, I don't know. I couldn't answer the question. I mean, we knew where she lived, the associates down there. I remember reading some information about that in the reports, but beyond that, I can't comment on how extensive that was.
If Denise lived in Florida for a decade like her sister Donnie says, it seemed important to learn all I could about her time there. Lori Sellers believes Denise's time spent in Florida is important to why she eventually came home to North Carolina.
While she lived in the Sunshine State, Denise wrote a lot of letters and sent them back home to Donnie. Donnie has kept all of those, and the addresses Denise lived at are on them. Get my eyeballs.
One was 3204 Northeast 16th Street, apartment 4, Pompano. There was one at 700 Riverside in Pompano, Florida. 2311 East Rainier Road in Port St. Lucie.
One of the addresses is a house Denise lived with a boyfriend named Joe for about eight years. The family tells me Joe was questioned after the murder, but was ruled out as a suspect, largely in part because he was in Florida at the time of the murder. The other two addresses were places Denise rented by herself after their breakup. At this point, it's the early 1990s, and Donnie says Denise got a new waitressing job. Things were really looking up, but just as she was getting a fresh start, something major happened.
She made her way to somebody's house and they called Mama.
And then Mama and my sister got her into some, or my brother-in-law, but he's not my brother-in-law anymore. But they got her into like a halfway house until they could get there because she was just scared to death, you know. She got away and just got to some stranger's house and they got her into a shelter and then my mom went there and picked her up. And how old was she, you think, at this time? Well, that was about two years before she moved back home, so I guess late 20s.
Did she file a police report? Oh, yeah. I'm sure there was a police report filed and all of that. That would have been in... 90...
This was a bombshell. Denise saying she'd been a victim of a brutal sexual assault and kidnapping was a huge piece of information I had never heard before. Donnie Johnson says it was something only close members of Denise's family knew at the time because Denise was mortified to tell anyone about it. I started searching for a police report that Donnie says Denise filed afterwards. Local police services, this is Ellen. Can I help you?
I'm looking for a potential archived police incident report from the early to mid-1990s. Do you guys records go back that far? Yeah. They do? Mm-hmm. Okay. It's a little tricky because the person that would have filed the report is now deceased, but they were likely listed as the complainant or the victim.
I made calls for several weeks to police departments in the Florida towns and counties where Denise had lived. Okay, her last name is going to be Johnson, J-O-H-N-S-O-N. Denise, D-E-N-I-S-E. February 18th, 1963.
Yeah, I don't have her name on our system right now. You're talking to the City of Boca Raton Police Department. Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office also has jurisdiction in Boca Raton. So perhaps they were the agency that had contact with her.
My search became very broad because of one complicated reason, a little word known as jurisdiction. Denise lived at the addresses Donnie Johnson gave me from the letters Denise mailed, but that doesn't mean the crime Denise was a victim of happened in those places.
The alleged rape and kidnapping could have happened in a neighboring city or county to where she lived. All Denise could tell her family was that it had happened in a field. Denise could have filed a police report in the location or jurisdiction where she escaped the attack, not necessarily the city or town where she lived. So my search had to include police departments in jurisdictions all around where Denise lived and worked. Okay, if I'm looking for something in early 1990, what are my chances?
There might be a chance. The person who filed the police report, I have their full name and I have their date of birth. Some smaller police departments across eastern and central Florida didn't even exist in the early 1990s. County sheriff's offices instead would likely have records dating back that far. Good morning, Rebecca. Linda speaking. How can I help you?
I was curious as to how far back the records go with you guys. Now, when you say it was a kidnapping or sexual assault, was Denise the victim? Yes, Denise would have been the victim, and she would have been in her early 20s, so she wasn't a minor at the time of it either. Right, so when we're putting her name in, nothing's coming up. We don't have anything under her name at all. What's the person's last name? I don't have anything on her.
I was getting a lot of no's, or sorry we no longer keep records that old. But just as I was giving up hope, the city of Pompano Beach, Florida, found something. I think I found it. The name of the person is on the request, but there's nothing in relation to what the request is all about. And then you see here, your email address, because I found the request here.
The city clerk unearthed a police report from 1992, and it was filed by Denise Johnson, who is a white female and has the same date of birth.
The report wasn't for rape. It was for a civil matter, a request to evict someone from her home. The address on the report was for an apartment in Pompano Beach, but not one that Donnie Johnson had provided me. I told Donnie about it.
Right. And so it's December of 1992, which would have been pretty close to her coming back to North Carolina, right? Because she got back there when your mom died in, what, 93? I went over the report line by line with Donnie.
Denise called the cops to, I guess, get this guy out of this place that she was living in. And the officer's narrative says a man named Eric...
White male, born in 1969. The officer arrived and responded to that address in reference to a civil disturbance. When he arrived, he made contact with the complainant, Denise Johnson, who advised that she was in the process of evicting a tenant, Eric Johnson. It's handwritten, so it's kind of hard to tell, but Johnson explained further that she called the police so that an officer could speak with her
Wow.
Now, I know what you're thinking, but the Eric in this police report does not have the same last name as the Eric who was living next to Denise in Kill Devil Hills at the time of her murder in 1997.
The Eric in the Florida police report we will refer to as Eric M. I researched Eric M. in several public and criminal records databases in Florida. He had a history. A few people had taken him to small claims court in Palm Beach County to get money back he owed them. He also had been involved in an eviction case. In 1990, Eric M. and a woman were evicted from a building after a tenant had complained and called the cops on them.
Out of curiosity, I looked up the couple in North Carolina, checking for criminal histories, anything that could connect them to Kill Devil Hills. The Dare County Clerk of Courts, the Dare County Jail, and Kill Devil Hills Police do not have records for Eric M. or the woman he was evicted with. I widened my search to include the state of Virginia, but then hit a roadblock. For
Virginia is not an open record state. No police departments or sheriff's offices would fulfill my public records request because I'm not an attorney and I'm not a cop. Many of you listening may ask, why do some states not allow people to see records? The answer is that every state is different and laws vary widely on what is and isn't public record.
There could be a tie to Eric M. and Virginia, but with the way the law is written, I won't be able to ever know or access them. I also never found any court paperwork in Florida for the 1992 eviction of Eric M. by Denise Johnson. It's likely the case was dropped. The only proof I had that it happened was the Pompano Beach Police Department's report on microfilm.
It may not have been about Denise's alleged rape and kidnapping, but it was a paper trail, one that she could have made on her own volition. And as it turns out, it wouldn't be the only police report she'd file.
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In September of 1996, almost a year before her murder, Denise filed a police report with the town of Kill Devil Hills. She complained she was receiving dozens of harassing phone calls. She told her sister Donnie about them. This guy kept calling her from Florida and threatening her.
Local newspaper reporter Daryl Law, who covered the murder in 1997, heard the same thing from his community sources. I had someone tell me that Denise was a scarified other person in Florida. And I know for certain that two policemen went to Florida and talked to somebody down there.
Former Kill Devil Hills Police Detective Bill Walker, who worked Denise's case, also acknowledged, albeit briefly, that Denise had reported being harassed by phone. I recall a harassing phone calls complaint, and I did not recall it until you mentioned it. But I do recall that, but I do not recall Florida.
I requested from Captain John Taller a copy of the police report Denise filed regarding the calls, and he provided me one. Denise filed it on September 3rd, 1996. An officer came to her home on Norfolk Street, and she told him that a person had been calling her residence several times a day since March 3rd of 1996. That's a span of seven months. The Kill Devil Hills police officer who took the report was a newcomer on the force, Officer Mark Evans.
Yeah, the same Mark Evans, who in a matter of months would be responding to Denise's house fire and would discover her murdered. I called Mark to see if he remembered filing that harassment report for Denise. Do you ever remember taking a police report from Denise prior to her death?
No, that's why I was like, you had me curious when you called yesterday of what interactions. Way back there, that was what, so many years ago? I'm sure I did, but I was thinking, if you have that incident number, I'm going to try to get them to make me a copy of it today so I can read it and see if it even jogs my memory. Going off the cuff with it, one would think, I would think that only 10 months into it, I would go, wait a minute, I took a report from this person.
this address, you know, 10 months prior. But of course, you know, I've
A lot of things could have gone on. Did she come to the police department and make a report? Did I go to her house? I want to get it and find out what's going on with that because that is very interesting. When I listen to your podcast, on the initial phase of that, we may have talked to the killer and then couldn't put all the pieces at the time together, but it's always good to go back and try to fire back up. So I definitely want to see what was going on with the harass and phone calls.
A few days later, Evans called me back after reading over the report he took from Denise. I saw that name and I was like, "Wow, can you imagine that?" Well, I looked over this report last week because you had sent me the numbers. How did you come about finding this? Because I was trying to rack my brain and I don't remember even talking to her, which back then, it was like a year after. But still, I would have thought that would have been fresh in my mind.
But apparently it was a routine call. I was looking over the narrative that I wrote and nothing really stood out. I told her to try to hang on and keep a log when he's calling or whatever. So if she wanted to go talk to a magistrate later for harassment or whatever down the road, she was more than welcome to do that. Was this report related to her killing? It's hard to know. But experienced homicide detective Chris Morgan says you can't ignore it. That's very significant. You see what I'm saying now?
You got to know what's going on in this victim's world. What kind of stresses are they under? Where do those stresses come from? Who did they tell about? I mean, if she's getting threatening or, but you don't know what the nature was that somebody that said, was it some kind of, was it sexual harassment? Was it threat? Do you know anything at all about that?
I couldn't answer that question. The copy of the police report Kill Devil Hill's police department released to me was redacted. Huge chunks of information about who made the calls and all of the details in Mark Evans' narrative of what Denise told him were blacked out from view. I asked Captain John Taller why. The same names that appear in that report were also people who were questioned as part of the murder investigation.
Not saying that they had anything to do with the murder, but they were part of Denise's past, and her past was exhaustively explored as part of the investigation. Her associations, people's relationship with her, you know, any disputes she had, any beefs she had, all of it was carefully considered.
So there it was. The reason the information on Denise's harassing phone call report wasn't viewable is because whoever's name was underneath all of that black marker was someone homicide detectives questioned after the murder, which means the calls automatically become part of the open-ended murder investigation. That frustrates Donnie Johnson.
I understand about certain things that could lose the case. I understand that. Sure. But what about, you know, little tidbits that could help the case? You know, I respect the police, but it's been a real... Not be angry at the way they've handled everything, you know?
Even Mark Evans, a now-retired captain of the police department, wants to know more about how the harassing phone calls connect to the murder case. Unless Denise was murdered at random by a complete stranger, which few people believe is the case, something in her life should reveal a possible motive or reason for her brutal murder. Here's Chris Morgan again. Do what, when, where, why, and how. In most cases...
The biggest question to answer to get you to the one you really have to answer, which is who, is why. Why is this person dead? And if you figure out the why, most of the time, at some point, you're directly a who.
or the guys down there, did they ever ask which of her four or five sisters, which one was she closest to? Who was her best friend in the world? Who would know anything, you know, who would she depend on to give her advice about any problems she was having, whether it was at work or whether it was with a male companion?
companion, a suitor, somebody she was dating just casually or whatever, who would she go to if she had a problem?
Harassing someone by phone, you have to know their telephone number. There was a personal connection here. I circled back to Mark Evans again to squeeze as much information as I could from him about the report he took from Denise. If I couldn't read beneath the redacted copy for myself, I'd have to trust Evans' memory, and thankfully his memory was refreshed because he'd read an unredacted copy right before a phone call.
She saw this guy on the mail a couple of times, like a couple of dates was it. And then he just kept on just kind of wanting to stay in contact and kept calling and calling and calling. And I think he left a couple of notes on her vehicle. So that's when she was like over it, I guess, because it was like six months span. And then that's when she called to make the report that day. And I went over there and took the report from her.
So Mark had just said someone left notes on Denise's car. In order to leave a note on a car, you have to go there in person. You have to know Denise's address. I didn't really take a lot of notes on it other than that...
She had mentioned in the report that she had only dated him a couple of dates. I mean, just randomly, and that was back in the previous March of 96. She'd only been on a couple of dates with this guy, and shortly thereafter they had broken up. And that's when he just kept on wanting to go out or whatever and was harassing her and just kept calling and calling and calling and calling. She just wouldn't return his call. And he left a couple of notes on the car, you know, pretty much give me a call, whatever, and she just brushed it off.
Evans recalls that the person leaving notes on Denise's car was also harassing her over the phone. When I brought up the possibility that there could be two people, one leaving notes and calling, and possibly another person calling from out of the area, Evans admitted it needed to be re-evaluated for clarity.
That's interesting. I brought it up to the chief when you called me about it. One of the lead detectives that's kind of carrying on the case to kind of bring this to his attention to kind of, hey, when you get a day or two, how about going through your case file and pull up your case management to see if the detectives had done their homework and kind of trace this down.
Donnie Johnson and Denise's family members are adamant. Denise said she was being harassed over the phone by someone from out of town, out of the state even. She told me the guy from Florida had been harassing her on phone calls. And I told her, you need to file a report. File a report every time he calls. And don't answer the call, you know, and have your voice message on. Because he was threatening, really, really threatening her.
To leave a note at a person's car, you got to be there physically. And so, you know, did this person come and go or was it two different people?
harassing things that were taken in the same report. Like, where the phone calls one person and the physical notes another person. I don't know. Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
To add to that was Derissa Johnson, Denise's other sister. She remembers Denise telling her a man was physically coming around the house on Norfolk Street. Denise told me that he would like be on his roof, her roof. Yeah. Or somebody was on her roof two weeks before it happened or three weeks. She told me that people were after her, leaving messages, messages.
I've spent over a year researching this case, and at this point, I'm convinced Denise Johnson was not only being harassed by someone from outside of Kill Devil Hills, but also possibly a lovesick former date in the Outer Banks who couldn't stay away. By the age of 33, Denise had dated quite a few men. Whether as steady boyfriends or just flings, the men in and out of Denise's life added up.
Lori Sellers, Denise's friend, knew her for two decades and says Denise's dating habits weren't atypical for a single woman in her 30s with no children. She wasn't really a different guy every day person. She would usually date them. I mean, they'd be together for a substantial amount of time. She's never been like a fly-by-night, one-night stand that I ever saw.
If Denise was being harassed by a former lover or a scorned date, maybe, just maybe, there would be proof. Donnie says she went looking for that when the family was let back inside the house after police released the crime scene. She went straight to Denise's answering machine to find a trace of who had been calling. ...and checked the, you know, back then they had tape cassette recordings, you know. That's what our recorders had in them, remember? ...
Anyway, all the tapes were still in the recorder. The cops didn't even take them. I mean, I took them to them, but they said they were too damaged to get anything off them.
Police detectives didn't retrieve Denise's answering machine tapes, most likely because at the time of processing the crime scene, they hadn't made the connection that just a few months earlier, Denise had filed the harassing phone call report with the department. After all, 22 years later and the officer who took the report and was first to respond to the crime scene still didn't remember he'd spoken with Denise before she was killed.
Not collecting the answering machine tapes as evidence seemed like a huge oversight on police's end. But that's when I remembered what former Kill Devil Hills detective Bill Walker had told me. What is evidence? Nobody knows until it is. When you go into a crime scene and start analyzing what you see, you don't know what is evidence until you prove it's evidence.
In addition to leaving the answering machine tapes at the crime scene, there was another glaring piece of potential evidence Donnie Johnson says police overlooked. 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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When I went to the house, there were, I mean, I couldn't even believe all the, just like they just dropped all the rubber gloves all over the house. Like I said, there were still the tapes in the answering machine. There was that knife sitting on the sink. You know, Denise wasn't the best housekeeper in the world. But this knife, it just shocked me because out of all the smoke and soot and everything, here's this big,
Big old butcher knife sitting there gleaming clean on the sink. The only thing laying on the sink in the drain board was the big old butcher knife.
Killdevil Hills police have never said whether or not the murder weapon that caused the fatal gash in Denise's neck was ever recovered. Exactly what kind of weapon caused her death remains a mystery. At one point, police did release to the media that autopsy findings revealed it was likely a large serrated edge knife. Whoever used it was strong enough to subdue Denise and cut her throat at the same time. Well, I've always thought it had to have been somebody on something because how can you be that brutal?
in their right mind. Except for that weirdo guy, you know, in Florida. I don't know anybody that hated Denise like that. You know, haters so bad who want to do her harm like that.
The brutality of her youngest sister's murder still weighs heavy on Donnie. She says she's found peace with God over it and trusts that Denise is in a better place, finally at rest. Harder days in their healing process have come when people who say they have information reach out. Besides myself and a few sketchy psychics, Donnie Johnson has only heard from a handful of people offering information or real help over the years. But something striking happened in 2017.
Yeah, that was kind of creepy.
Two anonymous letters sent on the 20th anniversary of Denise Johnson's murder. One was for Donnie and the other was for Kill Devil Hill's police captain, John Towler. Donnie read the computer typed letter to me and its contents are very interesting. For the sake of the investigation, she doesn't want it read verbatim for this podcast. But what I can say is that whoever wrote the letter seems to know a lot about who police should be looking for.
The author provided some specific details. The contents of the letter that went to Captain John Towler are unknown. The letter sent to Donnie suggests a theory we've heard before. The killer knew Denise, but wasn't from Kill Devil Hills. However, they were familiar with people and places there.
It suggests investigators look closely at the timeline and Denise's movements in the hours before her murder. So that's what I did. Look, it looks like an old gas station. It's even got a garage deal. This is it. And found just the person I needed to talk to. I was at night clerk there. I worked alone at the night, the graveyard shift.
She came in about one. This one tall girl kept following her around. She never bought anything. That's next time on CounterClock. Be sure to follow CounterClock on social media and subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. 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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