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WBUR Podcasts, Boston. Previously on Beyond All Repair. Her head was beaten in with, we determined later, fireplace tongs. If you knew her, you just can't imagine that anybody could do that to her. I mean, she was a housewife. Instead of finding the person that might have killed my wife, they're looking at me. I mean, what are we looking at? Is it some kind of a robbery gone bad? Is it a burglary in the house? And that's where that $10,000 stash comes in.
It's February of 2003, one year after Marlene's murder, and roughly one month before the trial of her alleged murderer would begin. Wow.
We're hearing a hearing, another one of those pre-trial hearings, where the prosecution and defense are legally duking it out over what evidence should and should not be allowed to be presented to the jury. Sophia's defense attorney, Therese Lavallee, has a few things she definitely wants to keep out. I want to keep this jury focused on the murder. This whole trial is about the murder. It is not about Sophia Johnson's past bad acts.
Bad acts. Remember that metaphor for Sophia's life? All those boxes that need to be unpacked? We've got a big one in this episode. If you allow the state to parade in what they want to do, it's going to change the whole focus of the jury from...
the murder onto her bad acts. They're going to be trying a case within a case. And it's much more funny, especially in light of the fact that she's... Therese is arguing that Sophia's bad acts or previous misdeeds are unrelated to the murder. It would be wrong to equate them. But if the jury knows about these bad acts, they won't be able to unknow about them. And it'll color their perspective of Sophia in a way that'll make her trial less fair.
The prosecution sees it differently. The defense is arguing that this is very prejudicial and that we are attempting to keep on a mini fraud trial on the defendant in the middle of her murder trial. This is the deputy prosecuting attorney for the case, Kelly Osler. And what the defense is calling mudslinging, Osler might call a connecting of the dots. The jury should be allowed to hear
In order to get that money she was looking for.
Money, the prosecution says, is why Sophia killed Marlene Johnson. In the months and years leading up to the murder, Sophia was in undeniably serious financial trouble, at least some of which was caused by bad and maybe desperate acts. There are a hundred different choices I could have made differently. I wish I had made better choices. I wish I can go back to my young self and say, please put it back.
But was Sophia desperate enough to commit murder? Don't do it. It's not worth it. The far-reaching consequences will not be worth this now. I'm Anne-Marie Sievertson. From WBUR and ZSP Media, this is Beyond All Repair. Chapter 5, The Motive.
We're going to unpack the bad acts box together and try to understand how Sophia ended up in a desperate enough state of debt that some people believe she may have killed to get out of it. I want to start in the fall of 2000. Sophia had been in Vancouver, Washington for a couple years at this point. She was married to a fellow Jehovah's Witness, and she had a job as the office manager for a telecommunications company, County Communications.
She liked talking to the people who came into the store, one person in particular. Brad came in one day and I commented to my boss, the owner. I said, gosh, he is such an attractive man. Brad Johnson, with his brown eyes, almost fluffy hair, square chin and cool confidence. He seemed very playful and very funny.
And I really liked that. Sophia's boss happened to be good friends with Brad, but he was also a Jehovah's Witness and knew she was married. So Sophia and Brad struck up an over-the-counter, under-the-radar flirtation. And then one afternoon, he called her. Brad said, I was just wondering, I'm going out tonight with some friends. I wanted to know if you'd like to join me.
And I jokingly said, you know, you're one of my favorite people, but I'm still going to have to say no. And he said, why do you have to wash your hair? And I started laughing. I'm like, yep, that's it. Sophia was like, haven't you seen my wedding ring? He said, yeah, but sometimes girls wear that just to keep creeps away. And I said, yeah, not in this case. I said, so it's not really a rain check. It's I can't do this.
And then I called him two days later to say, I can't stop thinking about you. How about that date? That first date was in September of 2000. Timing will become important. But for now, the still-married Sophia is swooning for Brad. I felt so giddy by the fact that this guy was interested in me. That this guy, who I thought was so hot, was interested in me.
Just a few months later, Brad invited Sophia to spend Christmas with him and his parents, Marlene and Richard Johnson. This was Sophia's first time meeting them. And they have a really nice house, and it's on a good piece of property, and it's an A-frame house that has glass all around it. It's all windows on that main level, and it's really beautiful. Now, how'd Sophia get away with celebrating arguably the biggest holiday with another man's family?
Well, Jehovah's Witnesses don't celebrate holidays or birthdays. So a holiday celebrating Jesus's birthday? No, thank you. Still, it was complicated. And the dad opens the door. Super nice. I'm thinking to myself, God, are my wedding rings in my pocket? Or is it like, do I have them on? I felt like a creep.
So who was this guy that Sophia was willing to feel like a creep to be with? Hey, Brad, how's it going? Oh, not bad. Another peachy day. Another peachy day? Yep. Brad, like his dad, didn't want to go on the record when I first reached out to him. But a full year and a half later, he finally agreed. Yeah. Brad and I talked for more than three hours that night.
I'll share some of what I've learned, both from him and from the case file. Brad was 33 when he met Sophia, and 12 years her senior. I loved Sophia. I admit it. I found her very attractive, and, you know, I was fat and happy at that time. Ah, the fat and happy early days of a relationship. Indulging in each other, but also just getting to know one another.
Sophia learned that Brad was divorced and that he also worked for a telecommunications company, a competitor of the one she worked for, the one his good friend owned. And they sold a lot of the same equipment. Flip phones, Palm Pilots, you know, early 2000s stuff. But sometime before that, Brad worked for the FBI. We did some bugging and wiretapping. I have relationships with all of the sheriff's departments. And I did camera work, alarm systems.
I did telephones. I did their 911 dispatch consoles. So a lot of places will have me put up covert cameras, you know, like a camera that looks like a pencil sharpener or a camera that looks like a clock. And then you can't see the camera unless you know what you're looking for. Sometimes you can't see the thing that's right in front of you unless you know what you're looking for.
There's a lot Brad says he didn't see about Sophia. But there also might be something that no one saw about both of them. The embezzlement started, and I hate to ask you this, what year did I marry Brad? Was it 2001? It was, right? Right. Sophia and Brad got married in September of 2001, almost a year to the day from their first date.
But the embezzlement Sophia is referencing started just a couple months after that first date. And it started with a bad act against her, Sophia says. So I worked in the office, like I told you, at County Communications. I did their office manager work, but then I started moving mostly into sales because I really liked it.
Sales was where the money was. The commission on a single cell phone was more than five times Sophia's hourly office manager rate, she says. And one day, she sold one of those cell phones to a guy who was opening a branch of his business in the area and would need a lot more phones and two-way radios and the like. Oh, we got you, Sophia told him. County Communications can get you all set up.
Cha-ching. The sale was made, Sophia's boss did all the paperwork, and she was looking forward to a hefty commission payout. But when Sophia went to log the sale in the company's computer system the next day, she didn't see her name credited on the paperwork. All of it showed Jim as the person collecting all of the commission. Jim O'Donohue, her boss. I thought, what the hell? Bullshit. No way.
You never would have gotten this guy without me. He came in here. He came to our store because I told him about you. There's no way. According to Sophia, Jim was basically like, I made the sale. And she was like, but the sale never would have happened without me. He refused to give me the commission on that. He disagreed entirely. And we're talking thousands of dollars.
So I started taking money. And I know this is wrong. I make no excuses for it. But instead of pursuing this fight with Jim, I started stealing money from the company that would equal that money from the commissions. At first, Sophia says she was pocketing cash from customer sales rather than putting it in the register.
But she didn't stop with the money she missed out on from that one deal. I went on a rampage. I felt wronged. I felt cheated. And it felt slimy. And of course, I went ahead and in turn did the exact same thing. I was wrong. I cheated him. And I became slimy. Weeks went by. And no one seemed to notice the missing money. So Sophia kept going. She started writing checks and forging the co-owner of County Communications' signature.
Like, I was out of control. I made a bad situation a hundred times worse. It would be nine months before her boss, Jim, realized what was going on. He confronted Sophia, but he also spoke to his good friend, Brad, who is now Sophia's fiancé. We sat down in the middle of this driveway, and we were talking for probably a good hour. And eventually he says, I believe Sophia is stealing from me.
Brad was supposed to marry Sophia, the now mother of his unborn child, a month from when this conversation with Jim happened. He didn't want to believe what his friend was telling him. But also, Jim didn't make it easy to believe him, Brad says. Do you remember what amount he told you at the time?
I think it's an obscene amount. For the size of his business, I think it's an obscene amount. $400,000. Whoa. $400,000 is a lot of money for Sophia to have potentially stolen from county communications. But investigators weren't able to prove that much had been taken, or even close to it. In the end, the amount of money that was documented to have been stolen by Sophia...
$71,283.82. By the time Marlene Johnson was murdered in January of 2002, about six months after Sophia's boss confronted her, the embezzlement investigation was still ongoing. We had gotten information from the Washougal Police Department that they were doing an investigation into county communications in which Sophia had embezzled a large amount of money.
Detective Rick Buckner didn't know about the embezzlement when he was first questioning Sophia. And they did call and say, you know, just FYI, Sophia Johnson's a suspect in one of our cases, too. This was intriguing intel, considering Rick was investigating the murder of Sophia's mother-in-law. We're looking at, you know, who would have benefited from this? He was asking himself that simple question that lacked a simple answer. Why would anyone kill Marlene?
The only evidence that we had was that Sophia Johnson had mentioned to somebody that she was looking for a stash of money that her mother Marlene had. That somebody, of course, was Sophia's brother, Sean. She said that Marlene had $10,000 stashed in some place in her house. Sean, do you recall Sophia ever discussing in your presence...
What would happen if Marlene and Richard Johnson died? Yes. What did she say in that regard? That her and Brad would get a house. The detectives knew from early interviews with Sean that Marlene may have had money in the house. But now, with knowledge of a separate investigation into Sophia for stealing someone else's money, and a lot of it,
Sean's story was starting to sound more believable. Motive-worthy, maybe. She was looking for money. That was her big motivation right there. But let's think this through. By the time of the murder, Sophia knows she's in serious financial trouble. Her former boss has gone to the police about the embezzlement. It's unclear what the full consequences of that will be.
Meanwhile, there might be a stash of cash at her mother-in-law's house. Maybe $10,000, as Sean said? Well, that's a fraction of what Sophia owed her employer. Hardly an amount to kill someone over. Though no amount is, obviously. So say it's a robbery gone wrong. If, as Sean said, he and Sophia were in the house when Marlene came home...
Couldn't they have just snuck out another door when they heard the garage opening? Or heck, even just stayed put. Sophia went over to Marlene's house all the time. She and Brad had a key. Even if she had rounded a corner of the house and run smack dab into Marlene, couldn't she have just said, Oh my God, I'm so sorry. My brother just really needed this money from the coat I left here, but we couldn't find it, so we were just on our way out.
Or, let's say Sophia was after an inheritance, as Detective Buckner posited to me in a follow-up phone call. If anything were to happen to Richard or to Marlene, who inherits it? Brad Johnson. Who's married to Brad? Sophia Johnson. Maybe, like Sean said on the stand, Sophia wanted a house from her in-laws. They have a really nice house and it's on a good piece of property.
Or maybe she was hoping for some life insurance money, which she would only get through her marriage to Brad. But if Sophia owes her boss tens of thousands of dollars, couldn't Brad, her husband, have been feeling the weight of that too? And on that note, is it really possible that Brad didn't know Sophia was bringing home thousands of dollars of stolen money at the time?
Did Sophia ever, you know, admit to you that she had taken money from county communications in any amount? Nope. She never admitted it to you? Never admitted it. He knew that I was taking money. He knew because he was cashing it. More in a minute. It's Madeline Barron from In the Dark. I spent the past four years investigating a crime. When you're driving down this road, I plan on killing somebody. A robber.
A four-year investigation, hundreds of interviews, thousands of documents, all in an effort to see what the U.S. military has kept from the public for years. Did you think that a war crime had been committed? I don't have any opinion on that. Season three of In the Dark is available now, wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Meghna Chakrabarty, host of On Point. At a time when the world is more complex than ever, On Point's daily deep dive conversation takes the time to make the world more intelligible. From the state of democracy to how artificial intelligence is transforming the way we live and work to the wonders of the natural world. One topic each day, one rich and nuanced exploration. That's On Point from WBUR. Be sure to follow us right here in your podcast feed.
It's January 14th, 2002, four days after Brad Johnson's mother was found bludgeoned to death and hours after his wife was arrested for her murder. The detectives on the case are fleshing out their money-themed motive after learning about tens of thousands of dollars Sophia had stolen from her employer the year before, mostly by forging checks. But there's an eyebrow-raising detail.
Some of those stolen checks were made out to Brad Johnson, about a dozen of them, according to Brad himself, who told detectives they ranged from several hundred to several thousand dollars each. When he took the first check, he never asked why this check was made out to him. And when the second check and the third check came, there was no question. It was, OK, I'll put this in the bank.
Brad may have never asked why his name was on the checks, according to Sophia, but the detective sure did. His response? He didn't know. It's goofy the way that the money is getting to your account, one of the detectives said. But goofy enough to make him a suspect in his own mother's murder investigation? Yes. Detective Buckner again. Do you feel like Brad told you the whole story? No. Nobody ever tells me the whole story.
Brad wasn't a suspect for long. Because while Buckner may have never gotten the whole story from him, Brad didn't factor at all into the story he did have for the day of the murder. The one Sean told him, which focused solely on Sophia. So the inconclusiveness around Brad's involvement in the embezzlement, you can file that under that casually haunting statement we heard from Buckner in the last episode. I mean, there's little things in the investigation that we could never really pin down.
I'm not sure I got the full story from Brad either. If this response regarding Sophia's county communications checks is any indication. I'm going to plead dumbness because I don't remember her. I don't remember her ever bringing home a paycheck. And I don't remember her ever not bringing home a paycheck. Or maybe Brad really didn't see the thing that was right in front of him. I was in the middle of the storm and I didn't pick up on it. Isn't his name on these accounts too?
Shane, Sophia's youngest brother, the lawyer...
He doesn't buy it. He's just saying, hey, officer, I know all of these specifics. I didn't stop it, and it was her. After reading through the case file and wrapping his head around the timelines for both Sophia and Brad's relationship and the embezzlement, a couple things stand out to Shane. She doesn't start embezzling until after she meets Brad. The fact that he still marries her after, like, it comes out that she's embezzling. This is true, as far as we know.
Sophia and Brad started dating in September of 2000. The embezzlement isn't documented to have started until November of that year. Maybe Brad put Sophia up to it? He did know the business and Sophia's boss really well. And then there's this.
Months after Sophia supposedly stopped stealing from county communications, she continued to write large checks, bad checks, in fact, between various bank accounts of hers and Brad's, including one for $20,000. Brad claimed not to know about this, but... There's no erasing him from those pictures depositing the checks.
In the case file are bank surveillance photos of Brad sitting in his car at a drive-up ATM. And there's a letter from a bank teller confirming that they have a check for $20,000 and video footage of Brad and Sophia. The teller also wrote that Brad, quote, "...seemed suspicious," and says the bank took down his license plate number and a description of his car.
What Shane sees in all of this is a lack of accountability when it comes to Brad. And you, the 5'4", 6-month pregnant woman, two people who are committing this financial crime, you're the one we're going to take down for this brutal murder.
Let's go back to that pre-trial hearing we were hearing earlier. The one in which Sophia's lawyer said this about including Sophia's bad act-induced debt in her murder trial. It's much more interesting. And the deputy prosecuting attorney argued, no, no, it's context. The jury should be allowed to hear...
Well, the judge said...
And so, come the start of the actual trial, the state of Washington v. Sophia Johnson, the lead prosecutor, Tom Duffy, he was able to serve up a buffet of financial issues Sophia was staring down at the time of the murder that, collectively, he claimed, explained why she killed Marlene. The evidence will show the motive for this act was greed.
Now, desperate acts, as the judge said, and greedy ones, are not the same thing. And it might not be one or the other in this case. But if I were a prosecutor trying to convince a jury that someone was wicked enough to commit murder, I know which narrative I'm going with. One of these greedy acts, Duffy said, involved two of the most significant people in Sophia's life. State would call Michael Sheflin. Forward, please.
Michael Sheflin is Sophia's first husband, the Jehovah's Witness she had moved across the country with and then divorced a few years later. On the day of Marlene's murder, Michael gave Sophia a call around 8 a.m. What was the purpose of your contact with Sophia that morning? I had some problems with some bills and I needed to get a certain bank situation corrected as soon as possible.
The audio is not terrific, VHS tapes, man. But stick with him, because what Michael would go on to say is that his ex-wife Sophia's name was still on his bank account. And for a reason unknown to him, the account had been suddenly overdrawn. When you spoke to Sophia that morning, what did she indicate was her intention?
Michael wasn't the only one trying to get a hold of Sophia that day. Enter VIP number two, Sophia's mother, Grace, who said she had stopped by her house around 1 o'clock, minutes after Marlene is believed to have been killed.
Sophia's lawyer asked Grace about this when she was on the stand. Grace knocks. Lightly. No answer.
Remember, Sophia says she was at home at this time, listening to music. Loudly. Was it a pleasant reason for which you were trying to contact your daughter, or was it a matter that was of somewhat serious concern?
Despite being divorced from Michael and estranged from her mother, Sophia's name was still on both of their bank accounts, which meant that if Michael's account was overdrawn, the bank could just pull funds from Grace's account to cover the deficit. And it did. Grace's balance was zero.
So on this day of all days, Sophia's mother and her ex-husband were both trying to reach her with urgent money problems that Sophia, the prosecution asserted, had created. Buffet dish number one, done.
Dish number two. A few days later, at Marlene's funeral, money was supposedly still on Sophia's mind. Did you have any conversations with the defendant after the funeral that you have a distinct memory of?
Well, after the formal funeral arrangements were finished and everybody adjourned and filed into the lobby to get ready... This is Dean Cole, Marlene's brother, another witness for the prosecution. Sophia was there and came up to me at some point in the lobby there and said, well, you know, tomorrow we're going to get to go down and read the will. Marlene's will is going to be read tomorrow. And...
It just struck me as, you know, entirely inappropriate at a funeral to be talking about somebody's will. But that was the comment that was made to me. So there was the embezzlement, the overdrawn bank accounts, the alleged inappropriate inquiry into Marlene's will. And for a final dish, documents discovered at Sophia and Brad's house. Which indicated that Sophia had obtained credit cards in the name of Brad Johnson,
Shane is reading an affidavit by Detective Rick Buckner describing a police search a few days after the murder. Buckner and his team found a number of credit card statements under various names, all of which showed past due balances, and, this summary said, all of which were linked to Sophia. But Shane, once again, has questions. And more theories. That's weird. What documents would indicate that...
A credit card that was obtained at Brad Johnson's name, which was found in the house of Brad Johnson, was obtained by Sophia. Because maybe Brad was in financial trouble prior to meeting Sophia. Maybe that's what actually was the motivation for inducing this 22-year-old girl into embezzling from her employer. Brad has denied any participation in the embezzlement. Any witting participation, at least.
And Shane, of course, will forever be Sophia's brother first, the one who credits her for raising and protecting him, giving him a foundation that would help him persevere through his own period of desperation all the way to a law degree. So it's clearly hard for him to square that sister with the one who, at best, stole tens of thousands of dollars and, at worst, committed murder.
And it's not hard for him to be skeptical of Brad when he denies any knowledge of the severity of the couple's financial troubles. One of the things that I found out after the murder is that my wife had not been paying the bills like she was saying.
So she was hiding things. She was in charge of the bills in the house? Yes, she was. That is simply not accurate. Sophia has told me Brad managed their money. Or mismanaged it, she would say. The credit cards and all the other debt that Brad and I had, Brad had before I even met Brad.
Sophia says she had complained to her mother-in-law about Brad's spending habits in particular. Because I was heartsick over it. He was out spending money hand over fist. So Brad is either a dishonest super spender, or he's the guy in his mid-30s who handed over his finances to a new love in her early 20s, only to have her tank them and commit a serious financial crime while he was none the wiser.
Shane, who himself is in his mid-30s now, doesn't buy it. Again. And he doesn't understand why more wasn't made of this point during Sophia's trial. 22-year-old girl approached by a 35-year-old man, competitor of a business, sees an emotional anger, exploits it. Not saying that that's what happened, but that's what it looks like to me.
No matter who was actually in the know in Sophia and Brad's marriage, there was one more rude awakening with regards to the couple's finances. Here's Shane reading from Detective Buckner's affidavit again. I also noticed that the city of Vancouver had sent Sophia and Brad a disconnect notice for their water due to the bill being passed due. In the days leading up to Marlene's murder, Brad and Sophia were tens of thousands of dollars in debt.
They had the embezzlement hanging over them. They had a baby due in just a few months. And now their water was about to be shut off. What is happening here? The tornado just kept getting bigger and bigger. Yeah, this is the walls closing in, man. Like, you start messing with people's, like, food, water, shelter, and a person who's desperate, that's reality hitting. A reality that looks increasingly desperate.
My primary concern was making sure this money was paid back and that this baby that I'm pregnant with would be okay. Whether the bad acts we've learned about were motivated by revenge, greed, desperation, or some combination, embezzlement, alleged credit card fraud, these crimes cannot be equated with murder. But still, I was unsettled. Maybe you are too.
Sophia is someone capable of deceit. But deceit turned deadly? And were these acts committed by Sophia alone? Sophia with Brad's knowledge? Sophia and Brad? In the end, it didn't matter. Only Sophia was on trial for Marlene Johnson's murder.
And the jury now had a lot more to consider in making its decision. I have been handed the verdict forms by the jury. In the matter of State v. Sophia Johnson, Clause number 021-01770-3. Verdict forms that are filled out. That's next time.
Beyond All Repair is a production of WBUR, Boston's NPR, and ZSP Media. It's written and reported by me, and this episode was co-written with producer extraordinaire Sophie Codner. Mix and sound design by Matt Reed and production manager of WBUR podcasts, Paul Vycus. Original scoring by Paul Vycus and Matt Reed. Theme and credits music by me.
Our managing producers are Sama Tajoshi for WBUR and Liz Stiles of ZSP Media. Our editors and executive producers are Ben Brock-Johnson of WBUR and Zach Stewart-Pontier of ZSP Media.
If you have questions about the case, the people at the center of this story, anything, we want to hear them. Email beyondallrepairpod at gmail.com. Voice memo, written message, you do you. beyondallrepairpod at gmail.com. Do me a favor, will ya? Listen to a good song, eat a treat, go for a little walk, tell someone you love them, and then tell them about this show. In that order. Thank you for listening.