Sarah Johnson
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But on September 2nd, 2003, three terrifying gunshots changed everything. This is Forensic Tales, episode number 103, The Sarah Johnson Story. ♪

Welcome to Forensic Tales. I'm your host, Courtney Fretwell-Ariola.

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On September 2nd, 2003, Bellevue, Idaho resident Kim Richards was woken up by someone pounding on her front door. She saw a 16-year-old girl standing on her doorstep. The girl was hysterical. The teenager told Kim that someone had shot her mom and dad and that she thinks they're both dead. Kim followed the girl to her parents' house. When they got to the house, she told the girl to wait outside while she went in to see what had happened.

Once inside, Kim encounters a bloodbath. Inside the master bedroom, she found a female victim lying in bed with a single gunshot wound to her head. She found a male victim not too far away with two gunshot wounds to the chest. Neither a victim appeared to be breathing.

Kim Richard frantically gets to the phone and calls 911. She tells Bellevue, Idaho police officers that her teenage neighbor knocked on her door sometime around 630 that morning and told her that someone had shot her parents. And when she went to go check on the house, she discovered two adult victims.

Within minutes, just moments, Bellevue police officers arrive on the scene, 1193 Glen Aspen Drive in Bellevue. When they enter the master bedroom, they find two victims. And after a quick assessment of the scene, both were pronounced dead.

Someone entered the house, shot and killed both victims in an ambush-style attack. Because the female victim was lying in bed, she probably never saw her attacker coming. The Bellevue police identified the female and male victims as 52-year-old Diane Johnson and 46-year-old Alan Johnson.

Alan Johnson worked as an executive and director of a landscape company, Webb Landscapes and Garden Design. His wife, Diane Johnson, worked at the Haley Medical Clinic as a tax collector. The Johnsons left behind two children, a teenage daughter, Sarah, and an adult son, Matt. Sixteen-year-old Sarah was a student at Wood River High School in Bellevue, and Matt attended college at the University of Idaho.

The murders came as a shock to the entire Bellevue community. No one could believe that someone broke into the Johnsons' home and murdered this well-liked couple in cold blood. Diane was lying in bed when she was shot, and Alan was shot in the chest, like maybe he heard the shot and walked into the master bedroom to see what happened. Then he was shot and killed. It seemed like neither Diane nor her husband had any real chance to fight back.

It was like whoever did this had the entire thing planned out.

But why would someone target the Johnsons? Bellevue, Idaho is a safe place to live. The neighborhood where they lived isn't some crime-infested city where break-ins and murders happen daily. The street where the Johnsons lived was a good street. And when I say good, I mean the houses there were well-valued over around a half million dollars at the time.

So we're talking about this double murder happening in a lovely upscale community. So for the Johnsons to be murdered in this way seems so out of character for this particular community. The only other person inside the Johnson home when the murders took place was Diane and Alan's 16-year-old daughter, Sarah Johnson.

Sarah was the one who ran out of the house that morning, ran down the street, and got her neighbor to call 911. So, naturally, the first person the police want to speak to and find out what happened was Sarah. Officer Ross Kirtley was the first Bellevue police officer to arrive. Officer Kirtley spoke to Sarah to try and find out any information about what happened.

Sarah told the police that she was asleep inside her bedroom, right down the hall from her parents' bedroom, when she heard the gunshots. Initially, she said she didn't know what the sounds were. She told the police she's never fired a gun before, so she wasn't entirely sure if what she heard were gunshots or not. She waited inside her room for a few minutes, then went outside to see what happened.

Before walking down the hall to her parents' bedroom, she said she called out both of her parents' names and waited for their response. But when they didn't say anything after calling their names several more times, she realized someone must have shot them, and that what she heard was in fact gunfire. She told police that she assumed her parents had been shot to death and that she ran out of the house and knocked on her neighbor's door, Kim Richards' house.

Now, when the police asked Sarah if she heard or saw anything else that morning, she said no. She didn't see or hear anyone break into the house because she was asleep in her bedroom. Police then asked her if she knew anyone who would want to do this to her parents. Again, she shook her head no. She had no idea who would want them dead. Like everyone else, her parents' murders came as a complete shock.

At the time of the murders, Sarah's older brother, Matt, was away at college at the University of Idaho, studying abroad in Moscow. Matt's fiance was the one who called him to break the news about his parents' murders. And immediately after finding out, Matt made the trek back home to be with his younger sister.

And then Bellevue police immediately began processing the house as a crime scene. They needed to find and process the forensic evidence quickly if they had any shot at trying to find out who did this to the Johnsons. When detectives arrived, Alan and Diane's bedroom door was found propped open with two pillows. According to Sarah, her parents often did this because it would get incredibly hot inside their bedroom.

So when they propped the bedroom door open with pillows, it basically created this wind tunnel to cool off the bedroom. Alan and Diane would also do the same thing with the sliding glass doors in the bedroom and downstairs in the living room. Diane was found lying face up in the bed with the comforter covering her body and tucked around her head.

When the detectives lifted the comforter, Diane's head was blown off from the chin up. There was nothing left of her face. Police believed that she was killed instantly in her sleep by a point-blank shot to the face.

Next to the bed, the detectives found blood, skin, hair, and brain matter smeared across the walls and ceiling. But it wasn't only the bedroom. They also found blood and brain matter smeared in the hallway leading up to the master bedroom and some on Sarah's bedroom wall directly across from the master.

From where Diane's body was lying in bed and the location of the spatter, the detectives theorized that the shooter shot Diane while standing on the east side of the bedroom. The blood and brain matter went straight up and came out towards the west side of the bedroom. Next was Alan. The detectives found Alan's body lying between the nightstand and the bed.

Based on the blood evidence, the police believe someone shot Allen as he came out of the shower. One of the shots went through Allen's lung, which would have meant that he bled out over the next several minutes. Unlike his wife, he wasn't killed right away. A blood pattern found on the floor suggested that Allen walked towards the bed where his wife was after being shot near the shower. Then once he got to the side of the bed, he collapsed and died.

The Bellevue Police's first theory about the murders was a murder-suicide. The murder weapon was found in the master bedroom lying next to the bed, a bolt-action .264 Winchester Magnum rifle.

This incident could be a murder-suicide type situation because why would the shooter leave the murder weapon behind? Anytime you leave behind a murder weapon, there's the real possibility of leaving behind forensic evidence, maybe a fingerprint on the rifle or fibers. So unless the shooter was caught off guard and then maybe accidentally left the murder weapon behind, this just seems strange.

But the police's murder-suicide theory didn't last long. They couldn't figure out the motive for either Diane or Alan. They weren't having any financial issues. There was no evidence that either one of them was having an affair. And besides the lack of a solid motive, there was the blood evidence.

Based on the blood evidence, the police believed the killer stood on the east side of the bedroom when they shot Diane. But Alan was shot near the shower, across the other side of the bedroom. So unless Alan went to the east side of the bedroom, shot and killed his wife, and then walked over to the shower, this theory didn't make much sense and it didn't match the blood evidence.

The rifle wasn't the only weapon the police found in the bedroom. They also found two kitchen butcher knives on the floor at the foot of the bed. And they found a third knife at the foot of the bed in the Johnson's guest room where their older son Matt stayed when he came home from college.

What was weird was that none of the knives were used in the murders. Diane and Alan didn't have any stab wounds on them. And the police didn't find their DNA on the knife's blades. And all of the knives came from the Johnson's kitchen. Since the knives belonged to the Johnsons, the Bellevue police asked Sarah why she thought they might be there. And she gave the police a rather interesting explanation.

Sarah suggested to the officers that the knives were somehow gang-related. Gang members may be the ones responsible for her parents' murders. Street gangs often leave behind marks to claim their territory or their turf.

Most of the time, these marks are graffiti. Gangs use graffiti to not only mark their turf, but it's also a symbol of the gang's dominance in the area, or sometimes it's used to challenge another gang's authority. Rarely do we see gangs leave behind marks in the way of weapons, but it does happen in neighborhoods like the Johnsons.

So Sarah suggested to detectives that a gang may have used the knives to quote Mark, not only herself, but her older brother Matthew. Because they also found one knife in the guest room where he stays when he comes home from college. The quote Mark was the gang's way of telling Sarah and Matt that they were next.

But the gang theory didn't hold up either. The police didn't find any known gang in the area whose signature mark was to leave behind butcher knives. So when the detectives confronted Sarah, she changed her story. She started saying that it might be the family's housekeeper. She claimed that the cleaning lady who came around started harassing her mom and was stealing stuff from the house.

According to Sarah, the cleaning lady called Diane, her mother, on the night before the murders. And the cleaning lady yelled at her because she lost her job and didn't know how she would support her child. Diane allegedly told Sarah to call the police the following morning to complain and report the harassment. But Sarah couldn't do so because, well, because they were murdered the next day.

That's not the only story that Sarah told the police. She also offered varying details about what she saw and heard that night. Initially, she gave Kim Richards, the neighbor, two versions of events. At first, she told Kim that her bedroom door was closed when she heard the gunshots. Then, minutes later, she said, no, no, no, her door was actually open because her mom came in earlier to kiss her goodnight.

Sometimes she said she woke up that morning after hearing her dad get in the shower. Other times she said it was the gunshots that woke her up. The more and more the police talked to Sarah, the more her story seemed to change. While the police investigated Sarah's gang claims, officers started questioning neighbors who lived on the Johnson Street.

Several neighbors were able to corroborate Sarah's story. Many of them said that they heard gunshots earlier that morning. They said they heard two gunshots within a few minutes of each other. And then a few minutes after that, they heard a girl screaming for help, which, of course, we know was Sarah trying to get the neighbor's attention. So everything the neighbors heard and saw that night lined up perfectly with Sarah's story.

Her story might have been lining up with the neighbor's accounts, but it wasn't lining up with the forensic evidence. As the detectives arrived at the house that morning, they noticed it was trash day. All of the houses on the street had their trash cans lined up neatly across the sidewalks. So the police decided to search the garbage can belonging to the Johnsons to see if maybe their killer left behind any clues. And they did.

The police searched two trash cans belonging to the Johnsons. One of the cans was filled with yard clippings, leaves, grass, but the other one wasn't. Inside that garbage can, the police found a pink colored robe covered in blood spatter. Someone had wrapped the bloody bathrobe around one left-hand women's leather glove and one latex glove.

Now, investigators didn't find any blood on the leather glove. However, when they performed a gunshot residue test on it, the test came back positive. The Johnsons' older son, Matthew, was the one who identified the leather glove.

He told police that his mom kept the gloves inside of her car. She would sometimes wear them to drive if she got cold. And according to him, she just liked having them inside the car if, in fact, there was a time that she needed to put on a pair of warm gloves. Then there was the latex glove. Now, it was clear that the latex glove was old. It was discolored. It was quite yellow.

Detectives discovered that the Johnsons kept several first aid kits throughout the house, all of which had latex gloves. At first glance, the police didn't find anything on the glove. But when detectives tested it for DNA, they got a hit. They found Sarah's DNA as well as an unknown person's DNA on the inside of it.

As detectives collected more and more evidence throughout the house, they considered if maybe Sarah knew a lot more than what she admitted to. It's her pink robe with blood on it inside of a garbage can, and it's her DNA found on the inside of the latex glove. As the police consider Sarah as a possible suspect in her parents' murders, they learn a little bit more about the teenager.

Did Sarah Johnson have a motive for the murder? While digging into Sarah's background, detectives learned that she was dating 19-year-old Bruno Santos. Unfortunately, Bruno Santos isn't what you would describe as the ideal boyfriend for a young teenage daughter.

Not only was Bruno three years older than Sarah, legally an adult, he was also here in the U.S. illegally from Mexico and was a high school dropout. Sarah and Bruno started dating about three months before the murders. When Sarah's parents discovered that she was dating someone 19 years old and was dating someone who didn't even graduate high school, well, they weren't exactly thrilled.

The instant Sarah told her parents, they told her to break up with him, that she wasn't allowed to see someone three years older than her. But Sarah didn't listen to her parents and continue dating Bruno behind her parents' back. Over the months that they were dating, she would often tell her parents that she was staying over at a girlfriend's house, but instead she was secretly sneaking away to go spend time with Bruno.

And the last straw came when Diane and Alan discovered their daughter and Bruno were sexually active with each other. After finding this out, they told Sarah that she would never be allowed to see Bruno again. That if she were ever caught hanging out with him, ever, she would be in serious, serious trouble.

They also threatened her by saying that if she didn't stop seeing him, they would file statutory rape charges against Bruno because Bruno was 19 years old and Sarah was only 16. But the threat didn't seem to stop them. Instead of breaking up, they exchanged promise rings. Sarah told her friends that they were engaged to be married.

Bellevue detectives brought Bruno Santos in for questioning. He told the officers that he had nothing to do with his girlfriend's parents' murders. Plus, he had an alibi. At the time of the murders, he said he was at home, sleeping on a mattress in the middle of his parents' living room when he got the call about Sarah's parents. He said his adult female cousin was the one who called and told him.

Now, to prove that he wasn't lying, he offered detectives samples of his hair, DNA and fingerprints. He also surrendered his clothes to the police and a search warrant was executed on his parents' house. Everything came back negative.

The police didn't find any of Bruno Santos' DNA, hair, or fingerprints on anything inside the Johnsons' home, including the gloves, the rifle, the butcher knives, nothing. So the police officially cleared Bruno Santos as a suspect and then turned their attention to their new prime person of interest, Sarah Johnson.

Before the police could arrest Sarah, they needed to figure out one last critical piece of evidence, the murder weapon. How could a 16-year-old teenage girl get her hands on a rifle like that? Well, the gun used in the murders belonged to a guy staying in the guest house attached to the Johnsons' house. Mel Spiegel, an electrician, rented the guest room.

The police linked the rifle back to Mel Spiegel. Spiegel was the registered owner of the gun, and they found out that he was out of town on the morning of the murders. The police confirmed that the gun was inside the guest house when Mel left town, the guest house that Sarah could easily access.

One month after Diane and Alan's murders, the police arrested Sarah and charged her with two counts of first-degree murder. In March 2005, now 18 years old, Sarah took her case to trial where she continued to maintain her innocence. Although she was only 16 years old at the time, the state charged her as an adult, and if convicted, she could spend the rest of her life in prison.

The prosecution argued that Sarah murdered her parents so that her and her boyfriend, Bruno Santos, could be together and then cash in on the parents' $600,000 life insurance policies. However, Sarah's defense attorney had a different argument. Her defense team believed an intruder was to blame for her parents' murders and that Sarah was innocent. The criminal trial lasted five weeks.

Dozens of witnesses took the stand. Witnesses for the prosecution testified how cold and unemotional Sarah was after the murders. Her aunt told the jury how her niece seemed to be interested in painting her nails rather than attending their funeral.

Others testified that Sarah wasn't acting like herself before the murders. For example, witnesses with Sarah at volleyball practice the night before the murders recalled how she seemed more serious and that she played harder than usual. Instead of laughing and talking with her volleyball teammates, she was just different that night.

Bruno Santos, the boyfriend, even took the stand for the prosecution, the guy that Sarah wanted to spend the rest of her life with. Bruno also testified that Sarah seemed, quote, weird on the night before the shootings. He also noticed that her behavior had changed dramatically. Witnesses for the defense testified that Sarah was a kind, sweet teenage girl who was incapable of murdering her parents.

But the trial wasn't about which witnesses were more convincing. Instead, the trial came down to the forensic evidence. The prosecution's expert witness relied heavily on the blood evidence. So let's talk about the blood, starting with Sarah's pink robe that the police found in one of the garbage cans. The robe is a critical piece of evidence in this case.

This robe had high-velocity blood spatter from both Diane and Alan, suggesting the killer wore the robe while they shot them. High-velocity blood spatter is usually caused by gunfire, but can also be caused by any other object if in fact there's enough force behind it. The force of the blood hitting a surface for a high-velocity spatter is over 100 feet per second.

And when the blood hits the surface, it leaves behind a fine mist or spray pattern. Most droplets from a high velocity blood pattern measure only about one millimeter in diameter. So they are very, very small. When the police recovered the pink bathrobe, there was a significant amount of high velocity spatter on the back of it.

According to the prosecution's story, Sarah wore the bathrobe backwards when she shot her parents, and that's why the blood spatter was on the back of the robe. The prosecution says that after she shot her parents, she took the robe off and tossed it in the garbage can, which is in fact in the same direction of her neighbor's house. The police also found a small amount of blood on the bottom of one of Sarah's socks.

Now, what about the gloves? The leather and the latex gloves were found wrapped inside of the bathrobe in the trash can. Now, the gloves didn't have any blood on them. Some experts believe that the left-hand leather glove belonging to Diane may not have been used during the shooting because it didn't have any blood on it.

However, when the glove was tested for gunshot residue, the test came back positive for GSR, suggesting that the shooter did in fact wear the lever glove during the shooting. When tested, the latex glove had Sarah and an unknown person's DNA on the inside of it, but no blood was found on the outside of it.

And exactly like the leather one, the latex glove also tested positive for gunshot residue. Now let's talk about Sarah's bedroom. Because the police also found blood spatter inside her room, the prosecution's witness testified that the police recovered Diane's blood and bone fragments on one of Sarah's bedroom walls.

A piece of metal bullet, shaving, and body tissue were also found on the bedroom door. This discovery contradicts her original story, that she was asleep with her door closed when she heard the first shot. The blood spatter found on one of her bedroom walls tells us that her bedroom door was open when the shootings happened.

The prosecution's experts theorized that because blood spatter from both parents were found on Sarah's robe and blood was found on the bottom of one of her socks, that without a doubt, she was the shooter. Furthermore, they said that she wore the robe backward to protect her clothing and then got rid of it on her way out of the house. But the defense experts had their own theories with their own interpretation of the blood evidence.

Sarah's defense is that someone else wearing Sarah's pink robe killed her parents. Their experts argued that the blood evidence actually proves that Sarah couldn't have been the shooter. No blood was found on her face, hair, the tops of her socks, or on her pants. So their experts are saying there's no way she could have done this.

The police would have had to have found blood spatter on her hair, face, or pants if she did, if she were the shooter. It would be practically impossible to shoot two people with a high-powered rifle and then not get a drop of blood spatter on them. But when the police saw Sarah that morning, she didn't have any blood on her. None. Not even a single drop of blood was on her.

The state tried to show the jury that Sarah shot her mom through the bed's comforter and sheet to shield herself from blood spatter. However, these experts only had access to photographs of the comforter because the original investigators didn't retain it as well as the sheet as evidence.

Based on these photographs, the prosecution's expert witness testified that there were bullet holes in the upper sheet and comforter. But the defense experts believed that number one, there were no bullet holes, and number two, existing holes in the bed sheets didn't bear the same characteristics of being shot with a high-powered rifle.

And then number three, the holes could have been caused by propelled bone or skull fragments, not just bullets. So was there blood on the comforter or not?

The neighbor who first arrived on scene said that she didn't see any blood on it, which was odd because the comforter was covering Diane's body and face. So you would expect to see at least a little blood on it, probably just from the blood seeping through the sheet itself.

But Officer Ross, currently the first police officer on scene, testified that he did see blood on a comforter. He testified that he saw blood on the lower portion of the comforter towards the foot of the bed. This side was the side of the bed closest to the sliding glass door. Sarah's defense called Michael Howard, a forensic scientist, to testify.

Michael Howard testified that the bottom sheet was indeed exposed at the time of the shooting. There were blood droplets and pieces of tissue on it.

He concluded that Sarah could not have been the shooter because the blood spatter would have settled onto her clothing, end quote. An extremely thorough examination was done by several laboratories of Sarah Johnson's clothing and absolutely no blood was detected, end quote.

So the question becomes, can you shoot two people and not get any blood spatter on you? The defense expert witnesses say no. It's impossible to shoot two people with a high-powered rifle and not get a drop of blood on you.

But the prosecution disagrees. Prosecution expert and crime scene reconstructionist Rod Englert testified that blood spatter would not necessarily have gotten everywhere. He specifically pointed to a particular part of the ceiling that was right above where Diane's body was that didn't have any blood spatter on it.

He believes that because Diane was covered with the comforter when she was shot, this blocked the blood from hitting this portion of the ceiling. Otherwise, you would expect to find blood all over the ceiling 360 degrees.

So he's basically saying that this clean part of the ceiling right above Diane's body proves that number one, she was covered with the blanket when she was shot. And that number two, more importantly to the prosecution's case, that blood would not have necessarily gotten everywhere. In this case, it didn't.

And if blood didn't have to be everywhere, this means that blood didn't have to be on Sarah's clothing either, especially if she's shielding herself either with the comforter and she's wearing her bathrobe backwards. Okay, here's another question. Could Sarah have washed the blood off her face and hair? Of course not.

Samples from her hair, face, ears, earrings, and nostrils were taken to be tested for traces of blood, but all of the samples came back negative.

One expert for the prosecution testified that when the police officers arrived on the scene, they found a bath towel with one end draped over the edge of Sarah's tub and that the rest of the towel extended down onto the floor. According to them, according to the officers, the towel looked like it had been recently put there, maybe suggesting that she did wash off her face.

Now, there was one more piece of clothing that the prosecution said that Sarah wore while shooting her parents, and that was a shower cap. Sarah's older brother testified that his Sarah kept a shower cap in her bathroom. And when the police searched the bathroom, they didn't find the shower cap.

According to the prosecution, Sarah used the cap to cover her hair and parts of her face from getting blood on her and then got rid of the shower cap by maybe flushing it down the toilet. The shower cap can also explain why the prosecution didn't find any blood in her hair. Fingerprint and DNA evidence were other critical aspects of the case.

There was a considerable debate during the trial about the length of time fingerprints can last on non-porous surfaces. How long do prints last on smooth gunmetal versus porous surfaces like cardboard? The police recovered several sets of unidentified fingerprints on the rifle's stock and on two boxes of shells.

The investigators ran the fingerprints through the automated fingerprint identification system, but no match. Not for Sarah, Bruno, the cleaning lady, the owner of the rifle, nobody. The defense argued that the unknown fingerprints pointed to Sarah's innocence.

But there's one big elephant in the room. We don't know how long fingerprints can last on porous and non-porous surfaces. Some experts testified that they could last up to a year on these types of surfaces. Others testified that it's hard to say, almost impossible to say how long they can last.

So in other words, these experts are saying that this unknown set of fingerprints left behind on the rifle and on the scope of it could have been there months earlier. We just don't know. After three weeks of testimony, the defense and prosecution turned the case over to the jury. The jury's mission was deciding which forensic experts they believed more, experts for the defense or the prosecution.

They had to figure out whether Sarah Johnson could have murdered her parents with a high-powered rifle from close range without getting a drop of blood on her. The jury decided with the prosecution's forensic experts. They convicted Sarah on both counts of first-degree murder as well as a firearm enhancement.

The jury believed that she could pull these murders off and do it in such a way that the police wouldn't find blood evidence.

The jury believed the prosecution's story that Sarah went to the guest house to get Mel Spiegel's rifle. She returned to the house, put on the shower cap and bathrobe. She then went into her parents' room, shot her mom first. A few seconds later, her dad came out of the shower after hearing the first round of gunshots, and that's when she turned the rifle on him, killing him.

Sarah then tried getting rid of the evidence by throwing the shower cap down the toilet and getting rid of the bathrobe and gloves in the trash can on the way to the neighbor's house. Finally, she tried to cover up the murders by staging the kitchen knives to look like a gang hit. As far as a motive, the motive was simple. Sarah Johnson killed her parents to date her high school dropout boyfriend, Bruno Santos.

On June 30, 2005, the court sentenced Sarah to two concurrent fixed life sentences for the murders, plus a 15-year weapon enhancement for using the rifle.

Immediately following her conviction, Sarah filed a direct appeal. But on June 26, 2008, the Idaho Supreme Court affirmed the judgment, and on December 1, 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court denied her petition for a writ of certiorari. A few years later, in April 2012, Sarah filed a post-conviction petition and requested new DNA testing on the unknown fingerprints.

but both of her requests were denied. The court refused to look into the new DNA testing because they didn't believe it would reveal any new evidence. In their own words, the DNA samples were too small to be tested in 2003, did not have the scientific potential to produce new evidence that would show it's more probable than not that Johnson was innocent, end quote.

In 2017, Sarah made one last attempt to get a new sentence. She tried to reduce her life sentence by citing the Miller v. Alabama and Montgomery v. Louisiana Supreme Court rulings. Both of these cases held that it was unconstitutional to sentence juveniles to life sentences. But, just like her previous attempts, her original sentence was upheld.

Sarah Johnson is being held at the Pocatello Women's Correctional Center in Pocatello, Idaho. Since the murders, she's had no contact with her ex-boyfriend, Bruno Santos, who in a twist of fate testified for the prosecution against her at trial.

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