“It’s really hard to see what happened,” a grieving father and husband told Law&Crime after finding his wife and their two young children dead in a horrific murder-suicide in Alabama last week.
On Sept. 28, Derek Johnson found his estranged wife, Nancy Johnson, 37, his daughter, Mia Johnson, 6, and his son, Jacob Johnson, 2, dead in their home on Evergreen Court in the small city of Semmes, part of the broader Mobile metropolitan area. Both children had been drowned in the bathroom. The girl’s throat was also slashed, and she lost a significant amount of blood that contributed to her cause of death, according to the Mobile County Sheriff’s Office.
The mother then hung herself.
“I think there’s a lot more to be learned on the mental health side, and I’m still grappling with it,” Derek Johnson told Law&Crime Network host Sierra Gillespie in an interview. “Even her family is still not believing that she would truly have done something like this.”
Derek Johnson arrived at the residence the day before, he said, after completing a cross-country trip in a camper he had picked up in Washington State – a journey mandated by court order.
At the time of the deaths, the couple was going through a divorce. And, as a condition of an order splitting custody of the children, both the husband and wife were to share the camper and stay in it whenever the children were in the custody of the other parent.
Derek Johnson said the first day he got back to Semmes, he treated everything as more or less normal – under the circumstances of having to live in a camper outside of where his family was staying.
The next day was different. Markedly so.
“I noticed there was no sounds,” he told Law&Crime. “There was no movement in the house. All the blinds were closed. It was very dark. There was only one light on in the master bedroom.”
After that, Derek Johnson said, he knew he needed to get inside the house and find out what was going on. So, he drilled through the door lock in the back of the house and got in through the French doors.
“I noticed my kids were taking naps on the L-shaped sectional we have,” the distraught dad haltingly told Law&Crime.
“I saw my children, but I didn’t feel them,” Derek Johnson said. “I don’t – I don’t know how else to say that. They were there, but I did not feel them. And I went over to my son and put my hand on his back to wake him up, and … he was just stiff. And then I saw foam coming out of his mouth and nose, and he had discolorations on his – and I started panicking. And then I went over to my daughter, and she had the same thing. And then I started wondering where their mom was.”
In the bathroom, he found an awful scene — a blood-and-water-filled tub. That sight, he said, he could barely process except as something that shouldn’t be the way it was. Then, he checked some of the closets on the way to the master bedroom. He finally found his wife sitting in a “collapsed position” with blood on the floor.
“After that, I really don’t remember much other than to call 911,” Derek Johnson said. “And that’s all I remember.”
In his interview, the heartbroken parent sought to clarify that while his wife and her family were from Utah, the family of four had never lived there. They had recently moved to Alabama after the cost of living – housing in particular – simply got to be too much in Washington State.
In December of last year, Nancy Johnson began pushing for a divorce – but she never could articulate why, Derek Johnson said. Still, he said, he went through the motions as his family moved to Alabama, and he largely stayed out of state to work and provide for them.
Then, a series of “strange” police reports began to be filed by Nancy Johnson against her husband in Semmes – even though, he said, he wasn’t even in the state during those alleged incidents.
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In June, Derek Johnson filed for emergency custody after realizing his wife had severe mental instability.
After the father received joint custody, however, the mother made a show of reconciliation, he said.
“She took advantage of my love towards her,” Derek Johnson told Law&Crime. “And was able to cancel the divorce. Able to cancel the emergency order through her persuasion, through me. I was stupid. I didn’t see what she was doing. She eventually took the children down to Utah. Refused to tell me where they were at.”
Another divorce lawsuit was filed in August.
Derek Johnson said he had not seen his children from late June until a hearing on Sept. 20. That’s the day a judge ordered him to go and get the camper, he said.
But the timeline gets a bit murky here.
Later in his interview with Law&Crime, Derek Johnson said he had seen his son and daughter on Sept. 17, when he was arrested at the Semmes house for violating a protection order issued by a judge in Utah. That arrest came amid a police complaint filed by Nancy Johnson.
On that day, Derek Johnson said, he noticed a pickup outside the house that he did not recognize. He admittedly tried to get in through a back window because his wife had changed the locks. Nancy Johnson allegedly tried to push him out the window and clawed at him as the man demanded to hug his children.
Derek Johnson said he briefly hugged his son before the boy was ripped out of his arms by Nancy Johnson and began to cry. Then, he said, his wife took the boy and his sister, left the house, and called the police. After that, he said he was arrested for the protective order he never knew about and then spent 24 hours in jail.
The novel camper-house switch “nesting” agreement was only intended to last until the newly renewed divorce was finalized.
“It never happened,” Derek Johnson told Law&Crime. “She mentally could not comprehend that. She wanted full control of the children and no sort of interaction from me.”
Reflecting on the tragedy, he said things started going wrong during the pandemic when his wife got into QAnon conspiracy theories – though he insisted she was not a conspiracy theorist herself – and reading “tons of horror stories” about murder-suicides and sex-trafficking. All of that, he said, was “very taxing on the mind” for a young mother who became more or less obsessed with the lurid.
As she deteriorated mentally, Derek Johnson said, his wife refused all efforts to get her help because she believed she would be drugged and locked away in a psychiatric institution.
“This was not Nancy’s behavior,” he said when asked if he wanted the world to know anything about his family now that they were gone forever. “Nancy always went above and beyond as a mother.”
A GoFundMe was started by Derek Johson’s sister to help him through the insurmountable loss.
“They loved life,” he added – referring to the children.
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