Left inset: Joanne Johnson. Main: the Augusta home where she was killed (Kansas Bureau of Investigation).
Nearly one year after the mysterious Labor Day weekend 2023 death at home of a 93-year-old Kansas woman who lived alone, a case that prompted the governor to issue a reward-focused executive order for the capture of whoever perpetrated the homicide, investigators have announced the arrests of two suspects, both of them 14-year-old girls.
The stunning development prompted Joanne Johnson’s son to call his mother’s alleged murder at the hands of teen girl strangers “inexplicable,” comparing it to “getting struck by lightning on a cloudless day,” KWCH reported.
When the family found their loved one dead last year at her Augusta home, the report said, it was clear to them that the crime was brutal and calculated, even if the motive behind it remains unclear to this day.
The Kansas Bureau of Investigation, which did not identify the suspects at this time since they are minors, confirmed that two 14-year-old girls from the same town as the victim were arrested Thursday in a first-degree murder case and that they are jailed in different juvenile detention facilities. It’s not yet clear if they will be charged as adults, but if they are, the suspects would be named then.
State investigators did not say how they zeroed in on the teen suspects, whose arrests left the neighborhood shaken.
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“We just loved her and this was the most devastating thing for our block, our neighborhood,” neighbor Holly Randol reportedly said, alarmed and “heartbroken” that it was allegedly “kids” who murdered the 93-year-old woman in her own home.
As recently as April, Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly issued an executive order authorizing a $5,000 reward for “information leading to the apprehension and conviction of any person responsible” for Johnson’s murder, a case that involved a “large number of interviews […] multiple items of physical evidence […] and multiple search warrants.”
Around that time, Johnson’s son reportedly expressed his shock that an “inexplicable, brutal, senseless murder” could happen on a “peaceful, tree-lined street that’s in a neighborhood in the middle of a 9,000-person town.”
“She was the the type of person who was always interested in other people and so she would talk to you for a couple minutes and she’d know where you’re from, where you went to school, what you were doing and what you wanted to do,” he said, according to KWCH. “And the next time she’d talk to you she’d remember every one of those things, you know, the type of person a lot of us aspire to be, I know I do.”
Joanne Johnson’s obituary said the avid fan of Jayhawks basketball graduated high school in 1947, went on to work as a secretary at Boeing, got married years later, had two sons, “dedicated her life to her family, and had an unmatched amount of love and pride in her” five grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.
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