His body was found naked and mutilated. Decades later, silence and fear cling to the murder of Missouri man.
SPRINGFIELD, Mo. — The body was found naked and decomposing. The hands and feet were severed and missing. The teeth and lower jaw had been removed.
In April 1989, Ronnie Allen Johnson, 26, was discovered mutilated in the Mark Twain National Forest, not far from West Plains, Missouri. He had been shot in the head.
Thirty-two years later the grisly murder remains a mystery.
No one has been brought to justice; no one has been charged.
Following the dark code of the Ozarks, no one has talked.
Fear lingers over the case like a morning fog over the deepest Ozarks hollow.
Perhaps the killer is not dead. Maybe the mutilation was meant to send a message about snitching.
“There are long memories here,” said Frank Martin III, who was managing editor and publisher of the West Plains Daily Quill at the time Johnson went missing.
“This is the kind of thing that could still get somebody killed all these years later,” he said. “That might sound a little melodramatic. You just have to live here.”
The "here" he speaks of is a land of hardscrabble poverty and natural beauty.
The national forest where the body was found spans 1.5 million acres, an area the size of Delaware. Here, night falls fast behind tall trees; streams and unmarked forest roads crease the deep woods.
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In the past, Martin says, people grew so much marijuana in the Ozark woods of Howell County that — according to one agricultural study — weed was one of the county's largest cash crops. This was long before it could be grown legally.
In 1989, someone thought the national forest was a perfect place to leave the body of Ronnie Johnson.
Martin's newspaper ran stories about its discovery. One day he was home when he picked up the phone and a man threatened to kill him if he and his newspaper didn't back off.
"I took it as credible," Martin said of the threat. "I went around armed."
Why it was so difficult to identify the body
According to police reports, two turkey hunters discovered the body the morning of Aug. 26, 1989. They telephoned law enforcement from a nearby store.
But even that is murky. A woman now living in Joplin has told the News-Leader, a part of the Paste BN Network, she was in the woods with someone who found the body the day before. (Her version of events is detailed in an accompanying story.)
It didn’t take long before someone else called the Daily Quill. Martin remembers that day.
“My editor had already sent out the only reporter who was in the newsroom at the time — and he was more suited to movie reviews,” Martin said.
Martin arrived at the scene south of Noblett Lake and near the old Horton Cemetery. In fact, he helped move Johnson's body onto a stretcher. A photo of Martin assisting law enforcement ran in his paper.
Martin has roots in West Plains; his family was one of three that owned the paper. He had worked with law enforcement. As a photographer, he occasionally snapped crime scene photos for the Missouri State Highway Patrol.
“I have a strong stomach,” he said.
He took photos of the dismembered body that day.
Some newspaper accounts say Johnson’s genitals also were severed. Martin doubts that.
“They were more likely eaten by an animal. The body had been chewed on,” Martin said.
Howell County Chief Deputy Don Baysinger and Howell County Coroner Lonnie Pruett were first to arrive on scene.
Either way, the Missouri State Highway Patrol would take charge of the investigation.
Looking back, the patrol did a poor job, according to one investigator who reviewed the murder as a cold case.
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Jim Hedlesten took a look at the case years ago while he was a Howell County sheriff's deputy. A member of Johnson's family had asked him to review it.
"The big problem with this case is that nobody did anything about it initially," he told the News-Leader earlier this year. "It was so sketchy."
"A cold case usually gets solved when the investigators do a helluva job from the get-go and then technology catches up," he said.
That didn’t happen here, he said. Little investigation was done quickly by the highway patrol.
“If I were them, I would be less than proud.”
Others dispute that the case was mishandled, arguing that the investigation was difficult because more than a few people wanted Ronnie Johnson dead.
When the body was found, a forest ranger was called to determine which county it was in. She concluded it was about two-tenths of a mile into Douglas County.
Highway patrol troopers from nearby Willow Springs were there, as was Douglas County Sheriff RoldanW. Turner.
Turner, then 34, had been elected sheriff 5 ½ months prior; it was his first paid law enforcement job and his first murder case.
“Back in those days our department was small. It was me and one deputy,” he told the News-Leader. “We relied on the highway patrol extensively for cases like this.”
Only a small amount of blood was found near the body. There were no clothes and none of the hands or feet. Similarly, there was no bullet, no shell casing and no weapon.
A nearby pond was drained in search of evidence. Nothing.
Sgt. Carl Watson, with the patrol, said at the time that someone went to great lengths to make identification difficult.
“Once you remove the teeth, hands and feet, there’s not much to go on,” he told the media.
Watson wrote in a report the "body appeared to have been carried to its location from forestry road 744."
In addition to the dismemberment, Martin told the News-Leader, something else made identification difficult.
The coroner had put powder on the body to slow decomposition. Unknowingly, that powder covered up faded tattoos.
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Initially, investigators said it was not Johnson’s body, despite the fact he had been missing since April 2 — more than three weeks.
Law enforcement made this error because they relied on an initial autopsy by Dr. Mary Case, the St. Louis medical examiner.
Case at first concluded the body was too small to be that of Johnson, who was 6-foot-2, 225 pounds.
Johnson had tattoos; Case found none.
One thing was clear: The cause of death was a bullet to the head.
Curtis Johnson, one of Ronnie's brothers, said this year that their mother feared it was Ronnie despite the assurances it wasn't.
“She had a suspicion that he was dead. Mom thought it was odd that she had not seen Ronnie. He usually came out every morning for coffee.”
The Douglas County coroner called Case and asked her to look closer at the body for a tattoo on a shoulder that said “Rochelle."
Johnson had a 6-year-old daughter named Rochelle.
This time, Case found it.
A daughter's search for answers
Rochelle Johnson is 39; she has moved from her hometown, where she graduated from West Plains High in 2000.
“West Plains is filled with bad memories,” she said.
She is married with two children. She asked that her married name not be used in this story out of concern for the safety of her family.
Many of those interviewed for these stories on Johnson's murder expressed concern that even after all these years talking to a reporter or to law enforcement could be dangerous.
Rochelle Johnson did not want her city of residence made public and also did not want her photo taken.
Not only is she worried about retaliation, she also has lived a life where too many people have pointed from the periphery and whispered: "That's the girl whose daddy was murdered."
She was 6 years old when her father was killed. Her younger brother was 1.
“I remember they tried to keep it from me,” she said. “I was walking with my mother and there was a neighbor who lived close to us. Mrs. Ford was taking a walk to church.
“She came up behind us and she was crying and said, ‘I am so sorry.’”
Rochelle Johnson's fondest memory of her father is when just the two of them went swimming at a public pool in West Plains.
Rochelle will not let go of her father’s death, even though many others have.
She believes there are people still alive who know what happened.
“There’s just this code,” she said.
Someone knows the details, she said. Someone knows the story: The Why.
She is ready for whatever truth she might resurrect, no matter if it involves kin.
She demands an accounting of what law enforcement did or did not do in finding the person who shot her father. She asked, without success, for the Missouri State Highway Patrol to open its files to her.
The News-Leader paid to obtain redacted copies of the patrol’s 102-page investigative file on the murder. The paper made the request under the state’s open records law. The paper, as promised, shared those copies with Rochelle Johnson.
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Rochelle Johnson was a first-grader at West Plains Elementary when her dad was killed. Since then, she has learned some unvarnished truths about him.
He sold marijuana, she said. He served time in prison, Aug. 27, 1982 to April 29, 1986. She knows that her father cheated on her mother and had an out-of-wedlock son.
“There is speculation that he was snitching,” she said.
It’s possible, she says, her father was providing information to law enforcement and drug dealers found out. Perhaps his body was carved up to send a gruesome message to those thinking about cooperating with police.
Rochelle wants to know if the case was never solved because her father lived on the other side of the line that is not supposed to exist.
It's the line that separates victims who are upstanding citizens from victims like her father, an ex-con involved with drugs found shot dead in the woods.
The barber of West Plains
Peter Galbraith was a barber with a shop on the West Plains town square and, later, in a small building in the backyard of his Texas Street home.
He was a Mason, an Army veteran, a member of Calvary Baptist.
He graduated from barber college in Kansas City and soon married Lucille Gannon in 1958. They honeymooned at Niagara Falls.
They lost a daughter at birth and adopted an infant girl who would become Rochelle's mother. The two families lived a few houses from each other in West Plains.
"He was the most calm and patient man you would ever meet," Rochelle said of Galbraith, her maternal grandfather. "He never raised his voice. He was a religious man. He had lots of friends. Very easy to laugh. A great sense of humor. A really kind person."
Her grandfather knew many people, including judges, lawyers and politicians.
Yet Rochelle believes to this day that he died in 2000 at age 85 keeping the Ozarks code of silence about her father's murder.
"I am sure he was involved," she said. “The funny, ironic thing is that my grandfather was the last person to see him alive, the last person with him, and his vehicle was never searched. His home was never searched. To me, that is awful fishy.”
The account Galbraith offered in 1989 — which was recounted by local newspapers, including this one — is that Galbraith and Ronnie Johnson, his son-in-law, went to look for "turkey signs" in the national forest on April 2, 1989.
Looking for "turkey signs" is what turkey hunters do just before the season starts.
They were on their way home, Galbraith told law enforcement, when Johnson asked to be let out of Galbraith's truck at what was then the Texaco gas station and Snappy Mart, north of West Plains.
According to Galbraith, Johnson said that he saw a man at the truck stop and he needed to talk to him.
Johnson exited his father-in-law's truck and told Galbraith to go on home and he would find a ride back later.
Galbraith told police he neither saw who Johnson was going to talk to nor knew his name.
Weeks later, Johnson's body was found in the woods.
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Ronnie Johnson backed down to no one
Ronnie Johnson was the second oldest of four sons who grew up fast and rough when their father was killed by a driver while walking along a highway near Cabool, Missouri, in 1978.
Some in West Plains suspect that killing was no accident, either, but that's another Ozarks story.
Ronnie was 16; his father was 41. His mother remarried; she wed her husband’s brother, Thurlow Johnson.
None of the Johnson boys finished high school; they all worked. Ronnie made it through ninth grade. He was working at a sawmill near the time of his death.
“If dad would have been alive, he would have made sure that we stayed in school," said brother Curtis Johnson, 56, who still lives in West Plains.
Their father was a meat cutter who was born in West Plains, moved to Kansas City, Missouri, and returned to his hometown to escape big-city crime.
“He was a very strict man," Curtis Johnson said. "Dad did not ask you twice. He told you once.”
Curtis and his brothers believe that Galbraith, the father-in-law, was involved in Ronnie Johnson's murder. They made that clear to investigators early on — the day Ronnie Johnson was reported missing.
"I don't know if Pete actually done it, but he knew what was going on," Curtis Johnson said. "He knew the right people to get a hold of."
Rochelle Johnson said her father's side of the family has always believed her grandfather was involved.
She recalled her father's funeral service. Galbraith attended with police protection and left the service early in the company of officers.
Rochelle Johnson said that for years after the murder her mother did not allow her to see her father's side of the family.
Gary Johnson was the brother closest in age to Ronnie. He pushed hardest for the truth.
(Years after the murder, Gary was paralyzed in an accident and later took his own life.)
The two living brothers say Gary was like a pit bull with a bone, once going well beyond the limits of the law.
According to Curtis and Eddie, who is the eldest, Gary put up a $5,000 reward for information to find Ronnie's killer. No one ever claimed the money.
The brothers told this story about Gary:
One day, they said, he caught up with Galbraith in West Plains and stuck a .44 Magnum in his mouth. Gary demanded that Galbraith finally tell everything he knew about Ronnie's death.
Eddie Johnson, 61, is the biggest of the Johnson boys at 6-foot-5 and 280 pounds.
"Gary was going to blow his head off when a buddy of his put his hand next to the hammer to stop it," Eddie Johnson said.
The brothers said Ronnie was in an unhappy marriage and did not get along with Galbraith, his father-in-law.
Eddie Johnson said Galbraith had put away some money and the last thing he wanted was for it to end up in the hands of Ronnie, who backed down to no one.
“Ronnie wasn’t scared of nothing," Eddie Johnson said. “Ronnie was like the rest of us. If somebody bounced up on him he was not going to turn away.”
According to brother Curtis, "Ronnie was easy to get along with. He was not a loner. But he did not take anything either. If you said something to him you’d better be able to back it up.”
Eddie Johnson told the News-Leader he thinks too much time has passed for the truth ever to be known.
"I really would like to know who done it. All these years it has just tormented me and tormented me. I am never probably going to ever know the truth about it.
“You really don’t let it go. But I have seven grandchildren and I don’t want to sit around and be an old grump and think about the past."
'Is your dad going to kill me?'
Rochelle Johnson shared two stories with the News-Leader that she says she had heard told by her mother, who is still alive, and her maternal grandmother, who died in 1992.
Law enforcement did not hear these two stories at the time of her father's death.
First, she said, the night before her father disappeared in 1989 Galbraith had called her father at home to ask if he wanted to look for turkey signs the next morning.
"My dad had never went with my grandfather — hunting or looking for turkey signs. They were not enemies, per se, but they were not close," she said.
Her father agreed and when he got off the phone he turned to his wife and asked: "Is your dad going to kill me?'"
The second story, Rochelle Johnson said, is that when her grandfather (Galbraith) got home after looking for turkey signs he asked his wife to wash his clothes because they had blood on them.
Rochelle Johnson told the News-Leader that at the time her grandfather knew Ronnie Johnson was cheating on his wife — Galbraith’s daughter.
Rochelle Johnson also said both her maternal grandparents knew from friends that Ronnie Johnson was selling marijuana.
The News-Leader spoke to Rochelle Johnson's mother (Ronnie Johnson's former wife) over the telephone.
She was 17 when she and Ronnie Johnson first got married. Today she is 56, remarried and close to daughter Rochelle. She did not want her name to be used, although she agreed that the newspaper could run a 33-year-old photo of her, Ronnie and Rochelle.
Yes, she said, Ronnie asked her that night if her father, Peter Galbraith, planned to kill him.
She told him no and said: "Why would he want to kill you?
“I thought it was a silly thing to say so I kind of laughed about it. Then I got to thinking: What has Ronnie done to have somebody kill him?"
She was asked by the News-Leader if she thinks Galbraith, her father, was involved in Ronnie's 1989 murder.
“Anything is possible. My dad was a hush-hush kind of person. He would not tell anybody anything. It is possible, but I don’t think so.”
After that first interview, Ronnie Johnson’s former wife declined to speak to the News-Leader again.
Both Johnson brothers told the newspaper that Johnson’s wife and her father were instrumental in sending Ronnie Johnson to prison in August 1982 for a parole violation.
According to documents obtained by the News-Leader, Ronnie Johnson was convicted for stealing a rifle from a man in 1981 and placed on parole.
Rochelle Johnson told this newspaper that for her entire life her mother had told her that Ronnie Johnson’s parole violation was for having a firearm and for forging his wife’s signature.
The forgery, Rochelle Johnson said, came about while Ronnie Johnson was trying to access money he was awarded in an insurance settlement. He'd been injured while riding a motorcycle and the settlement money was placed in his wife’s bank account because he did not have one.
She would not give the money to him, Rochelle Johnson said, so he forged her signature.
“My mother had always told me that my grandfather encouraged her to press charges,” knowing it would send Ronnie Johnson, already on parole, to prison.
That's what happened. Ronnie Johnson went to prison for three years and eight months.
His wife divorced him while he was incarcerated.
Johnson was released in 1986 and the two remarried.
According to brother Eddie Johnson, "The only reason Ronnie got back with her was so he could see his kids."