Women Who Kill: Profiles of Female Serial Killers (7 page)

On 25th September 1977 she went to two-year-old James’s bed and sat on the sleeping child, suffocating him with her 250 pound weight. She then phoned her husband saying that she couldn’t get the toddler to waken. Earl rushed round and found the little boy motionless in his crib. The body was cold and he could see immediately that he was dead.

Martha told the police that she’d gone to ask the toddler what he wanted for breakfast, only to find him rigid. The area around his mouth was a disturbing blue.

The doctors recorded the death as being Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, SIDS, and Martha was free to kill again. (Twelve years later the doctor would reverse this verdict in the light of the three subsequent deaths, saying that there was a ninety percent chance that this first death was homicide.) Martha was now reunited with her grieving spouse.

She gave him a son, Earl, in 1979 and a daughter, Tibitha, the following year. She was still feeling afraid and inadequate and presumably hoped to cement her floundering relationship by giving her husband both a daughter and a son. Again, on the surface she was good to the children and they were always cleanly dressed and well fed.

But Martha and Earl fought again in November 1980 and Earl went to his lover, Stanley Hullen. Martha called Stanley in the hope of getting Earl back. She said that if something happened to the baby it would all be Earl’s fault. Stanley was distressed by the conversation, though Martha would later deny to police that she made such a call.

When her husband still didn’t return, Martha
partially
suffocated the three-month-old girl then left the room. Shortly afterwards - as she’d doubtless intended - a distraught Jennyann told her that the baby was gasping for breath.

Earl Bowen was called and told to go to the hospital. He found his wife and her mother there and asked his wife what she had done with their baby daughter. She
denied harming Tibitha, asking why she would carry the children for nine months if she didn’t want them? But her estranged husband still suspected the worst.

When Martha spoke to the police she said she’d been in the shower when her oldest daughter Jennyann appeared and said Tibitha was having difficulty
breathing
. Martha said she’d rushed to the baby’s side to find sweets on the bed. She wondered if her toddler Earl had given the sweets to the baby, causing her to choke. But the autopsy wouldn’t show any such sweets in the baby’s windpipe and again the diagnosis was SIDS.

Earl Bowen told the medical examiner that this was the second time one of Martha’s children had died after he’d argued with her, but this information wasn’t acted on. One reason for this was that Martha’s frequent house moves meant that she saw many different
hospital
staff, autopsy specialists and social workers and few of the personnel communicated with each other
effectively
about the case.

All hospitals know that parents can injure or kill
multiple
times - but they hesitate to involve the law for fear that they can’t prove it. Former prison officer Robert Adams told me that ‘the best single predictor of future violence is previous violence.’ But he admits that it’s
complex because many people have one violent episode and that most murderers don’t go on to kill again.

Martha, though, wasn’t in the category of having one violent moment. Two of her children were already dead and the circumstances were right for her to kill a third…

In early 1989 Martha was still missing her husband Earl. She spent part of January and the first days of February repeatedly taking his son, little Earl, to the local hospital saying that he’d swallowed rat poison or had a seizure. Unknown to her, at around this time Earl had applied for custody of the little boy because he feared for the toddler’s life.

Incredibly, Martha now phoned Stanley again to say that if Earl didn’t return home she’d do something to Earl junior. Stanley now strongly suspected that Martha had killed her first two children. He warned her that she’d burn in hell if she killed the third and he phoned the child protection services and told them of his fears.

But the enraged Martha was hellbent on creating another bereavement that Earl would have to comfort her over. She rolled her considerable weight on to the helpless child. She and her distraught daughter Jennyann then rushed Earl junior to hospital but he died on the way to the emergency ward. He was resuscitated and kept alive
on a machine for three days after which he was declared brain dead and the machine was switched off.

This time the doctors thought the toddler had had a seizure and again failed to suspect foul play. It’s
possible
that Martha, like many baby-killers, could act the part of a grieving mother. She also seemed an unlikely child killer, for those who knew her testified that she was always good to her kids and she and Jennyann were apparently close.

But Stanley Hullen’s phone call to a child protection worker in Fulton County now started to produce results. The worker saw that Martha was indeed obsessed with the idea of getting Earl back and suspected she might go to any lengths to do so. Worried about the remaining child, Jennyann, she asked for the girl to be removed from the home, but a judge refused.

Earl Bowen was also concerned that Martha might harm Jennyann so he took her back to her natural father, Bobby Wright. The girl told her father that she was afraid of what her mother might do, and that she’d had a dream in which her mother suffocated her with a pillow. Both Bobby Wright and Earl Bowen got the impression she knew something about her siblings deaths but that she was too frightened to tell what she’d seen or heard. After a few days Mr Wright took his child to Martha’s mother and she ended up back in Martha’s care.

Sadly, such inactivity or lack of later vigilance on the part of the authorities isn’t uncommon. Interviewed for
this book, former prison officer Robert Adams explained that ‘many researchers feel the true incidence of fatal abuse cases, including those against children, is vastly underestimated. For instance, some highly suspicious deaths in families where violence is previously known to have occurred aren’t recorded as homicides because there is insufficient evidence to make a criminal
conviction
stick. Parents may admit some responsibility years later. This is not as rare as one might expect.’

He also cites research by Peter Scott in 1973 (
Parents
Who
Kill
Their
Children
Medicine, Science And The Law volume 13 issue 2) regarding parents who killed their children when they were under five years old. It showed that the parents who repeatedly killed weren’t usually the aggressive psychopaths. Instead, Robert says, ‘the really dangerous ones were the ones who were quiet and over-inhibited. When the otherwise passive person became unexpectedly violent the result was often fatal.’ This was the final lesson that Martha Ann Johnson’s three young children had now learnt. But Martha still hadn’t achieved her goal of having Earl back full time so she prepared to kill again.

One year and one week after she’d killed her third child, Martha crushed eleven-year-old Jennyann into
the mattress. Again, her motive was to regain contact with her former husband. This must have been a terrible death as a child of this age will fight for some time to draw breath. When her daughter went limp, Martha called her upstairs neighbour to say that the girl had stopped breathing and had wet the bed.

The neighbour found Jennyann face down on the bed clad in a t-shirt and dry briefs, apparently lifeless. She found Martha’s demeanour odd, not that of a bereaved mother - especially a mother who had now lost all four of her children in a five year period. Instead, she was matter of fact and calm.

The police were also surprised at her lack of
emotion
and the paramedics were very suspicious of her child’s death. Martha explained that Jennyann had fallen off a climbing frame a few days previously and had consequently had a brace fitted in hospital and that this had caused her to have breathing difficulties. The reality was that Martha had taken her daughter to the hospital complaining that she was having
difficulty
breathing. (She’d set up a similar alibi prior to killing one of her other children.) But when hospital workers examined and X-rayed the child they’d found nothing wrong.

Hours later, whilst conducting his investigation into Jennyann’s death, Lieutenant Roberts realised that the woman was totally obsessed with getting back her estranged husband. When the subject of the deaths was
brought up, she asked him, ‘If I were two people and this other person did hurt the kids, would I go to jail?’ He replied that she would.

Later, at the funeral, she was overheard to remark that though Jennyann was dead, Earl her husband was back home. This time the police feared homicide and ordered an autopsy. It showed that the girl had
probably
died of asphyxia. The crime lab strongly suspected homicide but just didn’t have any proof. As a
consequence
, they didn’t file charges against the now
childfree
Martha, who now went in search of husband number four.

Soon she married Charles Eugene Johnson and went to live at Locust Grove, south of Atlanta. She was
physically
unable to have any more children but told
relatives
that she still thought of the four who had died, especially at their birthdays and at Christmas. She seems to have blocked out the truth of what she’d done to them. She added that she looked at photographs of them all the time.

She made friends with lots of the neighbourhood kids and took a job in the local convenience store. When asked to explain the deaths of all four of her children she said ‘I think it was just bad luck.’

But Martha’s own luck was beginning to run out. At the end of 1988, seven whole years later, an investigative reporter in Atlanta found a medical report on Jennyann’s death which admitted the death was suspicious. The newspaper,
The
Atlanta
Journal
&
Constitution,
made the findings public and as a result the autopsy details were looked at again.

The police now brought in FBI agent John Douglas and other specialists from Quantico to examine the case. The chances of a woman losing all four of her
children
to natural causes was deemed highly unlikely, and it was recognised that the deaths of the two-year-old and the eleven-year-old could hardly be attributed to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome as they were no longer infants. Various child protection workers, law
enforcement
personnel and Earl Bowen’s lover, Stanley, also voiced their very strong concerns.

In the summer of 1989 Martha Ann Johnson, now aged thirty-four, was arrested for murder. Sergeant Kenneth Stewart spent time sitting with her and helping her to dry her tears. Unknown to the accused, he had a video camera set up, hidden inside a box on a nearby shelf.
Martha’s confession was therefore taped without her knowledge, something that her defense would object to at her subsequent trial.

On the tape she confessed to suffocating Jennyann and James as a way of getting back at her husband after they’d argued. Her actual words to the police were ‘… I was just in a rage. I was mad. It hurt.’ Of the
suffocation
, she explained ‘I took Jennyann to bed with me and laid on her so she could not breathe. When she stopped moving I knew it was over with.’ At another juncture she said ‘I just hated him (Earl Bowen) so much for what he put me through.’ But she denied killing the two children actually fathered by him.

Sergeant Stewart had had the children’s graves bugged in case she apologised out loud for killing them, but she was always accompanied by relatives on her visits to the gravesides. Indeed, one of her aunts would speak in her defence at court. Though Johnson’s defense would criticise the sergeant’s tactics in going through Martha’s garbage to ascertain more about her lifestyle, he would later receive a citation of merit for helping break the case.

The taped confession would remain a bone of contention throughout the trial for her defence would claim that it was meaningless. They said their
vulnerable
client was easily manipulated and would say almost anything under pressure. Martha herself would claim that she lied about causing the deaths in order to go home.

Her fourth husband clearly loved her and believed in her innocence. He promised that he’d look after her so she was let out on bail with the provision that she not be left alone with any child under the age of twelve.

In court she retracted her guilty statement, saying ‘They had me convinced that I did it,’ and later ‘I didn’t really understand. I was nervous and upset.’

But her original confession was played in court and the tape showed that she was aware of exactly what she’d done and she was heard saying that she was so sorry, that ‘I knew over the years I did wrong.’ She explained on the tape that suffocating the children with her weight was the only way she could think of to get her husband to come back.

Hearing the tape, she cried - possibly because her earlier statement helped prove that she was guilty. Towards the end of the tape she wept that she was afraid to go to jail.

On the last day of the five day trial she collapsed and had to see a doctor. She wept again that she hadn’t harmed her kids. The jury - eight women and four men - didn’t believe her and she was convicted of smothering eleven-year-old Jennyann. Though police, medical
personnel and the fathers of the murdered children were in no doubt about her guilt, her fourth husband and some of her relatives continued to believe in her innocence.

Several sources suggest Martha was sentenced to the death penalty but in fact she was given a life sentence, which she immediately began serving at the Georgia Women’s Correctional Institute in Hardwick. The District Attorney would later be criticised by a defense attorney in another case for not seeking the death penalty for both Martha and another woman due to gender bias.