Nearly a year after the murder of a 93-year-old Kansas woman who lived alone over Labor Day weekend 2023, investigators have announced the arrests of two suspects, both 14-year-old girls. The governor issued an executive order offering a reward for information leading to the arrest of the killer.
The shocking news made Joanne Johnson’s son say that his mother’s alleged murder by stranger teenage girls was “inexplicable,” like “getting hit by lightning on a cloudless day,” according to KWCH.
The family found their loved one dead at her home in Augusta last year, and the report said it was clear to them that the crime was brutal and planned, even though no one knows why it happened to this day.
The Kansas Bureau of Investigation stated that two 14-year-old girls from the same town as the victim were arrested Thursday on suspicion of first-degree murder. They are being held in different juvenile detention facilities and the suspects have not yet been named. Their names would be made public if they are charged as adults, which is still not clear.
Investigators from the state didn’t say how they found the teens who were suspected, but their arrests caused a lot of trouble in the neighborhood.
“This was the worst thing that could have happened to our block and neighborhood,” neighbor Holly Randol is said to have said, shocked and “heartbroken” that “kids” killed the 93-year-old woman in her own house.
In April, Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly signed an order that said there would be a $5,000 reward for “information leading to the apprehension and conviction of any person responsible” for Johnson’s murder. This was after a case that included “a large number of interviews, multiple pieces of physical evidence, and multiple search warrants.”
Around that time, Johnson’s son was said to be shocked that an “inexplicable, brutal, senseless murder” could happen on a “peaceful, tree-lined street in the middle of a 9,000-person town.”
He told KWCH, “She was the kind of person who was always interested in other people. After just a couple of minutes of talking to you, she’d know where you were from, where you went to school, what you were doing, and what you wanted to do.” “And the next time she talked to you, she’d remember all of those things. That’s the kind of person I think a lot of us want to be.”
Joanne Johnson was a huge Kansas Jayhawks basketball fan who graduated from high school in 1947 and went on to work as a secretary at Boeing. She later got married, had two sons, and “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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