Bill Osinski - Guilty By Popular Demand: A True Story of Small-Town Injustice

Who killed Todd and Annette?

When I first arrived in Logan, Ohio, in the near-zero cold of an early January morning in 1984, I assumed the state of Ohio had discovered the answer to that question. It was the first day of the trial of Dale N. Johnston, the man charged with those two unspeakably savage murders, so I expected Id soon be hearing some strong evidence against him. The case had been cloaked in the dark of fear and mystery for more than a year; now all would be brought into the light of the court of justice.

As a reporter covering the trial for the Akron Beacon Journal, I was there because I had a job to do. I had a reserved seat in the small second-floor courtroom in the Hocking County Courthouse. I was a little unsettled, though, as I took my seat and saw the eager faces of the people packing the spectator section. What had compelled these people to line up outside before dawn? Were they really so anxious to hear the lurid details of how the boy and girl next door had been killed and butchered?

From the start, it was clear the investigators and prosecutors considered Johnston to be a violent sexual deviant. According to the states theory of the crimes, he had conducted an incestuous relationship with his eighteen-year-old stepdaughter Annette and then killed her and her boyfriend Todd in a jealous rage. After shooting them, the state charged, Johnston had compounded the horror by dismembering and mutilating the corpses, dumping the torsos into the Hocking River at a spot less than a mile from that very courthouse, and, finally, burying the remaining body parts in the middle of a field of corn planted in a tract of river-bottom land.

I waited through nearly three weeks of trial testimony for the prosecutors to present evidence of how Johnston had committed these crimes. On the last day, I was still waiting. I listened as the trial prosecutor gave a histrionic and, I thought, totally nonsensical closing argument. As an unbiased professional observer, I remember thinking to myself, It couldnt have happened that way. He ended his summation with the macabre statement: Murder is the ultimate form of incest. To me, it was as if he were saying: We suspect this man of molesting his stepdaughter, so he surely must have killed her. I was more than a little shocked when, in short order, the three judges hearing the case agreed with him and convicted Johnston.

I stayed on the case. Back in those days, investigative journalism was still a significant part of the newspaper business, and so my paper supported me in my desire to examine the case more closely. I was able to spend significant parts of the next two years working the story. I wrote a series of articles pointing out the weaknesses in the states case, and I wrote a long article about another man who had been in the Logan area at the time of the murdersa convicted killer who specialized in dismembering his victims. I argued that he made a much better suspect than Johnston.

I left Ohio in 1987 for another reporting job in Florida, so I missed covering the next milestone in the case: Johnstons successful appeal of the verdict and his release from prison after five years on death row. I was not surprised to learn that Hocking County prosecutors refused to reopen the murder investigations, insisting that Johnston was really the killer. I was again shocked, however, when Johnston lost his civil suit for wrongful imprisonment, despite his presentation of new evidence that supported his alibi. The state of Ohio had prevailed, arguing that Johnston still might be guilty and so should not be compensated.

Around that time, I started working on the manuscript that ultimately became this book. The story was compelling, but the ending was too murky. I put the project aside and moved to Atlanta, where I spent the final sixteen of my thirty-six years as a newspaper journalist.

Many times during those years, I fell asleep at night wondering if Id ever find out who had killed those two kids. I hold to the Christian belief that all is revealed when we pass from this life to the next, so I took some consolation in the hope the truth would ultimately be made known to me. The only hitch was, Id have to die first.

Thankfully, I was still alive on an otherwise unremarkable day in 2008, when I received a phone call from a woman I hadnt heard from in nearly twenty years. Hello, Precious! said Dolly Shaner, one of my sources during my investigations of the Logan murders. Dolly is an effusive woman who moves quickly to familiarities with her friends, but there seemed to be an added note of joy in her voice. Her sources within police agencies in central Ohio had passed along some big news: there was something stirring in the long-cold case. Someone was going to be charged with the killings, she said, and that someone was not Dale Johnston.