For some time, Richard Johnson’s estranged son, Chris, who appears in several sections in Met Her on the Mountain, has been working on a memoir, How I Survived the Man Who Met Her on the Mountain.
The book, a searing account of life with Richard Johnson, is now out and available on Amazon ( https://www.amazon.com/How-Survived-Man-Who-Mountain/dp/B0G1L535DV/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0 ).
“My name is Christopher Johnson, the son of a man who would terrorize me for the first twelve years of my life,” he writes.
“For most of my life, I lived in the shadow of a man whose name still makes my blood run cold – Richard Johnson…. [To] me he was the devil that wore my father’s face. His violence shaped my childhood, his choices destroyed lives, and his silence buried truths that took decades to uncover.”
Chris’s purpose, he writes, is “to set the record straight – to ensure the truth about Richard Johnson is known once and for all…. Writing this book has been like walking naked across shattered glass.”
Chris accepts my theory of the Nancy Morgan case, that his father was one of a group of Hot Springs men who kidnapped, raped and murdered Nancy Morgan. But the case is covered mainly in a single chapter, and not much is added to what we know. This account is heavier on emotion than providing new facts about the murder.
One new fact for me was that then Madison County Sheriff John Ledford told me that he thought Richard was guilty at the same time he was telling Chris that he wasn’t.
However, other chapters deal in greater detail with his witnessing the horrendous poisoning of his little sister Joyce, who at age five was murdered by her father. Chris took the witness stand in Richard’s murder trial, which resulted in a guilty verdict which earned the father a 30-year prison sentence, which he is still serving.
Hot Springs attorney Steven Huff, who may have saved Chris’s life in the days following Joyce’s death, by removing him from Richard’s custody, is well portrayed in the memoir, as is former prosecutor and county commissioner Jim Baker. Steven is the son of the late Joe Huff, who successfully defended the man I called in my book “Ed Walker,” who Sheriff E. Y. Ponder tried to frame for Nancy Morgan’s death.
Chris’s accounts of his beatings as a boy provides more insight – if any is needed – into Richard’s explosive violence, the essence of his evil. In the process, Chris offers a graphic account of how it felt to be raised in the house of a monster.
Sometimes the prose is overheated, almost purple, which is completely understandable.
Ultimately, this book is about human resilience. Chris describes himself as a survivor, rather than a victim. He has had a hard life. Apart from the trauma of an abusive childhood, Joyce’s murder and testifying, Chris has endured a stroke, Huntington’s disease, and divorce. He remarried and battled back to become an EMT with the Marshall Fire Department and the Buncombe County Rescue Squad.
“I constructed a life of love rather than of violence,” he writes. “Every word written here is a piece of truth wrestled from memory, from nightmares, from the long echo of fear.”