In the interest of due journalistic diligence for this piece for the North Carolina Assembly ( My 50-Year Obsession with an Unsolved Mountain Murder), I visited Richard Johnson earlier this week at the Nash Correctional Institute in eastern North Carolina, a trip not without trepidation. The facility is high security, surrounded by triple coils of razor wire. The visiting room was bright and almost antiseptically clean. Johnson, dressed in gray, two piece prison garb, seemed more subdued than on my previous visits. His health is not good — he has metastatic prostate cancer and multiple stents in his heart.
This time he was more forthcoming in his account of Morgan’s abduction and rape, and his role in both.
The first she drove past the French Broad River en route to fellow VISTA “Ed Walker,'” Johnson said “we all knowed her,” Johnson had seen her at the restored Hot Springs movie theater. The decision to wait for her was “a spur of the moment thing.” He said that after Morgan was boxed in, Johnson got behind the wheel of her gray, government-owned Plymouth as they drove in a caravan to the farm on Mill Ridge. There, all of them fondled her, and then used the car to drive into Tennessee to buy beer. On their return, all of them — including Johnson — raped her on a detached car hood that was on the floor of the barn. At the time, there was animosity and no remorse for what they did to Morgan, he said. “She thought she was high and mighty.”
The next evening, they all had sex with her again.
When Sheriff E. Y. Ponder, who was out of office, called Hot Springs Police Chief Leroy Johnson, Richard picked up the phone. “I’m not asking you, I’m telling you,” Ponder told the son. “You need to get her to a place she can be found.” Johnson suggested the logging road where Morgan was ultimately found, but said he did not load her into the Plymouth, or accompany those who did.
Despite what they told me, the two SBI agents who reinvestigated they case after meeting with me in Orlando, Johnson said that when they visited him in Central Prison, they did not swab him for a DNA sample.
By the time we spoke, Johnson was in the 41st year of his twenty years to life sentence for poisoning his daughter. I asked if he expected to be paroled, he said, “I ain’t looking to get out.”
I asked Nancy’s younger brother George for a comment for the Assembly. This is his response:
“Mark,
I want you to know that all of your efforts to resolve my sister, Nancy’s murder case are appreciated by my family and by me. The cause of justice has been and is being served through your tireless searching, researching and publishing that increased the public’s awareness. My sister was never one to seek revenge but she knew that protecting life requires that criminals are brought to justice.
George Morgan”