Richard Lewis Johnson, the Madison County, N.C., man who confessed to me twice that he was part of a group of five local men who kidnapped, raped and murdered federal anti-poverty worker Nancy Dean Morgan in 1970, is dead. He died Jan. 24 of what are believed to be natural causes, according to Keith Acree, communications director for the North Carolina Department of Adult Corrections. He was 77.
At the time of his death Johnson was in the chronic medical unit at the Scotland Correctional Institute in Laurinburg. He was serving a 30-years-to-life sentence for the horrific poisoning death of his five-year-old daughter Joyce in 1984, in a failed attempt to win back his estranged wife. In his decades in the N.C. prison system Johnson had numerous disciplinary infractions.
Johnson’s admission to me of how the attack unfolded formed the climax of my book, Met Her on the Mountain: The Murder of Nancy Morgan.However, local and state law enforcement, who were roundly criticized for their investigation at the time and after, did not accept my conclusion or Johnson’s confession.
While Johnson confessed to being part of the group that waylaid Morgan on her way home from a late-night dinner with a fellow VISTA worker, he remained steadfastly silent on his personal role in the abduction following Morgan’s seizure. Numerous times I asked him in person and correspondence – without success – about what he did in the gang rape and hogtieing of Morgan, whose body was found in her government car near the Appalachian Trail. His last, rambling letter to me was written on January 3, but there would be no further dying declaration or detailed, deathbed account of his participation.
Richard Johnson was part of an extensive, informal network of informers, mostly petty thieves and vandals, who reported to longtime Madison County Sheriff E. Y. Ponder. In exchange, the sheriff offered leniency to the informers. At his urging, another member of the network, Johnny Waldroup, implicated Nancy Morgan’s VISTA dinner partner the night of her abduction. However, a jury rejected Waldroup’s testimony and found the anti-poverty worker not guilty of Morgan’s kidnapping, rape and murder.
Johnson, whose father Leroy Johnson was a Ponder ally and chief of police in Hot Springs, told me that while Morgan was being held by the men the sheriff, then out of office, called Leroy Johnson and left a message saying that if Richard and his friends had the young woman, they should free her.
Several months ago, Richard Johnson was the subject of a memoir (see below) written by his son Christopher, How I Survived the Man Who Met Her on the Mountain. In it, Richard was portrayed as an unremittingly evil monster, as well as an abusive husband and parent.
“The years have taught me the futility of vengeance but at least he’s not breathing our oxygen and contributing carbon dioxide to our atmosphere. I thank the tax payers who paid to keep us safe from this deranged creature for all of these years.” George Morgan, Nancy’s brother