Killer recounts crime in video at sentencing retrial

Dressed in civilian attire and seated alongside his defense attorneys, Ernest Lee Johnson, 45, faced a projector screen Monday in the 13th Judicial Circuit Court and watched himself being interviewed by a psychologist in 2004. At the time of the interview, he was wearing a black-and-white-striped jumpsuit. On Monday, Johnson didn’t say anything as he and the rest of the courtroom watched. The video spoke for itself.

“I just waited for the last person to get out of the store,” Johnson said on the video about the final customer who left Casey’s General Store at 2200 Ballenger Lane, the night of Feb. 12, 1994. He said he wore a mask because he didn’t want to be recognized and that he entered the store to rob it because he wanted drug money. He then explained how he murdered store manager Mary Bratcher and store employees Mabel Scruggs and Fred Jones.

The video was the last piece of evidence presented to jurors on the first day of Johnson’s sentencing retrial. It was a day largely devoted to testimony by witnesses for the prosecution about the murders and the investigation that followed. Jurors, selected from Pettis County to ensure lack of familiarity with the case, will determine whether to recommend life in prison or the death penalty for Johnson. He was originally sentenced to death by lethal injection in 1995. After winning an appeal in 1998, he was again sentenced to death. In 2003, the Missouri Supreme Court granted Johnson a second retrial of the penalty phase based on a 2001 U.S. Supreme Court ruling making it illegal to execute someone with diminished mental capacity.

Defense Attorney Timothy Cisar said in his opening statement Monday that Johnson is a man “of very low intelligence” who made “the biggest mistake of his life” in murdering the three Casey’s employees.

Cisar said in an earlier interview with the Missourian that the defense planned to argue that Johnson was mentally retarded at the time of the murders.

The first day of Johnson’s retrial began before 9 a.m. Monday and ended shortly after 6 p.m. Jurors and victims’ families weren’t the only ones watching the retrial. A group of 43 Southern Boone County High School government and law students also attended on a class trip.

In the 2004 video, Johnson said he had been under the influence of cocaine on the day of the murders. He said people in the store knew him because he visited it often. He said he knew Bratcher had the key to a safe where some of the store’s money was kept. Bratcher told him she didn’t have the key, Johnson said. He said he later confronted her as she was trying to flush the key down the toilet of a store bathroom. Then, Johnson said, he lost it.

The video continued with Johnson’s description of how he attacked the victims. He said he first used a handgun to shoot Bratcher, Scruggs and Jones. He said he also used a hammer.

He said in the video, however, that he told Casey’s employees he simply wanted to rob the store, not to hurt them.

On Monday, Marilyn Stanley, Bratcher’s sister, said it was difficult to listen to the testimony being presented and to watch Johnson, who, she said, “still shows no remorse.” She said she came from Connecticut to be at this week’s trial. Stanley said she and Bratcher were very close in age and went to school together for many years.

“It’s like losing a twin,” Stanley said. She said she does not think Johnson is mentally deficient.

“He is cruel and calculated,” Stanley said about Johnson. “He is not retarded.”

On Monday, Boone County Prosecutor Kevin Crane questioned a series of witnesses about events and evidence surrounding the murders.

Crane called current and former officials from the Boone County Sheriff’s Department and Columbia Police Department to testify about their roles in investigating the scene of the murders, which include serving a search warrant at Johnson’s house on Mohawk Avenue and examining a nearby field and Indian Hills Park, where evidence was also recovered.

At one point, Crane questioned Mike Himmel, a former Columbia Police investigator who was assigned in 1994 to search the store and surrounding area for evidence, at length about “blood spatter interpretation.” Crane helped Himmel unroll a window blind on which blood had spattered during the course of the murders.

Later Monday, Crane asked that a mannequin dressed in the clothing Johnson had been wearing on the night of the murders be brought into the courtroom. Jurors watched as Himmel explained patterns of blood spatter on Johnson’s clothing. Crane also presented photos and diagrams showing various details of the crime scene.

Crane told victims’ family members at the close of the first day that they would testify today after a medical examiner’s testimony.