On a full day of lengthy closing arguments, the prosecutor’s rebuttal ended with two succinct sentences.
Looking at jurors in Department 2 of Solano County Superior Court, Chief Deputy District Attorney Paul Sequeira said, “She’s gone, and the case is 42 years old. Justice for DeAnna Lynn Johnson is in your hands.”
With that, he brought the three-week Marvin Ray Markle Jr. murder trial to a close Tuesday afternoon in the Vallejo courtroom of Judge Daniel Healy, who read final instructions to the 12 jurors who will determine the evolving fate of the previously convicted 59-year-old felon.
Markle is charged with the Nov. 15, 1982, strangulation and bludgeoning death of Johnson, 14, a student a Will C. Wood Junior High, whose body was found the next day alongside railroad tracks near Elmira Road in Vacaville, just blocks from her home on Royal Oaks Drive.
Sequeira was especially animated during his 30-minute rebuttal to the closing argument of Markle’s attorney, Thomas A. Barrett, chief deputy of the Alternate Defender Office, who asserted another person, not Markle, was culpable to Johnson’s brutal murder and that a fireplace poker was the likely cause of lacerations on the girl’s face.
Among his first points, Sequeira said a fireplace poker would not have cause Johnson’s skull fracture, which evidence revealed in the autopsy report showed it was more likely caused by a large rock or football-sized chunk of concrete. There was no DNA on the poker, he added.
And, Sequeira said, jurors need to sift “reasonable and unreasonable” inferences from trial testimony during deliberations and question Barrett’s assertions that a possible other suspect in the case, James Zimmerman, who lived in another Royal Oaks Drive home, the site of a beer party Johnson attended on Nov. 15, was her killer.
Her assailant was Markle, said Sequeira, who argued, “There was no accounting for where he was” after Markle, 17 years old at the time, left the party and did not want to be seen walking past Royal Oaks Drive after killing Johnson.
Recounting trial testimony, Sequeira said Markle more likely “came from the railroad tracks” and took “the secret way,” walking along a fenced-off irrigation canal, back to the party house.
He reminded jurors that Matthew Lydon, a former Vacaville police captain and now an investigator for the DA’s Office, testified that in his long career as a Vacaville officer he only encountered two people inside the canal area.
“It’s just not a place people go — unless you don’t want to be seen,” said Sequeira.
And when did Zimmerman kill Johnson, as Barrett said, when no one sees him leave the party house and the party ends about 9 p.m., he wondered, adding that Zimmerman, shirtless and shoeless, and another man, Joseph Silva, later left the house in a vehicle to buy beer, then the car ran out of gas on the way back to the house.
The deeply experienced longtime prosecutor then reminded jurors that blood analysis of the boots Markle wore on Nov. 15 yielded Johnson’s DNA and her fingernail clippings, according to a state Department of Justice criminalist, also yielded Markle’s DNA.
Several witnesses, including Markle’s sister, Melissa Markle, testified that over the years they heard Markle, suicidal and guilt-ridden, admit to killing Johnson, including times when he was believed to be high on methamphetamine, Sequeira said.
Those statements were “shocking” to hear, he said, adding and pacing behind and in front of the lectern just steps away the jury box, that “brief statements,” like “I killed somebody,” are short and, thus, easily remembered.
“Either the defendant’s the unluckiest guy or he’s stone guilty,” said Sequeira before showing what he called “one exhibit,” to the jurors, a color photo of Johnson.
Early on in his closing argument, Sequeira also reminded jurors of statements made by Dr. Harold Brazil, a forensic pathologist, a transcript read in court. Sequeira read the prosecutor’s part and Deputy District Attorney Barry Shapiro read Brazil’s statements.
Sequeira showed a half-dozen or more graphic and grisly color autopsy photos of Johnson’s body and head, the latter covered in blood spatter, on the day the autopsy was performed, Nov. 17, 1982.
He called the trial “a journey through time in this case,” and called Johnson’s killing “first-degree murder,” that Markle intended to kill her and “made a decision and killed in two different ways,” alluding to strangulation and the bludgeoning.
Over the past several years, as the case wound its way through the county court, trial dates more than once were assigned, then vacated.
As previously reported, in February 2017, Markle pleaded not guilty to one count of murder in connection to Johnson’s death when he was arrested a month earlier at Kern Valley State Prison on suspicion of murder and use of a deadly weapon. At the time of his arrest, he was serving an 80-year sentence for the 2001 murder of a Biggs woman, a fact not likely to be introduced during the ongoing trial.
It was the death of Shirley Ann Pratt, 41, in Butte County, that led to Markle’s arrest in the Vacaville case. On the morning of Oct. 12, 2001, Pratt was found naked in the Oroville Wildlife area, dead from an apparent gunshot wound to the face. In July 2013, the Butte County Sheriff’s Department officers arrested Markle, who was later tried and convicted. He has remained in either state prison or jail custody ever since.
In the Vacaville case, according to court records, on the night of Nov. 15, 1982, Johnson attended a party at a home on Royal Oaks Drive, up the street from her family’s residence. She was later reported missing after her brother, another party attendee, returned home and discovered she was not there and was out past her 8 p.m. curfew.
The next day, her body was found by a Southern Pacific Railroad employee near the tracks along Elmira Road.
The Solano County District Attorney’s Office filed its complaint against Markle on July 31, 2017, and a preliminary hearing was held on Jan. 16 and 17, 2018.
If convicted of the murder charge, Markle, who remains in Solano County Jail without bail on a state prison hold, faces 25 years to life in prison, with the possibility of more time for being a previously convicted felon.
Jury deliberations begin at 8:30 a.m. Wednesday in Department 2 in the Justice Building in Vallejo.