Two retired Vacaville police officers on Wednesday recalled the early days of the investigation into the November 1982 killing of De Anna Lynn Johnson, 14, of Vacaville, as testimony resumed in the third day of trial for Marvin Ray Markle, Jr., who is charged with murder in the case.
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Joseph Munoz, 88, a longtime Vacaville resident who worked the police department for 28 years, said he came upon Johnson’s badly beaten body on Nov. 16, a day after the Will C. Wood Junior High student left a party at a Royal Oaks Drive home, just down the block from her own home.
“I could tell she was a teenager,” said Munoz, who, seated in the witness box in Department 2 of Solano County Superior Court in Vallejo, needed an audio-assist device to hear questions from Chief Deputy District Attorney Paul Sequeira.
“I was working off a missing person’s report,” he said, adding, “I was already thinking it was the missing person.”
Johnson’s body was found on or near the railroad tracks along Elmira Road, close to her home. Investigators believe she was strangled and bludgeoned to death with a rock or large piece of broken concrete.
Sequeira showed Munoz a half-dozen or more color photos of body’s location, an area at the time rife with sagebrush, weeds, debris and garbage. Sequeira also showed him a close-up of her head, and Munoz confirmed he saw “major injuries to her head” and that she appeared “to have been pushed down with a lot of force.”
He and another investigator also searched for other evidence that may have been used to kill her, he said.
Continuing to build his case after two previous days of testimony, Sequeira then showed him a photo of a concrete block with blood on it and other photos. They included photos of Johnson’s hands showing blood spatter, her hand and fingernails, one of her palms with blood on it, and a photo of a hand with a ring on it.
Johnson’s mother, in the missing person’s report, said her daughter was wearing her 1963 high school graduation ring, noted Munoz.
Standing next to the witness stand, Sequeira also unboxed a medium-sized rock with blood on it but did not remove it and showed it to Munoz.
From the location of Johnson’s body, the retired officer said he could see her home.
As the investigation proceeded, Munoz began to interview several of the party attendees, adding that in the days afterward he received “quite a few phone calls and tips.”
Munoz continued his work on the case two years later, he testified, and also worked on the case for the entirety of his last year of police service, 1991.
In his cross-examination, Chief Deputy Alternate Defender Thomas A. Barrett returned to previous questioning about a fireplace poker that may have been used in the killing. The poker’s configuration, he has asserted, is consistent with markings on Johnson’s face, and the poker belonged to someone at the Royal Oaks Drive party house. Her body was exhumed in 1984 to compare the facial wounds with the poker.
During the afternoon session, retired Vacaville police officer Don Waller, who worked at the department for 28 years and was a detective during the Johnson murder investigation, reviewed a transcript of a Nov. 20 interview he conducted after the killing.
The interview with a male party attendee indicated that Johnson left the party “with three or four people” around 8 p.m. because of her 8 p.m. curfew.
Later that evening, according to person Waller interviewed he said he remembered Marvin Ray Markle Jr., known as “Ziggy” to everyone at the time, was seen with blood on his hands after returning to the party.
Markle told him that he had to climb the barbed wire fence behind the home after to get out of Putah Creek Canal area. Questioned why he was in the canal area, Markle reportedly replied, “I was looking for another person.”
A day or two later, Waller spotted Markle riding a bicycle, then asked him he could obtain the clothes he wore on Nov. 15, the night of the party, and if Markle, 17, and a student at County High, Vacaville Unified’s continuation high school at the time, would submit to an interview.
Markle agreed and Waller went inside Markle’s home and spotted some tennis shoes that “were still wet.”
Waller said Markle told him he washed the shoes after spilling some oil on them.
Sequeira then opened yet another evidence box and removed the tennis shoes, placing them atop the witness stand’s counter. As he did so, Markle, clad in a light gray shirt over tan slacks, his head shaved and sporting an all-white goatee and mustache, leaned to his left at the defense table to get a long look at the shoes.
Judge Daniel Healy, who is presiding over the case, previously told jurors that the trial may take several more weeks.
Over the past several years, as the case wound its way through the county court, trials 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 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 county jail custody ever since.
In the Vacaville case, according to court records, on the night of Nov. 15, 1982, Johnson was first reported missing after her brother, another party attendee, returned home and discovered she was not there and was out past her 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 found guilty at trial, Markle, who remains in Solano County Jail without bail on a state prison hold, faces 25 years to life, with the possibility of more time for being a previously convicted felon.
The trial resumes at 8:30 a.m. Monday in Department 2 of the Justice Building in Vallejo.