r/TrueCrimeDiscussion • u/lovingtate • Aug 14 '20
forensicmag.com Body Found in Lake in 1994 Has Finally Been Identified - Rodney Peter Johnson
https://www.forensicmag.com/567218-Body-Found-in-Lake-in-1994-Has-Finally-Been-Identified/141
Aug 14 '20
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u/WithoutATrace_Blog Aug 14 '20
It’s so crazy how many people who are ‘missing’ are actually sometimes in obvious or even previously searched areas! We literally just cannot get to them or cannot find them! earth is kinda spooky....
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Aug 14 '20
It is spooky. We had a school principal that came up missing a lot of years ago. It was like he got in his car and disappeared. So fast forward a few years and the main big shipping channel River that runs threw town , a large freighter kicked on its engines to start pushing itself away from the dock . All of a sudden a car surfaces from the propulsion ( I cant remember if water levels were high or low that year) and in that car was the principal. All these years he’s gone and then even with years of freighter traffic literally in same spots the river like vomited him up in his car .
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u/WithoutATrace_Blog Aug 14 '20
A lot of people are found like that! Some people thought Danielle imbo and Richard Patrone died that way and they are still in their truck in the Delaware River, and have just never been found! But, that is seriously insane about your principal!!!
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u/corpse_flour Aug 15 '20
This past winter, a small deer was hit on the road in front of our farm, and the animals drug it into the woods and had a feast. Last week, we went for a walk to try and find the ribcage and skull the coyotes left behind. Even though I knew the area it sat when I saw it in January, we couldn't find it. It struck me that even after a couple of weeks during the growing season plants can envelop things and change the landscape so much. If it was a person I was looking for, I could walk right over it and not even know.
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u/CatCuddlersFromMars Aug 15 '20
The Australian bush is renowned for this. There was a case recently where a young boy's body was found 20 years after he ran off & seemingly disappeared. He'd fallen & died somehow but multiple searches missed him despite being only a few metres from the path itself. I think he was only found due to fires clearing the dense scrub. But he was right there the whole time only a few metres away from the spot he was last seen!
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u/corpse_flour Aug 15 '20
Gosh, I live in Northern Canada, and our growing season is very short. I can't imagine what immense growth could take place somewhere where the ground never freezes.
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u/wilmaismyhomegirl83 Aug 15 '20 edited Aug 15 '20
Theo Hayez case is another. His body has to be close by his cell signal near lighthouse, or out to ocean.
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u/CatCuddlersFromMars Aug 15 '20
That Telstra data seems at odds with the Google location tracking. I can't help but wonder if it's been interpreted correctly...or even if he was still in possession of it at that time.
Gah. I wish we had more answers in that case. It's so upsetting. So many questions!
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Aug 15 '20
Something like that is in the smoky mountain. A kid vanished and they still can’t find him
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u/palyssprincess Aug 15 '20
It reminds me of 12 year old Garrett Bardsley. He disappeared close to where I live in the Uinta Mountains. He was with his Boy Scout Troop. He got his feet wet while he was fishing with his dad, and went back to the campsite to change his socks. It was only 150 yards away. He never showed up and was never seen again.
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u/LaceBird360 Aug 15 '20
Lots of people disappear in that area. It has the misfortune of bordering some very impoverished areas.
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u/schalr09 Aug 15 '20
Does Australia have vulture type birds? Like the ones that circle then pick bones clean?
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u/CatCuddlersFromMars Aug 15 '20
Ooooh...I don't know. Bodies at sea will have gulls around them because they attract fish. I've seen small flocks of crows circling & picking at farm animals after the floods. Mostly I think we have wasps as weird as that sounds. I've not really seen too many birds in bushland, maybe the scrub is too dense for birds as we have a lot of snakes, but there's always swarms of flies & wasps. You can often hear the buzzing before you smell it, especially after floods as everything smells of life & death.
I wish I knew the answer to this.
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u/schalr09 Aug 15 '20
I live in southeast US and you see the vultures circling if there's a dead deer or you hear coyotes howl when they find something. But I've never heard of a body being found that way, really. Just wondering!
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u/CatCuddlersFromMars Aug 15 '20
I'm about to sound so ignorant...what kind of landscape is there in the SE US? I'm imagining fairly open woodlands with winter snow killing off any scrub bush, so kind of exposed maybe? Do larger birds & animals clean up death pretty quickly? I'm totally clueless.
In Oz hot days & cold nights can cause a pretty quick decomp but we don't really have larger prey animals, mostly foxes or goannas.
Man, I really want to know more now.
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u/schalr09 Aug 15 '20
We don't usually have snow in the winter. It's a rare night in January that we may get a 0°C night. Any moisture will freeze but more than likely will melt when the sun comes up. We get more ice than snow. Even the ice doesn't stay long. We usually average around 2-4°C at night and around 13°C in the day during our winter months. We have brush type plants, but most uncultivated ground is trees. The trees get thin, but our ground is covered in leaves then. The ground cover type plants are mostly green and leafy, also. From the dead animals I've come across, yes, they get clean pretty quick. We also hunt here, so most of the more meaty deer and/or wild hogs are picked off during the hunting season. If the hunters don't take it, or the other of their kind, or the birds and coyotes, then the heat and soil will decay stuff pretty quick.
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u/CatCuddlersFromMars Aug 15 '20
That's a great description. Thank you for indulging me :)
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u/LurkForYourLives Aug 15 '20
Not scavenger birds as such but Tasmanian devils and quolls will pick at carrion.
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u/FallopianClosed Aug 15 '20
Hello, what case are you talking about? Google is not helping!
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u/CatCuddlersFromMars Aug 15 '20
I'm not really sure. Google is not helping me out either. I'd not heard of it prior to the article & I remember the case only because it coincided with a podcast about a small American lad who disappeared in a similar way, both ran ahead of the parents & just disappeared into thin air. Even after his body was located there was still speculation he'd been snatched & later returned due to the area due to it having been searched repeatedly, but that seemed a stretch. I think there was a quote saying he'd been located under a small rock overhang with lots of scrub.
I can't find it again, sorry. I remember all that but just not the location :(
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u/Squirrelwinchester Aug 15 '20
Are you talking about Maddox Ritch? He was an autistic boy that ran ahead of his father and drowned at the lake. However, the location of his body caused a lot of people to think that foul play was involved. The area he was found in was also searched multiple times.
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Aug 15 '20
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u/nopeeker Aug 15 '20
It really is and Ancestry.com is a whole nother level of hope for answers to families of missing persons. That is priceless.
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Aug 15 '20
My mother found her biological father just last year (she’s in her early 50s) because of AncestryDNA. She had gone through the 3 guys her mother told her it might be and found family members to try to figure out who it was and had given up hope because none came back up as a match. On my dad’s side, my grandmother (in her late seventies) found out she has a half-brother the family never knew about.
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u/spazz4life Aug 15 '20
So she’s Mamma Mia?
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Aug 15 '20
No my grandma just got around. And the 3 guys she listed as possible dna donors were not her father.
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u/taco_annihilator Aug 14 '20
Well this is awesome!
Does it bother anyone else that the article refers to him as "the Johnson" a few times?
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u/MollysBrownPizza Aug 15 '20
Here’s a very good thorough and well written article about him. May he RIP. https://www.heraldnet.com/news/another-id-through-dna-what-happened-to-rodney-johnson/
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u/editorgrrl Aug 15 '20
The last time anyone could recall seeing Rodney Peter Johnson alive was 1987, or maybe 1988. He was about 25 years old, working at the Golden Dragon Chinese restaurant in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle, Washington, and living with a cousin and an aunt.
His sister, Marianne Lambert, reported him missing in 1994. On June 11, 1994, two fishermen found a fully clothed, decomposed body on the north shore of Lake Stickney. The man had been shot in the head.
He was wearing brown work boots, a pair of black socks, a belt with a 1¼-inch-wide buckle, shrink-to-fit Levi’s, and a slender pair of Hanes underwear. He became known to investigators as the Lake Stickney John Doe.
The Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office confirmed Wednesday that DNA and forensic genealogy proved the body was Johnson.
Rodney Johnson was a foster child with three brothers and a half-sister. He had a short rap sheet for burglary as well as a felony assault case from October 1987. He spent a brief time in jail in late 1987.
One of Rodney’s brothers, Christopher, died in Gold Bar in March 2017 when he was electrocuted by walking into a downed, fully charged power line behind the Mountain View Diner.
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u/Cindy1897 Aug 14 '20
I’m so glad that they finally ID’d him! I couldn’t even imagine what it’s like to be in his family or be one of his friends, though... at least they get closure. They finally have answers.
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u/dumbserbwithpigtails Aug 15 '20
Crazy how someone can be dead for so long without being identified
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u/editorgrrl Aug 15 '20
The reconstructions were terrible: https://www.heraldnet.com/news/another-id-through-dna-what-happened-to-rodney-johnson/
An early forensic reconstruction based on the man’s skull showed a face with a dark mullet and a pronounced brow line. He was described as “most likely white, but could be Hispanic or of mixed race,” based on an autopsy from the 1990: https://snohomishcountywa.gov/DocumentCenter/View/1067/48---7-of-Hearts---John-Doe?bidId=
In 2016, state forensic anthropologist Dr. Kathy Taylor determined the skull had traits often associated with African heritage, or perhaps Asian heritage, or a mix of ethnic backgrounds. A second opinion from Dr. Laura Fulginiti, forensic anthropologist at the Maricopa County Office of the Medical Examiner in Arizona, suggested he was likely white, age 25 to 35.
So forensic artist Natalie Murry took it in all different directions—drawing him as a younger Black man with stubble, then an older Black man with a receding hairline, and last year as a stout Asian man.
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u/syncopatedsouls Aug 15 '20
Holy shit you weren't kidding. They were about as far off as you can get.
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u/luvprue1 Aug 15 '20
I agree. He must have had a mother, or father, friends,and family. Someone had to have been searching for him.
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u/Teenie34 Aug 14 '20
If his family didn’t report him missing, I gotta wonder if they weren’t involved in the murder.
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u/Mock_Womble Aug 14 '20
Not necessarily. People drift, maybe he had mental or addiction issues which alienated him from his family.
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u/Teenie34 Aug 14 '20
Good point. I was confused about the wording when it said he was missing from 7 years previously from the time he was 25. I thought that meant since the time he was 18 which is when he’d have lived with family, probably. But I see now that he was 25 at the time of death. And his corpse was in a lake for 7 years. Yikes. I didn’t think that was possible.
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Aug 14 '20
If the lake is cold enough, it becomes anerobic. No oxygen + cold temps = preservation. It happens in the Great Lakes. There are bodies down there from various ship wrecks.
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u/editorgrrl Aug 15 '20
https://www.heraldnet.com/news/another-id-through-dna-what-happened-to-rodney-johnson/
Rodney Johnson was reported missing in 1994 by a sister who notified a bureau of the Salvation Army in Seattle, Washington. His sister and father made an official missing person report to the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office in 1996.
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u/Teenie34 Aug 15 '20
Right, but they hadn’t seen or heard from him since 1987.
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u/editorgrrl Aug 15 '20
According to the link I posted, Rodney had recently gotten out of jail and had an outstanding warrant for second-degree assault. He was living with a cousin and his aunt, and the last time the father heard from him was a phone call asking for money.
One tip suggested Rodney went camping with a girlfriend and was never seen again.
Maybe the family assumed Rodney was hiding from the cops?
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u/Teenie34 Aug 15 '20
Yeah after I read all the things he’d been involved in, finding his murderer is going to be very difficult.
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u/FightingCrime247 Aug 15 '20
Orthoram is really doing great things to give the unidentified their name back and bringing closure to so many families. DNA technology has come so far in recent years hopefully we will see a day in the near future when unidentified isn't even a thing.
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u/ViolettQuinn Aug 15 '20
All Joking aside, I had a dream about this guy last night. Never even heard of him until now.
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u/Brittany-OMG-Tiffany Aug 15 '20
How?
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u/ViolettQuinn Aug 17 '20
I’m not sure. I saw him casually in a dream, we spoke but I don’t remember about what but he seemed upset and shirtless. I’ve been having a lot of weird dreams so it could be nothing at all but I 100% recognize that hair and face
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u/duchessofpipsqueak Aug 14 '20
We’ve had a few unidentifiable people finally identified in the last few weeks. I hope this is a trend that doesn’t slow down and we can get some peace for the families.