Murdered Vacaville Teen De Anna Johnson Remembered with High School Diploma

By Kathy Keatley Garvey
Special to Dixon Patch

De Anna Lynn Johnson, 14, left her Royal Oaks Drive home in Vacaville at 6 p.m., Monday, Nov. 15 to attend a party in her neighborhood, only seven houses from her home. Her 17-year-old  brother also attended the party.

When she did not return home by her 9:30 p.m. curfew, her worried mother telephoned police.

The next day two railroad workers discovered her badly bludgeoned, fully-clothed body near the railroad tracks in a field off Elmira Road, a site visible from her family home.

At the time, De Anna was a ninth grade student at then Will C. Wood Junior High School.  She would have graduated with the Vacaville High School Class of 1986.

The class graduated without her and just marked its 25-year reunion.

Now she is a graduate.

Vacaville High School principal Ed Santopadre recently presented her uncle, Ed Auld of Walnut Creek, with her high school diploma at a five-class reunion (1984, ’85, ’86, ’87 and ’88) at the Pippo Ranch on Cantelowe Road.

Santopadre told the crowd that the worst thing about being principal is “to lose a student.”

Gratefully accepting the diploma, Auld said the presentation “gives us, her family, a very warm feeling that she has not been forgotten.”

The diploma reads: “This certifies that De Anna Lynn Johnson has satisfactorily completed a four year course of study at Vacaville High School and is therefore awarded this diploma.”

Kevin Mauser, a member of the Vaca High Class of 1986 who attended the reunion, said he was pleased to see her remembered.

“She was in my English class when we were ninth graders at Will C. Wood Junior High School, which later became Will C. Wood High School,” he said. “I didn’t know her that well. She was the cute girl who sat in the corner.”

“I remember the day her seat became empty,” he said.

Mauser recalled riding the school bus and seeing “a police presence” along Elmira Road, the morning her body was found. “We passed right by there on our way to school,” he said, adding “school started at 8:30.”

Mauser, who later married and raised four daughters, said he worried about his own girls when they became teenagers “because of what happened to De Anna.”

 “I’ve never understood all that DNA technology, and why there were no arrests and convictions,” Mauser said.

Will C. Wood football player Tony Wilson, then 16, was best friends with De Anna’s brother, Ron, and considered De Anna “my little sister.”

“She lived on the north corner of Royal Oaks Drive and I lived on the south corner,” he said. “De Anna was that person everyone wishes was a sister or friend.

She was a very, very sweet girl who did not have any enemies. None. She never spoke ill of anyone. She was just an amazing girl. She was that sister, that friend, that classmate that everyone loved.”

“I miss her to this day,” he said. “When I see a rainbow, I think of De Anna. She loved rainbows. I wish someone would come forward and give her family some closure.”

After De Anna’s murder, “the whole town changed,” Wilson said. “Everything changed. People were scared to go out, hang out, do the things together we always did. And we wondered ‘Who’s next?’

“To hurt a child—and she was a child—“is the worst crime on the planet,” Wilson said. “I don’t know what would possess someone to harm a sweet, innocent girl like her. She was 14, beautiful on the inside and out. Everyone’s dream child.”

““People at the party know who killed her,” Wilson said. “What is the fear that prevents people from going to the police? What are they scared of?”

The homicide case has never been solved, despite a $50,000 reward offered by the State Attorney General’s office. The autopsy report indicates she was strangled, beaten and bludgeoned about the head.

 “It’s still an open and active case,” said Vacaville Police Sgt. Matt Lydon, who has been working on the case for the past 10 years. He and his partner Jeff Higby, both assigned to the homicide investigation in 2001 (Higby retired this year in July) interviewed hundreds of people, some from throughout the nation.

 “We continue to monitor people and their activities,” Lydon said.

The investigation, Lydon said, initially focused on four persons of interest, and now has narrowed to one. He said anyone with information should call him at (707) 449-5236.

Vacaville Mayor Steve Hardy said he is “deeply saddened that the case has not been solved to date. Until and if the case is solved, the parents and many of De Anna’s dearest friends will always want a solution to this awful crime.”

“I am surprised that a corroborating witness has not come forward after more than 25 years that would allow law enforcement to solve this case,” Hardy said. “I recall that there were one or two suspects that really stood out, and yet law enforcement could not bring the killer or killers to justice.  DNA evidence has come to be so much more dependable with latest scientific evaluation of evidence.  I am most hopeful that a team of officers will be able to solve this as a cold case.”

Ed Auld remembers De Anna Lynn Johnson as a little girl. “De Anna and my daughter were first cousins and about the same age and used to run around in the backyard together,” he said. “They used to go to their grandmother’s house—my mother’s house--in Truckee in the winter and play in the snow. Being little girls, they liked to dress the same. Their grandmother used to make clothes for them.”

De Anna’s birthday (May 24) and the anniversary of her death are difficult for the family, he said. “We don’t have the option of forgetting.”

Her friends and family described her as a bright, kind and generous girl who worshipped at St. Mary’s Catholic Church, played baseball, loved the color purple, enjoyed writing poetry, and loved little children—she would babysit for free. She hated injustice and any form of suffering. Her ambition: to become a social worker to help troubled teens.

In words read at her memorial last year at St. Mary’s Church, her mother, Ginger Dimple, said “she loved little kids and puppies.  She loved adventure, picnics, outdoors, skiing, camping, swimming, baseball and eating pizza.  She liked to make doughnut holes, cakes and cookies.” Like a typical 14-year-old, De Anna “talked endlessly on the phone, enjoyed eating out, loved to shop for clothes, and saved all her birthday cards.”

“We all miss her and still would like to know why someone chose to take her from us,” Dimpel wrote. “We have tried to seek justice, but to no avail.  The person or persons responsible are no more than lowly cowards who hide behind the silence of a little girl taken so tragically from us.  We have faith though, that they will one day be judged by the highest power and justice will prevail.”

An estimated 30 to 35 pre-teens, teens and young adults attended the party.  Many continue to live in Vacaville. Other have moved to Dixon, Oroville, Biggs, Stockton, Bakersfield and out of state, sources said. 

At age 14, De Anna stood five-feet, two inches tall, weighed about 100 pounds, and had shoulder-length blond hair and hazel eyes.  Today she would have been 43.

“I’m sure that today, she would have looked like her classmates who attended the reunion,” Auld said.

Her childhood friend, Mary Borchers of Vacaville, who shared a school locker and overnighters with De Anna, remembers that “we did each other’s hair, played dress-up, swam in the pool and watched movies—typical things that 12 to 14-year-old girls do.”

The case is fraught with faded memories, wild theories, vicious rumors, false assumptions, faulty recollections and downright lies that have played out on the Internet, sources said. Some who attended the party or worked on the case are deceased.

Over the last 29 years, the De Anna Johnson homicide case has generated an intensive and integrated law enforcement investigation; pleas to the district attorney’s office and State Attorney General’s Office; widespread news coverage and display ads; reward posters on city buses and downtown streets; letters to the news media; letters to nationally syndicated TV shows; two grand jury investigations; an exhumation of the body; hundreds of interviews; death threats; an arrest (murder charges were later dismissed); a lawsuit against the city from the suspect and his family; psychic readings from California and Texas; a Facebook page; a Vacaville City Council proclamation; and more recently, memorials on the anniversaries of her birthday and death, both coordinated by Borchers.  

“I’m keeping De Anna’s memory alive,” Borchers said. “Recently I was told that I am ticking off a lot of people by what I’m doing. No matter who this may bother or upset, I will continue this fight for De Anna and her family. I want justice and De Anna’s family deserves it.”

Yet the case, which former Vacaville Police Det. Joe Munoz (now retired), described as the “most brutal crime” he’d ever seen, remains unsolved and unprosecuted.

But today, De Anna Lynn Johnson--who wore her mother’s high school graduation ring to the neighborhood party she attended that fateful night on Nov. 15, 1982--is a graduate of Vacaville High School, Class of 1986.

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