A Girl Craving Freedom Ends up in Captivity
(“Disrobed,” Forensic Files)
Note: Updated with information from 2020.
“Disrobed” tells the story of a teenager who shot her mother and father after they forbid her to see a guy who sounded at best like a waste of time and at worst like a life ruiner.
Bourgeois privilege? Since a jury convicted Sarah Marie Johnson at age 18 and sent her to prison for life for a crime she committed at 16, an epilogue to her story seems in order.
The justice system tends to show mercy to middle-class convicts who committed their crimes — no matter how awful — as minors.
A fair amount has happened since “Disrobed“ first aired in 2008. But before getting into that, here’s a recap of the episode plus some information from internet research.
Diane Johnson, a 52-year-old tax collector, and her husband, Alan, a 46-year-old landscaper, provided a lovely home for Sarah and her older half-brother, Matt, in Bellevue, a city on the outskirts of Sun Valley, Idaho.
By 2003, Sarah had taken up with a 19-year-old named Bruno Santos. He was a high school dropout suspected of gang membership and drug activity.
He also had a cocky personality. Sarah’s parents found him none-too-endearing.
Happy ending. But Sarah had no intention of letting go of Santos and tried the usual teenage tricks, like telling mom and dad she was sleeping over at a girlfriend’s when she was really with him.
When they found out about one such incident, her parents took away her car and threatened to file charges against Santos for statutory rape.
At some point, Sarah decided to quell the controversy by disposing of her parents.
That way, she and Santos could run off and set up their own love-filled affluent household financed by her parents’ $680,000 life insurance payout and the rest of their estate.
Dressed to kill. According to Disrobed, Sarah was a fan of true crime entertainment. Perhaps she felt she had picked up enough know-how to pull off a double homicide with impunity.
First, Sarah stole a .264 caliber rifle from the guesthouse on her family’s property. The Johnsons rented out the structure to Mel Speegle, an electrician who was out of town at the time of the crime on September 2, 2003.
That morning, Sarah pulled a shower cap over her blond hair, put a pink plush bathrobe on backward, crept into her sleeping mother’s room, and shot her in the head at close range.
Fall planting. Her father ran out of the shower to see what happened. Sarah shot him in the chest.
To suggest gang activity, she placed knives at the foot of her parents’ bed and in her brother’s room. (Matt Johnson was away at the University of Idaho in Moscow at the time.)
She put the rifle’s scope on Speegle’s bed and left the rest of it at the crime scene.
Then she made a beeline for a neighbor’s house and said her parents had been shot by an unseen intruder.
Investigators were probably disappointed to rule out their first suspect, Bruno Santos.
He was arrogant and disrespectful, but they couldn’t connect any of the crime scene evidence to him or his DNA.
Mel Speegle, who Sarah had probably hoped to implicate, gave police a solid alibi.
By this time, Sarah’s lack of sorrow over the tragedy had aroused suspicion.
Evidence galore. Her aunt, Linda Vavold, who appeared on Forensic Files, noted that Sarah seemed more interested in having her fingernails painted than grieving her mother and father’s demise.
And a lot more than innuendo was building up against Sarah. It turned out that she had pretty much left a trail of forensic breadcrumbs for the police to follow.
First, the presence of her mother’s blood and bone fragments on Sarah’s bedroom wall contradicted her story that she was asleep with her door closed when she heard the first shot.
Cap it off. The pink bathrobe that police retrieved from the trash — Sheriff Walt Femling had stopped the garbage truck from picking up the can on the day of the murder — had high-velocity blood splatter from both Diane and Alan Johnson.
Gloves found in the garbage had traces of gun powder residue outside and Sarah’s DNA inside.
Plumbers recovered the shower cap, which Sarah had flushed down the toilet.
As crime scene investigator Rod Englert said during his Forensic Files interview, “The evidence was yelling and screaming.”
Prosecutors charged Sarah with two counts of first-degree murder.
Family affair. At this point, Sarah probably didn’t need any more proof that her fairy tale had gone awry, but she got some anyway: Bruno Santos decided to testify against her in court.
Santos wanted to prove he had nothing to do with the murders.
Sarah’s brother took a turn in the witness chair in the 2005 trial as well, but he didn’t seem to have an agenda.
Matt Johnson said his sister was overdramatic and tended to stretch the truth when it suited her, but he loved her just the same.
Defense lawyer Bob Pangburn uncharitably pointed out that Matt would receive Sarah’s portion of their parents’ insurance money if the jury convicted her.
The prosecution brought in one of Sarah’s cellmates, convicted drug trafficker Malinda Gonzalez, who revealed that, during their jailhouse conversations, Sarah seemed to inadvertently confess.
Aunt no help. As reported by Emanuella Grinberg for Court TV, Gonzalez testified: “One time, she said, ‘When I killed…’ Then she stopped herself and was like, ‘When the killers …'”
Linda Vavold, Diane Johnson’s elder sister, ended up on the prosecution’s side as well. “When we would be discussing Alan and Diane and someone would be upset, [Sarah] would roll her eyes and act disgusted,” Vavold testified.
The five-week trial of the flaxen-haired killer turned into a national sensation. Court TV broadcast the proceedings live from Idaho’s Ada County courthouse.
Sarah received two sentences of life in jail without parole.
Pin it on someone. As far as what’s happening with her today, my initial guess was that Sarah had confessed to the crime already, embraced religion, and was helping inmates in a prison literacy program — and asking the state for mercy since she was young and foolish and evil back in 2003 and regretted her crimes.
Or maybe she would take the Menendez brothers’ route and admit to killing her parents but tell tales about why they deserved it.
Wrong on all counts.
As recently as 2014, Sarah — now 33 years old and prisoner No. 77613 at the Pocatello Women’s Correctional Center — was claiming someone else killed her parents.
She managed to draw the Idaho Innocence Project into her case. They contended that she had ineffective counsel at the first trial.
Her legal team also brought up the fact that the murder weapon carried someone else’s prints (not Sarah’s or Mel Speegle’s).
BF behind bars. But Speegle said that some prints probably came from a friend who had helped him move his things from his ranch to the Johnson guesthouse in 2002.
The Idaho Supreme Court denied Sarah’s petition in a six-page decision in February 2014.
Life has been no dream for the motivation for all this misery, either.
Bruno Santos served some jail time related to drug charges around the time of Sarah’s trial in 2005.
Then, in 2010, Blaine County brought him up on new substance-peddling charges, including the sale of a half pound of methamphetamine to an undercover detective.
The following year, he received a 10-year sentence and earned himself a bunk at the Idaho State Correctional Facility.
Santos, who is allegedly in the U.S. illegally, received parole in May 2018 and could face deportation to Mexico — possibly in 2024, which the Idaho Department of Correction lists as his sentence satisfaction date.
Finally, it should be noted that Idaho released an inmate named Sarah Marie Johnson-Ploghoft in 2018, but she’s not the Sarah Johnson who killed her parents.
That’s all for this post. Until next time, cheers. — RR
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These shows make me feel good about not having kids. After watching Forensic Files, I don’t think I’ll be naming a spouse beneficiary of life insurance. House pets, maybe. Dogs are entitled to the standard of living to which they are accustomed.
Nice point — I don’t think my Chihuahua mix has any intention of bumping me off in my sleep.
Right, because parricide is bringing our society to its knees through its ubiquitousness.
You’re right: parricides account for approximately 2 percent of all homicides. You’re more likely to be murdered by a spouse or partner than a child.
This case is sadly similar to that of Brenda Wiley of Rosemont, NJ, who at the age of 15 stabbed her mother and brother to death because she was grounded from seeing her 18 year old boyfriend. (She planned to kill her father, too, but he was at work when the killings took place.) Brenda is now 42 and serving two concurrent life sentences at the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility in Hunterdon County, NJ. I guess it wasn’t Forensic Files material because there was never any question as to whether or not Wiley was guilty.
So sad! Somehow I missed that one at the time. I found a nice story on how she and some other inmates got associate degrees and had a graduation ceremony at the prison. http://www.mycentraljersey.com/story/news/local/hunterdon-county/2014/10/08/fourteen-edna-mahan-inmates-earn-college-degrees/16920027/
Oh wow. I happen to know someone who is at that facility. She eviscerated a 2 week old infant then threw the poor baby down the stairs in a crazed drugged out state. The baby died. It happened in nj too. Around 2004ish.
OMG, glad she’s incarcerated!
She needs to work on delayed gratification.
Her parents might have done better with the reverse psychology route — act like they love the guy, too, and wait for her to get tired of him.
Yeah except then she might have ended up pregnant by what sounds like an absolute dirtbag. I can’t believe she actually thought this would work and threw her life and her parents’ lives away for a low-life like that. She sounds really stupid and is right where she needs to be.
The girl definitely had her priorities disordered.
Sums it up nicely.
Actually my parents did the reverse psychology route with my oldest sister, and it does work. She decided that the guy she was head over heels in love with wasn’t that much of a catch if Mom & Dad approved. She’s gone after the “bad boy” all her life. Been married 6 times. Told me once “I want the kind of guy you’re married to, someone beams every time he sees and/or talks about you, the guy that would lay down his life for you if he had to.” My comment to that? “Stop trying to find these guys in bars. Sure, there’s one or two guys in a bar that might not be all that bad…..but for the most part drinking gets worse after you are married”….Of course she wanted the soulmate type of man in her life, but she wasn’t willing to change to get it. The guy she lives with now gaslights her every chance he gets…..disgusting.
The point about Johnson is that SHE was the worse one, more so than the male she got with, who merely did her bidding (at least that’s what the court thought). Of course, he was a appalling too. We may see this as a ‘fatal cocktail’-type scenario wherein two people who would otherwise not be murderers mixed, with fatal consequences. But there’s no getting away from Johnson’s evil nature, which would merely be dormant with a ‘nicer’ male who didn’t do her murderous bidding. Seen in this light, she was a time-bomb, just waiting for the circumstances that would light her fuse, whether that would be hatred of parents, boyfriend, husband, love-rival, or work colleague.
Your sis, I’m sure, is nothing like Johnson – even if she also goes for bad boys. Six marriages says either she’s impossible to live with, has chronically poor judgement, or both… Could she try a friend (with benefits if necessary) for a change, insead of living with/marrying them? At least they can dump each-other more easily when it all goes wrong, as seems inevitable…
Just found this blog and really enjoying it, also a bit Forensic Files fan, also having read the whole appeal decision document. I can’t imagine why they thought that appeal would work
Thanks much, Daniel — and so true, way too much evidence for her lawyers to refute.
It is interesting how everyone keeps saying what a dirtbag the boyfriend is/was. By all accounts, he’s no prince, but it appears that she is, by virtue of her deeds, worse than him.
True — no evidence that he committed any assaults, let alone murders.
Thanks for this, RR: There’ve been a few ‘bad boy attracts middle-class girl’ stories on FF — but maybe cases such as this prove that narrative is, sometimes at least, sexist, for here’s a seriously deranged girl who was rather ‘badder’ than her man. Assuming her guilt, continued denials will likely see no parole (if she’s eligible for it). Santos is obvious trash, and if he’s an illegal immigrant, the sooner he’s sent home so US taxpayers don’t have to pay out the better.
I read a different article about the blood analysis. I side with the girl actually. Children have been grounded by their parents many times before for things like this, if not worse and you don’t hear about them killing their parents because of it. Not to mention, wouldn’t there have been gun powder on her as well? Like her pajamas since there was apparently a latex glove in her robe. Also, just because it was her robe means nothing. If someone came in and murdered my parents using my robe and left me alone, it doesn’t mean I committed the crime. It just means that my robe was used. If I wear my robe, then my DNA will be found on it. Simple. It’s like a crime I saw on FF a while ago. A lady killed herself with her husband’s gun and they convicted him of her murder. After a while and more tests, it was proven that he in fact did NOT kill his wife but she committed suicide. Just because the evidence stacks, and you have motive, opportunity and execution lined against someone, doesn’t always mean they did it. The justice system sucks sometimes and they convict innocent people.
But what about the latex gloves?
You were not serious, right? In case you were, let me break it down for you.
1. Why would a total stranger break into a home, sneak to a teenager’s bedroom, swipe the teenager’s bathrobe…all to shoot the teenager’s parents?
2. Why didn’t the intruder leave the home upon realizing someone was awake and in the shower?
3. Why would this mysterious intruder ditch the robe in the outside trash can on the curb upon leaving the home?
4. After three very noisy gunshots from a high powered rifle, why would this mysterious intruder leave by the front door?
**Does any of the above seem reasonable to you?
As for the gunpowder, the teenager murdered her parents wearing a shower cap on her head (it was recovered from the plumbing), her bathrobe was worn backwards over her pajamas, a leather glove on her left hand and the latex glove on her right hand.
Forensics proved:
1. The ONLY DNA on the robe belonged to mom, dad and the daughter
2. The t-shirt the daughter was wearing had dried green paint on the front only. Flecks of that paint were found on the inside back portion of the robe.
3. The leather and latex gloves had gunpowder on the outside and the daughter’s DNA on the inside.
Does this answer your questions?
“Children have been grounded by their parents many times before for things like this, if not worse and you don’t hear about them killing their parents because of it.”
Er, yes, you do FF itself depicts a number of cases were angry ‘teens have committed parricide – and there are news stories annually about this. Off the top of my head, ‘teen Brian Vaughn (FF) murdered his father for apparently refusing him a new(er) car after an argument about it, staging it to look like a break-in.
Youthful parricide is motivated by a variety of factors. Current research conducted by the Parricide Prevention Institute indicates the top 5 motives causing a child (aged 8 – 24 years old) to commit parricide are: issues of control – 38% (e.g., put on restriction, phone taken away, etc.); issues of money – 10% (access to life insurance, wants money for a party, etc.); stop abuse of self or Family – 8%; fit of anger – 8%; wants a different life – 7% (e.g., wants to live with non-custodial parent, wants to be a prostitute, etc.).
It is a common misconception that youthful parricide offenders murdered their parent/s to escape egregious child abuse. This is not the case. In fact this notion was challenged beginning in 1999 when Hillbrand et al. suggested that child abuse is only one variable among myriad variables that lead to adolescent parricide, rather than the primary reason for youthful parricide events.
Interesting stuff, Catherine — thanks for writing in!
Is that photo up there a current picture of her?
In the top picture, she’s only around 20, IIRC. She’s in her late 30s now.