Karla Brown: Murdered at 22

What Happened to John Prante?
(‘Body of Evidence,’ Forensic Files)

The popular kids seemed like gods and goddesses back when I was in school, and their lives fascinated me. So the episode about Karla Brown, a former cheerleader with Farrah Fawcett hair, drew me in.

Forensic Files portrays Karla’s homicide as happening after an old classmate, someone who wasn’t in her social circle, tried to chat her up on the street and she gave a less than enthusiastic response.

For this post, I looked for more information on Karla, the trial and whether a mild snub was really what motivated John Prante to prey upon her. So let’s get going on the recap of “Body of Evidence” along with extra information from internet research:

Seventies sweetheart. Karla Lou Brown was born to Floyd and Jo Ellen Brown on February 28, 1956, in Lima, Ohio. Her father was in the military and died young in an accident.

Definitely one of the cool kids at Roxana High School, Karla participated in not only cheerleading but also pep club, gymnastics, chorus, intramurals, fine arts council, you name it.

In addition to blond hair, she had a lovely smile and the thin arched eyebrows in style in the disco era. When she wore a bikini, her sister Donna Johnson said, “she was a knockout.”

It’s easy to imagine countless boys having crushes on her. There were probably some girl crushes (even before that term existed) on her, too.

Ups and downs. By 1978, Karla was finishing up her studies at Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville while waitressing at an International House of Pancakes. Her boyfriend, who Forensic Files calls Mark Hart but other sources identify as Mark Fair, was an electrician who had served in the military. His job was described as apprentice construction worker by “Killer in the New Neighborhood,” an episode of A Body in the Basement.

She and Mark had a five-year relationship that was difficult at times, but they ultimately got engaged and decided to live together in a small house they bought at 979 Acton Avenue in Wood River, Illinois. The neighborhood was considered safe.

“She was happier than she’d ever been,” Donna told A Body in the Basement. “She was thrilled. She wanted to get married and she wanted to marry Mark. Things were finally falling into place.”

Ringing off the hook. On June 21, 1978, Karla took the day off work so she could get things settled at the house. Media accounts vary as to whether the couple had moved in the previous day or they were just preparing to move in after they married.

A friend of Karla’s would later recall that they chatted on the phone that day and the last thing Karla said was that someone was at her door, according to Forensic Files. Karla actually spoke to two friends, Jamie Hale and Debra Davis, that morning, but she was talking to her boyfriend’s mother, Helen Fair, when someone came to the door, according to Circuit Court of Madison County papers.

At least one girlfriend stopped by the house that day, but no one answered the door.

Horror house. At around 5:30 p.m., Mark brought his buddy Thomas Feigenbaum over to show him the new place. After searching for Karla upstairs, the young men found her lifeless body in the basement, with her head in a bucket of water, her hands tied with an electrical cord, and Mark’s socks wrapped around her neck so tightly that police had to cut them off. She was dressed in only a sweater.

Donna remembers the phone call she got from her sister Connie Dykstra. “She said, ‘Donna, it’s worse than you could imagine. Get home.'”

Karla had linear bruises on her face and neck. Someone had bitten her shoulder and broken her jaw. Blood stained the nearby sofa cushions, according to court papers.

Double helix not handy. The killer had stowed the carafe from the couple’s Mr. Coffee in the rafters. It looked as though he poured water into the vessel and then used it in an attempt to clean the blood. The New Detectives, however, suggests that the murderer used the water in an attempt to revive Karla.

Then, the attacker moved her to the laundry area.

The killer spent a lot of time at the house arranging the scene in a perverted manner. The cause of death was strangulation or drowning. A blow to her neck came from a TV table in the house, it was later determined. Police found no foreign fingerprints at the scene. Forensic DNA testing didn’t exist yet, so investigators had no way of analyzing bodily fluids at the scene.

No concrete leads. Mark Fair was inconsolable with grief, according to The New Detectives. He cried and screamed. As the boyfriend, however, he was the chief suspect. During her appearance on Forensic Files, Connie said that she didn’t know Mark well.

But Mark’s colleagues confirmed his alibi, that he was at work when the murder happened.

“No one was a suspect and everyone was a suspect,” prosecutor Don Weber would later tell the Belleville News-Democrat. “I even looked into where Ted Bundy was at that time.”

There was also Karla’s mean, creepy ex-stepfather — he reportedly made a pass at one of her friends — but no evidence linked him to the crime.

Beers and blunts. The police found out that two men were sitting outside the house next door to Karla’s while she was movings things into her place.

John Prante and a friend Forensic Files calls Duane Conway but court papers identify as Paul Main were drinking beer and smoking marijuana at Main’s place.

Forensic Files suggests that John Prante called out to Karla, saying that they knew each other from school, and she answered him coldly. But John was six years older, so it seems unlikely they were high school classmates.

College in common. Court papers describe the encounter this way:

John Scroggins, who knew both the victim and the defendant, testified that on the afternoon before the murder, he and the defendant [John Prante] had been at Paul Main’s, at which time he introduced the victim and the defendant, who afterward on that same day expressed considerable sexual interest in the victim.

That description makes more sense. Prante told friends he knew Karla from Southern Illinois University. It might hurt someone’s feelings to not be recognized by a classmate from a small-town high school like Roxana — but it was entirely forgivable for Karla, who was attending a college with nearly 10,000 students, to not remember John Prante from there.

Above their pay grade. So who was this face in the crowd? John Prante was born around 1950 and lived in East Alton, Illinois. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch gave his occupation as unemployed barge worker. He had attended Lewis and Clark Community College as well as SIU. Prante said that he was looking for a job during the summer of 1978 and turned in an application at Shell Oil Company in St. Louis on the day of the homicide.

Police had nothing incriminating on him. The investigation stalled for two years.

Donna would later tell A Body in the Basement that she was frustrated that the police didn’t summon outside help. They were good at rescuing cats from trees, she said, but didn’t have enough experience for a murder case of this nature.

County gets in gear. Then, in 1980, Don Weber won an election for Madison County state’s attorney. On his first day, he summoned everything the office had on the Karla Brown homicide. “I put it on my desk and I said, ‘We’re going to solve this case,'” he told A Body in the Basement. Karla looked like a girl he’d gone to high school with, and the unsolved murder haunted him.

Investigators turned their attention back to John Prante and Paul Main. Prante, it turned out, once told friends at a party that he saw Karla’s body while looking over the shoulders of police officers, and he spotted a bite mark. But police said Prante was never in the basement with them. And the public didn’t know about the bite mark; the authorities withheld that information.

In 1982, Karla’s mother agreed to let authorities exhume her daughter’s body for another autopsy. Dr. Mary Case found that the attacker broke Kara’s jaw in two places. But she believed Karla was still alive when the killer put her face in the water, and she drowned. She also believed that Karla had been sexually assaulted. There was a used tampon on the coffee table at the murder scene.

Got ’em. Weber brought in FBI profiler John Douglas, who thought the killer would be a single, young, and slovenly unemployed white male, a loser with women, and his car was a Volkswagen.

Sure enough, Prante drove a VW — a blue Beetle and possibly also a red VW station wagon belonging to his father.

Prante was working as a house painter by the time police charged him with murder and put him in the county jail in Edwardsville.

“I believe Karla Brown can rest in peace now,” said Wood River police chief Don Greer.

Attracted to wedded gals. Main told police that on the day of the homicide, Prante turned up at his house and looked flushed and out of breath. His T-shirt was wet.

He also said that Prante liked flirting with married women and would make inappropriate advances toward them. In other words, it was who Karla was — not how she acted — that spurred Prante to prey on her.

Investigators believe that Prante knocked on Karla’s door and, once inside the house, made an unwanted sexual advance. There was a struggle, and he overpowered Karla, who was 4 foot 11 inches tall and weighed 100 pounds, according to court papers. Prante then killed her and arranged the scene in a bizarre way for reasons never explained.

Couldn’t shut up about it. During the trial, the prosecution, led by Don Weber, heavily emphasized John Douglas’s predictions, including that the killer would contact the police to learn more about the investigation. Prante had called them to say that he was a witness but didn’t want to be considered a suspect.

Far more damaging was the testimony of Prante’s former friends, who said that Prante seemed to have inside information about the case and made incriminating remarks.

One witness, Vickie White, said that just days after the murder, Prante said that he had to get his story straight and leave town because the police were looking for him. Paul Main’s wife, Judy Main, said that Prante mentioned that Karla’s murder was a capital offense and that he or Paul could go to the gas chamber.

Old accounts. Susan Lutz, who once dated Prante, said he had bitten her during their relationship. She also testified that he told her that he had once killed someone, but he couldn’t talk about it because he could lose his freedom. Another witness recalled Prante’s having said that “a nice looking blond chick had moved in next door and that he wouldn’t mind getting some pussy off her.”

Prante’s lawyer, Neil Hawkins, countered that the friends’ memories were mixed in with later media reports; they were testifying four years after the crime. He also contended that police should have looked more closely at Main as a suspect.

A defense witness said that, while he was serving time in Madison County Jail, cellmate Joseph Milazzo admitted that he had killed Karla Brown by strangling her.

Cue up the violin. The defense trotted out a more respectable witness in Dr. Edward Pavlec. The orthodontist testified that the “bite” marks were useless because it wasn’t even certain that they came from teeth. Even if they had, someone could have pulled on the victim’s skin, which would make it appear that the teeth had extra space between them. He had a point — bite marks in general have since been widely discredited as forensic evidence (Ray Krone).

John Prante took the stand in his own defense. He calmly denied ever biting Susan Lutz or saying that he had killed someone.

Prante also played the victim card (Thomas Jabin Berry), saying that he had suffered abuse at the hands of Marine Corps Guards when he served in the military. He was handcuffed to a bunk and beaten and had his head bashed into a wall, he testified.

Relief, finally. In July 1983, after deliberating for four and half hours, the jurors returned to the courtroom — and none of them looked at Prante. He was convicted of first-degree murder.

Karla’s family members cried and hugged prosecutors and police, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.

Prante, who showed little reaction to the verdict, was led away in handcuffs and leg shackles.

He’s out?! He got 75 years in state penitentiary.

Prante’s attempts to appeal the conviction over the years failed but—horror of horrors — he won parole in 2019.

He had earned days off on his sentence for good behavior.

Judges unmoved. Prante is still trying to clear his name, based on faulty bite wound evidence. The Innocence Project and the Exoneration Project have taken up his post-conviction cause.

In response to Prante’s petitions in 2020 and 2021, judges agreed about the bite wound evidence — acknowledging that the scientific community no longer deemed it as credible as fingerprints — but ruled that there was enough other evidence pointing to his guilt.

In 2022, Prante made the news again, when he was charged with DUI and going through a Stop sign while driving his 2005 Saturn in Bethalto, Illinois. He fell down several times during a field sobriety test.

Forensics in back pocket. Prante said that he hadn’t been “this drunk or high for 37 years,” according to local paper The Telegraph.

As for the town of Wood River, it has healed over the decades since the murder. “It’s a relatively peaceful community now where people don’t even know that that’s the house where it happened,” Weber said.

The field of forensic science, however, has changed forever and law enforcement now has ever-advancing DNA testing on its side should anyone — young or old, popular or not — fall prey to a killer in Madison County again.

That’s all for this post. Until next time, cheers. — RR

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Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube or Peacock or Amazon

The New Detectives episode including a vignette about Karla Brown’s murder is on YouTube. The A Body in the Basement episode is available on Amazon but there’s a fee to watch it, even if you have Prime