On the night of October 18, 1984, Angela Bonds was stabbed to death in her Bogalusa home. The crime involved several weapons, two of which were left in her body. Anthony Johnson, Ms. Bonds’s boyfriend, became a suspect after witnesses reported that they’d seen his car parked at her house that night. One witness claimed to have seen Mr. Johnson leaving the scene in the morning. Physical evidence from the scene included two weapons left in the victim’s body – an ice pick and a meat fork. Other evidence collected included a shower cap, the victim’s underwear, bedding, and a sexual assault kit from the victim. Mr. Johnson reported that he had been at the house that night, but he and Ms. Bonds had argued and she would not let him in the house.
The state, at trial, contended that Mr. Johnson gained entry through a window, raped and killed Ms. Bonds, and escaped through the same window. Police arrested Mr. Johnson the next morning, though they found no blood on Mr. Johnson, in his home, or in his car. Police would later claim that Mr. Johnson had knowledge of the weapons used in the crime, knowledge only the perpetrator would have. Mr. Johnson was jailed for two years before his trial.
In that time, Matthew Brown killed two women in Bogalusa, one in the same apartment where Ms. Bonds was murdered. Brown pleaded guilty to those two crimes and bragged about committing a third – the Bonds murder. Still, a jury convicted Mr. Johnson of second degree murder in February 1986, and he was sentenced to life without parole.
Innocence & Justice Louisiana discovered that, after Mr. Johnson’s trial, evidence emerged that Ms. Bonds had been involved with Matthew Brown – she’d been seen with him on the night of the murder. In 2004, Mr. Johnson won the right to post-conviction DNA testing. In 2006, DNA testing of Ms. Bonds’s fingernail scrapings produced a male profile that could not have been Mr. Johnson. The court vacated his conviction based on the DNA results and a finding that the state had withheld crucial exculpatory evidence, including information about Matthew Brown. The state fought this ruling for three years before it compared the DNA profile from the fingernail scrapings to Brown’s profile. They matched.
Almost 26 years after his arrest, Mr. Johnson was exonerated in September 2010. He’d spent more than 22 years in prison for a crime he did not commit.
