Murder: True Crime Stories - UNSOLVED: The School Gym Murder 1

Episode Date: December 9, 2025

When 17-year-old Kendrick Johnson failed to come home from school in Valdosta, Georgia, his family’s world was turned upside down. The next morning, Kendrick’s body was discovered inside a rolled-...up gym mat at Lowndes High School. Authorities ruled his death a freak accident — but his family refused to believe it. In the first of this two-part investigation, host Carter Roy takes you inside the case that shocked the nation. From the mysterious discovery of Kendrick’s body to conflicting autopsies, missing evidence, and allegations of a cover-up, this episode examines the early investigation and how one family’s search for truth became a national movement. If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Murder True Crime Stories to never miss a case! For Ad-free listening and early access to episodes, subscribe to Crime House+ on Apple Podcasts. Murder True Crime Stories is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios 🎧 Need More to Binge?  Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of…, Killer Minds, Crime House Daily and Crimes and more wherever you get your podcasts! Follow me on Social Instagram: @Crimehouse TikTok: @Crimehouse Facebook: @crimehousestudios YouTube: @crimehousestudios To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Starting point is 00:00:00 This is Crime House. We put a lot of trust in schools. They're where our kids spend most of their days where they learn not just math and science, but how to navigate the world, how to solve problems, deal with conflict, and be better humans. So it makes sense that we expect and hope. that our kids will be safe when we send them off to school every day. For the Johnson family of Valdosta, Georgia, Louns High School was like a second home for their son. They didn't have fears about sending him to class or worry about him staying late for a basketball game.
Starting point is 00:00:48 But when Kendrick never came home one day in 2013, the trust they had shattered. Their child had been failed by the one place he should have been. protected. And as the investigation dragged on, the Johnson family started to wonder if they would ever learn what really happened to Kendrick. People's lives are like a story. There's a beginning, a middle, and an end. But you don't always know which part you're on. Sometimes the final chapter, arrives far too soon, and we don't always get to know the real ending. I'm Carter Roy, and this is Murder, True Crime Stories,
Starting point is 00:01:39 a crime house original powered by Pave Studios that comes out every Tuesday and Thursday. Crime House is made possible by you. Follow Murder, True Crime Stories, and subscribe to Crime House Plus on Apple Podcasts for ad-free early access to each two-part series. And if you can't get enough true crime, go search and follow Crime House Daily. Our team's twice a day show bringing you breaking cases, updates, and unbelievable stories from the world of crime that are happening right now. Please be advised that this episode includes sensitive content involving the death of a minor and graphic medical findings. Please listen with care.
Starting point is 00:02:22 This is the first of two episodes on the mysterious death of 17-year-old. old Kendrick Johnson in 2013. Today, I'll introduce you to Kendrick and tell you about the day that everything changed for the Johnson family. We'll learn how Kendrick was found dead in his school gymnasium, the controversial investigation that followed, and how his family continued to fight for justice. Next time, I'll share how their efforts paid off when a U.S. attorney reopened to Kendrick's case. But just when it seemed like the Johnson's would finally get answers, the Department of Justice delivered some crushing news.
Starting point is 00:03:05 And to this day, Kendrick's family is still looking for the truth and for closure. All that and more coming up. Wonderland is bringing the holiday magic this season with Winterfest on select nights now through January 3rd. Step into a winter wonderland filled with millions of dazzling lights, festive shows, rides, and holiday treats. Plus, Coca-Cola is back with Canada's kindest community, celebrating acts of kindness nationwide with a chance at 100,000 donation for the winning community and a 2026 holiday caravan stop. Learn more at canadaswunderland.com. Sometimes, you can just tell a child has been raised right.
Starting point is 00:03:59 That was the case with Kendrick Johnson. In January 2013, the 17-year-old had just started his second semester as a high school sophomore in Valdosta, Georgia. His grades were just okay, but his athletic abilities were where he really shined. He did basketball and track, but Kendrick's true passion was football. He constantly told his family he hoped to go pro one day. And Kendrick definitely looked the part of a football player. He was tall, fit, and handsome with dark eyes framed by shoulder-length dreadlocks. But he wasn't a typical extroverted jock.
Starting point is 00:04:41 His grandma called him her peculiar grandchild because he was so much quieter than his five siblings. As the baby of the family, he was always more of a listener than a talk. When he did speak, he tried to make his words count. He especially loved to tell jokes that brought people together. A kid like that was bound to be surrounded by friends, and Kendrick certainly had many. He was well liked by his classmates and had a reputation at school as a good kid. That's why his mom, Jackie, didn't micromanage his schedule. When Kendrick didn't get off the bus at his usual time on Thursday, January 10th,
Starting point is 00:05:22 She figured he had a good reason. Jackie knew there was a basketball game at school that night, so she assumed he'd decided to stay. It wouldn't be the first time a teen forgot to tell his parents something, and if he needed a ride home, he could always text her. But by 10 p.m., she was starting to get nervous. When he didn't answer her calls, Jackie headed to the high school. She hoped she would find him sitting on the steps with a story about a dead phone battery.
Starting point is 00:05:52 Instead, the campus was a ghost town. Her heart pounding in her chest, Jackie drove in circles, calling her son's name out the window. When she didn't get a response, she sped over to the Lowndes County Sheriff's Department to file a missing person's report. By the next morning, Kendrick still hadn't turned up. So around eight hours after Jackie first reported him missing on the morning of January, January 11th, 2013, the search for Kendrick officially began. Sergeant Mike Adams pulled into the parking lot of Lowndes High School just after the first bell. He grinned as a couple of tardy teenagers rushed ahead of him. Louns was huge.
Starting point is 00:06:41 With more than 3,000 students, it was one of the biggest schools in all of Georgia. Sergeant Adams hurried after the kids, pushing his way through the glass doors, in the foyer, an enormous tapestry depicting the school's mascot, a blonde Viking hung above the front office. Adams headed there first to ask the school's secretary about Kendrick Johnson. He learned that Kendrick's first period teacher reported that he hadn't shown up that morning. At that point, Kendrick's mother and sister were already on campus looking for him. Adams tracked down the family and they sat down to answer some questions. Jackie told Officer Adams about how Kendrick went missing the night before and the same story
Starting point is 00:07:29 she told at the station. Adam's first instinct was to ask her about Kendrick's friends and relationships. He told her that sometimes teens run off with a girlfriend or boyfriend or simply go out with friends and forget to tell their parents. Jackie said that as far she knew, he didn't have a girlfriend, but she gave Adams the name of one of his business. best friends. Because the students involved were minors at the time, I'm using pseudonyms throughout the story. In this case, I'll call Kendrick's friend, James. James had recently been suspended, so Adams radioed another officer who spoke to the student at his home. It didn't take long to hear back. James claimed he hadn't spoken to Kendrick since the previous
Starting point is 00:08:15 morning. From what James could remember, Kendrick didn't say anything about skipping school or running away. With nothing else to go on at the moment, Sergeant Adams finished up in the office and left the school. But just a few hours later, he got a call from Lowndes. This one was a code blue. A dead body. Adams joined another deputy named Carrie Quinn in the gym where the body had been found. Just like the rest of the building, the place was enormous, complete with a basketball court painted in the school colors, maroon and white. Adams could tell by the smell that the body was in the southwest corner. Several huge blue and white cheerleader mats were against the wall, rolled up tight. These were heavy, thick pads, a high flyer might use to practice a trick.
Starting point is 00:09:13 Sergeant Adams felt his heart sink as he and Quinn got closer. Poking out of one of the vertical mats which stood six feet tall was a pair of white-socked feet. When they moved the other mats away, their worst fears were confirmed. The person inside was a young boy. His face was swollen, but he looked like 17-year-old Kendrick Johnson. On the floor nearby was a pool of blood. Sitting on top of it was a clean Adidas shoe.
Starting point is 00:09:54 Just after 10.25 a.m., Sergeant Adams called for backup. Soon, two detectives arrived, John Marion and Jack Pretty. Marion checked the area around the gym, and it didn't take long for him to find something suspicious. In a nearby girls' bathroom, there was a wad. of bloody paper towel stuffed in a trash can. It was the first piece of evidence that seemed to suggest Kendrick may have been the victim of foul play. Meanwhile, Detective Pretty hiked back to the front office
Starting point is 00:10:27 to check the school's surveillance footage. But since Lowndes was so massive, well, that was easier said than done. Just in the wing where Kendrick's body was found, there were 35 cameras worth of footage to dig through, Making matters worse, the timestamps weren't accurate, so pretty couldn't be sure what time of day the footage was actually recorded. After hours of searching, he finally found the right video. It showed Kendrick entering the gym from the hallway outside.
Starting point is 00:11:01 The footage was timed stamped at 109 p.m. the previous afternoon. The cameras positioned inside the gym, caught the same movement, but, These were time-stamped 119, 10 minutes after the camera's outside. There was no way to immediately tell which time was correct. For all, investigators knew both of them might be wrong. Regardless, there was video of Kendrick entering the gym, but none that showed him leaving. When Detective Pretty tried to get a copy of those tapes, he ran into technical issues. The IT person promised to send the police all the footage he had from the last 48 hours.
Starting point is 00:11:49 But given the number of cameras, he estimated that copying everything would take a couple of days at least. While the school worked on the footage, Detective's Pretty and Marion created a rough timeline of Kendrick's final hours. They knew he arrived at school on the bus the previous morning around 7.30 a.m. He likely died just after 1 p.m. when he entered the gym. And that would mean he didn't go to the basketball game that night. His body may have been stuck in the gym mat for almost a full day before he was found. But at that point, the detectives still weren't clear on the timing, and before they could do anything else, they got some disturbing news.
Starting point is 00:12:37 Word about Kendrick's death was already spreading through the school. Facebook was flooded with posts mourning his loss or spreading rumors about what might have happened to him, and not everyone was kind. Right after school that day, on January 11th at around 2.30 p.m., a girl came to the sheriff's office. She claimed that one of her fellow students, a boy who didn't get along with Kendrick, made a post on Facebook that he hastily deleted afterward, though she couldn't remember the exact wording it was something like when you start messing the goons body starts showing up for the detectives this was a huge red flag and just like that they had their first suspect
Starting point is 00:13:26 on january 11th 2013 17 year old kendrick johnson was was found dead in his high school's gymnasium, stuffed in a rolled-up cheerleader mat. While the authorities were investigating, they got some interesting intel from one of Kendrick's classmates. According to the student, someone posted on Facebook saying something to the effect of when you start messing,
Starting point is 00:13:59 the goon's body starts showing up. The girl who reported the post said the person who wrote it, a student Will called Charlie, had problems with Kendrick and his buddies. Kendrick's group of friends called themselves the Clietville Click, or CVC. Cliottville was a local neighborhood, and apparently one of the boys in the CVC was flirting with Charlie's girlfriend, which kicked off a feud. And just as police were recording the girl's statement, Detective Marion got a call. There had been an assault near Lownd's high school.
Starting point is 00:14:35 When Marion arrived, he was surprised to find that the supposed victim was Charlie. the same person who'd posted that threatening message on Facebook. According to Charlie, he'd been attacked a few hours earlier. He claimed that Kendrick's sister drove up alongside him while he was walking down the road. She accused Charlie of killing her brother. Before he could respond, a group of young men jumped out of her car, knocked him down, and started beating him. when one of the assailants hit him in the face with a silver pistol
Starting point is 00:15:12 before he was finally able to run away. Charlie insisted he wasn't involved with Kendrick's death and had no problems with him, but he also said he didn't have a Facebook account, which he later admitted was a lie. After listening to Charlie's story, Detective Marion made note of the alleged assault but didn't file charges.
Starting point is 00:15:37 he was skeptical that Charlie was telling the truth since he didn't have any visible injuries. If anything, Marion wanted to learn more about Charlie's connection to Kendrick, but before doing that, he still had to nail down the facts, including when exactly Kendrick had died. On January 13th, two days after Kendrick was found dead,
Starting point is 00:16:05 detectives finally got a bit more clarity. They learned that Kendrick had missed his fourth period class, the one he would have gone to after entering the gym, which meant he died shortly after 1 p.m. That confirmed what Marion had already suspected. Now that he had a rough timeline established, he turned to the gym teacher who found the body. Coach Philip Peeplow.
Starting point is 00:16:32 Peeplow explained that on the morning of January 11th, His students were filling out a class survey when one called out for help. They had spotted a pair of feet wearing socks stuck upside down inside one of the mats. Coach Peeplow cleared the kids out and took a look. He reached out cautiously and tugged on one of the ankles. It didn't budge. Instead, it felt slightly rigid. Peeplow could tell the boy was dead.
Starting point is 00:17:03 By then, several students had, already called 911. After talking to Peeplow, Detective Marion reached out to some of the students and spoke to several other kids who attended the school. That's how Marion learned that a lot of students stashed their gym shoes inside the mats. It was a way to store shoes without having to rent a locker. One of Kendrick's friends told police he and Kendrick actually shared a pair of of Adidas because they had gym at different times. According to him, at the end of each class, Kendrick made a jump shot and tossed his shoes into the middle of the mats for him to find. This information completely changed Marion's understanding of the case. Initially, he believed
Starting point is 00:17:52 that Kendrick was a victim of foul play, but now he wasn't so sure. With that in mind, Marion and his team took another look at the evidence. Kendrick was found wearing socks. He was upside down, inside the mat, with one of his arms pinned to his side. The other was outstretched, as if he was reaching for something. His street shoes, a pair of Nike's, were tucked behind his legs inside the mat. Meanwhile, his Adidas for gym class were in two places. One of them was stuck behind his head, and the other was on the floor next to the mat.
Starting point is 00:18:37 A dried pool of blood had spread under Kendrick's head, yet somehow none of it had gotten on the one shoe that was on the ground. There was also some additional blood splatter on the wall around 40 feet away. That's when detective started to wonder if Kendrick's death could have been an accident. They theorized that he tried to reach his shoe. shoes by climbing on top of the upright mat and diving in head first he was five foot 10 and the mat was a little more than six feet tall he might have gotten stuck and slowly suffocated in that case his death would have been a freak accident and that's exactly what the autopsy ruled medical examiner marianne
Starting point is 00:19:27 Gaffney Craft noted no wounds on Kendrick except for a scratch on his wrist and some minor trauma to his right pinky. She determined he died from positional asphyxia. In other words, he suffocated inside the mat. She felt this explained the puddle of blood beneath him and why his head was so swollen. She estimated he had been upside down for almost 24 hours. As blood rushed to his head, it caused it to swell, eventually it would have dripped out of his nose and mouth forming the puddle. The findings shocked everyone, but no one more than Kendrick's parents, Jackie, and Kenneth. They simply couldn't believe he died in an accident. They thought he was too tall and athletic to get stuck that way, and they didn't understand how he could have
Starting point is 00:20:24 possibly been stuck for 24 hours in a school full of students and teachers. Kenneth, who identified his son's body, believed the medical examiner got it wrong. He thought that right before he died, Kendrick had been in a fight, and Kenneth was determined to prove it. On January 16th, five days after Kendrick was found dead, the Johnsons held a public vigil. There, they mourned Kendrick and urged the police to reconsider their belief that Kendrick's death had been an accident, and they began openly questioning the investigation. One of their main critiques was that the authorities had waited too long to notify the coroner, Bill Watson, about Kendrick's body.
Starting point is 00:21:16 By law, officers are required to call a coroner immediately when a body is discovered. But in Lowndes County, police often waited until after a crime scene was processed. Sheriff Chris Pryne insisted there was little Watson could have done except wait in the parking lot while officers finished securing the evidence, which took five hours. He swore that no police officers touched Kendrick's body. But Bill Watson disagreed. He said the five-hour wait was improper. and that Kendrick's body had been moved,
Starting point is 00:21:56 meaning the crime scene had been compromised. In response to the pushback, the authorities kept Kendrick's case open as they continued to examine evidence. The bloody tissues found in the bathroom were sent for testing, as was the blood splatter found on the gym wall. Then, five days after the body was found, on January 16, 2013,
Starting point is 00:22:22 The school's IT department finally turned over the surveillance footage. It was a huge amount of data, 290 hours of video from 35 cameras. Authorities eagerly scanned the footage, but what they found disappointed them. The cameras pointed at the mat in the gym were out of focus, making the video practically unusable. Other footage was erratic because many of the cameras were. were motion activated, and the recordings often showed students appearing and disappearing with unreliable timestamps. In the end, detectives didn't learn anything new from the video. They confirmed that Kendrick arrived at school on time and entered the gym after 1 p.m.
Starting point is 00:23:12 They also found some footage of him jogging through the gym right after arriving, but there was no way to tell when and if he approached the mats. The team was back to square one, and now Kendrick's family was demanding answers. Hoping to find another witness, detectives began asking students who knew Kendrick if he had any enemies. A couple of names cropped up regularly in these interviews. First, there was Charlie. He was the one who mocked Kendrick's death on Facebook and claimed that Kendrick's sister attacked him. But at the time Kendrick disappeared, Charlie was nowhere near him, his alibi checked out,
Starting point is 00:23:57 and eventually even Kendrick's sister quickly stopped believing he was responsible. Then there was a white classmate we'll call William Clark. And depending on who you asked, he was one of Kendrick's friends. The two played on the football team together, and a year before his death, Kendrick and William got in a fight on a bus to a game. It's not clear what the fight was about, but it apparently started when William and Kendrick began bickering. At first, it was lighthearted, but eventually things turned physical. At some point, William grabbed Kendrick by his dreadlocks and yanked his head down.
Starting point is 00:24:37 Kendrick pulled William's hands off his hair, and that's when the real fight started. According to a teammate, Kendrick won, kind of. The bus driver called the police. William was allowed to watch the game from the stands while Kendrick was held in the back of a squad car. William claimed the two of them made up after the incident and considered each other friends, but Kendrick's father said his son described it differently.
Starting point is 00:25:05 According to him, Kendrick said that William's brother, who we'll call Sean, went around telling people that the fight wasn't over after the bus ride. And that wasn't all. Kenneth claimed tensions were so high that William's father, who we'll call Scott, got involved. Kenneth said Scott confronted Kendrick at school, claiming the fight on the bus wasn't fair, and he even allegedly invited Kendrick to come by his house and fight William a second time. According to Kenneth, Kendrick shrugged off the interaction and the second fight never happened.
Starting point is 00:25:46 and Scott Clark, who was an FBI agent, adamantly denied the conversation ever took place. But the history between William and Kendrick was enough to make several students suspect the Clark brothers were involved in his death, which meant detectives finally had a strong lead. A boy goes missing from a bus stop in Queensland, Australia. His disappearance made national headlines and launched the largest search for a missing child in Australia's history. It was absolutely enormous. He said it was going to be a long few days.
Starting point is 00:26:30 We didn't know it was going to be a long 12 years. Who's ever responsible to pick on the wrong family? We're going to hunt you down. From Sony Music Entertainment and Campside Media, this is Where is Daniel Morecam. Available now on The Binge. Listen wherever you get your podcast. In January of 2013, 17-year-old Kendrick Johnson was found dead in his high school gym.
Starting point is 00:26:56 An initial autopsy determined that he died of a freak accident, but for months, the Lowndes County Sheriff's Department continued to investigate the case. And eventually, they found two strong suspects in Kendrick's death, brothers William and Sean Clark. The detectives were eager to interview. William and Sean, but when they approached them, they were told to speak to the family's lawyers instead, which was strange, because the brothers did speak to several media outlets around the same time. William insisted he was Kendrick's friend and said he couldn't even remember what the
Starting point is 00:27:37 fight on the bus was about. Both he and his brother were adamant that they didn't see Kendrick on the day of his death, and they were nowhere near the gym where his body was found. And that was all the police could glean about the brothers. With no probable cause, they couldn't force them to talk. By May, five months after Kendrick's death, police had interviewed more than a hundred people. On top of that, they'd reviewed hundreds of hours of surveillance footage and tested several blood samples found inside the gym. The bloody tissues in the girls' bathroom belonged to a color guard performer
Starting point is 00:28:19 who injured herself on the morning Kendrick was found. The blood spatter on the wall, found 40 feet from the body, wasn't Kendrick's. Police couldn't identify whose blood it was, but they believed it had been there for a while. Though many of the students had theories about who might have killed Kendrick, the authorities believed
Starting point is 00:28:40 all of them were based on gossip. In the end, they didn't find any proof he had been murdered. And so on May 2nd, the Lowndes County Sheriff's Department officially closed the investigation and ruled that Kendrick Johnson's death was a freak accident. The news infuriated Kendrick's parents. They protested outside the police station and contacted the media. They believe that because Kendrick was black, the authorities had chosen not to fully investigate his case. But the Johnson family wasn't giving up. If the police weren't going to keep the case alive, the Johnson's would. Kendrick's parents exhumed Kendrick's body and paid for a second independent autopsy by a pathologist named Dr. Anderson.
Starting point is 00:29:38 sin. And what he discovered was truly shocking. Kendrick's organs were nowhere to be found. During an autopsy, organs are normally removed and placed in bags, but they're supposed to be returned to the body before burial. In this case, the organs were replaced by wadded up newspaper. Instead of a heart, a pair of lungs, and a brain, there were J.C. Penny advertisements, letters to the editor, and comic strips. Funeral homes often use sawdust or cotton to fill cavities in bodies. It was highly unusual to use something like old newspapers. The family contacted the funeral home that prepared Kendrick for burial, and they declined to comment about the newspapers. but insisted the organs were already missing when they took custody of the body.
Starting point is 00:30:45 The Georgia Bureau of Investigation, which had performed the autopsy, disagreed. They said the organs were in the body when they sent it to the funeral home. But the Lowndes County coroner, Bill Watson, sided with the funeral home. He explained that the organs were so badly decomposed after the initial autopsy that they had to be destroyed. With all that he said, she said, it was difficult to know who was telling the truth, and there was another issue.
Starting point is 00:31:19 No one could find the clothes Kendrick was wearing when he died. At first, a lawyer for the funeral home told CNN they received the clothes at the same time as the body, but a few days later, they retracted the statement, claiming they never received the clothes at all. All the mess made the Johnson family suspect that somebody was covering up a mistake. But even without the organs or clothes, Dr. Anderson was able to perform the second autopsy. And when he reviewed the first one, he noticed a major red flag.
Starting point is 00:31:58 Kendrick's cause of death was listed as positional asphyxia. That means he was stuck in a position where he couldn't breathe. When someone dies like this, they fight for breath in their final moments. This struggle wears out their muscles until eventually their heart fails. And as it does, fluid fills the lungs. The lungs typically triple or even quadruple in weight by the time of death. But in the original autopsy report, the medical examiner noted no fluid at all. Kendrick's lungs were a completely normal weight for his size.
Starting point is 00:32:39 Dr. Anderson believed this made positional asphyxia impossible. And as he examined the body, he noticed even more inconsistencies. For example, the only injuries the first medical examiner noted were a scratch on Kendrick's wrist and mild damage to his right pinky. But Dr. Anderson found unheeled cuts on the fingers of his left hand, which Kendrick likely got right before he died. The cuts looked like they were done by fingernails, suggesting that he may have been in a fight, just like his father believed. But the biggest bombshell was yet to come. As Dr. Anderson examined Kendrick's neck, he noticed an area near the jaw had bled internally.
Starting point is 00:33:38 Damage to that area can massively affect blood pressure and, in some cases, even cause sudden death. None of this was described in the original autopsy report, but for Dr. Anderson, this was irrefutable proof that Kendrick Johnson had died of blunt force trauma. The reason his lungs were empty of fluid was because he was already dead when he was put inside the mat. Dr. Anderson believed Kendrick was likely murdered. At best, that meant the police made some serious mistakes. At worst, they were covering up a homicide. But either way, the results meant that Kendrick's killer was still out there. The news sparked outrage from the Valdosta community. Crowds of hundreds joined the Johnson family
Starting point is 00:34:41 at rallies, calling for a second investigation into Kendrick's death. Civil rights leaders, including Reverend Al Sharpton and Martin Luther King III, attended and offered to help. Soon the Johnson's hired lawyer Benjamin Crump, who had previously represented the family of Trayvon Martin. To pressure the Department of Justice to reopen the case, they requested a special hearing called a coroner's inquest. This is something like a trial where all the evidence relating to Kendrick's death would be presented to the coroner and a jury. Inquests don't assign guilt or determine legal liability, but they do establish official causes of death. And if Kendrick's death was ruled a homicide, it could force police to reopen a criminal investigation. Although coroner Bill Watson had previously said he wasn't satisfied with how the police handled Kendrick Johnson's body, he refused to hold an inquest.
Starting point is 00:35:48 For the Johnson family, disappointed was an understatement. But luckily, they still had one more chance at justice. The U.S. attorney for the district, Matthew Moore, announced that he was considering taking another look at the case. In the meantime, the Johnsons held daily rallies in the community and continued to raise awareness for the case through Facebook. With the public pressure mounting, on October 31st, 2013, Matthew Moore finally agreed to reopen the case. After ten months of fighting, the Johnsons had scored a major victory. As the second investigation began, they were more confident than ever that they would find the person who killed their son. They had no idea that their path to justice was just beginning, and it would drag on for much longer than they expected.
Starting point is 00:37:00 Thanks so much for listening. I'm Carter Roy, and this is Murder, True Crime Stories. Come back next time for part two on the murder of Kendrick Johnson. and all the people it affected. Murder True Crime Stories is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. Here at Crime House, we want to thank each and every one of you for your support. If you like what you heard today,
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Starting point is 00:37:56 We'll be back on Thursday. Murder True Crime Stories is hosted by me, Carter Roy, and is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. This episode was brought to life by the Murder True Crime Stories team. Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro, Alex Benadon, Natalie Pertofsky, Lori Marinelli, Sarah Camp, Tara Wells, Molly Quinlan, Artwick, Honeyas Saeed, and Russell Nash. Thank you for listening. Looking for your next crimehouse, listen, don't miss clues with Morgan Absher and Kalin Moore. Every Wednesday, Morgan and Kalin take you deep into the world of the most notorious crimes ever.
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