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    Redondo police ID bones found in 2001 — answering family’s 4 decades of questions
    • June 26, 2023

    Antonio “Tony” Johnson was 5 years old when his mother left. Again.

    But the boy, now a man in his late 40s, was likely too young to remember when his Mom, Catherine Parker-Johnson, initially left Memphis, Tennessee, four years earlier, eventually making her way out west to Southern California.

    That first departure, however, was followed by phone calls and letters – and an eventual return.

    On May 13, 1981, a day before Tony Johnson’s big sister, Rebecca, turned 8, their mother showed up on their doorstep.

    But the reunion was short-lived.

    Despite pleas for her to stay, Parker-Johnson continued her wayward existence. She left again – and would never return.

    The letters and phone calls also stopped. Eventually, a sense of abandonment set in among her children, Tony Johnson said. It was as if they were unwanted.

    But the truth is more tragic: Their mother was dead.

    She was likely murdered.

    Her corpse – or most of it, anyway – was buried in the backyard of a Redondo Beach house, where it remained undiscovered for 20 years.

    Missy Koski Forensic Genetic Genealogist speaks at a press conference identifying the victim of a cold case homicide from 1981, in Redondo Beach on Monday, June 26, 2023. The Redondo Beach Police Department Cold Case Unit in partnership with the DNA Doe Project have identified the victim as 24-year-old Catherine-Parker Johnson. (Photo by Brittany Murray, Press-Telegram/SCNG)

    Joe Hoffman, Redondo Beach Chief of Police speaks at a press conference identifying the victim of a cold case homicide from 1981, in Redondo Beach on Monday, June 26, 2023. The Redondo Beach Police Department Cold Case Unit in partnership with the DNA Doe Project have identified the victim as 24-year-old Catherine Parker-Johnson. (Photo by Brittany Murray, Press-Telegram/SCNG)

    Retired Redondo Beach Sgt. Rick Petersen, Missy Koski an investigative genetic geneaologist, Redondo Beach Police reservist Mike Stark and retired Redondo Beach Police Capt. John Skipper, were part of a team that helped uncover the identity of bones found buried in the yard of a Redondo Beach home more than 30 years ago. (photo by Michael Hixon/SCNG)

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    That truth, though, wouldn’t come for more than four decades – not until earlier this year. Ultimately, two retired Redondo Beach police detectives who have made it their post-career mission to help solve cold cases — former Capt. John Skipper and Sgt. Rick Petersen — were responsible for the revelation.

    But now, the search for answers, for the full truth behind Parker-Johnson’s fate, is in a new, potentially more challenging phase: Determining how she died – and who was responsible.

    That’s why Redondo Beach Police Department officials held a Monday morning, June 26, press conference to ask for the public’s help.

    “We’ve been able to develop plausible working theories that are heading us down the right path,” RBPD Chief Joe Hoffman said during the press conference. “But we can still use more information.”

    The story of Parker-Johnson’s life and death, and why her remains were hidden in the Earth, is an incomplete manuscript. Detectives have some chapters in full. Other chapters have gaps. Many are missing entirely.

    There are also details Skipper and Petersen aren’t divulging, since this is now an open and active murder investigation.

    But while the story of Parker-Johnson’s life and death may be fragmented, what is known represents a multilayered tragedy. She dealt with addiction. She was, at least for a time, an itinerant. And she was a Black adult woman, a demographic whose members then and now too often get ignored when they go missing.

    It took DNA technology and the hard work of Skipper and Petersen to identify Parker-Johnson, the first step in discovering the missing fragments of her life – which, in turn, will allow her family to heal.

    “They,” Tony Johnson said, referring to the detectives, “brought a little light to me.”

    “I couldn’t stop her. There was nothing I could do.”

    –Van Johnson, Catherine Parker-Johnson’s husband

    The way her family describes it, Parker-Johnson had some darkness within her.

    She was born on Nov. 9, 1957, in Memphis. But her mother died when she was young and her father didn’t want to tend to tyke and her siblings, said Van Johnson, Parker-Johnson’s husband. So she ended up in foster care.

    The bones found buried in the yard of a Redondo Beach home more than 30 years ago were recently identified through DNA as Catherine Parker-Johnson. Investigators are hoping to find out what happened to the 24-year-old when she was killed in 1981. (photo courtesy of Redondo Beach Police)

    Johnson met Catherine Parker in the early 1970s at a friend’s home. He fell in love with her deep-set, large, brown eyes, full lips and demure smile.

    They married quickly. He was 18. She was 16.

    Their two children, Rebecca and Tony, followed shortly after.

    And for a time, they were happy. But things changed.

    Parker-Johnson, her husband said, grew restless. She began experimenting with drugs, sneaking behind Johnson’s back to do so.

    Arguments ensued. And then, Johnson said, he began “just (staying) out of her way.”

    Johnson moved with the children into his mother’s house.

    Parker-Johnson, her husband said, continued spiraling.

    “She was messing with the wrong dudes,” Johnson said in a Saturday, June 24, phone interview. “Her lifestyle changed. She liked that camp life or whatever it was they were doing.”

    One night, Johnson said, his phone rang. The caller, Johnson said, told the husband he bought a Cadillac and was planning to drive Parker-Johnson to California.

    Johnson, now a retired nurse’s assistant, said he thinks the caller followed through.

    He begged his young wife not to leave, but she didn’t relent. She left Memphis in 1977.

    Yet, she didn’t disappear.

    Instead, she kept in touch with her family. She called frequently to ask about the children. She wrote letters, Johnson said, mostly to her daughter as the girl got older.

    And then, four years later, the day before her daughter’s eighth birthday, the prodigal mother returned home.

    It was a temporary reunion.

    “I didn’t want her to go back to California,” Johnson said. “But she was grown. I couldn’t stop her. There was nothing I could do.”

    Two weeks after returning, Parker-Johnson was gone.

    This time, she vanished.

    John Skipper, retired Redondo Beach police detective is working a cold case of a skeleton found buried in the backyard of a home in 2001. This sewage pipe collected from the scene will hopefully help narrow down the time of the possible burial in Redondo Beach on Thursday, February 10, 2022. (Photo by Brittany Murray, Press-Telegram/SCNG)

    John Skipper, retired Redondo Beach police detective is working a cold case of a skeleton found buried in the backyard of a home in 2001 from his office in Redondo Beach on Thursday, February 10, 2022. (Photo by Brittany Murray, Press-Telegram/SCNG)

    Retired Redondo Beach detectives John Skipper and Rich Petersen volunteer their time to work the department’s cold cases. Currently the duo are working a cold case of a skeleton found buried in the backyard of a home in 2001. This sewage pipe collected from the scene will hopefully help narrow down the time of the possible burial in Redondo Beach on Thursday, February 10, 2022. (Photo by Brittany Murray, Press-Telegram/SCNG)

    Retired Redondo Beach detectives John Skipper and Rich Petersen volunteer their time to work the department’s cold cases. Currently the duo are working a cold case of a skeleton found buried in the backyard of a home in 2001. This sewage pipe collected from the scene will hopefully help narrow down the time of the possible burial in Redondo Beach on Thursday, February 10, 2022. (Photo by Brittany Murray, Press-Telegram/SCNG)

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    Skipper and Petersen have spent the last 18 or so years volunteering their time to help solve old cases their full-time counterparts can’t get to.

    They have had multiple successes during that time.

    In October 2011, for example, they came across the case of Edward Emery, whose murder had gone unsolved for 23 years.

    On Nov. 11, 1995, Emery and his wife had just finished shopping at Smith’s Food King on Inglewood Avenue, in Redondo Beach, and the Carson resident was returning a cart when a man walked up to him and shot him in the chest.

    Some early leads fizzled and the case went cold.

    But then Skipper and Petersen looked into it. The detectives noticed investigators at the time had collected a saliva sample from the crime scene.

    They sent the sample, which had been refrigerated, to a police lab, which ran it through the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System, otherwise known as CODIS.

    They found a match.

    “Even though it wasn’t the end-all,” Petersen said in a previous interview, “it was nice to have a good starting point.”

    A lengthy investigation and then a trial ensued, until, in October 2018, Elliot Kimo Laanui was convicted of Emery’s murder.

    Two months later, Skipper and Petersen got to work on another cold case: the death of Parker-Johnson.

    But at the time, Parker-Johnson was a Jane Doe.

    In August 2001, plumbers were digging in the back of a house on Wollacott Street, in Redondo Beach, when they discovered a plastic bag a few feet above a sewage pipe.

    The bag was filled with bones.

    The Los Angeles County coroner’s office excavated the backyard and found a “nearly complete skeleton,” Skipper said.

    But there was no skull.

    Investigators quickly classified the case as a “probable homicide,” Skipper said.

    Recovery site photograph from August 2001 from when human bones were found in a plastic bag, buried in a Redondo Beach backyard. (photo courtesy of Redondo Beach Police Department)

    Detectives worked on the case “pretty intensively for a period of time,” Skipper said. They even submitted DNA from the remains to CODIS, which operates local, state and national databases of DNA profiles from convicted offenders, unsolved crime scene evidence and missing persons.

    But that system, which had only been operational for three years, returned no hits.

    And there were no other tangible leads that would help identify the victim.

    Then, a month later, the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks occurred. The country began prioritizing anti-terrorism efforts – including local police agencies.

    A couple of detectives were pulled away, Skipper said, and the case went cold.

    “This case was going nowhere,” Skipper said. “There were no leads at the time.”

    About 17 years later, Skipper and Petersen, with the Redondo Beach Police Department Cold Case Investigations Unit, pulled the case and got to work.

    The duo began conducting a traditional investigation. They tracked down people who had lived at the Wollacott Street house. They looked into missing person cases.

    Then, they decided to put the nearly 20 years of genetic genealogy advances to use.

    But it wasn’t as simple as sending the DNA back through CODIS.

    “It’s gonna be a lot of work and it’s gonna take time. But this is solvable.”

    — Missy Koski, investigative genetic genealogist

    What followed was a genealogical exploration.

    First, Skipper and Petersen obtained a slice of femur from the coroner’s office. Then, in 2021, they reached out to the DNA Doe Project, a nonprofit that has used cutting-edge technology and multiple labs to identify John and Jane Does for the past five years.

    Eventually, DDP identified the DNA as belonging to a “Sub Saharan African American female,” Skipper said.

    It wasn’t much. But it was something.

    Skipper and Petersen pulled 40 years’ worth of missing persons reports for African American women in Los Angeles County, from 1954 to 1994, to ensure they got enough hits.

    “I thought for sure there would be a few hundred,” Skipper said.

    There were 37. And those leads went nowhere.

    That’s not entirely surprising, though. Law enforcement hasn’t traditionally taken missing persons cases involving adults all that seriously, Skipper said, particularly in the 1980s – and even more so if those folks were Black.

    During her time in California, Skipper said, Parker-Johnson was “marginalized as far as society goes” and had a few “contacts with law enforcement.” Skipper declined to elaborate further.

    But the dearth of missing persons reports wasn’t the only challenge.

    Building a family tree would be complex. And slow.

    They had to build the family tree one DNA match at a time.

    “We might not have any close relatives here; she may have been on vacation here, or a recent immigrant or something,” said Missy Koski, an investigative genetic genealogist and team leader with DDP. “We might not have enough relatives here to identify her.”

    The first break came when the DDP team found a probable third cousin who lived in Northern California.

    That gave them hope.

    Koski quickly called Skipper.

    “I think we can do this,” she told him. “But it’s gonna be a lot of work and it’s gonna take time. But this is solvable.”

    Slowly, the leads started building. So Skipper brought on another team member, longtime RBPD reservist Mike Stark.

    Stark hit the road to track down DNA matches and potential family members. His first stop was Northern California to meet that match and to get a DNA sample from her.

    But there was a roadblock: The match was adopted, Stark learned, and didn’t know her biological parents.

    So officials turned to ancestry.com.

    That led to a woman in Texas – whose father was an even closer match.

    “We were in shock,” Koski said. “He ended up testing out right on the edge of what would be a first cousin, or possibly a half first cousin or the child of a first cousin.”

    The Texas match, Stark said, led to 22 first cousins scattered nationwide, one of whom gave the DNA team its biggest lead yet: There was an 84-year-old aunt in New Jersey, that cousin said, who was essentially a family historian.

    Stark went to New Jersey.

    “Do you remember anybody,” Stark asked her, “who just disappeared sometime maybe in the ’70s, early ’80s that no one’s ever heard from again?”

    She did.

    There was half-niece, she told Stark, who might have left for California and had not been heard from for years.

    Stark left New Jersey with the names of Parker-Johnson’s sister, a niece’s sister and a potential daughter, who turned out to be Rebecca.

    He also had another name: Van Johnson.

    “I believe if she was still living, she would have been back.”

    — Tony Johnson about his mother, Catherine Parker-Johnson

    Jackie Johnson answered the phone in Memphis and then summoned her husband.

    “There’s a police officer from California on the phone,” she told him. “They think they found your wife.”

    Early on, Van Johnson said, he assumed Parker-Johnson had just left her old life behind. He waited for years to see if she would return.

    “I thought she was going to come back, eventually,” he said. “But I had to move on.”

    He never heard from Parker-Johnson again. Later that decade, he filed for divorce, ensuring he’d have full custody of the children.

    Eventually, he remarried.

    Stark’s call, decades later, jolted him.

    “I was in shock,” Johnson said. “I figured something was strange.”

    He figured “something was strange” with his wife’s disappearance, Johnson said — he never imagined this.

    A few more DNA swabs later and the mystery of the Jane Doe, discovered 22 years before in a Redondo Beach backyard, was solved.

    In April, it became official: Jane Doe was Catherine Parker-Johnson.

    “We have reason to believe that she was alive in California, at least until August of 1981,” Skipper said in a recent interview. “And then she doesn’t surface at all after that, in any way shape or form, not a traffic ticket, nothing.”

    Investigators believe Parker-Johnson was living in Inglewood when she died, Skipper said, though the last known contact with her was in Lennox.

    But questions, including how she died and why, who killed her – and why she was buried in that backyard.

    No suspects have been identified, said Hoffman, the Redondo police chief. And there’s no direct connection to the house where Parker-Johnson’s remains were found.

    “There are opportunities for the investigators to pursue different paths,” Hoffman said Monday, “with the hopes that one of those leads toward the suspect that was responsible for this crime.”

    But until then, at least Parker-Johnson’s family has one answer.

    Learning that police had found his mother was bittersweet, said Tony Johnson, who is now 48.

    His last memory of his mother, Tony Johnson said, is of her running up and down the street playing with him.

    Then she left. And vanished.

    For years, the son said, he thought Parker-Johnson didn’t care about him or the rest of their family. Now, the younger Johnson said, he believes something else.

    “I believe if she was still living,” he said, “she would have been back.”

    Perhaps then, her son’s last memory of her would be more recent.

    Thanks to two retired detectives and a team of genealogists, it’s now possible for her son to believe that’s true.

    To believe that Parker-Johnson would have come home.

    Staff writer Lisa Jacobs contributed to this report.

    How to help

    The case is an active homicide investigation.

    Anyone with information can call Skipper or Petersen at 310-379-2477, ext. 2714, text 310-937-6675, or email [email protected].

    ​ Orange County Register 

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