I didn’t see the same tone. I had 28 more days before they decide that they’re going to put my lights out. I can’t be my best friend because I have never liked myself.
On February 12th, 2009, Johnny Ray Johnson was executed by lethal injection at the Huntsville Unit in Huntsville, Texas. He was 51 years old. He had been on death row for 13 years. And the woman he was put there for, 41-year-old Leah that night in 1995. In this video, we’re going to walk through everything. The crime, the trial, the execution, what his last meal was, and what his very last words were. Stay with me.
To understand what happened on March 27th, 1995, the night that would eventually cost Johnny Ray Johnson his life, you have to understand who he already was before that night. Johnny Ray Johnson was born on August 2nd, 1957, in Travis County, Texas. He grew up, found work driving trucks, operating forklifts, working out of daily labor pool sites across Houston and Austin. On the surface, he was just another working man, a face in the crowd, someone you’d pass on the street without a second thought. But underneath that ordinary exterior was a man with a pattern, a deeply violent, deeply predatory pattern that had been building for nearly two decades.
By the time of his arrest in 1995, Johnson had been arrested 20 times. He had three prior prison sentences, one for burglary and aggravated assault in 1978, one for sexual assault in 1983, and another for sexual assault in 1987. That last prison stint, he served only 10 months before being released. He had also, during a period when he worked as a cab driver, confessed to raping women he picked up as passengers. He raped his own 8-year-old niece. He sexually assaulted his sister-in-law’s sister. The system had him multiple times, and multiple times it let him go.
What happened next is on the record, and it is brutal. March 27th, 1995, Houston, Texas. Johnson, then 37 years old, approached a 41-year-old woman named Leah Joett Smith. Leah Smith was a cocaine addict. She was vulnerable, and Johnson knew exactly how to exploit that vulnerability. He offered her crack cocaine in exchange for sex. She accepted the drugs. She smoked them, and then she said no. That refusal, a woman exercising the only boundary she had left, is what triggered what came next.
Johnson grabbed her. He ripped her clothes off and threw her to the ground. When Leah fought back, when she picked up a wooden board and tried to defend herself, Johnson grabbed her head and slammed it against a concrete curb over and over until she stopped fighting. Then he raped her. He stomped on her face five or six times, and then he walked away.
But he came back. He had left his wallet at the scene. So he returned, and while Leah Smith lay dying on the ground, barely alive, choking, he raped her a second time. Then he picked up his wallet, took her boots, and left. After that, according to records, he went and got a beer.
In his own confession, Johnson described what was going through his mind during the assault:
“Something in my head was just saying, ‘Kill, kill, kill.'”
Leah Joette Smith did not survive. The medical examiner who testified at trial confirmed the cause of death. She choked on her own blood. Both sides of her jawbone had been fractured. Her teeth were knocked out. Her tongue was displaced. She died face up on that street, drowning in the blood that pooled in the back of her throat.
Here is where this case becomes something even larger than one murder, because Leah Smith, as horrific as her death was, was not the only victim. Court documents revealed that her killing was part of a month-long spree of violence in 1995. Investigators tied Johnson to at least five rape slayings and at least eight additional rapes across Houston and Austin, crimes that stretched back to the late 1970s.
After his arrest, Johnson did something unexpected. He talked. He directed police to the scenes of the other murders he had committed. He gave written confessions. He gave three videotape statements confessing to the rape and murder of two other women found in Houston in 1995. He also confessed to a third murder, but investigators could not confirm it. They believed the victim may have survived, severely injured, without anyone knowing the attack was connected to Johnson.
In total, Johnson confessed to raping 13 other women beyond Leah Smith, including his 8-year-old niece. Many of those rapes involved brutal beatings and strangulation. At least two ended in death.
At the time of his arrest, investigators noticed something chilling about the geography of the crimes. Johnson was being hired out of daily labor pool sites in Houston. The bodies of the slaying victims were found near those same labor pool locations. He was hunting close to where he worked, blending in, invisible. A federal appeals court in 2007 described the evidence against him in just five words:
“The evidence of his brutal rapes and murders seemed endless.”
Johnson was arrested in 1995. On July 27th, 1995, a Harris County Grand Jury indicted him for the capital murder of Leah Joette Smith. The trial moved forward in May 1996. Prosecutors presented the physical evidence, the confessions, the medical examiner’s findings, and perhaps most powerfully, Johnson’s surviving victims took the stand themselves during the punishment phase of the trial. Women who had lived through what he did to them. Women who sat in that courtroom and told the jury what kind of man they were dealing with. His 8-year-old niece, now older, testified against him.
Johnson’s response? He said it was her chance to get even with him. That her mother had a vendetta. He was that man.
On May 21st, 1996, the jury found Johnny Ray Johnson guilty of capital murder. Nine days later, on May 30th, 1996, he was sentenced to death. He was assigned death row number 999197 and transferred to the Polunsky Unit in Livingston, Texas, the facility that houses Texas’ condemned men.
What followed was 13 years of legal proceedings. Johnson and his attorneys pursued every avenue available to them. In February 1998, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed his conviction and sentence on direct appeal. In July 1998, he filed for a writ of habeas corpus in state court. That was denied in February 2004. He then moved to federal court. In January 2005, he filed a federal habeas petition. The Federal District Court denied it in March 2006. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that denial in March 2007. The US Supreme Court declined to review his case in December 2007.
On November 10th, 2008, a trial court set his execution date, February 12th, 2009.
In the final days before that date, his lawyers made one more attempt, filing a subsequent habeas application on February 10th, 2009, just 2 days before the scheduled execution. They argued, among other things, that Johnson was intellectually disabled and therefore should not be executed. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals reviewed it and dismissed it on February 11th, 2009, 1 day before his death, finding that Johnson had failed to make a sufficient case for intellectual disability. His lawyers then turned to the US Supreme Court. The Supreme Court refused to intervene. The execution was carried out less than an hour after that final refusal.
Was there controversy in this case? There was, though it was limited. Johnson consistently maintained, right up until the end, that he did not kill Leah Smith.
“I wasn’t there.”
He told the Associated Press the week before his execution.
“I was at work that night. I don’t know what happened to her.”
He claimed his confession had been coerced.
“They made me sign it. I told them I didn’t do this.”
The prosecutor who put him away, Harris County District Attorney Bill Hawkins, said simply:
“I never felt like Johnson was somebody committed to telling the truth all the time.”
What was clear from Johnson’s own confessions, from the scenes he led police to, from the testimony of surviving victims, was that the courts found the evidence overwhelming.
February 12th, 2009, Huntsville, Texas. The Huntsville Unit, the site of every Texas execution. It was a Thursday evening. A small group of friends and relatives he had personally asked to witness his death were present, separated from the chamber by a window. They stifled sobs as he was brought in. He was strapped down, and then, before the drugs began, he was given the opportunity to make a final statement. He took it. At length, Johnny Ray Johnson spoke for several minutes.
He never said Leah Smith’s name. He never acknowledged the women he had beaten, raped, and killed. Instead, he spoke about himself, about death row, about the death penalty. He called the Polunsky Unit, the prison where he had spent 13 years, the Polunsky Dungeon.
“It’s life without meaning.”
He said.
“It’s life without purpose. It is no life at all.”
He described death row as a pit of hopelessness, unforgiveness, terrifying, and debilitating. He then addressed everyone watching, the witnesses in the room, and in his mind, perhaps the world beyond.
“Why does my heart ache? We want pleasure, love, and satisfaction. Does anyone care who I am? Can you feel me, people?”
He spoke about justice, and then he made his final appeal to the public.
“The most terrifying thing is the US is the only place, the only civilized country free on this planet that says it will stop murder and enable justice. I ask each of you to lift your voices and demand an end to the death penalty in the United States of America.”
He then invoked his faith.
“If we live, we live to the Lord. If we die, we die to the Lord. Christ rose again in Jesus’ name.”
He said goodbye to the people watching him through that window.
“Bye, Ann Helen, Louise, Joanna, and to all the rest of y’all.”
And then he looked at the warden.
“You may proceed, warden.”
And then, before the drugs took full effect, Johnny Ray Johnson began to sing.
“Jesus, keep me near the cross. There’s a bright and shining…”
His voice faded. His eyes closed. At 6:19 p.m., he was pronounced dead, 8 minutes after the lethal drugs began to flow.
Before his execution, Johnson made his final meal request, and the prison said they would honor it as long as the items were available in the kitchen. He asked for four pieces of fried chicken breast, two chicken fried steaks, 20 fried shrimp, four fried eggs with no yolk, two golden brown biscuits with butter and honey, two gallons of black coffee with cream and sugar, and two hand-sized pieces of peanut brittle candy. A large meal, specific, almost meticulously planned.
Johnson was the eighth person executed in Texas in 2009. He was the 431st person executed in Texas since the state resumed capital punishment on December 7th, 1982. He had been arrested 20 times before his conviction. He confessed to raping 13 women beyond his capital victim. He was connected to at least five murders. He spent 13 years on death row, and he died insisting he was innocent of the one crime he was convicted of while confessing in detail to many others.
Cases like Johnny Ray Johnson’s sit at the uncomfortable intersection of everything we argue about when we argue about the justice system. A man with 20 arrests, multiple prison sentences, released early, released again, given chance after chance to cycle back into society and into the lives of women who had no idea what was coming. A system that documented his violence, convicted him of it, and still put him back on the street. And then, at the very end, a man who asked the world to feel something for him, who spoke about love and longing and the cruelty of death row, who sang a hymn as the drugs took hold.
Meanwhile, Leah Joette Smith, 41 years old, struggling with addiction, human and flawed like all of us, died choking on her own blood on a street in Houston. she did not get a final statement. She did not get to say goodbye. She did not choose what her last moments looked like.
So, I’ll leave you with this. Johnny Ray Johnson went through the criminal justice system multiple times, convicted, sentenced, released, convicted again before he graduated to murder. At what point does the system bear responsibility for the people it puts back on the street? Leave your thoughts in the comments below and until next time.
