Johnson was born in 1964 and was Dustin Honken's girlfriend. Honken ran a methamphetamine operation in northern Iowa and was facing federal prosecution built on informants.
On July 25, 1993, Greg Nicholson, a former dealer who had informed, was killed along with his girlfriend Lori Duncan, thirty-one, and her daughters Kandace, ten, and Amber, six. Johnson's role, as the prosecution proved it, was to lure Nicholson and to be present; the children were killed because they were there. On November 4, 1993 a second informant, Terry DeGeus, was killed. The five bodies were buried in woodland and were missing for more than seven years.
The case was solved because of what she did in jail. Held in 2000, she drew maps showing where the bodies were buried and gave them to a cellmate she believed she could trust, who was cooperating with the government. The bodies were recovered in 2000 and 2001.
She was convicted in 2005 and sentenced to death on December 19, 2005, becoming the first woman a United States federal jury had condemned in more than half a century. In March 2012 the district court vacated the death sentence for ineffective assistance of counsel, Judge Mark Bennett finding in a four-hundred-and-forty-eight-page ruling that an “alarmingly dysfunctional” defence team had failed to put her mental health before the jury. The convictions were untouched; he said the evidence of guilt was overwhelming. In December 2014 the prosecution gave up the death penalty, she dropped her appeals, and she was resentenced to life imprisonment without parole. Honken was executed by the federal government on July 17, 2020.