In 2000, serving time on drug charges, Angela Jane Johnson sketched a map for a fellow inmate she trusted, Robert McNeese, showing where some bodies were buried. McNeese was an informant. The map led investigators to shallow graves near Mason City, Iowa, and to five people missing since 1993: Greg Nicholson and Terry DeGeus, two former dealers for Johnson's boyfriend, Dustin Honken, who had become government witnesses; Nicholson's girlfriend, Lori Duncan, thirty-one; and Duncan's daughters, Kandi, ten, and Amber, six.
Honken ran one of the Midwest's largest methamphetamine operations out of Britt, in northern Iowa, and in 1993 a federal investigation built on those informants threatened to end it. Days before he was due to plead guilty to drug charges, Johnson got into Lori Duncan's home on July 25 by posing as a saleswoman. She and Honken forced Nicholson to make a videotaped statement clearing Honken, then drove Nicholson, Duncan and the two girls to a field and shot them all in the back of the head at close range. The children were killed because they were home. On November 4 Johnson lured DeGeus, a former boyfriend of hers, and he was killed too.
Johnson was born in Forest City, Iowa, on January 17, 1964. Her sister later testified that their mother was an abusive, neglectful alcoholic; she was raised by deeply religious grandparents who, when she was in grade school, held her down, waved Bibles over her and spoke in tongues to drive out demons, and she was molested as a child.
Tried separately from Honken, she was convicted in 2005 of five counts of aiding and abetting murder and sentenced to death on four of them, the first woman condemned by a federal jury since the 1950s. In March 2012, in a 448-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Mark Bennett threw out the death sentence, finding her defense team "alarmingly dysfunctional" in failing to put her mental state before the jury, while leaving the convictions in place because the evidence of guilt was overwhelming. In December 2014 prosecutors withdrew the death penalty; she dropped her appeals and was resentenced to life without parole. Honken was executed at Terre Haute on July 17, 2020. Johnson is held at the Federal Correctional Institution in Aliceville, Alabama.