Angela Johnson was convicted in 2005 of helping her boyfriend, Dustin Honken, kill five people in northern Iowa in 1993. Two of them, Greg Nicholson and Terry DeGeus, were methamphetamine dealers who bought from Honken and had become potential witnesses in a federal case against him. The other three were Lori Duncan, Nicholson's girlfriend, and her daughters, Kandi, 10, and Amber, 6, who were with him the night he was taken. The killings happened in two separate attacks, in July and November 1993. Johnson was tried and convicted as his aider and abettor; she did not fire the shots, United Press International reported in 2005.
For seven years no one could say what had become of the five. The case broke in 2000, when Johnson, newly charged and held in a county jail, drew maps of the burial places for a fellow inmate who had won her confidence. He handed them to the authorities. A federal jury in 2005 found her guilty and voted for death, making her the first woman sentenced to death in the federal system since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, according to the Associated Press. In 2012 the trial judge threw out the death sentence, ruling that her lawyers had failed her at the penalty phase, and in 2014 her sentence was reduced to life in prison. Honken was executed in 2020.
Dustin Honken grew up in Britt, Iowa, and studied chemistry at a community college before he began cooking methamphetamine, the Associated Press reported in 2020. In 1992, according to the Eighth Circuit, he began making the drug in Arizona with a friend, Tim Cutkomp, with money from his brother. He supplied it to two dealers in Mason City, Greg Nicholson and Terry DeGeus. Cutkomp moved to Iowa early in 1993 and stayed in the business.
Angela Johnson was DeGeus's girlfriend at the time. She then began a relationship with Honken and became pregnant by him, the court recorded. She lived in north central Iowa, and news reports later described her as a woman from Forest City.
By early 1993 Greg Nicholson was cooperating with investigators. He secretly recorded Honken, the Associated Press reported. On March 21, 1993, Nicholson met Honken to hand over money from drug sales, and police arrested Honken and Cutkomp the same day, according to the Eighth Circuit. A federal grand jury indicted Honken in April 1993 on a methamphetamine conspiracy charge, and he was released on bond.
Through June and July 1993, Honken and Johnson looked for Nicholson. Johnson often asked a friend to babysit her daughter while they searched, and the couple borrowed the friend's car so they would not be recognized, the court said. On July 7, 1993, Johnson bought a semiautomatic nine-millimeter pistol at a pawnshop about an hour from her home. A witness at her trial said it was not the kind of gun people bought for hunting.
Lori Duncan was 31. The Justice Department later described her as a single working mother. She was not involved in drugs and did not know that Nicholson, who was staying with her, was an informant, according to the Associated Press. Her sister-in-law remembered her as a sweet, innocent person who had been put in a bad situation. Her daughters were Kandi, 10, and Amber, 6. Greg Nicholson was 34.
On July 24, 1993, Honken and Johnson killed all four, the Eighth Circuit found. Johnson used a ruse to get the door of the Duncan home in Mason City opened, and before the killings Honken made Nicholson record a videotaped statement clearing him. All four were shot.
Honken's plea hearing in the drug case came five days after the killings. He declined to plead guilty. The videotape of Nicholson was returned to Honken and never recovered, the Eighth Circuit noted. Honken was not charged at that point in connection with Nicholson's disappearance, and investigators turned their attention to the other dealer, Terry DeGeus.
DeGeus was 32 and had once been Johnson's boyfriend. After a friend of his testified before a grand jury, DeGeus spoke with that friend and then called Johnson. On November 5, 1993, he left his daughter with his parents and told them he was going to meet Johnson. He was killed that night. He was shot, the court said, and a witness testified that Johnson had described to her taking part in his killing.
Johnson afterward gave different accounts of that night, the court recorded, telling some people she had not seen DeGeus and others that he had left after they talked. That fall the same friend found a handgun fitted with a silencer in her own closet. Johnson came and took it away.
The five were missing, and the first federal drug case against Honken was dismissed in March 1995. Honken went back to the business. He recruited a new partner and took him to meet Johnson for her approval. The new partner was secretly working with law enforcement, according to the Eighth Circuit. A search of Honken's home in February 1996 led to new drug charges.
Tim Cutkomp later testified that Honken and Johnson talked about killing witnesses, among them the new partner and federal agents. He said Honken was reluctant to bring Johnson into a plan to kill the new partner because she was a "hot head" who wanted to act at once, and that he worried she would push Honken to go through with it. Honken pleaded guilty to drug charges in 1997. Around the time he was sentenced, Johnson telephoned his brother and shouted that if Dustin was not going to see his children, she would make sure his brother did not see his.
In July 2000 Johnson was charged with the murders and taken to the Benton County Jail in Iowa, the Eighth Circuit said. (The Associated Press, in 2012, described her as being in custody on drug charges at the time.) In the jail she met another inmate. He told her he had connections to organized crime and could find a prisoner already serving a life term who would confess to the killings in her place. To make such a confession believable he needed details, and Johnson gave them to him: maps showing where the bodies were, and an account of how the victims had died. He passed everything to the authorities.
Using the maps, officers found the bodies of all five near Mason City in 2000. They had been missing for seven years.
Honken was tried first, in the same federal court. On October 14, 2004, a jury found him guilty of numerous federal offenses, including five counts of murder in furtherance of a continuing criminal enterprise, the Justice Department said. The trial was held under heavy security. The judge, Mark Bennett, seated an anonymous jury, and Honken wore a stun belt under his clothes, the Associated Press reported. The jury recommended death for the murders of Kandi and Amber Duncan; for the killings of Lori Duncan and Terry DeGeus he received life sentences, the Eighth Circuit noted. Iowa has no death penalty, which is why the case was brought in federal court.
Johnson was tried separately in 2005, before Judge Bennett. She was charged with aiding and abetting the five murders under two theories: murder in furtherance of a continuing criminal enterprise, and murder while engaged in a drug conspiracy. That made ten counts, two for each victim. The trial ran in three phases: a merits phase on guilt, an eligibility phase on whether she could face death, and a selection phase on the sentence.
The jury found her guilty on all ten counts. At the merits phase her defense argued that the case rested entirely on circumstantial evidence and that she had not known Honken meant to kill anyone, the Associated Press later summarized. The Eighth Circuit set out the evidence the jury could rely on: she bought the murder weapon, joined the search for Nicholson, used the ruse that got them into the Duncan home, took part in the attack there, and used her relationship with DeGeus to lure him to a remote place. The court added that the jury could reject her claim that she had meant only to help with a kidnapping, since nothing showed a plan to hold anyone, and could find that she drew DeGeus out knowing that Honken had already killed four people.
In the penalty phases her lawyers offered evidence of a troubled childhood, of her relationship with her daughters, and of the useful life she could lead in prison, and they pointed out that she had no earlier criminal record. The appeals court later called the mitigation evidence she presented significant. For the victims, Lori Duncan's brother read a short poem written by one of Amber's childhood friends. It ended: "Amber isn't just a color. She was my best friend." In his closing argument a prosecutor told the jurors that no matter how small Johnson's cell might be, it would be larger than the coffins of the two girls.
The jury voted for death for her part in the killings of Lori Duncan, Kandi Duncan, Amber Duncan and Terry DeGeus, and for life for Greg Nicholson. Because each killing carried two convictions, the result was eight death sentences and two life sentences. Honken's own jury had voted for death only for the two girls.
Judge Bennett formally imposed the sentence in December 2005. He said the law required him to impose what the jury had recommended, and he said he was troubled by the lack of certainty in the record about exactly what Johnson had done in the crimes, according to a report in Minnesota Lawyer. Johnson, then 41, maintained that she was innocent and said Honken had manipulated her. She called her trial a joke and argued that she did not deserve to die because she had not fired the shots, and she warned prosecutors that if they executed her they would have blood on their hands, United Press International reported. Prosecutors said she and Honken would probably face more than five years of appeals before any execution.
Johnson and Honken were the first people sentenced to death in an Iowa case in more than 40 years.
The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals heard her appeal and ruled on July 30, 2007, in an opinion by Judge Wollman for a panel that included Judges Bye and Smith. It rejected almost all of her claims.
Johnson argued that it was disproportionate to sentence her to death for the killings of Lori Duncan and Terry DeGeus, for which Honken's jury had given him life. The court disagreed. It said proportionality review looks at the relation between the crime and the punishment, not at differences between codefendants, and that separate juries may reasonably reach different verdicts. It found the evidence enough to show that she was an essential participant who intended the killings.
The court upheld the use of statements by Nicholson and DeGeus under the rule of forfeiture by wrongdoing: by helping to kill witnesses, Johnson lost the right to object to their words being used against her, even though they had been witnesses against Honken rather than her. It held that the prosecutor's comparison of her cell with the girls' coffins had strayed over the line, but found it too limited to have made the sentencing unfair. It also rejected a claim of juror misconduct involving a juror who had told others that she would get three automatic appeals.
On one point Johnson won. The conspiracy-murder convictions duplicated the continuing-criminal-enterprise convictions for the same killings, and the government did not contest it. The court sent the case back so that five of her ten convictions could be vacated, leaving five. The Supreme Court declined to hear her case in 2008.
Johnson then challenged her sentence in the trial court, arguing that her lawyers had been ineffective. Judge Bennett held four evidentiary hearings over 18 days, according to the Eighth Circuit. In March 2012, in a ruling 448 pages long, he vacated her death sentence. He found that her 2005 defense team had been "alarmingly dysfunctional," the Associated Press reported.
Bennett found that the lawyers never presented expert testimony about her mental health at the time of the killings, including evidence of serious brain impairments, personality disorders and past methamphetamine use. They also failed to offer evidence, such as testimony about battered woman syndrome, that could have answered the prosecution's claim that she took part in DeGeus's killing out of revenge. He noted that Iowa has no death penalty and that few lawyers in the state had experience with capital cases. He had appointed the team himself, three lawyers he had called a dream team: Alfred Willett, Patrick Berrigan and Dean Stowers. Stowers agreed that the team had been dysfunctional and said he was glad she would get a new chance.
The ruling left her convictions in place. Bennett said the evidence of her guilt was overwhelming. He acknowledged that the decision would upset the victims' families but wrote that he had done his duty under the Constitution. The Associated Press noted that Bennett, appointed by President Bill Clinton, had acknowledged personal opposition to the death penalty and had written in 2006 of grave concerns about how unfairly it was applied. At the time Johnson was held at a federal medical center for women in Fort Worth, Texas. She had been one of two women on federal death row.
Terry DeGeus's sister told the Associated Press that the ruling did not surprise her. She hoped prosecutors would appeal, but said she could accept a life sentence if the ruling stood, because her family was tired of reliving her brother's death and taxpayers should not have to pay for another trial.
In June 2012 Assistant U.S. Attorney C. J. Williams filed notice in federal court in Sioux City that the government would again seek death at a new sentencing hearing. Bennett set it for June 3, 2013, and jury selection and the hearing were expected to take up to three months. Her new lawyer was Michael Burt of San Francisco. In July 2012 an Iowa assistant attorney general who had worked with federal prosecutors on the case withdrew; a state spokesman did not say why.
Bennett ruled that the new jury would decide only whether she should be sentenced to death, and that if it did not choose death he would sentence her to life without parole. He also limited the evidence prosecutors could present. Prosecutors said the limits kept them from arguing that she would be dangerous if released and from presenting some evidence of how the murders were planned. In April 2013 he suspended the hearing after the government said it would appeal.
On August 25, 2014, the Eighth Circuit vacated those orders in part. The panel majority held that a new jury must decide for itself whether the government had proved the aggravating factors needed for a death sentence, and that Bennett had been wrong to exclude all evidence of planning for the Nicholson and Duncan killings. Judge Bye dissented; he would have dismissed the appeal. In December 2014 Johnson's lawyers asked to have the new hearing moved to Minnesota or out of western and central Iowa, the Associated Press reported.
In 2014 her death sentence was reduced to life in prison, the Associated Press reported in 2019. Later Associated Press reports said that Judge Bennett reduced her sentence to life. By 2019 Bennett had retired from the bench and was directing an institute for justice reform at Drake University in Des Moines.
Honken had been on federal death row in Terre Haute, Indiana, since 2005. In July 2019 the Justice Department announced that it would resume federal executions, and he was one of five death row inmates given execution dates. He was executed by lethal injection at the federal prison in Terre Haute on July 17, 2020, and pronounced dead at 4:36 p.m. He was the first person executed in an Iowa case since 1963. His last words were a prayer to the Virgin Mary; he did not address the victims' families.
Bennett, by then retired, told the Associated Press before the execution that although he generally opposed the death penalty he believed Honken deserved it, that the defense lawyers had done an outstanding job with very little to work with, and that the evidence was overwhelming. The Duncan family said the execution brought some justice and closure, and that the girls had never had a chance to grow up. The girls' father had pressed for years for Honken's execution. He died of cancer in 2018, and his family had promised him they would be there. Lori Duncan's sister-in-law planned to attend.
Johnson was serving her life sentence at a federal prison in Minnesota, the Associated Press reported in July 2020.
How much Johnson herself did is the central dispute in the case. She was convicted as an aider and abettor, and news reports and the Justice Department describe Honken as the man who killed the five. She has said she is innocent, that Honken manipulated her, and that she did not deserve death because she did not pull the trigger. At her trial the defense argued that she had not known he meant to kill. The jury rejected that, and the Eighth Circuit upheld the finding that she intended the killings. At the formal sentencing, Judge Bennett said he was troubled by the lack of certainty in the record about her precise role.
The account of DeGeus's last hour rests on testimony about what Johnson said, not on an eyewitness. The court's account of how he died rests on that testimony. News reports have described the same events differently. A 2012 Associated Press report said Johnson lured DeGeus a month after the July killings, but the court record puts his death on November 5, 1993. Reports have also differed on DeGeus's home town, giving Britt in one account and Mason City in another.
Accounts of the custody she was in when she drew the maps also differ. The Eighth Circuit said she had been charged with the murders in July 2000; a 2012 Associated Press report said she was then serving time on drug charges.
1992: Dustin Honken begins making methamphetamine in Arizona with Tim Cutkomp; Greg Nicholson and Terry DeGeus sell it in Mason City, Iowa.
March 21, 1993: Honken and Cutkomp are arrested after Nicholson, cooperating with police, meets Honken.
April 1993: Honken is indicted on a federal methamphetamine conspiracy charge and released on bond.
July 7, 1993: Johnson buys a nine-millimeter pistol at a pawnshop.
July 24, 1993: Greg Nicholson, Lori Duncan, Kandi Duncan and Amber Duncan are killed.
Five days later: Honken declines to plead guilty at his plea hearing.
November 5, 1993: Terry DeGeus is killed after telling his parents he is going to meet Johnson.
March 1995: The first federal drug case against Honken is dismissed.
February 1996: A search of Honken's home leads to new drug charges.
1997: Honken pleads guilty to drug charges.
July 2000: Johnson is charged and held in the Benton County Jail.
2000: Her maps lead investigators to the five bodies near Mason City.
October 14, 2004: A jury convicts Honken; it recommends death for the murders of the two girls.
2005: A jury convicts Johnson on ten counts and votes for death for four of the five killings.
December 2005: Judge Mark Bennett formally sentences her to death.
July 30, 2007: The Eighth Circuit affirms, apart from five duplicate convictions it orders vacated.
2008: The Supreme Court declines to hear her appeal.
March 2012: Bennett vacates her death sentence for ineffective assistance of counsel; the convictions stand.
June 2012: Prosecutors announce they will again seek death.
April 2013: The new sentencing hearing is suspended pending a government appeal.
August 25, 2014: The Eighth Circuit orders a full sentencing rehearing.
2014: Her sentence is reduced to life in prison.
July 17, 2020: Dustin Honken is executed at Terre Haute, Indiana.
July 2020: Johnson is reported serving her life sentence at a federal prison in Minnesota.