On July 3, 1989, in an interview room at the Clayton County police department, south of Atlanta, a camera and a tape recorder were running when Martha Ann Johnson told an officer that she had killed her eleven-year-old daughter, Jenny Ann Wright, seven years earlier. She said she had also killed her son, J.W. Taylor, who had died in 1977 at not quite two. She denied killing her two other children. All four had died in their mother's care in the space of five years, and until then the only death anyone had called suspicious was Jenny's.
Johnson was thirty-three when she made that statement and had been married four times. Her first marriage had produced Jenny, born in 1971; her second, a son, James William Taylor, in 1975. Her third husband was Earl Bowen, and they had a son, Earl Wayne, in 1979 and a daughter, Tabitha Jenelle, in 1980. Johnson and Bowen fought, separated and reunited repeatedly.
In September 1977, when she was twenty-one and living with Bowen and the two older children, J.W. died. His death certificate said sudden infant death syndrome. Tabitha died at three months, and her certificate said the same. Earl Wayne, about two, went into cardiac arrest in February 1981 on the way to the hospital with a seizure; he was revived and put on life support, declared brain dead, and taken off it three days later. His death was put down to a seizure disorder.
Jenny was the last. In February 1982 Johnson said the girl had been complaining of chest pains, and a doctor had prescribed Tylenol and a rib belt. On February 21 paramedics found her face down on her mother's bed, foam at her mouth, and could not revive her. The state crime lab's autopsy found that she had died of asphyxiation. Clayton County police told Johnson that she was a suspect in Jenny's death and in the three before it, and then did nothing more for six years.
The case was reopened in 1988. Later reporting credits an investigation by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution with bringing it back; investigators then found that each death had come seven to ten days after a bout of trouble between Johnson and Bowen. On the tape, by the account of her confession that has been published, she said she had smothered Jenny and J.W. in bed by lying on top of them; she weighed more than 250 pounds. She said she had done it to get back at Bowen, whom she said she hated for what he had put her through, and at the same time to bring him back. She denied harming the two children he had fathered.
She was tried in Clayton County in 1990 for Jenny's murder alone. On the stand she retracted the confession and testified at length that she had not killed her daughter; the jury watched the videotape. Her husband at the time, Mr. Johnson, testified for her. The prosecution also called a biostatistician, who told the jury that only about five percent of cases like those of her younger children, as a conservative estimate, might be due to causes similar to SIDS. The jury convicted her of murder and on May 5, 1990, returned a sentence of life in prison.
On July 9, 1991, the Supreme Court of Georgia affirmed the conviction. It held that the confession had been properly admitted. It also held that the statistician should never have been allowed to give that figure: he was not a doctor, had laid no foundation for it, and relied only on what he said were long conversations with pediatricians at the Centers for Disease Control. The court disapproved of the testimony but ruled the error harmless, given her confession.
Johnson was never charged in the deaths of J.W., Tabitha or Earl Wayne. Early in 2020 the State Board of Pardons and Paroles notified Clayton County that it meant to release her. The district attorney, Tasha Mosley, wrote to object, and her office said the three earlier children had died in Fulton County. Jenny's half-brother, Shane Wright, and half-sister, Jennifer Coker, said that in 1990 they had been promised she would never be released. "She never once told anybody in that courtroom that she was sorry, never," Wright said. Coker pointed out that Johnson had admitted lying on top of one of her sons and suffocating him, and "nothing has been done about that." Martha Ann Johnson was paroled in March 2020.