Martha Ann Johnson

Victims

4 deaths, 1 COVERED BY A CONVICTION. She was convicted only of the murder of her eleven-year-old daughter Jenny Ann Wright, and sentenced to death; that sentence was set aside in 1997 for ineffective assistance of counsel and replaced with life imprisonment. The three earlier deaths, all infants, were certified as sudden infant death syndrome at the time and no conviction followed for any of them

Years active

1977 - 1982

Location

Clayton County, Georgia, USA

Method

Smothering

Status

Arrested on July 3, 1989 and tried in Clayton County for the death of her eleven-year-old daughter Jenny Ann Wright. She was CONVICTED OF MURDER AND SENTENCED TO DEATH on May 5, 1990, becoming one of the few women on death row in Georgia. The three younger children, who died in 1977, 1980 and 1981, were not the subject of that conviction; their deaths had been recorded as sudden infant death syndrome at the time and were reinvestigated only after the fourth. In 1997 the Supreme Court of Georgia set the death sentence aside on the ground that she had been denied effective assistance of counsel at the sentencing phase, and on resentencing she received LIFE IMPRISONMENT. Held in the Georgia Department of Corrections.

Johnson was born in 1955 and lived in Clayton County, Georgia. Four of her children died between 1977 and 1982: James William Taylor, twenty-three months; Tabitha Jenelle Bowen, three months; Earl Wayne Bowen Jr., two; and Jenny Ann Wright, eleven. Each death was attributed to natural causes at the time, including sudden infant death syndrome, and no connection was made between them.

The pattern that eventually drew attention was the timing. Three of the deaths followed within days of a violent argument with or a separation from her husband, and the prosecution's case was that the children had been killed to bring him back.

The cases were reopened by a Georgia investigator in the late 1980s. She made statements that were treated as admissions and later retracted them.

She was tried for the death of Jenny Ann, the eleven-year-old, convicted, and sentenced to death in 1990. The death sentence was later reduced to life imprisonment.

One conviction and four deaths is the range this roster carries, and it is the honest one. The medical evidence in the three infant cases was, by the time of the trial, decades old and had been recorded as natural at the time; the conviction concerns the oldest child, whose death could not be explained that way. This case sits with Diana Lumbrera, Christine Falling and Martha Woods in this archive as an infant-death series recorded as natural and reconstructed years afterwards, and, as Kathleen Folbigg's entry shows, that class of case requires care in both directions.