The body by the Interstate 84 overpass had been dragged. Hartford police found Aida Quinones on the afternoon of April 16, 2000, face down in the dirt and gravel of a lot off Laurel Street, her shirt and sweater pushed up to her chest and her pants pulled down and left hanging from her left leg. Her right shoe had been pulled off and dropped nearby. Her left shoe was still on her foot. The abrasions on her back and the position of her arms told investigators she had been attacked in one spot and moved a short distance to another.
Four and a half months later, on August 29, 2000, Rosali Jimenez was found in the basement of an abandoned building at 50-52 Cedar Street, about eight-tenths of a mile away. Her shirt was pushed up. Her pants and underwear were pulled down and hanging from her left leg. Her right sneaker had been removed and set near her body, the left one still laced on her foot. There was a bloody shoe print on her right arm.
Eleven months after that, on July 22, 2001, Alesia Ford was found beside the loading dock of an abandoned building at 1 Myrtle Street, eight-tenths of a mile from each of the other two scenes. Shirt pushed up, pants and underwear pulled down off the left leg, a boot print on the outside of her T-shirt.
Three women, three secluded spots inside a one-mile circle, and the same arrangement each time. All three had died of blunt force trauma to the head. H. Wayne Carver II, the state chief medical examiner, later testified that the injuries to all three were similar and had been inflicted with a similar degree of force. Quinones and Ford had also been manually strangled. The damage to their heads was consistent with repeated stomping.
The three women had a good deal in common besides how they died, and it is the part of the case that explains why the murders went unconnected for as long as they did. Quinones was thirty-three, Puerto Rican, an intravenous drug user with cocaine, morphine and methadone in her blood and needle marks along both arms. Jimenez was thirty-two, also Hispanic, with cocaine and a trace of Prozac in hers; her boyfriend, Orlando Ortiz, had last seen her around nine the previous evening. Ford was thirty-seven, African American, with alcohol and cocaine in her blood and the enlarged lymph nodes of a long-term intravenous user. All three had arrest records for prostitution. They were women whose absence did not generate an immediate search.
For most of two years the three deaths were worked as separate cases. What connected them was laboratory work rather than detective work. Swabs taken from each body were compared against one another, and the same unknown male genetic profile turned up in all three. Investigators built a list of men in the area with records of sexual assault or violence against women, and pulled eleven other Hartford homicides that resembled the three. None of the eleven could be tied in.
In January 2002 the unknown profile was run through the state DNA database and returned a name. Matthew Steven Johnson was thirty-eight, born in Hartford on May 24, 1963, one of ten children and a twin. He had grown up in the Blue Hills and Asylum Hill neighborhoods. He had lost the sight in one eye at twelve, shot with a pellet gun. His recorded IQ was sixty-nine; he had an intellectual disability and a seizure disorder that required medication he stopped taking as a teenager. He had earned a high school equivalency diploma after seeking help at the Institute of Living in Hartford, and had worked as a laborer.
He also had a record of violence against women going back two decades. In May 1980 he robbed and assaulted a pregnant woman. At nineteen, while living in a home for troubled youth, he tried to kill a security guard during an attempted robbery inside the Cathedral of St. Joseph on Asylum Avenue, and was sentenced to ten years for it. He served four. In 1988 he was arrested for forcibly restraining a woman in the street, and about two years later he raped and beat another woman; both women identified him. His fraternal twin brother Mark, who lived in Florida, was checked and eliminated.
On January 2, 2002 Johnson came to Hartford police headquarters voluntarily, at the invitation of detectives. He was read his rights, handed a color photograph of Aida Quinones, and asked whether he knew her. Court records show he studied the picture for about a minute and said he did not. Detectives then asked him to account for the fact that his semen had been recovered from inside her body at the time of her death. He could not, and told them he had not had sexual intercourse with a woman since 1982. Police had not yet established that his DNA was also on Jimenez and Ford. He was arrested on January 13 and charged with all three murders.
The forensic case against him was built on quantities that left little room for argument. The semen recovered from Quinones matched his profile at odds of roughly one in thirty-nine to fifty-nine million depending on the reference population. Semen from Jimenez's mouth matched at about one in two hundred million, and a dried blood-like substance under the fingernails of her right hand carried both her profile and his. Semen on Ford's abdomen matched at approximately one in three hundred million, and a blood-like smear on her chin carried his profile as well. A cigarette butt at the Myrtle Street scene tested positive for saliva consistent with his. Some samples pointed elsewhere, and the record says so plainly: semen in Jimenez's vagina was not his, and semen on Ford's underwear came from at least three unidentified men, none of them him.
Before trial the state asked to try all three murders together, arguing that the evidence in each was admissible in the others to show intent, identity, a common plan and motive. The defense objected that the counts were not cross-admissible and that one trial would be unfairly prejudicial. The trial court granted the motion, pointing to the similarities among the three scenes.
The state's principal expert was Henry C. Lee, the former state chief criminalist and director of the state forensic laboratory, who reviewed the autopsies, the police files, the photographs and the physical evidence and partially reconstructed each scene. Lee testified that all three were what he called primary crime scenes with two nearby locations, meaning each woman was attacked in one place and moved a short distance before being left. He built an argument about timing out of the biology. Semen deposited in the mouth degrades quickly and is easily washed away; Jimenez's fingernails were short and clean; the semen on Ford's abdomen still contained intact sperm. Each of those, he said, meant the material had been left shortly before the woman died. On Quinones he made a narrower point: his semen was inside her but not on her pants, which meant she was killed after intercourse and before she could dress.
Asked to consider the three cases together, Lee listed six shared features, and then gave the jury the forensic taxonomy for multiple murder: single homicide, double homicide, mass killing, separate homicides, continuous killings, and serial killings, the last defined as two or more separate murders linked by similarities and divided by a cooling-off period. Over a defense objection he told the jury the three murders fit the definition of serial killings. The defense had tried to bar the phrase entirely, arguing that the words carried connotations far broader than the technical meaning a forensic scientist would give them. The trial court let it in. The jury convicted on all three counts in 2004, and the court imposed sixty years on each, consecutively, for a total of 180 years.
The appeal turned on both of those rulings, and the Connecticut Supreme Court resolved the first one in a way neither side had argued. Johnson's public defender challenged the consolidation and the serial-killing testimony. The court declined to decide whether the evidence had been properly admitted to show intent or a common plan, holding instead that it was cross-admissible to show propensity under State v. DeJesus and State v. Snelgrove, two decisions handed down while the appeal was pending. DeJesus created a Connecticut exception permitting propensity evidence in sex-related cases; Snelgrove extended it to defendants not charged with a sexual offense. Johnson faced no sexual charge, but the court found the killings sexually driven, and affirmed on that basis.
The result is a peculiar one. The trial judge had told the jury, twice and at length, that it could not treat the evidence as showing a predisposition to kill, and could use it only to consider modus operandi and intent. The Supreme Court affirmed the convictions on the ground that the evidence was admissible for precisely the purpose the jury had been forbidden to use it for, reasoning that any error in admitting it on the narrower grounds was therefore harmless. On the serial-killing testimony the court agreed the term is "likely to be inflammatory when used colloquially," but held that Lee had defined it forensically, explained its application and submitted to cross-examination. A separate claim, that Lee's opinion had improperly decided the ultimate question of identity, was not reviewed at all: the argument had not been made at trial, and a late request for plain-error review came too late to be considered. The judgments were affirmed on November 11, 2008. The ruling was later overruled on other grounds by State v. Payne in 2012.
Johnson petitioned for habeas corpus, arguing that his trial lawyers, George Flores and James McKay, had been ineffective, and that the habeas court should have heard from a former juror who had sat on his case. The petition was denied and the denial affirmed by the Appellate Court in 2015.
One death remains attached to the case without ever being charged. On June 20, 1999, ten months before Quinones, a woman was found dead on a back porch on Garden Street in Hartford with a crushed skull and injuries to her head and neck. Fingerprints identified her as Ladawn Roberts, twenty-eight, dead less than a day. She was pregnant. Her mother told police her daughter had fallen on hard times. Lieutenant Mark Pawlina of the Hartford police, who worked the series, has said the injuries were the same kind that became familiar over the following year. No charge was ever brought in her death and it is unsolved. Johnson has been described in later accounts as a suspect in two further deaths; he has not been charged in either, and nothing beyond the three convictions has been established against him.
Police also looked at him for the death of Rosalind A. Casey, thirty-two, found on Sigourney Street in June 2000, two months after Aida Quinones. He was never charged with it. Accounts also differ on Rosali Jimenez's age, thirty-two in the court record and thirty-three in others. At sentencing her brother, Gabriel Jimenez, asked for the maximum; Johnson said he felt for the families and still denied the killings, insisting he had not had sex with a woman since 1982.
He is serving his sentence at the Cheshire Correctional Institution.