News

Grocery Clerk John Eichinger Confesses to Killing Two Sisters and a Toddler, and to a 1999 Murder

Hours after Heather and Lisa Greaves and three-year-old Avery Johnson were stabbed to death, Eichinger admitted the killings and said the same knife killed Jennifer Still.

Published

Illustration of police officers on the walkway of a two-story seaside motel at night, patrol cars below. Not an actual scene from the case.

For almost six years, the stabbing of Jennifer Still had gone unsolved. On March 25, 2005, the man who killed her confessed, hours after he stabbed two sisters and a three-year-old girl to death in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania.

That morning, John Eichinger went to the Greaves home in Upper Merion Township and killed Heather Greaves, 27, her sister Lisa Greaves, 23, and Heather's daughter, Avery Johnson, 3. The sisters' father found them when he came home. A witness told police she had seen Eichinger leaving the house bleeding, and Montgomery County detectives went to the Acme food market in Somers Point, New Jersey, where he worked. He first gave a false account, then confessed. "I did it," he said. He told detectives he had meant to kill Heather unless she ended her relationship with her boyfriend.

In the same interview, Eichinger confessed to using the knife from the Greaves killings to kill Jennifer Still, 20, on July 6, 1999, because she had rejected him to stay with her fiancé. Still and Heather Greaves had both been part of his circle of friends. He waived extradition the next morning and was handed over to Montgomery County detectives.

On October 18, 2005, Eichinger waived a jury and was convicted of all four murders in a stipulated bench trial. He received three death sentences for the Greaves killings and life in prison for Still's murder.

Sources