Cold Case

I am a complete sucker for cop shows. Law and Order is my current fave, but I've been known to watch one or the other of the CSI's, the show about missing persons that stars Anthony LaPaglia, and - an especial favorite when I remember that it's on - Cold Case Files. Cold Case has an interesting little twist to it: when they open up a cold case, the action ratchets back and forth between present day and the time of the crime (complete with period music and atmospherics).

So the other evening when I heard on the news that a cold case in Worcester - the murder of an elderly woman - had been solved after nearly 25 years, I was immediately interested.

When I heard the headline teaser at the start of the 11 o'clock news, I wondered whether this was the case of Mrs. Johnson, who had lived in the neighborhood I grew up in. (She was no longer living there at the time of her death.) I was long gone from Worcester in 1984, but I remember my mother telling me the story about how Mrs. Johnson had opened her door and was murdered.

When the news item came on, there she was, pictured on the screen. Mrs. Lillian Johnson, with the same short, flippy-curly hairdo and kind smile that I remembered.

It turns out that the police had hung on to a blood sample found at the crime scene, and were able to match it to the person who had murdered Mrs. Johnson.

It's hard to imagine who would have murdered this nice old lady - she was nearly 80 when she was killed - but now we know. And it must be a comfort for her family to know that they finally got the guy.

Let's hear it for forensic technology.

Mrs. Johnson...

Until I was six-and-a-half, my family lived on the second floor of my grandmother's three-family house. (My grandmother refused to call it a three decker because the house didn't have a flat roof like most triple deckers did. Instead, the third floor flat had all sorts of weird rooms with short, slanted ceilings.) Our street had an assortment of modest one-, two- and three-family houses on it (including genuine triple deckers), and several of the multi-family houses were inhabited, like ours, by members of the same extended family. (By the way, when we did move into a single family house, it was on the next street, maybe a hundred yards away from my grandmother's house. We definitely stayed in the 'hood.)

Mrs. Johnson lived two houses down from our house, in a triple-decker that also had a flat occupied by Mrs. Johnson's aunt, Miss Anderson.

As kids, we were quite familiar with who lived where, and what sort of welcome we might expect when we showed up on their doorstep. Children in my era were pretty much free-range, and when we were bored, our little pack of three, four and five year olds would call on one of the houses that was inhabited by older folks - those with no children or much older children. (Or we would call on one of the teen-age brides who occasionally took up occupancy in one of the flats on our street. They were a little too young to pal around with the more established mothers, and I think they liked the diversion we offered from being cooped up all day with a squalling infant.) Not all of the neighbors put out a welcome sign; there were some scary grouches out there. But mostly, people seemed happy to see us when we rang their bell.

The Anderson-Johnson house was one of our top stops.

For one, they had a big conch shell on their porch, the clever hiding place for the skeleton key to the front door. No one seemed to mind our taking turns listening to the ocean in that conch shell, as long as we left the key underneath it.

Mrs. Anderson, who I believe was Mrs. Johnson's aunt - in any case, she was an older woman -  would often come out to chat with us. Sometimes she gave us candy, sometimes she gave us nickels. (Both were better than what Mrs. Hurley gave us once: graham crackers slathered with what I remember as mayonnaise, but which may have been margarine. Whatever it was, I remember tossing my cracker into her hedges.)

Mrs. Johnson was, if I remember correctly, a widow, and I think she worked. But she was always very kind to the neighborhood kids.

The main attraction of the Johnson household was her son, Bobby, who was quite a bit older than we were - maybe 15 years or so - but who would let us hang out with him when he mowed the lawn, or washed the car, or did whatever it was that big boys did around the yard. He would always take time out to play catch with us. My brother Tom idolized Bobby Johnson, and I had a big crush on him, too.

His affinity for kids translated into his professional life, as I learned when my mother sent me an article in the newspaper when he became the principal of the neighborhood public school. (We attended public school for kindergarten-only, but my father and his siblings were Gates Lane School grads.)

Bobby Johnson...

I hope that he and his brother lived to see their mother's murderer found.

What a nice family they were.

I think of the open and trusting world Mrs. Johnson lived in. A gentler world in which people left their house keys under conch shells, in which three and four year olds roamed free - three and four year olds whose parents thought nothing of their little ones calling on neighbors' houses and hanging around with those neighbors' nearly grown sons who probably just wanted to catch a tan in their backyard.

Although my mother would mention the case once in a while, I haven't thought of Mrs. Johnson all that often. I suspect that the last time I ever spoke with her was at my father's wake in 1971. But I have thought of her on those occasion when an older person is killed, senselessly and viciously, in their home.

How terrible that Mrs. Johnson died because she trusted that whoever was knocking on her door would cause her no harm. How terrible that her last moments were likely lived in fear and confusion, rather than in ease and tranquility - hearing the ocean in conch shell.

How good that they have finally caught up with her murderer.