Twenty-four-year-old Rachael Johnson lived in Tallmadge, Ohio with her three-year-old daughter Katelin. On the evening of Friday, March 29th, 1991, Rachael had hired a babysitter and went out on the town with her best friend. The two women were seen leaving the El Cid bar at about two-thirty a.m. on the morning of Saturday, March 30th.
On their way back home, the friend’s car got a flat tire, and she pulled the vehicle off the road into the parking lot of a Dairy Mart at the intersection of Dan Street and Glenwood Avenue. A faded gray car was seen to follow them into the lot.
The friend apparently decided that she would be able to get home on the flat tire, but Rachael decided to walk the rest of the short way back to her own residence, as she didn’t like the burning rubber smell that was permeating the inside of the vehicle. Rachael’s friend drove off into the night, while Rachael herself was either lured or forced into the mysterious gray car that had driven into the lot behind them.
The next morning, the burned body of Rachael Johnson was discovered lying in the middle of Weller Avenue. She had been beaten, raped, stabbed ten times in the chest, and then set on fire while still alive.
The only solid suspect in the case at the time was a then-twenty-one-year-old man by the name of Daniel E. Wilson. He was arrested and charged with aggravated murder in May of 1991, following the killing of twenty-four-year-old Carol Lutz, who was left for dead in the trunk of her car, which was subsequently set on fire.
Though Wilson’s DNA was compared to DNA found at the Rachael Johnson crime scene, the results were inconclusive, and though Wilson did admit to murdering Carol Lutz, he denied involvement in any other killings.
Significantly, though, police have looked into the possibility that whoever killed Rachael Johnson—whether Daniel Wilson or some other suspect—may have perpetrated many other comparable crimes spanning a fairly large geographical area. For example, two other Ohio women—thirty-two-year-old Elaine Graham of Hambden Township and thirty-seven-year-old Jean Eddy of Lakewood—were murdered and found in the trunks of their burning cars, in November and December of 1990, respectively.
Further, a twenty-one-year-old woman named Lynda Shaw was beaten, stabbed, and burned to death in London, Ontario, Canada in April of the same year. And earlier still, four other victims—twenty-two-year-old Catherine Corkery, twenty-nine-year-old Brenda Bloom, twenty-year-old Rafaella Bryant, and one unidentified woman—were murdered in very similar ways in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and California between the years of 1984 and 1989.
The investigation into the brutal slaying of Rachael Johnson was reopened in 2013, and in March of 2020, an arrest was made: Daniel Rees, who was fifty-seven years old at the time of his arrest and was linked to the murder via a DNA profile found on the victim’s body. Although Rees had not been on authorities’ radar at the time of the murder, he lived across the street from the Johnson family and was well known to them, a friendly neighbor who they had seemingly never had an issue with. Rachael Johnson’s daughter Katelin, who was three years old when her mother was murdered, told the media that she was shocked by Rees’s arrest, as she had known him all her life and claimed that she “never suspected him to be anything but harmless.”
As of this writing, Rees’s case is still ongoing.
Crime Immemorial 