It was the evening of Friday, January 14th, 1977, and the weather in Port Huron, Michigan had been far crueler than usual. Twenty-year-old Iris Johnston simply wanted to go down the block to the store, but was unable to get her car out of the driveway, so decided to bundle up and set out on foot.
She first went to Stone’s Market near her home in Sparlingville, and was later spotted at another store called the Open Pantry in Port Huron. At around nine p.m., Iris apparently stopped by the home of one of her husband’s relatives, where she stayed for about an hour. After leaving the relative’s home, she then made her way to the Colony Club Bar on Huron Avenue.
Over the course of the night and into the wee hours of January 15th, Iris was allegedly seen sitting at a table in the bar, drinking with two men. One of these individuals was described as being a slim white male in his early twenties, about five-foot-seven-inches tall, with long, dark brown hair; while the other man, also white, was in his mid- to late twenties, around six feet tall, with curly, reddish hair.
Though several witnesses saw Iris and the two men together at the bar up until around one-thirty a.m., evidently no one saw any of them leave. Iris never returned home, and her husband William reported her missing, though it would be more than two months before her whereabouts were discovered.
On March 23rd, the body of twenty-year-old Iris Johnston was found in a wooded area in Clyde Township. An autopsy determined that she had been strangled. Two bloody towels were found in close proximity to the remains, and detectives also found Iris’ blood-spattered shoes, jeans, coat, and purse strewn along the back roads leading up to the dump site. Authorities theorized that perhaps the killer or killers had become wounded during the attack on Iris.
Composite sketches of the two men last seen with Iris the previous January were circulated in the media, but unfortunately, neither of them was ever identified, and the investigation quickly went cold.
To this day, the killing of Iris Johnston remains one of nearly twenty unsolved murders in the Port Huron area since 1970. The investigation into all of them remains open.
Crime Immemorial 