Hi! My chosen name is Karl Saint Lucy, but my given name is Karl Michael Johnson. My father, Michael Johnson, has been the prime suspect in this case for 32 years. I thought I'd pop on here and fill in some personal context for those of you who are still following this case.
I was two years old when Elizabeth was murdered, and my sister was nine months old. Covenant tried to illegally deny my father his M.Div. when it became clear he was the prime suspect, but they did manage to forcibly evict us from on-campus housing, and when we finally left St Louis, we moved to southern California. At that church, the session told my father that, since he'd never been charged with a crime, it wasn't on him to divulge his dubious connection to the Elizabeth Mackintosh case when applying for pastoral jobs. So he'd get a job, we'd move across the country for his new church job, and we'd have to leave when the locals figured out that he was embroiled in the PCA's most infamous murder.
He only ever scored an executive pastor job once, though, in South Dakota. The article from Edinburgh's Daily Record, shared above, was faxed from the newspaper to our local newspaper in Lennox, South Dakota. When the locals found out, they terrorized us; they throw rocks at my sister, calling her "the murderer's daughter," and it was enough that my parents at that point shared the story of Elizabeth's murder and why my dad was implicated. I was 12 at that time. We had to flee to Texas to live near my mother's parents.
Of course, at that point, my parents shared it with us as if it was a big frame job; my dad was put-upon and disliked by seminary administration, according to them. But my father was emotionally and physically abusive throughout my childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood, and I finally allowed myself to consider the possibility that he had done it after I came out as gay to my parents at age 20 and he reacted with violence.
I personally reached out to CCPD a few years ago when one of my father's coworkers at a retail establishment was found dead in his home. I didn't have any evidence that my father was responsible, but a few things rang alarm bells: my dad was responsible for driving him to work the day he died, but when my dad got to his home, the guy didn't answer. Rather than informing his boss, my dad just went about his day and didn't say anything until he went the next day and there was still no answer. The guy had developmental disabilities similar to my brother's, and they were the same age; my brother was my father's favorite target for violence at home. The way my mother shared the news with my sister was just really strange, and it smacked of the language and delivery she uses when she's manipulating or hiding something. I wrote a CCPD detective saying that I had a weird feeling about this recent death and that I thought it might be possible that he was involved in Elizabeth's murder as well. As I understand it, my letter to that detective is largely responsible for the case having been recently reopened.
I don't know whether my father killed Elizabeth Mackintosh, but the man certainly has homicidal rage. He's racist, misogynistic, homophobic, and narcissistic, and he has such profound issues with authority that he can barely hold down a basic retail job. I cut off contact with both of my parents in 2014 for a number of reasons, chief among them being my realization, through therapy, that my mother had been an accessory to my father's abuse, and I was getting absolutely nothing but drama and disappointment from continuing to be in contact with either of them.
This is basically just all to say that regardless of whether he killed Elizabeth Mackintosh, the PCA is a horrible institution, as are the police, and the fact of my having been essentially born into the conditions that paved the way for her murder has shaped my entire life in ways that are difficult to explain. Church people knew throughout my childhood that things were bad at home, and no one intervened; neither did the police. I've suffered from major depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder for my entire adulthood, and though EMDR was helpful, I still have a long way to go.
I just hope that, when you discuss cases like this, you can have compassion for the innocent bystanders whose lives were ruined by every person and institution involved. The fact that I've survived to 34 is testament to my queer sensibility, and the ways that subjectivity has allowed me to see through all the patriarchal stuff that's kept this woman's family in misery and me in a state of deep ambivalence for 32 years.
Certainly, her murder was a heinous crime, but the ways I was neglected, abused, and failed utterly by institutions and people that were supposed to be there for me has resulted in a profound amount of suffering for me. I hope that, through my work towards developing a healthy relationship with her murder, and in investigating the crime, I can draw attention to the broader scope of social and religious abuse that continues to follow its superficial discussion as a run-of-the-mill whodunit.
