For more than 42 years, the friends, family and loved ones of Vacaville teen De Anna Lynn Johnson waited to hear the words they had long hoped for.
On Friday morning, in Department 2 of Solano County Superior Court in Vallejo, Judge Daniel Healy delivered them, bringing a measure of long-awaited relief and justice: Marvin Ray Markle Jr. will serve 26 years to life for the brutal strangulation and bludgeoning death of Johnson, 14, a student at Will C. Wood Junior High.
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Her body body was found Nov. 16, 1982, one day after Markle enticed her, following a neighborhood party earlier in the evening, to walk to railroad tracks near her Royal Oaks Drive home, where he killed her.
Healy said Markle’s sentence would be consecutive to the life sentence he is currently serving for the 2001 fatal shooting of Shirley Ann Pratt, 41, in Butte County.
In his closing statements before issuing the sentence, Healy praised the professionalism of Chief Deputy District Attorney Paul Sequeira, who led the prosecution with investigator Matt Lydon by his side, and Thomas A. Barrett, chief deputy of the Alternate Defender Office.
But the judge quickly added, “There’s a substantial difference between justice and healing” that may or may not have come for those close to the case for more than four decades.
“No matter what I do today,” said Healy, Markle would almost certainly “spend the rest of his natural life in prison.”
While Barrett argued during the trial that there was no DNA evidence linking Markle to Johnson’s murder, Healy said the case “arose because of Mr. Markle’s statements,” essentially confessions, nearly 20 years later and overheard by three witnesses, including his sister, who testified during the three-week trial in the Justice Building.
Marvin Ray Markle Jr., 59(Solano County Sheriff’s Office)
Markle, convicted of Pratt’s murder more than 10 years ago, was eventually incarcerated at Kern Valley State Prison. There, in 2017, after years of relentless investigative efforts by Lydon and other Vacaville police officers, he was arrested and transferred to Solano County Jail in Fairfield, where he awaits return to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
In a reference to the case that went cold after an initial investigation by Vacaville police officers in the early 1980s and Markle’s decades-long determination not to admit to the crime, the judge, looking directly at Markle said, “You can avoid justice, but, in the end, you can’t avoid yourself.”
At the outset of the sentencing hearing, Markle, 59, entered the courtroom — smiling broadly while clad in striped jail jumpsuit, shackled, his head shaved, his goatee silvered — and sat down at the defense table, tattoos visible on his neck and left arm.
Barrett, citing some missing information in a Probation Department report, quickly asked the judge to consider delaying the sentence, but Healy proceeded with the hearing.
Lydon, seated at the prosecutor’s table, read the only victim-impact statement, from Ginger Dimpel, Johnson’s mother, who said her daughter was “brutally taken from us.”
De Anna, she added, was 14 years old, weighed 97 pounds and was 5 feet 1 inches tall. “She was happy and doing well in school,” she recalled.
Her goal, Dimpel said, was “to be a social worker” and counsel troubled teens, but she drew “her last breath at the hands of a callous coward.”
“We pray for justice” for De Anna, she added.
In his statement before the sentencing, Sequeira said, “We all know not all murders are created equal,” adding that, in the Johnson case, there was “great bodily injury” (strangulation and the side of her skull was crushed apparently by a concrete rock) and “a high degree of cruelty and viciousness.”
Markle, then 17, “talked her into going to an isolated area,” he said.
Standing and occasionally looking at Markle, Sequeira noted the emotional and psychological differences between a 14- and a 17-year-old, a vast difference between “maturity and age in the thought process.”
Then, “something went wrong,” he said.
Recalling some court testimony, Sequeira said, “He kneels on her for a long time,” creating “sweater impressions” on her body, and proceeded with the strangulation, “a personal, vicious way to die,” with Johnson looking at her killer, “kneeling on her and choking the life out of her.”
While the strangulation occurred first, Markle “executed” Johnson with “a large concrete block and smashed her face beyond recognition,” said Sequeira.
“You can imagine the terror she must have felt,” he added. “The last face she sees is Marvin Markle’s.”
Sequeira said the crime “shocked the community.”
“Who is Marvin Markle?” he asked rhetorically and referred to many defendants who grew up with difficult backgrounds and circumstances. He then pointed toward Markle and said emphatically, “But not him! He grew up in a middle class family. He had a good family.”
During the initial police investigation 42 years ago, Markle was disingenuous when interviewed by police officers, said Sequeira, adding that he tried to blame the killing on others, “even though he knew he did it.”
Sequeira recounted some of Markle’s previous crimes against women, including stalking in 1984, a terrorist threat against a woman in in 2000, the murder of Pratt in 2001.
De Anna Lynn Johnson
In his remarks to the court before sentencing, Barrett, noting Markle had not demonstrated or shown remorse for Johnson’s murder, asked simply, “How can you express remorse for something you did not do?”
Barrett recalled the case against Shawn Melton, a self-employed investigator who was charged with the 1987 abduction and murder of Jeremy Floyd Stoner, 6, of Vallejo. Melton, investigators said, provided information to police only the killer would know and his statements led to the charge and two trials, with both juries acquitting him. Statements, like the ones Markle made to witnesses, were not enough to convict Markle, Barrett seemed to suggest.
Melton, who died some years later, was eventually exonerated by new DNA technology, the same technology that identified a new suspect in the case: Fred Marion Cain III, who is 71 and was arrested and charged in September 2023 and awaits trial. Barrett did not note, however, that a criminalist testified during the trial that blood found on shoes that Markle wore on Nov. 15, 1982, contained a DNA match.
As Barret spoke, Markle occasionally rocked back and forth in his chair.
After the sentencing, Kathy Martinez of Vacaville, a classmate of Johnson’s, recalled the killing, saying, “It shocked the community. It was so cold.”
“It was frightening,” she continued, adding that Vacaville at the time was “a very safe community,” but the crime “changed the way we live.”
Like some of De Anna’s friends, she suspected early on that the killer was Markle, and called Friday’s verdict, coming more than four decades later, “a long, long time to wait.”
Retired teacher Kelly Donald (nee Hudgins) told The Reporter before the sentencing that she was a Wood Junior High classmate of Johnson’s and knew Markle by his nickname: Ziggy.
She recalled seeing “an empty desk” in the classroom after the killing.
“It was very sad,” said Donald, wearing a purple T-shirt with Johnson’s image on it, like so many of her friends and relatives also wore while gathered in the hallway outside Department 2. “She signed my yearbook. She was always smiling, silly and funny.”
Following the sentencing, Solano County District Attorney Krishna Abrams, in a press statement, noted that trial testimony from retired Vacaville police officers Joseph Munoz, Don Waller, Dolores Dunnachie, and Jeff Higby — who originally investigated Johnson’s murder — “were still around the area and available to testifyat the trial.”
“I am so thankful for the dedication of the Vacaville Police Department and members of our office, that no matter how much time went by, they remained steadfast in their commitment to De Anna Lynn Johnson to solve her horrific case,” Abrams said in the statement.
News of Johnson’s “horrific” death, she added, “traveled quickly and rocked the very fabric of our community. From that moment of finding De Anna Lynn Johnson’s lifeless body on the railroad tracks and all the years since, Vacaville Police Department never once gave up.”
She cited the “continued efforts” by Lydon, who retired from the Vacaville department before working to the DA’s Office, and former officer Aaron Dahl “for continuing to carry the torch.”
“Every parent’s worst nightmare is to bury their child,” said Abrams. “Our hearts go out to De Anna Lynn’s parents, who lived that nightmare, and to the rest of her family and friends as they have waited a lifetime for justice.”
“We are grateful for the jury’s verdict and today’s sentencing as Defendant Markle is finally being held accountable for De Anna Lynn’s unspeakable death,” she added. “The defendant deprived De Anna Lynn of a life that he has lived. Although nothing will bring De Anna Lynn back, hopefully this conviction provides some sense of closure and justice for our community.”