Selena Johnson lived her final months in mortal fear of her husband.
Selena managed to get out of the car, but Ed did too and pursued her. “I turned to see if he was about to shoot me,” she said in the affidavit. “He saw how scared I looked and that’s when he told me he loved me and that he wasn’t going to hurt me. He tried to get me back into the car. I resisted because of fear. (I thought he must have lost his mind and Ed was very intoxicated, he’s been drinking the whole day and night.)”
Selena asked the police to help her, and really believed they would. She had more faith in the police than do a lot of citizens, particularly blacks like her. “She told me once, ‘If you need help, who else do you turn to?’” a friend of hers says. “She was very serious. I felt she was putting too much trust in the police.”
Selena’s charges, and Ed’s behavior, did eventually prompt Ed’s bosses to act: they sat him down for heart-to-heart chats, advising him to stay away from his wife and let his lawyer handle matters, and recommending counseling but not requiring it.
Ed got his final pass in the early morning hours of Tuesday, September 13. It was the state police this time who let him slide. Ed, who had been drinking, caused a three-car accident on the Dan Ryan at 1:30 that morning. Ed and his sister’s husband, Robert Kilpatrick, were out for a drive when the accident occurred. One of the state troopers who arrived on the scene smelled the booze on Ed’s breath and confiscated his gun. But Ed and Kilpatrick insisted that Kilpatrick had been driving, not Ed. Kilpatrick says that after the trooper wrote his report, he returned to their car, and Kilpatrick admitted to him that he was just covering for Ed. But the trooper returned the gun and let Ed and Kilpatrick proceed on their way.
The first officers on the scene found Selena prone on the bed, her hands cupped under her face. Blood had pooled beneath her; it was spattered on the pillow next to her, on the walls, the ceiling, the dresser and TV, and on the wall of the hall outside the bedroom.
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Domestic slayings usually appear to be such aberrant, spontaneous acts that later it seems no one could have stopped them, certainly not the police. But family-violence experts say these “nutso” murders are often both predictable and preventable. Murders by spouses are almost always the culmination of a history of violence in the marriage. The homicide is usually preceded by death threats, and often the eventual killer also hints broadly to others what’s to come, if he doesn’t tell them plainly. Ed Johnson may have flipped, but it wasn’t overnight, as Detective McWeeny himself learned upon interviewing Ed’s coworkers and family members. “Everyone we talked to said the same thing–he was enraged about the family situation, and he’d been talking goofy for a long time.”
