A Reply To A Comment Given By Ace Backwords

North Face of Mount Shasta

Apparently the blog format I've chosen doesn't allow me to reply directly to a comment on a post.  So I’ll reply by way of a new post.

First, I'd like to thank Ace Backwords for commenting on a previous post focusing on Vincent Johnson.  I'd also like to say that I'm sorry to hear Vince Johnson has passed, and I'd like to extend my sympathies to Ace Backwords on the loss of a best friend.  After reading the reporting on Rainbow Village from '85 to '86, and also reading Patricia Gioia's descriptions of him in her book (particularly her account of seeing him while driving in traffic), it  seems to me that Vince Johnson was an interesting and very decent man.

Now to reply to the concerns expressed in the comment.  For those who've not read it, here it is:

"The line that Vincent Johnson, "Some time in the mid 90s did recant his testimony he gave at the trial" is completely false. Vince was one of my best friends, and one of the most honest, sincere people I ever met. He never recanted his testimony. Stood by what he said until his dying day. As for supposedly "making a deal" with prosecution to have "charges against him dropped" -- that is also completely false. What charges? And what's the source for this BS? There is no source. The guy convicted of the murders was completely guilty. And everyone at Rainbow Village was well aware of that."

It seems to me that the paragraph in question is this one:

"Some time in the mid 90's Johnson did recant the testimony he gave during the trial about Cercy telling him she hadn't seen anything. He admitted he'd made a deal with the prosecution to have charges against him dropped in exchange for his testimony.  But by that point the man pictured below had been in prison on death row for over ten years."

So first let me say that I did not write that Johnson recanted his entire testimony, only that part of it in which he told the court that Vivian Cercy had told him (sometime in September or October of '85) that she'd not seen anything the night of the murders; she only told the police what Harry Shorman had told her to report to them.  (This discredited the defense's main witness.)

How do I know this?  What is my source?  My claims are based on court documents that are available online but that I've also collected and made available through the blog.  Here I relied on this paragraph from Thomas v. Wong  C93-0616 (p. 22):

  1. 11. Vincent Johnson: Petitioner submits the declaration of a key prosecution witness,

  2. 4  Vincent Johnson, in which Johnson recants statements made at trial suggesting that Cercy told him

  3. 5  that she had not seen anything on the night of the murders. Decl. of Vincent Johnson at 8, Exh. 7 of

  4. 6  Am. Pet. filed July 2, 1997. He also asserts that at the time of trial, he was being prosecuted in a

  5. 7  separate case by the same district attorney's office, and that he was promised that in exchange for his

  6. 8  testimony, charges against him would be dropped. Id. at 7. Petitioner states that his trial counsel did

  7. 9  not adequately investigate or cross-examine Johnson. To the extent that petitioner's allegations

  8. 10  regarding Johnson are reiterated in claim 4, the Court will reserve its consideration of them until that

  9. 11  claim is reviewed.

I want to end this post with a quote from Vincent Johnson that further piqued my interest in him as someone with whom I'd have liked to have had a conversation.  This is taken from a story on Rainbow Village that appeared in the Oakland Tribune on January 24, 1985 (just a week before the Village was relocated):

"Some people are here because they have to be here," said Johnson inside the bus.  "It's hard to explain why I am here.  I'm here because of the chance to produce a community out of this."

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"Fear stalks Berkeley's Rainbow Village"

Image
In this post I will try to walk a thin line between skepticism and cynicism with regard to the  veracity of Vivian Cercy’s testimony .   T o some, cynicism may  appear to be s kepticism , so I will give a definition of skepticism, and then I’ll give a definition of cynicism to distinguish the two clearly.   Skepticism is merely maintaining an attitude of doubt with regard to the truth of a claim or set of claims.   Cynicism, on the other hand, is an inclination to believe that people are purely motivated by self-interest. So there are many reasons to be skeptical regarding the veracity of Vivian Cercy’s testimony, and these go beyond her claim to have seen Mary and Greg with a tall, skinny, blond man around 0130.   These are reasons that prosecuting attorney Jim Anderson (a cynic, in my opinion) could have given a jury to get them to doubt the truth of her entire testimony.   They explain why Vivian Cercy may have told Vincent Johnson   that, “she actually had not seen anything on the
Read more

Brazen Killer or Just a Callous Shithead?

Image
Fennario If you read through the court documents and/or listened to the Dead and Gone podcast, you can't help but think to yourself, "After the murders, did Bo act like a brazen killer or he did merely act like a callous shithead?" Here I'm going to assume (as I have all along) that the following accounts are true.  I'm going to weigh statements attributed to Bo individually, and then weigh them together.   1. " Jong Cheol Cho: Cho was a traveling Deadhead. The referee found Chaffee knew of Cho, whose name and address were disclosed in a police report. Cho testified that he knew someone named Bo, but no one named James Bowen. Cho identified pictures of James Bowen as the man he knew as Bo. Cho was in Rainbow Village the night of the murders. The morning after, he had a conversation with Bo and another man he knew as Weston about the previous night. Bo said either, 'I' or 'we' 'went swimming into [sic] the bay last night.'  In response,
Read more

"But, still, you should be straight up with people. Let 'em know."*

Image
Candor matters. I came across Dead and Gone in February 2021, and I was hooked by the story, because I like listening to Grateful Dead music and the podcast focused on a crime committed in the mid 80's—around the time I was about Greg Kniffin's age, the same age of some interviewed for the podcast.  After I  finished listening to the ten episodes, I went to Reddit to see what others had thought about the podcast and to see if anyone else (e.g. amateur sleuths) had done work on the case.  I came across a thread with the heading, " Lies By Omission By The Duplicitous Payne Lindsey ."  Here I found a link to  People v. Thomas.  I read it and used it to check Lindsey's reporting.  This document led me to look for other court documents that I also used to check Lindsey's reporting.  I also used them to evaluate the postings in the Reddit thread.  While I think some contributors were not fair to Lindsey, nor were they being accurate in their assessment of the report
Read more