Chief Deputy District Attorney Paul Sequeira described the Nov. 15, 1982, killing of De Anna Lynn Johnson, 14, of Vacaville, as a “brutal murder” and a long-held “secret” harbored by the man who is now on trial in the case.
Johnson “drew her last breath” on railroad tracks near Elmira Road in Vacaville, he told a Solano County Superior Court jury during opening arguments Monday, adding that she died at the hands of Marvin Ray Markle Jr., himself a teenager at the time and now 59.
Markle Jr., listened quietly, seated at the defense table in Department 2 of Solano County Superior Court in Vallejo.
Marvin Ray Markle Jr., 59(Solano County Sheriff’s Office)
The trial got underway with 12 jurors and four alternates looking at a large color photograph of Johnson projected on a large monitor just steps away from the jury box.
Johnson, said Sequeira, died of “blunt force trauma,” a short walk from her home in the 300 block of Royal Oaks Drive, and the autopsy showed “someone had knelt on her shoulders,” smashed her head with a rock or piece of concrete and strangled her. The official cause of death cited as brain hemorrhage and strangulation, he added. Johnson’s body was found the next day.
Nov. 15 was a Monday, noted Sequeira, and Johnson, 5 feet, 2 inches tall and weighing 100 pounds, attended a party in a home up the street from her residence.
“The common denominator of all high school parties” is an absent parent or parents and also “alcohol and testosterone,” he said.
At one point, he said, looking at the jurors and pacing, Markle “wants to get dropped off at a girlfriend’s house.”
Johnson left the house shortly after 9 p.m., and, said Sequeira, “That was the last time she was seen alive,” riding in a car with a man, another boy, and with Markle in the back seat, where they could be seen kissing.
A deeply experienced prosecutor, Sequeira said the evidence would show that Markle returned to the party “sometime after 10 p.m.,” with blood on his hands. Asked by a party attendee how he managed to have blood-stained hands, Markle told him that he “came over a barbed wire fence” next to an irrigation canal.
“There’s no reason” to be in the canal area at that time of night, said Sequeira.
Johnson’s death became “the talk of the community,” rife with hearsay and speculation, he added, saying a investigator at the time was bothered by the killing for the rest of his career before retiring.
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The case grew cold in the mid- and late 1980s, then “stone cold in the ’90s,” said Sequeira.
Twenty years after Johnson’s death, in 2002, then Vacaville police officer Matt Lydon, began to try to piece together what happened.
Some five years afterward, Markle, who was working in construction in Clearlake in Lake County, is alleged to have “blurted out” to someone that he had “killed somebody.”
Markle was living in Oroville and married to a woman whose brother “heard him making comments that he wanted to end his life.”
Sequeira said Markle allegedly later confessed aloud to killing Johnson, saying, “I killed a girl — De Anna Lynn Johnson in Vacaville.”
Someone called the Oroville Police Department, and an officer arrived to conduct a welfare check, asking Markle if he were suicidal, Sequeira recounted in his detailed chronology.
As Markle was telling the story, “He was visibly agitated,” he said, adding that “in front of his sister and parents” he admitted he killed Johnson.
“Justice has been delayed, but it can no longer be denied,” said Sequeira, ending his opening statement.
Markle’s defense attorney, Thomas A. Barrett, chief deputy of the Alternate Defender Office in Fairfield, agreed that Johnson was killed “sometime after the party,” and asserted that no murder weapon has ever been discovered.
His client “did not kill De Anna Lynn Johnson,” he said. “He’s not guilty.”
Barrett confirmed that Johnson, aka “Ziggy” as a teenager, got into a vehicle with Markle at about 9 p.m., but that Markle “never got out of the car.”
As his attorney spoke, Markle, clad in a white shirt over tan slacks, his head shaved and sporting a white-haired goatee and mustache, started to take notes.
Barrett wondered if a fireplace poker could have caused Johnson’s facial injuries, and a forensic pathologist on Jan. 4, 1985, concluded that those injuries were “consistent” with a fireplace poker, which another person at the party house possessed and would sometimes carry it in his car.
Blood analysis of a rock had a “mixture of DNA” on it, and a “major profile” revealed the blood matched that of Johnson but a “minor profile” of the blood did not match Markle’s DNA.
Barrett also cited a 2010 confession by Markle that he “killed a girl,” and a few years later someone overheard Markle again declare that he killed Johnson.
However, the defense attorney, at the end of his statement, suggested another person had killed Johnson, not Markle.
As his first witness, Sequeira called Johnson’s mother, Ginger Dimpel, to the stand. She noted that her daughter’s curfew was 8:30 p.m., and, when she did not return home, she called the Vacaville Police Department.
As the hours advanced, she called her husband to tell him De Anna was missing. The next day, she saw “police activity” in the Elmira Road area but did not want to inquire what it was about, she told Sequeira.
A police officer came to the door to tell Dimpel that they believed the victim was an older woman, not a teenager, because the victim wore a 1963 high school graduation ring.
De Anna wore “my high school ring,” she told the officer.
Judge Daniel Healy, who is presiding over the case, previously told jurors that the trial may take several weeks or more.
Through the years, as the case wound its way through county court, trials dates more than once were assigned, then vacated.
As previously reported, in February 2017, Markle pleaded not guilty to one count of murder in connection to Johnson’s death when he was arrested a month earlier at Kern Valley State Prison on suspicion of murder and use of a deadly weapon. At the time of his arrest, he was serving an 80-year sentence for the 2001 murder of a Biggs woman, a fact not likely to be introduced during the trial.
It was the death of Shirley Ann Pratt, 41, in Butte County, that led to Markle’s arrest in the Vacaville case. On the morning of Oct. 12, 2001, Pratt was found naked in the Oroville Wildlife area, dead from an apparent gunshot wound to the face. In July 2013, the Butte County Sheriff’s Department officers arrested Markle. He has remained in either state prison or county jail custody ever since.
In the Vacaville case, according to court records, on the night of Nov. 15, 1982, Johnson, a Will C. Wood Junior High School student, attended a party near her family’s Royal Oaks Drive home. Markle, then a 17-year-old student at Country High, at the time Vacaville Unified’s continuation school, was also at the party.
Johnson was first reported missing after her brother, another party attendee, returned home and discovered she was not there and was out past her curfew.
The next day, her body was found by a Southern Pacific Railroad employee near the tracks along Elmira Road. Police were never able to amass substantial evidence that tied Markle to the crime. And the case went cold.
The Solano County District Attorney’s Office filed its complaint against Markle on July 31, 2017, and a preliminary hearing was held on Jan. 16 and 17, 2018.
If found guilty at trial, Markle, who remains in Solano County Jail without bail, faces 25 years to life, with the possibility of more time for being a previously convicted felon.