MARKED FOR MURDER,INMATE STACEY JOHNSON

STACEY JOHNSON

Found guilty of beating, strangling and killing Carol Heath while her children were in their De Queen home in April 1993

Scheduled for execution on April 20, 2017
Date of original condemnation: Sept. 23, 1994
County in which crime occurred: Sevier
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When the beaten and strangled body of Carol Heath was found in her De Queen apartment on April 2, 1993, her two children were also found in a bedroom, looking out the window.

Heath’s daughter, Ashley, who was 6 at the time, told investigators that a man had come to their door who said he had just been let out of prison. He and her mother started arguing about another man Carol Heath was seeing, the girl said. The man had visited their home a couple times before the day of the killing, she said.

The 6-year-old told police that at one point, she and her 2-year-old brother, Jonathan, hid in a closet while the duo fought. The children were in the closet when their mother was killed, which police say was either late April 1 or early the next morning.

Carol Heath’s partially nude body was found by a relative in a pool of blood on the living room floor. Heath reportedly had been beaten, strangled and had her throat slit. 

Death row inmate Stacey Johnson (left) listens as his attorney Jeff Rosenzweig during a clemency hearing.

After the attack, investigators reportedly found bloody clothing that belonged to Heath and then-23-year-old Stacey Johnson at a rest stop between De Queen and Horatio. Ashley Heath reportedly pointed Johnson out in a lineup and told authorities she had seen him standing over her mother’s bleeding body.

Johnson was arrested on his way to Albuquerque, N.M., a few months after Heath’s death on a murder warrant during a routine traffic stop. He was convicted by a Sevier County jury of capital murder on Sept. 23, 1994, and sentenced to death, but the conviction was overturned by the Arkansas Supreme Court when justices ruled in 1996 that a police officer should not have been allowed to testify about Ashley Heath picking Johnson out of the lineup. 


Johnson was retried, convicted and sentenced to death again. He appealed the conviction, arguing he was denied access to Ashley Heath’s psychological examination and treatment records, but the state Supreme Court upheld the conviction in a 2000 decision.

Melissa Cassidy (left) comforts her nephew, Jonathan Erickson, during testimony about death row inmate Stacey Johnson at a parole board hearing. 

New tests on DNA samples ordered in 2004 did not help Johnson's case. The state's high court then ruled in 2006 it was unnecessary to reorder additional testing and upheld Johnson’s conviction.

In the following years, Johnson and his lawyers continued to challenge the ruling through a series of legal battles. In a 2015 clemency request, Johnson’s attorney, Jeff Rosenzweig, brought up issues with submitted evidence in previous trials such as Ashley Heath’s testimony and the refusal to retest DNA evidence. Those outstanding issues raise enough doubt to commute Johnson’s sentence to life without parole, Rosenzweig wrote.

At that clemency hearing, Ashley Heath reportedly told the Arkansas Parole Board she did not want Johnson put to death and had forgiven him. At the same hearing, her brother, Jonathan, disagreed. He told officials he could never be truly at peace with the crime if Johnson continued to “have the luxury of life itself.”

The state Parole Board again recommended denying Johnson’s request for clemency in March 2017. At the hearing, Johnson said he was sorry for what happened to Carol Heath but maintained his innocence.

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CAROL
HEATH

Carol Jean Heath was a 25-year-old mother of two living in De Queen with her 6-year-old daughter, Ashley, and 2-year-old son, Jonathan.

Johnson stole "a lifetime of memories, hugs and kisses from a mother I loved so very much."

— Ashley Heath, Carol Heath’s daughter, in March 2010