By DAMIEN FISHER, InDepthNH.org
DNA testing is underway on evidence in the 1988 murder of Sharon Johnson, and Jason Carroll hopes the results will make him the first man in New Hampshire to prove that he was wrongly convicted of murder and is in fact innocent as he has claimed throughout the decades he has been imprisoned.
Carroll, 53, claims he was forced into giving a false confession in Sharon Johnson’s murder by police, including his own mother when he was 19. He was convicted of second-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder and sentenced to 46 years to life in prison.
The New England Innocence Project pushed to reopen the case and has forced the state to produce evidence that had long been considered lost.
In October of 2022, a box of evidence containing items from the Bedford construction site where Sharon Johnson’s body was recovered from a courthouse basement. That box contained documents related to the case, as well as blood samples found beneath Johnson’s fingernails, several knives, and a stained white long sleeve shirt.
In April of this year, prosecutors finally dropped their opposition to having those items tested for DNA with little explanation for the reasoning behind the change. However, Assistant Attorney General Charles Bucca stated at the time the state will challenge the results if they look like they could clear Carroll.
Lawyers for the New England Innocence Project and the state were due in Hillsborough Superior Court — North in Manchester on Thursday for a status conference on the DNA testing. However, according to a motion filed by Cynthia Mousseau, Carroll’s attorney, there’s nothing to discuss yet as testing is underway.
“Since April, the parties have met with experts in the state lab and have developed an agreed-upon testing plan. Quantification is now underway and parties are awaiting results,” Mousseau wrote.
DNA quantification testing is done to find out if there is enough DNA material on a given sample to do further testing to identify the DNA source. Mousseau and prosecutors agreed to a 90-day wait for the next hearings in order to get results from this early round of testing.
The items currently being tested are not the first batch of evidence found decades after Carroll’s conviction. Last December, another box containing physical evidence from the murder was found by Department of Justice staff.
According to Bucca, the box was found the week of Dec. 11, 2023, days before a hearing in Carroll’s case, during a walkthrough of the 33 Capitol St. building in Concord that the New Hampshire Department of Justice was vacating.
The DOJ moved out of the building that is now slated for demolition as part of a plan to expand parking around the State House. Senior Assistant Attorney General Ben Agati and a DOJ staffer were going through the basement storage area to make sure nothing was inadvertently left when they found the box, Bucca said.
The unmarked box was alone on a bare shelf in the side of the storage area for records on civil cases, Bucca said. Agati reportedly ascertained quickly it was actually evidence in a criminal matter, and not records from a civil action.
Sharon Johnson, 35, was seven months pregnant when she was murdered. She was stabbed multiple times and strangled.
Carroll was not a suspect until November of 1989, more than a year after the murder, when he was interrogated by police over a three-day period. One of the officers who was in the room questioning Carroll was his own mother, who was a Bedford police officer at the time.
Sharon Johnson’s then-husband, Ken Johnson, and Anthony Pfaff, who worked with Carroll in an industrial cleaning business at the time, were also charged. Ken Johnson was accused of hiring Carroll and Pfaff to help kill his wife. Pfaff knew Ken Johnson as he had dated Ken Johnson’s daughter. But, Pfaff was acquitted at trial and the charges against Ken Johnson ended up getting dropped for lack of evidence. Pfaff and Ken Johnson have both since died.
