Bio

Stacey Eugene Johnson was born on November 26, 1969, in the United States. By early 1993, Johnson had spent time in custody before the killing of Carol Heath. According to the account later given by Heath’s six-year-old daughter, Ashley, the man who entered the family’s apartment said that he had recently been released from jail. Court records also describe Johnson as having visited Heath’s home before the night of the murder. The prosecution relied on these circumstances to argue that he was not an unknown intruder who selected the apartment at random.

Carol Jean Heath lived in a duplex apartment in De Queen, Arkansas, with her two young children. Ashley was six years old, while her brother, Jonathan, was two. Heath was involved with a man identified in court records as Branson Ramsey. Statements attributed to Ashley indicated that the visitor who came to the apartment asked about Ramsey and appeared angry about Heath’s relationship with him.

The precise nature of Johnson’s relationship with Heath before the crime was disputed during the litigation. The prosecution treated the prior contact and the child’s account as evidence connecting him to the household. Johnson’s defense contested the reliability of Ashley’s identification and later attempted to present Ramsey as a possible alternative suspect. The courts ultimately held that the proposed evidence concerning Ramsey did not directly connect him to the murder and was therefore inadmissible under Arkansas law governing evidence of third-party responsibility.

There is no verified evidence that Johnson had previously committed murder. His profile should therefore classify him as a murderer rather than a serial killer or mass murderer. The death of Carol Heath remains the only killing for which he has been convicted.

Murder Story

Carol Jean Heath, a white female living in De Queen, Arkansas, was murdered during the night of April 1, 1993, or the early morning hours of April 2, 1993. At the time of the attack, she was inside her duplex apartment with her two young children, six-year-old Ashley Heath and two-year-old Jonathan Heath.

At approximately 6:45 a.m. on April 2, 1993, Heath’s sister-in-law, Rose Cassidy, went to the residence. After knocking and receiving no answer, Cassidy entered through the unlocked door and found Heath’s partially nude body lying in the living room in a pool of blood. Police later observed signs of a violent struggle inside the home, including displaced furniture near the body.

Dr. Frank Peretti, Associate Medical Examiner for the Arkansas State Crime Laboratory, determined that Heath died from cutting injuries to the neck, strangulation, and blunt-force injuries to the head. She also had bruises, abrasions, defensive wounds on her hands and arms, a bite mark on her breast, and injuries to her genital area. Investigators also recovered an empty condom box and an empty douche bottle from the home. Although these findings raised suspicion of sexual assault, Dr. Peretti testified that the physical evidence did not allow him to conclusively determine that rape had occurred.

Several days later, evidence connected to the crime was found in a wooded area between De Queen and Horatio, Arkansas. The recovered items included Heath’s purse, a bloody green pullover shirt, a bloody white T-shirt, and a bloody towel. Laboratory testing found hairs microscopically similar to Heath’s hair on the items. Additional forensic evidence included hairs of African ancestry collected from the crime scene.

DNA evidence became a major part of the case against Stacey Eugene Johnson. Testing conducted by Cellmark Diagnostics showed that blood recovered from the green shirt matched Carol Heath. Other testing showed that Johnson could not be excluded as a possible contributor of DNA found on a cigarette butt and hair samples connected to the recovered clothing.

Another important part of the prosecution’s case involved statements made by Heath’s daughter, Ashley. After the murder, Arkansas State Police Investigator Hayes McWhirter interviewed the child. According to court testimony, Ashley identified Stacey Johnson from a photographic lineup and described events surrounding her mother’s death. Johnson was later arrested in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

In 1994, Johnson was tried in Sevier County Circuit Court and convicted of capital murder. On September 23, 1994, he was sentenced to death. In 1996, the Arkansas Supreme Court reversed the conviction, ruling that an out-of-court statement attributed to Ashley Heath had been improperly admitted because she had been found incompetent to testify during the first trial.

Johnson was retried in November 1997 after the case was moved to Pike County. During the retrial, Ashley Heath was found competent to testify and appeared before the jury. Johnson was again convicted of capital murder and again sentenced to death. The Arkansas Supreme Court affirmed the conviction and death sentence in 2000.

Over the following years, Johnson pursued state post-conviction appeals and federal habeas corpus proceedings. His appeals raised issues involving Ashley Heath’s psychotherapy records, ineffective assistance of counsel claims, alleged Brady violations, victim-impact evidence, third-party culpability arguments, and requests for additional DNA testing.

Johnson’s case later received national attention in 2017, when Arkansas scheduled multiple executions before the expiration of its lethal injection drugs. Johnson came close to execution before the Arkansas Supreme Court granted stays allowing further litigation over DNA evidence. As of the latest verified public information, Stacey Eugene Johnson remains incarcerated on Arkansas’s death row while post-conviction litigation continues. He has not been executed.