A Body at the Pentagon

Underworld or financial crimes have never particularly interested me, but the circumstances of John Samuel Johnson’s 1953 murder are quite interesting. The 32-year-old Pentagon postal clerk took annual leave on June 25, told his wife he was going to visit a sick coworker, then called her around 1:30 p.m. to tell her he was going to be “a little late.” He never made it to the sick man. On June 30, the stench emanating from a car trunk in the north parking lot at the Pentagon began to attract comment. Coworkers of Johnson recognized the car and noted that it wasn’t parked in Johnson’s assigned spot. Law enforcement soon arrived and popped the trunk, revealing Johnson’s decomposing body. A bizarre scene followed as various agencies spent four hours arguing about who had jurisdiction while Johnson’s body remained in the trunk. Curiosity-seekers stood atop nearby cars to observe the proceedings. The FBI won out, and the body was finally removed. In what was possibly the most stomach-churning newspaper article in D.C. history, Afro-American reporter Fred Leigh devoted an entire article to minutely describing the body’s decomposition. Among other things, Leigh noted that the head was so covered with maggots that it looked like a “giant snowball” and he gave plenty of details on various liquids involved in the decomposition process. An autopsy showed that Johnson’s killer bashed his head 18 times with a blunt instrument, though there never seems to have been a public statement on when he actually died, though presumably it was soon after he was last seen on June 25. There were also contrasting accounts of how long his car had been parked in the wrong spot. One can only presume that the killer figured that driving the body back to the Pentagon parking lot would delay discovery of the body, and it must be said that the plan worked.

It didn’t take long for the FBI to find out from underworld informants that Johnson had a history of running a numbers racket, and a reputation for “welshing” on bets. At one point he ran a $500-a-day operation employing four runners, but his bad reputation for not paying up seems to have reduced him to playing a one-man numbers game. Investigators noted that he was last seen the day before payday, suggesting that someone was expecting to get their money after he was paid, but became very disgruntled when they found out that no money would be forthcoming. The fact that he took annual leave that day added more suspicion to the circumstances. The case led to an intensive investigation of gambling operations in federal offices, but no movement ever really occurred in the case. The last mention of the case in the papers seems to have been 1955, leaving Johnson’s murder a mystery.