Did Billy Joel Johnson really kill himself on accident
A deep investigative dive into a Mississippi Black man's death cast as a suicide and accident, your Friday long listen
We go to Reveal for this week's long listen by Ryan Fatica. Read the whole story, “Mississipi Goddam.” We include key excerpts below to convince you it’s worth your time!
A dream cut short
Glenda Perryman: He was dating a white girl. He was in love and she was in love too.
Al Letson: She said many people around there still didn’t approve of interracial relationships, including some folks in law enforcement. In December of 2008, a month after Obama was elected, a white cop pulled Billey Joe over. Authorities say Billey Joe handed the officer his drivers license. The officer then went back to his cruiser to run a check. He said while he was looking down reading the license he heard the gunshot. He looked up and Billey Joe was lying on the ground, blood pooling from his head, a shotgun on top of his body. Initially police said Billey Joe died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The official story didn’t make sense to Glenda and the workers. He was a football star with a bright future and everything to look forward to. They wanted me to investigate. Standing in the sweltering heat of a Mississippi summer, I felt the history of this country like the humidity in the air. It was all around me. From the ghost of the enslaved Black people who worked the land to the shadows cast by the trees, silent monuments to the victims of lynching, to right now.
Al Letson: Every time, the promise I made to Glenda would haunt me. The investigation left so many questions unanswered. Billey Joe died after being pulled over by the police, but we don’t know what happened. The traffic stop wasn’t captured on video, and there were no eyewitnesses. What I did know, his family didn’t believe the official version, and they felt ignored by the system. His death didn’t make any sense to them and it didn’t make any sense to me either. From time to time, I checked to see if there’d been any developments in the case. I would spend hours online looking for email addresses and cellphone numbers of family members, but it’s really hard to report on a rural community unless you’re physically there. Like I said, life got in the way. Then I started working for Reveal. One day, seven years after I first learned about this case, I found a number, someone I thought might be a family member. I left a message. A day later I got a call back.
Veronica Fairley: My name is Veronica Fairley. I live in Benndale, Mississippi. I married into the family in 2007.
Al Letson: Did you know Billey Joe at all? Because he passed away in 2008, right?
Veronica Fairley: I did. Billey Joe would come over to the house in the afternoons when he’d get out of school. My husband would always try and help him make extra money, and which a lot of people did, because he was an awesome, very awesome young man. Amazing. He worked hard for what he believed in. His goal was to make pro football so that he can provide a better living for his mother. Billey and his mother had a very close relationship. He would help anybody in the community. Not just saying it, but he was a very respectable young man. Everybody liked him.
Underscored
Al Letson: In September of 2008, just three months before Billey Joe’s death, the Mississippi legislature issued a damning report. It concluded that the state medical examiner’s office lacked the staff and resources to ensure that suspicious deaths could be resolved competently. And Tucker says that system disproportionately harmed poor Black people in Mississippi.
Tucker Carrington: The point is not that every elected official in Mississippi’s criminal justice system was or is motivated by bigotry. Nevertheless, the system in which he, Dr. Steven Hayne, and the state’s coroners, operated was built on racism.
Al Letson: When Billey Joe Johnson died in December of 2008, what’s the state of the medical examiner’s office at that point?
Tucker Carrington: It was absolutely in transition. Things were still messy. They’re still messy now.
Al Letson: We got ahold of a DOJ memo summarizing all of the information they collected, and what they left out of their press release was one of their main findings: the DOJ believes Dr. Lewis got it wrong. Their pathologist said the shotgun was inside Billey Joe’s mouth, and therefore it must have been a suicide.
His family didn’t buy that. They think he was murdered. But there’s no indication in the case files that investigators ever interviewed them about that, or asked what leads they had that would make them believe there was foul play.
Bottom line
Al Letson: When investigators arrived at the scene, they started documenting it. There are hundreds of photographs of the truck, the parking lot, the gun. And of course, Billey Joe. We had a crime scene expert review them. He said what he saw in the photos doesn’t seem to line up with what the grand jury found that Billey Jo had accidentally shot himself. Instead, he says, it’s more likely that the gun was in Billey Joe’s mouth.
Al Letson: Billey Joe’s arm length is undocumented in the case files or in the autopsy. But according to estimates, Pete says it would be extremely difficult for Billey Joe to pull the trigger. Dr. Adele Lewis, the medical examiner who performed the autopsy was adamant that the shotgun was not in Billey Joe’s mouth. She believed the buckshot hit the outside of his head and her testimony helped lead the grand jury to declare that Billey Joe’s death was accidental. The Department of Justice and the experts we consulted with disagree with her and said the barrel was in his mouth.
Al Letson: Our pathologist looking at it saying the shot was intraoral. Meaning it was in his mouth. The grand jury got it wrong. We didn’t find out what the Johnsons really wanted to know, what happened to Billey Joe on that December morning. But what we have found has called the entire investigation into question. Joel Wallace, the lead investigator, has already told us the case should be reopened. The medical examiner changed her opinion of how Billey Joe died. The grand jury came to his decision after her testimony. That’s justification enough to reopen the case.
Listen to the whole podcast here.
Resources: State policy changes. News. Bureau of Prisons updates. State court changes. Prison holistic self care and protection. Jailhouse Lawyers Handbook.
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