Michael Johnson: He had his chance

By Joel Thurtell

Michael Johnson thinks 29 years in Michigan prisons is long enough. His family and lawyers claim he’s reformed. He says the family of the girl he tried to rape and then drowned has forgiven him. He wants out.

Johnson is in prison for murdering a Stevensville high school classmate in 1980 after trying to rape her, but his lawyers have argued in Berrien County Circuit Court that he’s already served too much time.

I too think Johnson should be released — when he qualifies for a pine box to hold his dead body.

Michael Jeffrey Johnson has already had one chance too many.

If a judge had followed juvenile court staff advice back in 1979 instead of springing this known rapist from a county juvenile home, Johnson might be free today.

And his 16-year-old classmate, Sue Ellen Machemer, would be alive.

Frankly, I don’t care if the victim’s relatives have forgiven Johnson. Their opinion is meaningless. It is Sue Ellen who is dead. She can’t speak, and her supposed loved ones do her memory no service by shamming as her spokesmen.

Nor do I buy Johnson’s argument that he’s reformed. It’s pretty easy to claim good behavior from a prison cell, where your promises go untested and your behavior is closely monitored.

While Sue Ellen Machemer can’t speak, the woman Johnson earlier raped and probably would have killed but for the timely arrival of state troopers can still express herself. According to the Benton Harbor Herald-Palladium, she wants him to stay locked up:

The 25-year-old victim told police she was walking near a business off Michigan 139 on her way home in the early morning hours when someone approached and put a knife against her ribs.

The man, later found to be Johnson, forced her into a car and drove down a dirt road where he bound her hands behind her, stripped off her clothing and raped her at knife point over a two-hour period.

During the assault, Johnson forced the woman to say degrading things about herself, she told police, and would alternate between being highly tense and threatening or relaxed.

Eventually he wrapped the woman’s dress around her head, dragged her out of the car and threatened to kill her if she moved before he was gone, according to reports.

Johnson threw more of her clothes out of the car, and after she got dressed she found a phone booth and called police.

While she was waiting for the police, Johnson returned. The woman told Johnson she had called the police, and as he was driving away troopers pulled up. Johnson’s car was stopped nearby and he was arrested.

In reading her comments, we have to ask ourselves, Would we want the man who did this set loose so he could — at his election — rape and kill again?

Incredibly, a physician, Charles Payne, reported to the juvenile court on the 1979 rape that while Johnson “knew right from wrong on the night of the rape in Benton Township…because of his immaturity [he] was unable to act with better judgment,” according to the Palladium.

A psychologist, one W.R. King, said Johnson didn’t plan the rape and “Johnson believed the victim acquiesced and ‘enjoyed her part,’ ” according to the newspaper.

What’s this? Johnson the rapist “believed” the victim he was poking at with a knife and forcing to utter repulsive things about herself enjoyed what he was forcing her to do?

Wonder what those professional idiots thought when they learned their “advice” helped free this monster so he could practice more of is “immaturity” by killing Sue Ellen Machemer.

So-called doctors and half-baked psychologists who give that kind of phony exculpatory advice deserve to be locked up along with Johnson.

Now his attorney, former Macomb County prosecutor Carl Marlinga, has picked up the chant from the 1979 voodoo artists: Marlinga described Johnson as an “emotionally immature, unsophisticated young man with a sex drive typical of 17-year-olds.”

“Immaturity” and lack of sophistication gave Johnson a ticket to rape and murder?

I wrote about this case in 1980, but I first heard about the Benton Township knifepoint rape case in late 1979 from juvenile court staffers appalled that the judge set Johnson free. But juvenile records were confidential back then, and staffers could be jailed for revealing confidential information about juveniles. Nobody wanted to take that risk. Mum was the word.

I knew that a juvenile had been released to live at home after committing forcible rape, a crime that carries a life prison term — for adults. But the charge was reduced to assault with a dangerous weapon and the file suppressed because Johnson, 16, was treated as a juvenile.

The staffers came to me because I was editor of the Berrien Springs Journal Era. The Berrien County Juvenile Center is at Berrien Center, not far from Berrien Springs. The people who came to me were worried that Johnson would do something worse, and they thought the public should know what happened with Johnson, but they refused to tell me who the kid was, what police agency arrested him or where the rape took place.

Minds changed after Sue Ellen Machemer was found early in 1980 drowned in a ditch.

Suddenly, I got a stream of information. “Staff said no, but judge freed boy,” was the headline I wrote for my article about Johnson in the Journal Era. The South Bend Tribune ran the story, too. The article blew the cover off the Berrien County court system’s dirty, deadly secret way of doling out justice.  The court’s reaction? Charles Kehoe, director of the Berrien County Probate Court’s juvenile section, asked the county prosecutor to investigate me and the Journal Era for revealing confidential juvenile information. Chester Byrnes, a Berrien County circuit judge, called me into his office and warned me that I and the Journal Era could be sued for libel.

Court officials wanted to intimidate me, rather than face the truth that their system of secret reports, secret hearings and secret rulings had released a killer into the community. The bullying went nowhere. Palladium managing editor Bert Lindenfeld wrote an editorial blistering the court and defending me and the Journal Era. And I wrote a piece showing that court officials routinely violated juvenile confidentiality by passing kids’ records to military recruiters. Prosecute yourselves!

Back then, I couldn’t figure out why the judge, in spite of juvenile court staff protests, let the kid out of the county juvenile lockup. Now that I’ve read the notes from the doctor and psychologist, I see the influence of professionals all too willing to excuse a young man despite his heinous crime.

At that time, letters from physicians and psychologists like Payne and King were not public records. The Palladium has acquired them through the Michigan Freedom of Information Act. Now I see that the judge may have heeded some very stupid, but professional, advice.

Judge Lange knew Michael Johnson had committed a brutal capital crime, but he set him free. Johnson knew just what to do with that freedom. He tried to rape Sue Ellen Machemer. When she screamed, he held her head underwater until she drowned.

Judge Lange gambled with Sue Ellen’s life. It was the young woman who paid.

In those days, because juvenile courts operated in secret, the judge could normally have counted on his decision going unnoticed in the press. In that instance, people with consciences came to me, the journalist. We all took a big risk.

Now, at least, the proceeding is open to the public.

The court betrayed Sue Ellen once.

Rape, attempted rape, murder.

In a letter to the Berrien County prosecutor, the woman Johnson raped in 1979 wrote, “Please do whatever it takes to keep him where he is.”

Michael Johnson had his chance. He should spend the rest of his life behind bars.

Drop me a line at joelthurtell@gmail.com