Arrest after 20 years....

[FormerOstrich]

I don't know if anyone else is interested in this, but I had several of my Missouri friends e-mail me the links, otherwise I would have never known of the arrest. I knew Gerald at the time and I was acquainted with Jackie.

I have often wondered why they didn't resurrect this case and they finally have. I personally suspect there are several missing women cases which might ultimately be tied to Gerald.

As far as I know there is no relation to Jean. However, the Carnahan family (Gerald's) is very very wealthy. I hope the John's will finally see justice done.

More than two decades after the body of 20-year-old Jackie Johns was pulled from Springfield Lake — raped and badly beaten — the man her father suspected all along is behind bars.

Gerald L. Carnahan, 49, was arrested at 5:45 p.m. Thursday, charged with first-degree murder and forcible rape in the 1985 death of the Nixa woman.

....clip

"I wasn't sure if I was going to live to see it," her father, Les Johns, said after the charges were announced during a press conference Thursday in Ozark.

"I was having kind of a bad day," said Johns, 80. "But I'm going to live another 20 years, now."

Advances in DNA testing appear to have provided the break in the case.

"In the early 1980s, DNA testing ... was just a beginning science," Greene County Prosecutor Darrell Moore said when announcing the charges at the press conference. "The advancement of technology has pushed this case along a little more quickly."

http://www.news-leader.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070810/NEWS01/708100438