True Crime Chronicles: Death of an Adair County mother in 2019 sent her husband to prison for life without parole
The call came in at 6:13 on the evening of September 6, 2018, from a house in Christie, a small community in the hollows of Adair County about twelve miles southwest of Westville. A man told the dispatcher that his wife and daughter had been shot.
Adair County deputies and emergency crews drove out toward Scraper Hollow and found a woman on the front porch with a single gunshot wound to the head.
The child was not there.
The woman was Goulanv Johnson. She was flown out by air ambulance. Accounts differ on the hospital. Some said Tulsa. Others said Washington Regional Medical Center in Fayetteville. She died of the head wound. She was the wife of Aubrey Harold Johnson III, a 28-year-old Stilwell man also known as Trey.
The girl was eight. One early broadcast put her age at seven. Undersheriff Jeremy Alverson later said she had been shot in the face. About two hours after deputies put out a lookout for Johnson, friends of the suspect brought the child into the emergency room at Stilwell Memorial Hospital. From there she was flown to Tulsa for surgery. She lived.
Johnson did not stay at the house. He had told the dispatcher he was taking the child to the hospital, then left. The Adair County Sheriff's Office asked the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation and the U.S. Marshals Service for help. Tips put him in a cream-colored late-model Buick and pointed toward Tulsa, Locust Grove, and the counties in between, Adair, Cherokee, Mayes, and Rogers.
Alverson told reporters the search had already stretched as far as Tulsa. "Realistically he could be anywhere," he said. "When you shoot a girl in the face and run you get everybody's attention." Johnson was listed as armed and dangerous.
He was not far. On the afternoon of September 8, a tip led deputies to a trailer at the intersection of Scraper Hollow Road and England Hollow Road, a short distance from the house. They took him into custody around 2 p.m. and booked him into the Adair County jail. The district attorney's office would decide the charges.
In Tahlequah, her brothers and sisters were trying to make sense of a phone call that began with one sentence. "All she said was your sister and the baby got shot," Wahiya Benoit said. "I was shocked. I freaked out. I didn't believe it."
Shalom Benoit said Goulanv always saw the good in people, and that was why she had stayed. Tlvdugi Benoit said she had her life together and was the one they thought would make it, until bad influences pulled her down. Wahiya said she was stubborn about anything she set her mind to, determined to go places.
"She's not," he said. "I wish she was here." He also said he wanted the law to put Johnson away.
Nothing in the public record establishes why Aubrey Johnson shot Goulanv Benoit Johnson or the child.
The case moved quickly once Johnson was in jail. On March 26, 2019, he stood in Adair County District Court and pleaded guilty to first-degree murder with deliberate intent. The sentence was life in prison without the possibility of parole. A companion charge of assault and battery with a deadly weapon, tied to the shooting of the child, was dismissed as part of the plea.
The girl, who had survived the surgery in Tulsa, gave a victim statement before the sentence was imposed. District Attorney Jack Thorp said Goulanv's family had suffered enough. "This defendant took away their loved one and deserves to spend his life in prison thinking of the pain he caused."
Reports never settled every detail. Some called the child his daughter. The Tahlequah Daily Press called her his stepdaughter. The spelling of Goulanv's name shifted from story to story, and so did the hospital that received her.
What did not shift was the outcome. A woman was shot once in the head on a porch in Christie and died. An eight-year-old was shot in the face and lived long enough to speak in court.
The man who called 911 was found two days later in a trailer down the hollow, and in March he took life without parole.
