Lawmaker kills self after abuse charge surfaces
The widow of a Kentucky lawmaker who killed himself this week after he was accused of molesting a teenager has announced plans to run for her husband’s old seat.
State Rep. Dan Johnson was found dead Wednesday, two days after an investigative news report revealed that a 17-year-old girl had accused him of drunkenly attacking her at his Louisville-area church in 2013.
“Dan is gone but the story of his life is far from over,” Rebecca Johnson said Thursday in a statement to the media. “These high-tech lynchings based on lies and half-truths can’t be allowed to win the day. I’ve been fighting behind my husband for 30 years and his fight will go on.”
In addition to representing Kentucky’s 49th District, south of Louisville, Johnson was the head of the nondenominational Heart of Fire Church. He embraced an identity as an anti-Barack Obama, gun-loving man of God.
“I believe Jesus taught us to be armed,” Johnson told Guns.com in 2014.
Johnson had been in public office for less than a year. He became a candidate for the state Legislature in 2016 after the Republican who won the primary was disqualified and Bullitt County GOP officials selected him as a replacement. Piggybacking on support for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, he ran on slogans to make Kentucky and his county “great again.”
He eked out a victory over the Democratic incumbent, Linda Howlett Belcher — a retired principal he called “Lyin’ Linda Lou” — winning 9,342 votes to her 9,186 votes.
But Johnson had his own record of dubious claims.
He claimed he had healed the sick and raised the dead. He claimed he had set up “safe zones” in Los Angeles during the 1992 riots. He claimed he served as a White House chaplain under multiple presidents. He claimed he served as an ambassador to the United Nations. He claimed he set up a morgue and gave last rites to the dying in New York outside the collapsed World Trade Center towers on Sept. 11, 2001.
But in a seven-month investigation published Monday, the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting couldn’t find evidence that Johnson’s stories about himself were true. What the small journalism nonprofit did find was “a trail of police records and court files, shattered lives and a flagrant disregard for truth.”
In the 1980s, police investigated Johnson on suspicion of destroying his car in an arson because he needed insurance money. Criminal charges were dismissed after he completed a sixmonth pretrial diversion program.
Then, in 2000, an arsonist burned down Johnson’s church, and insurance investigators discovered it was deeply in debt. A secretary accused Johnson of financial misappropriation. Johnson blamed the Ku Klux Klan. No charges were filed.
Johnson rebuilt the church, which would later be cited by the state for unlicensed liquor sales at a bar inside. Johnson called church drinking “communion.”
At boozy church gatherings, Johnson would sometimes kiss young women on the lips, the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting said.
In the story’s most explosive allegation, a woman named Maranda Richmond accused a drunk Johnson of digitally penetrating her while she was 17 and sleeping on a couch at Johnson’s church on New Year’s morning in 2013.
Richmond, now 21, complained to police later that year, but no charges were filed.