Cold case solved with Lego building blocks after 23 years. Authorities in Utah decided to reopen the cold case of murder victim Lucille Johnson and DNA found on few Lego blocks left at the crime scene, solved the mystery and brought closure to the family. If police had focused on the fingerprints on the Lego bricks sooner, they would have prevented the criminal John Sansing from killing a second time.
After 23 long years, a cold case murder mystery has been solved thanks to fingerprints on the Lego blocks found in the home where the horrible crime took place.
In February of 1991, Lucille Johnson was brutally murdered in her home in Salt Lake City, Utah. The 78-year-old woman was beaten and strangled by someone, she had welcomed in her Holladay house.
The members of the Salt Lake County Sheriff who arrived on the scene of the crime said that who ever killed Johnson was a monster or an animal because no human could have brutalized another person like that.
Police officers did not have much to go on at the time. The only evidence that they had were few Lego blocks left in the hallway. Authorities also noted that some of the elderly woman’s jewelry had been stolen the day of the murder.
With almost no clues to go on, the case went cold for more than two decades. In 2013, Sgt. Mike Ikemiyashiro decided to collect the Lego building blocks sitting in the evidence room and reopened the case.
Tests made on the Lego blocks revealed that it contained the DNA of John Sansing’s son. John Sansing is a murderer sitting on death row in Arizona.
According to Ikemiyashiro, the 47-year-old convicted murderer cooked up some fake story using his young son to enter Lucille Johnson’s home.
Once in the home, Sansing put his young child in the hallway to play with the colorful bricks and proceeded to beat and kill the senior citizen like a wild animal.
It is a pity that the authorities did not zoom in on the Lego blocks from the Johnson cold case. In February of 1998, Sansing who had moved to Arizona, called a local church to deliver free food to his family.
A woman by the name of Elizabeth ‘Trudy’ Calabrese from the Living Springs Assembly of God Church in Avondale, Arizona, showed up at the home with meals for Sansing, his wife and their four kids.
The evil doer and his wife tied up Calabrese, he sexually assaulted the woman and later murdered her in front of his family.
Johnson’s children Shirley England and Jerry Johnson are very thankful that the cold case was solved with the fingerprints found on the Lego blocks.
Police plan to reopen other cold cases to find if Sansing was connected to them.
