Bad John

On the evening of January 12, 1977, four teenagers left a card game at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, and drove off to find pizza and gas. In the car were Anthony Bates and Wesley Hawkins, both eighteen, sixteen-year-old Linda Needham, and nineteen-year-old Juanita Deckard. On a dark road inside the Army post, a military police truck pulled them over.

The officer was Specialist Johnny Lee Thornton, twenty-three, of the 463rd Military Police Company, who patrolled the reservation’s game and timber areas almost unsupervised. He said their car matched one from an armed robbery, handcuffed the two boys, and shot them. He drove the girls to an abandoned cabin near the Roubidoux, assaulted them for about four hours, then took them deeper into the timber, shot them both and covered the bodies with snow. Deckard, shot twice, lay still until he was gone.

She walked about six miles through deep snow and freezing dark, reached a rural house and got word out. Her description led investigators to Thornton, who surrendered the next day after a short standoff. Because the crimes happened on federal property he was tried in U.S. District Court, the venue moved to Council Bluffs, Iowa. In July 1977 a jury convicted him on three counts of first-degree murder plus rape, kidnapping and assault with intent to kill. That September he received three consecutive life terms and twenty years.