Authorities are hopeful that advanced forensic technology may finally crack a decades-old murder of a 23-year-old Montana transplant and aspiring model who was killed in Fremont County in February 1983.
Jannele Lee Johnson had been in Riverton for about two months when she decided to hitchhike to Denver for a modeling audition.
She never made it home.
She was last seen at a truck stop, near Rawlins, around 9 p.m. on Feb. 17, 1983. Nearly a week later, her nude body wasdiscovered along a desolate stretch of road near Shoshoni, in central Fremont County.
The cause of death was manual strangulation. She had also been sexually assaulted.
Johnson’s killer was never identified, despite four decades of investigation, countless leads and tips, and a trail thatgrew colder with every passing year.
Confounding early efforts to solve her murder was the loss of physical evidence that might have closed the case — asample of seminal fluid collected from her body — that was lost in the ensuing years after the evidence refrigerator broke down, destroying any chance of a DNA match.
Now, however, detectives might finally have received a much-needed break from a tip they received in 2021 that led to the exhumation of Johnson’s body from a Montana gravesite, said Anthony Armstrong, a detective with the Fremont County Sheriff’s Office.
The exhumation, which was kept under wraps, might have provided a crucial biological sample, Armstrong said, which investigators hope contains the perpetrator’s DNA now that advanced forensic technology exists.
The sheriff’s office is in the process of locating a qualified laboratory to perform the forensic analysis on the degraded sample — a process Armstrong hopes will be completed within the next year.
The hope is that modern techniques can extract a usable profile, one that either implicates or eliminates the three persons of interest or identifies an unknown individual altogether.
“You only get one chance at it,” Armstrong said. “A lot of stars have to align just right, but we’re hopeful that further testing can help give an answer.”
Darlene Hanks, Johnson’s younger sister, expressed cautious optimism that the new evidence could provide investigators with a tangible path forward after decades of unknowns.
“It would mean everything,” Hanks told Cowboy State Daily, her voice heavy with the weight of all the years spent seeking closure. “It wears on you, and it would mean the world to us to finally have answers.”
‘Like A Mom To Me’
Johnson was a young woman with big dreams on the cusp of her new life in Wyoming.
She had just left her family’s home in Glasgow, Montana, bound for Riverton to move in with a hometown friend who’d also made the same leap only months earlier.
She took a job at the Valley View bowling alley, but her real ambition lay elsewhere: She wanted to become a model.
Hanks was 16 when her big sister moved to Riverton, which she recalled broke her heart at the time. The two sisters were close, becoming even closer when their mother left their father to marry another man, leaving their father to raise the six children. It would take years for Hanks to rekindle her connection to her mom, so in the interim her older sister stepped in to fill that role.
“She was like a mom to me,” Hanks said. “A mom and a best friend.”
The girls were raised in Hinsdale, Montana, before later moving to Glasgow.
One of Hanks' favorite childhood memories is hiking with Johnson near Zortman, Montana, when she was around 7 years old and finding a huge rock, larger than a bowling ball. The sisters thought it might have contained gold and lugged it down the mountain with them.
Just that precious time with her then-teenage sister meant everything to her, Hanks said, and she still remembers it to this day.
“She was my everything,” Hanks said. “I wanted to be just like her.”
‘Beautiful Inside And Out’
Local papers chronicled a young Johnson as a Girl Scout with perfect attendance in elementary school, before the sports pages began to track her rise as a cheerleader and relentless scorer on the basketball court during her teen years.
Later, Johnson competed – and placed runner-up – in the Miss Montana USA in addition to her earlier title of Miss Northern Montana.
A February 1981 article about the pageant describes Johnson as a 21-year-old from Hinsdale who likes horses, basketball and “shoots a mean game of pool.” Her stated goal was to become a model or airline stewardess, she’s quoted as saying.
She was also tough as nails, Hanks said, recounting her sister’s bout with cervical cancer before moving to Wyoming. Her best option was a cancer center in Seattle, so Johnson traveled to Washington and stayed in a homeless shelter while receiving treatment.
Hanks admitted it was pure speculation, but she wondered if someone in Seattle had noticed her and followed her home. She said Johnson was such a beautiful girl.
“She was beautiful inside and out,” Darlene said. “A real people person who was always trying to find the light in everyone.”
Different Time
Perhaps it was her trusting nature coupled with her fierce dreams of becoming a model that prompted her to hitchhike. Hanks recalled that it was a last-minute and likely desperate decision on her sister’s part because she didn’t want to lose out on the opportunity with the Vannoy Talent Center.
She’d made the interview, Armstrong confirmed, and things had gone well. Employees at the agency recalled her leaving at about 5:30 that evening and were able to provide investigators with a detailed description of the outfit she was wearing.
Modeling was her dream, Hanks said, so she’s not surprised her sister would have done whatever it took to get there.
She doesn’t recall that her sister hitched often — or ever, for that matter.
Sonny Shrader, spent 46 years on the road before retiring and started his “The Retired Trucker” Facebook page on which people share stories and memories.
Back then, he was mostly driving south of the Mason-Dixon line. He recalled that picking up hitchhikers was common during the 1980s and 1990s, especially at truck stops.
He picked up a couple during his time and never had a problem, he said. Some employers frowned on it, while others didn’t mind.
“It was quite normal,” Shrader told Cowboy State Daily.
In those days, Shrader recalled, CB radios played a pivotal role in the job and some days he might be on the radio for 14 hours just talking back and forth and sharing information. The drivers also used the radio to help line up rides for the hitchhikers.
It was a big network with truckers working together.
“It was a different time altogether,” he said. “Nothing like today.”
At Rawlins Rest Stop
The truckers who gave Johnson a lift that night were key in helping investigators track her route, Armstrong said.
This was how they were able to trace her to a truck stop near Rawlins at about 9 p.m. There were no additional verified sightings of her after that, Armstrong said, until her body was discovered nearly a week later.
It didn’t appear the killer took the time to bury her, yet he had been thorough in leaving nothing behind — no personal effects, no weapon, not even her shoes remained.
Johnson’s body was discovered accidentally, Armstrong noted, following a freak warm spell in February that triggered snowmelt and flash flooding that washed out a road. A crew was called in to fix it when they spotted her body while preparing equipment for repairs.
Without that crew, she might have remained undiscovered for much longer. Though the road saw a lot of oilfield traffic, most drivers were shift-workers passing through outside of daylight hours, likely too tired to notice.
Area Booming
Johnson’s murder left a shadow over the community and was a major news story locally. It was also a dark time for murders of young girls in that region of Wyoming in general.
A year before Johnson’s murder, 18-year-old Naomi Kidder vanished while hitchhiking from Rawlins home to Buffalo. Her nude body was discovered three months later on ranchland in rural Natrona County, near Casper.
About two months after Kidder disappeared, in August 1982, Belynda Grantham — who also spelled her name “Belinda” — was found partially clothed and floating in the North Platte River outside of Glenrock with a rock tied around her neck.
Both of the young mothers were strangled and, to date, their murders also remain unsolved.
The oil fields were booming, pulling in a transient tide of workers that ebbed and flowed through the region daily. As uranium mining faded in Jeffrey City, Shoshoni and its neighboring towns swelled with new life.
State records show the town’s population peaked at nearly 800 in 1983 —a stark contrast to its current count of 471.
“Back then it was pretty booming,” Armstrong recalled. “There were quite a few people in and out constantly and a lot of transient workers.”
This constant churn of unvetted laborers created an investigator’s nightmare: An endless suspect pool, compounded by the absence of modern tracking technologies like security cameras and cell phones.
Persons Of Interest
Nonetheless, persons of interest emerged.
Earlier news accounts after Johnson’s murder suggested that the sheriff’s office was zeroing in on a suspect but didn’t have enough evidence to make an arrest.
That unnamed person is still considered a person of interest, though Armstrong declined to name him.
The only details he would share are that the man was Johnson’s co-worker at the bowling alley and that the two had a casual dating relationship. That person was extensively interviewed and cooperated with investigators, according to Armstrong.
“There was reason to pay attention to him, and they did a lot of work seeing if they could find evidence to tie him to her disappearance and ultimate death, but they weren't able to do that,” he said.
Another questionable piece of evidence widely reported at the time was that Johnson had bite marks on her shoulder, though Armstrong said that that has not been conclusively proven.
In fact, when he viewed crime scene photographs of the wound, he didn’t think it looked like a bite mark. A forensic odontologist also determined the injury pattern was inconclusive as to whether it matched teeth marks.
The extent to which that wound played in the early investigation is not clear.
Notable Killer
Also of interest to investigators is Dale Wayne Eaton, simply because of his criminal history and the fact he was living in the area and would have been active in the oil fields given his occupational skills as a welder and handyman.
“We can’t eliminate him,” Armstrong said, so Eaton remains on the list.
Eaton was convicted of the 1988 rape and murder of 18-year-old Lisa Marie Kimmell. She was driving from Denver to Billings when she was abducted by Eaton along U.S. Highway 20/26.
Her body was found a week later floating in the North Platte River, near Casper. Her murder remained unsolved until 2002, when DNA linked Eaton to the crime and her car was found buried on his Moneta property.
Eaton has also long been suspected in the 1997 disappearance of Amy Wroe Bechtel, who vanished while jogging on the Shoshone National Forest near Lander, but so far nothing has linked him to her disappearance.
Given his history, he’s also considered a potential suspect by authorities in the Grantham and Kidder murders, along with others.
Eaton is serving a life sentence at the Wyoming Medium Correctional Institution in Torrington for killing Kimmell.
He did not respond to previous correspondence sent to him in prison regarding these disappearances and murders.
Authorities, Family Optimistic
The third person of interest in Johnson’s murder is an unnamed person linked to the most recent tip that led to her exhumation.
Armstrong declined to provide further details about this individual or related evidence, noting the ongoing nature of the case.
He remains convinced the murder can be solved and is optimistic the specialized forensic lab they’ve found to analyzenew materials will be able to recover usable DNA from a potential suspect.
To that end, he asked anyone with information – no matter how small or inconsequential it might seem – to contact the Fremont County Sheriff’s Office.
“If you know something, speak out,” Armstrong said.
Hanks, likewise, hopes her sister’s murderer will be identified and encourages anyone with information to share it with police.
“It’s really nice to know that people still care. That the investigators are still working on it and that people care what happened to my sister. It would mean the world to us to have answers,” she said.
Anyone with information is asked to contact the Fremont County Sheriff’s Office at 307-332-5611. Tipsters can also contact the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation at 307-777-6710 or submit an anonymous tip online on the DCI website.
Contact Jen Kocher at jen@cowboystatedaily.com
Jen Kocher can be reached at jen@cowboystatedaily.com.
