El Paso Police make arrest in 45-year-old murder case

The El Paso Police Department has made in arrest in a 45-year-old murder investigation.

Willie James Johnson, 70, was arrested in Madison County, Mississippi in connection with the death of Doris Rivers. He has been charged with murder.

Rivers, who was 21 at the time, was stabbed to death around 1 a.m. Nov. 12, 1970 in her home in the 200 block of South Glenwood in South-Central El Paso.

Investigators at the time had secured fingernail clippings off of Rivers that were evidence in police custody over the years.

After an inquiry about the case from Rivers’ granddaughter, those clippings were sent to the Texas Department of Public Safety crime lab for DNA testing.

“She knew that her grandmother had been killed,” EPPD Det. Mike Aman said. “She wasn’t sure if we ever caught the killer or not. The initial investigation back in 1970 focused on the male acquaintances of the victim. Most of them were soldiers stationed at Fort Bliss.”

Johnson was an original suspect, Aman said, but there was no evidence at the time leading to him. The results of the DNA test led to the identification and arrest two weeks ago Johnson in Mississippi.

Johnson had been stationed at Fort Bliss at the time of Rivers’ death and police believe that he wanted a romantic relationship with Rivers but she was not interested in having that type of relationship with him.

“The key thing is DNA can be extracted from various items, bodily fluids, bones, skin cells, hair,” Aman said. “It’s not 100 percent. It doesn’t work 100 percent of the time. What’s critical is that the evidence collected is being preserved in the proper manner. If it’s not preserved or stored properly, in other words if environmental conditions destroy it, than its useless.”

Det. Aman went on to say when the evidence was collected, it wasn’t collected with DNA evidence in mind, because it didn’t exist yet.

“Back then they didn’t have anything,” he said. “They could not do anything with it. There was no DNA in 1970. That came years later. They did not collect that with DNA in the background because they didn’t know about it. They did an excellent job though of collecting that for us, storing it and collecting it properly so we could work with it.”

Johnson is expected to extradited to El Paso to face charges soon. Police Chief Gregg Allen pointed out that the statute of limitations never runs out on a murder.

Police told us this arrest is leading them to look at other cold cases and the possibility of also doing DNA testing.