ONLY ON ABC-7: Man charged with murder remains in jail under $1 million bond

The man accused of murdering a woman 45 years ago went before a judge Friday.

Willie James Johnson, 70, appeared before a magistrate judge in the El Paso County Jail for a bond hearing.

He was arrested earlier this month in Mississippi, where he was living.

El Paso police have said Johnson’s DNA was found in the blood on the fingernail clippings of Doris Rivers, who was stabbed to death in a South-Central El Paso apartment complex in 1970.

Rivers’ son, who is now 50 years old, was the one who discovered his mother’s body in 1970.

Police originally had two suspects in Rivers’ death — Rivers’ ex-boyfriend and Johnson.

Her ex-boyfriend was eliminated as a suspect in June 2015 after a DNA swab from him didn’t match the DNA taken from the blood on Rivers’ fingernail clippings.

Johnson’s attorney, Luis Islas, had told the judge that his client, a former soldier stationed at Fort Bliss around the time of Roberts’ murder, has no history of violence.

Islas also objected to the assistant district attorney saying that Johnson had been living “on the run,” adding that his client had consented to the DNA swab when he was approached by police this summer.

Islas asked for leniency in the bond, citing Johnson’s age and failing health, including diabetes and some type of cancer/liver disease.

But the judge ruled Johnson will remain behind bars on a million dollar bond.

The next hearing is scheduled for Nov. 5.

El Paso Police Det. Mike Aman said at a news conference earlier this month that Johnson was an original suspect in the case when the slaying happened, but there was no evidence at the time leading to him.

Police believe that Johnson 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.”