Boxed In: It was an easy task, clearing up some stuff a friend had asked him to store. One of the boxes is giving off an unpleasant smell.
The Murder Of Innocence: A woman dies in a house fire. Her husband is arrested, convicted, sent to prison. Then comes the shocker. He’s killed before.
Runs In The Family: It was an incredibly savage double homicide. But the killer had made a mistake. He’d left his DNA behind. That could send him to death row.
Killer Grandma: She was a mean, neglectful woman who once offered her granddaughter to a man in exchange for drugs. She was also a heartless killer.
Inside Job: It's easy to make enemies when you are a police officer who plays strictly by the rules. Some of those enemies may even be your colleagues.
A Small Measure Of Solace: Two young women embark on a backpacking excursion in Shenandoah National Park. It is a trip that will end in tragedy.
Killed For A Smile: The motive for this savage murder left everyone stunned. All it took to trigger the killer was a simple act of kindness.
Rest In Peace, Little Girl: A little girl murdered on her way to a play date. A man wrongly accused and convicted. Years later, DNA unmasks the real killer.
Cold Cases: Solved! Volume 16
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he call came into the Aurora, Colorado 911 center on a June afternoon in 2005. Usually, such instances herald an emergency – a missing child, a serious auto accident, a crime in progress. This one had more to do with a gruesome discovery. The caller, Richard Johnson, had been cleaning up some items he’d been storing on his back porch when he detected a horrible smell. It appeared to be coming from a plastic storage box, its lid secured with several layers of duct tape. Curious, Johnson peeled back the tape to peer inside. He instantly wished he hadn’t. The box contained the badly decomposed body of a woman.
Officers who arrived at Richard Johnson’s home found the man standing on the sidewalk, clearly distraught by what he’d discovered. He explained that a former friend, JD Harrington, had stored the box and some other items at his house three years earlier. The pair had since had a falling out, and since Harrington had failed to collect his stuff, Johnson decided to get rid of it. He’d been doing so when he detected the stench that led to his unsettling discovery. He asked the officers to follow him. They’d not yet reached the house when they caught a whiff of it, the putrid stench of decaying flesh.
The box was standing out in the yard, a large plastic container with copious amounts of duct tape around the lid. Whoever had secured, it had been determined that it would not be opened. At least two rolls of tape must have been expended on the job. One of the officers approached and flipped the lid. Inside were the skeletal remains of a woman, forced into the box in a fetal position, her knees almost touching her chin. The corpse still had a spray of reddish-brown hair, but much of its flesh had liquified, congealing into a pureed mess at the bottom of the box. The officer quickly replaced the lid and stepped away, fighting back his gag reflex.
Richard Johnson, the householder, the man who’d found the foul-smelling storage bin and called it in, was an obvious first suspect. After all, the box was on his property. But Johnson was adamant. The box belonged to his former friend, JD Harrington. He’d stored it for JD and had never touched it, never given it a second thought until today. Johnson was then asked if he had any idea who the woman in the box might be. “Yes,” he answered. “I believe it’s Carolyn Jansen, JD’s former roommate.”
The story of Carolyn Colleen Jansen is a sad, cautionary tale of a woman trying to get ahead in the world, enduring humiliation and setbacks at every turn. Born in Montgomery County, New York, in May 1958, Carolyn suffered her first trauma early in life when her parents divorced, and she was put up for adoption. She was taken in by the Douglas family of Fort Plain, New York, and grew to be a pretty, conscientious girl. She graduated from Fort Plain Central School in 1977. Carolyn was married twice and bore six children, one of whom died in infancy. She was, by all accounts, a devoted mother and grandmother, but after years in an unhappy marriage, she decided to make a fresh start. In 2001, she moved to Aurora, Colorado.
Life had handed Carolyn Jansen plenty of beatdowns in her 42 years on this earth. But Carolyn was no quitter. She remained determined to secure a happy future for herself. In Colorado, she found a minimum wage job as a waitress at a Waffle House and signed up with Avon. She was hoping that this direct sales business could eventually become her full-time occupation. It was at the Waffle House that she met fellow employee JD Harrington, also struggling to make ends meet. JD was looking for a roommate to help pay the rent on his apartment. That suited the cash-strapped Carolyn, and so she moved in.
But the arrangement would not last. According to Richard Johnson, JD had approached him barely a year later, saying that Carolyn had quit town, running away with his rent money. He was going to have to give up his apartment and needed a place to store some of his stuff. Johnson agreed to take the items, which included a white Rubbermaid box.
That box and its macabre contents were now moved to the coroner’s office, where DNA tests proved that the corpse was indeed the mortal remains of Carolyn Jansen. The autopsy also determined the cause of death. Carolyn had been struck a massive blow to the head, fracturing her skull above the left eye. The question was, who had landed that blow? Was it JD Harrington, as Richard Johnson was suggesting? Or was Johnson more involved in this than he was letting on? Johnson had already given his version of events. It was time for Harrington to do the same.
Brought in for questioning, JD Harrington expressed surprise that the remains of his former roommate had been found in a box among his belongings. He swore that he had nothing to do with Carolyn’s death. Asked how he thought the box might have ended up on Richard Johnson’s porch, JD offered a bizarre explanation. He said that his things had sat on the sidewalk for a long time on moving day, waiting for transport. Someone must have snuck the box in there while he wasn’t looking. According to him, he’d last seen Carolyn in February 2002, just before she took off with his money. She’d been alive and well back then.
Harrington’s story would have been laughable had the situation been less serious. It was further debunked when the police did some checking and found that some of Carolyn’s personal belongings, including her Social Security card, had been left behind in the apartment when JD moved out. Then a former girlfriend of JD’s came forward with a curious story. She said that JD had come to her house one night in February 2002 in an obviously distressed state. She’d asked him what was wrong and he had started crying, telling her that he’d just killed someone.
Things were not looking good for JD Harrington. Brought in for a second round of questions, he offered an even more fanciful story. He now conceded that the Rubbermaid container was his. He even admitted to securing it with duct tape. However, he claimed that he did not know what was inside.
The investigative team thought that they had him at this time. No jury was ever going to believe such a bizarre explanation. And their case was strengthened even further when Harrington’s prints were lifted from the Rubbermaid box. All of this evidence was presented to the District Attorney’s office. To the dismay of investigators, the DA said they didn’t have a case.
Prosecutors tend to be pragmatic about these things. No one wants to lose at trial, especially in a homicide, where the rule of double jeopardy is in effect. In this case, the DA did not believe there was enough physical evidence tying JD Harrington to the murder. Sure, the victim was his former roommate, and sure she’d ended up crammed inside a box that he’d stored at his friend’s house. But where was the proof that he’d killed her and put her there? All they had were the fingerprints, and those were easily debunked. Harrington did not deny handling the box. Besides, Richard Johnson’s prints were also on the box. The defense would very likely offer him as an alternative suspect. That might create reasonable doubt in the minds of the jurors. It was too much of a risk.
And so, JD Harrington, a man who every cop on the Aurora Police Department thought was a killer, walked. He was still a free man when a new Deputy District Attorney took office in 2011. John Kellner wanted to start clearing the backlog of cold cases on the department’s books and asked investigators to submit five that had a good chance of closure. One of those put forward was the murder of Carolyn Jansen.
This surprised many in the DA’s office who had long considered the Jansen case unsolvable. ADA Kellner was not of that mindset, but he was adamant about one thing. He would not try the case without physical evidence. It meant extracting DNA from the tape securing the box, and that came with a huge set of problems. The outer layers of tape had been exposed to the elements through at least three seasonal cycles in Colorado’s wildly fluctuating climate. The inner layers faced a different problem. They had been in contact with the chemical adhesive. These were hardly the best conditions for preserving DNA.
Still, the technology had come on in leaps and bounds over the previous decades. It was now up to the technicians to work their magic. After months of painstaking work, they had their result: a full DNA profile from the sticky adhesive portion of the duct tape. This was sent for comparison with the profile of prime suspect JD Harrington. The result was high probability rather than conclusive. It stated that JD Harrington could not be excluded as the contributor of the DNA. Taken in conjunction with the strong circumstantial case, it was deemed enough to bring charges.
Jon David Harrington was brought to trial in August 2015, charged with the second-degree murder of Carolyn Jansen. He entered a not guilty plea, with his defense insisting that JD and Carolyn had a good relationship. “What possible motive could he have had for killing her?” his lawyer asked.
To this, the prosecution presented evidence that Harrington was obsessed with money and prone to violence if anyone tried to relieve him of it. The likeliest scenario is that Carolyn took money from him (or he believed that she did) and he acted out in a fit of rage. Then he attempted to cover up his crime by cramming her into a box and claiming that she’d run out on him.
Of course, this is only a theory. Only JD Harrington knows what really happened inside the apartment that night. Nonetheless, the jury found enough evidence to convict. Harrington was found guilty as charged and sentenced to 25 years in prison. He is currently an inmate at the Buena Vista Correctional Complex in Colorado, and will be eligible for parole in 2036.
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