Laura Johnson was a 49-year-old White woman reported missing from Billings, Montana, with her last known contact listed as September 13, 2018. NamUs identifies the case as MP52588 and lists Billings in Yellowstone County as her last known location. Laura is described as 5 feet 4 inches tall, about 130 pounds, with blond or strawberry-blond hair and blue eyes. A noted distinguishing feature is a bird tattoo around her ankle.
Laura had moved to Billings several months before she disappeared to live with Gregory Scott Green, described in reports as her sometime boyfriend. According to The Charley Project, the two were living in a rented mobile home on South Windsor Circle, but had broken up several weeks before she vanished, and Laura was sleeping in a separate bedroom while subletting from him. She had found work delivering pizzas for Papa John’s and was reportedly attending a methadone clinic daily before she disappeared, which made her sudden absence from work, treatment, and family contact especially alarming.
Family members became worried after Laura stopped communicating and did not show up for work. Early reports said relatives used social media to ask the public for help after she vanished. Authorities later said she was last seen alive in Billings on September 13, 2018, and police asked for public assistance connected to a white Chevy truck believed to have traveled across the Yellowstone River Bridge south of Laurel on the night of September 14. Investigators also asked landowners and residents in the Shepherd, Worden, and Huntley areas to watch for possible evidence of a body or burial site.
Green reportedly told investigators that Laura had packed two red suitcases and left, possibly returning to Oregon or to family elsewhere. However, law enforcement and prosecutors later developed a different theory. Court and news accounts reported that a neighbor’s surveillance footage showed Laura entering the home she shared with Green and not leaving, and later showed Green moving a heavy object from the house. Prosecutors also said Johnson’s blood was found in Green’s pickup truck, and KRTV reported that investigators believed phone-location evidence connected Laura’s phone with Green’s movements after she disappeared.
In April 2019, Green was arrested in Henderson, Nevada, and charged with deliberate homicide in Laura’s case. The Yellowstone County Attorney’s Office filed the homicide charge, even though Laura’s remains had not been located. At trial, prosecutors argued that the evidence, including surveillance footage and blood evidence, showed Green killed Laura and tried to conceal what happened. The defense disputed the strength of the evidence and argued the case was circumstantial.
On March 4, 2020, after an eight-day trial, a Yellowstone County jury found Gregory Green guilty of deliberate homicide. Reports at the time emphasized that Laura’s body still had not been found, making the case a rare and painful no-body homicide conviction. In May 2020, Green was sentenced to 100 years in prison for Laura’s murder.
Laura’s case remains heartbreaking because, despite the conviction, her loved ones have not received the full closure that recovery of her remains could bring. Public records and case summaries continue to preserve her identity beyond the court case: she was a mother, a woman with family who searched for answers, and a person whose disappearance deeply affected those who knew and loved her.Last Seen: Sep 13, 2018
