Do you know who murdered Freda? On the evening of January 20, 1999, a sense of unease settled over a home in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Freda Ingrid Johnson, a 34-year-old African-American woman, was found murdered inside her residence. Her husband made the harrowing discovery, telling authorities he heard a gunshot as he arrived home. Inside, he found his wife in the living room, having been shot and bound with a telephone cord.
Their four-year-old son was found physically unharmed, hiding under a bed.
Investigators initially believed that robbery was the motive behind the violent crime. The day after the murder, a significant piece of evidence was found a block away from the Johnson home: a bloody shirt belonging to Freda. For years, the case grew cold, leaving a family shattered and a community searching for answers. The passage of time, however, would bring a new development through advances in forensic technology.
In 2008, a breakthrough emerged when the bloody shirt was submitted for DNA analysis. The testing identified a man named Tony Patterson, who was incarcerated in Colorado on unrelated charges at the time. Based on this new evidence, Patterson was charged with Freda's murder. However, the path to justice took another turn in March 2013 when the case against him was dismissed due to complications with the DNA evidence. To this day, the murder of Freda Ingrid Johnson remains unsolved, and no other suspects have been publicly named or charged in connection with her death.
