Do you know who killed 52 year old Andrea Cincotta in 1998? In the late summer of 1998, the life of 52-year-old Andrea Cincotta, a reference librarian in Arlington, Virginia, came to a violent and tragic end. On August 21st, she was found deceased inside the bedroom closet of the apartment she shared with her fiancé, James Christopher 'Chris' Johnson. An autopsy would later reveal that she had been strangled to death.
The initial investigation into her murder found no signs of forced entry into the home.
For years, the case remained unsolved, a cold case that haunted Cincotta's family, particularly her son, Kevin. The investigation had initially focused on Johnson, who was interrogated for 28 hours in the days following the discovery of Andrea's body. Despite the intense scrutiny, no charges were filed at the time, and the case gradually faded from the headlines, though never from the minds of those who knew and loved Andrea.
A significant breakthrough came in 2018 when a man named Bobby Joe Leonard, already incarcerated for other violent crimes, confessed to killing Andrea Cincotta. Leonard, who had done some work at Cincotta's apartment complex and had been given an old computer by her weeks before the murder, dropped a bombshell: he claimed he had been hired to commit the murder. He alleged that Andrea's fiancé, Chris Johnson, had offered him $5,000 for the killing. This confession breathed new life into the cold case.
In November 2021, more than two decades after Andrea's death, both James Christopher Johnson and Bobby Joe Leonard were indicted in connection with her murder. Leonard was charged with first-degree murder, and Johnson was charged with murder-for-hire. The indictments were the culmination of years of renewed investigative work by the Arlington County Police Department's Cold Case Unit.
The legal proceedings that followed took different paths for the two accused men. Bobby Joe Leonard pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and, in November 2022, was sentenced to life in prison. At his sentencing, he described himself as a 'very evil, sadistic person.' James Christopher Johnson, however, maintained his innocence and went to trial. In a stunning turn of events, after a four-week trial in September 2022, a jury acquitted Johnson of the murder-for-hire charge. Jurors reportedly deliberated for only an hour before returning the not-guilty verdict. Following his acquittal, Johnson filed a lawsuit against the lead detective in the reopened case, alleging malicious prosecution.
