Safety Assumptions in Doubt : Unsolved China Murder Troubles U.S. Educators

Early on the morning of Jan. 23, Mary Jo Kindt, an American teacher working in the grimy northeastern Chinese city of Shenyang, walked upstairs to the bedroom of her 18-year-old daughter Erin Johnston to awaken her for a phone call.

She found her daughter dead in her bed, the victim of what Chinese authorities concluded was a homicide. An autopsy showed that she had died from a sharp object that penetrated approximately 3 inches into her brain.

It was the first case of its kind. Over the past decade, several thousand American scholars and their families have gone to work in China. Most returned home safely after confronting nothing more serious than a bronchial ailment or a stomach bug.

Now, two months after her death, the murder of Erin Johnston remains unsolved. No arrests have been made, no suspects have been named and the case is beginning to cause puzzlement and concern among some of the American educators active in exchange programs with China.

“This seems so extraordinary, because we have always believed that there was no place in the world safer than the People’s Republic of China,” said Marvin T. Williamsen, head of the program at Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C., that sent Kindt and Johnston to China. “We’re trying to be patient and let the investigation proceed. And yet we have a strong need to know what happened.”

Asked about the progress of China’s investigation, Blaine D. Benedict, an official at the U.S. Consulate in Shenyang, replied: “We have no idea, because they have told us zilch.” A spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington said that his government has nothing to report about the investigation.

Williamsen and others say that the Johnston case raises questions about the ability of Chinese authorities to conduct an investigation in cases where gathering scientific evidence and interviewing foreigners could be important. Criminal cases in China are often solved when authorities obtain confessions from Chinese suspects.

Since China opened its doors to the outside world in the late 1970s, only one other American has been murdered in China--a Chinese-American named Ewald Cheer, 61, who was stabbed to death in a train compartment last June during a robbery. Chinese authorities quickly arrested two men and brought them to trial, and they were executed last August.

In the mysterious case of Johnston’s murder, it is still unclear whether the motive was robbery and whether the perpetrators were Chinese or other foreigners living in Shenyang.

Her Possessions Missing

Johnston’s stepfather, Allen Kindt, a music teacher at Appalachian State University who was also teaching in Shenyang, said that after the murder, several of Johnston’s possessions were missing. They included her purse, some money, a tape recorder, a radio, a watch and some jewelry.

Still, Kindt said in a telephone interview, robbery seemed an unsatisfactory motive “because she had so little (in possessions). . . . It might have been a straight robbery, or the robbery might have been just a cover-up.”

Kindt and others said that he and his wife were downstairs, directly below Johnston’s bedroom, throughout the night before she was found.

Like many other foreigners in China, the Kindts and Johnston lived in a special apartment complex set aside for foreigners and surrounded by a wall that was designed to separate it from the rest of the city. There was no sign of any forced entry into the Kindts’ apartment.

In addition to the Kindts and Johnston, there were quite a few other foreigners living in Shenyang. “She (Johnston) made friends with all the people that were there,” said Kindt. “There were a lot of (North) Korean students who ate in the cafeteria there. There were medical students from Africa that she became good friends with. . . . She had several Chinese friends, too, including a couple of soccer players.”

Foreigners Questioned

In the two days after the murder was discovered, Chinese police questioned all the foreigners in Shenyang who had known Johnston, according to Kindt. Then they let the foreigners leave Shenyang for a winter vacation in southern China. “I couldn’t imagine them letting everyone go, but they did,” said Kindt.

Efforts by Chinese law-enforcement authorities to investigate some of the foreign students could well have diplomatic complications.

Shenyang, formerly known as Mukden, is an industrial city in the heart of Manchuria, about 150 miles from China’s border with North Korea. In recent years, China’s relations with North Korea have been strained, primarily because of China’s economic reforms and its opening to the outside world.

Since the early 1980s, Chinese leaders and the official Chinese press have complained about increases in crime, particularly by young people. After an anti-crime crackdown begun in 1983, an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 Chinese were executed.

Very few of these crimes affected foreigners. “We are protected,” said Williamsen, who teaches Chinese history at Appalachian State and also lived in Shenyang a few years ago. “We aren’t that experienced in the seamier, darker side of Chinese life. . . . We send field trips to New York City regularly, and I think our faculty has been more concerned about the threat to physical well-being there than they have been in China.”

Warned to Lock Doors

Williamsen said that as a result of the Johnston murder, university officials are now telling teachers and students in China to comply with Chinese security recommendations, such as making sure that doors are always locked.

Johnston accompanied her mother and stepfather to China last August for what was intended to be a year between high school graduation and her freshman year at the University of North Carolina. She had ranked in the top 5% of her class in high school and had edited her high school yearbook.

In Shenyang, she taught English to Chinese students. “That was her ambition, to teach English in high school,” her stepfather said.

When Johnston’s body was discovered, Kindt said, at least 10 or 11 Chinese police officials rushed to the scene. “They were doing their best, working day and night,” he said. Nevertheless, he added, “I don’t know that they have any strong suspect.”

Kindt said that Chinese authorities at the Northeast University of Technology in Shenyang, the school where he and his wife were teaching, were “awfully embarrassed. . . . They took care of the whole cremation and provided a box for the ashes. They offered us a trip in China before we returned to the United States.”

The Kindts turned down this offer. On the day Johnston’s body was discovered, they quickly moved out of their apartment to quarters supplied by the American Consulate in Shenyang. Ten days later, they returned with Johnston’s remains for a memorial service in North Carolina and decided to remain at home rather than returning to China.