Police Arrest Suspect in 1975 Slaying

Computer technology--and a persistent daughter--helped crack a murder case that had stymied detectives for nearly two decades, Los Angeles police said Monday night.

Police said they arrested Phillis Carraway, 34, on suspicion of murder in the death of Mamie C. Johnson, who was slain during a robbery at her South-Central Los Angeles home on Aug. 20, 1975.

Detective Chuck Hawley of the South Bureau Homicide Division said officers lifted fingerprints at the murder scene but had not been able to match them until recently, when computerized records helped do the job.

“We now have technology that we didn’t have at the time, and we reran the fingerprints,” Hawley said.

He said police learned in November of the computer-identified match of the fingerprints. Carraway was 16 when Johnson, who had been a county librarian, was killed. Police found Carraway in San Bernardino and arrested her Monday. Two other suspects remain at large, Hawley said.

Police also credited Johnson’s daughter, Evelyn Irwin, for her diligence.

In October, Irwin and her husband read in The Times of the solving of another years-old murder through a computerized fingerprint network. They called detectives to ask if the same technique might be helpful in the Johnson case.

Hawley called Johnson’s slaying “a tragedy. She was 84. She was brutally murdered, and the family is quite relieved that the whole thing is coming to an end.”