‘Some Justice Is Being Done’ : A woman reminisces about her mother, whose murder 19 years ago may soon be solved through a new fingerprinting technique.

Evelyn Irwin’s mother, 84-year-old Mamie Johnston, was stabbed to death in her Los Angeles home in 1975, a slaying that was still unsolved last year when Irwin read about a new computer system purchased by the Los Angeles Police Department that can identify fingerprints in some old cases. The system is able to search through thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands, of fingerprints on file to match a latent print at a crime scene with the prints of a suspect. Irwin called police, prompting an investigation that led to the arrest of a woman who was 16 and lived across the street from Johnston at the time of the murder. The woman is in custody pending a hearing next month on whether she can be tried as an adult for the crime. Police are investigating the possible role of an accomplice. Irwin, who lives in Los Angeles, was interviewed by Mike Wyma.

When all of this began to happen there were a lot of feelings of maybe I shouldn’t have brought it up, maybe I just don’t want to go through all this again. But now I’m glad I did it. Knowing my mother, I think she would be pleased I did this and some justice is being done.

I now feel that whoever did this should be punished. When it first happened we had absolutely no idea who it was. Even though detectives talked to everyone in the neighborhood, including this girl, we had no leads at all. There are so many things like this that happen to older women and are never solved that I guess I just accepted that it was a situation that would never be solved.

I had some very strong guilt feelings that I had not forced my mother to move. I wanted her to move. Many, many times I asked her to. She was living alone. She couldn’t take care of the yard anymore. I thought she might be happier in a condo or something. But that was her home for 52 years, and my aunt Edna lived next door. My father built both of those houses at that development when it opened up.

I thought, if only I had gone out and rented her a condo or rented her an apartment and packed her and moved her physically. But my husband said that’s ridiculous. She didn’t want to move, and it was her right to stay there. When I started to think about that, I didn’t feel so bad.

She always said she couldn’t move because Edna didn’t want to move. There were just the two sisters, and Mother was the strong one. Mother was the extrovert and Edna was the introvert. Mother was my grandfather’s “boy” and she helped him with his bookkeeping and business, and Edna was my grandmother’s girl.

My aunt suffered. She lived three more years but she just couldn’t cope. I brought her home and she was here for a couple of months. But I was working and she was alone. She used to walk the house, back and forth, asking “Where’s Mamie? When’s Mamie coming back?” She wouldn’t eat. We found a senior home for her but she couldn’t adjust. Three nights a week my husband, Woody, and I would stop on our way home to see her. I don’t think she knew we were really there.

I was an only child, and the fact that my grandmother and my grandfather, who were my mother’s parents, and my aunt lived next door meant I had a very close relationship with my family. My mother and I used to do things together. The big event--I lived on 84th Place and Vermont and there was a street car on Vermont--the big event was to get on the street car and go Downtown, down to the Broadway. The store was at 4th and Broadway; the May Co. was on 8th and Broadway. We would window shop and just browse. There was never a lot of money to buy a lot. But we would just have a big day, have lunch at Clifton’s Cafeteria. I loved that.

My mother was a librarian. She did all of the library work for the city schools. When she got married she quit, then later she decided that our little Vermont-Manchester area needed a library, so she talked the Better Business Bureau and the Kiwanis Club and all these community groups into sponsoring a library. And she ran the library, probably from the very early ‘30s till the early ‘40s. All during my high school and junior high years.

She had many children’s books. I remember sitting in my little rocking chair, which I still have, incidentally, in front of the fireplace. We didn’t have a heater or a forced-air furnace. It was a little California bungalow. I can remember my dad sitting in his big chair reading his magazine, Field and Stream, and a newspaper, and Mother reading to me. I have some wonderful old children’s books.

Memories come back when situations trigger them. Something would arise that made me think of mother. I would sometimes dream about it at night. And I always felt her death was a very unfair thing. She was 84 years old and I could accept that she died. But I could never accept the manner in which she died.

I always hoped and I finally decided that during it her mind just snapped. That she went into a shock from fear, that she didn’t know what was happening to her. I’ve decided that was the way it was because that would have been less traumatic for her and less painful for her. Just not to know what was happening.

I did not go to a therapist. I did not go for counseling. The only counseling, if you can call it that, I got was from my husband.

The good that has come out of it is my feeling of greater support for the Police Department. I have always supported the police but I cannot say enough good for these detectives. They dug out the files from the archives and pursued this immediately, and they stayed with it and worked very diligently. I think they’re wonderful.