Ultimate Betrayal Unravels a Woman’s Tangled Life

Shonda Johnson had a way with the men no one could explain.

Her blond hair came from a bottle, and her teeth were so crooked she wouldn’t smile for photos. A high school dropout who rarely worked, she dreamed up a glitzy past for herself: head cheerleader, homecoming queen, high-paid paramedic.

Despite the plain appearance and the lies, there was something about Johnson. She was a small-town siren who had no problem attracting men in Walker County, a tough coal-mining area just north of Birmingham.

When Johnson quit school at age 18 and needed someone to support her, she married within a few months. When she needed a father for an unborn child conceived with another man, she found one. Twice.

And police say when she needed a man to commit murder, she found him too. Johnson, 31, is awaiting execution in Alabama’s electric chair for a bizarre crime of passion. Married to three men at the same time, she was convicted of getting one to murder another as the third died of AIDS.

The tale is one of tangled relationships and deadly intentions, all revolving around a petite mother of four described by her family as naive and childlike.

“In certain ways Shonda had her own little world. But that doesn’t make her a bad person,” said her sister, Christi Johnson.

Police say not only was Johnson bad, she made those around her bad--particularly Tim Richards, her fifth husband, who pleaded guilty to killing husband No. 3, Randy McCullar, in a show of love.

McCullar was fatally shot in the head with a deer rifle as he changed a tire outside a rural church on Nov. 30, 1997. The machinist and aspiring pilot was killed after filing a bigamy charge against Johnson, who stood to lose custody of her children if convicted.

“I don’t think Tim would have ever spent a day in jail if he hadn’t met Shonda,” said Walker County sheriff’s detective Joey Vick.

Johnson’s attorney, Steve Jones, refused to let her speak with the Associated Press, saying the case is on appeal.

Johnson had already wed and divorced two husbands legally before she went on her marrying spree. The first husband, Jeff Nelson, twice filed police reports during their six-year marriage claiming Johnson tried to kill him, but no charges were filed. The second husband, Jimmy Tidwell, divorced her after only five months.

Johnson and McCullar married on June 24, 1995, during a small ceremony at a white church within a couple of hundred yards of his parents’ home. The two met at the BC Lounge, a country bar that both frequented. Johnson would wear short skirts or jeans; McCullar liked his cowboy boots and western shirts.

“They were just as happy as they could be, couldn’t keep their hands off each other,” said the Rev. Jerry Haley, who performed the ceremony.

The bliss didn’t last long. McCullar quickly grew tired of working every day while his bride played at the lake with her friends, his parents say.

“She’d put on her bikini, throw a towel around her and go to the beach. He was working and she was out partying,” said his mother, Betty McCullar. “Randy was a Christian, and he just couldn’t take a life like that.”

The McCullars weren’t all that surprised when the couple separated. But they were stunned by a telephone call they received only three months after the two had wed: A friend of McCullar’s had seen Johnson marrying another man, Bill McIntyre, in a courthouse ceremony. McCullar and Johnson were still legally married.

Johnson and McIntyre met while working at a sleeping-bag plant, one of the few places she ever worked. Johnson, who already had a son by her first husband, was carrying McCullar’s child when she put on an ivory-colored dress to marry McIntyre.

“He told us he thought that was the girl God meant for him,” said McIntyre’s mother, Freida McIntyre. “Bill talked her out of having an abortion. He carried her to her doctor appointments and was in the delivery room.”

McIntyre was completing a home-study course to become a preacher in addition to supporting Johnson by working at the factory, where she was employed only two weeks, but his health started failing within a year. Despite telling in-laws she was a paramedic making $52,000 annually, Johnson began selling McIntyre’s compact discs for money to go to bars.

On Aug. 2, 1996, McIntyre went to the hospital with the onset of the disease that would later kill him, AIDS. That was the last day he and Johnson lived together as man and wife. McIntyre went back to his parents’ home, and Johnson went on to the next man.

Ronnie Webb moved in with Johnson, and she became pregnant about three months after she separated from McIntyre. By then, McCullar had gotten wind of Johnson’s new men and filed the bigamy charge.

Johnson was looking for a way to stay out of prison and keep her kids when she went to the BC Lounge in the spring of 1997 and met Tim Richards, a round-faced delivery truck driver described by both police and his adoptive parents as simple and trusting. Richards’ first marriage had failed, and he was lonely.

“I found out she was pregnant, and I went over and patted her on the stomach and said, ‘We’re all going to have to take care of this,’ ” Richards recalled in a jailhouse interview. In Johnson, Richards said, he saw a single mom who needed help. He fell in love that night.

“She laughed a lot. She’s pretty to me,” said Richards, who initially believed her stories about being a high school beauty queen, an “it” girl. “We dated about four weeks, and she asked me to move in.”

While still married to both McCullar and McIntyre, Johnson married Richards along the bank of a bubbling brook in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. Her world started caving in within weeks.

Johnson didn’t put up a fight as her first husband won custody of their son by claiming she was an unfit mother who left her children with neighbors for extended periods of time. Meanwhile, pressure was starting to build as the bigamy charge filed by McCullar wound its way through the courts.

It was then, Richards said, that the murder plot began.

Johnson told Richards and her family that she and McCullar were never really married because the ceremony was held before they had a license. She accused McCullar of raping her while they were together. She began talking about how she’d lose custody of her other two children if convicted of bigamy.

“She finally came out and said, ‘We’ve got to kill him, get him out of the picture,’ ” Richards said. “I had to make a choice between losing the woman I really loved or doing it. I had to do it to prove I loved her.”

The two stalked McCullar for weeks and finally settled on a plan. They lay in wait one night outside the BC Lounge, where McCullar was drinking. Richards slashed one of McCullar’s tires so he’d have to stop on the isolated two-lane road between the bar and home.

The plan worked.

Realizing his tire was flat, McCullar pulled into the gravel parking lot of Harmony Baptist Church. Richards pulled in beside him, with Johnson in the passenger seat. She’d already put a shell in the chamber of Richards’ hunting rifle, according to testimony at her trial.

Richards said Johnson shoved the weapon into his hands. He pointed it at the head of McCullar, who was kneeling with a lug nut in his hand just a few feet away.

“She just kept saying, ‘Do it! Do it!,’ ” Richards said. “The last thing I remember seeing was him falling.”

Richards drove off as Johnson laughed. They threw the gun and its case off two river bridges and went back home. Richards said Johnson wanted to have sex, but all he could think about was the murder.

Johnson was questioned only hours after the slaying and denied any involvement, but she changed her story repeatedly during a series of interviews with police. In the last version, she said the killing was all Richards’ idea but admitted she was in the car with him at the time.

This explanation makes sense to Johnson’s longtime friend, Bobbie Feltman, who says each of Johnson’s husbands except McIntyre beat her.

“She tries to treat her husbands like the Bible says, but then they run over her,” Feltman said.

But investigators didn’t buy Johnson’s story, so they turned to Richards. He, too, denied the killing at first but broke down after investigators played him tapes in which his wife pinned the blame on him. “I just started crying,” he said.

Believing Johnson was really behind the killing, prosecutors offered Richards a deal: In exchange for his testimony against Johnson in her capital murder trial, he could plead guilty to simple murder and have a chance at parole.

Richards agreed and testified against Johnson, who already had pleaded guilty to bigamy. Jurors didn’t buy defense claims that Richards--who once wrote a note threatening one of Johnson’s boyfriends, David Prescott--was the true aggressor in the slaying.

Perhaps just as devastating as Richards’ testimony was that of Prescott and Ronnie Webb, who both told jurors Johnson had tried to get them to kill McCullar before settling on Richards.

Johnson was sentenced to death on Jan. 19 of this year, about two weeks after McIntyre died of AIDS. Their marriage was annulled more than a year after she married Richards.

Johnson’s four boys, all by different men, live with the fathers’ families, with the exception of Tim Richards’ son, who was conceived in February 1998, two months after the slaying but before Johnson was jailed on capital murder charges.

The boy lives with Johnson’s mother, Wanda, who defiantly rejects the bad things being said about her daughter. “She’s not a bigamist. She didn’t kill nobody,” Wanda Johnson said.

Tim Richards still loves Shonda Johnson, despite all the men, the pain and the death. It’s there in his eyes, past the tears.

Looking down at his handcuffs and orange jail uniform, Richards tries to come to terms with all he has done. He is the one who should be on death row, he said, not Johnson.

“I took one life with a gun, and I took another one just by speaking,” Richards said. “That’s hard to deal with.”