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California

Man gets life for 1985 rape, murder

By Christopher Goffard
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A former sheet-metal worker from Anaheim was sentenced Friday to life in prison for the 1985 rape and murder of an Anaheim woman, the Orange County district attorney’s office said.

An Orange County jury convicted 52-year-old Lynn Dean Johnson in June of murder with special circumstances in the death of Bridgett Lamon, 19, a restaurant hostess. Prosecutors said Johnson raped her, beat her to death with a hammer and dumped her body in a trash bin in eastern Anaheim.

The case remained unsolved, prosecutors said, until improved DNA technology pointed investigators toward Johnson.

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Prosecutors said that in July 1988, Johnson was charged with exposing himself to a 17-year-old girl in Tustin and a month later kidnapped and sexually assaulted an 11-year-old girl.

He was in prison in connection with that case and was about to be released when, in 2004, a DNA database linked him to the Lamon killing.

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Christopher Goffard

Christopher Goffard is an author and a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times. He shared in the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for the paper’s Bell coverage and has twice been a Pulitzer finalist for feature writing, in 2007 and 2014. His novel “Snitch Jacket” was a finalist for the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best First Novel. His book “You Will See Fire: A Search for Justice in Kenya,” based on his Times series, was published in 2011.

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