In Bullhead City, Arizona, the city Sue Johnson and her husband thought would be a great place to raise their two children, one of their children, Scott dies in a mysterious shack fire. Sue and her husband moved from California to Arizona in the year 1973. Less than fifty yards from their new home, there stood an old shed, once used by copper miners as a powder magazine. Soon enough it became a playhouse for Scott and his friends, while Sue kept a close eye on the kids.
On April 3rd,, 1974, at 3:45 P. M. , the bullhead City Volunteer Fire Department responded to a call, the shed (The old powder magazine) was on fire. A former Bullhead City Fire Chief Larry Adams says he can remember the details very vividly: “What I could see through the smoke is what appeared to be upholstery on the floor. When I got the pike pole, I stooped down to look under the smoke to hook this material and hook it out to extinguish it. But what Adams found were the badly burned bodies of Scott Johnson and his friends. After 7 weeks went by, the coroner concluded that the fire was accidental; suggesting the boys were play with matches or gasoline, but Sue didn’t buy it. Sue had no doubt in her head it was a murder stating: “I was shocked, I was very shocked. My child was certainly smarter than to just lay in the back of a building and wait to be asphyxiated by smoke or burned by fire. It’s kind of an obvious thing.
I always knew it was a murder, always. ” But Sue wasn’t the only one to believe that this was not an accident, former fire chief Adams also believe that Scott and his friends were victims of foul play. As evidence shows a few feet away from the door Adams found a small 2-by-12 inch wooden plank. Adams thought it was odd that a board had a small charred circle on one side. Adams states his reasoning for thinking this was a murder: ‘it indicated to me that somebody had prevented their escape through that door.
They may have initially tried to hold the door, but it’s metal, it got hot, they couldn’t hold the door any longer. They’d need something to insulate them from the heat. They picked up the two-by-twelve, one on each end or more, and held the two-by-twelve against the door with one person on each end of it. ” Later a person by the name of Dale meldor came forward four years later with shocking evidence “Meador advised us that he saw two men holding these two young kids and pushing them in the powder magazine.
One of the kids looked like he was heavily drugged and the other was fighting. Then he saw one of the men with a gas can. One of them told him in street terms to get lost. And that they’d just burned up two kids. ” Another clue may be the strange discovery that Scott made three weeks before his death: a $100 bill. Sue Johnson believes that could have been a small key as she states: “I think it’s possible that there could’ve been someone that used that area, possibly for a drug transaction or something.
And maybe the people that they saw doing this thought that the kids would run a block away to the sheriff’s substation and report them, and therefore they felt like they had to do something to stop it. ” The answer to this case is quite simple; Scott and his friends were deliberately burned to death. There is no way two 11 year olds would ever play with matches and or gasolines, just to have it backfire on them. Obviously Scott was killed because his playhouse was more than a playhouse to some others. Meaning they needed to make sure Scott never told anyone about the drug dealing, by simply killing him.
