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Heads up, this show has descriptions of violence and strong language.

Hey. So my brain always spins after we have a conversation and you introduced so much new information, and oh, my goodness, there was a lot of it today.

I'm freshly back from a trip to New York to see Shane Coraya and share the latest with him about his sister, Sophia, who was charged with murdering her mother-in-law back in 2002.

I am starting to accept that whenever you visit, I am going to have terrible night's sleep.

I am haunting Shane. Just kidding. But I am offering him information on Sophia's case as it comes in, and he has been offering me his thoughts on all of it in the form of voice memos.

I'm just trying to understand what was going through her head.

We're several months into revisiting the murder at this point. It had become a obsessive side project for both of us. I was reading documents and talking to Sophia regularly, usually in the early morning hours before my regular workday started.Hi, good morning.Hi, good morning. How are you doing?

Did you get the stuff I sent you?

I did. I did. And I got the picture while I was on the run. Shane is more of a night owl, recording himself while he's unwinding from his day at work.

For the record, that's wine.

And pouring over his sister's case file.

First installment. Lots of pages.

Thousands of pages. Witness interviews, call records, crime scene photos.

Okay, this looks like it's an evidence form.

Shane is Sofia's brother, obviously, but he's also a lawyer.

Entry number 23. Paper bag with bloodflakes.

If he's ever going to believe, really believe, that his sister did not kill her mother-in-law.

How many entries are there? Oh, there's a lot of entries.

He's going to have to go through everything.

Even if she committed murder, I know that I love my sister, but she needs to also be held accountable if she committed murder.

I'm Amarie Sievertsen from W W. R. And Zsp Media, this is beyond all repair. Chapter 2, The Case.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, the jury. The evidence in this case will show that on January 10th of 2002, Marlene Johnson was brutally bludgeoned to death in her home.

I've fired up the footage of Sophia's trial, that box of the HS tapes I got in the mail. On screen, a drab courtroom, grainy faces, outfits from 20 years ago, and the prosecutor delivering his opening statements.

The evidence will show that she was bludgeoned to death by her own daughter-in-law to defend it in this case, Sophia Johnson.

All right, so Clark County Sheriff's Office Enforcement Intelligence Information.

Meanwhile, Shane is reading through Sophia's case file.

January 12, 2002. This is two days after the murder.

We each arrive at someone very important.

There's Rick Buckner.

This is probably the last time for the record, please. B-u-c-k-n-e-r.

Rick Buckner, Detective Rick Buckner, whose decisions in the days following Marlene's murder solidified Sophia as the primary suspect.

I've been the lead investigator on probably anywhere from 45 to 50 homicide cases.

That was Rick on the stand in Sophia's trial in 2003. But this is him talking to me. Do you have a reputation in the field?

I'm a total asshole.

Rick is big and broad, bald with a mustache. I'm sitting across from him in a small conference room in downtown Vancouver, Washington, which is near Portland, Oregon, in Clark County. Rick is cordial but guarded and a little intimidating, if I'm being honest. Part of that may have to do with the polygraph machine I saw in his office next door. That's what he's been up to since retiring from the Sheriff's office. He runs a private polygraph business, which feels on brand, because the thing I'd heard about Rick is that he was the guy who could get suspects to talk.

I've had people say they don't want to talk to their attorney, they want to talk to me, so that's pretty good.

People like Keith Jesperson, a. K. A. The Happy Face killer, who killed at least eight women in the '90s and drew smiley faces on letters to police and the media.

He wouldn't talk to us, and I said, Come on, Keith, I'll buy you dinner. Come on. But eventually, he called me and said, Yeah, I killed her. I've probably gotten more confessions than anybody else.

But Rick never got one out of Sophia. He remembers her well all these years later.

So is her position that she didn't do anything, that she didn't have any involvement in the death of Marlene Johnson?

It It is. I know that you probably have a different perspective. I do. Despite the fact that Rick's notes from this 20-year-old murder case are long gone, and it's clearly one of many that he's worked on, it stayed with him.

I've seen a lot of crimes in my ears as a detective. But to see this one where... I mean, this woman was just beaten beyond recognition. We determined later, fireplace tons. It was a vicious, vicious assault. Somebody wanted to make sure she was dead.

Buckner and his team started mapping out Marlene's movements the day of the murder. She'd gotten home a little before quarter to one on that Thursday in January.

I think she came back from a yoga class that day, went out grocery shopping. We had the grocery seats in the bag, so we could pretty much pinpoint the time that she actually would have arrived home. By all indications, she just parked her car in the garage, came in from the garage, into the house, carrying groceries, and somebody just viciously attacked her.

Marlene hadn't even set the bag in her arms down when she was struck by someone wielding fireplace tangs. She fell to the floor, groceries strewn around her. Marks and swelling on her hands and arms indicated that she'd tried to defend herself. The state's forensic expert estimated she'd been struck at least nine times. Marlene was beaten so forcefully that a piece of the fireplace tangs had broken off in the attack and was found next to her body. The cause of death was blunt force trauma to the skull. The time going by when Marlene's watch was broken and stopped was 12:42 PM. She was 58 years old.

What steps did you then take with regard to, shall I say, managing the investigation at that time?

Well, first off, as a lead investigator, it's my responsibility to direct and guide the investigation, to evaluate the information that comes in. I'm also responsible for the crucial interviews. So obviously, we wanted to contact the family.

Marlene and I had a very, very tight bond.

This is Roylene, Marlene's sister.

In fact, we made a pledge that we would never leave the state. We would never be long distance from each other, ever.

Can you just tell me a little bit about your sister, who she was as a person, what things that she loved?

Very, very trusting, which was something that I'm very untrusting. The great love for family and nature would be definitely her. I mean, she fed the squirrels, she fed the deer, she fed the birds, she fed everything. Bags of peanuts and bags of bird seed and stuff for the deer. And it's like, oh, my gosh. So, yes, very loving person. No mean bones in her body. I got them all.

Roylene is 15 years younger than Marlene, but she often found herself feeling like she needed to look out for her loving, trusting, generous older sister.

She'd go for long walks, love to walk, love to hike. I stressed about it all the time. I told her always to take protection. She said, There's nothing out there. I said, There's men and wild animals.

She'd go by herself?

Yes, go by herself with a little Yorkshire Terrier. Like, that's going to protect anything. I had to protect her from so many people because if you said, Jeez, I wish I had a dollar, she'd give you 10. I was very, very protective of my sister because she was so kind and thought there was something good in everybody. To me, and I'm the opposite, you have to prove to me that there's something good in you. Otherwise, I don't think that you're good at all. And her, she thinks everybody's good. You have to prove to her that you're not.

Someone did prove that to Marlene, likely someone she knew. But who? That was Detective Buckner's job.

And did you conduct a series of interviews over the next day or so?

Yes, I did. I interviewed Brad, Sophia Johnson, Richard Johnson.

Brad, Sophia's husband, Marlene's son, and Richard, Marlene's husband, now widower.

We asked everybody, What was your day like? What did you do? Who were you talking to? Those things. Do you know of anybody that could have done something like this? Anybody that would have wanted to hurt Marlene. I mean, she was a housewife.

Do you remember any first reactions from those first conversations that you had with Richard and Brad and Sophia?

All of them were very distraught. Brad Johnson was beside himself in the that he had just discovered his mother. Brad had gone in through the back door, I think it was, because he couldn't get in through the garage door and found his mother laying in there bludgeon of death.

Early interviews with family members filled out the events of the day, but they weren't all that illuminating in terms of the why of it all.

Then we were pretty much at square one. Who would have done this? What are we looking at? Is it some a robbery gone bad? Is it a burglary in the house?

Sometimes in an investigation, you have to seek out all of the leads. Sometimes Sometimes, as Buckner told the jury, a lead comes to you.

911 had received an anonymous phone call from a pay phone, and the person refused to give their name or anything.

But they did eventually give a name the detectives could work with. Sean Coraya. Not Shane, Sean, the middle brother of the Coraya children, four years younger than Sophia, six years older than Shane. Sean, this anonymous collar said, he knew something Marlene's murder, or maybe you did something.

How did your investigation proceed based upon what you were told?

Based on what we were told, our investigation focused on Sean Coraya at that time and Sophia Johnson.

Sean and Sophia. Because as Detective Buckner told me, there is no connection between Marlene Johnson and Sean Coraya.

The only connection is Sophia Johnson.

Sean had a story for the detectives that was about to fully connect the dots for them.

Eventually, he said that he didn't actually do it, but he was there when it happened, and that his sister is the one that actually blungeoned Marlene Johnson to death.

More in a minute.

The world's clean energy future relies on ancient elements still in the ground.

Without mining, there will not be a clean energy transition.

But pulling them out of the ground comes at an environmental and human cost.

Mining is intrusive, but the results are the building blocks for products that we use every single day.

I'm Megna Chakrabarty. Join me on Point for elements of energy. Mining for a Green Future. Five special episodes. Listen and follow on point wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Amri. You've heard me mention that this series, Beyond All Repair, was born out of another podcast I make called Endless Thread, and I co-host that show with Ben Brock Johnson. Hi. Ben, tell the good people what the heck Endless Thread is. It's me and you solving internet mysteries. Yeah. Telling untold histories and other wild stories that originate online. Yeah. You can listen to any of the 200 plus episodes of Endless Thread that Amari and I have made wherever you're listening to this podcast. That's Endless Thread from WBUR. January 12th, 2002. Two days after Marlene Johnson, Sophia's mother-in-law, was found bludgeoned to death with fireplace tangs in her own home. Sean Coraya was in custody. But he didn't murder Marlene, he said. His sister did, and he was willing to cooperate with Detective Rick Buckner.

After Sean was arrested, we decided to go ahead and see if he could step a call into his sister, Sophia, and get her to admit something on the telephone. We structured it a little bit.

Structured it a little bit, or as he would tell the jury.

We had scripted what we thought Sophia Johnson would believe, and we wrote out what we wanted Sean to say.

That call, of course, was recorded. Hello? Hey, Sophia. Hi. How are you doing? Doing good. How are you?

I'm doing great. Hey, I need to talk to you. Is it possible for me to talk to you where nobody had?

Yeah.

You want to call her?

No, I can't really come over right now.

It was the day of Marlene's funeral. Sophia and Brad close family over at their house when this call from Sean came in, and he was seemingly falling apart.

Sophia, I'm tripping out.

Okay.

I don't want these people to think that I did I need to admit.

Sean, why would anybody think that you did anything?

These people are asking me questions.

Everybody's being asked questions. They're going to- The recording is a little hard to understand in places, but Sean tells Sophia he doesn't want anyone to think he did anything. He's being asked questions. Sophia tells him everyone's being questioned right now.

What am I supposed to do?

Sean.

Sean? Yeah.

Sean? Yes. Calm down. Calm down. Okay? I've tried to picture what it must have been like being on all sides of this call. Sean with a script and a phone hooked up to some recording device. Sweating, maybe. Years old, definitely in some trouble, surrounded by detectives on the edge of their seats. Detectives who have nothing on Sophia at this point except Sean's word. This call could be their big break. And Sophia, 23 years old, maybe holding her six-month pregnant belly, tucked away in a corner of her house with her husband, father-in-law, and the rest of Marlene's nearest and dearest grieving close by. Listening to her brother say increasingly troubling things.

I don't want to be a part of this, Sophia.

I don't want to be a part of this, Sophia, Sean says. Sean, what? What are you saying? If you are really scaring me. Stop it. Relax. Stop it right now. Okay? But Sean doesn't stop. He dances around whatever exactly was done by whoever for about four minutes until, finally, he says this.

If these people find out that we had anything to do with this.

Excuse me? Okay.

If these people find out we had anything to do with this. What?

If these people find out that we had anything to do with this, we're going to go to jail.

Sean, what are you saying? Okay. Sean?

I'm telling you, I think they know.

Sean, Sean. And then, Sofia asks.

Sofia, I'm jumping in.

Do you need me to get you an attorney?

Do you need me to get you an attorney?

No, I just need some help, man.

But, Sofia, I don't want to go down for something I hate doing, man.

I don't want to go down for something I didn't do, Sean says. Okay, I'm going to be out.

Sophia, what am I supposed to do?

We'll be coming back to this call, just like the attorneys in this case would keep coming back to this call, in part because of what happened next. Sophia placed a call of her own to Detective Rick Buckner.

She said, I just received a strange phone call from my brother. I don't know what's going on. She downplayed the whole thing. Wait a minute.

Do you think he's involved in the death of Marlene Johnson? I really don't think he came to something like that. I don't know what his motive would be.

He never really knew her.

She didn't come right out and say, My brother killed Marlene Johnson.

But she did say she'd head down to the police station to share more of what she'd heard, or at least that's all she thought she'd be doing. Sophia and Brad went down to the Sheriff's office together. They thought they'd be questioned together as they had been the day of the murder. But this time, Detective Buckner told them he and his team wanted to talk to Sophia alone.

I am not in there for very long when this thing takes an awful turn. They said, You know when we're doing these types of investigations, we look into everybody, right? I said, Yes, I do know. And they said, Including you? I said, Yeah. And then they started asking me a series of other questions I would answer and they would say, Well, of course, that's very self-serving. And then when I didn't know the answer, they would say that that's an excellent answer, the perfect answer in a murder investigation as I don't know.

When Sophia says they, she mostly means Rick Buckner, who took the lead in this interview.

Phony, if you will. It sounded phony. The whole thing sounded phony.

I felt like I was being attacked. I felt confused. I was afraid. The interrogation lasted for probably about four hours. Then they said that they were charging me with murder. Rick Buckner looked at me like, I know you did it.

Sophia was fingerprinted and booked into Clark County Jail.

This female officer said, I booked your brother, and he said you did it. And I thought, What? She said, Yeah, he's the one saying you did it. Don't you know this information? He's telling everybody you did it, girl.

Ready for the next witness? Yes. State Call, Sean Correa.

It's now April of 2003. Sophia has been in jail for the last 15 months. She's given birth to a baby boy nearly a year prior and hasn't seen him since. Sean has been in jail, too, but he's just gotten out on a deal. His freedom in exchange for his testimony against his sister, who's on trial for first-degree murder. Come forward, please. A jury of nine women and three men are about to hear what happened the day of Marlene Johnson's murder. Raise your right-hand. From the brother who says he witnessed it.

You swear to tell the truth in today's proceedings? Yes, it is. All right, have a seat.

Sean is on the stand for three and a half hours, so I'll summarize his version of events. You're going to want to listen closely.

Do you recall what time of day you left your residence to go over to Sophia's?

It was about 8:45 or 8:30.

Sean says he had gone to Sophia's house early that morning with his girlfriend, Susie. He was technically married to another woman at the time, and Sophia had agreed to help him file for divorce.

She told me she would help me fill out the paperwork, and she would give me the money to file the papers.

Money that Sophia suddenly realizes she doesn't have on her. She tells Sean that the money is in the pocket of a coat that she left at her in-law's house the day before. Sean says that Susie then drives the three of them over to Marlene's house to go get the coat.

Did you know the way out there?

No.

Who was directing the route to be taken?

Sophia.

Susie testifies to that as well, by the way. No one was home at the Johnson's. Sophia's father-in-law was at work. Marlene was at yoga, then the grocery store. Sophia has a key, but after about 10 minutes in the house, she comes out without the coat. She can't find it. So Sean says that he and Susie start driving Sophia back to her house before he had to go to work at Wendy's and Susie had to babysit. When Sophia says, Wait a minute.

Can you pull over so I can think for a second?

Sophia proposes a new plan, according to Sean. Sean, I'll give you more money later if you call out of work, come back to my in-law's house with me, and help me clean their carpets.

I thought about it for a minute. I didn't miss no work before, and I figured I can get the money, go file for my divorce, and have it all taken care of in a day. So I said, okay.

This is a weird plot point, right? Skipping work to clean carpets at your sister her's in-law's house. It's a fishy story that either Sophia cooked up for Sean or that Sean cooked up for detectives and was now feeding to a jury.

Did you then, in fact, go back to the Johnson residence?

Yes, we did.

Again, no one was home. Pretty soon after they get there, Sean says, Sophia admits, There are no carpets to clean. I made it up. And she starts looking around for something. Her coat with the money in the pocket, Sean assumes. But then...

She said that Marlene had $10,000 stashed in some place in her house.

$10,000. Sean Sean was sitting on the steps between the main level of the house and the upper level, where he said Sophia was looking around for this hidden stash of cash. But her search was cut short by the sound of the garage door opening. Marlene was home.

Sophia was on the upper level, and she hustled by me, and she told me, Wait right here.

Sean says he did as he was while Sophia went somewhere downstairs. About five minutes went by, and then, Sean says, he heard a weird noise.

It was like a low breach, in a sense.

Did you hear any words that you understood?

No, I just got a little curious.

So Sean got up and went downstairs to the ground level of the house where he thought the low breach must have come from. And that, Sean says, is when things really took a turn.

As I got to the bottom of the stairs, I felt something wet dropped on me. I wasn't sure what it was. I wiped my face, and I just wiped in on my shirt. And as I was looking, and as I turned to the left, I seen someone laying on the floor, and there was blood all over the place, and there was someone standing over them. The person had something in their hand, a long object. And as I looked, I've seen the person standing over the body on the floor, strike it one time.Striking.

The body on the floor? Yes.

Sean says he didn't recognize the person standing over Marlene's body at first. But as he ran towards a sliding door to get away, he heard the person yell his name.

When I turned around, I saw the person that was standing over the body coming toward me. Then the person took... It was like a stalking off of their face, and it turned out to be my sister.

This day in court, Sophia told me, was the first time she was hearing Sean tell this story.

I looked at the jury, and I could see that they were listening to what he was saying, but I couldn't move. I couldn't cry. I couldn't scream. I was paralyzed.

And this.

It turned out to be my sister.

This was the first time Shane was hearing his brother's testimony on my laptop in his apartment during that particular visit that left him restless. Are there any initial gut reactions one way or the other?

I mean, really, this person is so unrecognizable that you see their outline committing a brutal crime, and you're like, Who is that? That's odd, right? It doesn't seem to pass the smell test.

We kept watching.

I probably said, What's happening?

From there, Sean says Sophia told him to get into the passenger seat of Marlene's van and keep his head down.

I was really scared. She told me just to Stay quiet and not say anything. I was crying. I didn't know what else to do.

Sophia drove them back to her house, Sean says. She could see blood on his untershirt and pants. So Sophia took the shirt and gave Sean a pair of her husband, Brad's pants, to change into. Then, Sean says she instructed him to drive the van to a particular parking lot where he'd be able to catch a bus home.

She also let me know that my daughter lived not too far from where she was.

Did you take that as an implied threat?

I wasn't sure how to take that. I didn't know what to do. At this point, I just figured I better just listen I wanted to tear his head off, his body.

Just the blatant lies with me in the courtroom with him. He could say such awful things about me. I looked at the jury, and I could see that they were listening to what he was saying. I don't know when it was over, but I knew my life was over. I knew they made him out to be this weak, sweet boy scout, and I was Satan's sister.

Sean, did you kill Marlene Johnson?

No.

Thank you. No further questions at this time.

Anything about the way that he's speaking that jumps out at you?

He sounds coached, which makes sense. You have to prepare for trial, so that's just good work.

Shane told me that hearing brother's version of events, finally, left him more confused.

There are a lot of details. To me, it sounds like something you would see on TV for someone who's coming up with a story.

Sean's audience in the courtroom that day didn't get much insight into who the Coraya siblings were.

The way Sean was presented to a jury, it was as if he had never been in trouble.

Or who they were to each other and how they got that way.

I don't know if I'm just because I'm so close to them that I would be shocked.

But that's where I'm going, and I'm taking you with me to places the jury didn't get to go, to people they never heard from. I have no doubt in my mind that he killed that woman. I have no doubt because he almost did it to me. That's next time.

Beyond All Repair is a production of WBUR, Boston's NPR and ZSP Media.

It's It's written and reported by me, Amarie Sievertsen, and produced by Sophie Codner. Mix, sound design, and original scoring by Paul Vycus, production manager of WBUR podcasts. Theme and credits music by me. Our managing producers are Summerta Joshi for WBR and Liz Stiles of Zsp Media. The show is edited and executive-produced by Ben Brock Johnson of WBR and Zack Stuart-Pontier of Zsp Media. If you have questions about the case, real people at the center of this story or anything else about this series, I want to hear them. Email beyondallrepairpod@gmail. Com. Voice message, written message, you do you. Beyond All Repair at gmail. Com. Do me a favor, will you? Tell someone else you love them, and then tell them about this show in that order. I'll be back with Chapter 3 next week. Thank you for listening. Look at you making it all the way through the credits. Thank you so much. Before you go, I just wanted to remind you about our Beyond membership. For $25 to support the show, you can get access to a private ad-free feed. You're going to get some bonus episodes. Then later in the series, we're going to be releasing some episodes early just to you as our thanks for a contribution of $25 to keep shows like Beyond All Repair going.

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