A Far South Side man already serving 90 years in prison for brutally beating and raping a prostitute was convicted Friday of sexually assaulting and murdering another woman.
“I’m overwhelmed with joy and grief,” Leslie Brown’s stepfather Ricardo Pittman said after alleged serial killer Michael Johnson was found guilty of Brown’s Jan. 11, 2010 strangulation .
Johnson, who strangled Brown despite having three fingers missing from his right hand, still awaits trials for allegedly murdering three other women and leaving another for dead. All the victims had a history of prostitution and were discovered half-naked.
Brown, 28, was found wearing only socks in an abandoned building in the 200 block of West 119th, Assistant Cook County State’s Attorney Alex del Castillo said.
Johnson, now 29, thought he committed the “perfect crime” by killing a prostitute, believing she had probably slept with so many men that detectives would never trace evidence back to him.
But it was only Johnson’s DNA that was inside Brown’s body, del Castillo reminded jurors in his closing arguments.
Johnson faces up to 100 years for Brown’s murder, del Castillo said.
Pittman on Friday said Brown’s mother, who worked as a teletype operator for the Chicago Police Department for three decades, was overcome with grief when her daughter was killed.
She didn’t come to court to hear gruesome details about the murder but Pittman was sure she would be “overjoyed” to hear Johnson was convicted.
One of the two victims who survived Johnson’s brutal assaults testified against Johnson during this week’s trial before Judge Joseph Kazmierski, del Castillo said.
Assistant Public Defender Brendan Max had argued that because the woman was a drug abuser, she probably couldn’t have remembered what her assailant looked like.
The other woman who made it out alive faced Johnson in 2013 when he was sentenced for attacking her.
That woman was choked and beaten so severely, her lungs collapsed.
“I wish that the defendant could feel the pain that he caused me and the other girls. The pain of being raped, the pain of being thrown down the stairs, the pain of being left in that alley,” the woman told Kazmierski.
“To me he is evil. He is the devil. I will never forget what he did to me and to the other girls.”