Local man guilty of rape

PALMER — A jury last week convicted Lenard Johnson of all but two of the 17 counts of sexual abuse of a minor he faced for repeatedly raping two generations of women.

Johnson’s trial lasted a little over a week, with a verdict coming back Sept. 20. The two counts he was found not guilty of related to sex with his step-daughter. Other charges relating to his relationship with his daughter yielded guilty verdicts, as did charges relating to sex with his granddaughter.

Johnson was initially charged in January of 2011 after his granddaughter was caught inappropriately playing with other children. When day care staff talked to her about it, she said she and her grandpa had been having sex.

Alaska State Troopers opened an investigation. As part of that they asked the girl’s mother if Johnson had ever done anything like this before.

Waiting to hear what her daughter had to say, she told troopers he hadn’t. Once her daughter laid it all out for troopers, though, the mother told troopers that Johnson had raped her for years starting the summer before she started high school.

Sex between the two was a regular occurrence, sometimes happening as often as twice a week.

Sears said that eventually Johnson moved on to the woman’s younger sister, the more rebellious of the two, who didn’t stand for the abuse long before she blurted out an accusation to the girls’ mother.

But when troopers tried to investigate it then, the older sister denied anything had happened. She didn’t want to tear the family apart.

The younger sister was shipped out of state and the older sister, feeling confident enough now to refuse Johnson’s advances, stopped the abuse.

“He would beg her like a kid begs for candy,” Sears said in her opening statements at the start of trial.

The woman spent time in the military but came back to Alaska with children of her own. She worried at first about leaving her daughter with grandpa but he showed no signs of returning to his old ways. Plus, the girl was only 6 or 7, much younger than she was when Johnson abused her. So she’d leave her kids with the grandparents while she did her duties in the National Guard.

When the allegations surfaced, she worked with troopers to gather evidence against Johnson, wearing a hidden microphone while she spoke with him.

Johnson returns to court Jan. 2 when he will receive his sentence.

Editor’s note: There are two men in the Big Lake area with similar names. The man involved in this case is not Harold L. Johnson, who also is known as H. Leonard Johnson.

Contact reporter Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.