After more than 30 years, an arrest has been made in the 1994 murder of Megan Johns, 29, who was discovered stabbed to death in her Irving, Texas home.
Darryl Patrick Goggans, 61, Johns’ next-door neighbor at the time of her death, was arrested on Tuesday and charged with capital murder.
Irving police say DNA led to the arrest after all these years.
Megan Johns’ case has been cold since the morning of October 5, 1994, when she failed to arrive for work. Concerned coworkers contacted the manager of Apple Apartments, who discovered her body in her home.
Johns was found face down in the living room, having been stabbed several times, according to police. There were no signs of forced entry, so investigators believe she knew her killer.
At the time, investigators examined the crime scene and gathered physical evidence, including a palm print. Despite interviewing several people and comparing prints, no matches were discovered, and the case went cold.
“Megan had struggled with addiction in the past, but she had turned her life around and was now helping others get sober,” Detective Eric Curtis said in a 2023 department video.
“In doing so, she was around people with troubled pasts, and that made her vulnerable.”
“Megan had problems with drugs and alcohol. She had gotten sober and was now helping others do the same. She was exposed to people who had a history of drug and alcohol use. So she did associate with people who may have sought to victimize her,” Detective Eric Curtis stated in 2023.
The case went cold, but police did not give up.
A breakthrough in the case occurred during a recent evidence review, when DNA testing was performed on a preserved sample. “Sometimes when you use those samples, depending on the size of the sample, you use it all up,” Curtis explained in the video. “And if you used it all up, testing it with a method that wasn’t going to yield the results we were looking for, and we didn’t want to do it at that time.”
The resulting profile was entered into the national Combined DNA Index System (CODIS), which yielded a match to Goggans.
Goggans was interviewed early in the investigation, along with “hundreds of others,” but he was never identified as a suspect, police said.
Retired Sgt. Tom Rowan, who worked the case from its inception until his retirement in 2016, said the lack of DNA technology at the time made it difficult to identify a suitable suspect.
“We didn’t have the tools then that we do now,” Rowan told me. “But we preserved the evidence, and we never gave up.”
Police did not provide additional information about the DNA match or the investigation that led to Goggans’ arrest.
“Thanks to the collective effort from family, friends, media, and law enforcement, Megan Johns’ case was never forgotten, and justice will finally be served,” officials said.
Goggans is still in custody at the Irving City Jail. No bond has been established.
