A Woman’s Tearful Confession--After 27 Years

NEWARK, N.J. —  It was an October afternoon when Susan Marie Watson walked into a Newark police interview room. She was there to discuss her mother’s murder 27 years earlier, and Det. Rashid Sabur knew exactly what she would say.

“I said, ‘She’s gonna lie, she’s gonna lie,’ ” recalled Sabur, one of two detectives comprising Newark’s recently formed cold-case squad. “ ‘But then she’s gonna tell the truth.’ ”

Two hours later, tears streaming down her face, she told the detectives that in 1971, when she was 14, she had killed her mother. Her stunned husband asked why she had confessed this horrible secret to a pair of total strangers.

“I trusted them,” replied the 41-year-old mother of three.

Watson’s arrest is an example of cold-case success, a combination of archeology and old evidence, of instinct and amateur psychology. It began--as many such cases do--with a phone call from a family member.

Her brothers, George and David Johnson, had read about the cold-case squad’s formation last fall. They wanted Sabur and partner Keith Sheppard to reinvestigate their mother’s murder.

The facts were fairly basic.

Maylon Johnson, while lying in bed, was shot to death in the early morning hours of Oct. 3, 1971. Her nightclothes bore a single bullet hole. The lone witness, her daughter Susan Marie, called police and implicated the dead woman’s boyfriend.

He instantly became the main suspect, but the trail just as quickly grew cold. The murder of Maylon Johnson became another unsolved homicide, ignored for years--until the cold-case squad phone rang this fall.

The Johnson brothers offered new information: They believed their mother was possibly dating a second man, someone apart from the suspect named by their sister.

Sabur and Sheppard reopened the case. They mounted a dig in the police property room, rooting through dirty boxes and decades of accumulated dust. They located the file and studied old evidence for something the original investigators might have missed.

The pair next hit the streets, re-interviewing everybody connected with the case. They tracked down Susan Marie Watson in Schenectady, N.Y., where she was married with three girls of her own and working as a keyboard operator.

She had a new life. But her old life was soon to intrude.

As he read Watson’s 1971 interview, Sabur sensed something wrong: “She was doing a lot of dancing around.” One specific thing bothered him: There was a two-hour gap between the time of death and the arrival of police.

“My thing is, being the suspicious person that I am, that this girl waited two hours to get her story together because she killed her mom,” said the veteran homicide detective. “She panicked. She sat there and said, ‘What lie can I tell so they won’t focus in on me?’ ”

His instinct, combined with some new details from her brothers, convinced Sabur that there was no mysterious boyfriend: Maylon Johnson was killed by her daughter.

When he first saw Watson, Sabur recalled, her body language sent the same message. But their conversation on Oct. 23, 1998, didn’t focus on her guilt.

The detectives instead chatted with Watson more than two hours, becoming the distressed woman’s “best friends,” Sabur recalled. Slowly, she opened up.

She told the detectives that she was sexually abused by the mother’s boyfriend. She said her mother had done nothing to stop it. And then, weeping before the two detectives, she confessed.

“Throughout my years as a police officer, I never felt what I felt in that room,” Sheppard said later. “The feelings were overwhelming when she confessed.”

Watson’s brothers have declined comment.

The case resulted in an unusual legal situation: Watson was charged as a juvenile, since she was 14 when the crime occurred.

Sentencing guidelines for juveniles have since changed. In 1971, she could have been held only until age 21. Now she could face 20 years. The case has yet to go to trial; a plea bargain is possible.

Either way, Sabur has little sympathy.

“The Ten Commandments say, ‘Thou shall not kill,’ ” the detective said. “You understand what I’m saying? So now it’s up to us to go and get these individuals responsible for these deaths and bring them to justice--not only in the eyes of society, but in the eyes of God.”