John Jefferson
Inset: Matthew Johnson in a missing person photo (Cottonwood Heights Police Department). Background: Jennifer Gledhill under arrest (KSL).
Prosecutors in Utah on Tuesday formally charged a 41-year-old wife and mother with murdering her National Guardsman husband as he slept and then getting rid of his body, which has not yet been found.
Jennifer Gledhill is facing a total of nine charges: one count of first-degree felony murder, five counts of second-degree felony obstruction of justice, one count of second-degree felony possession with intent to distribute, one count of third-degree felony desecration of a human body, and one count of third-degree felony witness tampering, the Salt Lake County District Attorney’s Office said in a press release.
She’s accused of killing her husband, 51-year-old Matthew Johnson, a member of the National Guard, in September. Gledhill reported him missing to the Cottonwood Heights Police Department on Sept. 28, but cops believe she killed him days earlier and buried him in a shallow grave.
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Prosecutors revealed that they relied on a key witness previously described as a confidential informant: the man with whom Gledhill was having an extramarital affair.
He apparently told cops that Gledhill, who has three young children with Johnson, came over to his house on Sept. 22. He relayed that she described to him how her husband had come home on Sept. 20 and “yelled at her because he knew she had been sleeping with someone else,” prosecutors claim. She allegedly told her lover that the next day, on Sept. 21, she shot Johnson as he slept in their bed.
“She told the informant that she put Mr. Johnson’s body into a rooftop storage container, slid him down the stairs of their home, and loaded his body into the back of their minivan,” prosecutors wrote.
Gledhill allegedly “smashed” Johnson’s phone and ditched his truck in a nearby neighborhood. She then drove his body “north” and buried him in a shallow grave, according to prosecutors. The informant noticed bruises on Gledhill’s body; she allegedly told him she got them while burying her husband’s body and cleaning the house.
Cops have some corroborating evidence to back the lover’s claims. GPS data from Gledhill’s phone places her in the location where she allegedly left Johnson’s truck the morning after the murder. Later that afternoon, data reportedly shows she was in Davis County — which is north of Salt Lake City — until she turned her phone off shortly after 2:30 p.m. When she turned the phone back on around 5 p.m., it showed she was driving along a Davis County highway, prosecutors said.
Surveillance video at a car wash allegedly shows her “thoroughly” cleaning her vehicle around 11 p.m. before driving to her lover’s house shortly before midnight.
Neighbors also told cops they saw Gledhill’s parents cleaning in her house for several hours on Sept. 24. When confronted with this fact, her parents claimed they were only there for a short period of time, prosecutors said. Detectives asked her father if he went into the master bedroom and he allegedly responded “I did not go in where the incident happened.”
Perhaps most eye-popping of all, Gledhill allegedly bought a new mattress to replace the one where Johnson was shot to death, but that apparently didn’t stop investigators from finding a “large blood-stained spot in the master bedroom carpet underneath the bed” and blood on “the bed frame slats[.]”
Gledhill’s parents claimed they bought her a new mattress on Amazon at their daughter’s request.
Investigators also searched her parents home. In a bedroom where Gledhill would sleep, they allegedly found a green and tan Glock 19x box wrapped in a baby’s onesie in a tote bag. The gun wasn’t there but prosecutors believe the box contained the murder weapon.
Cops arrested Gledhill on Oct. 2. She’s been in jail ever since.
“Our hearts go out to the loved ones of Mr. Matthew Johnson, not only a father and son but a member of the Utah National Guard. Our office will continue to work closely with investigators as we seek justice for Mr. Johnson,” Salt Lake County District Attorney Sim Gill said in a statement.
As Law&Crime previously reported, Gledhill filed for divorce in July. A court commissioner said that perhaps the “highly dysfunctional marriage” should have ended long ago.
Local NBC affiliate KSL reported that though Gledhill claimed Johnson was abusive, a court ruling said on Sept. 16 that text message evidence indicated she was “equally confrontational,” was possibly “attempting to goad him into a violent response,” and that she was “berating, belittling, and demeaning.”
CBS affiliate KUTV obtained a probable cause arrest affidavit that included some of the text messages between Gledhill and her secret lover. Apparently she was none too pleased when the man declined to offer his support after her stunning admission, the affidavit said.
“In these messages, Gledhill tells Informant that she assumed he would be like her and if her friend told her a hypothetical story, she would say, ‘let me get my shovel!”” the affidavit reportedly said. “Gledhill told Informant that if she was told the story she told him, she would take it to the grave.”
Matt Naham contributed to this report.
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