After more than 30 years, an arrest has been made in the 1994 murder of 29-year-old Megan Johns who was found stabbed to death in her Irving, Texas home.
Darryl Patrick Goggans, 61, who was Johns’ next-door neighbor at the time of her killing, was taken into custody on Tuesday and charged with capital murder.
Irving police say it was DNA that finally led to an arrest after all these years.
The case has been cold since the morning of October 5, 1994 when Megan Johns failed to show up for work. Concerned co-workers got in touch with the manager of Apple Apartments, who discovered her body inside her home.
Johns was found face down in the living room and had been stabbed multiple times, police said. There were no signs of forced entry, leading investigators to believe she may have known her killer.
At the time, investigators processed the crime scene and collected physical evidence, including a palm print. But despite interviewing several people and comparing prints, no matches were found, and the case went cold.
“Megan had struggled with addiction in the past but had turned her life around and was helping others get sober,” said Detective Eric Curtis in a 2023 departmental video.
“In doing so, she was around people with troubled pasts, and that made her vulnerable.”
“Megan had issues with drugs and alcohol. She had gotten sober, and she was now helping people to become sober as well. In doing that, she was around people who had drug and alcohol histories. So she did hang around people that may have looked to victimize her,” Detective Eric Curtis said in 2023.
The case went cold, but police never gave up.
A break in the case came during a recent evidence review, when DNA testing was conducted 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 2023 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), leading to a match with Goggans.
Goggans had been interviewed early in the investigation along with “hundreds of others,” but he never emerged 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 viable suspect.
“We didn’t have the tools then that we do now,” Rowan said. “But we preserved the evidence, and we never gave up.”
Police did not release further details 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,” police said.
Goggans remains in custody at the Irving City Jail. No bond has been set.
