Sharon Johnson Lawsuit: Carroll’s Confession and DNA Reversal

The Jason Carroll and Sharon Johnson case is a contested 1988 New Hampshire murder conviction in which Carroll, then 19, confessed after more than 13 hours of police questioning to fatally stabbing Johnson, a seven-months-pregnant engineer, as part of an alleged murder-for-hire plot. He recanted almost immediately, has maintained his innocence for more than 35 years in prison, and is now awaiting DNA results from evidence discovered in two long-lost boxes that could make him the first person exonerated of murder in state history.

The 1988 Murder and the Alleged Plot

Sharon Johnson, 36, was found stabbed and strangled in a sand pit at a rural construction site in Bedford, New Hampshire, in the summer of 1988. She was seven months pregnant with her second child.

Prosecutors built their case on a murder-for-hire theory. They claimed Johnson’s husband, Ken Johnson, offered a teenager named Tony Pfaff $10,000 to kill her, and that Pfaff recruited Jason Carroll to help in exchange for a share of the money. According to the state, the two teenagers lured Sharon Johnson from the Mall of New Hampshire under false pretenses, forced her to drive to the construction site, and killed her while her husband watched.

No physical evidence linked either teenager to the crime scene. The case rested on the confessions.

The Interrogation That Produced Carroll’s Confession

Carroll was not a suspect until November 1989, more than a year after the killing. Once arrested, he was questioned for more than 13 hours over four days without a defense attorney present. The lead investigator was New Hampshire State Police Sgt. Roland Lamy.

During one session, Carroll’s own mother, Karen Carroll, took part in the questioning. She was a Bedford police officer at the time. A recording captured her yelling at her crying son: “If you put a knife in that woman, I want to know! You stabbed her, didn’t you?”¹ The New Hampshire Supreme Court later acknowledged that her “frenzied, emotional and insistent questioning” was the primary factor that “precipitated the crucial admissions” from her son, but ruled she had acted in her “private capacity as a mother” rather than as a state agent.²

Carroll eventually told police he had stabbed Sharon Johnson in exchange for $5,000 from Ken Johnson. He recanted almost immediately and pleaded not guilty. Tony Pfaff confessed during his own lengthy interrogation, also recanted, and also pleaded not guilty.

How the Confession Contradicts the Evidence

Carroll’s defenders have long pointed to gaps between what he told police and what the physical evidence showed. Carroll said he used his pocketknife, which had roughly a two-inch blade. The stab wound in Sharon Johnson’s back was about four inches deep.³

He could not identify Ken Johnson in a photo lineup and incorrectly described him as having a beard.⁴ He said he and Pfaff returned Sharon Johnson’s car to the mall parking lot, but investigators found the car had not been there that night. He said he used money from the killing to buy a car stereo, but the truck’s owner told police the stereo had been installed before Carroll ever used the vehicle.⁵

The two teenagers’ confessions also diverged from each other on the weapon used, the motive, and the timing and method of payment.⁴

What Happened at Trial

Tony Pfaff went to trial first. After a 16-day trial in 1991, a jury acquitted him. At least one juror later told the New Hampshire Union Leader the jury doubted Sgt. Lamy’s testimony and believed Pfaff’s confession had been coerced.⁴

With Pfaff acquitted and both teenagers refusing to testify against Ken Johnson, prosecutors dropped all charges against the husband in October 1991, citing insufficient evidence.⁶

Carroll went to trial twice in 1992. The first jury convicted him of conspiracy to commit murder but deadlocked on the murder charge itself. A second jury later that year found him guilty of second-degree murder. He was sentenced to 46 years to life.⁴

On appeal, the New Hampshire Supreme Court affirmed the conviction in State v. Carroll, finding the confession voluntary under the totality of the circumstances and ruling that Karen Carroll had not been acting as an agent of the state.⁷

The Boxes of Evidence That Turned Up Decades Later

In 2019, the New England Innocence Project took on Carroll’s case. Staff attorney Cynthia Mousseau leads the legal team, joined by pro bono attorneys from Foley Hoag and experts in juvenile interrogation, adolescent brain development, and forensic psychology.⁵

In October 2022, the defense team located a box of physical evidence in a New Hampshire courthouse basement. It contained documents, blood samples taken from beneath Sharon Johnson’s fingernails, several knives, and a stained long-sleeve shirt. The evidence had been presumed destroyed.⁸ Carroll’s attorneys filed a petition for post-conviction DNA testing in November 2022.⁹

A second box surfaced in mid-December 2023 under even stranger circumstances. Senior Assistant Attorney General Ben Agati and a Department of Justice staffer were walking through the agency’s building at 33 Capitol Street in Concord before its demolition when they spotted an unmarked box on a bare shelf. It sat in an area designated for civil case records, but it contained criminal evidence from the Johnson case.⁶

On December 19, 2023, Judge William Delker ordered the New Hampshire State Police, the Bedford Police Department, and the Attorney General’s Office to document all efforts to locate evidence in the case and account for everything moved out of the Capitol Street building. The court-ordered searches eventually produced hundreds of pages of documents along with video and electronic recordings, all turned over to the defense.⁵

DNA Testing and the State’s Reversal

For roughly 17 months after Carroll’s team filed for DNA testing, the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office opposed it, arguing at one point there was “no scenario where testing these items will exonerate the defendant.”¹⁰

That position changed in April 2024. Assistant Attorney General Charles Bucca filed a motion dropping the state’s opposition, saying the decision followed “a review of the evidentiary items and reports of the expert witnesses.” The office offered no fuller explanation. The state reserved the right to challenge the significance of any results, citing potential contamination from decades of handling and storage.¹⁰

In May 2025, the New Hampshire State Police Forensic Lab reported preliminary results. Human DNA had been identified on several previously untested items, including blood found beneath Sharon Johnson’s fingernails, a pocketknife alleged to be the murder weapon, cigarettes recovered from the victim’s car, and clothing she was wearing when she died.⁹ The lab’s next step is to attempt to develop full profiles from those samples.

The outcome is not yet known. If the profiles point to someone other than Carroll, the case could produce the first murder exoneration in New Hampshire history. If they match Carroll, his conviction is reinforced. The results could also prove inconclusive.⁹

Where the Case Stands Now

Both Ken Johnson and Tony Pfaff have died.¹¹ Jason Carroll, now 56, remains at the New Hampshire State Prison, where he has been held since 1989.⁵ DNA profiling work on the recovered evidence continues. Mousseau has said an exoneration would be New Hampshire’s fifth overall and its first in a murder case.¹²

1
Concord Monitor. Effort to Free N.H. Man Lawyers Say Falsely Confessed to Murder
2
Nashua Telegraph. Lawyer: Convicted Murderer Jason Carroll Didn’t Kill Pregnant Woman in 1988
3
NHPR. Lawyers Work to Free NH Man Jason Carroll They Say Was Coerced by Police to Falsely Confess to Murder
4
NH Business Review. Lawyers Work to Free Man They Say Falsely Confessed to 1988 Murder
5
New England Innocence Project. Jason Carroll Case Spotlight
6
Nashua Telegraph. Evidence in 1988 Sharon Johnson Murder Just Found as Convicted Killer Seeks Exoneration
7
vLex. State v. Carroll, 138 N.H. 687
8
InDepthNH. New DNA Results Coming in 1988 Sharon Johnson Murder Case
9
NHPR. Testing Reveals DNA Evidence in Alleged Wrongful Conviction in New Hampshire Murder Case
10
NHPR. In Reversal, NH Drops Opposition to DNA Testing in Jason Carroll Case
11
InDepthNH. Evidence in Sharon Johnson’s 1988 Murder Just Discovered as Convicted Killer Seeks Exoneration
12
Concord Monitor. Exonerees Urge N.H. to Open Its Tight Window for New Criminal Trials