When Rayshawn Johnson awoke early on Nov. 12, his house was quiet. His grandmother, with whom he was living, had already left for the day. His 9-day-old son, girlfriend and brother were still sleeping. Quickly realizing he was -- in essence -- alone, Mr. Johnson slipped into a pair of black nylon pants, pulled on his jacket, laced up his Air Jordans and headed out the door.
Within minutes, he was standing in the back yard of Shanon Marks' rehabbed Victorian home in East Walnut Hills.
A systems analyst at Procter & Gamble, Mrs. Marks, 29, was in the bathroom, getting ready for work.
But Mr. Johnson already knew that.
The 19-year-old, who was temporarily living in his grandmother's attic, could see into Mrs. Marks' house from his. He knew her husband was gone, and he knew she was alone.
In rambling statements to police in the days after Mrs. Marks was bludgeoned, Mr. Johnson admits to killing her. He describes much of the crime -- and the events leading up to it -- in painful detail, but he never articulates why he beat the petite woman repeatedly in the head and neck.
"I don't even know what kind of, what made me even do it," Mr. Johnson says on one of the three tape-recorded statements that will be played this week during his capital murder trial in Hamilton County Common Pleas Court. Jury selection is scheduled to begin today.
"It just happened. Just happened. It was less than five minutes."
On his way out of his grandmother's house, Mr. Johnson passed through the basement. While there, he grabbed a baseball bat, which he stuffed under his coat.
From there, he crept into the detached garage, making sure to close the door behind him so his pet dog, Sweets, would not get out. He then made his way to the rear of the building, where he climbed through a window and dropped over a fence into Mrs. Marks' back yard. It was only a few steps from the garage to the back door of the house where he had, years earlier, done construction work for a friend. With a gloved hand, he reached for the knob.
"I just opened it an' it was open," Mr. Johnson tells police on Nov. 15, in the first of his statements. "If it wasn't opened, I was gonna do it to somebody else, I guess."
Once inside, Mr. Johnson walked through the kitchen and straight to the back staircase, which leads almost directly to the upstairs bathroom.
In the bathroom, Mrs. Marks -- clad in a white robe -- was looking out the window. Mr. Johnson said she apparently had no idea he was there. At some point, though, authorities say she likely tried to shield herself from the beating, because there were defensive wounds on her arms.
Mr. Johnson said the first blow from his bat landed in the curve between her shoulder and neck. He hit her again, on the back of the head, and she fell to the ground. He told police he struck her once more as she lay on her bathroom floor.
"I hit her three times. She fell," Mr. Johnson says. "She was still alive at that point, 'cause . . . she was saying, "Help, Help.' "
With Mrs. Marks lying on the floor, drawing her last breaths, Mr. Johnson stepped around her and walked down the hall.
In the nearby bedroom, he found her purse on the floor by the bed. He picked it up and emptied the contents "to make it look like a robbery." He then left, retracing his steps out of the house and through the garage.
But before he walked out, he heard Mrs. Marks crying out again. "Did you bend down, try to help Mrs. Marks at all at any point?" Officer Bill Couch, of the Cincinnati police homicide division, asks during a taped interview.
"I wanted to. Bad," Mr. Johnson says. "But I knew what I'd done. Couldn't, I didn't mean it. I didn't mean it."
Instead of stopping, he left her lying in a pool of blood, begging for help. Norman, her husband of almost three years, found her lifeless body 12 hours later, when he returned from work.
Neither he nor other relatives wanted to talk for this story. Mr. Johnson has told police that he was high on marijuana when he broke into the Marks' house. And though he has said he broke in to get money -- he needed it for housing and to support his new baby -- he took little, if anything, from their home.
Despite his statements to police, Mr. Johnson has pleaded not guilty to charges of aggravated murder and aggravated burglary. His attorney says he is hoping for an acquittal, though he would not say whether they will present any evidence on Mr. Johnson's behalf. A conviction could result in the death penalty.
Defense lawyer Peter Pandilidis also would not discuss how he planned to surmount Mr. Johnson's taped statements, saying, "We'll have to cross-examine the interrogators."
One detail the defense says may be helpful is Mr. Johnson's third statement, given Nov. 16. In it, he says he was joined in the crime by a man named Dante. Authorities do not believe Dante exists, but the defense is more hopeful.
"We're pursuing all avenues," Mr. Pandilidis said.
Attorneys still have not decided whether Mr. Johnson, who has been in and out of juvenile detention since he was 13, will testify. Whatever the decision, jurors will hear the high school dropout describe how he felt after he left Mrs. Marks' house.
"I'm a murderer, and I regret it for the rest of my life. Regretted it ever since then that day," he says on one of the tapes. "I don't know what made me do it. So much stress, man. Still on my mind."
Nicole Sroufe doesn't know Shanon Marks.
But she has some idea what the graduate of Bowling Green State University went through in the last minutes of her life.
Just two months before Mrs. Marks was bludgeoned, Ms. Sroufe was accosted outside her Springdale apartment. She says her attacker was the same man who has admitted to killing Mrs. Marks.
Because of the similar nature of the crimes -- Mr. Johnson allegedly watched both women for days before attacking -- Judge Robert Ruehlman ruled that the cases could be tried together.
Ms. Sroufe will tell jurors how she was grabbed from behind on the morning of Sept. 8 as she walked to her car.
"He started dragging me back towards where he had come from," Ms. Sroufe testified last month, during a pretrial hearing. "He told me that he needed money, he wanted to get out of town."
Instead of giving in, though, Ms. Sroufe fought back.
"I struggled away from him, and I turned to face him," she said. "And I just started pointing at him, saying, "I'm not going anywhere with you.' "
She said her attacker apologized and quietly walked away, telling her to have a nice day. Mr. Johnson was arrested that evening and charged with robbery and kidnapping. He got out of jail the next day, when his grandmother posted bond.
The only difference between Ms. Sroufe's case and that of Mrs. Marks, Hamilton County Prosecutor Joseph Deters said, "is that one victim got away."
