Trial opens for man accused in beating, body-dumping

Eric "Nathaniel" Johnson wanted his live-in girlfriend out of his life to make room for a new lady, so he tortured her and dumped her lifeless body in a trash-strewn lot in Port Richmond, Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Selber said yesterday during the opening day of Johnson's trial.

Jean Jackson, 40, was killed in March 2007 after a turbulent relationship with Johnson that included her working as a prostitute as he accompanied her in Kensington, Selber said.

She had been arrested twice for prostitution in the two months before she died.

"The evidence is going to be that she was brutalized over a period of weeks and eventually died sometime around March 28, and was disposed of in quite a methodical fashion," Selber said.

Johnson, 40, is charged with murder, abuse of a corpse and possession of an instrument of crime. His attorney, William Bowe, said that Johnson is innocent.

The couple met in Massachusetts in 2005 and moved to Philadelphia the following year, settling into a run-down apartment on Clearfield Street near Emerald, two-and-a-half blocks from where schoolchildren spotted Jackson's battered remains on March 31, 2007.

Jackson, originally from Haverhill, Mass., had been beaten to death, and her head had been covered with a plastic bag and pillow case, both fastened around her neck by a scarf and twine, police said.

Her hands were wet with some type of solution and placed in latex gloves, which made it difficult to retrieve fingerprints, testified Officer Gary Guaraldo, of the police crime-scene unit.

She had been beaten to the point that, initially, it was not clear if she was male or female, Guaraldo said.

It was Johnson's way of preventing police from tracing Jackson's remains back to their apartment, Selber said. But after obtaining her fingerprints, the day after the body was found, homicide detectives knocked on Johnson's door.

Another woman, Arlene Nicholas, of Massachusetts, was sitting on Johnson's bed, testified homicide Detective Henry Glenn.

"I asked [Johnson] where [Jackson] was, and he said, 'She ran away,' " Glenn recounted.

Recovered from the apartment, Glenn said, were numerous pieces of Jackson's identification, cutting weapons - some of which had red stains on them - and a calendar, on which Johnson had written, on March 28: "Jean Left 4 Good."