Owner of car buried at Bay Area mansion had reported it stolen, collected $87,000 insurance payout
It’s the end of an era.
When she passed away in 2016, Julie and Peter Johnson were planning their own funeral. “I had a friend who just died and she had a lot less. And so, I thought it was important to have a little something more,” she told The Chronicle.
She thought of their mother, whose funeral was held in March 2004, an eight-minute drive away from their home in the San Jose suburb of Milpitas.
That’s what Julie Johnson intended to do with her mother’s burial site.
It was on Sept. 21, 2004 that Julie Johnson, her then-husband, Peter and their young son, Caleb, took a drive with their father, Bob Johnson, when he suggested a drive-by to check out the land that stood between them and their mother’s grave.
It’s how Julie Johnson, 43, came to have an extraordinary story of a man who had become her best friend.
After she told her story Tuesday night, police released this composite sketch of the man who allegedly shot her.
On the way to the cemetery, Julie told NBC Bay Area her father pulled over at a Dairy Queen restaurant and asked her if she wanted to have dinner with him.
Julie never forgot his suggestion. He’d called her a month earlier, and she didn’t know what to do. She’d been in a relationship with a man for about two years.
But when she met her father for the first time, he explained why he wanted to meet with her.
“Your mom is still in the ground,” his son told her. “I’d like to get her home so you can visit with her a few more times.”
“I was like, ‘OK,'” she said.
Julie was 22 when her mother died.
Julie was living with Peter and Bob, her father and Bob’s father, in Milpitas
