The Slayings of Janine Johnson & Stephen Taylor in Ferris, Texas

Gone Cold - Texas True Crime

Vincent Strange

True Crime, Society & Culture, News

4.6 • 1.8K Ratings

🗓️ 3 May 2021

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

29-year-old Janine Johnson and 39-year-old Stephen Taylor had a good thing going. Their romance had blossomed into a full-blown commitment and Stephen had developed an extremely close friendship and bond with Janine’s 11-year-old son. They lived a quiet and relatively unassuming life in the city of Ferris, Texas – a place that was also quiet, unassuming, and safe. But in March of 2009, Stephen and Janine were slain in one of the most brutal and methodical crimes Ferris had ever seen. The murder scene, in fact, suggested that whoever killed the couple had done it before. The police were stumped and left to wonder if Janine and Stephen were murdered as the result of a case of mistaken identity.

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FerrisTexas.gov, The Story of Ferris Texas by Judge Grace C. McKnight, The Waxahachie Daily Light, and the Dallas Morning news were used as sources for this episode.

#JusticeForStephenAndJanine #Ferris #FerrisTX #Dallas #Texas #TX #TexasTrueCrime #TrueCrime #TrueCrimePodcast #Podcast #ColdCase #Unsolved #Murder #UnsolvedMurder #DoubleMurder #UnsolvedMystery #UnsolvedMysteries

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Transcript

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0:00.0	The Goncol podcast may contain violent or graphic subject matter, listener discretion is advised.
0:07.9	Ferris, Texas is located just southeast of the city of Dallas.
0:12.8	A tiny sliver of Ferris' north end, in fact, is in Dallas County, the rest in Ellis County.
0:21.0	The small town's humble beginnings go back to the early 1850s when the area nestled between
0:27.5	10-mile creek and Bear Creek was settled by two families who came from Rutherford County, Tennessee.
0:35.2	Settling the bleak and untamed prairie was no easy task, and the families lost several young
0:41.2	children to the harsh conditions there in the first several years.
0:46.2	It was the arrival of the railroad in the early 1870s that more or less saved the day for the community.
0:54.1	Just a few years before that, a large group from Mississippi, about 13 families, arrived in the area,
1:01.4	and it had grown enough by then to bring Jackson J. Strawda town to build and operate a general merchandise store.
1:09.6	In 1874, Waxahatchee Judge Justice Wesley Ferris handled the necessary formalities of a transaction to build a railroad depot,
1:20.2	which consisted of the Tennessee transplants deeding around 100 acres to the Houston and Texas Central Railroad Company.
1:28.8	Either as payment for his work or out of tribute, it isn't clear, the area was named after the judge and called Ferris from that point on.
1:39.3	Now, the railroad there had already been completed months before the transaction was complete.
1:45.7	It ran right through Ferris to Dallas from Corsicana.
1:49.8	The owner of the general store there had already been declared postmaster and a mercantile store, a hotel, the Citizen's National Bank,
1:58.6	and of course a church, Presbyterian, were all long established by then.
2:04.8	It was the couple years that followed, however, that brought what the town needed to really grow, a furniture company,
2:11.8	an artesian well, a cotton gin, and the true sign that something worthwhile was brewing there, a newspaper,
2:19.6	the Ferris Cyclone.
2:21.5	Interestingly, and less than a decade, that newspaper would be sold twice and renamed the Ferris Sentinel First and then the Ferris Wheel.
2:32.0	On July 15, 1901, the Ferris Town Council voted to abolish its former incorporation as the town of Ferris.
	...

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