May Investigation Continues.

MAY, JOHNSON, DEBRUIN, KIES

Posted By: Anne Hermann (email)
Date: 12/17/2008 at 23:00:18

Bellevue Herald-Leader
October 25, 2001

Closed door session here on Greg May case
Investigators meet here in advance of theft suspect’s Dec. 10 trial
By Lowell Carlson

Ten months after Greg May seemed to vanish from the face of the earth law enforcement officials continue the work of piecing together the case, and the evidence, connected with at least one aspect of his disappearance.

In a closed door session that included papering over the windows and door of the Council Chamber at City Hall, officials pursued the case away from prying eyes.

Ahead is a pre-trial court appearance for Julie Ann Johnson set for Friday, Nov. 9, at 10 a.m. in Maquoketa. She had been scheduled to go to trial on the charge in August, but that date was set back to December instead.

Johnson, 41, is charged with first degree theft in connection with the attempted sale of $70,000 in rare guns and Civil War collectibles through an auction house.

Those items have been identified as belonging to the missing Greg May after they turned up at a Rock Island auction house earlier this year.

Following her arrest along with that of Douglas DeBruin in Flagstaff, Arizona in April, Johnson was returned to Jackson County on a fugitive warrant.

She has been an inmate of the Clinton County Jail’s women’s facility since as the Minnesota native awaits trial on the theft charge. So far, that is all that Jackson County Attorney John Kies appears able to charge the woman with although she is suspected in the disappearance of May.

May shared a rented residence with Johnson and the man Bellevue residents knew as “Cody” Johnson, but Wisconsin Community Corrections knew as Douglas DeBruin.

May and DeBruin had arrived in Bellevue last year and it was only later that Julie Ann (Kern) Johnson joined them. When DeBruin, a hulking large man covered with tattoos, was a resident of Bellevue last year he was already a wanted man for leaving his St. Croix County, Wisconsin jurisdiction.

DeBruin will not be the one going on trial in December, but his background in connection with the theft and May’s disappearance remains of intense interest to Bellevue and Iowa law enforcement. May had befriended the ex-con and had been one of the few, if not only visitors DeBruin had received while doing time. He had been placed on seven years probation on his release from prison.

His criminal background included six felony counts in addition to illegal firearms possession. Included was robbery, battery, resisting a conservation officer, abuse of a child, possession of drug paraphernalia. He ended up being convicted on federal firearms charges in connection with an illegal length shotgun, a silencer and an electronic weapon (stun gun).

With DeBruin in prison, again, for parole violation, local authorities have focused their immediate efforts on making the case against Johnson and her role in the first degree theft of rare and expensive firearms and Civil War collectibles recovered in an old yellow former rental truck in Arizona.

When Arizona officials arrested the pair, May had already been missing four months. May’s bank account with thousands in it had remained inactive through the entire time.

The case seemed to break in April, when a face-to-face interview with Johnson in Arizona by Bellevue’s Police Chief Lynn Schwager indicated she wanted to cooperate, and that she might know what had happened to the new Bellevue resident.

City and county law enforcement, along with specially trained search dogs, combed the Iowa side of the Mississippi, from Bellevue to Sabula, just as near record flooding was turning the hunt into a race with the clock.

They found nothing after several long and grueling days walking the banks and backwaters as well as drifting downriver by boat looking for clues.

Within days of beginning the river search flooding pushed a wall of water, as much as 10 feet above normal river levels, through the area officers and volunteers had searched.

Through the summer Johnson sat it out in the Clinton County facility as investigators and the County attorney’s office sought to assemble evidence, and hopefully gain a cooperative Johnson. It apparently has not happened.

At her initial court appearance in May, Johnson had told the court she wanted to “have this matter cleared up” because she had three children.

By July her attorney J. Dean Keegan, Cedar Rapids, succeeded in having her $50,000 bond reduced to $13,000, but she was still unable to meet the court’s other requirements, especially living in Iowa, to gain release from jail and she returned to Clinton County.

Investigators for the most part have remained extremely tight lipped about aspects of this case, but in a conversation earlier this fall County Attorney John Kies said he believes that some trace of Greg May will surface, and that he doesn’t believe May’s body was placed near the river, if he indeed was murdered.

Kies would not elaborate on the observation, or why he believes it, but during the summer investigators have repeatedly gone back over the trail of evidence.

May’s older model Chevrolet Blazer, found abandoned in Aurora, Ill., in April was re-examined.

The yellow rental truck was recently re-examined by investigators, all part of an effort to strengthen their case against Johnson, and possibly DeBruin.

What they were looking for and what they found remains unknown.

It is a case that has constantly stayed close to the two main interests of Greg May. The role of rare and expensive historical artifacts and his connections within the tattooing profession.

The wealthy businessman had managed to bridge what outsiders might assume were mutually exclusive domains, the world of tattoo art and the art of finding authentic and expensive, collectibles.

Friends say May was able to rub shoulders with some of the subculture’s roughest types, yet move among the wealthy and well connected.

When Julie Ann Johnson goes on trial in December observers will be watching the extent of her knowledge about May and any link to his January disappearance.