In August of 1993, a woman vacationing on the Outer Banks made the fateful decision to spend an extra night at the beach. The next morning, her body was discovered in the sand within few hundred feet of her hotel room. She’d been sexually assaulted and stabbed to death. This type of murder was almost unheard of in the small coastal town of Nags Head, and when a hurricane made landfall on the island just a few days later, police feared they would never be able to solve the case. We’ll also discuss the still unsolved murder of a young woman who was murdered in Kill Devil Hills in 1997—her family is still hoping for justice.
In late August of 1993, 35-year-old Janet Siclari was visiting the Outer Banks with her brother Robert and a few other friends. She’d grown up visiting the area on her family vacations, so it was a favorite destination that she shared with her brother. They’d initially rented a cottage in Southern Shores for a week and planned to return home to New Jersey on Friday, August 27. At the spur of the moment Janet and Robert rented two rooms at the Carolinian Hotel located in Nags Head so they could spend one more night at the beach. I mentioned this hotel in Episodes 145 and 146, The Unsolved Murder of Brenda Holland in the OBX.
The oceanfront hotel first opened in 1947 and attracted visitors from across the country and along the Eastern Seaboard. In the evenings, guests lounged in the cozy Anchor Club and shared their tales of hunting and fishing. In the late 1980s, it opened a nightclub that attracted guests who loved live music and comedy. Visitors enjoyed the proximity to Jockey’s Ridge State Park, Wright Brothers National Memorial, and the Lost Colony Outdoor Drama. The Carolinian was demolished in 2001 to make room for beachfront luxury residences.
An Extra Night of Vacation
But on the night of August 27, Janet and her group checked into the Carolinian. She shared a room with Robert. Her friends Celeste Bethmann and Nancy Matt stayed together in an adjacent room. Janet, an attractive brunette, was born in Lyndhurst, New Jersey and was the only daughter in a family of four children. She earned a certificate in radiology in 1979 and moved to North Arlington, New Jersey to work at a hospital there as an ultrasound technician.
Janet, along with friends and her brother, spent a relaxing day on the beach.
They ate dinner together at a nearby restaurant, after which they checked out a local comedy club. By then, Robert was tired and decided to head back to the hotel. Janet, Celeste, and Nancy went to the Port O’ Call Restaurant & Gaslight Saloon for drinks and dancing. While she was at the bar, Janet ran into a local bartender, Edward Read Powell, who she’d been chatting with throughout the week of her vacation.
Powell had been arguing with his girlfriend, a woman named Fran, that night and needed a ride home from the bar. Janet offered to drop him off at his house on her way back to the hotel, which she did. She entered the room she was sharing with her brother around 2:30 a.m., and when he woke up, she lit a cigarette and told him she was going outside to smoke it. She never made it back to the room.
A Shocking Discovery on the Beach
When Robert woke up the next day, he noticed police gathered on the beach outside the room’s window. A member of a cleaning crew had discovered Janet’s bloodied and motionless body in the sand. She was lying in a fetal position, wearing a blue tank top and was clutching her shorts to a wound on her neck. Her underwear were stuffed inside the pocket of the shorts. It appeared she had tried to make her way back to the hotel before collapsing from her fatal injuries.
While police didn’t immediately release Janet’s cause of death, an autopsy later revealed Janet had small stab wounds on the side of her neck, a deep cut around her throat, lacerations on the side of her face and jaw, and defensive cuts on her hands. A few feet from her body, police found a pair of grey socks and a pair of men’s Spaulding high-stop sneakers, size 9. The medical examiner found semen in her body, leading investigators to believe the petite 92-pound Janet had been raped before her murder.
Unfortunately, just a few days after Janet was discovered murdered, a Category 3 Hurricane named Emily struck the Outer Banks and up to 10 feet of storm surge ran ashore on the Pamlico Sound side of Hatteras Island. This directly impacted the investigation into Janet’s death. An AP wire article published on September 1, 1993, quoted Manteo resident Betty Stratton saying she’d never seen Dare County prepare for a storm so quickly.
“I’ve never seen it shut down like this,” she said. A lot of people here went to work at relief shelters for Hurricane Andrew and saw the devastation and were impressed by it.”
Officials ordered a mandatory evacuation of the county by early Monday, August 30. By Tuesday, emergency officials estimated 120,000 people had left the county and the rest of the Outer Banks.
In the end, the main areas impacted were Buxton, Avon, and Frisco when they were pummeled by water from the Pamlico Sound. Some residents were so devastated by the impact of Emily that they said it was as bad as the Great Atlantic Hurricane that hit the North Carolina coast in 1944.
Investigators feared that whoever was responsible had either left the area because of the storm, or because they weren’t local and committed the crime of opportunity during their brief stay at the beach.
The List of Suspects
The first order of business was to interview the bartender Janet had gotten friendly with, Edward Read Powell. He admitted that after Janet had dropped him off at his house that night, he’d driven back to the Carolinian because his girlfriend was living at the hotel. In fact, he sat in his car with a knife, and a stick of pepperoni, nervously snacking while he watched for her. He told police he’d seen Janet arrive back at the hotel from his car and thought she was his girlfriend at first, because they looked very similar.
Read Powell voluntarily gave police a DNA sample, which eliminated him as the source of the semen found in Janet’s body. The true crime documentary “Nightmare Next Door” covered Janet’s murder in 2013 in an episode titled “Murder in Paradise.” Now, the show is known for dramatizing certain events and changing the names of principal characters. It pointed to Read Powell’s girlfriend Fran as an initial suspect, but I never read that in any other reporting of the case. The show featured a scene where Fran, who worked at the restaurant in the Carolinian Inn, had a run in with Janet and her brother over a dispute over the food. She later became a suspect because she had seen Janet and Read flirting that week and because she worked in a restaurant, would have had access to a knife. I’m not sure if the writers of that episode brought in Fran as a possible suspect in a fictional scenario, or if that was really true. There was another suspect in the mix, a young man who had been flirting with Janet all week on the beach and didn’t want to take no for an answer. He was eventually cleared as a suspect.
Investigators even checked out an ex-boyfriend of Janet’s, a mechanic from New Jersey who also belonged to a biker club. He had served time in prison for being an accessory to the murder of a man from a rival biker gang. But the ex-boyfriend’s alibi checked out and cleared him as a suspect.
They collected DNA samples from twelve different men, including Janet’s brother.
Robert Siclari, who owned an environmental consulting firm in Arlington, Virginia, offered $20,000 for anyone with information leading to the arrest of Janet’s killer. But the case quickly went cold. Until 1997.
A CODIS Hit
That year, CODIS, the combined DNA indexing system, was created to assist police departments across the country to be able to share genetic profiles of convicted felons. When the Nags Head police entered Janet Siclari’s rape kit sample into the database, they got a hit. In fact, it was the first time in North Carolina that a positive DNA match was connected to a “cold hit.” The semen from the rape kit was a match to a commercial fisherman and roofer named Thomas Jabin Berry. He would have been 27 years old at the time of the murder.
Berry’s DNA was collected while he was in prison for a parole infraction. The reason he’d been incarcerated in the first place involved a conviction for the statutory rape of a minor in 1992. The girl, who was 12 at the time of the offense, lived next door to Berry’s mother. Her family had known the Berry’s for several years, and the two groups socialized together on occasion. But one day, Berry asked the girl to help him find his nephew. Because the girl knew the nephew and his friends liked to make forts in the woods, she offered to show Berry the area. But once they were in one of the forts, she said Berry threw her to the ground and sexually assaulted her. Afterwards, he told her that if she ever told anyone, he would kill her mother. The girl told her mother, and when confronted by the police, Berry said the sex had been consensual. He pled guilty to indecent liberties with a minor and was placed on probation, which he soon violated. Berry tried to minimize the crime and later told the show “Forensic Files” that the girl had been older (more like 15) and again claimed the sex was consensual.
Once police had zeroed in on Berry as a suspect, they questioned his ex-girlfriend. She told them he always carried a fishing knife on his person in a sheath attached to his belt, and that the shoes and socks found near Janet’s body looked like ones that belonged to Berry. They searched his mother’s home, looking for the murder weapon and any blood clothes that would have connected him to the murder.
Berry Places Himself in Area
When questioned by the police, Berry said, yes, he was in nearby Manteo the day before Janet’s murder because he had to get an identification card at the Department of Motor Vehicles there. He said he couldn’t remember if he’d stayed in town or immediately returned home. Berry admitted that was during a period when he regularly smoked marijuana and crack cocaine, so his memory was hazy. However, he denied raping or murdering Janet and said he would have remembered that.
Robert Kennedy, a forensic crime scene analyst, compared the Spalding sneakers found at the crime scene to other shoes Berry had worn. He specifically looked at impressions left by the heel, the ball of Berry’s foot, and the upper portion of the shoe. After a careful analysis, Kennedy determined the shoe impression on the Spalding sneakers matched that of the other shoes known to belong to Berry.
The police weren’t buying Berry’s side of the story and felt the DNA evidence linking him to the murder was enough to arrest and charge him on March 30, 1998.
Trial Revelations
At his trial, the jury heard about Berry’s previous sexual assault of the 12-year-old girl. They also heard from another acquaintance of Berry’s, a local woman who said Berry broke into her house one night and forced himself on her. But he’d cut his arm when entered the home through a window, and she noticed he was bleeding. When she offered to get him something to clean up the wound, she escaped from the house and avoided the sexual assault.
Berry later told people he and the woman’s boyfriend had been out drinking that night when they decided it would be fun to “switch partners” for the evening. If that were the case, the woman obviously was not aware of that, nor was she willing to entertain the idea.
Two SBI agents testified about the DNA evidence found on Janet’s body that pointed to Thomas Berry as the contributor. Agent Mark Boodee said, “it was 112 times more likely that the DNA sample came from the defendant than other individual in the white population.” He also said, “It is scientifically unreasonable to think that the semen found in Janet’s body could have come from anyone other than the defendant, including a close relative.”
Prosecutors believed Berry’s habit of assaulting women continued when he came across Janet Siclari on the secluded beach, only he decided not to leave behind a living witness once the rape was over.
The jury also heard from Berry’s ex-girlfriend and the mother of his two children, the one police had initially spoken to. She again said she recognized the sneakers on the beach as being like a pair belonging to Berry, and that he carried a knife with him 98 percent of the time.
Berry chose not to testify on his own behalf.
Throughout the trial, Berry’s mother Doris defended her son, saying he was a good man who’d been physically abused by his father as a child.
The jury took four and a half hours to decide Thomas Berry was guilty of the rape and murder of Janet Siclari. But they couldn’t agree on the sentencing, and one juror held up sentencing the man to death. Instead, he received two life sentences.
Berry tried to appeal his conviction, but in May 2001, an appeals court judge stated, “Given the manner of the killing, the medical examiner’s testimony, and DNA evidence, we find that sufficient evidence existed . . . to find the defendant guilty of the first-degree rape and first-degree murder of Janet Siclari.
He remains incarcerated in a medium-security prison in North Carolina. He is not eligible for parole. He is 59 years old.
The Murder of Denise Johnson
I wanted to mention another murder from the Outer Banks that I came across while researching this case. I first saw it mentioned in an article that ran in the July 27, 1997 edition of The Virginian-Pilot. When the Nags Head police chief, Charles Cameron, said a suspect for Janet Siclari’s murder had been identified in the prison system, he added, the suspect was NOT in Dare County recently, and is in no way connected to this month’s murder of Kill Devil Hills resident Denise F. Johnson.
So who was Denise Johnson? She was a 33-year-old native of Kill Devil Hills who was back living in the childhood she and her family grew up in after her mother’s death. She was the youngest of six children. According to her sister Donny, she was bubbly, outgoing, friendly, and had a lot of friends. She loved animals and wanted to be a veterinarian. She moved to Florida not long after graduating from high school but returned back to Kill Devil Hills when she was 26 and her mother first grew ill. At the time of her death, she was working at a local restaurant, the Barrier Island Inn.
In the early morning hours of July 13, 1997, firefighters responded to a home on the 2000 block of Norfolk Street in Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina. Inside, they discovered Denise’s body. It didn’t take long for them to figure out she’d been stabbed to death prior to the fire, which seemed to have been set deliberately.
Fire Attempts to Cover Up a Horrific Crime
Firefighters found Denise lying on the floor of the bathroom, covered in blood. A firefighter carried her out of the house to attempt CPR, before realizing it was too late. Local police asked for assistance from the SBI in the case. An autopsy revealed Denise had been stabbed at least a half-dozen times with a knife, mostly in the neck, and those injuries, along with smoke inhalation, contributed to her death. She did not appear to have been sexually assaulted.
A short documentary the town of Kill Devil Hills produced on YouTube 12 years ago shared the experiences of the investigators who were investigating the arson and murder initially. Lt. Jim Mulford of the Kill Devil Hills Police Department stated he has always believed Denise was murdered by an acquaintance she knew, possibly a female. In the months before her death, Denise had said she received some harassing phone calls at home and worried that someone was stalking her.
According to eyewitness reports, Denise was last seen at a local convenience store, where she often stopped on her way home from work. She was with a blonde-haired woman standing between five feet five and five feet ten inches tall. This woman has never been identified.
During the the investigation a psychic contacted them and said they hadn’t talked to the perpetrator yet. She’d taken the details of her case to an annual convention in Las Vegas and discussed it with colleagues. A few years ago, podcaster Delia D’Ambra, a University of North Carolina graduate who had lived in the Outer Banks during her childhood, decided to look into Denise’s case files. She produced a podcast series called CounterClock in January 2020 in order to share Denise’s story. You can find it in Season 1 of the podcast. The Kill Devil Hills Police Department has announced they are reopening Denise Johnson’s case.
Anyone with information is asked to call the Kill Devil Hills Police Department at 252-449-5337. Anonymous tips may also be submitted through Crime Line by using the online form at darecommunitycrimeline.org/tips/or the anonymous tip line at 252-473-3111 or 800-745-2746.
Show Sources:
Janet Siclari
The Charlotte Observer
August 30, 1993
Body found at Nags Head identified as N.J. woman
https://www.newspapers.com/image/626602100
The Record
August 30, 1993
N. Arlington woman slain on N.C. trip
https://www.newspapers.com/image/497198189
https://scholar.lib.vt.edu/VA-news/VA-Pilot/issues/1997/vp970727/07270104.htm
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2949754
News and Record
May 2, 2001
Appeals court upholds murder convictions
https://www.newspapers.com/image/959735427
https://case-law.vlex.com/vid/state-v-berry-no-889113688
https://www.crimelibrary.org/notorious_murders/classics/ff306_thomas_jabin_berry/8.html
Forensic Files episode
Season 12, Episode 11
https://forensicfilesnow.com/index.php/tag/thomas-jabin-berry
Denise Johnson
Crime Line Cold Case Files
https://allthatsinteresting.com/denise-johnson
https://www.wtkr.com/2012/11/07/new-documentary-features-15-year-old-outer-banks-cold-case-murder
