“I hesitated…before calling [911] because, you know, she was already dead.”

-Chris Johnson, describing his thought process only seconds after he claims to have found Andrea Cincotta’s body. The body had been stuffed in a closet, with “copious” amounts of blood covering Andrea’s face. Johnson had been home for 7.5 hours, with the closet door ajar, doing laundry directly in front of the closet, prior to making the call.

Sometimes, a picture is worth 1,000 words. Note the position of the yellow hamper and blue laundry basket, relative to the closet door. Could you walk from the yellow hamper to the dresser at least five times and put the blue basket in its photographed position without noticing the closet? Johnson’s explanation for the evening’s events relies upon doing just that.

Andrea Cincotta, a 52-year-old reference librarian at Arlington Central Library, was murdered in her home on 8/21/1998. At 1:37am on 8/22/1998, her live-in fiancée, James Christopher (“Chris”) Johnson, called 911 and reported finding her in their bedroom closet.

She also had a 24-year-old son, Kevin Cincotta, who had moved out in 3/1997, but continued to visit for dinners on Sunday evenings.

The couple was building a vacation property together on the Rappahannock River in Lancaster, VA, informally called “the beach house,” which was in Johnson’s name. Johnson had been paying half of the mortgage on the couple’s primary residence (which was in Andrea’s name), in exchange for living at that residence. However, Andrea was allowing Johnson to pay less than half, as her financial contribution to the beach house. The couple spent most weekends at the beach house, with Andrea also performing physical labor to support the construction.

She usually kept the closet door open, but it was reportedly “closed” before Johnson found her body. We use the term “closed” in quotes because the closet door would not close all the way, which means that it was at least slightly ajar during the entire evening before Johnson stated that he found the body. Crime scene photos show that the closet was tiny and that, contrary to other media accounts, Andrea’s body was near the front when the door was ajar. It could not possibly have been “deep in the closet,” because the closet itself was very shallow. Johnson admits that the closet door actually wasn’t closed at all–it was ajar. Yet, even with the door ajar and Andrea’s body shallow in the closet, he claims that he put the blue laundry basket in its photographed location without noticing the body:

Johnson also described that, at another point in the evening, he had misplaced his keys. He states that his search for the keys caused his line of sight to go from the dresser (left side of screenshot above) to the yellow hamper (right side of screenshot above). This means the slightly-open closet door, with Andrea’s dead body at the front, was likely directly in his line of sight:

At one point, the detective becomes incredulous that Johnson could have spent so much of the evening doing laundry and walking past the closet so many times, without noticing that the door was out of position, or that Andrea’s body was inside. Johnson agrees that he walked past the closet door “at least five times.” When asked why he didn’t notice the door until hours later–after he fell asleep, with nothing in particular waking him up, Johnson appears to have difficulty answering.

In 2023, Johnson stated (through his lawyers) that he didn’t tell police that the door was ajar. The statement identifies as false the claim that “Johnson told police the door was ajar.” It’s unclear whether he is now changing his story to say that it was not ajar. Of course, this is a critical point, given where Johnson said he was that evening, and where he put the laundry basket (see photo above), presumably while the door was ajar, with Andrea’s dead body inside–many hours before he called 911.

Here is additional evidence that Johnson told police the door was ajar:

Johnson reported that coins and a bag were missing, as well as her purse, car keys, and car.

It was later discovered that Andrea’s will, located in a particular filing cabinet known to Johnson, was also missing. It’s now known that convicted-killer Bobby Leonard’s name and phone number were written on a loose piece of paper in the residence. Leonard would later confess to killing Cincotta and state that he did so at the behest of “Andrea’s boyfriend,” which is generally understood to refer to Johnson. Leonard described receiving multiple phone calls from “Andrea’s boyfriend” setting up the killing as a murder-for-hire. The piece of paper with Leonard’s contact information is missing. Johnson admits to throwing out several file folders of “old papers, ” doing laundry, and vacuuming on the night of the murder. None of the missing items were ever recovered.

Johnson also stated that he “sat on the floor and drank the last root beer” on the night of the murder, before throwing away that bottle, and previously throwing away other soda bottles that night. Leonard stated that an unopened bottle of root beer was left on the entry foyer as part of the crime scene. Johnson’s “Root Beer Statement” also reveals that his thought process for the evening relies on an impossibility: he asks the reader to believe that Andrea Cincotta had played the answering machine, which he found to be unplayed later in the evening. Family members stated that this was a cassette-based answering machine, and that there was no way to “unplay” a message.

An autopsy revealed the cause of death to be strangulation. According to the police file, the autopsy found “no signs of sexual assault,” contrary to Leonard’s usual MO and Andrea’s PERK kit was negative. Although Leonard has a lengthy criminal record, he has zero other homicides, and no attempted homicides that didn’t involve sexual assault. He also has never been found to have falsely implicated anyone else in any of his crimes.

At the scene, police almost immediately noticed signs of cleaning; the Medical Examiner remarked that it was the cleanest crime scene they had seen.

There were no obvious signs of a struggle, many valuables in plain sight were left undisturbed, and there was no sign of forced entry.

Johnson gave police a detailed description of what he thought Andrea’s schedule would be that day, but it had one slight inaccuracy: that she would be coming home at around 1pm. Leonard testified that the individual that called him to set up the murder-for-hire advised him that Andrea would be home at 1pm, and made other statements that are now corroborated.

After Leonard’s initial confession, police reviewed the file and found that both men had, in fact, appeared to reference phone conversations with each other in 1998 in the days leading up to the murder: Leonard said the “husband called him,” Johnson said that Andrea had asked him to call the computer guy. But Johnson had denied having any substantial knowledge of, or contact with, Leonard to the victim’s family. Consequently, it took the family almost two years and they spent thousands of dollars, before they finally found Leonard via a private investigator.

In June 2000, when family members told Johnson their discovery of the Computer Guy’s identity as Leonard, Johnson represented that these were the first details he was hearing about the man. Even then, he did not acknowledge being given the man’s number, being asked to call him, or his knowledge that the man lived in Southeast Washington, DC. Finally, in June 2018, when confronted by family members for the final time, Johnson again withheld the information he had shared with police in 1998, where he had appeared to describe prior contact, or at least basic knowledge of, Leonard.

Leonard’s October 2018 confession caused family members to view Johnson’s previous answers to these types of questions, and other artifacts, in a new light. One such artifact is the audio from the the home answering machine that day:

Johnson leaves three separate messages to say he will be a total of 15 minutes late, including the time that he’s calling all three times.

Family members said it was unusual for Johnson to call so many times in such a short period, and very unusual to leave a message each time. Although the answering machine also includes a message from a friend who sounds distressed and asks Andrea “are you alright?” Johnson did not attempt to contact the friend. Instead, he claimed that he thought that Andrea had gotten Judy’s message and was with Judy Taylor. One problem: Johnson stated he came home, found the answering machine unplayed, and played it. So Andrea could not have played nor gotten the message. On national television, Johnson said that, actually, Andrea had mentioned going to the Taylors’ to him previously. There’s no evidence that this is true in the case file–nowhere (that we can find) in his police interviews, his statement to police about Andrea’s whereabouts that day, or his Root Beer Statement, is this mentioned.

When confronted about these discrepancies in 2018, Johnson suggested that perhaps he didn’t play the answering machine at all that evening.

This gave rise to a re-examination of Andrea’s last few days–to investigate whether there was evidence of a “build-up” to the murder, and whether there were any discrepancies regarding Andrea’s involvement in the beach house, finances for the beach house, misuse of funds related to it, the issue of who owned the property, or evidence of actual or attempted infidelity.

andrea’s last conversations, activities, and Estimated Timeline

8/18-8/20/1998

According to the police case file, the word “house” was written on Andrea’s work calendar for most weekends in 1998, and each weekend in August 1998 that she wasn’t working. But it was missing for that weekend and the following weekend (the calendar is only available through August 1998).

Andrea also told her friend and co-worker Judy Taylor on 8/18/1998 or 8/20/1998 that Chris would be on his own at the beach house that weekend and she was not going, contradicting Johnson’s repeated statement that she was going. To our knowledge, neither Johnson nor anyone has offered an explanation for why he told police she was going, but her friend and documentary evidence say otherwise.

8/21/1998

Before 7am: Johnson goes to work.

~7:30-9am: Andrea leaves to go swimming and returns home to shower.

9:15am: Andrea hastily arranged lunch with friend Sally Harrs. According to the cold case detective, Harrs said Andrea was “excited and agitated” and said “we need to talk”. When Andrea never showed up to lunch, Harrs called Andrea at home and left her a voicemail.

9:30am-11:15am: Andrea likely goes to work for a couple of hours to work on special project, sends email confirming lunch: “See you at 1:00” (generally emailed from work, not home). This is corroborated by Johnson’s statement that he thought she was going to work for a couple of hours on a special project.

Sally Harrs statements to police, 8/25/1998 & 9/4/1998.

11:15-11:30am: Bobby Joe Leonard testified that he sees Andrea pull into a parking space in the condo’s parking lot. Around 11:30am, Andrea told him that someone she trusted has betrayed her, she did something nice for someone she trusted, but bad consequences are coming to her as a result. She tells him “No good deed goes unpunished.”

For contextual completeness, here is a relevant quotation from Leonard’s trail testimony: “And I got here [to the Courthouse area, which was both the location of the trial and the location of Andrea’s residence] around 11:00 just because I had this nervous feeling that maybe I’m being set up…So I got here around 11:00, 11:30 over at the Court House Road Subway station…Colonial Village apartments wasn’t very far. It was just like a block…So eventually, I got up by their place, and I saw her coming in with her car…So I saw her. And I saw her parking it and getting out of it and going up the steps.”

Ms. Harrs’ statement also says that, in arranging the lunch, Andrea said she didn’t have to “be on the [reference] desk [at the library] later, so she could take comp time,” apparently before sending the email stating “see you at 1:00.” These statements, combined with Chris Johnson’s statement that he thought she was going to work for a couple of hours in the morning, and the fact that she generally emailed from work rather than home, suggest that she indeed went to work. If so, Leonard’s timetable is further corroborated. Taken together, Andrea’s last three known conversations give the impression that she was in the midst of a conflict with someone she trusted, and that beach house plans–at least for that weekend–had suddenly changed.

On this theory, the caller told Leonard that Andrea would be home at about 1pm, because the caller didn’t know of Andrea’s lunch with Ms. Harrs at 1pm, which was scheduled that same day. Johnson told police that he thought she would be home at about 1pm. In fact, she came home slightly earlier. But Leonard had also come earlier, to investigate the setting, out of concern that he was being set up. Indeed, Leonard testified that he saw her come home shortly after 11:30am.

In other words, the timeline that Leonard attributed to the caller appears to match the timeline Johnson gave police. The two men appear to have had the same understanding of Andrea’s schedule that day, with the same slight inaccuracy. That inaccuracy (the lunch with Ms. Harrs) is something of which Johnson would have been unaware, because it was scheduled after he left for work on Friday morning. Leonard stated that the call came the night before.

• Johnson’s police interview

  Johnson was interviewed for 28 hours over three days, and ultimately provided a “vision statement”. In the statement, he described an argument over a t-shirt related to pornography, accidentally hitting Andrea on the head (causing her head to hit the corner of a desk), holding her upward but realizing that she was already dead, straddling her body while attempting to resuscitate her, and moving her body into the closet. He added details, such as doing his laundry, throwing away soda bottles, and drinking root beer. He repeated several elements of this same statement to the victim’s son, Kevin Cincotta, and to a private investigator, over the years. Several aspects of the statement are or appear to be corroborated as true. In particular, a shoeprint found on Andrea’s body is consistent with Johnson’s shoeprint, and its positioning is consistent with a CPR attempt (Leonard’s shoes appear much larger than Johnson’s). Johnson was not charged in 1998, primarily because the murder appeared to have occurred in the late morning or early afternoon and Johnson had an alibi for that time period: he was at work.

• “The computer guy”

  Meanwhile, family members focused on another individual: an individual to whom Andrea had given an unwanted computer about three weeks before the homicide. Although Andrea and the individual had exchanged names and phone numbers, Johnson told family members he knew nothing of this “Computer Guy”, except that he was male. However, he had already told police that Andrea asked him to call the man and that he remembered part of the phone number. Police appear to have found the man through information that Andrea stated to both Johnson and the victim’s son, but that only the victim’s son appears to have told police (the name of the man’s employer). This ultimately led police (and, later, the private investigator) to identify the Computer Guy as Bobby Joe Leonard. In 2000, Leonard was sentenced to life in prison, plus 30 years, for raping, attempting to murder (by strangulation), and abducting a 13-year-old girl and leaving her for dead in a closet. Many of Andrea’s close friends and family attended Leonard’s trial and sentencing; Johnson did not.

• Plea Agreement, Conviction, and Trial

  In 2018, Leonard confessed to killing Andrea Cincotta, but stated that he did so based on several phone conversations with an individual whom he understood to be “Andrea’s boyfriend”. In the 2018 confession, Leonard described leaving a crime scene, including an unopened root beer bottle on the floor. Leonard provided several other details about the caller that appeared to match Johnson. In 2021, both individuals were indicted by a grand jury on the charge of Aggravated Murder/Kill for Hire. Leonard pled guilty to the reduced charge of First Degree Murder and appeared to implicate Johnson in the factual predicate of his plea agreement. In 2022, Leonard testified against Johnson at trial. Johnson was found not guilty, although a juror acknowledged to the Washington Post: “We saw the possibility that he did it.”

Myths and Misconceptions abound in this case. We have attempted to address or debunk some of them on the linked page. One of the most pervasive and silliest myths is the idea that Leonard somehow benefitted by confessing to a murder for which he otherwise would not have been charged. You can find a thorough discussion of that, and other myths, on this site. We add myths as we find them; the recent 20/20 episode was a great source of them.

Feel free to browse other evidence as well. We typically upload new evidence several times per week. Thank you again for visiting! You can be the first to know when new uploads are made by signing up.