The “Beach House” refers to a property located in Lancaster County, Virginia along the Rappahannock River. Andrea and Chris purchased the property together and intended to build their dream vacation house there. They spent almost every weekend working on the construction of the house, performing the physical labor themselves. While the property was in Johnson’s name only, she was under the impression she owned half, giving him $250 per month towards construction expenses.
Notes from the police case file. Chris Johnson originally told police that Andrea contributes $250 a month towards the construction of the beach house. In 2018, Johnson changed his story and tells the victim’s son she contributed “not a penny”.
Andrea’s therapist bravely came forward in 2019 and confirmed her recollection that Andrea was paying for beach house construction by allowing Johnson to pay less than half of the mortgage on the primary residence. This is consistent with the statements of the victim’s son, and with Johnson’s 1998 statement. But it contradicts Johnson’s current story: that Andrea paid “not a penny.”
Johnson had taken out a construction loan on the beach house. This loan came due in the month of the murder, as Johnson admitted to police.
In fact, there is evidence that Andrea was murdered on or near the exact day that the one-year construction loan would have come due. Her work calendar for 1997 indicates that on August 21st, she was off of work for “Closing.” Given that the loan originated in 1997, and that she was also off the next day, this likely indicates closing on the loan:
Andrea’s work calendar appears to show “Closing” on a one-year loan, one year to the day before her murder.
Weeks before the murder in August 1998, Andrea emailed one of her cousins that if she and Chris ever split up, she’d hope Chris would “buy me out” of the beach house and that she’d “rather it burn than he end up in it with someone else.” She also refers to using “her half” of the beach house money on something else, in that scenario:
Leonard states that the determinative call came the night before the homicide. While the topic of this post pertains to potential motive, Johnson also had the opportunity to make this call. He states that he had a part-time job where he worked Tuesday-Thursday nights. At this job, he was mostly alone in an office. (This means he was alone, with access to a phone, with no chance that Andrea would walk in, on the night that Leonard says the call came.) In fact, Johnson states that this environment is so private that he does webcam-based pornography there: “I chatted on the internet with girls who have cameras on their computers…They do whatever, take their clothes off or whatever…This is at work…when I’m at work…those nights [at] the part-time job, there’s usually no one else around…there’s people out in the yard and everything but I’m the only one in the office”.
He admits to using a credit card to pay for these pornography services at $2/minute and says that he paid the bill in person, at the bank. This had the likely effect that Andrea did not see the expenses. He developed an email relationship with at least one of these cam girls and joined an online “Intimate Friends Network.”
These apparently secret pornography expenditures that occurred when Andrea thought she was giving him beach house construction money. In fact, Johnson told the victim’s son that Andrea never knew about the t-shirt associated with the pornography and vision statement. We don’t know the full extent of this apparent misuse of her funds. But even if Johnson had only used these services for an average of 2 hours and 5 minutes per month, it would have completely exhausted Andrea’s beach house money
The police file reveals additional details about Johnson’s offline pursuit of women; in particular, one of the neighbors. In the file, the neighbor describes receiving flowers on Valentine’s Day in both 1997 and 1998; receiving cookies; and Johnson bringing over a movie for them to watch while Andrea was in England helping her son move out of a dorm. The notes state that Johnson would “show up wherever she was; he knew she worked out at Gold’s Gym; he knew she ran her own company.” The notes also state that, at one point, Johnson was “looking in her apt.; he was peeping in her windows.” The police file also discusses at least one other date, with yet another woman, that Johnson went on, and never told Andrea about.
Additional investigative narrative documents that all was not as it seemed in Johnson’s relationship with Andrea:
However, I have found that Chris Johnson has been sending flowers to other single women in the condo complex, baking them cookies, cleaning off their cars in bad weather, and went to one of their apartments for dinner when Andrea was out of the country [helping her son move into his dorm] in England.
– Notes from Police Case File
In addition, according to detectives, the police file reveals at least some financial difficulty: the answering machine is said to include messages about missed payments to both the bank associated with the construction loan and the storage facility associated with construction materials.
In his Vision Statement, Johnson describes an argument, centered around Andrea finding a t-shirt into which he masturbated when watching pornography. Police later corroborated the t-shirt, the secret pornography expenses, that some injuries on Andrea’s body could be consistent with injuries that Johnson described during the argument, and other items. Some have argued that the confluence of these facts, combined with what’s known about Andrea’s last three known conversations, suggests that Johnson may have been telling the truth, when he told detectives that the couple had an explosive argument with Andrea, centered around pornography, that immediately preceded her death.
Indeed, the friend whom Andrea was to meet for lunch that day described that the lunch was hastily arranged on the same day, with Andrea saying “We’ve got to talk; let’s do lunch” and sounding “excited and agitated”:
This seems to match Leonard’s description of Andrea’s state when he arrived at the condo later that morning: he stated that she felt “betrayed” by someone she trusted and said that “No good deed goes unpunished.”
In describing Andrea, both Johnson and family members have consistently stated that the the one thing she would not tolerate is “dishonesty.” Indeed, the reason these details are relevant is not the details themselves. It is Andrea’s likely reaction to them.
According to family members, if Andrea found out some or all of this information, she likely would have been enraged, would have broken up with Johnson, would have felt entitled to “her half” of the beach house, and would have taken actions in furtherance of getting it. But Andrea was murdered in the same month that the loan came due, and Johnson ended up keeping all of the house that they were building “together.”
There is also a footnote to this evidence: Andrea told her best friend–a woman she’d known since 1970–that, two weeks before the murder, she was nearly killed, with a nail gun, at the beach house. The police report documents Andrea’s statement that Johnson was holding the nail gun:
Justice for Andrea Cincotta 