At about 7:30 p.m. on December 5, 1997, two Black men robbed Reca’s Beauty Salon in the Ghent neighborhood of Norfolk, Virginia.
The salon’s owner, Fred Asbell, was present, as was his assistant, Tracy Spence, and seven or eight customers. The gunmen, who had their faces at least partially covered, herded everyone in the salon into the dryer room and ordered them to lie face down on the floor and hand over their possessions.
During the incident Joyce Richardson was locked in the restroom, and one of the gunmen fired shots at the restroom door. Richardson was not hit. The gunmen fled, and Norfolk police arrived a few minutes later.
The police interviewed the employees and customers but did not record any statements that included descriptions of the gunmen.
There had been a string of robberies in the Ghent area in the weeks before the robbery at Reca’s. One of the victims at Reca’s would later say in an affidavit that “police told us soon after arriving that we had just become the latest victims of the Ghent robberies … [t]hey told us that . . . the armed robbery matched the same pattern as other robberies in Ghent both in style and in method.”
On the night of December 19, 1997, Asbell drove past a club in Norfolk and thought he spotted two men outside who he believed were the robbers. He returned to the salon and told Spence and others present what he had seen. He then called the police. Officers picked up Asbell and drove him to the club.
According to later testimony, the officers walked into the club, with Asbell in tow. As he was entering the club, Asbell saw 23-year-old Messiah Johnson on the sidewalk near the entrance and told the police that he thought that Johnson was one of the gunmen. He said that Johnson’s eyeglasses were similar to those worn by one of the robbers.
Asbell and the police quickly left the club to find Johnson, who had begun walking toward a parking lot. After Asbell told police that Johnson was the man he had seen outside the club when he first drove by, the officers pointed their weapons at Johnson and his friend, Mondell Slade, and ordered them to lie on the ground. Asbell then made another identification of Johnson.
Johnson and Slade remained in handcuffs outside the club. Asbell and two detectives returned to the salon to get Spence. On the drive back to the club, the officers told Asbell not to talk with Spence to avoid contaminating Spence’s identification.
At the club, officers drove Spence past Johnson and Slade, who were both sitting on the curb in handcuffs. Spence identified both men as the robbers, referring to Johnson as “the guy with the glasses.”
Slade and Johnson were both arrested. Slade was released and never charged.
Despite the arrests, Norfolk police continued the investigation into the Ghent-area robberies. On December 22, 1997, the police arrested Robert Humphries and several other men and women in connection with many of these robberies. In 1999, Humphries pled guilty to four of the robberies.
Johnson went to trial in Norfolk City Circuit Court on August 19, 1998. Richardson was the first witness. She testified that although she had said the gunman partially covered his face, preventing her from seeing many of his features, she identified Johnson as one of the robbers.
Later, she testified that a detective had shown her about 60 photos in an array, that she had narrowed the results down to two photos, and that she was unable to make a positive identification. Richardson testified she was “not sure” whether she actually identified Johnson.
The next day, Detective Ransom Wensel testified that Richardson was mistaken. She had only seen seven photos, not 60, Wensel said. Based on this confusion about what Richardson had seen, the judge declared a mistrial.
After the mistrial, Wensel began investigating Carl Lee as another possible suspect in the Reca’s robbery, in part because Lee had attended Johnson’s preliminary hearing. According to an affidavit by Lee’s attorney in 2016, Wensel’s theory was that Lee went to the hearing to see what evidence the state had against Johnson and him. Lee said he was there to show support for Johnson.
On September 17, 1998, Spence identified Lee as the second gunman, and charges were filed against him on October 7, 1998. A jury acquitted him in 1999.
After the mistrial, Johnson rejected a plea deal that would have required him to serve three years in prison. His retrial began on October 28, 1998. Many of the victims of the robbery were unable to identify Johnson. At least one victim testified that she only saw one gunman, not two. All the witnesses, like Johnson, were Black.
Spence identified Johnson in court as one of the gunmen, based in part on his memory that the gunman wore glasses. He testified that he identified Johnson at the show-up viewing, outside the nightclub, because of the “eyeglasses, his eyes, and his face.” Spence also testified that during the robbery he wasn’t able to see the gunman’s entire face, only from the “bridge of his nose up.”
Asbell also identified Johnson in court. He said that Johnson wore distinctive glasses during the robbery and those glasses were central to his identification of Johnson outside the club. Asbell testified that, although police had told him to remain silent as he and Spence rode back to the club, he had already told Spence what he had seen before the two men rode together in the cruiser.
Asbell also testified that in the weeks between the robbery and Johnson’s arrest, he viewed a photo array that did not contain Johnson’s picture. After the arrest, Asbell testified, he viewed an array that did contain Johnson’s photo as well as arrays connected to the investigation into the other Ghent-area robberies.
Although both Spence and Asbell identified Johnson, their testimony was at times contradictory. They agreed that Johnson was “the guy with the glasses,” but they disagreed about his actions during the robbery. Spence said the “guy with the glasses” remained in the dryer room and eventually fired a shot into the restroom. Asbell testified that the gunman whom he identified as Johnson took him to the salon area and forced Asbell to hand over his valuables.
Richardson testified that she had been unable to provide police with a description of the robbers on December 5, 1997. She testified that she had seen a photo array of seven men but leafed through a book that contained about 60 photographs.
She said of the smaller array, “I’m not sure. I kept saying, ‘I’m not sure ... I don’t want to say I’m sure and I’m really not sure right now.’”
Despite that apparent hesitation, Richardson identified Johnson in court as the gunman. She testified that she was “100 percent” certain; “It just came right back to [her],” after she saw Johnson at the first trial.
Unlike Spence and Asbell, Richardson said that Johnson wore a black jacket with a hood, not a mask. She also made no mention of any glasses.
Michael Fasanaro, Johnson’s attorney, moved for a mistrial, arguing that the state had not disclosed the arrays referenced in the testimony of Asbell and Richardson. Judge Junius Fulton III denied the motion.
Johnson testified about his activities on December 5, 1997, describing a night of shopping for clothes and jewelry with three friends before heading over to his girlfriend’s house. Two of the friends and his girlfriend also testified in his defense, supporting his alibi. During cross-examination, the prosecutor questioned Johnson about the cost of these purchases and got Johnson to acknowledge that he hadn’t worked in the two weeks prior to the robbery.
During deliberations, the jury requested the statements of Asbell, Spence and Richardson. “Who positively identified the defendant when and where?” the jury asked. Judge Fulton told the jury to rely on what it heard at trial.
On October 28, 1988, the jury convicted Johnson on five counts of robbery, six counts of abduction, 12 counts of use of a firearm, attempted robbery, and shooting into an occupied building. Judge Fulton sentenced him to 132 years in prison.
Johnson appealed, asserting that Judge Fulton erred in denying his motion for a mistrial. The Virginia Court of Appeals affirmed the conviction on July 7, 1999. The court noted that Detective Gary Mitcheltree had testified that Asbell and Richardson were mistaken; neither had seen numerous photo arrays. It was up to the jury, not the trial judge, to determine the credibility of the witnesses, the court said.
In late 1999, Johnson filed a pro se petition for a writ of habeas corpus in Norfolk City Circuit Court. A judge denied the petition on April 18, 2000.
Johnson then moved to the federal courts, filing a pro se habeas petition on January 25, 2001, that was transferred to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. A judge denied the petition on August 2, 2001.
Fifteen years later, on August 30, 2016, Johnson filed a second state habeas petition. He was now represented by attorneys from the Innocence Project at the University of Virginia School of Law.
The new habeas petition said that Johnson was innocent and included an affidavit from Humphries that said he and an unnamed accomplice who was not Johnson had robbed Reca’s.
Humphries said he wore big eyeglasses as part of his disguise. The robbery wasn’t planned, Humphries said. “I had just bought crack cocaine nearby and realized that the drugs I had bought were fake,” he said. “I saw the beauty salon and decided to rob it, thinking that there would be mostly women there and they would be easy to subdue.”
The petition also said that Johnson’s conviction was tainted by the state’s failure to disclose exculpatory evidence and correct false testimony and by the failure of Johnson’s attorneys to provide effective representation.
According to the petition, the state failed to disclose that:
The police believed the Reca’s robbery was tied to other area robberies, “robberies for which the [state] had developed suspects other than Messiah Johnson.”
Spence identified Lee as one of the robbers at the salon. He had already identified Mondell Slade as Johnson’s purported accomplice, meaning that he had made three identifications for a robbery committed by two perpetrators. (Although Spence had identified Slade as a participant in the robbery, leading to Slade’s brief arrest, he testified that he had made no such identification. The prosecutor did not correct that statement. )
Detective Wensel, who testified about the propriety of the photo arrays, had been sued by the City of Norfolk in 1996 over fraudulent time-keeping practices and was the subject of an FBI investigation during that same period. Fasanaro could have used this information to impeach Wensel’s credibility.
Andrew Sebok had been appointed to represent Johnson after his arrest. At the preliminary hearing in early March 1998, Sebok didn’t hire a court reporter. According to the petition, Sebok told Johnson that he would take notes himself. Robert Frank replaced Sebok as temporary counsel until April 3, 1987, when Johnson hired Fasanaro. The petition said that Sebok’s failure to use a court reporter harmed Johnson’s defense, because there was no accurate account of the testimony from the preliminary hearing. Fasanaro compounded the error after his appointment, the petition said, because he didn’t take the proper steps to reconstruct the hearing testimony. “Mr. Johnson was undeniably prejudiced by counsels’ failures,” the petition said. “There was no physical evidence that connected Mr. Johnson to the crime; the prosecution’s case rested exclusively on eyewitness identifications.”
In addition, the petition said:
Fasanaro failed to thoroughly investigate possible connections between the other Ghent robberies and the Reca’s robbery. The police theorized the crimes were all committed by the same men, and they had already arrested Humphries for his involvement with several of the robberies.
Related to this, Fasanaro didn’t adequately investigate or ask for discovery on the lineup and photo array issues that caused the mistrial. The confusion over these arrays indicated the police were casting a wide net that could have led Fasanaro to other suspects.
Fasanaro should have challenged the show-up identifications of Johnson made by Asbell and Spence, which the petition said contained “an egregious and unacceptable level of suggestiveness.”
Judge Fulton, the trial judge, heard oral arguments on the petition on June 20, 2017, and denied Johnson’s motion on July 24, 2017, ruling that Johnson’s petition was procedurally defaulted.
While his habeas petition was pending, Johnson filed a pardon request with the office of Governor Terry McAuliffe in May 2017. McAuliffe granted Johnson a conditional pardon on January 12, 2018, his last day in office. The pardon said that “credible evidence exists to support Mr. Johnson’s claims of being innocent of the underlying offense which resulted in his incarceration.”
Under the terms of the pardon, Johnson was required to complete a re-entry program, agree to three years of supervision by the Virginia Parole Board, and comply with other conditions set by the board during this period. He was released from prison on April 25, 2018.
Johnson supplemented his pardon request in 2019. The supplement noted that Fasanaro had also been disbarred that year for misconduct in two unrelated cases. Governor Ralph Northam did not act on Johnson’s pardon request before he left office in January 2022.
On May 15, 2024, Johnson filed a petition in the Virginia Court of Appeals for a writ of actual innocence based on non-biological evidence.
The petition included many of the claims raised in the 2016 habeas petition but also raised additional issues that pointed to Johnson’s innocence.
A report prepared by Dr. Amy Douglass, a psychology professor at Bates College and expert on eyewitness identification, said Johnson’s identification was marred by numerous factors, including the show-up, procedures, the time between the crime and the identification, the trauma of the robbery, and cross-contamination between the witnesses.
“My professional opinion is that these eyewitness identifications are so weak as to provide no evidence that Messiah Johnson robbed Reca’s Salon on December 5, 1997,” she wrote.
Separately, Johnson’s attorneys had been granted access to review the prosecutor’s files on the Johnson and Humphries cases.
In the files was a report from Wensel about Spence’s show-up identification of Johnson. In the report, which confirmed that Spence had identified Slade, Wensel wrote: “The officers are later told by Det. Wensel that this second identification (involving Mr. Spence) was far too suggestive and hampering to the investigation and possibly prosecution. They are cautioned not to do this again.”
The files also included information referencing one of Humphries’s co-defendants as a possible suspect in the Reca’s robbery.
The state opposed the petition. It said that Humphries had recanted his 2013 statement in 2024, and that the new evidence introduced by Johnson’s attorneys was either speculative, cumulative, or irrelevant. In addition, the state said the question of granting an innocence writ was moot: Johnson’s conditional pardon had become a full pardon after he had complied with the original terms for three years.
“There are no longer convictions against which a writ of actual innocence could be issued,” the state said.
On August 25, 2025, the Virginia Court of Appeals dismissed Johnson’s innocence petition. It said Johnson had been discharged from parole supervision on April 26, 2021, and that both the state and Johnson had stipulated that the conditional pardon had become a full conditional pardon.
“Having satisfied all of his conditions, Johnson now stands absolutely pardoned of the offenses for which he seeks actual innocence relief,” the court wrote. “As such, there are no longer any convictions for which Johnson can be found actually innocent of in this case.”
In 2026, the Virginia General Assembly agreed to pay Johnson $1.3 million as compensation for his wrongful conviction.
– Ken Otterbourg
Posting Date: 01-12-2026
Last Update Date: 04-23-2026
