Port Richmond torture-murder trial opens

More than two years after the battered and broken body of Jean Jackson was found in a vacant Port Richmond lot, the man accused of killing her to make way for a new girlfriend went to trial in a Philadelphia courtroom.

"'Jean left for good,'" was the note on Eric Nathaniel Johnson's home calendar on March 28, 2007, Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Selber told the Common Pleas Court jury in her opening statement this morning.

The following day, Selber continued, Johnson's new girlfriend, Arlene Nicholas, arrived from suburban Boston. And on March 31, 2007, children playing in a lot three blocks from Johnson's house in the 2000 block of East Clearfield Street found Jackson's battered, broken, unidentifiable body.

Selber said forensic experts will testify how blood identified as Jackson's was found throughout the ground-floor apartment in which the couple had lived for about five months.

Johnson, 38, who was arrested and charged under his middle name, is on trial for murder and abuse of a corpse in the fatal beating of Jackson, 40.

Defense attorney William L. Bowe urged the jury to keep an open mind and make certain the prosecution proves its case beyond a reasonable doubt.

Bowe also told the jury not to judge Johnson because of his "lifestyle. No one here ever should be convicted of any crime because of the way he lives."

Police say Johnson, a Philadelphia native who lived here until 1993, met Jackson in her native Massachusetts in 2005.

Jackson, Selber said, was mentally disabled and could not live independently. The couple moved to Philadelphia in September 2006 after his mother died.

Less than a half-year later, police allege, Johnson met Nicholas on a telephone chat line, and invited her to move in with him in Philadelphia. Nicholas refused as long as Jackson also lived in the house, Selber said.

When Jackson's body was found on March 31, 2007, Selber said, her body was so beaten and mutilated that police initially did not know if the corpse was male or female. Moreover, the body's hands were covered in white Latex gloves filled with a bleach-like liquid, what Selber said was an apparent attempt to prevent fingerprinting.

"You'll hear from neighbors," Selber told the jury, "people who spent time with the defendant, who will tell you what a sad woman she was, how she hardly spoke and who wouldn't look you in the eyes when you spoke to her - and about the man who controlled her."