The Silent Witness: The Murder of Laura Johnson and the Camera That Caught Greg Green

Author

Benjamin Hayes

Publication Date

March 26, 2026

Laura Johnson grew up in Vancouver, Washington, about ten miles north of Portland, Oregon. By the time she was twenty-three years old, she had five sons with her then-husband Howard Johnson, and she raised all of them in her hometown. Her boys described her as devoted and funny, a woman who made each of her sons a handmade quilt when they were young, and when those faded and tore, sat down and let them pick out new fabric. She made jewelry. She painted ceramic vases. There was always some kind of project underway on her work table. She was, by every account from the people who knew her, a woman who loved being a mother above almost everything else.

She was also a woman who had struggled. Years before her disappearance, Laura sustained a physical injury and was prescribed pain medication that eventually developed into an addiction. By the time she went missing in September 2018, she was in recovery and had been attending a treatment center in Billings, Montana every single day for three weeks. Her counselors would later tell investigators she had not missed a single visit since September 13, 2018, the last day anyone confirmed she was alive. That detail, small in isolation, would become one of the most important facts in a case that prosecutors would eventually call one of Montana's most notable no-body murder convictions.

A New Relationship, a New City

After separating from Howard Johnson, Laura eventually made her way to her parents' home in Utah. She met Gregory Scott Green on the internet. The two began a relationship that included day trips to Las Vegas, where Green was living in Henderson, Nevada, and Laura eventually moved in with him in the spring of 2018. The relationship was rocky from the start. Laura's family noticed that visits became increasingly difficult to arrange. Phone calls would be cut short without explanation. Her sons would plan trips only to have them fall through at the last minute, with Green always seeming to be somewhere in the middle of the cancellation. One of her sons, Justin, later described how plans to visit would fall apart in ways that always seemed to trace back to Greg.

The controlling behavior escalated to violence. Laura ended up in the hospital at one point, and an arrest warrant was issued for Green in Nevada for assaulting her. Approximately two months later, in June 2018, Green relocated himself to Billings, Montana, with Laura following him to the city in early August. They moved into a house together on Windsor Circle in Billings Heights, and Laura found work as a delivery driver at a Papa John's Pizza. She was going to treatment every day. She had moved into a separate bedroom. She was saving money. According to what investigators would later learn at trial, she was working up to leaving.

The Week Nobody Called

On September 13, 2018, Laura Johnson walked into her home on Windsor Circle at approximately 7:00 in the evening. A neighbor's security camera captured her doing so. It was the last time anyone outside the house saw her alive. She did not return to her treatment center the following day, or any day after that. She did not show up for her next shift at Papa John's. Nobody heard from her.

Green, when police first came around in the weeks that followed, had an explanation ready. He told officers that he had come home from work on the evening of September 13 to find Laura gone. He said she had taken her two red suitcases and her other belongings with her. He told investigators this kind of behavior from Laura was not unusual, that she had left before, and that she had probably returned to Oregon to be with her family. He did not call police. He did not report her missing. He sent two text messages to her phone on September 15, two days after she disappeared. One read: "You left again I see where to now." The other: "I hope your happy with your new guy, maybe you both will do harion together DOPERS." The second message, with its phonetic misspelling of heroin, was meant to suggest that Laura had run off with someone else, returning to drug use. It was the story Green was building, and it had the advantage of being hard to immediately disprove for a woman whose history included addiction.

None of her sons had heard from her. That in itself was not instantly alarming, because communication with their mother had been inconsistent while she was with Green. But by September 28, the silence had stretched long enough that one of her sons, Jonathan, grew suspicious. He filed a missing persons report with the Clark County Sheriff's Office in Washington state. When investigators there contacted Green in Montana, he repeated the same story: she was depressed, she didn't come home one day, and he hadn't called 911 because she had left before.

Early inquiries bumped against the same wall. Laura was an adult with a history of addiction. Her phone had pinged a cell tower in the Salmon Creek area of Washington, near a methadone clinic. Law enforcement noted there was nothing that jumped out as immediately alarming. The Billings Police Department assigned a detective to the case but had not yet opened it as an active missing persons investigation. To the outside observer, the pieces fit the story Green was telling. A recovering addict in a troubled relationship who had a history of disappearing, turning up near a treatment clinic in her home state.

But Laura's sons were not satisfied. Jonathan had already launched a social media campaign. And her son Stephan, after hitting wall after wall trying to get answers by phone, made a decision: he and his then-fiancee drove from Vancouver, Washington to Billings, Montana themselves.

The Footage That Changed Everything

Stephan Johnson arrived in Billings, talked to police, and started knocking on doors. By what the lieutenant who later led the investigation described as a key pivotal moment in the case, Stephan happened to speak with a neighbor who mentioned they had security cameras pointed toward the street outside the house Laura had shared with Green. The footage from those cameras would become what prosecutors would later call their silent witness.

What the footage showed began with Laura walking into the house on the evening of September 13. It showed Green working in the yard when she arrived. That alone directly contradicted what Green had told police, that he had come home from work that evening to find her already gone. But the footage from September 14 was the more devastating discovery. At 5:48 in the afternoon, the camera captured Green coming out of his garage carrying what investigators described as a very heavy object, held cradle-style, covered in a red blanket. The object was consistent, the affidavit stated, with the size and shape of a human body. Green placed it into the rear seat of the passenger side of his pickup truck. About forty minutes later, he started a small fire toward the rear of the truck while it sat in the driveway. Investigators were unable to determine what he was burning. About ten minutes after that, he placed a shovel into the bed of the truck. He then drove away. He did not return for nearly three and a half hours.

A review of the full surveillance footage confirmed that at no point on September 14, 2018, did Laura Johnson walk out of or away from the residence under her own power.

When police brought Green in to speak with investigators on October 5, they told him about the video. He seemed surprised, according to Detective Brad Tucker. Then he stopped talking.

Investigators impounded Green's pickup truck and secured a search warrant for the home, declaring it a possible crime scene. A second search of the residence revealed very new carpet in the bedroom. A neighbor told investigators that on the night of September 13, she had heard Laura and Green engaged in what she described as a really, really intense fight. Forensic testing of the truck turned up three small reddish-brown stains on the door. Those swabs were sent to the Montana State Crime Lab, which compared them to DNA provided by Laura's parents. The result came back as very strong evidence that the blood belonged to Laura Johnson. A forensic DNA analyst stated the genetic markers in the blood sample could have come from just a narrow fraction of the population, and that Laura was among them.

By April 2019, Green had left Montana. He was found in Henderson, Nevada, where he had apparently already begun a new relationship. He was arrested on April 17, 2019 and charged with deliberate homicide. He was extradited to Montana and held in the Yellowstone County Detention Facility to await trial.

Trial and Conviction

The trial of Gregory Scott Green began on February 24, 2020, in Yellowstone County District Court. It lasted eight days. From the opening statement, Yellowstone County Attorney Scott Twito made the surveillance footage the center of everything. He called it the silent witness, the piece of evidence Green could not explain away, could not charm his way past, and could not escape. Green sat through proceedings largely stoic, though reporters noted he turned to news cameras and smiled at one point during the proceedings, an image that struck many observers as chilling given the context.

The defense, led by public defenders Gregory Paskell and Blaine McGivern, acknowledged the obvious difficulty of the video but argued the prosecution's case rested entirely on circumstantial evidence. They leaned on Laura's history of addiction, suggesting she had simply fled the relationship. They pointed out that no one would take the stand and testify to having witnessed Green kill Laura Johnson. "There will be no witness that will testify to knowing what happened to Laura Johnson," McGivern told the jury. "Nobody knows."

The prosecution countered with the phone data, showing that Laura's cell phone had traveled with Green as he moved around the valley on September 14, the day investigators believed he was disposing of her body. The phone had later pinged a tower in Vancouver, Washington, weeks after the disappearance, which Green's texts had been designed to frame as evidence that Laura had returned home. But investigators eventually established that the ping corresponded to an incoming call from Laura's ex-husband Howard, calling on his birthday. Laura had never answered it. She had never returned to Vancouver. The phone had simply bounced a signal off a tower near her hometown.

Green took the stand and testified in his own defense, maintaining that he had nothing to do with Laura's disappearance and that she had left on her own. The jury deliberated for roughly two hours before returning a guilty verdict on March 4, 2020. On May 16, 2020, Judge Jessica Fehr sentenced Gregory Scott Green to one hundred years in state prison for the deliberate homicide of Laura Johnson. The judge did not impose parole restrictions. Green is currently incarcerated at the Crossroads Correctional Center.

What Was Never Found

Laura Johnson's body has never been recovered. Investigators believe Green drove south of Laurel, Montana on the evening of September 14, 2018, based on the phone data placing him in that area during the hours he was away from the house. They have asked for the public's help in searching for potential burial sites and ground disturbances across the areas south of Laurel and east of Billings, in the communities of Shepherd, Worden, and Huntley. They have also asked the public to watch for any sign of two red rectangular suitcases.

The case is remembered in Billings partly as a story about the limits of what investigators can do when a victim is an adult with a complicated history, and about what a family can accomplish when they refuse to accept that those limits are the end of the story. Lt. Brandon Wooley, the detective lieutenant who worked the case, said it plainly: if the surveillance footage had not been located or recovered, he was not sure where the investigation would have ended up. It was Stephan Johnson, driving across the country with his fiancee and knocking on a neighbor's door, who found it.

Laura Johnson was forty-nine years old when she was killed. She had five sons who loved her. She had quilts to make and jewelry to finish and a life to rebuild. She had been saving money. She was almost out.

If you have any information about the location of Laura Johnson's remains, contact the Billings Police Department Investigations Division at 406-657-8473.

Sources

Benjamin Hayes

Benjamin Hayes is a blogger with a passion for true crime and unresolved mysteries. In his free time, Benjamin is an avid hiker and photographer. He finds solace and inspiration in nature, often trekking through the scenic trails of the Appalachian Mountains.