An 88-year-old man doing time for a southeast Iowa murder has died in prison.
William Johnson was in the state prison’s hospice care unit when he died Friday of lung cancer. He’d been in prison for the past 39 years.
He was convicted of first degree murder for shooting a man to death in a Burlington bar in 1976.
Johnson claimed he shot Hobart Sharp in self-defense because he feared Sharp would knife him. Police say Sharp was unarmed when he was killed.