Breckenridge Texan

The Texas Department of Public Safety announced Friday, Oct. 11, that a 14-year-old murder case in Stephens County has been solved.

On Jan. 18, 2010, Jimmy Earl Whitt was discovered fatally shot in his residence in Stephens County. The Stephens County Sheriff’s Office, Breckenridge Police Department and the Texas Rangers began an investigation into Whitt’s death, interviewing multiple individual and ultimately developing Charles Larry Johnson as a suspect.

Jimmy Earl Whitt

The investigation continued through 2015 but was suspended due to the lack of new leads or developments that would enable successful prosecution of the murder.

In 2024, the Texas Rangers Unsolved Crime Investigation Program (UCIP) assisted the Stephens County Sheriff’s Office, re-investigating the case. During this new investigation, multiple interviews with individuals related to the original investigation were conducted revealing new details. Through the new investigation, Johnson was confirmed to be responsible for the murder of Whitt and was also found to be in possession of firearms and jewelry which had been removed from Whitt’s home at them time of his murder.

The case was presented to the 90th Judicial District Attorney’s Office, which agreed that sufficient evidence had been uncovered to prosecute Johnson for the murder of Whitt, but it was also discovered the Johnson had died in March 2022.

Stephens County Sheriff Kevin Roach said that when he returned to the Sheriff’s Office in 2017, he began investigating unsolved cases in the county and one of them was Whitt’s murder.

“(Johnson) was developed as a suspect in the original investigation, but for whatever reason, he was never prosecuted,” Roach said. “But what we were looking at is, with advancements in technology, seeing if there was maybe other DNA testing or something we could do to help confirm him as a suspect. … The Rangers re-interviewed some people that were originally interviewed during the initial investigation to just confirm some things.”

Roach said he and the Texas Rangers investigator came to the same conclusion — that Johnson, a convicted felon who had served time in prison, was responsible for Whitt’s murder. Since Johnson is dead, the case is now considered closed.

The Sheriff’s Office is continuing to investigate several other cold cases in the county, including two unsolved murders and a missing person case. “We have several cold cases that we have open as cold cases that we continue to try to investigate,” Roach said. “Some of them are so old that I don’t have much hope we’ll ever resolve them. But we do have more.”

The Texas Ranger UCIP was created to assist Texas law enforcement agencies investigating unsolved homicides or violent serial crimes. Since there is no statute of limitations on the offense of murder, investigators pursue these cases to a successful resolution or until no viable leads remain.