Four decades after Daralyn Johnson was murdered in Nampa, a jury convicted an Idaho man of raping, beating, and drowning the nine-year-old girl. After a six-week trial, a 12-person jury convicted 66-year-old David Dalrymple of first-degree murder and rape in Daralyn’s death, according to the Canyon County Prosecutor’s Office.
He will be sentenced at 9 a.m. on September 6 in the Canyon County Courthouse. Dalrymple, who has been incarcerated for two decades for a variety of violent acts, might face life in jail. Daralyn was reported missing on February 24, 1982, after she failed to arrive to Nampa’s now-closed Lincoln Elementary School.
Following a multiday search, her body was discovered 18 miles away in a drainage ditch near the Snake River. “The evidence that you are going to hear in this courtroom will establish that this defendant snatched her off of that street,” Canyon County Deputy Prosecutor Theodore Lagerwall told jurors during his opening remarks. ”
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He took her off that street and he robbed her of her joy, of her innocence, of a childhood — and he took her life.” Dalrymple was already in prison for the 2004 kidnapping of a lady and her child, whom he sexually abused for several years, when law police named him a suspect in the 1982 slaying, according to the Idaho Statesman.
Dalrymple was convicted of three felonies and sentenced to at least 20 years in jail, with the possibility of a life sentence. Charles Fain was initially prosecuted and then convicted of the offenses in November 1983. A few months later, he was sentenced to death and spent nearly two decades on death row.
In 1991, he was about to be executed when U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor postponed the death penalty, according to the Statesman. Fain was exonerated and released from prison in 2001, two years after filing a motion to test DNA on pubic hairs discovered during the girl’s autopsy. The state of Idaho did not proclaim Fain innocent until 2021.
During his opening statement in Dalrymple’s trial, Dalrymple’s attorney, Jesse James, attempted to shift the blame back to Fain, claiming that Fain drove a car similar to the one seen with a little girl inside idahostatesman Stated.
Investigators used hair from the crime scene and genetic genealogy to track down the Dalrymple family, linking Dalrymple to the killings and officially labeling him as a suspect in 2020. He was charged with various felonies in 2022. “It has been a long journey — 42 years — for Daralyn Johnson’s killer to finally be facing justice,” Lagerwall said during the trial.