Janitor who killed Prairie Village girl with overdose of chloroform gets chance at parole
The former school janitor convicted in the 1974 killing of 13-year-old Lizabeth Wilson of Prairie Village will get his second shot at being released from prison.
John Henry Horton remains in prison where he is serving a life sentence for her murder, but he is up for parole again this year.
The Kansas Prisoner Review Board will hold a public comment session Wednesday morning via Zoom, giving her family, public officials and others a chance to speak either in support or opposition of Horton’s release.
The comment session precedes a parole hearing for Horton, who is now 76 years old, that will be held next month. If granted, the earliest he can be released would be in November.
This is Horton’s second chance at parole. In 2018, the board denied his initial request and ordered him to serve another five years before his next chance to be released from prison.
The killing is one of Johnson County’s most notorious cold cases.
Lizabeth Wilson disappeared while walking through the parking lot of Shawnee Mission East High School on her way home from the Prairie Village swimming pool on July 7, 1974.
About six months later, her remains were found at a Lenexa construction site. Although Horton was a suspect at the start of the investigation, no charges were filed for decades.
In 2001, Kyle Shipps, a detective with the Prairie Village Police Department, asked for permission to look into the case. He had not been with the department during the initial investigation, but was intrigued by the case, which had turned cold..
Shipps teamed up with the Kansas Bureau of Investigation and they tracked down old leads and came up a new one that cracked the case.
Prosecutors argued that Lizabeth died after Horton drugged her with chloroform in order to sexually assault her.
In 2003, Horton was charged with first-degree murder. It took two trials and lengthy court appeals to convict Horton of first-degree murder. He was sentenced to life in prison. The Kansas Supreme upheld his conviction in 2014.
Under Kansas law in place at the time of the killing, he was eligible for parole after serving 15 years from the date he was first taken into custody.
