A 30-year timeline Dec. 25, 1978: Pfc. Suesette Bluing is found stabbed 38 times in her barracks at Camp Pendleton. April 29, 1979: Pfc. Michael Johnson says “I killed Suesette” while jailed at a Yuma brig. 1979: Johnson visits a childhood friend, says he killed Bluing, but doesn't give details. 2004: An investigator interviews the friend, who tells them what Johnson said. 2006: Johnson is indicted on charges of premeditated murder and murder during an attempted rape, and arrested. March 28, 2008: Johnson pleads guilty to voluntary manslaughter. Prosecutors agree to drop murder charges. Monday: A judge sentences Johnson to 10 years in prison. SOURCES: San Diego U.S. Attorney's Office and Naval Criminal Investigative Service

FEDERAL COURTS – A 30-year-old mystery surrounding the death of a Marine found stabbed to death in her barracks came to an end Monday when her killer was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison.

Michael Johnson said nothing to the judge who sent him away for killing 19-year-old Suesette Bluing.

He said enough in March, pleading guilty to voluntary manslaughter and admitting he intentionally stabbed her 38 times.

It was a victory for cold-case investigator Julie Haney, of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service.

The fifth agent to look into Bluing's case, Haney was told years ago that the case was so old, the evidence so weak, that she might as well close it and move on to something else.

She kept on it for years – even through a three-year detail to the FBI after the Sept. 11 attacks.

She kept thinking about Bluing, racial tension on Camp Pendleton in the 1970s and the drunken words of a jailed Marine, hoping to turn her hunches into evidence.

The case ultimately turned on long-held secrets, not forensic evidence, which in this instance was of little use.

In 1978, Suesette Bluing was a 19-year-old Southern girl just arrived in California.

Her 2-year-old daughter lived with relatives in Nashville, Tenn.

A private first class based at Camp Pendleton, she had kitchen duty, but also liked to spend time off-base, following the lure of the beaches and the freedom that life in Southern California represented for many.

A black woman, Bluing dated a white man who lived off base.

Not everyone was happy about it.

“When I go out, the guys heckle me. I'm scared,” she told a high school friend in a phone call the night before she died. “I already have some of the black guys upset with me because I associate with white guys also.”

The friend told a reporter at the time that Bluing had decided to stay in her room when she wasn't working.

But that didn't save her.

Shortly after 6 a.m. Christmas Day, Bluing, whose two roommates had left the base for the holiday, was found dead in her motel-style co-ed barracks. She had been stabbed in the chest and suffocated with a pillow. The way her body lay suggested a sexual attack.

The homicide of a black woman on the North County base made news around the country. Two years earlier, 14 black Marines had been convicted of assaulting seven white Marines they believed to be with the KKK.

Investigators interviewed more than 130 Marines, including another black 19-year-old private first class, Michael Johnson.

Nothing he said raised suspicion, and the investigation initially focused on the Marine who found her.

Then, in April, Johnson, who by then had transferred to a base in Yuma, Ariz., was jailed for assaulting an officer.

“I killed Suesette,” he said in the brig, apparently intoxicated, according to an account recently filed in court by federal prosecutor Paul Cook. “I killed Bluing.”

By the time investigators from Camp Pendleton caught up with him, Johnson had taken that back. He said he'd been in Bluing's room the night before, but denied killing her.

The case grew cold at that point, with a series of NCIS investigators taking a crack at it, including one who, in 1994, called on one of Johnson's ex-girlfriends, who said she didn't know anything about Bluing's death.

NCIS Special Agent Haney, who was in high school when Bluing was killed, got the case in 2000.

Johnson was her prime suspect.

He had tried to date Bluing, but she rebuffed his advances.

He told other Marines she should be killed for being a black woman who dated white men. And, after she died, he said she got what was coming to her.

Haney split her time between that case and other cold investigations.

In 2004, after three years on terror investigations, she called the ex-girlfriend the other agent had contacted 10 years earlier.

This time, the girlfriend mentioned a childhood friend of Johnson's whom investigators hadn't known about.

The childhood friend said Johnson visited him in Fresno days after the killing, and said he had killed Bluing.

“He had kept that a secret since 1979,” Haney said.

Johnson, a truck driver living in Stockton, was arrested on murder charges in October 2006, and the case wound through the courts for more than a year.

In February, prosecutors made Johnson an offer – plead guilty to voluntary manslaughter, with a 10-year sentence, and we'll drop the murder charges.

Like other plea bargains, it ensured a conviction and eliminated uncertainty of what a jury might do – especially with testimony about things that happened 30 years ago.

Johnson's lawyer, Alex Landon, wouldn't say Monday what led to the March plea, nor talk about his client's version of the events of that Christmas morning.

He simply pointed to the plea bargain, in which Johnson said he killed “while in a sudden quarrel or heat of passion, caused by adequate provocation.”

In court, lawyers referred to different motives: racial animosity, heat of passion, jealousy.

“It really doesn't matter,” prosecutor Cook said, “because Suesette Bluing is dead at the hands of this defendant.”

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