FEDERAL COURTS – A nearly 30-year-old mystery surrounding a Marine found slain in her barracks came to an end yesterday when her killer was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison.

Cold case conviction: 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 and 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. Yesterday: A judge sentences Johnson to 10 years in prison. SOURCES: San Diego U.S. Attorney's Office and Naval Criminal Investigative Service

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

In March, Johnson pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and admitted he intentionally stabbed Bluing 38 times.

It was a victory for cold-case investigator Julie Haney of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, who was the fifth agent to look into Bluing's case. Haney was told years ago that the case was so old and the evidence so weak that she might as well move on to something else.

She kept on it for years – even through a three-year assignment to the FBI after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Haney kept thinking about Bluing, racial tension at Camp Pendleton in the 1970s and the drunken words of a jailed Marine, and hoped 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, Bluing was a Southern girl who had just arrived in California. Her 2-year-old daughter lived with relatives in Nashville, Tenn.

Bluing, a private first class based at Camp Pendleton, 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.

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

The slaying 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 Ku Klux Klan.

In the Bluing case, 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 1979, 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 recanted. He said he'd been in Bluing's room the night before, but denied killing her.

The case grew cold at that point. A series of NCIS investigators took up the case, including one who, in 1994, called on one of Johnson's ex-girlfriends. The ex-girlfriend 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-case investigations.

In 2004, 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 agreements, 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 yesterday what led his client to accept the plea deal, nor would Landon talk about Johnson's version of the events.

Landon 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 and jealousy.

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

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Onell Soto: (619) 593-4958; onell.soto@uniontrib.com