Idaho man, in prison when he was charged, found guilty in Nampa girl’s 1982 murder, rape
Four decades after Daralyn Johnson was killed in Nampa, a jury convicted an Idaho man of raping, beating and drowning the 9-year-old girl.
Following a six-week trial, a 12-person jury found 66-year-old David Dalrymple guilty of first-degree murder and rape in Daralyn’s death, according to the Canyon County Prosecutor’s Office. He’ll be sentenced at 9 a.m. Sept. 6 at the Canyon County Courthouse.
Dalrymple — who spent two decades behind bars for several violent crimes — could be sentenced to life in prison.
Daralyn was reported missing on Feb. 24, 1982, after she didn’t make it to the now-closed Lincoln Elementary School in Nampa. After a multiday search, her body was found 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 in his opening statement. “He took her off that street and he robbed her of her joy, of her innocence, of a childhood — and he took her life.”
When law enforcement announced Dalrymple as a suspect in the 1982 killing, he was already incarcerated for the 2004 kidnapping of a woman and her child, whom he sexually abused for several years, the Idaho Statesman previously reported. Dalrymple was convicted of three felonies and sentenced to at least 20 years in prison, with the option for a life sentence.
Charles Fain was initially charged and subsequently convicted of the crimes in November 1983. A few months later he was sentenced to death, and remained on death row for nearly two decades. He came within four days of being executed in 1991 before U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor stayed the capital punishment, the Statesman previously reported.
Fain was exonerated and released from prison in 2001, two years after he filed a motion to conduct DNA testing on pubic hairs that were found during the girl’s autopsy. It wasn’t until 2021 that Fain was declared innocent by the state of Idaho.
Dalrymple’s attorney, Jesse James, attempted to shift the blame back to Fain during his opening statement in Dalrymple’s trial, alleging that Fain had a similar car to one that was spotted with a little girl inside of it.
Investigators used the hair collected from the crime scene and genetic genealogy to locate the Dalrymple family, connecting Dalrymple to the killings and publicly identifying him as a suspect in 2020. He was officially charged with several crimes 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.
