By Brian Anderson
Valley Times

June 19, 2001

OAKLAND — Daniel Johnson was a big dreamer.

He had designs on driving an expensive truck, opening a country bar and living a highfalutin lifestyle.

Johnson wanted money, Alameda County prosecutor Colton Carmine told a jury Monday, but he did not want to work for it.

“This man is concerned about himself,” Carmine said, thrusting a finger at Johnson during closing arguments in his month-long trial. “All he thought about was the victim’s money.”

Charged with first-degree murder and special circumstances that could bring the death penalty, Johnson sat quietly as Carmine recounted the events leading up to the beating death of Vincent Henneberry 6.5 years ago in his Pleasanton house.

There was a trip to Crown Chevrolet where Johnson, 27, and Henneberry’s son Marc Vincent Henneberry, 27, told a salesman they were coming into a lot of money, Carmine said. They wanted matching pickups and seemed unconcerned about the lofty cost.

Johnson had bragged to the owner of Dublin’s Room With A Cue, Carmine told the six-man, six-woman jury during a three-hour presentation. He and Henneberry were about to be rich and an expensive pool cue was on the wish list.

“I think of Dan Johnson as a parasite, like a blood-sucking leech attached to Vincent Henneberry’s body,” he said. “He took everything he had.”

With three of four swings of a baseball bat, Vincent Henneberry was killed Jan. 3, 1995 as he walked into his house on Harpers Ferry Court.

Carmine said Johnson and Marc Henneberry used the man’s credit cards to fly to Reno where they blew through cash in casinos and the infamous brothel called the Mustang Ranch. They were arrested in their hotel room shortly after a concerned family friend notified police that something foul might have happened to Vincent Henneberry.

Johnson’s lawyer, Daniel Horowitz, also told jurors his client killed Henneberry. But money certainly was not the motivation, he said.

Johnson acted in self-defense and to protect Marc Henneberry, who Johnson believed had been subjected to years of physical abuse, Horowitz said. Both young men were developmentally slow and did not have the mental capacity to commit the perfect crime. Johnson, he said, was “not wired normally.”

“This case has to be the most goofy, stupidest, inept, fantastical, childish plan to kill someone that you could possibly see,” Horowitz said. “(Carmine’s) trying to make him into the Einstein of crime. (But) much of what he’s arguing to you here is in the absence of evidence.”

Marc Henneberry will stand trail after Johnson’s case concludes.

Horowitz will resume his presentation Wednesday.