A Macomb County jury has once again found 41-year-old Henry Johnson guilty in the brutal 2013 stabbing deaths of Tina Geiger and her 11-year-old daughter Kristine, delivering a verdict on all counts after deliberating for exactly two hours following a trial that ran from September 22 through September 30. The retrial came after Johnson successfully appealed his original 2022 conviction, forcing prosecutors to walk a new jury through evidence from a killing that happened more than 13 years ago inside a Clinton Township apartment.
Johnson was convicted of two counts of first-degree premeditated murder and two counts of felony murder, according to FOX 2 Detroit, which cited information from the Macomb County Prosecutor's Office. Tina Geiger was 36 years old and her daughter Kristine was 11 when both were murdered on July 24, 2013, inside the Parkway Village Apartments. Johnson and his brother, Tony Johnson, stabbed both victims to death and sexually assaulted Kristine before killing her, per the same outlet's reporting.
The case sat cold for six years before a forensic breakthrough finally identified a suspect. In 2019, Clinton Township police reopened the unsolved case and identified Tony Johnson as a suspect after a bloody palm print on a closet door in Kristine's bedroom was matched to him; fingerprints taken during an unrelated arrest in Detroit separately matched fingerprints found at the scene; subsequent testing matched blood found on a stairwell at the scene to Henry Johnson, according to ClickOnDetroit.
A False Lead Delayed Justice for Years
The path to that forensic match was anything but direct. Immediately after the bodies were discovered in July 2013, Clinton Township police arrested another man, Jay Thomas Miller, but he was never charged with homicide — he was ultimately sentenced only to probation for resisting an officer, ClickOnDetroit reports. That early misdirection left the double murder unsolved for six years before DNA technology finally pointed investigators toward the Johnson brothers.
Store surveillance footage from the day of the attack showed Tony Johnson near Tina and Kristine Geiger at a local 7-Eleven before the brothers followed them home, according to the same ClickOnDetroit report. Both victims were mentally impaired and well known in their neighborhood, details that underscore just how vulnerable they were in the hours before the attack.
Tina Geiger suffered approximately 60 stab wounds, while Kristine suffered more than 20 stab wounds, primarily to her neck, according to CBS News, which attributed the counts to the Detroit Free Press. That same reporting confirms Kristine was sexually assaulted before she was killed.
First Conviction, Then an Appeal That Reopened the Case
Henry and Tony Johnson were first convicted in November 2022, when a Macomb County jury deliberated for less than two hours before finding both brothers guilty on all counts of first-degree premeditated murder and felony murder, CBS News reported at the time. Both were sentenced to life without parole in December 2022. Tony Johnson remains behind bars on that original conviction, per FOX 2 Detroit.```}}{{} Henry Johnson's case took a different turn when he won a new trial on appeal, arguing he had received ineffective assistance of counsel during the 2022 proceedings.
That appeal forced prosecutors to present the same complex forensic evidence — the palm print, the stairwell blood, the surveillance footage — to an entirely new jury four years later. The station's report notes that Johnson had been held at the Macomb County Jail on a $50,000 cash bond since his September 2020 arrest by Clinton Township police and the U.S. Marshals Task Force, and he remained in custody through the appeal and his September 2026 reconviction.
Mandatory Life Sentence Looms in December
Michigan law leaves no room for discretion in cases like this one. Under Michigan Compiled Laws Section 750.316, adult convictions for first-degree premeditated murder or felony murder carry an automatic sentence of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, according to the Law Offices of Joseph A. Simon, PLLC. Henry Johnson is scheduled to be sentenced on December 2, 2026, and that mandatory penalty means his new sentence will mirror the one he received in 2022.
Macomb County Prosecutor Peter J. Lucido thanked the jury for delivering justice to the victims and their families, noting that more than 13 years had passed since the murders. Investigators used cold-case forensic re-examinations to resolve this case.
Tina Geiger's sister is Rebeckka Mustaffa.
