Melody Felicano Johnson, right, admitted on April 8, 2024, to putting bleach in her husband’s coffee at their residence in Tucson, Arizona. She could be imprisoned for two years. (Law&Crime Network)
The woman who was caught on hidden camera adding bleach to her U.S. Air Force husband’s coffee has confessed to a lesser crime.
Melody Felicano Johnson, 40, pleaded guilty on Monday to two counts of adding poison or a harmful substance to food or drink. Prosecutors propose that she spend two years behind bars, but it could be up to four years. Following her release, she will be on probation for up to three years.
Wearing an orange jail jumpsuit, Johnson answered a series of questions from the judge and confirmed she agreed to the plea deal that dropped the attempted murder charge. A judge will sentence Johnson on May 10.
As Law&Crime previously reported, police in Tucson, Arizona, said Johnson had been poisoning her spouse’s coffee since he was stationed in Germany in March 2023. He is an airman with the U.S. Air Force and the couple had been going through a divorce at the time.
After two to three weeks of his coffee tasting bad, Johnson’s husband purchased pool chemical testing strips and the coffee pot water returned positive for high levels of chlorine even though the faucet water was normal.
Hidden camera video footage showed her trying to poison her husband by pouring bleach into his coffee maker — and the video was taken by the would-be victim himself.
“Boom,” he is heard saying in one self-recorded video after getting a positive result for chlorinated water.
According to officers, he set up a hidden camera in his home and it captured defendant Johnson pouring something into his coffee pot.
“He stated she knew that he would prep his coffee pot to be ready at night so that in the morning he just needed to turn it on to make his coffee,” documents show. “At that time he stopped drinking the coffee but continued to pretend to drink it as he did not want to make a report of this while in Germany.”
This pattern allegedly continued after the Air Force moved him on July 1 to the David Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson. He brought video evidence to police, and when the initial footage was not clear enough, he purchased even more cameras. He secretly recorded his wife making her way with bleach from the laundry room to the coffee maker and pouring the substance inside, police said.
Here is one such video dated July 16, 2023, from when the couple lived in permanent housing. A woman, identified as defendant Johnson, is in a small room pouring what appears to be a bleach bottle into a small bottle. The footage, which features time timestamps and is edited to depict different points of view, shows that in a matter of seconds, she made her way to the kitchen and poured the contents of the smaller bottle into the coffee maker.
Footage from July 5, 2023, when the couple lived in temporary housing, shows her pouring something into the machine while wearing just a towel.
Several videos depict the husband testing the water in the coffee pot, even comparing it to water from the tap. In the videos, he often commented on the smell and the soapy nature of the water in the machine.
“You can detect the odor from this distance,” he says in one video. “You can detect it.”
“Look at that,” he said, displaying the results of the test. “Completely altered. Wow. Wow, wow, wow.”
In this and other footage, he showed a close-up of the bubbly insides of the coffee maker’s water chamber.
Defendant Johnson remains at the Pima County Jail, online records show.