More Information on Deceased Woodruff Girl`s Body

Trella Ballard hasn`t been back to the farmland where Ashley Johnson`s 12-year old body, six years ago. But she remembers what she saw there, like it was yesterday. "There`s never a day that`s gone by, that I haven`t thought about her," Ballard says. Ashley Johnson had been missing from her grandmother`s home in Cotton Plant, Woodruff County for three months, when Ballard found her body. Ballard had been looking for her missing dog for weeks. She went into an abandoned farmhouse on Highway 360 looking for it. "I pulled up at the end of the driveway, got out, and was kind of to the left of the house, went around in the field and I smelled something," she said. "Then it had the orange tarp, and the end of the orange tarp, one ofher legs was hanging out and you could see the bottom part of her leg and her foot." Ashley`s body was wrapped in that tarp, she says, and it looked as if she`d been burned. Weeks later she saw an article in the Brinkley newspaper about the body. She`s kept it ever since. "But I never had a photograph, I never heard anything on it. It kind of shocked me her body was there that long," she said. And now Ballard has a face to match the body, that haunted her for weeks. Ballard also says police never took a statement from her, they never questioned her about what she found. Cotton Plant Police Chief Archie Roark says he couldn`t find any other reports than a supplemental report made from then-Police Chief Todd Brown to the Woodruff County Sheriff`s Department. Meanwhile, Roark says he plans to do a little more investigating of his own to find out why Ashley disappeared and how she died. Arkansas State Police say their investigation into Ashley`s death is still active