Adams, 47, led police on a high-speed chase down the Glenn Highway in July 2007 with Johnston's dead body in the back of his car. Prosecutors say he beat her to death. He stands accused of first-degree murder and destroying evidence.
First a former girlfriend, and then his ex-wife, took the witness stand at the Palmer courthouse, each telling her own nightmarish story twice, the first time with the jury out of the room so Superior Court Judge Beverly Cutler could decide what jurors could and couldn't hear.
The part about Adams duct-taping his wife's mouth shut and holding a syringe to her neck was allowed. Smashing her windshield, since she didn't actually see him do it, was out.
Adams' attorney, Scott Sterling, would have liked jurors to hear none of this. The relationship with the girlfriend was 10 years ago, and the wife goes back even further, he argued. The jury had already heard enough testimony about his client's abusive behavior.
"The trial court is obliged to say when is enough enough," Sterling told the judge. "We're saying we've reached that point."
Assistant district attorney Rachel Gernat disagreed.
"Quite simply, your honor, enough is not enough because it was never enough for the defendant. He created this path of destruction in women that he left behind, including the current victim."
For the most part, Cutler agreed, so the jury heard what the women had to say. As Johnston's parents and teenage daughter sat in the back of the courtroom, these two offered a painful glimpse into what the final months of Johnston's life may have been like.
Both said Adams was a great guy at first. Charming, loving, attentive, giving. But it didn't last. By the end, both fled in fear, one to another town, the other to another state.
When Jacqueline Bell-Little met Adams in the late '90s, she was a speech pathologist and owned a house in Tucson, Ariz.
He introduced her to crack cocaine, she said, and her life took a dive from there. She ended up an addict. She lost her job, she lost her friends. Adams took her money, she testified. He pawned her things, and all these scary homeless people starting taking over her house.
She went on to describe a sordid stew of drugs and domestic violence. Adams would fly into rages, she said, often fueled by jealousy.
He kicked her, choked her, stepped on her head and held the dull end of a knife to her throat.
To keep her from calling the police, he said he'd plant drugs and get her arrested. He'd have her gang raped. He'd burn down her house.
After two years, she finally made a break for it.
Next on the stand was Kristine Foley, who met Adams in an Anchorage bar, married him in 1994 and fled for her life a couple of years later.
When it came time for her to identify her ex-husband for the record, she couldn't even look at him.
Again, things were good in the beginning, she told jurors. They lived in Anchorage a while, then Colorado Springs, Colo., then Anchorage again. But he became increasingly possessive. He didn't want her spending time with friends or family, she said. He didn't seem to want her out of his sight.
He'd become enraged, she told the court, sometimes fueled by drugs and alcohol. One time he destroyed the living room.
"He slashed all the furniture with a knife, he knocked antique pictures off the wall, he stomped the stereo to pieces."
He shoved her. He spat on her. He yanked a chunk of hair the size of a softball out of the back of her head.
Toward the end he threatened to kill her. He told her he had a place picked out in the mountains where he'd bury her.
Foley said her sister tried to get her to leave Adams.
"What made you not want to listen to her?" Gernat asked.
He begged her not to, she said. He promised he would change, that things would be different. At first she believed him. Then she was too afraid to leave.
Fourth of July 1996 was the last straw. They were on their way to watch fireworks when they started fighting. She got out of the car and started walking. He tried to run her down.
She got away, caught a ride home and went to bed. He showed up in the middle of the night, shouting: "Where are you, b---h ... You're dead." He dragged her out of bed by her hair, she said. He put duct tape over her mouth, pinned her down and held a syringe to her neck.
When he took the tape off, she pleaded with him. "Please don't kill me." She said she loved him. She talked him down.
When he calmed down and went to sleep, she slipped out of bed, out of the house, and with the help of her sisters, away for good, fleeing that day to another state.
On cross-examination, Sterling suggested that alcohol or drugs were part of the events described, which neither woman denied.
The prosecution said it expects to wrap up the state's case by mid-week.
Contact Debra McKinney at adn.com/contact/dmckinney.
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