Christopher Todd Johnson, 49, was arrested by Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation Special Agent Evan Thompson at the Gerald R. Hinzman Center, a residential correctional facility in Cedar Rapids on Thursday.

According to the arrest warrant, Johnson had previously been an inmate at the federal medium-security prison in Butner, North Carolina. A search of the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ inmate finder revealed that Johnson was released from the BOP on Thursday as well.

In October 2019, Johnson pleaded guilty in federal court to possession of firearms as a felon. He was later sentenced to six and a half years in prison.

Johnson was arrested in May 2017 after officers were dispatched to a Dayton residence on reports of a suspicious person, later identified as Johnson, possibly stalking the female occupant. Officers located Johnson nearby in a barn, where they seized two guns — a Ruger .22 caliber pistol and a Jimenez Arms .22 caliber pistol — along with ammunition on his person.

At the time of Johnson’s arrest, he had been a person of interest in Preston’s murder for nearly six months.

Preston was found shot to death in a field near Moorland on Dec. 26, 2016. A farmer had found him. The DCI and the Webster County Sheriff’s Office began a joint investigation into the death. An autopsy two days later concluded that Preston had died of gunshot wounds to the head and abdomen and the death was ruled a homicide. At the scene, investigators found three unspent .40-caliber rounds and six spent .40-caliber ammunition casings.

According to court documents, Fleener, then a sergeant, filed a search warrant application for Johnson’s 1992 Toyota Camry and a trailer home at 108 Eighth St. S.W. in Dayton in search of evidence “relevant to the ongoing investigation into the death of Donald Preston.” The application was dated Jan. 20, 2017.

According to the search warrant, Johnson had told investigators that Preston had been in the vehicle with Johnson prior to the vehicle being impounded in Greene County, and that both men were shooting a handgun while in the vehicle.

On the morning of Dec. 21, 2016, a resident of Jefferson reported a suspicious vehicle and when Greene County Sheriff’s Office personnel arrived, they found Johnson’s Toyota sitting in a field on the east side of the road on R Avenue north of 218th Street. Both license plates had been “ripped off,” leaving partial pieces of the plates. Deputies found a bag of tools in the car’s backseat and had learned the registered owner, Johnson, had a prior history of burglary. With the combined suspicious circumstances of the missing license plates and the burglar’s tools, the deputies impounded the vehicle.

Upon searching the vehicle, DCI Special Agent Scot Ely found two cell phones — one of which he says in another search warrant application that he believes belonged to Preston.

According to several search warrants, investigators conducted multiple interviews and learned that on Dec. 19, 2016, Johnson had pulled out a .40-caliber handgun and pointed it at a woman’s head while at a residence in Fort Dodge. The woman then texted Preston for help and when Preston arrived, he confronted Johnson.

Another witness to the incident later left with Preston and Johnson and after dropping off Preston at another location, the witness and Johnson went to Walmart around 7:30 a.m. to purchase ammunition before going to Lizard Creek to practice shooting the handgun.

According to the search warrants, investigators recovered several .40-caliber casings from the Lizard Creek site and the DCI lab confirmed they were fired from the same firearm as the casings found around Preston’s body at the crime scene.

Further on in the search warrant, Ely states that Preston was last seen alive on Dec. 20, 2016, leaving the residence in Fort Dodge with Johnson in Johnson’s car. Preston’s last cell phone activity was around 4:30 p.m. on that day.

“Although Preston’s body was not found until Dec. 26, there is no indication Preston was alive after Dec. 20 when he was with Johnson,” Ely wrote in an October 2017 search warrant for Johnson’s cell phone records. “The matched shell casings indicate that Christopher Johnson’s .40 Glock was used to kill Donald Preston.”

On Friday, Fleener told The Messenger he can’t talk about the facts of the investigation, but said that Johnson’s name was brought up early in the investigation as a possible person of interest and through “numerous leads,” interviews and collection of evidence “it become pretty clear that he was our prime suspect.”

The volume of information, leads and evidence collected, however, take time for investigators to work through, he said.

The Sheriff’s Office and DCI’s move to arrest and charge Johnson with the murder this week — just over six years after the crime — was a result of his release from federal prison, Fleener said.

“We had put this case together probably three years ago and talked to the prosecutor’s office and were kind of dotting the I’s and crossing the T’s, waiting for his federal sentence time to end to begin this process,” he said.

Now that the case is in the hands of the Webster County Attorney’s Office for prosecution, Preston’s family is that much closer to getting answers and seeing justice for his murder.

“Always our goal is to get closure and some answers for the family because that’s what nags at them even after all this time,” Fleener said. “We are now in the process of being able to tell them what we believe really happened to him.”

Johnson had his initial appearance in Webster County Magistrate Court on Friday morning, His case was assigned to the Mason City Public Defender’s Office. A preliminary hearing is scheduled for Feb. 14.

Johnson remains jailed on a $1 million cash-only bond.