Christopher Todd Johnson, 49, was arrested nearly a year ago and charged with first-degree murder in the 2016 homicide of 51-year-old Donald Preston. He was taken into custody from a residential correctional facility in Cedar Rapids shortly after he was released from federal prison for possession of firearms as a felon.

Johnson was arrested on Feb. 2, 2023, and pleaded not guilty to the charge on Feb. 27. A trial was scheduled for Jan. 23, but on Jan. 4, defense attorney Charles Kenville filed a motion to set a plea hearing in the matter.

A plea hearing is now scheduled for Jan. 26 at the Webster County Courthouse.

The court documents do not indicate what the terms of the plea agreement are.

Johnson had been a person of interest in Preston’s death since 2017. Preston was found shot to death in a field near Moorland on Dec. 26, 2016. A farmer had found him.

The Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation 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.

In a search warrant filed during the investigation, DCI Special Agent Scot Ely stated that Preston was last seen alive on Dec. 20, 2016, leaving a 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.”

Following Johnson’s February 2023 arrest, Webster County Sheriff Luke Fleener told The Messenger he couldn’t talk about the facts of the case, 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 became 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.

“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.