An Alaska man who is missing on the Big Island of Hawaii is wanted for questioning in the murder of a former Tustin woman.
The body of Brittany-Jane Royal, a 25-year-old who was two months pregnant, was found tangled in fishing line in the Pacific last Tuesday. Medical examiners later concluded she had been strangled.
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Detectives want to talk with Boaz D. Johnson, a 22-year-old who was last seen camping with Royal near Kalapana, the coastal area east of Hawaii Volcanoes National Park and 30 miles south of Hilo.
Johnson, of Petersburg, Alaska, last spoke to his family at noon on Monday, May 27.
Royal attended the Interior Design Institute of Newport Beach but quit a few credits shy of graduating. Her last permanent address was in Tustin. She had been traveling the world the past six years and had just moved to the Big Island.
Last month, she flew home to tell her family she was pregnant. “She was thrilled,” her father, Ted Royal, told KCBS/Channel 2. “We were all thrilled.”
Now, the grieving father said of his daughter and unborn grandchild, “We lost two souls.”
He would not go into his daughter's relationship with Johnson but did say he had met the father of her daughter's baby. “I think there's gonna be a lot coming out in the next few days,” he said.
Schuyler Royal, the woman's brother, flew to Hawaii and told KCBS he couldn't imagine why someone would want to hurt her.
“Her life was to see the world and then experience everything that she could,” he said. “I loved her so much, and she was the best sister I could ever ask for.”
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.