Defendant pleads guilty in triple homicide in Mounds View

Saying only "I was high" by way of explanation, Johnny Lee Ellis Jr. pleaded guilty Wednesday in Ramsey County District Court to murdering his girlfriend, her special-needs sister and their mother last October in their Mounds View home.

Ellis, 39, entered a plea to three counts of intentional second-degree murder and agreed to serve consecutive sentences for each. That means he will be sentenced to at least 76 1/2 years in prison, according to the county attorney's office.

District Judge Edward Wilson will sentence Ellis on Aug. 3.

Police said Ellis was dating Angela Vigen, 40, and had been living at the home she shared with her sister, Jennifer Vigen, 35, and their mother, Jolyn Vigen, 75. Jennifer had Down syndrome, and Angela was an office manager at TSE Inc., an agency that serves people with disabilities.

The plea hearing offered no insight into the motive for the killings. "I was high," was all Ellis said.

Still, the guilty plea brought some relief to the Vigen family and those who knew the victims.

"We're so happy for the family that they don't have to go through a trial," said Lynne Megan, CEO and president of TSE. Megan knew all three women because Jennifer Vigen had received services from TSE for about nine years.

According to the criminal complaint, the Ramsey County medical examiner determined that Jolyn and Jennifer Vigen bled to death from stab wounds. Angela Vigen died as a result of multiple sharp-force injuries to her head and blunt-force injury to her forehead. A 2-inch portion of a broken knife blade was lodged in her brain.

Ellis said he killed the women on Oct. 23 or 24; their bodies were found Oct. 27.

Mounds View police said at the time that Jolyn's and Jennifer's bodies were found about 12:30 p.m. that Monday at the Vigens' home in the 5100 block of Sunnyside Road when a relative who had been unable to reach the women called police. Angela Vigen's body was found in a locked basement room about 8 p.m. after authorities conducted a more thorough search. A bloody hammer was found near her corpse.

While investigators were processing the house that evening, Minneapolis police were called to an apartment at 3001 N. 3rd St. on a report that a man was threatening to kill himself because he had committed a crime in another city.

They found Ellis with a knife in a back bedroom. He was threatening to kill himself and hurt the officers, police said.

Police used a Taser on him, but he began to stab himself in the chest. Police used the Taser again, and officers wrestled the knife away.

As he was being led from the building in handcuffs, Ellis tried to jump off a third-floor railing, police said.

Ellis had a mental health evaluation to see if he was competent to stand trial. In December, he was ruled competent.

Ellis' guilty plea will help "put closure to this horrific thing that he did," said Betty Tangen, who worked with Jolyn Vigen for nearly 20 years at the Head Start program in Pennington County. Jolyn Vigen moved with two of her daughters to Mounds View from Thief River Falls, Minn., 10 years ago after retiring from her job as director from the Head Start program.

"It was so brutal," Tangen said. "I don't understand this kind of personality and what happened. But maybe he doesn't either."