Walking with Johnny Ray

Parish accompanies convicted killer on his journey into the Catholic faith

A version of this story originally appeared in the Fall 2026 edition of The True Voice magazine. Copies of the magazine can be found at parishes across the archdiocese.

He remembers the Catholic strangers who kept showing up.

Johnny Ray had never met Sister Mary Anne Murphy, but in the early 1990s the late Servant of Mary sister put his name on the Sacred Heart Parish prayer list. Soon two parishioners he’d also never met, Margie O’Hanlon and Mary Lou Ruh, started driving to a Nebraska prison to visit him. Then, for more than two decades, it was Deacon Rick Crotty of Sacred Heart — who even drove to Tecumseh mid-chemotherapy and in snowstorms.

Ray, now 53, was 17 in 1990 when he fatally shot Mathew Mallory, 21, during a robbery in Omaha. He was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life without parole. Many of his childhood friends were already incarcerated as he prepared to begin his own sentence. But after his sentencing, at his lowest moment, he had an encounter with God that consoled him and gave him hope that God had a plan for his future.

“Grief changed to relief and hope in milliseconds,” Ray said, “just by hearing that voice, hearing my name.” He didn’t know how long he’d serve. He knew, somehow, it wouldn’t be forever.

As he wrestled with his faith, his hope continued to grow. O’Hanlon and Ruh were the first to visit, and word soon reached Deacon Crotty, who’d been doing prison ministry since 2001. Over the two decades that followed, it was the deacon’s visits, week after week, that carried Ray’s faith forward. They read Job and the New Testament together, but just as often talked football. “It’s a big difference between having a prison conversation and an outside social conversation,” Ray said. “He was my spiritual nourishment.” That steady presence, one Catholic after another, turned Ray toward the Catholic Church itself.

His faith still took years to settle. Reading “an eye for an eye” left Ray convinced he was unforgivable, until conversations with his Sacred Heart family gave him a fuller understanding of God’s mercy. “Once I started shaking my old belief, I knew that I was forgiven,” Ray said. “God forgave me. So I needed to forgive myself.”

A shift in U.S. Supreme Court sentencing law for juveniles eventually made possible what Ray says he’d been promised that first night: a path out of prison. He was resentenced in 2016 to a term of years, making parole possible.

He has never wavered on one point since: No number of years could measure what his crime cost. “I can’t put a number on his life,” Ray said. “That’s what I can’t do.”

In 2022, thanks to the Archdiocese of Omaha’s Jail Ministry Program, Ray was baptized and confirmed at the Omaha Correctional Center. His baptism drew a standing-room-only crowd of fellow inmates, many not Catholic, who came just to witness it. His sacramental records, he learned, were kept at Sacred Heart, just because it was the north Omaha parish nearest the prison.  But having them at Sacred Heart ended up meaning more to Ray.

“I think everything was written for me to be here,” he said in an interview from his parish.

After his parole in 2024, Ray began worshipping at the parish that offered visitors when he was in prison. “I look at everybody as family — the people that walked this time with me, one way or another,” Ray said. “I want to keep that connection.”

Now home in Omaha, his mission is reentry. He’s worked with Catholic Social Services’ prison reentry apostolate and is pursuing a peer support specialist certification through Community Alliance, hoping to accompany other men coming out of prison through the same transition Sacred Heart walked with him.

Every week at Sacred Heart, before Mass, a welcome letter is read aloud — naming those who are “just browsing” or “just got out of jail” among the many it says are wanted there. For Ray, that welcome was never just a line in a letter.

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