Sex offender who eluded capture since 1994 found living in Georgia

Editor’s note: This article has been updated throughout with more details.

MACON — His neighbors sometimes saw him taking walks, listening to music while he strolled. He kept to himself, the neighbors say, never causing trouble.

He was known around the apartments that overlook one of this city’s main thoroughfares as “Bud.”

The endearing nickname seems to have served him well.

Because the name he was living under wasn’t his. And his real name, had anyone known it, may well have landed him behind bars on the other side of the country, where he’d escaped from a minimum-security prison nearly 30 years ago.

Steven Craig Johnson, an Oregon sex offender, had served about five years of a 20-year sentence for crimes that included sex abuse and four counts of attempted sodomy when he slipped away while on a prison work crew at an unfenced lockup in Salem in November 1994. Published reports there said the facility housed inmates who were within four years of being released.

He was captured here at his fifth-floor apartment on Tuesday, the day after his 70th birthday.

While on the run, the authorities said he had assumed the name of a boy who died in Texas in 1962. That boy’s name: William Cox.

The U.S. Marshals Service, in a news release announcing Johnson’s apprehension, did not offer specific details of what led marshals to Johnson, but officials noted in their statement that “new investigative technology employed by the Diplomatic Security Service developed new leads in the case.”

Investigators were said to have learned that Johnson had at some point “stolen the identity” of the Texas boy and somehow obtained the child’s birth certificate. In 1995, Johnson was said to have been issued a social security number in the child’s name and then, in 1998, used the alias to get a Georgia driver’s license.

Upon his escape in November 1994 from a prison in Salem, Oregon, officials there believed he may have been headed to Texas. Why wasn’t mentioned.

It was also not immediately known how long he had been in the Macon area, just that he had been living in an apartment here since 2011. Sheriff’s officials in Macon said he had no known local arrests.

The apartment building where he was said to be staying, a five-story, 52-unit complex, is typically home to older residents. It lies about five blocks west of I-75, just east of the Allman Brothers Band Museum at the Big House, along Vineville Avenue, which leads into and out of downtown.

An alert circulated by Oregon Department of Corrections officials in early 2019 described the hazel-eyed, 6-foot-tall Johnson as “a pedophile” who “presents a high probability of victimizing pre-teen boys” and that he “should not be allowed contact with children.”

Johnson was booked into the Bibb County jail on Tuesday and was awaiting extradition to Oregon, the authorities said.

Johnson, whose birth name, “Steven Johnson,” no doubt lent him a cloak of anonymity in his youth — in an era before computer databases made people easier to locate — appears to have adopted a similarly common and effective pseudonym, “William Cox,” while in hiding.

Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.

But folks at Clisby Towers apartments in Macon, where Johnson lived on the top floor, just called him “Bud.”

Thursday afternoon, while some residents sat in the shade of a front-door awning there, a couple of them spoke fondly of the man they had no idea had been a fugitive since 1994.

“Nineteen ninety-four? I wasn’t even born,” said Devonte Goolsby, 28.

Goolsby, whose mother lives in the building, was unaware of Johnson’s arrest.

“He was a good person,” Goolsby said. “He was one of those type people you could actually talk to, vent to. … You know how old people try to talk to young people? … He’d say, ‘Young man, you got it.’”

When a reporter informed him of Johnson’s past, Goolsby said, “It gives me some chill bumps, like I don’t want to talk to nobody. It makes me want to stay inside the house.”

Clisby Towers resident Terro Lundy said Johnson was “a pretty good guy.”

“Bud didn’t mess with no damn body,” Lundy, 66, said. “He didn’t do nothing but speak and take his morning walk and come back in his apartment.”

Lundy, who spent time in prison himself in the early 1990s for driving infractions and drug possession, said if he had been in Johnson’s shoes he would have gotten a lawyer and turned himself in. “Everybody makes a mistake, you know?”

On Tuesday, when members of the U.S. Marshals Southeast Regional Fugitive Task Force showed Johnson’s picture to the apartment managers, deputy marshal Chris Wright said someone recognized Johnson and said, “That’s Bud.”

Wright said he and his fugitive squad colleagues considered having Johnson called down to the front desk to pick up a package. Instead they went upstairs and knocked on his door. When Johnson opened it, he tried to stay in character, Wright said. He let the marshals in and told them his name was William Cox.

The marshals, probing to see how versed Johnson was in the details of his assumed identity, asked him where his parents, or rather the parents of William Cox, were born.

“He stumbled for a second,” Wright said, “and said, ‘I don’t know.’”

Before long, the deputy marshal said, Johnson “admitted who he actually was.”

“When 30 years of being on the run came to an end on a random Tuesday afternoon, he was surprised,” Wright said. “He was cordial on the ride to jail.”

On the way, Wright was curious about something.

So he asked Johnson about it, whether he’d ever had, in the course of his life on the lam, any close encounters with the cops.

Considering Johnson’s success at laying low, his reply wasn’t all that surprising.

“Absolutely not,” he said.

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