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March 24, 2006
LONESOME FUGITIVE A look inside the life of the 'Bandit'CHILDHOOD FRIENDS FONDLY REMEMBER GEORGE JOHNSTON
By ROBIN FLINCHUM
The Burns lived on Ambrose Avenue, two houses down from the Johnstons, a family with four boys. Between them was a house with a well-tended flower garden and a picket fence. When young Robbie Johnston wanted to play with Sue's younger brother Bobby Burns, he slipped a picket out of its slot, snuck through the gap, quickly replaced the board and took a shortcut across the garden. George Robert "Robbie" Johnston, as his childhood friends remember him, was always like that - very quick, very smart, and determined to do things his own way. So, decades later when they learned he had been fast and clever enough to elude capture by law enforcement in four Western American states and achieve the status of a minor legend, they weren't altogether surprised. But it did surprise and grieve them to learn some of the other elements of the story of the man who became known as the Ballarat Bandit after his exploits in the Death Valley and Nye County deserts garnered him local press. That he had resorted to petty crime and that he had taken his own life just didn't fit with the Robbie Johnston they remembered. But they hadn't seen him since before his arrest in 1997 in connection with the largest marijuana crop ever confiscated in the history of Prince Edward Island. They hadn't seen how his mental state deteriorated in prison and afterward, prompting parole board officials to deem him a danger to himself when he jumped parole the last time in 2002. Now over 50, Bob Burns remembers that his friend Robbie Johnston carried two things in his pockets as a kid - firecrackers and dog biscuits. The biscuits were for a big collie that followed him around the neighborhood, or younger boys who could be tricked into eating them, and the firecrackers were to startle his friends and liven things up. "He was always a little strange," said Burns, "but I kind of looked up to him." Even then, Johnston had a fascination for firearms and already owned a small arsenal of juvenile weapons. He was a crack shot with his BB and pellet guns, according to Burns. When his father, a brigadier general and World War II hero, was away from home, Johnston snuck his German war souvenirs out and showed them to the other boys. "He'd have a German Luger, a Nazi helmet. When we were playing war you never knew when he'd lob a real grenade at you." Burns remembered. But while the favorite games for the band of boys who roamed the Brighton streets were war, team chase, and cowboys and Indians, none of his friends remembered Robbie as violent tempered. Fearless and even reckless, but never violent. What they remembered is that he had a need for speed - to move quickly in body, mind and conveyance. Burns said he remembered a photograph taken of them in childhood. "I was on my tricycle pedaling," he said, "and Robbie was whizzing by in the background on a scooter. You couldn't even see it was him he was going so fast." It was symbolic of Johnston's relationship to the world around him. And this need would only intensify as he grew older. As a teenager, Woody White, who lived two streets over, also looked up to Robbie Johnston. While White stood perhaps a foot taller than his older friend, he said Johnston was the clever one; the one girls were drawn to, though he rarely reciprocated their interest. "He was an outlaw from the beginning and he was always interesting to us because he was doing things, like driving down Main Street at 70 miles an hour and dodging lampposts." Johnston loved anything that could make him go fast. Eventually, the two boys began riding motorcycles. "He was great to ride with," White said. "He was fearless. He'd go over a blind hill at a hundred miles an hour and never get hurt. He'd kind of clear the path ahead of you." Johnston was in constant motion, White said. "He'd borrow a car on Friday night and put a thousand miles on it over the weekend, just driving it around town. He'd even just drive around the block, drinking all the while." White and Johnston even took their first drinks together - two glasses of rum in White's kitchen, White said. But the edge that set Johnston apart from the other boys, and made him something of a hero among them growing up, drew him in a darker direction as he approached adulthood. White remembers that Johnston began experimenting with and selling drugs and was first arrested for trafficking marijuana when he was about 17 years old. After that his connection with the Brighton neighborhood, his family, and his friends, changed. It was a different kind of speed, intravenously injected methamphetamine, according to White and Burns, that really changed Johnston. After he began using the drug, White said, "Speed really wrecked him, changed him completely, even his face changed. The guy I knew was sophisticated and soft-spoken, next thing I knew he was redneck trailer trash." Johnston dropped out of high school in the 11th or 12th grade and devoted himself full time to the drug trade, said White. But apparently this finally took its toll and Johnston stopped using hard drugs though he continued to use marijuana. Johnston learned the drywall trade, as did Burns and White, though they did not learn it together. As adults, both of the other men did work with Johnston from time to time. "He would work 16 hours a day and sleep at the job site," White said "and always had lumps of cash, maybe even a hundred thousand dollars. He made and lost more money than most people ever see." But Johnston's need to keep moving finally prompted him to head west. When he went, he left Bob Burns a $500 set of tools that Burns still uses to this day. Both men remember Johnston as one of the smartest men they ever knew and were awed by his ability to teach himself any skill simply by reading a manual. Both felt that Johnston, a restless loner, had been born about 100 years too late and would have been better suited to a life of the kind Old West legends are made of. Burns and White, who kept in sporadic touch with their friend, heard tales of his American adventures, riding across the United States on a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, prospecting in the Death Valley desert, and all the while staying below official radar, supporting himself by finding under-the-table drywall jobs or other transient sources of funds. He had an affinity for the wide-open American Southwest, Burns said. Some time in the late 1980s Johnston met a woman named Maura, also known as Tommi, from Canada's West Coast and when he finally returned to Prince Edward Island, they were married by common law and had four little girls. At least two of the girls, Burns said, were supposed to have been born in the United States, one in Arizona. By this time, whatever he did and wherever he went, Burns said, Johnston's prime directive was to stay below official radar. His girls were born with no official records in the United States, he told Burns, so that when they returned to Canada, the government there would never know of their existence. On Prince Edward Island, Johnston established a marijuana farm that would turn out to be the largest known grow in the Island's history, as well as a crude hash oil laboratory. The family lived, according to Burns, in a remote area behind a locked gate. His girls did not attend school or make use of Canada's socialized health care system, though Maura Johnston was battling terminal leukemia. Later he would boast that he had not paid taxes in many years. "But he treated his family with respect and always done right by them," Burns said. With the income generated from Johnston's massive illegal cash crops, he provided the family with expensive vehicles, including a red Chrysler LeBaron for his wife, computers, the latest toys and all terrain vehicles. But court documents generated after Johnston's arrest in 1997 and obtained by The Guardian newspaper of Prince Edward Island, indicate that perhaps he was not taking care of his children as well as he should. The children, ages 5-10, were found in a motor home at the site of the marijuana field and were said to be living in "filthy conditions." They were taken into protective custody after Johnston's arrest and eventually returned to their mother. At his first parole hearing officials determined that Johnston posed no threat of violence to his community. However, "the police believe that the real victims of your crimes are your children and that you should serve each and every day of your sentence," the parole report stated. After the 1997 arrests, things would change dramatically for Johnston and his family, now dependent upon the system they had shunned for so long. Johnston served less than a year in prison and was paroled in 1999. The family relocated to British Columbia, where Maura Johnston apparently had family. But Johnston was unable to readjust. He battled with depression and suicidal tendencies and when his wife grew weary of his struggles and threw him out of the house, he went to the United States to seek help from a faith healer, according to the parole report. From there Johnston's life became a regular round of arrests, brief stints in prison, parole, flight, and recapture, until 2002, when he disappeared from Canada for good and again made his way south to the United States. Unable to find a balance between his brilliance and his darkening madness, Johnston stayed on the move. In Canada, his persistent parole violations meant that he would be required to serve more time if he were caught and, in the United States, the long list of petty crimes accumulating behind him meant at least several years in prison here. So Johnston went to the extreme edge of existence. In Canada he was forbidden to own firearms of any kind, due to a weapons charge against him at the time of his marijuana arrest. In the California and Nevada deserts he stole and stockpiled unusual, high-powered weapons just, apparently, for the thrill of possessing them. In Canada he had lived outside the system and earned his living tending his illegal cash crops, but he had been a relatively tame sort of outlaw, providing for a wife and family, paying utility bills and buying a new washer and dryer for his home. He had surrendered easily to police, pleaded guilty to the charges against him and did not fight a court-ordered seizure of his assets. In the United States he was the kind of outlaw rarely seen since the presses churning out dime novels about the Old West grew quiet, ultimately choosing death over capture and a return to prison. If his own personal demons kept him on the run, Johnston apparently chose to push the limits of his fantasies as well as his own body and mind. Woody White said Johnston suffered from scoliosis and had a bad back. The Canadian parole board noted that Johnston suffered from serious health problems, both mental and physical. But in Death Valley, Johnston was an unstoppable physical machine. In Canada, Johnston used his remarkable intelligence to become the best drywaller in the business and later an expert at growing marijuana. In the United States, he used his extraordinary mental faculties to obtain security protected government documents, to elude law enforcement officials on any terrain, and in almost any weather and to live entirely outside the parameters of human society. But there were remnants of the old Robbie Johnston, who first came to Death Valley with a large dog by his side, who moved fast and outsmarted his pursuers, who could operate any vehicle, weapon or piece of equipment, and who always avoided confrontation, well aware that his brains were far more powerful than his fists. Though it grieved his friends to learn that he had committed suicide in the lonely western desert rather than be captured and returned to prison, it wasn't entirely surprising that he would choose where and how to end the dangerous game he'd started. "I was surprised that he'd commit suicide," said Bobby Burns. "I always thought he'd go out in a blaze of glory." For now, according to San Bernardino County Coroner Dave Van Norman, who finally identified the Bandit after 18 months of searching for a fingerprint match, there are no plans to remove Johnston's remains to Canada. Johnston's wife, according to one source, still suffers from leukemia but is alive and resides in British Columbia with her daughters. This source also indicated that the family as yet had no plans to hold funeral services for Robbie Johnston, whom most of them already mourned years ago. "It's a strange story," said Burns, of the saga of his friend the Ballarat Bandit. "And that's the way he'd want to leave it." |
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