George Robert Johnston. The "Ballarat Bandit" stands with his daughters, from left, Katherin, Meghan, Tessa and Clara in spring 2000. Seated is his wife, Tommi Johnston. Johnston disappeared for six years before dying by his own hand in Death Valley two years ago. Only last month did his family learn of his fate. Advertisement

It's been just over two years since the outlaw known as the Ballarat Bandit took his own life in an empty wash on the edge of Death Valley. Here, in the desert country where he was pursued by police in four counties and became a minor legend, the case of George Robert Johnston has been laid to rest -- the body buried, the files closed.

But in British Columbia, Canada, for Tommi Johnston and her four daughters, the grieving has just begun.

For six years the Johnston women waited, wondered and finally got on with their lives after father and husband Rob Johnston left Canada, seeking help for his deteriorating mental state, and was never heard from again. He had been a huge and even overwhelming presence in their lives, loved and missed despite an intense and highly tuned personality that made their family history an adventure saga fit for a Hollywood movie script.

Then, one day last month, Tommi Johnston looked up to find one of her daughters standing before her with a sheaf of papers in hand and tears in her eyes. While surfing the Internet, she'd accidentally come across some articles detailing the final days of the Ballarat Bandit.

And that was how his family learned that Rob Johnston was dead.

That he had died an outlaw's death in the remote American desert came as a surprise, but only because the papers claimed he had died by his own hand. When she thought about it, Tommi Johnston said, she would have guessed that Rob Johnston was "off in Montana somewhere gold mining or off in the desert eating rattlesnakes and waiting for the aliens to come."

She didn't discount the possibility that he might be dead, but that he had taken his own life and that he had resorted to petty thievery was hard for her to believe.

Although Johnston said that her husband's mental condition had deteriorated significantly since his time in prison on a marijuana charge several years before, the years they had spent together prior to that, in a world outside the system where most people live, had convinced her that stealing and suicide were two things her husband would never consider.

Johnston first met her husband when she was 19 and he was 31. She was an exotic dancer, he a drywaller, riding past the house where she was staying on his yellow motorcycle. "I used to see and hear Rob roaring past but could never get a good look at him because he was going so fast," she said.

She was tall and beautiful, he was small, clever and tough. In a weekend, at a friend's party, they formed a bond that would last for decades to come and carry them through an odyssey of survival in the American desert and the wilds of Canada.

"He was polite, quiet, and eerily respectful when everyone else was running around drunk and grabby," she said. "He was intelligent, well traveled, had a pocket full of money and the bluest eyes I'd ever seen."

Within a few months, Johnston said he wanted to go to Arizona. Tommi wanted out of the life she was living, dancing on stage for the Hell's Angels, and Johnston promised she would never have to dance again. Tommi had a young son she was afraid of losing in a custody battle and Johnston promised the law would never find them.

From the moment they both cut their hair and crossed the border into the United States, with her son in tow, life became the kind of adventure she could never have imagined. They tried briefly to live a normal life, renting a house in a subdivision while Johnston earned money hanging drywall with Tommi as his assistant. But a scuffle with the neighbors over Johnston's dog put an end to that.

From then on the couple lived in a camper truck or an RV. "We parked in the desert, off road, down bike trails and natural paths. We never spoke to other people. No one was to be trusted. No one would do us any favors, I would get arrested and sent home and I would lose my son. He repeated that daily."

Johnston was determined to stay out of the system -- not to pay taxes or be tracked in any way by any government entity. This was not simply to protect Tommi and her son but was a part of a deeply ingrained belief system in which Johnston saw both government and religion as mechanisms to trap and enslave the working man.

Despite all that, Tommi said, Johnston continued to work for wages and always earned everything they possessed. Stealing was simply not in his character for, while he despised organized religion, he nevertheless had a great fear of the wrath of God.

Johnston believed that they were fast approaching the end times, Tommi said, and that when the end came, it would not be safe in the cities. So he and Tommi stayed in the back-country wilderness where she became pregnant with their first child. Johnston, she said, "was my only source of information on anything at that point. No TV, no outside contact, no newspapers. He could have said Jesus had landed on a jet plane and I wouldn't have known the difference."

She gave birth to their first daughter in a travel trailer with only a neighbor in attendance. The couple stayed on the move continually, but even so, Tommi's son's father eventually caught up with them and took the boy away. Tommi was devastated but had no recourse, no way to fight for the boy without running the risk of losing her new daughter or even her own or Johnston's freedom.

Their second daughter was born in Florida. When she became pregnant the third time, Tommi insisted that they return to Canada. Eventually they settled in a log home in the wilderness on the side of Anarchist Mountain near the Washington state border.

"We had solar and windmill power," Tommi recalled. "The girls began home schooling and learning how to shoot. We grew our own food. Had no phone, no TV. We had horses and fun and that was about it."

Although many who pursued Rob Johnston through the Death Valley desert, into Northern Nevada and beyond during a year long petty crime spree in 2004, suspected that he had received specialized military training or at least paramilitary training, Tommi Johnston said this was not the case. He had spent time in Arizona in what Johnston called a survival camp, but "just to learn some stuff. They ate snakes and marched around in camo pants with big honking rifles with laser scopes. Rob was interested in their knowledge, but not at all in their politics."

He had also, Tommi said, done drywall work with a number of Vietnam vets who had shared their stories with him, including many military details. This was the extent of any training her husband received, she said. Most of his knowledge and interest came from his own reading.

"Rob was the first adult that caught my imagination. He told me things, big things, about life, and God and death and music, and Billings, Mont., and Carlos Castaneda. He talked about Armageddon and conspiracies," Tommi said. He was fascinated by Jim Morrison and the Doors and often talked of the concept of "breaking through to the other side."

Eventually, the couple left Anarchist Mountain and returned to Prince Edward Island, where Rob Johnston had been born and raised. After the birth of her fourth child, Tommi was diagnosed with leukemia and access to medical care became vital. Johnston began cultivating marijuana, discovered he had a knack for it and turned it into a cash crop.

In 1997, when the crop was discovered by Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Johnston was sentenced to two consecutive four-year prison terms. It was then that the couple was legally married, in what Tommi described as an ultimately futile effort on her part to convince him that she would not abandon him.

Tommi Johnston believes that it was her husband's time in prison, exacerbated by anti-psychotic drugs improperly administered, that caused his final break with reality. He had always been emotionally intense, impatient, brilliant and on the edge, but when he emerged from prison, the man she knew had crumbled, she said, and "your Ballarat Bandit was born."

Sometimes, said Tommi, she would simply find him sitting in the closet, picking through his beard. Unable to function, feeling he had failed them because he was unable to provide for or participate in his family, Johnston bid them farewell six years ago, saying he was going to the United States to see a faith healer and get some help. That was the last they ever saw of him.

The rest, including his exploits and derring-do as he outwitted and outran law enforcement officers in four states, is a matter of record. His suicide, after several days on the run with no water in the heat of Death Valley in July, 2004, while he was surrounded by police in the air and on the ground, is something his wife still struggles to come to terms with, but which she is beginning to accept.

Tommi Johnston said she disliked the moniker "Ballarat Bandit". "The articles in the paper make him sound like a song, or a character, but somehow they all miss the point. They believed he ran from some huge and horrible crime because he ran so far and fast; they didn't know what he feared most were his own thoughts.

"My husband, the father of my children, the son of a brigadier, was a strangely magnetic man with ideas no one had thought before and few would understand. He saw far into the future. He prophesied tragic and treacherous futures for us all. He ran, and taught me to run with him. On this earth and in our hearts we paced each other, always pushing and pounding for each other's sake.

"He died alone deep in the desert where all his fantasies finished off. Somewhere in the killer heat of gold mine country, where those old western novels of cowboys and Indians and the mother lode came from, he looked at a future behind bars or of facing his children and he decided to break on through to the other side. Open that door, pull that trigger, and end the eternal clock that ticked toward Armageddon."

Before his identity was established, Rob Johnston was buried by the coroner's office in an unmarked grave in the San Bernardino County potter's field. Johnston's mother was the only contact person listed by Canadian authorities and she expressed no wish to make other plans for the body, nor did she inform his wife and daughters of his death.

Now, nearly two years after that fateful Death Valley day, Tommi Johnston plans to have her husband's remains cremated and brought home to Canada, where she and her daughters will release them at their old home site on Anarchist Mountain. "He was really happy there," she said. And it was a place where his daughters had good memories of their unusual father.

"I never stopped believing, until I saw the coroner's photo on line, that he'd come back," Johnston said. "I just felt in my heart that he'd make everything right somehow. He was a huge part of my life and he loved his daughters so much. I couldn't believe that he didn't mean to face them again some day and explain what happened. I think he was trying to make good of something before he died. I wish I knew what it was.

"I'd like to think he thought it through, but in the end, he was just a man," she added. "Fear gets the best of us all and it appears it got the best of him."