A man who escaped from an Oregon state jail over 30 years ago and took the identity of a murdered child was apprehended in Georgia on Tuesday, according to officials.
Steven Craig Johnson, who had been convicted of sexual abuse, escaped from a prison labor detail at Mill Creek Correctional Facility in Salem, Oregon, on November 29, 1994, according to officials. He had been in the Oregon Department of Corrections custody since June 1989.
The US Marshals Service and one of its fugitive task squads captured Johnson, who is now 70, on Tuesday afternoon at an apartment complex in Macon, Georgia.
He has been living at the apartment complex as William Cox since 2011, according to an announcement from the service.
According to the announcement, an investigation determined that Johnson took the identity of a toddler who died in Texas in January 1962. Johnson received a copy of the child’s birth certificate and was eventually granted a Social Security number in Texas in 1995, according to officials. Johnson acquired his Georgia driver’s license three years later.
The Marshals Service took up the investigation in 2015 at the request of the Oregon Department of Corrections, according to the announcement. The stolen identity was discovered when the US State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service used new investigative technology to establish new leads in the case this year, according to the Marshals Service, which did not elaborate on the technology.
Johnson was booked into Georgia’s Bibb County Jail and is awaiting extradition to Oregon, according to the Oregon Department of Corrections. It is unknown whether he has an attorney.
Johnson was among Oregon’s most wanted fugitives, according to the prisons department’s website. He “is a pedophile and presents a high probability of victimizing pre-teen boys,” according to a 2019 wanted poster from the prisons department. “Fugitive Johnson should not be allowed contact with children.”
According to the Oregon Department of Corrections, Mill Creek Correctional Facility will close in 2021 on the order of then-Gov. Kate Brown as part of her sentencing reform initiatives. It opened in 1929 as the Oregon State Penitentiary’s Farm Annex. According to the Oregon Historical Society, up until 1998, convicts processed milk from a farmers’ cooperative for use in other state prisons.
“MCCF was a minimum-security prison on 2,089 acres only five miles southeast of Salem. “The facility was unfenced and housed approximately 290 adults in custody who were within four years of release,” the department stated.
According to The Associated Press, Brown’s move to close three Oregon prisons, including Mill Creek, aimed to save the state more than $44 million. Brown stated that she intended to lessen dependency on incarceration and invest more in preventing people from entering the criminal justice system.