"Ballarat Bandit" Dies In Death Valley. Former BC/PEI Resident
Greg Carr
'Ballarat Bandit' lost to family for years
Widow says she believe he was running from himself
By ROBIN FLINCHUM
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. Website has pic.
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."
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http://www.pahrumpvalleytimes.com/2006/02/24/news/bandit.html
MYSTERY SOLVED
Ballarat Bandit identified
MAN WHO KILLED SELF AFTER LEADING COPS ON A YEARLONG CHASE A CANADIAN
MARIJUANA FARMER
By ROBIN FLINCHUM
SPECIAL TO THE PVT
Apparently, it was a wandering pig that tipped the hand of fate for the
man who would eventually become known as the Ballarat Bandit.
If the pig, belonging to a neighboring farmer on Canada's Prince Edward
Island, had never found its way into the field of 4,000 marijuana
plants being cultivated by 43-year-old George Robert Johnston in 1997,
things might have been different for a lot of people.
For instance, life might have been a little easier for Inspector Dave
Van Norman of the San Bernardino County Coroner's Office, who spent
more than a year doggedly following every lead, no matter how unlikely,
in a fruitless effort to identify the corpse of John Doe #39-04, AKA
the Ballarat Bandit.
Van Norman then spent another four months shopping from one Canadian
agency to another, through INTERPOL and back again, for a fingerprint
search before finally receiving positive confirmation of the man's
identify from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police last week.
Things might have been less complicated or frustrating for the people
whose vehicles, weapons, food and other supplies were stolen during
Johnston's eventual crime spree through Death Valley, Nye County and
other parts of the American West. Things might have been different for
the hundreds of officers in at least four states who pursued him
uphill, across the scorched desert, through blinding snowstorms and
into thin air between August of 2003 and July of 2004.
The burden of sorrow might have been a little easier to bear for
Patricia Johnston, loving mother and proud widow of a World War II hero
in her home on Prince Edward Island, who hadn't seen her son in seven
years and was bewildered by the news of his death and the nature of his
recent exploits.
But most especially they might have been different for George Johnston,
whose marijuana crop, according to previous writings by his former wife
Tommi Johnston, earned him an eight and a half year sentence in a
Canadian prison; whose prison sentence separated him from his
terminally ill wife and his four young daughters; and who, some time
after the death of his father in 1999, jumped parole in Vancouver and
fled to the United States, where he surfaced in Death Valley in 2003
and soon became a legend.
Starting with a string of thefts in and around the desert ghost town of
Ballarat, Johnston (then known only as the Ballarat Bandit) led law
enforcement officials in at least four western states on a massive
manhunt for nearly a year.
They tracked him on foot, on horseback, using all terrain vehicles,
four-wheel drives, and even airplanes, calling in extra manpower and
coordinating efforts between a number of federal, state, and local
agencies interested in the capture. They looked for him by day and by
night using infrared vision equipment. In Nye County law enforcement
officers doubled and tripled their forces, spending sixteen hours a day
in the field - and the mission wreaked havoc on Sheriff Tony DeMeo's
overtime budget. They spoke of the frustration created by the elusive
Bandit and quietly marveled at his seemingly superhuman endurance.
But they couldn't catch the mystery thief who could run five miles
straight uphill into the setting sun and cross 60 miles of snow-covered
high desert on foot. Not until the following year, when the searing
heat of a July day in Death Valley drove him to the end of his rope.
Then, when misstep after misstep brought him to the brink of capture,
he took his own life.
That was in July of 2004, the end of a massive manhunt pursuing the
lean, blue-eyed Bandit through Death Valley's Inyo County, Nye and
Washoe counties in Nevada, and on into Utah and Oregon. In the end, the
Bandit put a finish to the pursuit in a sandy wash just over the Inyo
County line, outside the edge of Death Valley National Park, in San
Bernardino County. Surrounded by police on the ground and in the air
above him, he stripped off his clothing and shot himself in the head,
leaving an already overworked coroner to answer the burning question -
who was this man?
Investigator Van Norman struggled with the case for more than a year,
finding not one single fingerprint or missing person description match
in any of the U.S. databases he tried, before he received a suggestion
from a source who now wishes to remain unnamed.
In July, a year after the still unidentified Bandit's suicide, Van
Norman buried him in San Bernardino County's potter's field. That
October, a colleague of Van Norman's received an e-mail tip from a
visitor to Death Valley who had heard the Bandit legend and given the
matter some thought. The colleague considered the message "bizarre,"
but passed it on to Van Norman.
"Who talks like an American, looks like an American, acts like an
American, but isn't American?" the anonymous tipper wrote. "A Canadian.
Maybe the Bandit was a Canadian ... Maybe the (Royal Canadian Mounted
Police) ... might be able to provide some help."
Intrigued by the idea and willing to try anything, Van Norman began the
long and tedious process of connecting across national boundaries with
Mounties. Since October of last year, Van Norman's requests for a
fingerprint search on his John Doe #39-04 have been bouncing around
through various Canadian agencies, through INTERPOL and back again,
finally resulting in a solid match last week. Now, pieces of the puzzle
of the Bandit's enigmatic life and American criminal career are slowly
rising to the surface.
Though the story has not been officially confirmed by the Royal
Canadian Mounted Police, writings by Tommi Johnston indicate that her
husband George first began cultivating marijuana because she chose it
over morphine as a form of pain relief for her terminal leukemia. While
4,000 plants was certainly far more than one ailing woman could use,
and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police assumed it was grown to sell,
Tommi Johnston spoke out about what she considered the injustice of her
husband's arrest and the treatment her family received.
According to her writings from the late 1990s, the couple's four
children were taken into protective custody, their property seized, and
Johnston herself was remanded into a rehab program when she admitted to
using marijuana for her illness.
Though her daughters were eventually returned to her, she railed
against Canada's harsh anti-drug policies as she struggled to secure
the return of her home and belongings. In a diary she kept in the third
person, Johnston recorded her thoughts about her incarcerated husband
one night while she looked out the window, wondering if she and he
might be watching the same stars in the sky.
"Is he sleeping and does he know what a foolish world [we] live in?"
she wrote. "A world that puts a man who nurtures and grows the only
peace [his wife] knows in prison? A world that takes a father from his
children...when they love him more than magic? That takes a husband
from his wife when she needs him so, and loves him more?"
Later, one of the things anyone who spoke with Johnston during his time
in Inyo and Nye counties would remember is that he had an intense
hatred of government. In the last days before his death Johnston was
still actively cultivating marijuana plants inside Death Valley
National Park, and died with a handful of marijuana seeds in the pocket
of the shorts found near his body.
To date, further information about what happened to the Johnstons,
either George or the ailing Tommi or their children, in the intervening
years has been difficult to extract over international boundaries.
Sources at the Royal Canadian Mounted Police have not yet cleared the
release of further background information and Patricia Johnston, still
reeling from the shock, declined to be interviewed at this time.
How George Johnston made the transition from a man with a name, a
family, a home and a history to the mysterious Ballarat Bandit, a man
who died nameless, naked and alone on the empty desert by his own hand,
remains a mystery.
Detective Jeff Hollowell, of the Inyo County Sheriff's Department, who
dedicated many hours to the pursuit of the elusive Bandit, said the
identification had come as a relief. "I stared at that picture of him
on my computer many times and wondered all the time who he was,"
Hollowell said.
But while law enforcement officers now have a name to apply to the man
who caused so many sleepless nights among them, they are still working
to piece together the history that brought him into their territory.
And relics of his Death Valley adventures continue to surface. A blue
and white 1980 Ford Bronco was recently recovered from a very remote
area in the national park's Butte Valley region, according to Detective
Hollowell. The vehicle was stolen in Mancos, Colo., in 2003 and had
apparently been collecting dust in Death Valley for more than two years
before it was spotted and towed out about two weeks ago. Hollowell said
authorities suspect the vehicle was another of the Bandit's casualties.
So far there is no indication that George Johnston, whom his wife
described as having worked as a painter and drywaller for 25 years,
ever received any specialized military training, though many law
enforcement officials, especially Nye County's Sheriff Tony DeMeo,
wondered if he had.
However, Patricia Johnston indicated that her husband, George
Johnston's father, had been a brigadier general in the armed forces and
had been present at D-Day during World War II. One officer speculated
that having grown up with a career military man probably exposed
Johnston to a great deal of the knowledge and procedures that so
impressed and worried authorities responsible for the military
facilities in Nye County.
Van Norman said he notified Patricia Johnston of her son's death on
Feb. 17, and said that she was "bewildered" to learn not only of the
manner of his death but his exploits in the year leading up to it.
According to Van Norman, Johnston said she had last seen her son seven
years ago, around the time of his father's death, and had no idea of
where he had gone or what he had been doing since. "She didn't say so
directly, but my impression was this just didn't sound like the son she
knew," Van Norman said.
Now that the Ballarat Bandit has been identified, his family will have
the option of claiming George Johnston's remains from the lonely
potter's field in San Bernardino County and returning them to Prince
Edward Island for reburial, Van Norman said, but as yet no decisions
had been made in the matter.
Meanwhile, as has been the case all along, George Johnston, better
known in Death Valley country as the Ballarat Bandit, still leaves in
his wake many mysteries unsolved and many questions unanswered.