A man who had been on the run for nearly 30 years was apprehended in central Georgia this week, as reported by CBS News. The fugitive, who escaped from an Oregon prison in 1994, had been living under the identity of a child who died decades earlier in Texas, according to the U.S. Marshals Service.
Steven Craig Johnson was arrested on Tuesday by a regional task force in Macon, Georgia. Authorities located him around 2 p.m. at an apartment complex in the city. Johnson, now 70, had been living under the alias William Cox since 2011.
Johnson escaped from a prison work crew in Oregon on November 29, 1994, while serving a state sentence for sexual abuse and sodomy. His convictions included three counts of first-degree sex abuse and one count of first-degree attempted sodomy, as reported by CBS affiliate KOIN-TV.
He was serving his sentence at the Mill Creek Correctional Facility in Salem, which is located approximately halfway between Portland and Eugene. The Mill Creek facility was a minimum-security prison on an unfenced property covering around 2,000 acres, housing roughly 290 inmates who were within four years of release, according to the Oregon Department of Corrections. The facility closed in 2021.
Johnson had been listed among Oregon's six most wanted fugitives for years, with a warrant out for his arrest for escape. A wanted poster issued by the Oregon Department of Corrections noted Texas as a possible location for Johnson, though his connection to the state was unclear. The poster described Johnson as "a pedophile" with a high likelihood of victimizing pre-teen boys and warned that he should not have contact with children.
The U.S. Marshals Service took on Johnson's fugitive case in 2015 at the request of the Oregon Department of Corrections. After nine years of investigation, "new investigative technology employed by the Diplomatic Security Service" provided significant leads in 2024.
The investigation revealed that Johnson had stolen the identity of a child who died in Texas in January 1962. Johnson obtained a copy of the child's birth certificate and a Social Security number in Texas in 1995. The earliest record of Johnson with a Georgia driver's license dates back to 1998.
Following his arrest in Georgia, Johnson was booked into the Bibb County Jail in Macon and is awaiting extradition back to Oregon.
