By Lisa Ryckman
Rocky Mountain News
GARDNERVILLE, Nev. — The man known as Robert Fargo spent the past 32 years rafting rivers, repairing roofs and hiding in plain sight.
Lots of people knew him as a good partyer, a good river guide and an all-around good guy. It appears that nobody knew he was really convicted killer Robert Charles Johnson, a fugitive flying beneath the radar — until one small mistake finally brought him down.
“Bob got along with everybody. I don’t know anybody who didn’t like him. He was an easy-going, personable person,” said Al Lamoure, an employee at a white-water rafting company in Coloma, Calif., that hired Johnson as an occasional guide. “He dealt well with customers, other employees and management. He seemed like a genuinely nice fellow.”
At an extradition hearing in a Nevada court Wednesday, even the judge praised Johnson, 56, for his exemplary behavior, according to the Gardnerville, Nev., newspaper, The Record-Courier.
“I’ve wanted to get this over for 32 years,” Johnson reportedly said as he signed papers allowing Colorado authorities to come get him.
“Obviously, he cleaned his life up,” said Lamoure, who recalled Johnson working at several of the 30 rafting companies tucked along a five-mile stretch of the American River. “Around here, no one would ever know. This news is going to be like a tidal wave going from one end of Coloma to the other.”
Johnson’s transformation apparently was so convincing that even those closest to him, including the woman he had been living with for the past 10 years, had no idea who Johnson really was, Deputy U.S. Marshal George Schroeder said. Schroeder and other officers pulled Johnson out of bed Monday night and arrested him.
“Let me tell you a story that starts in 1973,” Schroeder said to him. “Then I outlined the entire case against him.”
Johnson was convicted of the 1973 murder of Michael Albert Lucas, a fellow marijuana dealer, in El Paso County.
Johnson had served two years of a 10- to 15-year sentence at the Fremont Correctional Facility in Canon City when he escaped from a work crew April 22, 1975. He used the name “Robert Fargo,” along with a different birth date and Social Security number, authorities said.
Johnson surfaced briefly in 1990, after he was arrested for drinking and fighting in Angel’s Camp, Calif. His fingerprints went to the FBI, but Johnson disappeared before the connection was made.
In 2005, the Colorado Department of Corrections and the U.S. Marshals Office began looking at cold cases, including Johnson’s, Schroeder said. Acting on information that Johnson might be living in Gardnerville, U.S. marshals tracked down a Nevada roofing company where Johnson had worked. Employment records confirmed that Fargo was Johnson.
On Wednesday, Johnson told East Fork Justice Jim EnEarl that he had revealed his true identity to two attorneys whom he refused to name.
“They both came back and said, ‘You were railroaded,’ or misrepresented,” he said.
According to The Record-Courier, EnEarl told Johnson that he had been a gentleman in court and wished him a safe trip back to Colorado.
“I think this time around,” Johnson said, “I’ll know a lot more about life than I did when I was 20.”
Copyright 2007 Rocky Mountain News