The Bandit of Ballarat

As quietly as possible, officers encircled the man they tracked over the last year. They could see his make shift camp site as they approached.

“Gun!” one of the officers shouted. Another yelled, “Police! We have you surrounded!”

Seconds later, the single report of a gunshot echoed over the rock-strewn landscape. The chase had concluded and the man dubbed “The Ballarat Bandit,” was no longer.

The desert camp where the Bandit shot himself with a .22 rifle, ending a yearlong manhunt about a mile outside Inyo County, where he was well-known to local authorities. In death, the Bandit became an even greater mystery when every effort to identify him met with failure.

In 2003, he made himself known to law enforcement. The Bandit stole a geologists car and wallet and used his credit card to purchase supplies, including filling his gas tank in Tonopah.

During the year-long pursuit he stole food, weapons, cars, wallets, and even a child’s little red wagon in Nevada, which he used to transport a stolen battery to jump-start a stolen car. He was neat and precise in his habits, cleaning his campsites so thoroughly not even a square of toilet paper, much less a fingerprint, remained.

In one instance, authorities discovered the Bandit’s camp near the base of a 9000-foot mountain. They launched an assault at dawn with a K-9 unit and a SWAT team.

They chased the Bandit up the slope following his tracks and came within 50 feet of him, but the Bandit eluded them He sprinted five miles up and over the mountain and across the valley beyond leaving law enforcement officers in the dust.

A couple of months later, he again escaped by jogging through desolate backcountry to the Reno area. Officials hunted him from helicopter and horseback, from the triple-digit heat of the desert to the snow-capped High Sierra Mountains.

Suspected of being a terrorist, the Bandit set up paramilitary style camps, well stocked with high-tech firearms, overlooking the Tonopah Test Range, the Naval Air Weapons Station at China Lake, NAS Fallon and the government’s secret installation, known as Area 51. He was also believed to be a mental case or some sort of folk hero.

When possible, he avoided human contact and confrontation. He did, however, have a temper, as investigators found when they discovered he had shot a stolen vehicle full of holes when it became stuck in the mud, kicked a dent into the side of the stolen truck when it wouldn’t start, and disabled the vehicle of the man he bunked with in a remote cabin after the man asked him to leave.

For the owner of that isolated cabin, his house-guest was irritating and lazy, constantly talking about his hatred of the Bureau of Land Management. Still others reported brief interactions with a lean, highly energetic man with bright blue eyes.

Either way,the bandit burglarized uninhabited ranch homes, farms and cabins in remote areas. He took batteries, macaroni and cheese, soup and other nonperishable food, pots and pans, guns, cars, clothes and cooking spices.

But all that changed when an off-duty BLM ranger spotted a campsite on his way through Death Valley. He stopped to check it out, discovering marijuana plants, several weapons and ammunition.

Inside the vehicle, a pickup truck stolen in Nevada’s Humboldt County, the officer found the geologist’s driver’s license. He disabled the truck and left the park, alerting authorities to the camp.

But by the time rangers reached the scene, the Bandit had returned, grabbed a plastic bag of .22 bullets from the cab of the truck, a few cans of food and a sleeping bag, and fled on a stolen ATV.

Temperatures in Death Valley at the time were in excess of 120 degrees, and the Bandit had only one small 2-quart water container him when he fled. The heat, apparently, was beginning to affect him for his usual careful habits faltered.

And it only got worse as he went further south, avoiding the settlements of Tecopa and Shoshone where he could have found water, and descending further into the dry desert heat until he ran out of gasoline for the ATV. A National Park Service ranger spotted him sitting near a callbox on California Highway 127 near Ibex Pass and called for backup.

Three hours later, as officers converged on his remote campsite, the exhausted Bandit was out of options. He stripped off all his clothing, stretched out under a tarp held up and shot himself.

The only thing found in the pocket of the shorts removed before he died was a handful of marijuana seeds. It seems he had, in fact, thoroughly erased himself.

It was a hot, quiet day at the Samaritan Cemetery in San Bernardino as the man known as the Ballarat Bandit was finally laid to rest. John Doe #39-04, the identity assigned to him by the coroner’s office, seemed to have taken his all his secrets to the grave.

Eighteen-months later the Ballarat Bandit authorities identified the Bandit as George Robert Johnston, left his family after being jailed in 1997 after officials found 4,000 marijuana plants on his Prince Edward Island farm in Canada. Perhaps it was prison that drove him to the open desert and to take his own life, fearing more confinement.

It’s a secret that sleeps with the resting bones of the still-mysterious Bandit of Ballarat.