Fugitive’s Past Confronts Him at 70

EUGENE, Ore. —  It was so long ago, it’s almost like it didn’t happen. Or like it happened to somebody else. There was a getaway car, a bag of cash, a gun, and the flashing lights of a police car in the rear view mirror.

The officer ended up dead. And although Robert Lee Burns was the driver, not the gunman, he pleaded guilty to murder and was sentenced by a California court in 1964 to life in prison, serving the first part in Oregon for an earlier parole violation.

Fast forward 37 years. Burns is 70, in failing health, a soft-spoken grandfather doted on by his daughters. He had only served nine years before the Oregon governor, convinced that Burns had become a changed man, released him and refused to send him back to prison in California. Burns went on to earn a good living as a house painter, raise five children as a single father and keep his promise to the governor not to get into any more trouble.

Not long ago, nobody knows exactly how, Burns’ name showed up on a computer database as a fugitive cop killer. California authorities tracked him down to the small Eugene apartment where he has lived all these years, under his own name, not hiding from anybody.

Now, whether Burns lives out the two years the doctors say he has left with his family or gets handed over to a California prison depends on the Oregon state court of appeals, which is scheduled to rule next week on Burns’ bid to stay in Oregon.

The case has raised complex questions of extradition law and set up a discomfiting conflict between the two states at the top levels. Gov. Gray Davis believes that bank robbers who kill police officers should do their time. Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber has asked Davis to consider Burns’ poor health and good life.

“He has kept faith with Oregon and Gov. [Bob] Straub [who granted him sanctuary in 1974] for many years,” Kitzhaber wrote to Davis. “That should count for something.”

The issue reached surreal proportions last week when California authorities, acting the moment after an Oregon court ruled they had jurisdiction to take him, placed Burns in a van in Eugene and headed south on Interstate 5. Just 18 miles from the border, they were pulled over by the Oregon State Patrol, armed with an emergency stay from an appeals court.

Now, Burns is back at home with his family, awaiting the next roll of the dice.

“If I go down there, there’s not a doubt in my mind, I’ll be dead,” said Burns, who recently had a stroke and suffers from advanced prostate cancer, anemia and a heart malfunction. “It’s going to be a bloody battle to the end, in the courtroom.”

The story of how Burns started out a bank robber with a string of assaults and general bad behavior under his belt and ended up a quiet, almost courtly grandfather adored by even his ex-wife’s relatives, is a study in the transitory nature of the human heart.

Burns figures he started out bad when his father, an abusive alcoholic, left him to fend for himself, his mother and his 11 siblings in Oklahoma during the Depression. He got his first job at a chicken farm at the age of 5, earning 30 cents a day.

“We’d scrounge everything we could. We’d hunt and fish and scrounge the garbage cans to feed ourselves. . . . I had never in my life known that you could eat enough food that you weren’t hungry. But the Army taught me that. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t hungry.”

But he was quickly in trouble, first for stabbing a fork into the hand of a sergeant who tried to take an extra piece of roast beef in the mess hall, then for shooting a master sergeant who drove through his guard post without authorization. Burns was handed only minimal punishment and was honorably discharged.

Heading for California, Burns got arrested for taking gas out of an old tractor, sawed his way out of jail and--figuring he didn’t have much to lose--moved to Bakersfield and started holding up convenience stores with his brother.

When they finally got arrested in San Francisco, “Eight states wanted us. Seven of ‘em dropped the charges and disappeared. Oregon wouldn’t drop the attempted robbery charge. . . . I got 20 years.”

Nine years later, when he was paroled, “I was no longer the soldier who got out of the Army with an honorable discharge. I was a man filled with hatred to the point of insanity.”

He and two cohorts robbed a bank in Sacramento in 1963, driving away in a stolen Cadillac with nearly $45,000. California Highway Patrol Officer Glenn Carlson pulled them over near Truckee, and Roger Mealman got out of the car with his gun.

“He [the officer] looked at Roger and screamed, ‘Get back in that car, you scumbag!’ He brought his pistol up and the officer brought up his pistol. I saw the officer run across the road and fall down.” Burns stepped on the gas.

They were caught in short order and all three men pleaded guilty to murder to avoid the gas chamber. Oregon wanted Burns for violating his parole, and California authorities let him serve his term in Oregon with the idea that he would come back to California to serve the murder sentence.

Burns somehow turned his life around in the Oregon penitentiary. He read hundreds of books, studied history and anthropology in university correspondence courses, made friends with prison guards and psychologists. The warden started letting him out on work release and speaking engagements.

By the time he was released from prison and up for return to California, he had letters from lawyers, congressmen and senators testifying to his character. Burns met with then-Gov. Straub, who agreed to grant him sanctuary in Oregon.

“He said, ‘Mr. Burns, I’m putting the key of Folsom Prison in your front pocket. It’s up to you to turn it,’ ” Burns recalled. “I said, ‘Governor, you’ve got my word, I’ll never break the law again.’ ”

He started a house painting business, got married and helped raise his wife’s younger brothers and sisters. When the marriage broke up, he remained friends with his ex-wife and raised his five children alone.

Now, his ex-wife’s younger sister, Tammy Ferguson, is one of his biggest defenders. “When I was a little girl, when we were sick, Bob would come pick us up from school and take care of us. Bob was always there for me,” Ferguson said. “He’s a good-hearted man. The people who are doing this, they know how he used to be. They don’t know him for how he is today.”

Christina Loomis, Burns’ 21-year-old daughter, draped her arms around his thin shoulders. “This all feels like being in a movie,” she said. “What good’s it going to do for my dad to go down and die in prison just because their dad died? Two wrongs don’t make a right.”

In the years since Burns’ release, the U.S. Supreme Court has overturned a governor’s right to grant sanctuary. Nonetheless, California stopped pursuing the matter after a few years, raising it only recently, when Burns’ name showed up on a database as a fugitive.

“It doesn’t look like they looked very hard, because he had a driver’s license and a business and paid Social Security, but I don’t know what their actions were or weren’t,” said Stephen Green, spokesman for the California Youth and Adult Correctional Agency.

“But we’re required by statute to pursue fugitives, and when we find one, we go after them. We don’t have discretion to say, ‘Oh, well, we’ll let this one go.’ ”

If returned to California, Green said, Burns would be allowed to serve in the state medical facility at Vacaville and could be before a parole board in as few as six weeks.

Eric Carlson, who turned 4 on the day after his father was shot, feels a pang when he sees pictures of Burns’ family pleading for their father’s life.

Then he remembers his own childhood, how his mother would get sad every year on the day before his birthday. “I’m sure I asked a million times, ‘Where is he?’ ” said Carlson, who is now a construction worker in Truckee.

“We don’t want revenge against his family. We feel bad for them. We do. But he was convicted of a crime. You have to do what the law says, otherwise, why even have laws?”