A fugitive who stole a college graduate’s identity and proceeded to use it for more than 40 years as a way to avoid arrest on an attempted murder charge has now pleaded guilty to fraud, among other charges, federal authorities said.Stephen Craig Campbell, 73, took on the identity of an Arkansas man named Walter Lee Coffman, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for New Mexico, where Campbell was arrested last year. Coffman had recently graduated from the University of Arkansas with an engineering degree when he died in a car accident in 1975, at just 22, the U.S. attorney’s office said. After remaining on the U.S. Marshals’ “Most Wanted” list for four decades, for an attempted murder in Wyoming in the early ’80s, Campbell was found and arrested on Feb. 19, 2025. He has pleaded guilty to misuse of a passport, possession of false papers to defraud the U.S., aggravated identity theft, and possessing a firearm and ammunition as a fugitive of justice, according to the U.S. attorney’s office. Campbell is expected to face 12 years in prison once sentenced.Campbell is originally from Stockton, California, and attended University of Arkansas at the same time as Coffman, CBS Sacramento reported. Authorities said Campbell initially applied for a U.S. passport under Coffman’s name in 1984 and went on to renew it multiple times, using his own address and photograph, through at least 2015. Throughout the years Campbell lived under Coffman’s identity, he had evaded an outstanding 1983 warrant issued in Wyoming for failing to appear in court on an attempted murder charge. He also obtained a Social Security card under Coffman’s name in 1995, using an Oklahoma driver’s license and after first contacting the Social Security Administration to remove records of Coffman’s death, the U.S. attorney’s office said. After Campbell’s arrest, the special agent in charge of the FBI Albuquerque office, Raul Bujanda, told CBS affiliate KRQE that the lack of technology at the time helped Campbell accomplish such a scheme.”If this were to happen today, the likelihood of someone being able to go 40 years from today to evade law enforcement, I say that opportunity or that chance is slim to none,” said Bujanda.Investigators believe Campbell received roughly $140,000 in government funds using the fraudulent Social Security card. Authorities said he applied for retirement insurance benefits under Coffman’s identity starting in 2015.Over the years, Campbell purchased property in Coffman’s name in Weed, New Mexico, and used the fraudulent passport to renew a New Mexico driver’s license in Coffman’s name, too, as recently as 2019.Campbell was arrested during a raid on his residence in Weed, as law enforcement executed a search warrant on the property. The U.S. attorney’s office said he confronted the officers with a loaded rifle, but eventually set it down “after repeated commands” to do so. There were 57 firearms and “a large quantity of ammunition” recovered from the home during a subsequent search, the office said.Federal authorities said he allegedly planted an explosive device at the residence of his estranged wife’s boyfriend in 1982, which detonated when the wife opened it. She lost a finger and suffered additional injuries as a result. The explosion also caused a fire that damaged the homes of the boyfriend and a neighbor.
