Fugitive pleads guilty after 40 years living under stolen identity
He used a dead engineering graduate’s name for four decades, collecting benefits, renewing passports and buying land before investigators found 57 firearms in Weed.
A dead University of Arkansas graduate’s name carried Stephen Craig Campbell through more than 40 years of fraud, until federal prosecutors said the 73-year-old fugitive pleaded guilty to identity theft, passport fraud and firearms offenses. Campbell admitted living under the identity of Walter Lee Coffman, an engineering graduate who died in 1975 at age 22, just months after finishing school.
The case is a stark study in how a stolen identity can move through government systems for decades without a decisive stop. Campbell first applied for a U.S. passport in Coffman’s name in 1984, then renewed it in 2005 and again in 2015. He obtained a replacement Social Security card in Coffman’s name in 1995, purchased property in Weed, New Mexico, around 2003 under that identity, and later used it to renew a New Mexico driver’s license in 2019.
Federal investigators said the deception also reached the benefits system. Campbell used Coffman’s identity to collect Social Security Title II Retirement Insurance Benefits beginning in 2015, taking in about $140,000. That span of payments, along with the renewed passport and state license, shows how a forged identity can survive when records are not effectively cross-checked across agencies.
The case also exposed the danger that comes with a long-running fugitive status. Campbell had an outstanding 1983 Wyoming warrant for failure to appear on an attempted first-degree murder charge connected to a 1982 bombing that allegedly injured his estranged wife and damaged a home. When law enforcement executed a search warrant at his Weed residence on February 19, 2025, investigators said Campbell was armed with a loaded rifle and later recovered 57 firearms and large quantities of ammunition from the property.
The identity theft drew added attention because Campbell and Coffman had both attended the University of Arkansas as engineering students around the same time. Coffman’s family said they had never been told his identity had been stolen and were shocked when the case surfaced publicly in 2025. For federal law enforcement, the plea closed one chapter of a decades-long pursuit; for the institutions that issued passports, benefits and licenses along the way, it left a hard question about how one stolen name could pass for so long.
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