New Mexico man pleads guilty after 40 years living under stolen dead man’s identity

A 73-year-old New Mexico man who spent more than four decades living under a stolen identity — and who had been on the U.S. Marshals Most Wanted List for more than 40 years — has pleaded guilty to federal identity theft, passport fraud and firearms offenses, according to court documents.

Stephen Craig Campbell assumed the identity of Walter Lee Coffman, an Arkansas man who died in 1975 at age 22 and had earned an engineering degree from the University of Arkansas. Campbell first applied for a U.S. passport in Coffman’s name in 1984, submitting his own photograph, and renewed the fraudulent document multiple times over the following decades, court records show. In 1995, he obtained a replacement Social Security card in Coffman’s name after attempting in 1992 to have Coffman’s death record removed from Social Security Administration files.

Using the stolen identity, Campbell purchased property in Weed, New Mexico, around 2003 and continued renewing the fraudulent passport in 2005 and 2015, prosecutors said. On Sept. 4, 2019, he presented the fraudulent passport to a New Mexico Motor Vehicle Division employee in Cloudcroft to renew a driver’s license in Coffman’s name. Beginning in 2015, he collected approximately $140,000 in fraudulent Social Security retirement benefits by claiming them under Coffman’s identity, according to court documents.

Investigators traced Campbell’s flight from justice to a 1983 Wyoming warrant charging him with failure to appear on an underlying attempted first-degree murder charge. Prosecutors allege that in 1982, Campbell planted an explosive device at the home of his estranged wife’s boyfriend. When his wife opened the package, it detonated, causing her to lose a finger, suffer additional injuries and igniting a fire that damaged the residence and a neighboring unit.

On Feb. 19, 2025, federal agents executed a search warrant at Campbell’s Weed, New Mexico, residence. Campbell, who was armed and partially concealed during the ensuing standoff, was found in possession of a loaded rifle and eventually set the weapon down after repeated commands from law enforcement, according to prosecutors. A search of the property recovered 57 firearms and a large quantity of ammunition. Campbell acknowledged that as a fugitive from justice, he was prohibited from possessing firearms.

Campbell pleaded guilty to misuse of a passport, possession of false papers to defraud the United States, aggravated identity theft, and being a fugitive from justice in possession of a firearm and ammunition. He faces 12 years in federal prison at sentencing.