Luck Smiles on Inmate With ‘Nine Lives’

In a race to the border, state police on Friday stopped a California prison van from leaving the state with a 70-year-old Oregon man on his way back to prison for the 1963 murder of a CHP officer.

The California Department of Corrections took custody of Robert Lee Burns of Springfield after a Lane County judge denied his motion to block the extradition pending an appeal. But Burns’ attorney on Friday won an emergency stay from the Oregon Court of Appeals.

Burns and his guards were on Interstate 5 within 21 miles of the border when Oregon state police armed with the stay caught up to them and brought him back to jail.

“The whole family is really excited,” said Tammy Ferguson, Burns’ former sister-in-law, who just hours earlier had told him goodbye in the courtroom. “Bob’s boys started crying for joy that he didn’t get taken to California. As long as he’s here in Oregon, they felt like he had a chance.”

If the prison van had crossed the border, there would have been no way to get Burns back or have the Oregon Court of Appeals consider his case, said public defender Dave Phillips.

“This guy has nine lives,” Phillips said.

Before his arrest in January, Burns had been free the past 27 years. He served just 4 1/2 years of his California murder sentence before being sent back to Oregon to finish an unrelated sentence for robbery. Oregon authorities deemed him completely rehabilitated, and then-Gov. Robert Straub refused to send him back to California to finish the life sentence for murder.

After his release, Burns married and raised four children.

Burns’ sanctuary in Oregon was revoked in 1987 by a U.S. Supreme Court ruling, but California did nothing to go after him until 14 years later, Phillips said.

The latest turnaround came just hours after an Oregon judge told Burns that the legal issues in his case should properly be settled in California, where he pleaded guilty to murder after his partner in a 1963 Sacramento bank robbery killed a highway patrolman outside Truckee during the getaway.