(2 of 3)
Friends say the father soon had second thoughts about Little Bruce's aptitude for the family business and urged him "to look for a 9-to-5 job." The son ignored the advice and ended up last summer in the Chester County prison farm for stealing $2 worth of gas from a farmer. Released on bail, he was promptly sent back to the farm for stealing a pickup truck. Little Bruce was despondent because he had been planning to marry his girlfriend, pretty Robin Miller, 15, who lived on a farm in nearby Oxford. But he resolved to follow the family maxim: "Do your time or don't commit the crime."
In July, Robin visited Little Bruce at the prison farm, along with Bruce Sr. and James Sampson. Afterward, Robin went to a motel with the two men and drank most of a bottle of whisky. She later tearfully told Little Bruce that she did not clearly remember what had happened but she had passed out and awakened in the morning stripped of her clothes. Angry, Little Bruce decided to get even. On Aug. 9, he told a federal grand jury in Philadelphia about the theft ring allegedly headed by his father.
Bruce Sr., whose intelligence system was at least as good as that of the police, got word of Little Bruce's defection and of reports that James might also testify against him. On Aug. 15, James phoned Great-Aunt Sarah to say that his father had told him not to appear before the grand jury. "I'll be gone for a couple of days," he said. That was the last heard from James until his body was found.
Little Bruce, meanwhile, had been released from prison when he threatened to stop providing evidence against his father if authorities kept him from Robin. Bruce Sr. made three trips to Harriet Steffy's house looking for Bruce and Robin. "He told me that he didn't want to hurt them," Mrs. Steffy recounted. "He said he would give $12,000 to Little Bruce if he told the police he had been on dope when he testified and that it wasn't true that his daddy led that gang. But I told him that I didn' think Little Bruce was going to change his mind because he knew that his daddy had doings with Robin."
At 12:30 a.m., Aug. 30, gunmen ambushed Little Bruce and Robin as they sat in a yellow Volkswagen Rabbit in front of her mother's farmhouse. Robin was killed by two shots in the face. Little Bruce was hit by eight bullets in the head and body but somehow survived.
Two weeks later, a helicopter flew in low over a cornfield near Oxford and landed on the courthouse mall. A squad shotgun-toting U.S. marshals and state troopers hustled Bruce Johnston Jr. to the courthouse, where he testified at a preliminary hearing against his father and Leslie Dale. Afterward, the federal marshals took Little Bruce to a secret hideaway for safekeeping.
Bruce Johnston Sr. was arrested in December by police near Reading, Pa., on a charge of stealing an $8 tape cartridge from a store. He is now being held at a federal jail in Philadelphia on federal and state counts of obstruction of justice, conspiracy and theft. Brother David, who turned himself in to authorities, is being held in the Lehigh County jail on state robbery charges. Brother Norman is wanted by the Federal Government for obstruction of justice and by the state for robbery. He is in hiding.