Emily Chan
For many years, a man named Gary Johnson took a unique and deceptive approach to fighting crime.
He was popular with people looking to hire an assassin to take out their coworkers, spouses, or other family members.
In reality, he was an undercover cop, posing as a professional hitman to entrap these individuals and bring them to justice, all while conning them out of their money. Over the course of his career, he aided in the arrest of more than 60 people.
Johnson grew up in rural Louisiana and had a nice, normal childhood. His first experience in law enforcement was in Vietnam, where he worked as a military policeman for a year.
Afterward, he spent a short time as a sheriff’s deputy in Louisiana. In the 1970s, he served as an undercover mole for a Texas police department, helping them bust drug dealers. It turned out that he was quite skilled at being undercover.
However, at the time, his dream was to be a college professor of psychology. He earned a master’s degree in psychology from McNeese State University in Louisiana.
In 1981, he moved to Houston, hoping to enroll in the doctoral program at the University of Houston. He was rejected, which led him to accept a job as an investigator for the district attorney’s office. That was how he became a fake hitman.
In 1989, the Houston Police Department found out that a 37-year-old lab technician named Kathy Scott was looking for a hitman to murder her husband.
The department designated Johnson as the hitman. He created a fake persona and met up with the woman at a bowling alley.
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