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http://historytogo.utah.gov/salt_lake_tribune/in_another_time/101093.html

"I thought to myself I probably wouldn't see another car that day, so I pulled him over and wrote out a warning ticket. The driver--he was alone--didn't say much, as I recall, just took the ticket and went on his way," Johnson said. Trooper Johnson continued his patrol and at the end of shift turned his car toward Kanab and headed home. As he pulled into his driveway, he was mildly surprised to see the California car parked near the house. "My wife and I were living with her father at the time," he said. "When I walked into the house, I saw my father-in-law, John Kitchen, talking to the man I'd written the ticket to earlier in the day. The fellow was startled to see me. I was wearing my uniform, you know and he made a move to get up from the chair, when John said, It's all right; it's my son-in-law, he lives here; he's OK.'"

After the initial confusion passed, John Kitchen made a remarkable announcement: "Merrill, this here's an old friend of the family, Bob Parker--Butch Cassidy--he was passing through and dropped in to say hello. Butch, this is my son-in-law, Merrill Johnson, and that's my daughter, Ramona, in the kitchen."

...Having been thus introduced by his father-in-law, Johnson sat down with the two old-timers and listened as they traded reminiscences about the days of their youth in Utah. The Kitchens, John and his father before him, John G., worked the East Nipple Ranch in the Paria River area northeast of Kanab in the 1880s. That's where they first met the Parkers as cowboy ranch hands. "Cassidy told us he'd been in Bolivia, I remember that much of the conversation," Johnson said, "but meeting him wasn't such a big deal then; he had been out of the news for years and years.

I recall he said he'd been in an automobile accident in California and spent some time in a hospital, I believe he said in the Los Angeles area, and that he had only just been released. He was on his way to see his brother, Bill Parker, in Fredonia just over the Arizona line. Then he decided to stop in and see the Kitchens," Johnson said.

"They talked for hours," Ramona Johnson remembered. "I walked in and sat down to listen for a time, then I went to bed. I didn't pay close attention. But it was definitely Butch Cassidy. My father knew him well."

"He spent that night with us," Johnson said, "and the next morning I drove him in the patrol car, over to Fredonia to see his brother. Butch stayed, and I went to work. His car was still at our place in Kanab, and his brother drove him over later that day. He told me, Butch did, that he only wanted to see Bill Parker, and he wasn't planning to go to Circleville or anything. When he drove away later, he said he was on his way to Wyoming.

And that's all I remember, except that I've tried to find the copy of that ticket, and I couldn't. I even went up to Salt Lake to check through the records there, but since it was a warning citation, Cassidy wouldn't have had to appear. I do recall it was written on July 17, 1941. And I really don't remember the name he gave me at Mount Carmel Junction. I even may have told him later at the house to forget the ticket. I don't recall. There's no question that it was Butch Cassidy, I saw photos of him later, and they were the same fellow. When the movie 'Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid' came out and caused all the fuss about him, I tried to tell the newspapers what had happened in '41, but no one was interested." Merrill Johnson died in Kanab last March.