Missionary Daniel Stephen Johnson was charged with molesting Cambodian orphans

EUGENE, Oregon — A twisted U.S. missionary from Oregon has been convicted of sexually abusing children at an orphanage he ran in Cambodia for nearly a decade.

Daniel Stephen Johnson, 40, of Coos Bay, faces a minimum of 30 years in prison for a long-running history of abusing children at rural Cambodian orphanage he set up in 2005.

Johnson, who had lived in Cambodia for more than decade, was brought back to the United States by the FBI in 2015 after serving a year in prison in Cambodia for abusing five young boys in his care there.

Investigators in the U.S. had caught wind of Johnson back in 2013 through a probe into an unrelated case in Oregon and spent nearly a year trying to track him down. With the help of Cambodian police, Johnson was arrested in Phnom Penh later that year.

After being returned to the United States, Johnson was charged with molesting six young victims at the evangelical Hope Transitions orphanage he ran, where hae cared for up to 30 children and teens at any given time.

Authorities say that as he awaited trial, Johnson repeatedly tried to tamper with the prosecutor’s Cambodian witnesses, contacting some victims online and offering large sums of cash if they would retract their statements.

In 2000 and 2001, Johnson was charged in Oregon with six counts of sex abuse and sodomy committed against three young boys in his sister’s care. The charges were later dropped after investigators began to doubt the reliability of testimony from the boys, who had also admitted to lying about sexual abuse committed by their birth mother in the past.