US Fugitive captured in Belize pleads guilty to drug charges a year later

In the past couple years, there have been an unusually high number of international fugitives being caught in Belize. News Five reported on many of those captures, but one wanted man whose arrest went under the radar was sixty-five year old Robert Widdowson, a resident of Texas who was on the run for over twenty years. Widdowson was wanted for manufacturing one hundred pounds of the ecstasy drug, and on December fourteenth, 2010 he was captured in Belize. He was quickly extradited and handed over to US Marshals in Houston. Exactly one year later, on Wednesday, Widdowson pleaded guilty to the drug charges and is now facing up to twenty years in jail and a million dollar fine. According to a report in the QRKE News from Albuquerque, he was indicted in 1988 after selling two thousand doses of the hallucinogenic drug to an informant working with the Drug Enforcement Administration. He was initially imprisoned for about five months until a federal judge dismissed the indictment. The case was reinstated a few months later, but Widdowson had already disappeared. It is not known how much of his twenty years on the lam was spent in Belize.