A former US fugitive is desperate to return to the Far North Queensland town where he evaded authorities for decades, but the biggest obstacle to his homecoming is not his secret drug-smuggling past.
Oxygen tanks are on constant rotation in the US home where Patton Eidson – or Mike McGoldrick, as he was known for so long – has been whiling away the months.
His lungs are shot.
A simple conversation is a test of endurance as the effects of chronic respiratory disease and confinement in dank, mouldy prison cells take their toll.
He is a damn sight healthier than the skin-and-bone shred of a man that emerged from jail two years ago, but the years have not been kind.
"Any time I go through an upper respiratory infection of any kind – the smallest bad cold or anything – it's probably 20 times more radical and drastic … than on a normal healthy person," he explains with laboured breath.
The white-haired American made global headlines in 2017 after more than a dozen police and immigration officials swooped on his Far North Queensland home and bundled him off to a detention centre in Brisbane.
It was the most excitement the Atherton Tableland town of Julatten had seen in years.
The man locals had known as health spa owner Mike McGoldrick – one of the town's biggest employers – was a wanted criminal.
How the Eidsons became the McGoldricks
Eidson, who also goes by the name Peyton, because he is not fond of the US general with whom he shares a name, was busted for conspiracy to import marijuana in 1985.
He had been involved in a Californian hippie drug ring that ran boats laden with pot from Thailand back to US shores for distribution and sale.
Rather than face court, he and wife Sonja assumed false identities and whisked their young daughter, Maya, onto a flight out of the country.
"We had a very good friend and he had liver cancer," Eidson says.
"And [he and his wife] were never going to leave the States.
"Back then all you needed was a birth certificate and a driver's licence to get a passport, so we didn't actually steal anybody's ID — it was given to us."
So Patton and Sonja Eidson became Mike and Anita Goldrick and, along with Maya, wound up in the sleepy tropical hamlet of Julatten.
They built a successful business and became popular members of the community.
It was all plain sailing and cold beers until computers back in the land of liberty started flagging inconsistencies in 2011.
"The shit hit the fan and we got busted," Maya says.
"Not due to anything that we did – it was just the people whose names … Mum and Dad had assumed had passed away.
"Technology caught up with everything and they started cross-referencing deaths with passports and stuff like that.
"When they went to renew their passports, it came up that they were deceased in the United States but still living in Australia.
In 2012, Sonja and Maya – who still goes by the name she inherited as a 15-year-old fugitive – were both found guilty of fraud-related charges related to the use of fake passports but did not have convictions recorded.
The daughter's false identity was overlooked because she had been a minor when they entered Australia, and her mother's poor health was taken into account.
Eidson was sentenced to three years' prison, but only served six months at the minimum security Lotus Glen Correctional Centre near Mareeba.
The US opted against extradition and the family thought they could finally stop looking over their shoulders.
Immigration officials swoop in Julatten
After his release from Lotus Glen, Eidson cared for his wife for two years before her death in 2016 after a battle with cancer.
She was buried on the same Julatten property where immigration officials would later take Eidson into custody early one May 2017 morning.
He spent time under guard in Cairns before being shifted to the Brisbane Immigration Transit Accommodation centre while his medical fitness for extradition was assessed.
Julatten locals did not let their favourite neighbour go without a fight.
Then-immigration minister Peter Dutton was bombarded with thousands of petitions, the shire's mayor voiced her support, and Kennedy MP Bob Katter made characteristically passionate pleas on behalf of this "well-loved, popular, respectable citizen".
But it was the background work of Leichhardt MP Warren Entsch that had the most practical impact.
Eidson did not live in Entsch's electorate and the pair had never met, but an onslaught of community appeals to the federal politician's office was enough to convince him to investigate the matter further.
He organised a face-to-face meeting with Eidson in detention, became convinced of his good character, and went directly to Mr Dutton.
“I went back to Dutton and said, 'This guy has been here for so long, he’s been a model citizen, all his family lives here and his wife is buried here — we can't not take that into consideration,'" Mr Entsch says.
"Eventually Dutton came back to me and said that if he was prepared to go back to America and face the music, wear the consequences of what happened so long ago, and … get himself an American passport — if he does that and keeps his nose clean, no more nonsense, he would guarantee that he would organise a visa to be issued and he could come back and live in Australia as a resident for the rest of his life."
Eidson was understandably suspicious of the offer, so Mr Entsch had Mr Dutton set it down in writing.
All attempts to contest extradition were abandoned and the man once known as Mike McGoldrick, in the midst of a long-running battle with chronic inflammatory lung disease, was flown back to the US.
In 2018 he was sentenced to three years' prison in a San Francisco court after pleading guilty to conspiring to distribute marijuana and identity theft.
He wound up serving two years at Terminal Island, a federal facility in Los Angeles that opened in 1938 and once counted Al Capone as one of its inmates.
Maya left Australia a fortnight before her dad's release so she could care for him through six months of house arrest in Southern California at the end of his prison term.
Life under house arrest
The emaciated figure that rolled out of Terminal Island in a wheelchair, permanently attached to an oxygen tank breathing apparatus, was a shadow of the man she called Dad.
His time in prison had been a constant rotation of hospitalisation, return to general population and reinfection, punctuated by several comas and two cardiac arrests.
"[The prison is] old, it's damp, it's full of black mould — they say it's not, but it is," Eidson says.
"I spent more time in the hospital … than I did in prison.
"Every time when I would get out and get back up to health, they then put me back in general population, where you're in a room with 60 other people, living one foot apart.
"You never quite get back to where you were before.
Maya says she almost lost her father on multiple occasions.
"He actually died a couple of times while he was in prison in the hospital, but they revived him," she says.
"It was really bad — he suffered a lot."
Maya nursed her father back to a point where he only needed oxygen if he was doing something strenuous.
They were ready to come back home, but had to wait until the sentence had run its course.
Health deteriorates as return put on ice
That milestone finally arrived at the end of February 2020 — just COVID-19 sent the world into a tailspin.
"They basically didn't process any visas or anything like that for a good year and a bit," Maya says.
"By the time corona was to the stage when they started processing visas again, Dad had gotten sick again … he spent a couple of weeks in the hospital."
Eidson is now back to constantly requiring oxygen, but his condition has stabilised.
The visa approval that Mr Dutton promised remains valid, but the doctors still need to observe several days of regular breathing patterns before they will give the 78-year-old the all-clear to travel.
"What to you and I is just a little cough is really dangerous to him," Maya says.
Eidson has effectively done two prison terms for his crimes — once in Australia, and once in the US.
"I'm not happy about it, because there was a different way to do this thing," he says.
"For the crimes I went to prison for, especially the marijuana crimes, me and one other guy were the only two to get any prison time at all.
"None of the rest of the 20 people who were indicted, none of them went to prison at all.
"It was not a big thing back then, what we were doing.
"We were very much removed away from the actual process of putting marijuana on a boat and taking it off … we were more involved in buying the boats."
Eidson believes US prosecutors were vindictive in their pursuit of him simply because he had evaded them for so long.
'Can't wait to see you again'
Back in their McGoldrick days, the family had been among Julatten's most favoured citizens.
The parties they threw were legendary, with hundreds of people sometimes showing up for long-running celebrations of what it meant to be alive.
The first realisation that the McGoldricks were the Eidsons hit the town like a tonne of bricks.
"Me and my wife and my family had been an integral part of the community of Julatten, the growth of the community," Eidson recalls.
"The minute that this happened, you go back and look at the newspapers — people could not believe anything that they were hearing, they just couldn’t believe we would have done something like that.
"But it was true, we did."
Eidson says he does not feel guilt over using a false identity, but he does wish his neighbours had known him by his real name.
"I'm not really that guilty about what I did," he says.
"The matter with the marijuana is it's legal now in most everywhere I lived in the States, you know?"
They were clearly forgiven, as shown by the community's huge, doomed campaign to fight their extradition five years ago.
"They stood by us, they put petitions to the government with thousands of signatures of why we shouldn't be deported and why we shouldn't be arrested," Eidson says.
"Because we'd been good neighbours."
He frequently dreams of being back on Australian soil.
"Every day, every day, it's still that way every day," he says.
"I just think how it would be to wake up, look out my window, see a Ulysses butterfly or a birdwing butterfly or a kangaroo, or something instead of a car.
"I would say look, people of Julatten — thank you so much for standing by me in my hour of need.
"I will be back there to stand by you and I can't wait to see you again."
'He's been through a lot in his life'
Mr Entsch plans to be there when Eidson returns, carrying the letter from Mr Dutton, framed and ready for the wall.
"He belongs back where his wife's buried," Mr Entsch says.
Maya has put her life and business in Australia on hold to be with her dad.
She has nursed him back from his post-prison state and will remain by his side for whatever life throws at them next.
For the moment, both Eidsons are solely focused on that one-way ticket back to Queensland.
"Once we get home, then I can decide where to go from there," Maya says.
"He's been through a lot in his life and I feel like in his later years he deserves to have someone just there to look after him and keep him comfortable."
