Brittany Rogers was riding back from a barn dance Sept. 29 with her husband, David, near Manila, Daggett County, on the Utah-Wyoming border. When they passed the Daggett County Jail, David asked her if she had heard about the two convicted murderers who had escaped about a week earlier.

A little alarmed, but figuring they probably had left the area by that point, she said she had not.

Just 10 minutes later, the couple drove past the remote trailer of 79-year-old Bill Johnson. Out of the darkness they saw "a guy runnin' toward the truck waving his arms up and down," David Rogers said. David's first thought was that he was a "mad farmer," and they kept driving.

"We thought he was trying to tell us to slow down," Brittany Rogers said.

But when Johnson tried to run after them, Brittany Rogers told her husband it had to be something more and had him stop. That's when they saw duct tape and torn sheets hanging from his wrists.

Johnson had been kidnapped and tied up by the two escaped inmates, who had just stolen his truck. The Rogerses called 911.

About 20 minutes later, Danny Martin Gallegos and Juan Carlos Diaz-Arevalo were taken back into custody outside of Rock Springs, Wyo., following a high-speed chase and confrontation that included one of the escaped men being shot and injured by police.

On Wednesday, Johnson and the Rogerses were presented with the award money from the U.S. Marshals Service and the Utah Department of Corrections for their actions, which led to the arrests of the two men.

Johnson was given a $5,000 check from the marshals and a $10,000 check from Corrections. Originally, he was slated to receive the full $20,000 reward. But at his request, a $5,000 check from the marshals was given to the Rogerses.

"It's pretty neat. We weren't expecting it," Brittany Rogers said.

The director of the U.S. Marshals Service, John Clark, who was in Utah for an unrelated engagement, rearranged his plans to personally present the checks.

Clark praised Johnson, a retired Salt Lake City police officer, for his resolve, his "great sense of heroics" and "going the extra mile, literally" in helping catch the convicted killers.

"There are not enough zeros in infinity to express our appreciation," said Robyn Williams, the prison's deputy director of operations, as she presented Johnson with his check.

On Sept. 23, Gallegos and Diaz-Arevalo, Utah State Prison inmates who were being held in the Daggett County Jail, escaped the understaffed and poorly maintained jail by climbing a fence.

Gallegos pleaded guilty in March 1991 to first-degree felony aggravated murder in the shooting death of 18-year-old Tammy Snydergaard of Sandy. He was spared the death penalty but was ordered to spend the rest of his life in prison for the slaying. Diaz-Arevalo shot and killed his 23-year-old girlfriend, Lindsey Fawson, on March 16, 2005, with a sawed-off shotgun while her young son sat nearby.