It’s about a four-mile kayak paddle from inside Deer Harbor to the closest spot on San Juan Island. However, that doesn’t count tides, winds, or currents, which, if they’re against you, can make that distance the equivalent of a moon shot. From Orcas to Friday Harbor is a forty-minute ferry ride, available to walk-ons and car passengers five or six times a day depending on the season. You can also run between islands via small motor boat in twenty minutes. If you managed to Doctor Doolittle yourself onto the back of a Steller sea lion, it could carry you there in about an hour. The point is, we had no clue how Colt got from Orcas to San Juan Island. No reports came in of stolen boats, cars, or planes. It was possible someone smuggled Colt onto the ferry in his or her car. But if so, why? Why not simply get on one going the other way, toward the mainland, and drive him wherever he wanted to go? Unless, like before, this was just a way to keep playing the game, making things intentionally more difficult, all ego and craftiness, complicating things just to keep the adrenaline flowing.
Two days after the footprint on the bridge, Colt broke into a home at the southern tip of San Juan Island where it tails toward Lopez. He snagged the owner’s mountain bike and the keys to his twenty-four-foot SeaSport, a Northwest-built sportfishing boat. Late Thursday night/Friday morning, he drove the boat out into Griffin Bay and then curled around Cape San Juan heading east. He cruised by Goose Island, where the honking comes from seals and sea lions, not geese, and then crossed the fast-moving waters of Cattle Pass—named for a load of cows shipwrecked by the Hudson’s Bay Company. On the Lopez side of the channel, Colt skirted Deadman Island and then grounded on Shark Reef. In an attempt to get as close to shore as possible—and maybe in order to cause the least amount of damage to the boat—he raised the engine’s outdrive. He also switched off the batteries before hopping ashore with his gear and the bike.
Lopez is the third largest of the San Juans. Folks from Orcas and San Juan Island good-naturedly refer to it as “Slowpez” for its countrified atmosphere. The one-finger wave (index finger, thank you very much) is a universal, year-round ritual on Lopez—not just an off-season nicety among locals as it is on Orcas. Lopez’s most notable resident when he’s not in Seattle or cruising the world aboard his 416-foot super-mega-yacht, Octopus, is Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, who owns a 387-acre peninsular chunk of the island.
Much of Lopez is farm-flat and great for biking. By Friday evening, Colt had ridden the 8.5 miles up to the northeast corner of the island. Cameras at Spencer’s Landing Marina caught him coming down the ramp to the dock at 11 p.m. wearing a big backpack. He looked around carefully at first, spotted a camera tucked up under an eave, and bolted out of its range. He didn’t leave the marina, though, and was tracked on other cameras as he moseyed up and down the four long docks, stopping here and there among the 110 slips like he was at a boat show. He calmly shopped all night, boarding at least six boats. “He was very relaxed, not gun shy about anything,” says Kim Smith, who, along with his wife, Michelle, manages the marina. “It was like he knew the place.”
The slips at Spencer’s Landing are all taken by full-timers, not strangers—“transient boats” in marina parlance—so there aren’t many security concerns. Plus this is Lopez Island: five of the boats Colt went aboard had been left unlocked. Inside one, he pulled out a chart to study the waters south of the San Juans that included Camano Island. In others he turned on lights and electronics, kicking the tires, checking fuel levels. Each boat was filled with gear, but he didn’t take anything except, apparently, a nap in one of them. Every boat Colt surveyed was capable of making the trip he had planned, but he kept looking for just the right boat. Shortly after 5 a.m., he found her.
She was a Coastal Craft 300, a thirty-foot-long, aluminum-hulled flybridge cabin cruiser christened Stella Maris—a $400,000 pocket yacht. “It’s a real looker and had all the electronics you could want on it,” says Kim. With a top speed of thirty-two knots and a range you could stretch out to eight hundred nautical miles, she was definitely an Alaska-capable boat. Colt stepped aboard, but found the cabin locked. He spent half an hour unsuccessfully trying to get inside. At 5:45 Saturday morning, with the sun coming up, he walked back up the dock and left the marina.
Later Saturday morning, a deputy came by and told Kim about the boat stolen on San Juan Island and found on Lopez. He said they figured it was Colton Harris-Moore and that he might be looking to steal another boat. Kim had a couple of large yachts in the marina he’d been doing engine work on, so he secured those as best he could. Since it was a weekend, people who used their boats as second homes would be living aboard at the dock. Kim figured that activity plus the security cameras would dissuade anyone from nosing around. The owners of the Coastal Craft, two Seattle women who also have a weekend home on Lopez, took their boat out that day to jig for cod. When they returned from fishing that afternoon, Stella Maris had about 150 gallons of fuel left in her tanks.
Just before 9 p.m. that evening, May 15, Colt came barreling back to the marina on the mountain bike. He parked it at the head of the main dock and went directly to the Stella Maris. A couple from Seattle were on the deck of their sailboat just one slip away, reading books in the twilight. Colt ignored them, though, and went aboard. Fully exposed to anyone who might look up or walk by, he worked on the Coastal Craft’s front hatch for nearly half an hour. The hatches are designed to stay watertight even if a large wave crashes over the bow and are very difficult to break into without causing extensive damage. But Colt finally got it open and climbed inside.
He turned on the interior lights and methodically searched for what he knew he’d find: ignition keys. They were in a drawer, hidden beneath silverware. Once he knew he could start the boat, he jumped off and went back to grab the bike. He lifted it aboard, unplugged the shore power cord, cranked the diesel engine, and cast off the lines.
At 9:30 p.m.—with the Seattle couple still contentedly reading—Colt flicked on Stella Maris’s spotlight and motored out of the marina with the fenders still dangling off the sides of the boat. He cruised up around the tip of Lopez, and then set a course not north to Alaska, but south for home.
When Kim got to work the next morning, he noticed that Stella Maris was missing. No big deal, he first thought, because the women could have come by early and headed out fishing again. Then he saw that the dock lines and power cord were just thrown onto the dock, not neatly coiled like the owners always left them. “I went to the office and looked at our security footage from Saturday night,” says Kim. “Sure enough, here’s the kid taking the boat.” He called the sheriff. His wife, Michelle, suggested they check the footage for Friday night. There, live on tape for more than six hours, was Colt boat shopping.
On Sunday morning, a Coast Guard Safe Boat found Stella Maris adrift off Hat Island, aka Gedney, which lies about three miles below the southern end of Camano. With no one aboard, they figured the operator had fallen into the water and launched a search-and-rescue (SAR) mission.
Kim got in contact with the owners, then told the coast guard they were okay. He asked one of the Guardies whether the Stella Maris’s dinghy was still aboard. When they said yes, he asked if there was a bicycle. “They said no, and I said, ‘He’s gone.’”
There was no damage to the Stella Maris; the owners say Colt took good care of their boat. The only visible evidence that someone had been aboard were a couple of used towels and a wrapper from a Snickers bar.
Kim says he then found himself in the middle of a turf war. The San Juan County sheriff didn’t want him to share his surveillance footage with the Island County Sheriff’s Office, and Island County didn’t want to share any information with the coast guard. Kim finally threw up his hands and turned over the recordings to San Juan County, which later released a couple of still frames to the media. According to Kim, they weren’t even the best shots from the video, which had enough resolution to tell Colt had neatly trimmed his hair since his famous photo, plus had let his sideburns grow.
The authorities never recovered a GPS track from the boat and didn’t know which route Colt took from Lopez south—but it’s easy to guess. The long way is seventy-five miles; the short route is fifty. The shorter path would take him through Deception Pass at night. When the tide is ripping at Deception, two million cubic feet of water per second flow through the narrow pass, with the current reaching nearly ten knots—faster than the cruising speed of many boats. It’s such a choke point that water levels inside and outside the pass can differ more than three feet, making a trip through at full flow seem like running a swirling, whirlpooling rapid. With any kind of storm surge or wind opposing the rushing water, waves can stack up ten feet high. Boats without enough power to muscle through can be spun around and spit into the rocks. It’s one of the most spectacular and dangerous spots in all the Salish Sea.
What would Colt do? He wouldn’t hesitate to take Deception. It would explain stealing the boat earlier than his usual post-midnight hours of operation. He would have checked the tide tables and known to get through Deception somewhere close to slack water. Leaving the dock at 9:30 and running at eight knots—a smart nighttime cruising speed—put him on schedule to be through and into protected water behind Whidbey Island by the forecasted midnight slack tide.
THAT SUNDAY AFTERNOON, PAM was hanging around the trailer as usual. “I heard a whistle from the woods… didn’t sound like any bird I knew.” She didn’t pay much attention, though. “Then I heard what I thought was my idiot friend coming up the drive, babytalking to Mel. I waited for him to come up to the house, but nobody came. Then later, Mel went off into the woods at the back of the property and came back with a fresh rib bone.”
Pam says Colt never actually came to the house, and doesn’t know if that was him stopping by to see Melanie and give her a treat. When I told her the boat he’d taken was a yacht, she said, “Well, that’s Colt’s style.”
At 11:30 that night, Pam was in bed watching a Western with the sound cranked up. “I hear a voice calling to me, asking which window or door I was going to meet them at. I yelled, ‘Let me get my bathrobe and slippers on!’ I heard them calling again in a voice like trying to sound like a young person, like they were trying to make me think it was Colt. I yelled out that I was getting my shotgun. I cocked it, had it ready to go, and went to the front door. I had my hand on the handle, then stopped and thought no… Instead, I went to the kitchen window and moved the curtain to look out, and suddenly a bright light was in my eyes. I yelled, ‘Get that goddamn light out of my eyes!’ Gawd that just pissed me off… I hate that.”
It was the FBI. “They said they knew Colt was here today and started threatening me right and left. ‘We know you’ve been helping him and you’re going away for years!’ I said I haven’t seen him and I don’t know where he is and if you don’t believe me then give me a lie detector test. They said, ‘Oh, we don’t do that.’ I said well then arrest me or I’m going back to bed. They didn’t say anything, so I closed the door and locked it and waited until I thought they were gone. Couldn’t relax, though, so I turned off all the outside lights and went out and sat on the deck, listening and looking for those little flashlights they all carry.”
BY THE EIGHTEENTH, ISLAND County deputies discovered that the Wagners’ house and beach cabin had been broken into again.
“We’d secured everything after the last time,” says Bill Wagner. “So he had to break the lock on the main house to get in. And he also broke the door on the cabin. That’s the first time he’d ever done any damage at our place.”
Inside the beach cabin, the Wagners’ hookah rig—a floating compressor that feeds scuba regulators—had been inflated but not used. An outboard motor and gas can had been carried out to the beach. Both were left on the sand, the outboard with its engine cowling off, as if someone had trouble getting it started. Missing, though, was the Wagners’ eight-foot Livingston dinghy.
When Colt faced charges the last time, the Wagners told the court they’d pay for school books, “or anything that might help his education while he was in juvie or after he got out,” says Bill. Now, he said, while he wasn’t angry about the boat or the damage to the doors, he was worried that Colt was “way beyond” needing just a nudge onto the right path. “He’s an extremely bright kid who could have done anything. Now, with the planes and the boats and the fame, it’s evolved to the point where he’s become something he never thought he could be… He thinks this is his one chance to really live life.”
Bill wasn’t under the illusion that it was going to end well for Colt in the short run, but said of the “kind, helpful” kid he came to know during those Camano summers, “He deserves a happy ending.”
BACK ON ORCAS, THERE was a definite exhale after the Stella Maris was found off Camano. Ray Clever and his team pulled up their stakeout at Chuck Stewart’s hangar and slept at home for the first time in thirty nights. Kyle Ater, the holistic Dirty Harry, did the same, leaving Eastsound in the care of our handful of deputies and a host of new security systems.
Something about Colt’s exit from the island this time made it feel permanent. The extra energy, the id in the air, was gone. So Sandi, Murphy, and I were especially surprised at dusk on the twenty-first to once again hear a banging under the cabin. We looked at one another for a moment. Then it happened again.
I dragged Murphy away from the door and went outside into the dim light. I started to bend over and look under the cabin when movement in the salal behind me caught my eye. I spun, and would have been less surprised to see Colton Harris-Moore sitting there eating a pizza. Instead, it was a peacock, a full-blown, shimmering electric-blue-and-green peacock with a five-foot-long, hundred-eyed tail, staring at me. The big bird wasn’t afraid at all. Sandi brought me a piece of seed bread and he ate it out of my hand, then calmly posed for pictures.
Some folks in Crow Valley were the only ones who kept a small flock of peafowl, but we called and they weren’t missing any. It was a bizarre visitation. Depending on which mythology you follow, the peacock symbolizes compassion, the heavens, or immortality, as in rebirth—like a phoenix.
The peacock’s cries haunted our woods that night, then he moved about a mile away and adopted friends of ours. A year later, he’s still roosting on their pickup.
PUSHING OFF FROM THE Wagners’ beach on the west side of Camano during the right tide and sea conditions, it’s not a bad paddle across to Whidbey Island. The currents can even help carry you south to a sandy point near the little town of Langley. From there, it’s about eight miles down to the bottom of Whidbey and the next dot that the police connected to Colt’s run.
On the night/morning of the twenty-third/twenty-fourth, a boat went missing from Sandy Hook, a dense development with sixty-some private docks biting into a skinny strip of water so it looks, from the air, like an alligator’s snout. Residents believe someone had been lurking around the neighborhood for at least a night or two, carrying out several break-ins and sleeping aboard a boat. One dock held a twenty-seven-foot Maxum powerboat. During the night, a thief rowed across the hook and exchanged his small dinghy for the sleek Maxum, ripping out the ignition to hotwire it. After a short six-mile trip southwest across the passage to Eglon, near the top of the Kitsap Peninsula, the boat was beached. Bare footprints led away down the sand.
The boat theft made the news, noting the possible connection to Colt—including the fact that the forensic evidence was turned over to the FBI. The FBI doesn’t waste its time on run-of-the-mill boat thefts, so this was a strong indication that they believed it was Colt and that he was on the move heading south. Despite that, there was already a full head of steam ramping up the Barefoot Bandit chase back on Camano, which was now likely six days and two steps behind Colt.
The media focus turned back to the South End. Pam called the cops on a TV crew that sauntered up past the YOU WILL BE SHOT sign in order to get the “I’m getting my shotgun” footage—which it did. The responding deputy noticed the nice new wooden stairs that had replaced the cinder block pile leading to the deck. “He asked me if they were booby trapped,” says Pam. “I told him no, but said there were others all around my property.”
Pam got continuous media offers, but refused to go on camera. One major network sent her a box of fruit, which had no effect, as she said she “wanted the green stuff” and wasn’t talking veggies. She told me I was lucky that I got in early, before she started charging people for interviews.
THE EVERETT HERALD REPORTED that Bigfoot hunter Richard Grover now pointed his dowsing rod toward Camano. South Enders hoped he would at least help locate a few of their old moonshine stills lost amid the nettles. As the story got bigger, more new characters entered the fray. In early May, an Orcas native attending school on the East Coast started a blog and Web site called Catch the Barefoot Bandit. Using the nom de plume David Peters, he cast his efforts as a direct counter to the fan clubs and T-shirt sellers. On his site, community members could fight back against Colt by donating to a reward fund—with the thought that eventually it would get high enough to tempt someone to turn him in—and by buying T-shirts, mugs, kitchen aprons, and so on with Colt’s picture and mocking messages such as “Turn yourself in and we’ll give you the second part of the flight manual—you know, the part about landing.”
Peters contacted Mike Rocha, a fugitive recovery specialist, aka bounty hunter, to ask what it would take to get someone like him interested in hunting Colt down. Beyond bounty hunting, Rocha’s various companies offer surveillance, execution of high-risk warrants, “anti/counter terror services,” and Spetnaz-trained teams that can teach you to defend your “important bridges and transportation routes… from enemy combatant attacks.” They basically do anything that involves wearing black tactical gear, kicking down doors, taking lots of target practice, and other things that go well with the soundtrack of “Let the Bodies Hit the Floor” that plays on his Web site.
The swaggering Rocha, a Vin Diesel double including the shaved head, saw an opportunity to promote his companies and maybe change the public image of bounty hunters from Dog “the” to something at least less hairy. A bail bond company he’s connected to donated $2,500 toward the reward, and Rocha volunteered his team of door kickers. A sticky issue, though, was that Colt wasn’t a bail jumper. When an arrestee bails out, he signs a contract that explicitly gives the bond agency the right, should he skip, to break into his home, kick his ass, cuff him, and drag him to prison. In Colt’s case, however, the bounty hunters had no legal authority beyond any regular citizen to chase or arrest him. And they couldn’t go onto private property without permission.
Rocha came out to Camano and left Pam a note explaining how he could arrange a “win-win” situation. According to Pam, Rocha wrote that she or Colt’s friends could turn him in and collect the $5,000 reward, then All City Bail Bonds would post Colt’s bail for free and have a lawyer standing by to work the case pro bono.
Colt was an escapee, though, and he still owed Washington State jail time on his previous sentence. If he was caught or turned himself in, Colt could automatically be sent to prison to start serving out the remainder of his three-year stretch even before new charges were filed. So bail was moot.
Rocha eventually met in person with Pam. She liked his look, but didn’t like what he had to say. Things got testy to the point where she wound up telling him that if any of his guys shot Colt they’d have to watch their backs for the rest of their lives.
ON THE TWENTY-SEVENTH, THERE was a sudden burst of activity on police radios. “Usually cops are very laid back on the radio,” says Shauna Snyder, who heard them on her scanner. “But they sounded gleeful.” The excitement was over a teenager captured on an Island County beach. “Residential burglary… one in custody” was the call that caused all the titter. Word spread very, very fast. At the trailer, the phone rang. A reporter called Pam to get her reaction to Colt’s being caught.
Problem was, it wasn’t Colt.
“They should double-check this crap before they call a mother and say that her kid is arrested!”
BY THE THIRTIETH OF May, Colt had made it 127 miles from Eglon down to Raymond, Washington, a little village on the Willapa River. Driving along Highway 101, Ocean Avenue, toward the town of South Bend, Colt stopped at a Vetters Animal Hospital. He took a ragged piece of paper and wrote a note:
Drove by, had some extra cash.
Please use this money for the care of animals
He attached a $100 bill and put it in the front door of the clinic, which does considerable work with abandoned pets. The receptionist found it and, according to the vet, didn’t recognize the name. She thought it might be from one of their regular clients. The vet herself, though, had heard of Colt. She didn’t know if the note was real or not, but called the local sheriff, who ultimately got in touch with the Island County Sheriff’s Office. They told him it sounded like Colt, but that they’d like to keep it quiet until they could check forensics.
The vet wrote about her brush with the Barefoot Bandit to a friend, the libertarian author Claire Wolfe, who mentioned it on June 1 in her Living Freedom blog online at Backwoods Home magazine. Wolfe writes often of “outlaws,” though makes a distinction between common thieves and those who run afoul of rules set up by what she considers an intrusive government. “Colton Harris-Moore may not be a true Freedom Outlaw. He may not even be a particularly good guy. But you gotta admit, the boy does what he does with panache. And in this day of omni-surveillance, it’s encouraging to know that some untrained kid can spend years outfoxing ‘authoritah’ and surviving in the cold northwestern forests.”
Once Wolfe published her blog online, the news that Colt was likely at least as far as Raymond and only thirty miles from the Columbia River—Washington State’s southwestern border with Oregon—was out there. It popped up on my “Colton Harris-Moore” Google alert on June 1, but the story didn’t hit the papers for seventeen days (by which time Colt was already halfway across the country).
The delay must have been surprising if not disappointing for Colt, because here was another action specifically tailored to get press attention. He did, by all accounts, love animals. The only civic statement anyone I spoke to could remember Colt making was when he told his mom that the penalties for animal abuse should be harsher. Pam took this and tagged it on to any mention of making money off of Colt’s notoriety. After his legal expenses (though she expected a lawyer to take his case pro bono just for the press), and after building a house on her property that she’d eventually leave to Colt, she said any leftover money would go to starting an animal shelter, because that’s what he would want.
The vet note showed that Colt was further embracing his media construct: he signed this note with his full name, Harris-Moore, the name used by the press, not his usual Colton Harris. Outlaw legend–burnishing and Facebook fan–wise, it was a smooth PR move. Who could hate a poor kid from a rough home who loved animals? Rob from the rich and give to the pups.
The $100 gift itself, though, was confiscated by the police. To them, the money was evidence. The note was also evidence: another sign that Colt was cocky enough to not worry about covering his tracks… “You can’t catch me.”
THAT MONDAY, MAY 31, was Memorial Day. Colt continued down 101 until it hit the Columbia River. Then another puzzler. Turn left and he could have simply driven south and crossed the Astoria-Megler Bridge. Drive a little over twelve miles, and he’d have been in Oregon. A few minutes more and he’d be at his next intended stop. No muss, no fuss… no fun. Instead, he went right and headed for Cape Disappointment.
In 1775, a Spanish explorer sailing up the Pacific Coast figured that the huge volume of brown water flowing into the ocean at 46 degrees 15 minutes north meant there was a river mouth aquí. The waters looked so treacherous, though, he didn’t risk trying to confirm it. Later on, a Brit poked his bowsprit between the two points of land but didn’t believe it was a river, so he renamed the northern headland Cape Disappointment. It was an American merchantman, Captain Robert Gray aboard the Columbia Rediviva, who finally braved the current and waves at the mouth to claim North America’s fourth-largest river for the adolescent United States in 1792, naming it after his ship. As with most New World “discoveries,” Gray was greeted by the Indians who’d been living there forever. These were the Chinook, who lent their name to the king salmon.
Tucked in behind Cape Disappointment lies the Port of Ilwaco, the closest marina to the infamous Columbia River sandbar or, as it’s known to mariners the world over, simply “the Bar”—often said with a shudder. More than two thousand vessels have sunk around the Bar, which is the most crowded crypt in a stretch of Northwest coast called the Graveyard of the Pacific. What makes the area so perilous is the battle between the outflow of the mighty river and the Pacific’s winds and waves that takes place atop the huge sandbar. In the right (wrong) conditions, the mouth of the Columbia can transform from a tremulous smooth swell to twenty-foot-tall breakers in the time it takes to ask, “Where’d we put the life jackets?”
The seas here are so consistently hellish that the U.S. Coast Guard bases its National Motor Lifeboat School at Ilwaco in order to train Guardies to handle anything the ocean can throw at them. The guard also mans a busy search-and-rescue base at Cape Disappointment that includes three lifeboats specially designed to operate in Bar conditions, which means being able to roll over and then right themselves and keep going with only minor soiling of the crew’s survival suits.
That said… there’s excellent salmon fishing just outside the mouth of the Columbia, which makes Ilwaco a great place to keep a boat as long as you know what you’re doing and always respect the Bar. Larry Johnson of Tumwater, Washington, keeps his Fat Cat there during the summer. Fat Cat is a thirty-four-foot Ocean Sport Roamer, a muscular twin-diesel $400,000-plus fishing machine built, coincidentally, at a small factory on Camano Island. Larry had used his boat Memorial Day, then put her safely to bed in her slip that evening. Boaters are second only to plane owners in their obsessive relationships with their craft, and Larry even has a sort of baby monitor for his. “There’s a webcam at the port that you can control by computer, so I sign on and check the boat every day.”
Not that he thought there was much to worry about. Boat theft didn’t happen at Ilwaco. The marina had security cameras and, as a bonus, a woman lived full-time aboard her boat moored next to Fat Cat. Larry kept his boat locked, but like many folks who have to travel long distances to their marinas, he kept a key squirreled away, hidden under gear, just in case he ever forgot his.
The surveillance camera sweeping the port showed Fat Cat right where she should be at midnight on the thirty-first. At 12:45 a.m., though, it showed an empty slip. In the meantime, Colt had crept aboard, rooted around the cockpit (on a boat, the cockpit is the open deck area behind the cabin, not, as on a plane, the place where the driver sits), and found the key. Once inside, Colt unsnapped all the window curtains, carefully rolled them up, and stowed them neatly on a shelf. He started the engines, cast off, and motored out of the marina.
To get where he wanted—across the Columbia to the town of Warrenton—Colt had to thread his way down a snaky channel that winds around several small islands and past constantly shifting sandbars just to reach the river. Charts of the area are cluttered with icons for sunken ships along with notations that even some navigational buoys aren’t marked because their positions have to be changed so often due to the deceptive sands. The channel took him right past the Cape Disappointment Coast Guard station, where he would have had to slow to “No Wake” speed alongside their dock.
Just past the station there’s a beach jutting into the channel that would have been invisible on this dark night with just a sliver of moon hidden behind an overcast sky. Around that and past Sand Island, the Fat Cat would finally be in the river.
Once on the river, Colt could open up the throttles, but the danger wasn’t over. The most perilous part of the Columbia is actually crossing the Bar, and Colt didn’t have to do that, though, as Larry says, “he was close enough to spit on it.” Even behind the Bar the crossing can be hairy, with sloppy seas to contend with, and on the other side Colt had to snug into the Oregon shoreline to avoid grounding on the Desdemona Sands. Then he needed to pick out the flashing beacons marking the Skipanon Waterway against the lights of Warrenton, Oregon, a town of five thousand built on tidal flats across Youngs Bay from Astoria. Colt made it and motored down the Skipanon to a commercial pier north of town. He docked the boat, tied her up, shut her down, locked the door, and put the key back in its hiding place.
Tuesday morning, Larry logged on and pulled up the Port of Ilwaco camera. “I couldn’t believe it,” he says. “I downloaded the image three or four times and then called the port.” The marina sent someone down to the slip and called him back, confirming his boat was gone. Larry phoned the coast guard while Ilwaco called all the marinas around Washington and Oregon. They soon got a call from Warrenton that they’d found Fat Cat at their dock, tied up among much larger commercial fishing boats. When Larry heard where it was, he assumed that it had been taken by someone very experienced with boats and with navigating the local waters.
More evidence of that came when he arrived at the boat. “There wasn’t even any cosmetic damage.” The boat has a full electronics package, with integrated radar and chartplotter, but it didn’t look like that had been used. “The covers were on the electronics, switches off, and there were no new tracks saved on the plotter.” That really puzzled Larry. “With the channels poorly marked and the Bar out there, to have done that at night without navigation equipment… I don’t know how you’d do it. He got real lucky.”
One explanation is that Colt carried his own portable GPS unit—he’d stolen plenty of them by this time. With lots of time to plan, he could pull up charts on his laptop, plot his routes, then transfer them to a GPS. That doesn’t make what he did easy. He still had to contend with everything Mother Nature could dish up, and he had to drive the boat across a big black expanse of moving water while navigating from a tiny screen.
“Why you would steal a boat to get to Warrenton I have no idea,” says Larry. “It takes a long time and you have all the risks out on the river. Instead, you can drive a car across the bridge and be there in a few minutes.” And conditions weren’t ideal: Larry couldn’t bring his Fat Cat back to Ilwaco for several days because the river was raging with eight-foot swells.
The Warrenton chief of police, Mathew Workman, says that as soon as they recovered the stolen boat, Colt was the prime suspect. “Mr. Moore had been put on our radar… and we fully expected to have something else happen in the area because that seemed to be his MO. When we didn’t have anything reported stolen that day, we were concerned he could be staying in one of the vacation homes that we have around here.”
Workman, forty-two, was a twenty-year police veteran who’d been chief in Warrenton since October 2008. He says that he got the word out to all Clatsop County police to be on the lookout. “Then I contacted the TITAN Fusion Center down here and asked if they could put something out to all law enforcement in the area.”
TITAN Fusion Centers are a post-9/11 Homeland Security big fix that allows local, state, and federal law enforcement to share intelligence and connect the dots on a broad range of subjects, including gangs, organized crime, and serial criminals working a local area, as well as activities that might be terrorism related. Workman says he was told that the information he presented to the Fusion Center didn’t “meet their criteria” for forwarding it among other agencies.
Despite TITAN’s turndown, law enforcement in Clatsop County, Oregon, as well as Pacific County and Island County, Washington, and the FBI, all knew that Colton Harris-Moore was in Warrenton. And anyone with a twitching EEG knew about his predilections for airplanes. For some reason, though, no law enforcement agency made the obvious move to get in touch with the first place that would come to mind when wondering what Colt would do next. Less than two miles from where he docked the Fat Cat lay the Warrenton-Astoria Regional Airport, offering two scenic runways on the shores of the Columbia. John Overholser, the airport manager, says that he received no word, no warning, and had no idea that the Barefoot Bandit was even in Oregon.
At some point on the first, Colt made his way from the Warrenton commercial dock to the airport. Inside the fence that evening, a Cessna 185 sat unattended out on the ramp. It was a proverbially dark and stormy night, one when pilots with hundreds of hours in the left seats of airplanes they know by heart would beg off taking them up. But someone walked through the rain and gusty winds out to the Cessna. Regardless of the weather, the 185 had some things going against it as sensible transportation for Colt. This model sits on two big front wheels with just a tiny turnable gear under the vertical stabilizer to keep its butt off the ground. The configuration gives the aircraft a distinct nose-up attitude—thus the nickname for this style: tail-dragger. The vast majority of early planes had this setup, though nowadays almost all designs incorporate the tricycle-style wheels like the 182s and the Cirrus.
Cessna stopped building 185s back in 1985. Colt always said he preferred newer models, and landing tail-draggers takes much more practice as they have the tendency to tip over on their noses or ground loop (spin in a circle). But out came a flathead screwdriver to try to pry open the plane’s doors. Nothing gave easily, though, and he may not have been trying too hard. If he had gotten inside, he would have found the fuel tanks empty.
Colt, police say, then headed for the small terminal. An outside light illuminated a window that looked like the easiest entry point, so he unscrewed the light fixture and laid it on the ground. He untwisted the bulb until it went out, throwing that side of the building into darkness. His trusty screwdriver made short work of the window latch and he climbed inside. It turned out to be a kitchen, and as Colt stepped down, his foot landed on the stove, bending one of the burners. The only stuff in the kitchen was, according to Rich Rasmussen who works at the airport for Hertz, “some pretty nasty food… been expired a long time,” so Colt moved on to the rental car office.
The door to the Hertz office had some play in it, so first Colt tried to jimmy the lock. That didn’t work, so he simply put a shoulder to it and busted it open. It appears he didn’t dawdle in the office—two hundred dollars were left behind in the desk—and instead just picked two sets of keys out of a glass bowl, one labeled for a Dodge Journey, the other for a Ford Fusion. The Dodge was right out front.
WHILE COLT WAS BOATING across state lines and shopping planes in Oregon, residents back on Camano Island were gathering for a meeting at the Elger Bay Elementary School. It had been set up by Josh Flickner and David Peters to introduce the community to Mike Rocha and his team. Some locals, though, weren’t too receptive to the idea of armed bounty hunters skulking around the island. One woman said she wasn’t comfortable having them walking through their backyards with automatic weapons. Rocha reassured her, saying they wouldn’t do that. “We carry semiautomatics,” he said. That got a laugh. What didn’t was when one older guy stood up and said of Colt, “Most of us want him dead!” The crowd of more than two hundred responded with groans. Flickner got up and said the man wasn’t speaking for anyone but himself. The “dead!” quote, though, made the evening news.
Rocha told the crowd his men were already out working the island. Sheriff Brown wasn’t at the meeting but announced that he wouldn’t be sharing any information with any private group, including bounty hunters. That certainly seemed accurate, because while the bounty hunters began shaking the bushes on Camano, the police and anyone paying attention knew Colt was already south of the state border.
AT 7:30 A.M. ON the second, Rich Rasmussen noticed that the Dodge Journey was missing. Last thing he expected, though, was that it had been stolen. He figured another Hertz employee had borrowed it. What made more of an impact on him was that the key to his office door was working much better. “It’d usually catch a little and you’d have to wiggle it… That morning it just turned,” he says. “I thought maybe it was a miracle.” When word came back that the Dodge wasn’t with Hertz staff, Rich called the cops. “They said, ‘We’ve been waiting for your call.’” The police told the airport manager, John Overholser, that once the stolen boat showed up, they figured it was just a matter of sitting by the phone and sooner or later they’d get a call about something else getting ripped off.
COLT DROVE THE DODGE Journey south on Highway 101—the Bandit with no driver’s license cruising one of the world’s great road trip routes. From the time he dropped the C-note at the vet’s in Raymond, he’d had the Pacific Ocean beside him nearly the entire time. The only downside to 101 in Washington and Oregon is trying to ignore the patchwork of clearcuts that make the region look like a green dog with mange. Of course since Colt traveled nocturnally, he missed most of the sights. South of Seaside, Oregon, he veered southeast into Yamhill County, Oregon’s wine country.
He ditched the wagon in Dayton and made his way three miles to McMinnville at the north end of the Willamette Valley, thirty-eight miles south of Portland. If Colt hadn’t been on the lam, this would be a natural stop. The town hosts the country’s second-largest annual UFO Festival—only the one in Roswell, New Mexico, is bigger—which seems like it might attract a kid who specialized in unidentified flying. The serious draw, though, is the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum, retirement home for Howard Hughes’s famous flying cargo ship, the Spruce Goose, the largest airplane ever built. The Goose (actually made of birch) is housed in a gigantic glass-walled hangar that’s lit up beautifully at night.
Just across Salmon River Highway from the museum lies McMinnville Municipal Airport, a busy little hub that serves as a base for more than 130 prop planes, jets, helicopters, and gliders. The cluster of businesses and offices on the field include the FBO/flying school Cirrus Aviation along with Northwest Air Repair, and the ten-thousand-square-foot area command of the Oregon State Police—a big-ass cop shop. There’s also a National Guard armory on the property, and just south of that lies Airport Park, a heavily wooded campground that’s open to the public. Fliers who come to McMinnville to check out the museum often camp at the park, which runs practically right onto the taxiway.
Northwest Air Repair is owned by U.K.-born Graham Goad, who also serves as the airport’s manager. His younger brother Adam worked at McMinnville as a flight instructor for a helicopter company.
According to Graham, the first weirdness happened on Thursday, June 3, “when Connie, who works at the FBO, went to get her lunch out of the fridge and noticed it was gone.” Lunch-bag larceny wasn’t a common occurrence at McMinnville. No one made a big deal out of it, though—some folks just aren’t that fanatical about their food. And some folks are. When Graham walked into his hangar office on Monday the seventh, he immediately noticed that something was horribly, horribly wrong: three of his Johnsonville Beddar with Cheddar brats were missing.
Graham loves those fat tubes of beefy cheesy goodness. Often he’ll just nuke a couple in the microwave and gobble them down without even bothering to bun ’em or add fixings. He doesn’t take brat banditry lightly, and with a notorious forager known to be in the area, he quickly came up with a suspect. “My brother Adam has a key to my shop and he sticks his head in my fridge all the time.”
Adam, though, swore up and down that he didn’t do it. Graham scratched his bald head and almost had himself convinced that he just might have been eating so many himself that he’d lost count. But then he noticed a couple more odd things around the office. His computer had been reset, and his WiFi signal booster had been unplugged, disabling the camera that sent images of his shop to his desktop throughout the day. Minor, compared to the missing hot dogs, but still evidence that something fishy was going on.
BACK IN WASHINGTON ON June 3, another bizarre twist. An anonymous donor made a public offer to Colt: turn yourself in and I’ll give you $50,000. The offer was made through Jim Johanson, an Edmunds-based attorney and former state rep whom fugitive-recoverer Mike Rocha described as “a friend of our company.” Johanson says the donors were “just some people that didn’t want to see anything bad happen to Colt or anyone else, like law enforcement.” Part of the deal was that Johanson would also represent Colt pro bono, “no strings attached.” The free lawyer and $50 grand in “no longer walking around” money had a deadline, though, set to expire June 8 at 3 p.m.
I couldn’t find a law enforcement officer anywhere who’d ever heard of such a thing as allowing a fugitive to basically collect a bounty on himself. If it worked, it could start a whole new trend. Go directly to jail and do collect your $200.
“He’s not gonna turn himself in,” said Pam. “Give up your freedom for a lousy fifty thousand dollars! What the hell can you do with that small amount of money? Maybe get a really nice car.”
The deadline came and went without a peep from Colt. The prospective donors have remained anonymous.
ON WEDNESDAY MORNING, JUNE 9, Graham Goad arrived at his McMinnville shop and noticed that the back door was unlocked. Inside his office, Graham’s computer screen wasn’t how he’d left it and his wireless booster was again unplugged. He called Adam in and demanded to know if he’d been messing with his stuff. Again, Adam pleaded innocent. Then it was his turn. He pulled his head out of his brother’s fridge and asked, “Graham, how many hot dogs did you eat yesterday?”
Oh no, Graham thought, not now, not when he’d just stocked up on the special smoked sausage dogs. Graham did some quick hot dog calculus that put Captain Queeg’s geometric strawberry logic to shame. He ran the figures again and double-checked the net number of wieners left in the wrapper. The result was inescapable: six dogs had fled the pack.
“That’s when I realized, ‘Hey, somebody’s been in here!’”
Graham walked over to the FBO for a cup of joe and mentioned the theft. “One of the people there said, ‘Ho ho ho, maybe it’s the Barefoot Bandit!’”
Graham and other local pilots had heard of Colton Harris-Moore and his affinity for airports and aviation. “We knew he was doing this kind of thing,” he says. “But naw, we figured he was still stuck up there in the San Juans. We didn’t think he’d venture this far.”
Of course the information that he was most likely in Oregon and shopping the state’s small airports was already there for the disseminating. Here again Colt was serving as a war gamer for law enforcement and Homeland Security. He wasn’t a serial killer or an Al Qaeda sleeper, but he was someone already accused of stealing four planes, more than a million dollars in property, and committing dozens of other felonies. He was very high profile and certainly would be a feather in the cap of whoever caught him. The FBI was actively hunting him and you’d hope they have big ears.
The Dodge Journey stolen from Warrenton-Astoria was recovered by the Yamhill County Sheriff’s Office in Dayton at 7 p.m. on June 3. That’s less than two miles from McMinnville Airport, which has that State Police Command Center right on the property. Yamhill contacted Warrenton that day and Chief Workman called state authorities and the TITAN Fusion Center. The Fusion Center declined Workman’s request to get the report out, and though a window-licking squirrel could have looked at the info and Colt’s well-known MO and come up with McMinnville Airport as his target, no one in law enforcement even called the airport to give them a heads-up.
Instead, on June 3, just after Pam says she’d poured herself a beer, the FBI drove up to Haven Place on Camano Island. They were there to ask once again that Pam let them know where Colt was. One of Pam’s standard lines had become “If you don’t believe me, give me a lie detector test!” The FBI agents always declined. This visit, though, the FBI agents told her they were going to set one up for her, but that it would take a couple of weeks. Suddenly Pam wasn’t so sure. “I’m going to have to think about it… I don’t trust these polygraphs.”
Pam had bought herself a small tape recorder and now recorded the police and FBI whenever they questioned her. During this visit, the tape ran out. The FBI agents stopped the interview and one of them inserted a new tape for her. They all saw the humor in that, and telling the story, Pam went into a fit of throaty laughter that ended in a hacking cough.
“They were real nice like they used to be,” she said. “And I gave them a big damn lecture about shining that damn flashlight into my face the last time. I said, ‘Don’t you ever do that again!’” The agents, Pam says, told her they didn’t have too much time to look for Colt “because they were after bin Laden and stuff like that. I told them that Colt and his dog could find bin Laden, and one of them laughed and said, ‘Yeah, he probably could.’”
Friendly as they were, they did, however, leave Pam with a copy of U.S. Code, title 18, chapter 1, section 3, the law regarding actions such as harboring or hindering the apprehension of a criminal that would make someone an accessory after the fact.
She sighed and said that her life revolved around Colt’s problems. “I get so tired of thinking about it… I go to sleep thinking about it and I wake up thinking about it.” Other than her movies, she said, she has only one escape. “It’s called beer,” she laughed, then added, “I’m serious.”
As Pam was reading the paper the FBI agents left her, a spider crawled across it and she suddenly yelled, “They bugged me!”
LATE IN THE EVENING on the eighth, the telephone rang in the trailer. Pam picked it up and recognized a voice she says she hadn’t heard for months. “It was Colt… I was shocked, but it was great to hear from him. He sounded good, relaxed, says he’s fine.” Pam says she asked Colt where he was and got silence for an answer. “He says he got rid of the cell phone he used to use and now he’s on a throwaway.” Pam warned Colt that the heat was on. “I told him to lay low, real low, because of the stupid bounty hunter… but he already knew about him.” As usual, Colt had been following all the news about him. He told Pam, “I read where you said that I wouldn’t be interested in no lousy fifty thousand.”
“I said, ‘I was right wasn’t I?’ And he said, ‘Yeah.’”
Pam had just gotten in touch with John Henry Browne, who, depending on who you ask, is either Washington State’s most effective criminal defense attorney or its most hated. Or both. Over a long career, the sixty-four-year-old Browne has been attracted to numerous high-profile cases. Early on, as head trial lawyer for the King County public defender’s office, he represented serial killer Ted Bundy. Since going into private practice, he’s specialized in clients who’ve been similarly popular in the public’s eye, such as a man who set a warehouse fire in which four Seattle firefighters died. Browne, brash, theatrical, and six feet six inches tall, sees himself as a great equalizer for the individual against a too-powerful government. He has a reputation for aggressively attacking the prosecution’s witnesses, which he’s paid to do, and taunting and threatening prosecutors, which just seems to be his favorite hobby.
Browne confirmed he was interested in Colt’s case. Maybe having a headline-making lawyer to defend him would convince Colt to turn himself in before somebody got killed. I figured it was worth one more shot, and on June 7 wrote a blog post to Colt that included John Henry Browne’s cell phone number.
WHEN I NEXT SPOKE with Pam, she said she’d told Colt about the lawyer, “but he didn’t act interested.”
Pam, though, was almost bubbly in this conversation. Colt had finally reached out to her again, and she was feeling like she’d taken control of some things. She had John Henry Browne, and she was setting up a defense fund for Colt.
“I have people saying hi to me that haven’t said hi in friggin’ years,” she said. “Yesterday down at Elger Bay store, two of the cashiers that have always had their noses in the air to me were suddenly saying, ‘Hi, Pam, how ya doin’?’ What the hell is that? Oh, we better hurry up and make friends with her because she’s gonna be famous. What the hell?”
Pam said that Colt was studying a foreign language but wouldn’t say which one. In one of their conversations, she said, he also mentioned a girlfriend. “So I told him about birth control ’cause I guess she stayed with him for a while… I said, ‘Now, Colt, you’re not supposed to have any kids until you’re quite a bit older. And he said, ‘Oh, don’t worry, Mom.’”
Colt had asked her for some other advice, too. “He wants me to write down my words of wisdom for him. And I said, number one: don’t get involved with Orientals or black girls. But then the next time he called me I said I take all that back. I said, ‘Colt, if you love them, then I don’t care what their color is, because real love is not easy to find.’ He said, ‘Well, she’s gotta be able to build a campfire.’ I said, ‘Okay, what else?’ He said, ‘She has to know how to cook and she has to know how to set up a campsite and fish.’ Anyway, he went down his list and what he was describing was me! I felt good about that.”
BACK IN OREGON… SIX days and nine hot dogs after law enforcement knew the Dodge had been dumped within walking distance of McMinnville Airport, the owner of the FBO called Graham Goad and told him a rental car was missing. One of the services offered by the FBO is to line up cars for incoming pilots. A silver GMC Acadia was stolen while waiting for Enterprise to come pick it up. That same day, the ninth, they noticed that the stock of AA batteries in the supply closet had been raided. Then the owner of a private hangar went to turn on his handheld GPS and it wouldn’t work. When he opened the back to check the batteries, they were gone.
Graham and the owner of the FBO called the Oregon State Police station seventy-five yards away, but the Staties shrugged and told them to call the city police—they had no interest in a stolen rental car and disappearing hot dogs. The McMinnville PD showed up and took a report, but didn’t do any forensic work. It was Graham who found where the back window to his hangar had been pried open with a screwdriver.
A week later, Graham’s youngest brother, Matthew, who lives up in Everett, Washington, sent him an email link to a newspaper story about Colton Harris-Moore being tracked to Oregon. “He says, ‘Hey, this guy is in your area!’ I said, ‘Yeah, we figured that out, thanks for the timely heads-up.’”
“NO, I NEVER HEARD anything,” says Alan Daniels, manager of Oregon’s Ontario Municipal Airport. He’d received no warning about any airport-surfing plane and/or car thief at loose in the region, certainly not near his airport, which offers a single five-thousand-foot runway right alongside a golf course. Hook your approach to runway 32 at Ontario, and you could land your Cessna in a water hazard.
Ontario has a population of eleven thousand or so, making it the biggest town in Malheur County. “We’re just a quiet little community out here in the desert,” says Daniels. “It’s not the edge of the world, but if you stand on your tiptoes you might be able to see it.” Ontario grew up on the Union Pacific Railroad and lies on the Snake River where it begins to serve as the squiggly divide between Oregon and Idaho. The area farms out potatoes, onions, and beets, but the town’s main claim to fame is that it’s the home of Oregon’s largest state prison.
The Ontario airport is close to a major highway, and several other arteries intersect in and around the town. Ne’er-do-wells like the easy on-and-off access. “Our crime rates,” says Captain Mark Alexander of the City of Ontario Police Department, “are up there with bigger cities just because we have such a transient population.” Captain Alexander says they get a lot of people coming through town because they’ve got themselves a Walmart and no sales tax. Plop that combination close to the border of a state with 6 percent sales tax, and sooey, it’s feeding time. “Any given day at Walmart, 75 percent of your license plates are Idaho.”
Alexander says he hadn’t heard of the Barefoot Bandit. “You gotta understand, we’re just flooded with ‘Be on the lookout of all kinds of people,’ and that’s just from around here.” That doesn’t mean their airport was totally off police radar. “We’ve had some hangars broke into before,” says Alexander. For that reason, officers do drive-bys around the airport every once in a while. One of them cruised through at 10:30 p.m. on June 9, and saw nothing amiss—because you can’t see what’s already missing.
Local pilot Gary Taylor, fifty-two, flies corporate, a Learjet, out of Ontario Muni. He’d pulled up to the airport that day at 3 p.m. in his white 2008 F250 diesel pickup. He parked the big rig next to the hangar and his copilot cruised up alongside in her Prius.
Gary, who’s been flying since he was sixteen, went inside to wipe down the jet with an ugly blue bath towel he’d bought just for the plane’s exterior. Once he had the Lear sparkling, he tossed the towel and his keys into the pickup. “I don’t like to fly with car keys and take the chance of losing them on a layover.” The Ford had a keyless entry, so he always stuck his keys up under the driver’s seat and locked the doors. On the front seat, he left a $1,000 Bose noise-canceling pilot headset and a brand-new jacket. Normally, Gary would have tucked his truck into the hangar, but this was scheduled to be a short flight, just a hop to Salt Lake City and back, so he left it outside. They fired up the jet and took off at 4 p.m., expecting to be back by 9 p.m. that evening.
Instead, it wasn’t until midnight when they taxied back to the hangar. The big truck was gone. “At first,” Gary says, “I thought it was some of my sick friends playing a joke on me.” He didn’t find it funny. “It was late and I just wanted to get home.” He made a couple of calls and realized this was no joke, then called the police.
The cops told him not to worry—too much. They said that it would probably show up later that night. “They said it was pretty common for… you know, Hispanic people to go out and joyride for a little while. They told me the cars usually show up in town.”
As they poked around, it became apparent that the pickup might not have been the thief’s first choice. He’d used a screwdriver to try to get in the Prius. Then they discovered that he’d also tried to force open the hangar’s man door. Typically, those are flimsy, but Gary had reinforced it with a steel plate. It turned out to be a lucky break for the burglar: if he’d opened the door, he would have tripped the silent alarm.
The next day, Gary was driving toward the hangar when he noticed something that caused him to hit the brakes. A jerrican of fuel and a hand truck that had been in the bed of his missing pickup were sitting alongside a silver GMC Acadia parked not far from the Lear’s hangar.
“I thought that is really way too weird.”
It got weirder. When Gary walked up to the Acadia and looked inside, he saw his ugly blue towel.
He called the police out again. The towel, they theorized, had been used to wipe down the prints on the stolen SUV.
Gary’s truck wasn’t found in town. Two nights later, though, at 2:15 a.m., he got a call from a deputy from over in Ada County, Idaho, who told him they’d found his F250 on a farm road grandly named the Emmet Highway in a little town of less than two thousand called Star. The truck had gone about thirty miles down 84 and then east about ten miles, ending up in the middle of a field where the corn crop was just starting to sprout with stalks about six inches high. “I asked if my headset was in there and the sheriff said yes. The keys were gone, though. They didn’t bother with prints or anything, he just said, ‘Come get it now,’ because the ignition key was missing and they were afraid whoever took it was going to come back.”
Gary was able to get ahold of a tow company to go put the truck up on a flatbed, but they refused to bring it all the way to his place and he had to go meet them halfway. When he got to the pickup, Gary says he noticed a couple of things right off. First was olfactory, and it wasn’t a new-car smell. “Horrendous body odor. That freaked me out… I wasn’t sure I could take it.” The second thing was that the seat was pulled way up, as if whoever was driving it was real short, or he’d moved the seat up so he could stretch out and sleep in the back. Then, when he turned on the engine, the radio started talking Spanish—not the station he’d left it on.
Because Ada County didn’t bother to do forensics, there’s no clue who took Gary’s truck—other than the person who did might not have bathed in a few days, and he either spoke Spanish or… was possibly learning the language and wanted to practice. Or the truck may even have been stolen twice, both thieves realizing they weren’t going to get far without having to stop for fuel, which isn’t a smart thing to do considering that almost every gas station in the country has surveillance cameras.
What is known, though, is that Colton Harris-Moore was in Ada County at that time, where he stole a 2006 Ford F150 and continued his road trip. He did a big 372-mile swing below the Sawtooth National Forest amid the western foothills of the Rocky Mountains and then drove down into the Teton Valley to a town called Driggs, Idaho. There at Driggs Teton Peaks Municipal Airport on June 12, he traded the pickup for a gray Cadillac Escalade, which he stole from a private hangar. The airport had a number of cars around, all with keys in them, but Colt picked the top of the line, the favorite SUV of rap stars.
He dumped the Escalade in Cody, Wyoming, the following day. Moving between those two points, the most likely route is through Wind River Canyon, past Kirwin, a spot that Amelia Earhart liked so much that she was having a cabin built there while she attempted her ill-fated around-the-world flight. The other choice would be up through Yellowstone National Park and across the Wapiti Valley, a drive that Teddy Roosevelt called “the most scenic 50 miles in America.” It’s the perfect path for a summer road trip, but risky due to having to stop to pay a park entrance fee to a ranger. Regardless of the route, both drives run through such breathtaking vistas that it should be a felony to do either one of them at night.
Colt was now getting into real bandit country. In 1832, Driggs was the site of a huge fur trapper rendezvous that, beyond the usual alcohol-fueled shenanigans that made those gatherings famous, ended with the deadly two-day battle of Pierre’s Hole, where mountain men along with their Nez Perce and Flathead friends fought a band of Gros Ventre Indians. And Colt certainly wasn’t the first rustler to make a run through Teton Valley, though historically it served as a hideout for those who filched cattle and horses instead of boats and planes. Crossing into Wyoming, the red hills and frontier towns still faintly ring with the ricochets of Robert LeRoy Parker and Harry Longabaugh, aka Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, along with Wild Bill Hickok, Doc Holliday, Calamity Jane, and Frank and Jesse James.
The local legend most akin to Colt was probably Ed Harrington, a gentleman bandit whose lasting celebrity came from a July day in 1914 when he held up fifteen stagecoaches. They were sightseeing coaches, each filled with tourists visiting Yellowstone Park, so it was like robbing the faux boats as they make their way through the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. Harrington was very polite, used the magic word “please” when asking folks to deposit their cash in his sack, and didn’t hurt anyone. He got so cocky with how well his plan was working, though, that he allowed his victims to take snapshots of him as souvenirs. Harrington collected more than $1,000 in cash and jewelry, but was later identified and spent five years in Leavenworth.
The Wild West was once policed by characters like Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson, who were just as wild as the famous outlaws they corralled and sometimes caroused with. Today, it’s men like Detective Ron Parduba and George Menig of the Cody Police Department. Both are former NYPD. New York cops all think they’ve seen everything, but when Parduba and a fellow officer, John Harris, went out to investigate a break-in and stolen truck at High Country Roofing on June 13, they found a distinctive piece of evidence: a giant bare footprint. Harris saw the print in the mud and said it looked “like Bigfoot.” Cody police suspect Colt first went for an Escalade parked at a body shop—’cause that’s how he rolls—then realized it was too damaged and took the roofing truck instead. At some point during his time in Cody, the Barefoot Bandit cut his foot. As he drove the truck east, he bled DNA onto the floorboard.
The truck made it only two counties before it ran out of gas. Colt ditched it along the highway, leaving the keys in the ignition. A quarter mile away, he sneaked into an unlocked garage and made off with a Lincoln Mark LT, a $40,000 luxury pickup that’s very popular in the carports of the Mexican cartels. The Lincoln was found later at a small airport, a giant footprint on its bed cover.
Detective Parduba reported the Bigfoot sighting to Assistant Chief Menig, who saw a media report on the Barefoot Bandit. Together they concluded that all the evidence fit Colt’s MO and made a call back to the trailhead. Island County’s Ed Wallace says Menig’s call was the first hint of Colt’s location he’d received since Oregon.
THE LINCOLN PICKUP MADE its way to Buffalo in Johnson County, Wyoming, in the foothills of the Big Horn Mountains just north of Crazy Woman Canyon and the legendary outlaw sanctuary Hole-in-the-Wall. The most famous denizen of Hole-in-the-Wall was Butch Cassidy who, historians say, first soured on authority figures at the age of thirteen when he rode to town on his day off to buy some jeans, but found the store closed. He broke in, got his pants and a piece of pie, and left an IOU. The store owner pressed charges, however, and an outlaw was born.
Butch and Sundance stayed in Buffalo at the Occidental Hotel, as did Calamity Jane and Buffalo Bill. Today, folks drifting into town are more likely to be about coal and methane production than gunslinging, but the area’s still primarily big skies and open spaces. Only 8,500 people live in all of four-thousand-square-mile Johnson County.
Jim McLaughlin, who’s the manager and fixed base operator for the Johnson County Airport two miles north of the town center, fits the rugged landscape he’s occupied since 1978. That, though, still doesn’t make him a local. “Not in this town,” laughs the easygoing seventy-two-year-old great-grandfather. Jim raises a small herd of cattle and there’s a bit of John Wayne in his voice, but he says he doesn’t get along so good with horses. “I’ll stick to planes—they’re a heck of a lot safer.” He flies and maintains Cessnas and Supercubs, and other than most weekend evenings when he’s out dancing, Jim says he seems to spend all his time at the airport. He hadn’t, though, gotten any calls about Colt even though his was the closest airport to the Barefoot Bandit’s last known whereabouts.
“I’d heard a little bit about him a long time ago, but I didn’t think anybody like that would try something here because, you know, it’s kinda dangerous around these parts—a lot of guys pack weapons.”
Jim’s first hint of something odd was on Saturday, June 12, when he slammed his hangar door shut and the padlock fell out, broken. “At first I thought maybe it was just old and rotted.” Then, when Jim came in on Monday, he realized that more than entropy had been afoot. Eight Snickers bars had been swiped from the FBO counter, and when he went to his hangar he noticed a bunch of tools—big screwdrivers, pry bars, and channel locks—was missing. Jim walked the rest of the private hangars and saw that six of them had been broken into. In one, there’d been both a Suburban and a $65,000 sporty-luxe Cadillac CTS-V—“One of them go-fast ones,” says Jim. Both vehicles had full fuel tanks and the keys inside. “He wanted a Cadillac.” Sometime Saturday night, Colt had closed the hangar door behind him and drove off in the supercharged sedan.
Jim called the law but didn’t expect much. “They don’t go out to a shooting here until they’re sure the bad guys are out of ammunition.” The police took a report but didn’t do any forensics at the airport. “They might know where the fingerprint kit is, but I’ve never seen them use it.” Jim says the police didn’t mention anything about the Barefoot Bandit and didn’t have any suspects in mind. “They were… disinterested.” The police did collect some of the tools that had been taken out of Jim’s hangar, but he says he’s not sure if that was for evidentiary purposes. “Probably a cop needed a big screwdriver.”
Later, the fancy Lincoln pickup stolen just a ways out of town was found—sitting in the Johnson County Airport’s lot.
THE CADDY WAS RECOVERED a few days later, undamaged, 163 miles away in Spearfish, South Dakota. To get there, Colt drove through Crook County, Wyoming, and its most famous town, Sundance, which lent its name to Harry Longabaugh, the Sundance Kid, after he did a stretch in its jail for horse thieving at the age of eighteen.
Spearfish takes its name from the Sioux Indian practice of spear fishing in the local creek. It’s a Black Hills town of 8,600 just ten minutes north of Deadwood, the notoriously lawless gold rush town where Wild Bill Hickok was gunned down.
The Cadillac was ditched just a mile from Spearfish’s Black Hills Airport. By now, anyone could guess where strange things started happening next. The FBO at Black Hills is Eagle Aviation, run by Ray Jilek. Did Ray get any warnings that something wicked his way comes? “None.”
Ray runs a tight ship. “We balance the till every night and again in the morning,” he says. When they did the count Monday morning, the fourteenth, it was off. “We were four dollars short.” The missing four bucks wasn’t near as strange as the fact that several hundred dollars was left behind in the cash drawer. “It was really puzzling… It just didn’t seem rational,” he says. Someone less precise might even think they’d simply miscounted, but not Ray. He started looking around and found that a number of locks had been subtly jimmied.
“Everything was put back as close as possible to the way it was left, but you could tell.” One of the doors that’d been opened led to a hangar with two unlocked planes. “We had portable GPS units and headsets and all that kind of stuff inside… but nothing was taken.” He began to think it was probably just kids—until he got to work the following morning.
This time the till was empty. “It’d been pried open with a screwdriver.” Ray says the burglar took his big orange-handled Snap-on screwdriver and sledgehammer and went to work on a four-drawer fireproof filing cabinet. “He beat on that thing, must have been for an hour to gain access to it only to find out there was nothing inside, absolutely nothing.” The planes were all accounted for, but one other count was off. “There were 15.8 gallons of high-grade aviation fuel missing.”
Inside the FBO is a lockbox where folks who keep cars at the airport store their keys. When a sheriff’s deputy found the stolen Caddy the next day, “that’s when they started putting two and two together,” says Ray. They figured there’d likely be a vehicle missing from the Black Hills Airport, and sure enough, when they went out and counted, a Ford pickup was gone. “He’d pumped the aviation fuel into the truck and took off sometime late Monday night or early Tuesday morning.”
The mystery that remained was the first night’s $4. “We were thinking about that and suddenly looked over at the vending machines.” Ray speculates that Colt got hungry and needed some singles to get a Coke and a candy bar, maybe a Snickers.
THE BLACK HILLS FORD drove through the spectacular desolation of the Badlands and pulled up to the Pierre Regional Airport in the capital city of South Dakota. This was the largest airport Colt hit during the summer of 2010. Pierre’s two runways stretched across its 1,700 acres and handled commuter airlines, including Delta Connection. Lindbergh once landed here in the Spirit of St. Louis during a goodwill tour.
A ten-foot-high fence surrounded the secure side of the airport. According to what airport manager Mike Isaacs and the local police figured out from the evidence, Colt found a natural entry past security and into the terminal building. A lone tree, a crabapple, stood in the parking lot and branched out toward the terminal. It was an easy climb, then out on a limb and onto the roof. Footprints—sneakers—led from the tree across the flat roof to a second-story door. “No one would even think to lock that door,” says Mike. “There’s no outside access to it—unless you climb the tree—and it’s only there to take weather observations for the FAA.” Once inside, Colt had access to the entire airport. “He could have messed with all the TSA’s equipment, but he didn’t.”
What he did do, though, was stealthily attempt to jimmy nearly every lock in the terminal using a screwdriver. “The more we looked, the more we found these little pry marks here, there, and everywhere. He could have easily broke a window and gotten into my office and taken laptops and all kinds of stuff, but he didn’t.”
Colt tried the cash box at the Delta counter but couldn’t crack it. He did get into the lockboxes at Avis and Budget, and took the key to a rental car. He then went outside on the runway side of the airport and found an open door at the firehouse. Upstairs in the chief’s office around 4 a.m., Colt got on the computer and pulled up Google Earth, zooming in on the satellite view of the airport and surrounding area. He grabbed the chief’s iPod touch on the way out and stopped by the firefighters’ break room where he microwaved himself a Hungry-Man frozen dinner and took a Diet Coke.
When he got back outside the fence, Colt had some good news and bad news. The Avis key he’d taken fit a car in the lot, but the car had been totaled. So he jumped back into the pickup he’d taken in Buffalo and continued east.
“I was surprised,” says Isaacs. “After I found out that he had a history of this, I was a little shocked that nobody had sent out anything to the airports.” Isaacs says he tried to make up for that by calling 866-GA-SECURE, a hotline for reporting suspicious activity around general aviation airports that’s a partnership between AOPA and the TSA. Calls ring at the TSA’s Transportation Security Operations Center. “I also called our state aeronautics office and the other local airports and let them know to watch out.”
COLT HAD NOW MADE it to the exact center of the country, 1,200 miles away from the comfort of his misty Northwest woods. He was adamant about sticking to the conspicuously predictable MO of hopping from airport to airport. The FBI, TSA, and police departments stretching back to the Pacific coast all had more than enough information to guess his next moves. It appeared the game was coming to an end.
Meanwhile, on June 16, local Seattle television aired footage of a team of masked bounty hunters gearing up and going out to hunt Colt. They patrolled dark roads and woods and hid in the weeds around an airport… on Camano Island.
On Orcas Island, high school yearbooks came out. The junior class photos included a kid who’d spent so much time on the island he might as well have enrolled and joined the Vikings basketball team. Colt’s was the only self-portrait.
JACK MCCALL, THE GUY who shot Wild Bill Hickok in Deadwood while he held aces and eights, was originally set loose because Hickok had maybe killed his brother. McCall was rearrested, though, and taken to a place where the law existed more formally than it did in Deadwood. That place was Yankton, Dakota Territory.
Yankton, South Dakota’s River City, lies on the north bank of the Missouri. It’s nearby airport is Chan Gurney, where Gary Carlson runs the FBO.
I’ll get this out of the way quickly: Gary, did you get any advance warning that there was someone in the area, state, or region who was targeting airports?
“None, no, not a one.”
Carlson’s first inkling came when he rushed into his office at 7 a.m. on a hectic June 17. He had a jet coming in early and was hurrying to have everything ready. He slammed his door behind him and noticed that it sounded funny. Then he went to his desk and saw that someone had turned his monitor off. That wasn’t right. When he’d left at 9 p.m. the night before, he’d put it into sleep mode, just like always. He went back over to the door and saw that the lock had been jimmied, then immediately ran out to make sure all the planes were okay.
They were, but his big Craftsman screwdriver was missing out of the toolbox, and that matched the damage on the security door. He also noticed that blankets were gone from the little spot the FBO has for pilots in need of a nap between flights. A brand-new Chevy pickup had been delivered to the airport by a local rental company for the people jetting in that morning. Its key was gone, but the pickup was still parked outside. This was interesting. The Chevy had OnStar, which has a stolen vehicle tracking function that can alert police to its exact location, speed, and direction via GPS. Beginning in 2009, OnStar even added the ability for operators to remotely slow a vehicle once the police confirmed it’d been stolen. A smart thief would know this and pick another car. But OnStar is also standard on all Cadillacs, like the recently boosted Escalade and CTS-V. It made sense to take those cars only if the thief was cunning enough to know that they wouldn’t be noticed missing until he’d already gotten to his next stop.
But what if the traveling thief had decided for some reason to stay put for a while?
Gary called the police, who immediately suspected Colt and knew what to look for. They quickly located the Black Hills pickup in the airport parking lot. Detectives jumped on Carlson’s computer and saw that someone had been online at 1 a.m., surfing AirNav.com, “the pilot’s window into a world of aviation information.” AirNav tells you everything you’d want to know about every airport: number and type of planes based there, how busy it is, hours of operation, FBO services, and whether there’s a manned tower. The site also links to satellite photos of the airport and surrounding area, which the computer history showed had been pulled up.
The fact that not much was missing from the airport led local detectives to believe Colt might be coming back for a second bite like he did in Spearfish and at least four other airports. So they came up with a plan to stake out the building that night. The police also began a search of the area, paying special attention to a copse of woods just south of the airport.
Those woods, a mix of elm and cottonwood, fully leafed in mid-June, form the northeast corner of a residential neighborhood adjacent to the airport. Inside the trees, you have an excellent spot to watch the area homes and see which ones remain dark after sundown. It’s less than a third of a mile from the airport to the street entrance of the development, or you can walk across a soybean field that takes you right to the backs of the houses.
Colt walked over and began snooping around. Police say that he visited numerous houses in the neighborhood, but didn’t find just the right one until he broke into the home of Kelly and Lisa Kneifl.
The Kneifls and the four youngest—ages fourteen, twelve, eight, and five—of their seven kids had just moved into the rancher a month before. Kelly and Lisa travel often for their jobs and it had been a very busy year. They’d barely even begun to unpack the house, but managed to block out a week for a vacation. That’s where they were, up in the mountains of Pennsylvania, when Colt came calling.
Several things made the Kneifl house ideal, even beyond the fact that the family was out of town. There was plenty of food, the kind of stuff teenagers love, like frozen pizza and chicken nuggets, packaged deli ham and chicken, and a whole vat’s worth of sugar-free Jell-O pudding cups. The home also backed up to open fields and ongoing residential construction. If someone inside was careful about turning on the lights up on the main floor, and spent most of his time in the large finished basement where the only light visible from the outside would be through the egress window facing the fields, it’d be possible to remain unseen indefinitely, even by the neighbors. Plus, the Kniefl boys had a kick-ass video game collection and three platforms—Xbox, Wii, and GameCube.
Colt chose one of the boys’ beds downstairs for sleeping. He spent the rest of his time on the couch in front of the TV in the basement family room. That’s where he ate, neatly piling his food wrappers and building what would become a leaning tower of Jell-O pudding empties.
In the middle of the night, officially early morning on June 18, Colt was wide awake and busy. He nuked himself some chicken nuggets and arrayed them in three precise rows of three on one of the Kneifls’ square plates. He set the clothes washer going, and with his nuggets cooling by the couch, jumped into the shower. When he got out, he turned on one of Kelly’s beard trimmers and started giving himself a buzz, cutting about an inch off his hair. Then he heard an unwelcome rumble…
Kelly and family had a long, long day getting home from Pennsylvania. They drove to Pittsburgh, flew into Omaha, and then had a two-and-a-half-hour run home. It was 3 a.m. when a blurry-eyed Kelly finally pulled into the driveway, hit the garage door opener, and roused the troops.
Lisa gathered up her five-year-old daughter and carried her to the door leading into the house. She noticed that the door was slightly ajar. “I don’t remember leaving this open,” she said to Kelly. Lisa stepped into the mudroom and flicked on the light. That’s when she saw that the door at the end of the hall leading to the interior of the home was also open. She was looking at it, just about to mention it to Kelly, when suddenly a hand reached out and slammed the door shut. Lisa screamed.
Kelly charged in and flung the door open like an angry grizzly. He was ready for almost anything… though he was still momentarily shocked to find a naked man. Colt ran away at full speed, and Kelly, a six-foot-three 340-pound former football player, took off after him, roaring, “Get out of my house!”
With Kelly right behind him, Colt fled deeper into the home, then suddenly made an acrobatic leap over a banister, landing three-quarters of the way down the basement stairs. Kelly had to backtrack to the top of the stairway and then rushed down, still screaming at the top of his lungs, “Get the hell out of my house!”
As Kelly neared the bottom of the stairs, the only light was a dim glow from the egress window off to the left; the rest of the basement was in total darkness. He was a clear target, though, silhouetted by the light coming from upstairs. Kelly’s roars were suddenly matched by a young voice shouting back at him from about fifteen feet away: “Stop! I’ve got a gun! I’ll shoot! I’ll shoot!” A red laser beam shot out of the darkness and hit Kelly. He stopped dead.
Lisa was watching everything from the top of the stairs. She turned and screamed to the kids, “Run!”
After freezing for a second, Kelly ran back upstairs. Out on the driveway, their twelve-year-old daughter had already dialed 911 on her cell. Lisa grabbed the phone and breathlessly told the operator that there were people in her house threatening to shoot her family. Kelly yelled for everyone to get back into the car. He slammed it into reverse and backed out and down the street, stopping two houses away. He pulled into a neighbor’s driveway, where he could still see the front of his home. He momentarily considered driving to the other side so he could shine his headlights on the basement window, “and then I thought, He’s got a gun, I’ve got the kids, that would make no sense at all.”
Down in the basement, Colt ripped open the washing machine mid-cycle, breaking the latch. He grabbed for his sopping-wet clothes—missing a pair of gray-and-black Calvin Klein boxer briefs in the bottom of the drum—then scooped up the rest of his gear and slid open the basement window.
About six minutes after the Kneifls dialed 911, Kelly saw two officers cautiously approaching the house on foot. A few minutes after that, a third officer showed up, and finally one of them circled around to where he could see the basement window. Several minutes later, the 911 operator told Kelly that the officers wanted to talk to him. He drove to another neighbor’s driveway, where a cop was waiting, wanting to know about the house’s exits and what weapons were inside. He said they had a SWAT team on the way.
It was nearly an hour before the four-man SWAT team arrived in full gear, assault rifles strapped across their chests. In the meantime, Kelly had sent Lisa and the kids off to a hotel to try to get some sleep. He drew the police a rough blueprint of his home, and they then told him to pull back out of the line of fire. Kelly didn’t have a house key to give them, so the tactical team hoisted their metal battering ram and approached the front door—they felt it was a safer entry point than going through the garage. Bang went the door and Kelly watched them pour inside “hoopin’ and a hollerin’.”
By the time they’d cleared the house, finding no one inside, it was 4 a.m. A canine team began working the area and the police asked Kelly to help them find his shotgun and rifles, which were all accounted for, along with Lisa’s jewelry and the cash he’d had stuffed in a drawer. A detective led him through the house, room by room, taking photos and asking how things had been left, what was missing or out of place. “Even the boys’ bedrooms, nothing was really messed up,” says Kelly. “Or at least not more than usual. Even the food wrappers around the couch were somewhat organized.”
Later Kelly realized that Colt had gotten into his locking file drawer, prying it open with a screwdriver. It’d been filled with birth certificates and other important papers. “The only things missing, though, were all my vehicle titles.”
The real disorder was in the basement bathroom, where it was obvious that someone had been interrupted mid-primp. A razor sat on the floor along with shaved whiskers. Inch-long head hair was all over the place, “on the floor, in the sink, on the counter, and even chunks of it on the window he’d climbed out.”
All through the police search, the washing machine had been angrily beeping about its premature evacuation. Kelly finally turned it off.
After a short break at the hotel to see his family, Kelly returned to his street at daybreak to find a scene out of the movies. Law was swarming the neighborhood. Investigators pulled Colt’s fingerprints from inside the house, while other officers canvassed the nearby homes, finding evidence Colt attempted to break into as many as a dozen. Police searched local construction sites and woods near the airport.
At 4 p.m., a search group from Codington County, two hours north, arrived with a trio of bloodhounds. Kelly watched them walk the dogs one by one around his house. Each hound picked up a strong trail leading from the basement egress window. The hunters worked the neighborhood hard until 11 p.m., while all afternoon and into the evening helicopters from the South Dakota National Guard sliced through the sky, searching for Colt from above.
Kelly had screamed so hard at Colt that he lost his voice for five days and had to hoarsely whisper reassuring words to his children as they called out night after night, frightened, saying they heard strange noises and were worried someone was in their house again.
When he began learning about Colt’s history, Kelly found it reassuring that he’d never physically hurt any of his burglary victims. One thought, though, kept him awake long after the incident. “Thinking about it from his side, with this big bearded guy chasing him down the stairs screaming bloody murder… I must have come very close to scaring him into shooting me.”
THE WORD WENT OUT to all law enforcement: Colt not only collected and carried guns, and might have fired a shot at cops in the woods, but now he’d actually threatened to shoot a civilian in his home. This amped things up immeasurably. If that laser was attached to a pistol, Colt had been a twitch away from making this a completely different story.
Colt told Josh that he’d use a gun if he had to, and he told Pam that he wouldn’t shoot first, but that he’d shoot back. He just made it a lot more likely that he’d have to.
EVEN THOUGH CAUGHT WITH his pants down in the Kneifls’ home, Colt made efficient use of the 3 a.m. darkness and the nine or ten minutes he had before the police got into position to cut off his escape. While law enforcement converged on Kelly’s house, Colt’s speed and stealth took him several miles east, far outside the search area. He broke into another home, stole the keys to a Toyota Sequoia, and hit the road.
Colt crossed the Missouri and made a straight shot south through sixty miles of Nebraska farmland to Norfolk, a city of twenty-four thousand in Madison County. Sometime after midnight on the nineteenth, he parked the Sequoia at Ta-Ha-Zouka Park on the Elkhorn River. The area had just experienced record flooding. The Elkhorn jumped its banks, swamped farms, and even tore down a railroad bridge and a pedestrian trestle that served as part of the state’s Cowboy Trail. Three days before Colt arrived, residents had been out in force, filling and piling sandbags to try to keep the river out of their homes and businesses.
Less than a mile down 81 from Ta-Ha-Zouka lies Karl Stefan Memorial Airport. At 2:56 a.m., Colt walked through an unlocked door and into the airport services building. He found and disabled the surveillance equipment, but a technician was later able to recover the data, which showed the Barefoot Bandit. There was cash and equipment in the airport office, but Colt didn’t bother with any of it. He did, however, grab a souvenir, a $40 hoodie embroidered with an airplane and NORFOLK AIRPORT. Colt then began snooping around the hangars, unsuccessfully trying to get inside a plane.
The airport folks—who’d received no prior warning—reported the break-in at 11 a.m. the next day. Police came and took a report, but it wasn’t until workers doing flood clean-up at Ta-Ha-Zouka found the Sequoia that Colt’s name came up. Norfolk PD told the airport manager she better check inside all the hangars, that chances were something big was missing. Something was: another Cadillac Escalade.
I’m pretty sure he’s thinking Grand Theft Auto at this point,” said one of the detectives closely following Colt’s run from back in Washington State. He told me he believed Colt was just going to keep stealing vehicles until he got wherever he was going. The joke around the Island County Sheriff’s Office was that Colt was heading for Chicago to turn himself in live on Oprah. More serious speculation was that he might be heading for Winnebago County, Wisconsin, for the annual Oshkosh air show, the biggest fly-in of plane freaks in the country and considered a rite of passage for private pilots. As many as ten thousand aircraft flock to the show each summer.
I didn’t have a clue where Colt was heading. Based on his interest in South American islands, I guessed he was studying Spanish, so Mexico had seemed likely until he turned toward the Atlantic Ocean. But I totally disagreed about the cars.
Wherever Colt was going, I was certain he wanted an airplane. When crumb after crumb on his trail turned out to be yet another Caddy or pickup, I did start to doubt my own theory—but only until I checked the weather. It’d been awful across the Midwest, with massive thunderstorms capable of smacking small planes out of the sky. It now made sense to me that Colt would hole up in a house like Kelly’s near an airport, waiting for the right flying weather.
The question that was still driving me crazy, though, was, How had the law not caught up with him yet?
I sat down on Sunday evening, June 20, to test two theories. One, that Colt was looking to steal a plane, and two, that his MO was so predictable that the cops and FBI should have easily been able to get out ahead of him. So far, Colt had stolen Cessna 182s and Cirrus SR22s. He flew the 182s at daybreak. He chose SR22s for his night flights when conditions and navigation are edgier and he could use the assistance of the glass cockpit instruments. With the bad weather across the Midwest, I assumed that he’d lean toward taking an SR22, day or night. Then I looked at his last known location and direction. Colt had recently taken a dip south, but I always figured he’d do that eventually in order to avoid Chicago since he needed to operate in rural areas where people were lax about security. I felt he’d get eaten alive in a big city. It still looked to me like he was determined to head east. Colt couldn’t risk stopping for gas, so his hops were relatively short. East out of Norfolk, Nebraska, the Iowa border was only sixty miles away. And, again, Colt wanted an airplane—they live at airports.
I simply Googled three words: Cirrus, airport, Iowa.
The top result was Classic Aviation, a Cirrus flight training center at the Pella, Iowa, airport. I picked up the phone and started to dial their number, but then looked at the time. It was 6 p.m. on Orcas, which made it… some hours later Central Corn Time. No one was going to be sitting around an FBO on a Sunday evening. I hung up and instead spent some time on Classic’s Web site, learning that Pella means “City of Refuge” in Dutch and was settled by immigrants from Holland who planted lots of tulips. It also said that along with flight training on Cirrus airplanes, Classic Aviation offered a free courtesy car for runs into town to check out the flowers and delicious Dutch pastries.
I wrote down their phone number and put it on my to-do list for Monday.
After breakfast the next morning, I called Shane Vande Voort, owner of Classic Aviation and manager at Pella Municipal Airport. The first thing I said was “This call is either going to sound real crazy… or not.” Shane laughed and said, “That’s okay, I get a lot of calls like that.” I asked if he’d received any recent calls from the FBI, NTSB, FAA, local police, or anybody else warning him about anything. Shane was silent. Yep, he thought I was crazy.
“How did you know to call me?” he asked after a long pause. I told him it was just a cold call, that I’d picked his operation simply by looking at a map and the kinds of planes based at the field.
“Well, no,” he said, “I hadn’t gotten any calls from the police in the past couple of days, though I wish I had… because I wound up having to call them myself this morning.
“We had a break-in last night,” he said, then asked me who I was. I explained that I was a writer following a teenage burglar and transportation rustler named Colt who had an affinity for airplanes.
“How did you already find out that we got hit?” he asked.
I told him, again, that this was just a cold call based on a couple minutes of research.
“You’re kidding me…” Shane said that the police were there doing their initial forensic work as we spoke. Not a word of this had gotten out yet.
“Did Colt get a plane?” I asked. Shane said no, that he and the police had already checked the planes and all were accounted for and everything looked fine. Shane told me that he’d locked up and left Sunday night at 9:30 (he would have been there if I’d called). He remembered leaving a hangar door open as he fussed around in the office. The police, he said, hadn’t found any sign of forced entry, so he thought the thief might have sneaked in while he was still there, walked through the hangar, and just hid inside until he left.
Shane said he knew right away that morning when he got to the brick building that houses Classic Aviation that he had trouble. “There was grass all over, in my office by my computer, and in the upstairs bathroom the whole bottom of the sink was filled with dead grass.” All the cash he’d had on hand, some $450, was missing, and his courtesy car was gone.
“But he didn’t try to get a plane?” I asked again, feeling my wild blue yonder theory fading away.
“Nope,” said Shane.
As the police pieced things together, they found that Colt had dumped the Norfolk Escalade at a tire company 1.3 miles from Shane’s airport. “The interesting thing about that,” said Shane, “is that there’s a four-lane highway in-between, so he must have run across.” That would have taken him through a lot of wet grassy fields.
When Colt got inside, he turned off two monitors in the front office, then went to Shane’s and sat at his computer. At some point, he deleted the browser history, then unplugged the network cable, which he could use to get his own laptop online. Rummaging around inside the office and FBO, Colt found the cash drawer and also took sweatshirts, two boxes of Tic Tacs that were in Shane’s desk, and keys to both Classic Aviation’s courtesy van as well as a customer’s Mazda Tribute. He also grabbed a pair of sneakers, size twelve, that belonged to one of the mechanics. Before he left, Colt went upstairs to the sink and washed the grass off his feet.
Shane said the police were scanning his computer trying to get any info on what Colt might have been researching (they didn’t find anything). I asked whether Colt had taken any flight training materials (no) and asked again (and again) about the planes. “He had access to an older Cirrus SR20, a Bonanza, and a Cherokee, and he could have easily gotten into the hangars with nicer, new planes including the SR22s, but no, he didn’t try,” he said.
I couldn’t understand why Colt didn’t at least attempt a plane, while Shane couldn’t understand why Colt traded in his late-model Cadillac Escalade for Shane’s crappy $1,500 silver Dodge Caravan emblazoned with the Classic Aviation logo and phone number. “I can’t imagine where he thinks he’s going in that, with our name written on the side.”
A local pilot had come to the field and started his plane at 5 a.m., so Shane speculated that he’d scared Colt into just taking the first car he saw that he had keys to. Since the van hadn’t been located yet, Shane’s main worry was that Colt was planning on coming back. He said he was already arranging to have surveillance cameras set up all over the airport, and just the thought of that disheartened him. “This is Iowa,” he said. “It’s a leave-the-keys-in-it kinda place, and this guy is capitalizing on that trust. That’s low.”
A FEW HOURS LATER, my phone rang. It was Shane. He said that because I’d been such a pain in the ass (or something to that effect but in a friendlier Midwestern phrasing) about the dang airplanes, airplanes, airplanes, he’d gone back out and rechecked them. “You were right,” he said. “He tried to get into one of the Cirrus SR22s by prying open the baggage door with something like a screwdriver.” The lock was damaged, but he wasn’t able to get inside. (Much later, Shane also realized that Colt had taken a Cirrus flight manual from his office bookshelf.)
“It’s kind of frustrating for me,” he said. “All this Homeland Security and GA Secure… It seems like the word could have been sent out by the authorities… I shouldn’t have to hear it from you.”
Shane took it upon himself to start making calls, hoping that other airports wouldn’t be left in the same position. He phoned Steve Black, at Ottumwa Flying Service just forty-five minutes down the four-lane from Pella. He told Steve about the break-in and warned him he was in the Bandit’s path. Steve in turn called the local police. “They said they’d be making additional patrols out here,” he says.
Word also went to the Iowa DOT’s Department of Aviation, which sent out the first organized bolo-type (Be On the LOokout) “Urgent Alert” to airports at noon on the twenty-first. It encouraged them to secure their facilities and “possibly even work with local law enforcement to step up patrols.” It only went statewide, though, and Colt was obviously on the move.
With adequate warning, ignition keys could have been secured and plane owners could have at least considered spending $100 on a throttle lock or wheel locks that make it much harder to steal an aircraft. The lack of official warning to every small airport in the country wasn’t a money issue or a manpower issue, just a lack of common sense.
Colt was always good at staying one step ahead, but even he had to be surprised at how easy it had been up to this point.
THE WEATHER, THOUGH, CONTINUED to work against him. In Ottumwa, Iowa, where they were getting ready for the big balloon races scheduled for the twenty-third, they had heavy rains and thunderstorms. A tornado tore through the area as Colt arrived.
Sometime Monday night or early Tuesday morning—after the Iowa DOT warning and after Steve Black says he called the local police to alert them—Colt got into the main building at Ottumwa Regional Airport and tried prying on every interior door with a screwdriver. He then moved on to the FBO and busted into the cash drawer, taking all the bills. The bathroom was also left a mess, as if someone had been bathing in the sink.
When Black discovered all this Tuesday morning, he spotted the Classic Aviation courtesy van out in his parking lot. The silver minivan was neat and clean, still had an eighth of a tank of gas, and all the clothing missing from the Pella terminal was inside. Even the keys to the Mazda Tribute were left sitting on the passenger seat.
That night, west of downtown Ottumwa, Colt climbed a fence into the parking area where the Frito-Lay company parks its delivery vans. First he tried to wrench open one truck’s door, but it wouldn’t give. The thought of all that crunchy goodness just inches away was too much to pass up, though, and he resorted to breaking a window. Along with the broken glass and disheveled snack packs, the Frito Bandito Descalzo signed the crime by leaving behind fingerprints and the hoodie he’d taken from the airport in Norfolk, Nebraska.
Just a short stroll from where the Fritos lay, Colt took a white 2010 Chevy HHR—a retro, fifties-style wagon—from the Ottumwa Water Works. The Chevy didn’t fit the Cadillac SUV and Lincoln pickup pattern. It wasn’t luxe, it was relatively underpowered, and it didn’t have four-wheel drive. According to the Ottumwa police, though, it was “easy pickings” since the water department driver had left the keys in the ignition.
TO THE EAST LAY the Mississippi. Steve Black says he heard police officers speculating that Colt would next take a boat and roll on down the river to New Orleans. It would have nicely closed the literary loop on any Huck Finnishness of the tale, but a little bit of research would have told Colt about all the locks along the way where he’d have to interact with lock masters. Instead, he crossed Ol’ Man River in the Chevy and made his way into a heavily wooded area outside Dallas City, Illinois, that’s called Happy Hollow.
“Happy Hollow is sort of our Cajun country,” chuckles John Jefferson, sheriff of Hancock County, Illinois. “People up there are pretty reclusive, pretty protective of their property, and a lot of them are not real fond of law enforcement. It’s a different kind of community… ”
The road taken by the Chevy into Happy Hollow, directly opposite the riverbank village of Pontoosuc, follows a streambed. “If you’re not from that area,” says Sheriff Jefferson, “you’ll get lost in there—all these little roads shoot off.” Colt may have been looking for a secluded spot to pull over and get some sleep or else knew that there were vacation cabins scattered around the Hollow. He got into trouble, though, because of the weather.
The road in crosses a creek. Normally, water flows beneath the roadbed through a culvert, but there’d been record rains all June, and the creek swelled until it overran the road, coating it with a thick layer of bottom mud and sand. If Colt had had an Escalade or one of the big four-wheel-drive pickups, no problem. However, once the front-wheel-drive HHR got hub deep in the muck, it stuck. Colt was not happy. When he couldn’t free the vehicle, he grabbed a shovel from the back and smashed every one of the windows. He threw the shovel into the water and then took off on foot into Hancock County’s backwoods.
Residents found the stranded Chevy at 7 a.m. Wednesday morning. After Sheriff Jefferson traced it back to Ottumwa, he was contacted by the Iowa Intelligence Fusion Center, which told him they were “100 percent convinced” that it was Colton Harris-Moore. Jefferson hadn’t gotten any advance warning, but he quickly got up to speed on Colt’s MO and put out a mass release to all the local media asking them to warn folks that Colt was likely armed and not to approach him, just call the police. In the meantime, he told everyone to lock up their homes and cars, and if they happened to have a plane, lock that up, too.
I spoke with Sheriff Jefferson several times over the days following the recovery of the HHR. Illinois-farm raised, he was serving his fourth term in office (he’s since won his fifth). And he apparently knew a thing or two about kids doing goofy things. He was raising a crop of them: six of his own, plus, over the last eighteen years, he and his wife had taken in thirty-five foster kids. “What worries me is that Colt is eventually going to graduate into something bigger.”
Jefferson had his deputies aggressively patrolling, but like law enforcement who’d chased Colt in every other jurisdiction, they were hampered by the fact that they couldn’t just go barging onto private property to do searches—especially not in a place like Happy Hollow, where folks don’t take kindly to anyone poking around their cabins, badge or not.
The sheriff felt like he was doing all he could, but it still seemed like a needle in a haystack situation. Jefferson oversees Hancock’s 816 square miles with just eight deputies and himself, plus some assorted small-town police forces spread through the county. Considering the notoriety of the case, he expected someone more useful than the media might call. “I’m surprised there’s been no help from the Feds, or that some kind of task force hasn’t called.” The Iowa Intelligence Fusion Center had collected the intelligence from their side of the line, but they said they weren’t going to actively investigate or pursue the case. Jefferson and his deputies went out and talked to everyone aviation related, which was no small task. “There’s a private airstrip about a mile and a half straight south from where he got stuck, and five small airports within twelve miles.”
MEANWHILE BACK IN WASHINGTON… Harley Davidson Ironwing was back out on the streets hoping to hook up with his old buddy Colt. While he was in prison, Harley says a Snohomish County sheriff and a corrections officer questioned him about Colt. “I told them to go fuck themselves.” Now Harley put the word out that he was a free man and ready to help Colt stay that way, too. “I’m the one person that can keep him out of prison. I guarantee it. I’ll just call in a couple of favors.”
On June 21, with Colt more than a thousand miles away, Harley’s hard-luck story took a tragic turn. His foster mother, Karen Ironwing, died of cancer. She was the one who, Harley said, he was counting on to help give him some much-needed structure outside of prison. Harley didn’t make the funeral—he still hated his foster brothers. That Friday, the twenty-fifth, Harley walked the aisles of the Stanwood Haggen grocery store. He was hungry and says he hadn’t eaten for three days. He stuffed five packages of string cheese into his pants and went for the exit. Store employees saw him and gave chase. As Harley got to the door, he spotted a Sno County deputy and turned to run the other way. The deputy caught up and tackled him, with both men tumbling into an elderly couple, knocking down an eighty-four-year-old man. The old man went to the hospital (bruised but okay) and Harley went to jail, eventually sentenced to eighteen months for third-degree assault.
ON THE SAME FRIDAY Harley got pinched for the string cheese chase, police back on the Iowa side of the Mississippi found a stolen pickup dumped at Casey’s General Store in Burlington. Colt had recrossed the river. This time, he says, he did indeed do it in a boat, and in a rowboat, much closer to Huck’s raft than the large yachts he’d stolen before. He didn’t strike out for the Big Easy, though, just struck out for the other side. Colt claims he lost a paddle along the way and had a harrowing nighttime crossing. Once in Iowa, he went north.
Casey’s lies directly across the street from Southeast Iowa Regional Airport, which was just twelve miles north of the stuck-in-the-mud Chevy HHR tied to Colt. The airport had received the Iowa DOT warning in time, but it didn’t help. A pilot taxied up to his hangar on the twenty-seventh and raised the door to trade his plane for the 2010 Ford F150 pickup he’d left inside. His truck, though, had already been gone for at least three days. A cop had even seen it on the twenty-sixth, 228 miles east at Vermilion Regional Airport in Illinois, but didn’t believe it was stolen because it hadn’t been reported yet.
The police were now two steps behind Colt, though he was doggedly, brazenly, sticking to his airport-to-airport MO, all the way across the country.
OUT AT THE OLD FBO building at Vermilion Airport on Thursday, June 24, thirty-nine-year-old Homer Woolslayer barbecued himself a steak and sat at a picnic table enjoying the evening. The airport was so desolate and so quiet he could hear the beacon rotating across the runway. A flight instructor and cropduster out of Tulsa, Homer first flew at eight years old, handling the stick of a Piper under the supervision of his oldest brother, who was already flying cropdusters. Always a risk taker, Homer raced motorcycles professionally until he realized he’d never make it to the top in that dangerous racket. After an ill-fated stint in his family oil field equipment business, he fell back on flying. He became a freelance instructor, and flew air ambulance missions in a Citation II jet.
In March 2010, just a few months before heading up to Vermilion, Homer had his Captain Sully moment. He had a student up in a 1976 Cessna 210 Centurion when the plane lost power on approach. Only five hundred feet above the Arkansas River with no time to maneuver, Woolslayer grabbed the controls and just had time to get the wheels down before flaring the plane onto a sandbar. “It was a nonevent,” he says with a barnstormer’s nonchalance. “There wasn’t a scratch on the plane and we didn’t bend it at all.” Unfortunately, water was being released from a dam upriver, and he could only stand there and watch as it rose and swamped his Cessna, ruining the interior and wrecking the electronics.
During the growing season, Woolslayer hires out as an itinerant cropduster. He’d gotten an offer to come up to Illinois and spray for Aero Crop Service. He’d be flying an Air Tractor 301, a tail-dragging radial-engine beast of an airplane. “It’s real hard work,” says Homer, “but there’s a lot of romance to cropdusting because it’s so dangerous. When the airplane is fully loaded, it’s barely able to fly. You have to be real careful. Lose focus for a moment and you’ll crash and kill yourself… But it’s a neat job.”
The plan was to spray ten thousand acres of corn in two weeks. Since Homer would be there only a short time, the owner of the dusting outfit, George, told him he could bunk out in an office in the airport’s defunct terminal building. Homer set up a “Kmart condo,” with an inflatable mattress and a few basics inside, and his barbecue just outside the door. The coals were still glowing as he sacked out on the twenty-fourth.
Homer didn’t get to sleep through the night, though. At 4:25 a.m., something woke him up. From his air mattress, he could see through the office window to an outside door. He heard the knob rattling and saw the silhouette of a very tall man apparently trying to get in. “What the hell? I looked at the time, it was just before the false dawn.” Homer pulled on some pants and went outside. He didn’t see anybody, but did notice something odd. “There’s a vehicle, a really nice late-model Ford pickup, that wasn’t there before. It stood out because every other car around had condensation on the windows and this one didn’t—it had to have just drove up.” Woolslayer noted that the mystery truck had Iowa plates and saw that someone had tossed a travel-size bottle of mouthwash underneath it. “I figured this guy was coming to meet an early plane and trying to get inside looking for someplace to take a leak. After a while, though, when I didn’t hear any planes coming or going, that kind of spooked me. It was weird, but finally I thought, Ah, forget it, and went back to bed.”
Homer told George about it the next morning. “He perked up, but there wasn’t much to do. He just said, ‘Gawd, Homer, nothing ever happens at this airport… Now you show up and people are sneaking around trying to get into my office.’” They laughed it off and went to work, but because the white pickup was still there at the end of the day and whoever drove it hadn’t flown off, Woolslayer had a funny feeling that the tall visitor would be back.
That evening, down at another part of the airport, Mike Vadeboncoeur was working late. He owns Midwest Aero Restorations and there’d been a lot of overtime lately as he put the finishing touches on a WWII P51 Mustang that was scheduled to appear at the big air show in Oshkosh at the end of July. At 9:45, he’d just taken a break to watch a YouTube video that his mom had sent him. The clip had a loud soundtrack, and in the sudden silence when it ended, Mike heard something outside his office. “There’s a loose tile out there and it makes a certain sound, a squeak, when someone steps on it.” Then he heard a door close. He got up and walked out into his secretary’s office, calling, “Who’s there?”
Mike hadn’t received any warnings about Colt. All he knew was that someone else was in the building. Out in the hallway, lights that are always left burning had been turned off. “It just didn’t make any sense, and I was pretty nervous.” He was also angry. Just that day at lunch he and the guys had been discussing Chicago’s strict gun laws. “I’m in favor of having weapons to protect yourself, and here I was, with somebody right outside that door, maybe with a gun, and I had nothing to defend myself with. It was a very sick feeling.”
Mike decided that staying in his office wasn’t a good idea, so he bolted outside onto the tarmac. He looked around, but there was no one there. He walked around to the front of the building… nothing. He tried the front door and it was securely locked. When he came back inside, he turned on all the lights. “I was really getting kinda spooked, but like an idiot, I grabbed the only weapon I could find, a broomstick, and went around checking every room in the building.” Everything seemed fine, and he tried to convince himself that he hadn’t really heard anything.
Down at the old terminal, Homer Woolslayer was lying on his back on top of the picnic table, belly full of barbecue and eyes full of stars. “It was a nice clear, dark night, and I was watching the sky and listening to the crickets and coyotes.” Still, he hadn’t forgotten about the prowler. “I had a feeling he’d come back at the same time.” Homer says he’s one of those people who does not need an alarm clock. “I can tell myself to wake up at a certain time… It’s the weirdest thing.” He set his internal alarm for 4:15 a.m., and it went off on schedule. “Then I just lay in bed waiting.” He didn’t have to wait long.
“Sure enough, he comes back, right on time at 4:27 a.m. I can see his silhouette, but he can’t see me.” Homer says he heard one door rattle and then the tall dark figure moved to the next. “I sat up in bed, watching him walk around trying to get in. I was a little bit nervous, and I didn’t just rush out. I mean, he was brazen. He had to know someone was inside—the air conditioner was going, and the coals were still hot out in the barbecue. I’m thinking, What happens if I go out and try to tackle this guy? If he’s desperate, he’ll kill me. If he’s not, and he’s just some harmless guy, then in a few minutes we’ll be laughing and drinking coffee. Or, if he’s somewhere in between, he’ll kick my ass and run. So I hesitated.”
Finally, Homer jumped up and went to the window. He got a good look at the guy as he was walking away. “He was very tall, had kind of an awkward gait, like the cheap white sneakers he had on didn’t fit him. He didn’t have socks on, and was wearing jean shorts and a T-shirt with a sprint car on it, like from some local, small-time speedway, and he had on a ball cap.”
Woolslayer went back to his bedroom and threw on his jeans. By the time he got outside, though, the tall guy was out of sight. “I walked clear across the airport out to the runways, about half a mile, but couldn’t find him. I think he knew exactly how to get away, he heard me scurrying around to come after him and he doubled back on me. If I’d a known he was a pro I woulda used some different tactics on him.”
SATURDAY MORNING, MIKE VADEBONCOEUR arrived at work still not sure whether he’d been imagining things the night before. He rechecked all the switches and circuit breakers and didn’t find any problems that would’ve caused the lights to go off. Then he went out to his hangar and looked around carefully. At the far corner, he noticed that there was more light than usual coming in around a door frame. “Sure enough, it’d been busted open.”
Colt had pried open the deadbolt on a hangar that housed a TBM 850, a Daher-Socate turboprop sports car of a plane, similar to a Pilatus but smaller and a bit faster. He then made his way into Mike’s hangar, which housed warbirds in various states of restoration. “I’m sure he looked at those and thought, Well, I don’t think I can start any of them,” says Mike. After that, Colt came through the doorway into the FBO, turning off the lights as he passed, then noticed Mike. “I’m sure he saw me sitting there and went, ‘Oops.’”
Homer Woolslayer says he walked around the airport with the other guys that morning and they discovered that as many as five hangars had been broken into. “I think this kid just walked into each and said, ‘Well, that’s no good, I can’t fly that plane, and I don’t want to fly that one… ’ He knew what his limitations were. Most of those planes were too sophisticated.” Homer says that even the airplanes that Colt could have flown weren’t the kind he was looking for. “He went into one hangar with a little trainer in it, a Piper Tomahawk, easy to fly, but some people call that plane the Traumahawk because they say it spins too easily… I was cracking up, because he wouldn’t even steal one of those.”
Homer and his boss talked about involving the police, but nothing was missing, “not a lightbulb. We’re saying, ‘Do we want the police out here?’ I’ll say there’s a healthy suspicion of authority around these parts.”
Mike didn’t share that feeling, though, and called the cops. They checked around, saw the mysterious Ford pickup with Iowa plates and the broken hangar door, and they very quickly came up with a suspect: Homer Woolslayer.
“The police were very suspicious just because I was the new guy and I was living out there,” says Homer. “One of them, this freckled guy in his thirties, was real aggressive, acting like he had some kind of mental problem, saying, ‘You’re out of state and I’m running your 10-26!’ or something like that. We’re standing around the Ford and he was shaking me down, demanding my ID, acting like he was going to arrest me. I finally just started cracking up, saying, ‘Man, you’re running my license to pull up whether I’ve run a tollbooth back in Oklahoma and in the meantime you’re leaning on a stolen vehicle!’ The cop got all huffy, and I said, ‘I’m telling you, whoever did this rolled up in this Ford pickup and right now he’s somewhere within four hundred yards of where you’re standing, but instead you’re interrogating me! You’ve lost your mind. I mean, what education do you need to be a cop in Vermilion County?’”
The police did run the plates on the F150 from Burlington, but its pilot owner was still on vacation and hadn’t reported it stolen yet.
Along with the local cops, some other folks at the airport weren’t so sure about Homer Woolslayer either. “I was the only thing that had changed, so they figured it was me.” Video from the surveillance cameras sure enough showed an image of someone walking around the hangars in the middle of the night, trying doors. However, the images weren’t clear enough to be conclusive. Homer’s boss believed him, though, and wanted to make sure he was properly equipped in case the tall stranger came around again.
“These farm people and cropduster types out here in Illinois are armed and ready for anything, man,” says Woolslayer, laughing. “If some army ever tries a frontal assault on that airport, they’d lose.” His boss cracked open a special safe, and when Homer lay down on his inflatable bed that night, he was packing extreme heat: two handguns and a sawed-off pan-fed Saiga shotgun (basically a twelve-gauge machine gun). Just in case the spotlight he’d been given wasn’t bright enough, he also had parachute flares “from some Eastern Bloc country.”
Woolslayer went to sleep laughing to himself. “I’m in bed dressed like Rambo, bullets strapped over my shoulder. It would be nothing to be lying there with a shotgun waiting for a burglar back in Oklahoma, but I’m in this different state and I don’t know the rules of engagement. I already knew this one cop didn’t like me… so I started thinking I don’t know if this is such a good idea. I mean, I wasn’t going to kill him, but I was planning on scaring him and finding out what he was doing. You know, hell, if he was hungry I probably would have bought him breakfast.”
However, nothing happened at the airport that night. Rambo Woolslayer got up, stripped off his guns, and went to the local diner. As he was sitting there, he overheard a waitress talking about a friend whose car had been stolen early that morning. “I said, ‘Hey, your friend doesn’t happen to live by the airport, does she?’ She said, ‘Yes, just a couple blocks away.’ I started laughing and said, ‘I know who took her car.’” Homer went back to the airport and told his boss that it was over, the guy was gone.
THAT DAY, SUNDAY, THE owner of the Ford pickup came home and noticed it was missing. The Iowa police connected it with the stolen car query from Illinois and called the Vermilion County sheriff with the story of Colton Harris-Moore, telling him that he’d probably have another stolen car or airplane any minute now. Conveniently, Vermilion already had the report from the waitress’s friend whose car had been taken at 2 a.m. When deputies went to reinvestigate the car theft, they found a handheld GPS and an iPod left behind at the site. According to the sheriff, the GPS memory showed tracks to all the locations where Colt had committed his cross-country crimes.
When Homer Woolslayer heard about Colt, he looked around the airport and speculated that he had probably camped out in the abandoned control tower. “It’s decommissioned, but you can still get up in it.” Homer read up on the case and couldn’t understand how anyone could call Colt a bad pilot just because he’d crash-landed a couple planes. “That’s really arrogant. He knew his limitations, knew he couldn’t take a cropduster or a warbird because there’s too much torque roll for a new pilot. And the landings? This kid can’t land and walk up to an FBO, so he has to put them down in fields—and he’s been able to walk away from those landings. I think he knows how to fly, and he’s actually pretty good. I wonder if there are award banquets in prison.”
COLT HAD FINALLY OUTRUN the bad weather. Across the Midwest, skies were clear and sunny, winds calm, temperatures reaching the 80s during the day, high 60s at night. It was great weather to watch planes at the big air show, but also fine weather to fly them. Oshkosh was northwest, but Colt drove southeast.
The stolen car from Vermilion turned up 120 miles away in a church parking lot in Bloomington, Indiana. Sunday churchgoers noticed its out-of-state plates, and when they peeked in the window, they saw a purse and keys. Police arrived and established that the vehicle had been stolen, but none of the owner’s personal property left inside had been disturbed. The only thing missing was the car’s ignition key. Whether taken as a souvenir or perhaps as a courtesy to prevent the car from being restolen, it all matched Colt’s MO.
The biggest hint was that the church stood a half mile away from the Monroe County Airport.
THE MONROE COUNTY SHERIFF’S Office began receiving calls from FBI and Homeland Security agents, catching them up on the suspect and the chase. The stolen car connected to Colt made the news, and anyone who bothered to look knew that the world-famous airplane thief Colton Harris-Moore was in Bloomington, very close to a small airport.
The sheriff’s office made a call to the airport, but the manager, Bruce Payton, was off for a couple of days and the warning wasn’t spread around until they finally connected on Wednesday.
“A detective came out the morning of the thirtieth,” says Payton. “He said that I should alert people on the field to be careful and watch for this guy known as the Barefoot Bandit.” Bruce went to his office and immediately downloaded everything he could find about Colt and passed it out to all the businesses and professional pilots. He asked the two FBOs to post the info and pass the word to any pilots who flew in. One FBO, Cook Aviation, took the warning so seriously that they hired a night watchman to guard their hangars. Monroe County is a fairly large airport with about a hundred general aviation aircraft based in buildings spread out over a mile of ground. Cook’s guard wouldn’t be in any position to see what was going on at other far-flung hangars.
Payton personally called all of the corporate flight departments at the airport. “I told them there was reason to believe this person might be in the area and to take extra precautions with their aircraft.” He even stopped by the daily coffee klatch. “A few guys come down every day and sit out on the deck on the public side of the fence to watch the planes and have a cup.” Before he could tell them what was up, though, one guy had to leave. As he was riding his bike back home, he saw a “scruffy young man, very tall and slender” walking on the nearby railroad tracks.
The only people left to give the word to were the private pilots based at Monroe. Payton went to one of the boys-with-big-toys beery barbecues held regularly throughout the summer down among the seven private hangars that sit at the far southeast end of the airfield, near the start of runway 24, the shorter of Monroe’s two strips. “There were nineteen guys there that night,” says Payton. “And I briefed everyone.”
The barbecue bunch that Wednesday evening did not include all the owners, though. One who was missing was sixty-year-old John “Spider” Miller. Miller and one of his older brothers, Don, owned a 2008 Cessna Corvalis 400 TT—a plane very similar to the Cirrus SR22—that Spider had just flown out to St. Simons Island, a beach and golf destination on the Georgia coast.
Spider Miller was the middle child in a family with eleven kids, and he got his nickname early on from his habit of crawling all over everything. “When I was a young guy I used to say it was because the girls all thought I had eight hands,” he laughs. “Now that I’m an old-timer, I’ll settle for four… Actually, I’ll settle for just crawling around.” Spider’s fascination with planes began at an early age, but he didn’t become a pilot until he was forty-nine. Since then, he’s worked his way through multiple ratings and flown his Corvalis, “a great little airplane,” for both business and pleasure.
Both Miller brothers have beer distributorships. Spider is the president of Best Beers, though he prefers the title “repackage manager.” If he’d been in town that Wednesday night, he might’ve wandered down to the barbecue, as he does occasionally. “They’re all great guys, and I go more for the drinking than the eating… I actually like my product.” Instead, he was relaxing in the Georgia sunshine, getting “robbed” on the golf course.
So the Vermilion car was found on the twenty-seventh. The public warning went out to the airport on the thirtieth. Now, days had passed without news of local vehicles going missing or any strange happenings at any other airport in the region. Colt had to be in the area, and he wanted a plane.
On Thursday, July 1, AOPA finally came out with an alert about Colt through its weekly email newsletter, which goes to virtually every private pilot, flying student, and anyone else remotely connected to general aviation in the country.
That same afternoon, Bruce Payton slipped out of work and headed down to Nashville to see a songwriter friend of his who had a gig. The trip was a birthday present to himself. Everything back at the airport had seemed secure, and even though he hadn’t noticed any additional police or FBI activity, Payton felt sure they must have had the place under surveillance. The entire facility is surrounded by a ten-foot-tall chain-link fence topped with three strands of barbed wire that are angled out, making it extremely hard to climb. “It looks a lot like a prison,” he says. The only chink in the security, according to Payton, is that some of the private hangar owners don’t bother waiting for the motorized gates to close behind them. They take about thirty seconds to close, long enough for someone hiding nearby to sneak in, especially after dark.
Normally, Payton would have spent at least a couple of nights down in Nashville, “but I had a funny feeling.” He struck up a conversation at dinner with some folks from Chicago who mentioned they’d seen news reports about the Barefoot Bandit. “I told them that he was suspected of being in our area up at Monroe, and said, ‘You know, I should probably get back there.’” Payton drove back up on Saturday, but everything seemed safely locked down.
Colt had gotten to Bloomington on Sunday the twenty-seventh. His favorite reconnaissance tool, Google Earth, showed a number of places to camp inside the fence of the one-thousand-acre airport. In fact, there’s so much wild ground and woods on the property that it supports a growing population of coyotes. For a week, they’d have to share their haunts with Colt.
One stretch of woods at Monroe is cut back into the shape of a person’s lower calf, ankle, and foot, with its toes pointed directly at runway 24. It’s just one hundred yards off the taxiway, but with the trees sporting their full complement of summer leaves, the wooded patch offered perfect camouflage for someone who wanted to watch all the activities. No one could see him, but Colt had an ideal view of everything, especially the secluded private hangars at the south end. He set up camp.
Over the following nights, Colt crowbarred his way into four of the seven private hangars and comfy’d up his camp with blankets and a couch pillow. He stocked his larder with pilot snacks, including Oreo cookies, peanut butter crackers, power bars, cans of soup, nuts, and even Tyson precooked chicken breasts. He took plenty of water and a good week’s worth of food out of the hangars. To help ensure no one saw his head peeking out of the leaves, he even borrowed a camouflage ball cap emblazoned with the Indiana University logo. The cap covered a freshly shorn head—he’d cut his hair and shaved inside one of the hangars, leaving the hair in the sink.
Colt couldn’t risk raising a shelter, but he enjoyed perfect weather. He lay back among the trees listening to music on his iPod and flipping through the magazines he’d liberated from a corporate hangar. Sticking with his style, he took a stack of Forbes—“The Capitalist Tool”—filled with lists of the world’s richest people and most expensive zip codes. He also had time to work on his planes and plans using a yellow pad.
Colt’s backpack held everything he felt important enough to carry across the country: personal mementos, a laptop, and a loaded Walther PPK (James Bond’s favorite pistol) with its serial number filed off. He also had a very cool little Contour video camera. Designed to shoot high-def footage of extreme sports from the extremist’s point of view, the five-ounce camera can be attached to a headlamp strap or the dashboard of a car or airplane. If someone wanted to take a video showing off his skills—say, taking off in a plane—this would be the camera.
Along with his eclectic mix of music, Colt had loaded his iPod with media files. Some were news reports following the career of the Barefoot Bandit. There were also airplane photos and flight training videos, including instructionals on landing several types of planes. One model featured with both a picture and a how-to training video was the Cessna 400 Corvalis, the same model Bill Anders had, which Colt had studied back on Orcas, and that Spider Miller had taken to Georgia.
At noon on Saturday, July 3, Colt’s ship finally came in.
SPIDER LANDED HIS YEAR-OLD Corvalis and taxied to his hangar. “I was due for an oil change, so I called the guy at the FBO and asked him if he wanted to knock it out. He said he had time that evening, and towed it across the field to his hangar.” The mechanic serviced the plane and started the engine again to check for leaks. Everything looked good, so he taxied it back to Miller’s hangar and then brought over the fuel truck to top off the Cessna’s tanks. Bingo.
The weather was ideal. The plane was perfect. It was extremely similar to the Cirrus SR22, which Colt had safely landed twice. He knew the Corvalis was equipped with the Garmin G1000 navigation package. And he knew the performance specs: a 310-horsepower turbocharged engine that produced enough thrust to drive it 270 mph—faster than any other plane of its type. If you understood how to lean the fuel mixture, the plane had a range of more than 1,200 miles. As the mechanic pulled away in the fuel truck, Colt even knew it had full tanks without having to risk breaking into the hangar. Everything was falling into place better than he could have dreamed. There was only one potential problem: he’d been unsuccessful getting into this style of plane if its gullwing doors were locked.
The mechanic—who’d been briefed by Bruce Payton about the Bandit—locked Spider’s hangar behind him, but he’d left the Corvalis keys inside the plane and its doors unlocked. Problem solved.
COLT KNEW THAT THE tower crew started work at 6:30 a.m. Dawn began brightening the eastern sky at 5:53 that day, though, so there was plenty of light outside as he raised the big bifold doors of Spider’s hangar. He rolled the plane out, then put the hand tug back in the hangar and closed and locked the doors. With any luck, no one would notice the plane was missing for hours, maybe days if he caught a break like he did at Granite Falls and no one paid attention to its emergency beacon.
Colt cranked the engine and taxied to the runway. At exactly 6:01, a security camera captured Cessna Corvalis N660BA taking off into the clear purple sky. It was the Fourth of July, Independence Day.