The Barefoot Bandit

by Bob Friel

  The following day a search of the airport grounds turned up soda cans, food containers, water bottles, and—in a hayfield beside the runway—one of the pistols, the .22, still in its holster. Later, Les Staite found Colt’s campsite, where he’d left a “practically new” pair of Vans sneakers.

  THE U.S. BORDER IS less than a two-mile walk from the Creston airport. A kayaker could also paddle across the frontier, floating down the Kootenay River as it exchanges its Y for an I, becoming the Kootenai on the American side. But Colt was carrying a heavy load and needed a car. Controls along the world’s longest border concentrate on vehicle traffic, and Colt didn’t have a passport or driver’s license, so he ditched the Corolla in Rykerts on the Canadian side near where Canadian Route 21 turns into Idaho Highway 1. On the American side lies a tiny farm community of less than a hundred folks called Porthill (“port” of entry near a “hill”). There’s a clearcut shaved through the forest all along the border, with the threat of electronic sensors hidden along this no-go partition, but it’s not particularly risky to cross on foot.

  On the Idaho side, Colt needed another car to carry his gear and loot. One quickly went missing from Porthill’s gas station. The vehicle was later found—minus the camcorder that was inside—twenty miles south, near the little town of Bonners Ferry, which sits very close to Boundary County Airport.

  On September 28, a CBP officer who also served on the Boundary County Airport board got wind of the strange goings-on up in Creston that, at this point, were thought to be drug related. He decided to check his airport just in case. He found that a half-dozen hangars had been broken into.

  Two days before, Pat Gardiner had put his 2005 Cessna 182 Turbo Skylane to bed after a trip to Redmond, Washington. The meter on Gardiner’s immaculate white plane with blue and silver swooshes had ticked nearly 309 hours of flying time in support of his small cattle operation. He provides prime Black Angus seed-stock to ranchers all over the region, and with the few roads that exist up in that chunk of the country forced to skirt mountains and follow river runs, a plane was an essential business tool. Says Gardiner, “It’s tough to get anywhere from Bonners Ferry without driving a month of Sundays.”

  Gardiner came to Idaho ranching the long way—via public lawyering down in Los Angeles. As counsel for L.A. County back in the seventies, he created a specialized child abuse court that became a pilot project for the entire country, and he personally worked more than one thousand child abuse cases. A trip to Spokane, Washington, introduced Gardiner to the Northwest and he fell in love with the area. “The farther north you drive the greener it gets and the less people you find. I liked that.” He moved full-time to Bonners Ferry, population 2,500, in 2000 and bought his Cessna the first year the Garmin G1000 glass cockpit option became available.

  After his flight to Redmond, Gardiner had checked his fuel gauge. About four and a half hours of flying time remained in the tanks and he decided to fill her up later. He locked the plane and all the hangar doors and took the keys.

  Colt got into some of the other Bonners Ferry hangars by finding hidden keys. He worked under cover of darkness and lingered inside, soaking up the airplane ambience and pretending he belonged in that world. In one hangar he even relaxed and put his bare feet up against the wall while he ate a snack. But Colt was really there as a thief. He stole whatever he fancied—a GPS, a digital camera—and then moved on to the next hangar. He found a Cessna, but that one was too old. At another hangar, he came upon a $2 million six-passenger turboprop Piper Meridien, but that one was too big and fast. When he got to Pat Gardiner’s plane, though, that was just right.

  The late-model 182 even had a turbo and a glass cockpit. Colton padded around the hangar, leaving a trail of bare footprints as he searched everywhere for a key. Not finding one, he jammed a screwdriver into the baggage compartment lock and tried to jimmy it open. Nothing doing, but he kept working the plane until he was finally able to pop open the passenger-side door and climb in. Everything passed inspection, but like his first night up in Creston, this was just a scouting trip. He pocketed Gardiner’s Leatherman multitool and a few other items and left, retreating to a makeshift camp where he’d stashed the bank bags from Orcas Island Hardware, the guns, and all his other gear.

  When the break-ins were discovered the following morning, calls went out to the police and plane owners. Gardiner arrived at his hangar door and was shocked at what he describes as the “violence” of the break-in. He was almost afraid to see what had been done to his $340,000 airplane. “The baggage door lock was wrecked, you couldn’t even get a key in it,” he says. Other than that, though, the plane seemed okay.

  The initial thought—like over on Orcas and up in Creston—was that drug runners were looking for a transport plane. Some Boundary County folks figured it was maybe some a’ them draft-dodgin’ old hippie types up in Nelson, B.C. But the thief or thieves hadn’t actually taken an aircraft, so the next theory was maybe drifters passing through looking for valuables. The police investigated and got good forensics—fingerprints and footprints were all over the hangars.

  Gardiner put his hangar door back together and bolted a thick hasp through the steel wall, topping it off with the most serious padlock he could find. Not that anyone figured on further trouble. “We felt we’d been hit, things taken, a lot of damage done,” says Gardiner. “After that, you don’t think of a thief having the audacity to come back to the scene of the crime.”

  Once again, Colt let the police come and do their thing and watched everyone run around patching things up, then he sneaked back after dark. This time he first went to the airport’s fixed base operator (FBO), which acts as a combination service station/concierge/rest area for pilots. The FBO is where visiting fliers gas up their planes, check the weather, get a snack, take a nap, arrange a rental car for touring or use the courtesy car for quick runs into town. Some also have bikes. Colt took the FBO’s bike, loaded it with all of his gear, and walked it the quarter mile down to Pat Gardiner’s hangar, leaving a trail of bare footprints alongside deep tire tracks.

  Colt ditched the bike behind the hangar and pulled out his crowbar. He used enough force to rip the bolts through the metal, tearing off the entire hasp. Inside, he again had all night to play pilot with his new plane. He even popped the hood and checked the oil. “It wasn’t low,” says Gardiner, “but apparently he added some anyway because we found the empty can in the hangar.” Colt loaded his stuff into the plane and tossed in one of Gardiner’s sleeping bags.

  At daybreak on the twenty-ninth, around 5:30 a.m., a Boundary County road crew was already on the job near the airport. Inside the fence, work continued on a new runway, with a water truck wetting the site to keep construction dust down. All the early-morning activity may have surprised Colt and forced him to rush. After he raised the hangar door and muscled the heavy plane out using a manual towbar, he placed the bar back in the hangar but didn’t close the door. If he had, his crime would not have been discovered for many hours, if not days.

  Colton climbed into the Cessna’s cockpit, stuck his screwdriver in the ignition switch, and cranked it to the right. This time the engine caught.

  The road guys were used to small planes buzzing in and out of the airport, but they sensed that this one was in trouble. The snarl of the Cessna’s engine sounded too high pitched, like it was overrevving. They stopped working and watched the plane accelerate along the ground to the southwest. The runway in that direction is called 2-0, but a couple witnesses said Colt didn’t bother with the runway and instead was attempting to take off from the taxiway, a narrow strip of asphalt that ran parallel to 2-0. They watched as the Cessna struggled into the air. It didn’t gain altitude nearly as fast as it should have, and was headed straight for a stand of trees.

  Gardiner speculates that Colton either set the variable propeller to the wrong pitch, or left the flaps at the neutral setting, which doesn’t offer the wing extra lift for takeoff. The witnesses also said he used only half of th
e runway. Instead of taxiing to the end of the field, pausing to look for traffic, and then taking off, Colt exited the hangar farm at the runway’s midpoint, turned left, throttled up, and just went for it.

  “That plane should have been at seven hundred feet by the time it reached the trees,” says Gardiner. Instead, at the last second and with the turbocharged engine “balls to the wall,” the Cessna barely cleared the trees.

  AIRBORNE WITH ENOUGH FUEL to carry him at least seven hundred miles, Colt had choices. He’d been heading east, putting plenty of distance between himself and all the recent newspaper, TV, and Internet coverage that had plastered his photo all over northwestern Washington. Regional law enforcement at every level now had a clear bead on his MO. All the real heat, though, was limited to the two small islands where he’d made the biggest impact. If he kept moving away and could stay off the radar for a few weeks, he’d be forgotten everywhere else.

  Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Oregon, Northern California, British Columbia: there was a lot of world-class secluded wilderness within his range. When millionaire adventurer Steve Fossett’s plane went down in the Sierra Nevadas it took a full year, and ultimately a lucky break, to find his remains. With Colt’s proven fearlessness at off-field landings, he had countless places where he could drop the plane and disappear into the rugged wilds. If he didn’t want to play survivalist, he could land closer to civilization and use his technical know-how to steal identities and melt into the fringes of society. He could even head back to Reno, where he’d previously been able to hole up incognito.

  At this point, Colt had won. He’d escaped from a prison home. He’d escaped from two small islands where everyone was hunting him. He had a grubstake and a fast, long-range getaway vehicle. Colt had even one-upped D. B. Cooper, because he had control of the plane and could land wherever he wanted to instead of having to jump out with a parachute. In four hours, Colt could touch down more than a thousand miles away from where all his problems began and where he had the greatest chance of getting caught. He’d brought on all his current troubles because he couldn’t stomach another year and a half in a laid-back juvenile group home. Now, with more than a dozen felonies already hanging over his head, capture meant facing up to ten years in prison. And, since he’d turned eighteen the previous spring, this time it would be nasty big-boy prison. It made sense for Colt to get lost and stay that way.

  Or not.

  ONCE IT SAW THE Cessna clear the trees, the Boundary County road crew shrugged and went back to work. An early-bird local pilot, though, arrived at the airport and knew immediately that something was wrong.

  “You out flying this morning, Pat?” he asked Gardiner on the phone a little after 7 a.m. “Nope,” came the expected answer. “Well, your hangar door is up, the back door is busted again, and your plane’s gone.” Gardiner told him to dial 911 and said he’d be right down.

  After a quick look around the airport, the local police dialed their own 911. Those deep bicycle tire tracks set off alarm bells that, according to what the authorities told Pat Gardiner, rang all the way to Washington, D.C., to Janet Napolitano’s office at the Department of Homeland Security. It certainly wasn’t some drifter breaking into hangars, and drugs were the most benign explanation for a missing plane carrying a heavy load. The alternate scenario was the stuff of nightmares because there was now a missing plane potentially carrying more than six hundred pounds of anything imaginable with the range to deliver it to Spokane, Sea-Tac Airport, Whidbey Naval Air Station, Naval Base Kitsap—home to a fleet of nuclear submarines and a stockpile of nuclear weapons—or the city of Seattle.

  An APB went out on the plane. The Civil Air Patrol was put on alert and missioned to check every small airfield within range. Calls also went out across the border to the Canadians. Air traffic control (ATC) radars blanketed the region and the Cessna’s Mode-C Transponder automatically squawked a transponder code that identified the plane to controllers. Surely, they’d get a quick fix.

  Colton flew south, over the infamous Ruby Ridge, and down Idaho’s panhandle. Above Lake Pend Oreille, he had his chance to turn left and follow the Clark Fork River, which would have led him southeast through the mountains away from Washington. Instead, he continued south another sixty miles and then turned west. Colt added to his troubles by flying the plane across the Idaho-Washington border south of Spokane, another federal offense on top of the one he committed by carrying firearms over the Canadian border.

  Colt flew on to Walla Walla, Washington, just north of the Oregon line, then turned northwest and headed for Moses Lake. Moses—named for a Sinkiuse chief—is home to Grant County International (formerly Larson Air Force Base), where Boeing and the U.S. Air Force test and train pilots to fly their heaviest jets. It’s one of the largest airports in the country, and it has stood by as an emergency landing strip during every NASA Space Shuttle mission. Grant County’s relatively endless 13,500-foot runway wasn’t Colt’s idea of a safe place to land during the day, though. He continued toward Wennatchee, where he had friends, but didn’t look for a landing spot there either. He crossed Lake Chelan, a breathtakingly cold and deep fifty-five-mile-long basin fed by Cascade snows, then once again rock-and-rolled through the turbulence over glacier-topped mountains on his way toward the town of Granite Falls.

  Except for his big swing south to avoid the most dangerous sections of the Cascades, Colt now flew on a line that ran direct from Boundary County Airport back to his Camano Island home—the very heart of his problems.

  The Cessna’s fuel tanks, however, couldn’t disregard the big detour. Colt knew he had to get the plane on the ground very soon. But again, he ran into trouble with the weather. As the plane’s hour meter ticked over 313, Colt found himself above rugged terrain shrouded in fog and mist. The last minutes of his flight showed some dramatically erratic flying as he desperately tried to find a landing spot before his fuel ran out.

  “There’s fuel and then there’s usable fuel,” says Pat Gardiner. The Cessna 182 can run out of fuel with five gallons still in the tanks—and that’s if it’s flying straight and level. If the pilot puts the plane into an uncoordinated maneuver, such as a turn where the aileron and rudder aren’t working together to keep the plane following its nose, the fuel flow can “unport” even though there’s enough gas to keep the motor running. “Unporting” is another of those nonchalant aviation code words. In English, it means “Oh shit, why did the engine stop?”

  According to investigators, Gardiner’s Cessna did some unintentional acrobatics just before landing. Colt later told a friend he was flying upside down at one point. As he got down to his last few gallons of usable fuel, he finally found a break in the mist and what he thought was a decent landing spot. From one thousand feet, it looked okay: an ice cream cone–shaped field of patchwork green and brown, roughly five hundred by nine hundred yards and separated from the banks of the Stillaguamish River by about a hundred yards of trees. Down lower, though, at the point of no return, it became obvious why there was this one treeless spot amid the forested hills: it was a logged clearcut.

  The misnomer about the word “clearcut” is that the forest floor is left clear. In fact, the trees are severed several feet up the trunk, leaving behind jagged stumps anchored to the ground by strong roots. At this spot, a summer’s worth of fast-growing vegetation camouflaged a minefield. Hundreds of immovable cedar and fir stumps spiked the field, any one of which could totally destroy the plane and its pilot.

  The final seconds of this flight were a terrifying blur and by all rights should have been Colt’s last. The plane was moving much too fast, faster than would be safe to land even on a perfect runway. Colt fully extended the flaps, which is correct procedure for landing, but that should happen only once the plane has already slowed to a reasonable airspeed. At the Cessna’s screaming velocity, extending the flaps was like throwing an anchor. The plane pitched steeply down toward the hillside. If he couldn’t pull out of the dive, Colt would end up as the pulpy red bu
ll’s-eye in a singed circle of ground.

  As a view of the field filled his windshield, Colt fought to pull the plane’s nose up. He throttled back to idle, but it was too late. Investigators estimate that the Cessna slammed into the clearcut at more than 115 miles per hour—twice as fast as a normal landing.

  The nose wheel crumpled on impact. The plane’s two main landing gear are stronger and fairly flexible, designed to withstand hard landings, but they didn’t stand a chance against the tree stumps. Both gear were ripped off, leaving just jagged pieces of strut as the plane careened forward, ramming into stumps and logs that hammered and tore into the fuselage. The starboard elevator caught a stump and spun the Cessna, folding the front gear underneath and punching it into the plane’s nose. An explosion of dirt and shredded green erupted as the propeller chewed into the field, its blades bending like boomerangs. Bits of soil and plants rained down onto the plane and into its engine compartment as the cowling burst open.

  One young tree had been spared by the loggers, but a wing nailed it. The next stump impacted just behind the passenger compartment, buckling and gashing the aluminum alloy as if it were tinfoil.

  Once it hit the ground, the Cessna stopped within a snot-flinging distance of ninety feet, a deceleration equal to about seven Gs. It was more than enough force to kill anyone in the plane as he was flung forward into the cockpit controls and dashboard at more than a hundred miles an hour.

  Unless… In the milliseconds after the plane hit the ground, just as Colt’s body flew forward, an airbag built into the pilot’s seat belt ignited and shot up in front of him.