The Barefoot Bandit

by Bob Friel

  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 us
ing 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 hom
e. 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.”