by Bob Friel
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.
Chapter 27
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 wo
rk 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.
