The Barefoot Bandit

by Bob Friel

  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 s
ays 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 ligh
tbulb. 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.