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The Barefoot Bandit

Page 40

by Bob Friel


  “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 a
ny 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.

  Part 5

  WILD BLUE YONDER

  Chapter 28

  The transponder on the Millers’ Corvalis was set to automatically ping 1200, telling air traffic controllers that it was adhering to visual flight rules (VFR). Under VFR, a pilot takes responsibility for not crashing into mountains, colliding with other planes, or running out of fuel and falling out of the sky. As Colt knew, by simply staying below eighteen thousand feet and avoiding controlled airspace around airports, military installations, or any FAA temporary flight restrictions, small-plane pilots enjoy the full freedom of the American skies. A VFR pilot doesn’t need to file a flight plan or even talk to anyone on the radio.

  He had a fine plane and he had a plan that made sense, at least to him.

  Instead of a short hop, this time Colt planned to leapfrog far ahead of his pursuers. Not that he had any reason to be unnecessarily concerned that they were catching up to him. After all, he had just spent an entire week at an airport within a half mile of where he dumped the last stolen car. This flight would be the big one, bigger headlines, bigger splash. He had a plane that could carry him out of the country to the first stop on a voyage to get to where the good life lives.

  Once at his cruising altitude headed south, Colt leaned out the fuel mixture. On paper, the Corvalis could just make it to Cuba. In 1904, Teddy Roosevelt signed an extradition treaty with Cuba that covered fugitives wanted for larceny, which would include Colton’s crimes. Complicated relations between the two countries since la revolución, however, have made the treaty unworkable and Cuba a reasonable choice for certain fugitives. Flying direct from the United States to Cuba without a flight plan can be dangerous, though, and not just the risk of miscalculating fuel and dropping into the Florida Straits. In 1996, Cuban MiGs shot down two American-flagged Cessnas flown out of Florida by the exile group Brothers to the Rescue. Tensions were higher at the time, but still, attempting to arrive unannounced on Castro’s doorstep isn’t necessarily a good idea.

  Instead, Colt veered east and flew out over the Gulf Stream. Fitting for a story that so far included UFO sites, ancient Indian burial grounds, and Bigfoot hunters, a little over four hours after he took off fr
om Indiana, the Barefoot Bandit entered the Bermuda Triangle.

  A half hour later, around 11:15 a.m., several Bahamians noticed the Cessna circling north of Sandy Point, a small village on a beach-fringed spur at the south end of Great Abaco.

  The Cessna kept circling in the overcast skies, but no one paid much mind. Private planes often buzz the area, either to take aerial photos of the scenery or to scout for a likely stretch of coast to carve out a development.

  Sandy Point’s airstrip serves this sparsely populated end of the island, but Colt didn’t dare use it. It was daylight, plus he figured there’d be Customs and Immigration officers there to greet planes. He’d have to execute another off-field landing. For the first time in his rough-landing career, finding “flat” wasn’t a problem. The southern tip of Great Abaco has miles and miles of pancaked land. Most of it, though, is covered in pine and scrub trees not conducive to safe set downs.

  Finally, Colt settled on a section of sugary bog, the margin of a swamp covered in marsh grasses and mangrove sprouts. There’s nothing similar to the mangrove in the Pacific Northwest forest. These bushy tropical trees reach into warm, shallow seas, thriving in a saltwater environment that would kill other plants, and forming the basis of an entire ecosystem. The ground here may have appeared solid as Colt extended the flaps and made his approach, but in reality it was a sandy mix of tidal muck.

  Normal landing speed on the Corvalis is 70 mph, and once it touches down on a runway, it uses about 1,200 feet to roll to a stop. As soon as Colt’s main gear hit the muck, though, it was as if he’d landed in peanut butter. The nose of the plane slammed down onto the front wheel, which burrowed into the soft sand, collapsed, and was torn from the fuselage. An instant later, the nose itself hit, with the propeller whipping into the ground, the blades bending backward like banana peels.

 

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