Colt walked back across the runway and, under the streetlight and in full view of Staite’s kitchen window, broke into the Cessna again. He took out its tow bar and attached it to the plane’s nose wheel. He then muscled the two-thousand-plus-pound plane more than five hundred feet—rolling it up a slight incline—to a dark spot beside the hangars and out of sight of Staite’s residence. Somehow, Colt did it all without alerting the tyrannical Shih Tzu.
Colt hadn’t found a key to the Cessna, but he knew he didn’t need one to start it. The planes aren’t equipped with antitheft ignition systems like modern automobiles. Colt followed the checklist procedures, then simply jammed a screwdriver into the ignition switch and wrenched it clockwise to Start. The starter whined and the propeller began to spin slowly… but the engine wouldn’t catch.
“That plane has a little quirk,” explains Staite. “You have to mess with the fuel system and know just how much fuel to give it in order to get it to fire off. You have to know your airplane.”
Colt didn’t know this particular Cessna’s idiosyncrasies, and kept cranking until the starter burned out and the battery drained. Once he realized he was grounded, he went for a vehicle. He chose a GMC Z71 half-ton pickup. There was an antitheft Club on the steering wheel, but it may not have been locked because Colt was able to remove it. His bad luck with batteries continued, though, because the truck belonged to a pilot who only flew in from Alberta every once in a while and it had been sitting so long that the battery was dead. Next Colt tried a Dodge van. He couldn’t find a hide-a-key, so he tore the ignition apart trying to hotwire it—so easy in the movies. Not in real life, though.
Colt then went to a 2009 Toyota Corolla that sat next to a hangar. He knew the car probably belonged to a pilot out on a trip, and if so, the keys would be in the hangar. All pilots share the same nightmare of leaving their car keys on a layover and getting back home to a big D’oh!
If Colt had simply cranked on the door with his crowbar like he did at the other hangars, it might have changed the course of his story. This hangar was rigged with an alarm system. Something else Colt had learned early on, though, was to carefully scope out his targets. He’d also studied up on how to defeat alarms. If he triggered this one it would automatically call the police, so he disabled it by cutting the phone line.
Just as he thought, the owner had left the key to the Corolla dangling on a hook inside the hangar. Colt grabbed it, started the car, and headed for the exit sometime before 9:30 p.m. To get in the airport’s security gate, a driver needs to punch in a code. Leaving just requires a short pause to wait for the gate to lift when it senses a car. Colt didn’t bother waiting. He rammed through the gate and drove off.
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
