Despite TITAN’s turndown, law enforcement in Clatsop County, Oregon, as well as Pacific County and Island County, Washington, and the FBI, all knew that Colton Harris-Moore was in Warrenton. And anyone with a twitching EEG knew about his predilections for airplanes. For some reason, though, no law enforcement agency made the obvious move to get in touch with the first place that would come to mind when wondering what Colt would do next. Less than two miles from where he docked the
At some point on the first, Colt made his way from the Warrenton commercial dock to the airport. Inside the fence that evening, a Cessna 185 sat unattended out on the ramp. It was a proverbially dark and stormy night, one when pilots with hundreds of hours in the left seats of airplanes they know by heart would beg off taking them up. But someone walked through the rain and gusty winds out to the Cessna. Regardless of the weather, the 185 had some things going against it as sensible transportation for Colt. This model sits on two big front wheels with just a tiny turnable gear under the vertical stabilizer to keep its butt off the ground. The configuration gives the aircraft a distinct nose-up attitude—thus the nickname for this style: tail-dragger. The vast majority of early planes had this setup, though nowadays almost all designs incorporate the tricycle-style wheels like the 182s and the Cirrus.
Cessna stopped building 185s back in 1985. Colt always said he preferred newer models, and landing tail- draggers takes much more practice as they have the tendency to tip over on their noses or ground loop (spin in a circle). But out came a flathead screwdriver to try to pry open the plane’s doors. Nothing gave easily, though, and he may not have been trying too hard. If he had gotten inside, he would have found the fuel tanks empty.
Colt, police say, then headed for the small terminal. An outside light illuminated a window that looked like the easiest entry point, so he unscrewed the light fixture and laid it on the ground. He untwisted the bulb until it went out, throwing that side of the building into darkness. His trusty screwdriver made short work of the window latch and he climbed inside. It turned out to be a kitchen, and as Colt stepped down, his foot landed on the stove, bending one of the burners. The only stuff in the kitchen was, according to Rich Rasmussen who works at the airport for Hertz, “some pretty nasty food… been expired a long time,” so Colt moved on to the rental car office.
The door to the Hertz office had some play in it, so first Colt tried to jimmy the lock. That didn’t work, so he simply put a shoulder to it and busted it open. It appears he didn’t dawdle in the office—two hundred dollars were left behind in the desk—and instead just picked two sets of keys out of a glass bowl, one labeled for a Dodge Journey, the other for a Ford Fusion. The Dodge was right out front.
WHILE COLT WAS BOATING across state lines and shopping planes in Oregon, residents back on Camano Island were gathering for a meeting at the Elger Bay Elementary School. It had been set up by Josh Flickner and David Peters to introduce the community to Mike Rocha and his team. Some locals, though, weren’t too receptive to the idea of armed bounty hunters skulking around the island. One woman said she wasn’t comfortable having them walking through their backyards with automatic weapons. Rocha reassured her, saying they wouldn’t do that. “We carry
Rocha told the crowd his men were already out working the island. Sheriff Brown wasn’t at the meeting but announced that he wouldn’t be sharing any information with any private group, including bounty hunters. That certainly seemed accurate, because while the bounty hunters began shaking the bushes on Camano, the police and anyone paying attention knew Colt was already south of the state border.
AT 7:30 A.M. ON the second, Rich Rasmussen noticed that the Dodge Journey was missing. Last thing he expected, though, was that it had been stolen. He figured another Hertz employee had borrowed it. What made more of an impact on him was that the key to his office door was working much better. “It’d usually catch a little and you’d have to wiggle it… That morning it just turned,” he says. “I thought maybe it was a miracle.” When word came back that the Dodge wasn’t with Hertz staff, Rich called the cops. “They said, ‘We’ve been waiting for your call.’” The police told the airport manager, John Overholser, that once the stolen boat showed up, they figured it was just a matter of sitting by the phone and sooner or later they’d get a call about something else getting ripped off.
COLT DROVE THE DODGE Journey south on Highway 101—the Bandit with no driver’s license cruising one of the world’s great road trip routes. From the time he dropped the C-note at the vet’s in Raymond, he’d had the Pacific Ocean beside him nearly the entire time. The only downside to 101 in Washington and Oregon is trying to ignore the patchwork of clearcuts that make the region look like a green dog with mange. Of course since Colt traveled nocturnally, he missed most of the sights. South of Seaside, Oregon, he veered southeast into Yamhill County, Oregon’s wine country.
He ditched the wagon in Dayton and made his way three miles to McMinnville at the north end of the Willamette Valley, thirty-eight miles south of Portland. If Colt hadn’t been on the lam, this would be a natural stop. The town hosts the country’s second-largest annual UFO Festival—only the one in Roswell, New Mexico, is bigger —which seems like it might attract a kid who specialized in unidentified flying. The serious draw, though, is the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum, retirement home for Howard Hughes’s famous flying cargo ship, the
Just across Salmon River Highway from the museum lies McMinnville Municipal Airport, a busy little hub that serves as a base for more than 130 prop planes, jets, helicopters, and gliders. The cluster of businesses and offices on the field include the FBO/flying school Cirrus Aviation along with Northwest Air Repair, and the ten-thousand- square-foot area command of the Oregon State Police—a big-ass cop shop. There’s also a National Guard armory on the property, and just south of that lies Airport Park, a heavily wooded campground that’s open to the public. Fliers who come to McMinnville to check out the museum often camp at the park, which runs practically right onto the taxiway.
Northwest Air Repair is owned by U.K.-born Graham Goad, who also serves as the airport’s manager. His younger brother Adam worked at McMinnville as a flight instructor for a helicopter company.
According to Graham, the first weirdness happened on Thursday, June 3, “when Connie, who works at the FBO, went to get her lunch out of the fridge and noticed it was gone.” Lunch-bag larceny wasn’t a common occurrence at McMinnville. No one made a big deal out of it, though—some folks just aren’t that fanatical about their food. And some folks are. When Graham walked into his hangar office on Monday the seventh, he immediately noticed that something was horribly, horribly wrong: three of his Johnsonville Beddar with Cheddar brats were missing.
Graham loves those fat tubes of beefy cheesy goodness. Often he’ll just nuke a couple in the microwave and gobble them down without even bothering to bun ’em or add fixings. He doesn’t take brat banditry lightly, and with a notorious forager known to be in the area, he quickly came up with a suspect. “My brother Adam has a key to my shop and he sticks his head in my fridge all the time.”
Adam, though, swore up and down that he didn’t do it. Graham scratched his bald head and almost had himself convinced that he just might have been eating so many himself that he’d lost count. But then he noticed a couple more odd things around the office. His computer had been reset, and his WiFi signal booster had been unplugged, disabling the camera that sent images of his shop to his desktop throughout the day. Minor, compared to the missing hot dogs, but still evidence that something fishy was going on.
BACK IN WASHINGTON ON June 3, another bizarre twist. An anonymous donor made a public offer to Colt: turn yourself in and I’ll give you $50,000. The offer was made through Jim Johanson, an Edmunds-based attorney and former state rep whom fugitive-recoverer Mike Rocha described as “a friend of our company.” Johanson says the donors were “just some people that didn’t want to see anything bad happen to Colt or anyone else, like law enforcement.” Part of the deal was that Johanson would also represent Colt pro bono, “no strings attached.” The free lawyer and $50 grand in “no longer walking around” money had a deadline, though, set to expire June 8 at 3 p.m.
