within walking distance of McMinnville Airport, the owner of the FBO called Graham Goad and told him a rental car was missing. One of the services offered by the FBO is to line up cars for incoming pilots. A silver GMC Acadia was stolen while waiting for Enterprise to come pick it up. That same day, the ninth, they noticed that the stock of AA batteries in the supply closet had been raided. Then the owner of a private hangar went to turn on his handheld GPS and it wouldn’t work. When he opened the back to check the batteries, they were gone.
Graham and the owner of the FBO called the Oregon State Police station seventy-five yards away, but the Staties shrugged and told them to call the city police—they had no interest in a stolen rental car and disappearing hot dogs. The McMinnville PD showed up and took a report, but didn’t do any forensic work. It was Graham who found where the back window to his hangar had been pried open with a screwdriver.
A week later, Graham’s youngest brother, Matthew, who lives up in Everett, Washington, sent him an email link to a newspaper story about Colton Harris-Moore being tracked to Oregon. “He says, ‘Hey, this guy is in your area!’ I said, ‘Yeah, we figured that out, thanks for the timely heads-up.’”
“NO, I NEVER HEARD anything,” says Alan Daniels, manager of Oregon’s Ontario Municipal Airport. He’d received no warning about any airport-surfing plane and/or car thief at loose in the region, certainly not near his airport, which offers a single five-thousand-foot runway right alongside a golf course. Hook your approach to runway 32 at Ontario, and you could land your Cessna in a water hazard.
Ontario has a population of eleven thousand or so, making it the biggest town in Malheur County. “We’re just a quiet little community out here in the desert,” says Daniels. “It’s not the edge of the world, but if you stand on your tiptoes you might be able to see it.” Ontario grew up on the Union Pacific Railroad and lies on the Snake River where it begins to serve as the squiggly divide between Oregon and Idaho. The area farms out potatoes, onions, and beets, but the town’s main claim to fame is that it’s the home of Oregon’s largest state prison.
The Ontario airport is close to a major highway, and several other arteries intersect in and around the town. Ne’er-do-wells like the easy on-and-off access. “Our crime rates,” says Captain Mark Alexander of the City of Ontario Police Department, “are up there with bigger cities just because we have such a transient population.” Captain Alexander says they get a lot of people coming through town because they’ve got themselves a Walmart and no sales tax. Plop that combination close to the border of a state with 6 percent sales tax, and sooey, it’s feeding time. “Any given day at Walmart, 75 percent of your license plates are Idaho.”
Alexander says he hadn’t heard of the Barefoot Bandit. “You gotta understand, we’re just flooded with ‘Be on the lookout of all kinds of people,’ and that’s just from around here.” That doesn’t mean their airport was totally off police radar. “We’ve had some hangars broke into before,” says Alexander. For that reason, officers do drive-bys around the airport every once in a while. One of them cruised through at 10:30 p.m. on June 9, and saw nothing amiss—because you can’t see what’s already missing.
Local pilot Gary Taylor, fifty-two, flies corporate, a Learjet, out of Ontario Muni. He’d pulled up to the airport that day at 3 p.m. in his white 2008 F250 diesel pickup. He parked the big rig next to the hangar and his copilot cruised up alongside in her Prius.
Gary, who’s been flying since he was sixteen, went inside to wipe down the jet with an ugly blue bath towel he’d bought just for the plane’s exterior. Once he had the Lear sparkling, he tossed the towel and his keys into the pickup. “I don’t like to fly with car keys and take the chance of losing them on a layover.” The Ford had a keyless entry, so he always stuck his keys up under the driver’s seat and locked the doors. On the front seat, he left a $1,000 Bose noise-canceling pilot headset and a brand-new jacket. Normally, Gary would have tucked his truck into the hangar, but this was scheduled to be a short flight, just a hop to Salt Lake City and back, so he left it outside. They fired up the jet and took off at 4 p.m., expecting to be back by 9 p.m. that evening.
Instead, it wasn’t until midnight when they taxied back to the hangar. The big truck was gone. “At first,” Gary says, “I thought it was some of my sick friends playing a joke on me.” He didn’t find it funny. “It was late and I just wanted to get home.” He made a couple of calls and realized this was no joke, then called the police.
The cops told him not to worry—too much. They said that it would probably show up later that night. “They said it was pretty common for… you know, Hispanic people to go out and joyride for a little while. They told me the cars usually show up in town.”
As they poked around, it became apparent that the pickup might not have been the thief’s first choice. He’d used a screwdriver to try to get in the Prius. Then they discovered that he’d also tried to force open the hangar’s man door. Typically, those are flimsy, but Gary had reinforced it with a steel plate. It turned out to be a lucky break for the burglar: if he’d opened the door, he would have tripped the silent alarm.
The next day, Gary was driving toward the hangar when he noticed something that caused him to hit the brakes. A jerrican of fuel and a hand truck that had been in the bed of his missing pickup were sitting alongside a silver GMC Acadia parked not far from the Lear’s hangar.
“I thought that is really way too weird.”
It got weirder. When Gary walked up to the Acadia and looked inside, he saw his ugly blue towel.
He called the police out again. The towel, they theorized, had been used to wipe down the prints on the stolen SUV.
Gary’s truck wasn’t found in town. Two nights later, though, at 2:15 a.m., he got a call from a deputy from over in Ada County, Idaho, who told him they’d found his F250 on a farm road grandly named the Emmet Highway in a little town of less than two thousand called Star. The truck had gone about thirty miles down 84 and then east about ten miles, ending up in the middle of a field where the corn crop was just starting to sprout with stalks about six inches high. “I asked if my headset was in there and the sheriff said yes. The keys were gone, though. They didn’t bother with prints or anything, he just said, ‘Come get it
Gary was able to get ahold of a tow company to go put the truck up on a flatbed, but they refused to bring it all the way to his place and he had to go meet them halfway. When he got to the pickup, Gary says he noticed a couple of things right off. First was olfactory, and it wasn’t a new-car smell. “Horrendous body odor. That freaked me out… I wasn’t sure I could take it.” The second thing was that the seat was pulled way up, as if whoever was driving it was real short, or he’d moved the seat up so he could stretch out and sleep in the back. Then, when he turned on the engine, the radio started talking Spanish—not the station he’d left it on.
Because Ada County didn’t bother to do forensics, there’s no clue who took Gary’s truck—other than the person who did might not have bathed in a few days, and he either spoke Spanish or… was possibly learning the language and wanted to practice. Or the truck may even have been stolen twice, both thieves realizing they weren’t going to get far without having to stop for fuel, which isn’t a smart thing to do considering that almost every gas station in the country has surveillance cameras.
What is known, though, is that Colton Harris-Moore was in Ada County at that time, where he stole a 2006 Ford F150 and continued his road trip. He did a big 372-mile swing below the Sawtooth National Forest amid the western foothills of the Rocky Mountains and then drove down into the Teton Valley to a town called Driggs, Idaho. There at Driggs Teton Peaks Municipal Airport on June 12, he traded the pickup for a gray Cadillac Escalade, which he stole from a private hangar. The airport had a number of cars around, all with keys in them, but Colt picked the top of the line, the favorite SUV of rap stars.
He dumped the Escalade in Cody, Wyoming, the following day. Moving between those two points, the most likely route is through Wind River Canyon, past Kirwin, a spot that Amelia Earhart liked so much that she was having a cabin built there while she attempted her ill-fated around-the-world flight. The other choice would be up through Yellowstone National Park and across the Wapiti Valley, a drive that Teddy Roosevelt called “the most scenic 50 miles in America.” It’s the perfect path for a summer road trip, but risky due to having to stop to pay a park entrance fee to a ranger. Regardless of the route, both drives run through such breathtaking vistas that it should be a felony to do either one of them at night.
Colt was now getting into real bandit country. In 1832, Driggs was the site of a huge fur trapper rendezvous that, beyond the usual alcohol-fueled shenanigans that made those gatherings famous, ended with the deadly two- day battle of Pierre’s Hole, where mountain men along with their Nez Perce and Flathead friends fought a band of Gros Ventre Indians. And Colt certainly wasn’t the first rustler to make a run through Teton Valley, though historically it served as a hideout for those who filched cattle and horses instead of boats and planes. Crossing into Wyoming, the red hills and frontier towns still faintly ring with the ricochets of Robert LeRoy Parker and Harry Longabaugh, aka Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, along with Wild Bill Hickok, Doc Holliday, Calamity Jane, and Frank and Jesse James.
