The local legend most akin to Colt was probably Ed Harrington, a gentleman bandit whose lasting celebrity came from a July day in 1914 when he held up fifteen stagecoaches. They were sightseeing coaches, each filled with tourists visiting Yellowstone Park, so it was like robbing the faux boats as they make their way through the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. Harrington was very polite, used the magic word “please” when asking folks to deposit their cash in his sack, and didn’t hurt anyone. He got so cocky with how well his plan was working, though, that he allowed his victims to take snapshots of him as souvenirs. Harrington collected more than $1,000 in cash and jewelry, but was later identified and spent five years in Leavenworth.
The Wild West was once policed by characters like Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson, who were just as wild as the famous outlaws they corralled and sometimes caroused with. Today, it’s men like Detective Ron Parduba and George Menig of the Cody Police Department. Both are former NYPD. New York cops all think they’ve seen everything, but when Parduba and a fellow officer, John Harris, went out to investigate a break-in and stolen truck at High Country Roofing on June 13, they found a distinctive piece of evidence: a giant bare footprint. Harris saw the print in the mud and said it looked “like Bigfoot.” Cody police suspect Colt first went for an Escalade parked at a body shop—’cause that’s how he rolls—then realized it was too damaged and took the roofing truck instead. At some point during his time in Cody, the Barefoot Bandit cut his foot. As he drove the truck east, he bled DNA onto the floorboard.
The truck made it only two counties before it ran out of gas. Colt ditched it along the highway, leaving the keys in the ignition. A quarter mile away, he sneaked into an unlocked garage and made off with a Lincoln Mark LT, a $40,000 luxury pickup that’s very popular in the carports of the Mexican cartels. The Lincoln was found later at a small airport, a giant footprint on its bed cover.
Detective Parduba reported the Bigfoot sighting to Assistant Chief Menig, who saw a media report on the Barefoot Bandit. Together they concluded that all the evidence fit Colt’s MO and made a call back to the trailhead. Island County’s Ed Wallace says Menig’s call was the first hint of Colt’s location he’d received since Oregon.
THE LINCOLN PICKUP MADE its way to Buffalo in Johnson County, Wyoming, in the foothills of the Big Horn Mountains just north of Crazy Woman Canyon and the legendary outlaw sanctuary Hole-in-the-Wall. The most famous denizen of Hole-in-the-Wall was Butch Cassidy who, historians say, first soured on authority figures at the age of thirteen when he rode to town on his day off to buy some jeans, but found the store closed. He broke in, got his pants and a piece of pie, and left an IOU. The store owner pressed charges, however, and an outlaw was born.
Butch and Sundance stayed in Buffalo at the Occidental Hotel, as did Calamity Jane and Buffalo Bill. Today, folks drifting into town are more likely to be about coal and methane production than gunslinging, but the area’s still primarily big skies and open spaces. Only 8,500 people live in all of four-thousand-square-mile Johnson County.
Jim McLaughlin, who’s the manager and fixed base operator for the Johnson County Airport two miles north of the town center, fits the rugged landscape he’s occupied since 1978. That, though, still doesn’t make him a local. “Not in this town,” laughs the easygoing seventy-two-year-old great-grandfather. Jim raises a small herd of cattle and there’s a bit of John Wayne in his voice, but he says he doesn’t get along so good with horses. “I’ll stick to planes—they’re a heck of a lot safer.” He flies and maintains Cessnas and Supercubs, and other than most weekend evenings when he’s out dancing, Jim says he seems to spend all his time at the airport. He hadn’t, though, gotten any calls about Colt even though his was the closest airport to the Barefoot Bandit’s last known whereabouts.
“I’d heard a little bit about him a long time ago, but I didn’t think anybody like that would try something here because, you know, it’s kinda dangerous around these parts—a lot of guys pack weapons.”
Jim’s first hint of something odd was on Saturday, June 12, when he slammed his hangar door shut and the padlock fell out, broken. “At first I thought maybe it was just old and rotted.” Then, when Jim came in on Monday, he realized that more than entropy had been afoot. Eight Snickers bars had been swiped from the FBO counter, and when he went to his hangar he noticed a bunch of tools—big screwdrivers, pry bars, and channel locks—was missing. Jim walked the rest of the private hangars and saw that six of them had been broken into. In one, there’d been both a Suburban and a $65,000 sporty-luxe Cadillac CTS-V—“One of them go-fast ones,” says Jim. Both vehicles had full fuel tanks and the keys inside. “He wanted a Cadillac.” Sometime Saturday night, Colt had closed the hangar door behind him and drove off in the supercharged sedan.
Jim called the law but didn’t expect much. “They don’t go out to a shooting here until they’re sure the bad guys are out of ammunition.” The police took a report but didn’t do any forensics at the airport. “They might know where the fingerprint kit is, but I’ve never seen them use it.” Jim says the police didn’t mention anything about the Barefoot Bandit and didn’t have any suspects in mind. “They were… disinterested.” The police did collect some of the tools that had been taken out of Jim’s hangar, but he says he’s not sure if that was for evidentiary purposes. “Probably a cop needed a big screwdriver.”
Later, the fancy Lincoln pickup stolen just a ways out of town was found—sitting in the Johnson County Airport’s lot.
THE CADDY WAS RECOVERED a few days later, undamaged, 163 miles away in Spearfish, South Dakota. To get there, Colt drove through Crook County, Wyoming, and its most famous town, Sundance, which lent its name to Harry Longabaugh, the Sundance Kid, after he did a stretch in its jail for horse thieving at the age of eighteen.
Spearfish takes its name from the Sioux Indian practice of spear fishing in the local creek. It’s a Black Hills town of 8,600 just ten minutes north of Deadwood, the notoriously lawless gold rush town where Wild Bill Hickok was gunned down.
The Cadillac was ditched just a mile from Spearfish’s Black Hills Airport. By now, anyone could guess where strange things started happening next. The FBO at Black Hills is Eagle Aviation, run by Ray Jilek. Did Ray get any warnings that something wicked his way comes? “None.”
Ray runs a tight ship. “We balance the till every night and again in the morning,” he says. When they did the count Monday morning, the fourteenth, it was off. “We were four dollars short.” The missing four bucks wasn’t near as strange as the fact that several hundred dollars was left behind in the cash drawer. “It was really puzzling… It just didn’t seem rational,” he says. Someone less precise might even think they’d simply miscounted, but not Ray. He started looking around and found that a number of locks had been subtly jimmied.
“Everything was put back as close as possible to the way it was left, but you could tell.” One of the doors that’d been opened led to a hangar with two unlocked planes. “We had portable GPS units and headsets and all that kind of stuff inside… but nothing was taken.” He began to think it was probably just kids—until he got to work the following morning.
This time the till was empty. “It’d been pried open with a screwdriver.” Ray says the burglar took his big orange-handled Snap-on screwdriver and sledgehammer and went to work on a four-drawer fireproof filing cabinet. “He beat on that thing, must have been for an hour to gain access to it only to find out there was nothing inside, absolutely nothing.” The planes were all accounted for, but one other count was off. “There were 15.8 gallons of high-grade aviation fuel missing.”
Inside the FBO is a lockbox where folks who keep cars at the airport store their keys. When a sheriff’s deputy found the stolen Caddy the next day, “that’s when they started putting two and two together,” says Ray. They figured there’d likely be a vehicle missing from the Black Hills Airport, and sure enough, when they went out and counted, a Ford pickup was gone. “He’d pumped the aviation fuel into the truck and took off sometime late Monday night or early Tuesday morning.”
The mystery that remained was the first night’s $4. “We were thinking about that and suddenly looked over at the vending machines.” Ray speculates that Colt got hungry and needed some singles to get a Coke and a candy bar, maybe a Snickers.
THE BLACK HILLS FORD drove through the spectacular desolation of the Badlands and pulled up to the Pierre Regional Airport in the capital city of South Dakota. This was the largest airport Colt hit during the summer of 2010. Pierre’s two runways stretched across its 1,700 acres and handled commuter airlines, including Delta Connection. Lindbergh once landed here in the
A ten-foot-high fence surrounded the secure side of the airport. According to what airport manager Mike Isaacs and the local police figured out from the evidence, Colt found a natural entry past security and into the terminal building. A lone tree, a crabapple, stood in the parking lot and branched out toward the terminal. It was an
