easy climb, then out on a limb and onto the roof. Footprints—sneakers—led from the tree across the flat roof to a second-story door. “No one would even think to lock that door,” says Mike. “There’s no outside access to it—unless you climb the tree—and it’s only there to take weather observations for the FAA.” Once inside, Colt had access to the entire airport. “He could have messed with all the TSA’s equipment, but he didn’t.”
What he did do, though, was stealthily attempt to jimmy nearly every lock in the terminal using a screwdriver. “The more we looked, the more we found these little pry marks here, there, and everywhere. He could have easily broke a window and gotten into my office and taken laptops and all kinds of stuff, but he didn’t.”
Colt tried the cash box at the Delta counter but couldn’t crack it. He did get into the lockboxes at Avis and Budget, and took the key to a rental car. He then went outside on the runway side of the airport and found an open door at the firehouse. Upstairs in the chief’s office around 4 a.m., Colt got on the computer and pulled up Google Earth, zooming in on the satellite view of the airport and surrounding area. He grabbed the chief’s iPod touch on the way out and stopped by the firefighters’ break room where he microwaved himself a Hungry-Man frozen dinner and took a Diet Coke.
When he got back outside the fence, Colt had some good news and bad news. The Avis key he’d taken fit a car in the lot, but the car had been totaled. So he jumped back into the pickup he’d taken in Buffalo and continued east.
“I was surprised,” says Isaacs. “After I found out that he had a history of this, I was a little shocked that nobody had sent out anything to the airports.” Isaacs says he tried to make up for that by calling 866-GA-SECURE, a hotline for reporting suspicious activity around general aviation airports that’s a partnership between AOPA and the TSA. Calls ring at the TSA’s Transportation Security Operations Center. “I also called our state aeronautics office and the other local airports and let them know to watch out.”
COLT HAD NOW MADE it to the exact center of the country, 1,200 miles away from the comfort of his misty Northwest woods. He was adamant about sticking to the conspicuously predictable MO of hopping from airport to airport. The FBI, TSA, and police departments stretching back to the Pacific coast all had more than enough information to guess his next moves. It appeared the game was coming to an end.
Meanwhile, on June 16, local Seattle television aired footage of a team of masked bounty hunters gearing up and going out to hunt Colt. They patrolled dark roads and woods and hid in the weeds around an airport… on Camano Island.
On Orcas Island, high school yearbooks came out. The junior class photos included a kid who’d spent so much time on the island he might as well have enrolled and joined the Vikings basketball team. Colt’s was the only self-portrait.
JACK MCCALL, THE GUY who shot Wild Bill Hickok in Deadwood while he held aces and eights, was originally set loose because Hickok had maybe killed his brother. McCall was rearrested, though, and taken to a place where the law existed more formally than it did in Deadwood. That place was Yankton, Dakota Territory.
Yankton, South Dakota’s River City, lies on the north bank of the Missouri. It’s nearby airport is Chan Gurney, where Gary Carlson runs the FBO.
I’ll get this out of the way quickly: Gary, did you get any advance warning that there was someone in the area, state, or region who was targeting airports?
“None, no, not a one.”
Carlson’s first inkling came when he rushed into his office at 7 a.m. on a hectic June 17. He had a jet coming in early and was hurrying to have everything ready. He slammed his door behind him and noticed that it sounded funny. Then he went to his desk and saw that someone had turned his monitor off. That wasn’t right. When he’d left at 9 p.m. the night before, he’d put it into sleep mode, just like always. He went back over to the door and saw that the lock had been jimmied, then immediately ran out to make sure all the planes were okay.
They were, but his big Craftsman screwdriver was missing out of the toolbox, and that matched the damage on the security door. He also noticed that blankets were gone from the little spot the FBO has for pilots in need of a nap between flights. A brand-new Chevy pickup had been delivered to the airport by a local rental company for the people jetting in that morning. Its key was gone, but the pickup was still parked outside. This was interesting. The Chevy had OnStar, which has a stolen vehicle tracking function that can alert police to its exact location, speed, and direction via GPS. Beginning in 2009, OnStar even added the ability for operators to remotely slow a vehicle once the police confirmed it’d been stolen. A smart thief would know this and pick another car. But OnStar is also standard on all Cadillacs, like the recently boosted Escalade and CTS-V. It made sense to take those cars only if the thief was cunning enough to know that they wouldn’t be noticed missing until he’d already gotten to his next stop.
But what if the traveling thief had decided for some reason to stay put for a while?
Gary called the police, who immediately suspected Colt and knew what to look for. They quickly located the Black Hills pickup in the airport parking lot. Detectives jumped on Carlson’s computer and saw that someone had been online at 1 a.m., surfing AirNav.com, “the pilot’s window into a world of aviation information.” AirNav tells you everything you’d want to know about every airport: number and type of planes based there, how busy it is, hours of operation, FBO services, and whether there’s a manned tower. The site also links to satellite photos of the airport and surrounding area, which the computer history showed had been pulled up.
The fact that not much was missing from the airport led local detectives to believe Colt might be coming back for a second bite like he did in Spearfish and at least four other airports. So they came up with a plan to stake out the building that night. The police also began a search of the area, paying special attention to a copse of woods just south of the airport.
Those woods, a mix of elm and cottonwood, fully leafed in mid-June, form the northeast corner of a residential neighborhood adjacent to the airport. Inside the trees, you have an excellent spot to watch the area homes and see which ones remain dark after sundown. It’s less than a third of a mile from the airport to the street entrance of the development, or you can walk across a soybean field that takes you right to the backs of the houses.
Colt walked over and began snooping around. Police say that he visited numerous houses in the neighborhood, but didn’t find just the right one until he broke into the home of Kelly and Lisa Kneifl.
The Kneifls and the four youngest—ages fourteen, twelve, eight, and five—of their seven kids had just moved into the rancher a month before. Kelly and Lisa travel often for their jobs and it had been a very busy year. They’d barely even begun to unpack the house, but managed to block out a week for a vacation. That’s where they were, up in the mountains of Pennsylvania, when Colt came calling.
Several things made the Kneifl house ideal, even beyond the fact that the family was out of town. There was plenty of food, the kind of stuff teenagers love, like frozen pizza and chicken nuggets, packaged deli ham and chicken, and a whole vat’s worth of sugar-free Jell-O pudding cups. The home also backed up to open fields and ongoing residential construction. If someone inside was careful about turning on the lights up on the main floor, and spent most of his time in the large finished basement where the only light visible from the outside would be through the egress window facing the fields, it’d be possible to remain unseen indefinitely, even by the neighbors. Plus, the Kniefl boys had a kick-ass video game collection and three platforms—Xbox, Wii, and GameCube.
Colt chose one of the boys’ beds downstairs for sleeping. He spent the rest of his time on the couch in front of the TV in the basement family room. That’s where he ate, neatly piling his food wrappers and building what would become a leaning tower of Jell-O pudding empties.
In the middle of the night, officially early morning on June 18, Colt was wide awake and busy. He nuked himself some chicken nuggets and arrayed them in three precise rows of three on one of the Kneifls’ square plates. He set the clothes washer going, and with his nuggets cooling by the couch, jumped into the shower. When he got out, he turned on one of Kelly’s beard trimmers and started giving himself a buzz, cutting about an inch off his hair. Then he heard an unwelcome rumble…
Kelly and family had a long, long day getting home from Pennsylvania. They drove to Pittsburgh, flew into Omaha, and then had a two-and-a-half-hour run home. It was 3 a.m. when a blurry-eyed Kelly finally pulled into the driveway, hit the garage door opener, and roused the troops.
Lisa gathered up her five-year-old daughter and carried her to the door leading into the house. She noticed that the door was slightly ajar. “I don’t remember leaving this open,” she said to Kelly. Lisa stepped into the mudroom and flicked on the light. That’s when she saw that the door at the end of the hall leading to the interior of
