the home was also open. She was looking at it, just about to mention it to Kelly, when suddenly a hand reached out and slammed the door shut. Lisa screamed.
Kelly charged in and flung the door open like an angry grizzly. He was ready for almost anything… though he was still momentarily shocked to find a naked man. Colt ran away at full speed, and Kelly, a six-foot-three 340- pound former football player, took off after him, roaring, “Get out of my house!”
With Kelly right behind him, Colt fled deeper into the home, then suddenly made an acrobatic leap over a banister, landing three-quarters of the way down the basement stairs. Kelly had to backtrack to the top of the stairway and then rushed down, still screaming at the top of his lungs, “Get the hell out of my house!”
As Kelly neared the bottom of the stairs, the only light was a dim glow from the egress window off to the left; the rest of the basement was in total darkness. He was a clear target, though, silhouetted by the light coming from upstairs. Kelly’s roars were suddenly matched by a young voice shouting back at him from about fifteen feet away: “Stop! I’ve got a gun! I’ll shoot! I’ll shoot!” A red laser beam shot out of the darkness and hit Kelly. He stopped dead.
Lisa was watching everything from the top of the stairs. She turned and screamed to the kids, “Run!”
After freezing for a second, Kelly ran back upstairs. Out on the driveway, their twelve-year-old daughter had already dialed 911 on her cell. Lisa grabbed the phone and breathlessly told the operator that there were people in her house threatening to shoot her family. Kelly yelled for everyone to get back into the car. He slammed it into reverse and backed out and down the street, stopping two houses away. He pulled into a neighbor’s driveway, where he could still see the front of his home. He momentarily considered driving to the other side so he could shine his headlights on the basement window, “and then I thought, He’s got a gun, I’ve got the kids, that would make no sense at all.”
Down in the basement, Colt ripped open the washing machine mid-cycle, breaking the latch. He grabbed for his sopping-wet clothes—missing a pair of gray-and-black Calvin Klein boxer briefs in the bottom of the drum—then scooped up the rest of his gear and slid open the basement window.
About six minutes after the Kneifls dialed 911, Kelly saw two officers cautiously approaching the house on foot. A few minutes after that, a third officer showed up, and finally one of them circled around to where he could see the basement window. Several minutes later, the 911 operator told Kelly that the officers wanted to talk to him. He drove to another neighbor’s driveway, where a cop was waiting, wanting to know about the house’s exits and what weapons were inside. He said they had a SWAT team on the way.
It was nearly an hour before the four-man SWAT team arrived in full gear, assault rifles strapped across their chests. In the meantime, Kelly had sent Lisa and the kids off to a hotel to try to get some sleep. He drew the police a rough blueprint of his home, and they then told him to pull back out of the line of fire. Kelly didn’t have a house key to give them, so the tactical team hoisted their metal battering ram and approached the front door—they felt it was a safer entry point than going through the garage. Bang went the door and Kelly watched them pour inside “hoopin’ and a hollerin’.”
By the time they’d cleared the house, finding no one inside, it was 4 a.m. A canine team began working the area and the police asked Kelly to help them find his shotgun and rifles, which were all accounted for, along with Lisa’s jewelry and the cash he’d had stuffed in a drawer. A detective led him through the house, room by room, taking photos and asking how things had been left, what was missing or out of place. “Even the boys’ bedrooms, nothing was really messed up,” says Kelly. “Or at least not more than usual. Even the food wrappers around the couch were somewhat organized.”
Later Kelly realized that Colt had gotten into his locking file drawer, prying it open with a screwdriver. It’d been filled with birth certificates and other important papers. “The only things missing, though, were all my vehicle titles.”
The real disorder was in the basement bathroom, where it was obvious that someone had been interrupted mid-primp. A razor sat on the floor along with shaved whiskers. Inch-long head hair was all over the place, “on the floor, in the sink, on the counter, and even chunks of it on the window he’d climbed out.”
All through the police search, the washing machine had been angrily beeping about its premature evacuation. Kelly finally turned it off.
After a short break at the hotel to see his family, Kelly returned to his street at daybreak to find a scene out of the movies. Law was swarming the neighborhood. Investigators pulled Colt’s fingerprints from inside the house, while other officers canvassed the nearby homes, finding evidence Colt attempted to break into as many as a dozen. Police searched local construction sites and woods near the airport.
At 4 p.m., a search group from Codington County, two hours north, arrived with a trio of bloodhounds. Kelly watched them walk the dogs one by one around his house. Each hound picked up a strong trail leading from the basement egress window. The hunters worked the neighborhood hard until 11 p.m., while all afternoon and into the evening helicopters from the South Dakota National Guard sliced through the sky, searching for Colt from above.
Kelly had screamed so hard at Colt that he lost his voice for five days and had to hoarsely whisper reassuring words to his children as they called out night after night, frightened, saying they heard strange noises and were worried someone was in their house again.
When he began learning about Colt’s history, Kelly found it reassuring that he’d never physically hurt any of his burglary victims. One thought, though, kept him awake long after the incident. “Thinking about it from his side, with this big bearded guy chasing him down the stairs screaming bloody murder… I must have come very close to scaring him into shooting me.”
THE WORD WENT OUT to all law enforcement: Colt not only collected and carried guns, and might have fired a shot at cops in the woods, but now he’d actually threatened to shoot a civilian in his home. This amped things up immeasurably. If that laser was attached to a pistol, Colt had been a twitch away from making this a completely different story.
Colt told Josh that he’d use a gun if he had to, and he told Pam that he wouldn’t shoot first, but that he’d shoot back. He just made it a lot more likely that he’d have to.
EVEN THOUGH CAUGHT WITH his pants down in the Kneifls’ home, Colt made efficient use of the 3 a.m. darkness and the nine or ten minutes he had before the police got into position to cut off his escape. While law enforcement converged on Kelly’s house, Colt’s speed and stealth took him several miles east, far outside the search area. He broke into another home, stole the keys to a Toyota Sequoia, and hit the road.
Colt crossed the Missouri and made a straight shot south through sixty miles of Nebraska farmland to Norfolk, a city of twenty-four thousand in Madison County. Sometime after midnight on the nineteenth, he parked the Sequoia at Ta-Ha-Zouka Park on the Elkhorn River. The area had just experienced record flooding. The Elkhorn jumped its banks, swamped farms, and even tore down a railroad bridge and a pedestrian trestle that served as part of the state’s Cowboy Trail. Three days before Colt arrived, residents had been out in force, filling and piling sandbags to try to keep the river out of their homes and businesses.
Less than a mile down 81 from Ta-Ha-Zouka lies Karl Stefan Memorial Airport. At 2:56 a.m., Colt walked through an unlocked door and into the airport services building. He found and disabled the surveillance equipment, but a technician was later able to recover the data, which showed the Barefoot Bandit. There was cash and equipment in the airport office, but Colt didn’t bother with any of it. He did, however, grab a souvenir, a $40 hoodie embroidered with an airplane and NORFOLK AIRPORT. Colt then began snooping around the hangars, unsuccessfully trying to get inside a plane.
The airport folks—who’d received no prior warning—reported the break-in at 11 a.m. the next day. Police came and took a report, but it wasn’t until workers doing flood clean-up at Ta-Ha-Zouka found the Sequoia that Colt’s name came up. Norfolk PD told the airport manager she better check inside all the hangars, that chances were something big was missing. Something was: another Cadillac Escalade.
Chapter 27
I’m pretty sure he’s thinking Grand Theft Auto at this point,” said one of the detectives closely following
