Colt’s run from back in Washington State. He told me he believed Colt was just going to keep stealing vehicles until he got wherever he was going. The joke around the Island County Sheriff’s Office was that Colt was heading for Chicago to turn himself in live on
I didn’t have a clue where Colt was heading. Based on his interest in South American islands, I guessed he was studying Spanish, so Mexico had seemed likely until he turned toward the Atlantic Ocean. But I totally disagreed about the cars.
Wherever Colt was going, I was certain he wanted an airplane. When crumb after crumb on his trail turned out to be yet another Caddy or pickup, I did start to doubt my own theory—but only until I checked the weather. It’d been awful across the Midwest, with massive thunderstorms capable of smacking small planes out of the sky. It now made sense to me that Colt would hole up in a house like Kelly’s near an airport, waiting for the right flying weather.
The question that was still driving me crazy, though, was, How had the law not caught up with him yet?
I sat down on Sunday evening, June 20, to test two theories. One, that Colt was looking to steal a plane, and two, that his MO was so predictable that the cops and FBI should have easily been able to get out ahead of him. So far, Colt had stolen Cessna 182s and Cirrus SR22s. He flew the 182s at daybreak. He chose SR22s for his night flights when conditions and navigation are edgier and he could use the assistance of the glass cockpit instruments. With the bad weather across the Midwest, I assumed that he’d lean toward taking an SR22, day or night. Then I looked at his last known location and direction. Colt had recently taken a dip south, but I always figured he’d do that eventually in order to avoid Chicago since he needed to operate in rural areas where people were lax about security. I felt he’d get eaten alive in a big city. It still looked to me like he was determined to head east. Colt couldn’t risk stopping for gas, so his hops were relatively short. East out of Norfolk, Nebraska, the Iowa border was only sixty miles away. And, again, Colt wanted an airplane—they live at airports.
I simply Googled three words: Cirrus, airport, Iowa.
The top result was Classic Aviation, a Cirrus flight training center at the Pella, Iowa, airport. I picked up the phone and started to dial their number, but then looked at the time. It was 6 p.m. on Orcas, which made it… some hours later Central Corn Time. No one was going to be sitting around an FBO on a Sunday evening. I hung up and instead spent some time on Classic’s Web site, learning that Pella means “City of Refuge” in Dutch and was settled by immigrants from Holland who planted lots of tulips. It also said that along with flight training on Cirrus airplanes, Classic Aviation offered a free courtesy car for runs into town to check out the flowers and delicious Dutch pastries.
I wrote down their phone number and put it on my to-do list for Monday.
After breakfast the next morning, I called Shane Vande Voort, owner of Classic Aviation and manager at Pella Municipal Airport. The first thing I said was “This call is either going to sound real crazy… or not.” Shane laughed and said, “That’s okay, I get a lot of calls like that.” I asked if he’d received any recent calls from the FBI, NTSB, FAA, local police, or anybody else warning him about anything. Shane was silent. Yep, he thought I was crazy.
“How did you know to call me?” he asked after a long pause. I told him it was just a cold call, that I’d picked his operation simply by looking at a map and the kinds of planes based at the field.
“Well, no,” he said, “I hadn’t gotten any calls from the police in the past couple of days, though I wish I had… because I wound up having to call them myself this morning.
“We had a break-in last night,” he said, then asked me who I was. I explained that I was a writer following a teenage burglar and transportation rustler named Colt who had an affinity for airplanes.
“How did you already find out that we got hit?” he asked.
I told him, again, that this was just a cold call based on a couple minutes of research.
“You’re kidding me…” Shane said that the police were there doing their initial forensic work as we spoke. Not a word of this had gotten out yet.
“Did Colt get a plane?” I asked. Shane said no, that he and the police had already checked the planes and all were accounted for and everything looked fine. Shane told me that he’d locked up and left Sunday night at 9:30 (he would have been there if I’d called). He remembered leaving a hangar door open as he fussed around in the office. The police, he said, hadn’t found any sign of forced entry, so he thought the thief might have sneaked in while he was still there, walked through the hangar, and just hid inside until he left.
Shane said he knew right away that morning when he got to the brick building that houses Classic Aviation that he had trouble. “There was grass all over, in my office by my computer, and in the upstairs bathroom the whole bottom of the sink was filled with dead grass.” All the cash he’d had on hand, some $450, was missing, and his courtesy car was gone.
“But he didn’t try to get a plane?” I asked again, feeling my wild blue yonder theory fading away.
“Nope,” said Shane.
As the police pieced things together, they found that Colt had dumped the Norfolk Escalade at a tire company 1.3 miles from Shane’s airport. “The interesting thing about that,” said Shane, “is that there’s a four-lane highway in-between, so he must have run across.” That would have taken him through a lot of wet grassy fields.
When Colt got inside, he turned off two monitors in the front office, then went to Shane’s and sat at his computer. At some point, he deleted the browser history, then unplugged the network cable, which he could use to get his own laptop online. Rummaging around inside the office and FBO, Colt found the cash drawer and also took sweatshirts, two boxes of Tic Tacs that were in Shane’s desk, and keys to both Classic Aviation’s courtesy van as well as a customer’s Mazda Tribute. He also grabbed a pair of sneakers, size twelve, that belonged to one of the mechanics. Before he left, Colt went upstairs to the sink and washed the grass off his feet.
Shane said the police were scanning his computer trying to get any info on what Colt might have been researching (they didn’t find anything). I asked whether Colt had taken any flight training materials (no) and asked again (and again) about the planes. “He had access to an older Cirrus SR20, a Bonanza, and a Cherokee, and he could have easily gotten into the hangars with nicer, new planes including the SR22s, but
I couldn’t understand why Colt didn’t at least attempt a plane, while Shane couldn’t understand why Colt traded in his late-model Cadillac Escalade for Shane’s crappy $1,500 silver Dodge Caravan emblazoned with the Classic Aviation logo and phone number. “I can’t imagine where he thinks he’s going in that, with our name written on the side.”
A local pilot had come to the field and started his plane at 5 a.m., so Shane speculated that he’d scared Colt into just taking the first car he saw that he had keys to. Since the van hadn’t been located yet, Shane’s main worry was that Colt was planning on coming back. He said he was already arranging to have surveillance cameras set up all over the airport, and just the thought of that disheartened him. “This is Iowa,” he said. “It’s a leave-the-keys-in- it kinda place, and this guy is capitalizing on that trust. That’s low.”
A FEW HOURS LATER, my phone rang. It was Shane. He said that because I’d been such a pain in the ass (or something to that effect but in a friendlier Midwestern phrasing) about the dang airplanes, airplanes, airplanes, he’d gone back out and rechecked them. “You were right,” he said. “He tried to get into one of the Cirrus SR22s by prying open the baggage door with something like a screwdriver.” The lock was damaged, but he wasn’t able to get inside. (Much later, Shane also realized that Colt had taken a Cirrus flight manual from his office bookshelf.)
“It’s kind of frustrating for me,” he said. “All this Homeland Security and GA Secure… It seems like the word could have been sent out by the authorities… I shouldn’t have to hear it from you.”
Shane took it upon himself to start making calls, hoping that other airports wouldn’t be left in the same position. He phoned Steve Black, at Ottumwa Flying Service just forty-five minutes down the four-lane from Pella. He told Steve about the break-in and warned him he was in the Bandit’s path. Steve in turn called the local police. “They said they’d be making additional patrols out here,” he says.
Word also went to the Iowa DOT’s Department of Aviation, which sent out the first organized bolo-type (Be On the LOokout) “Urgent Alert” to airports at noon on the twenty-first. It encouraged them to secure their facilities
