and “possibly even work with local law enforcement to step up patrols.” It only went statewide, though, and Colt was obviously on the move.
With adequate warning, ignition keys could have been secured and plane owners could have at least considered spending $100 on a throttle lock or wheel locks that make it much harder to steal an aircraft. The lack of official warning to every small airport in the country wasn’t a money issue or a manpower issue, just a lack of common sense.
Colt was always good at staying one step ahead, but even he had to be surprised at how easy it had been up to this point.
THE WEATHER, THOUGH, CONTINUED to work against him. In Ottumwa, Iowa, where they were getting ready for the big balloon races scheduled for the twenty-third, they had heavy rains and thunderstorms. A tornado tore through the area as Colt arrived.
Sometime Monday night or early Tuesday morning—after the Iowa DOT warning and after Steve Black says he called the local police to alert them—Colt got into the main building at Ottumwa Regional Airport and tried prying on every interior door with a screwdriver. He then moved on to the FBO and busted into the cash drawer, taking all the bills. The bathroom was also left a mess, as if someone had been bathing in the sink.
When Black discovered all this Tuesday morning, he spotted the Classic Aviation courtesy van out in his parking lot. The silver minivan was neat and clean, still had an eighth of a tank of gas, and all the clothing missing from the Pella terminal was inside. Even the keys to the Mazda Tribute were left sitting on the passenger seat.
That night, west of downtown Ottumwa, Colt climbed a fence into the parking area where the Frito-Lay company parks its delivery vans. First he tried to wrench open one truck’s door, but it wouldn’t give. The thought of all that crunchy goodness just inches away was too much to pass up, though, and he resorted to breaking a window. Along with the broken glass and disheveled snack packs, the
Just a short stroll from where the Fritos lay, Colt took a white 2010 Chevy HHR—a retro, fifties-style wagon—from the Ottumwa Water Works. The Chevy didn’t fit the Cadillac SUV and Lincoln pickup pattern. It wasn’t luxe, it was relatively underpowered, and it didn’t have four-wheel drive. According to the Ottumwa police, though, it was “easy pickings” since the water department driver had left the keys in the ignition.
TO THE EAST LAY the Mississippi. Steve Black says he heard police officers speculating that Colt would next take a boat and roll on down the river to New Orleans. It would have nicely closed the literary loop on any Huck Finnishness of the tale, but a little bit of research would have told Colt about all the locks along the way where he’d have to interact with lock masters. Instead, he crossed Ol’ Man River in the Chevy and made his way into a heavily wooded area outside Dallas City, Illinois, that’s called Happy Hollow.
“Happy Hollow is sort of our Cajun country,” chuckles John Jefferson, sheriff of Hancock County, Illinois. “People up there are pretty reclusive, pretty protective of their property, and a lot of them are not real fond of law enforcement. It’s a different kind of community… ”
The road taken by the Chevy into Happy Hollow, directly opposite the riverbank village of Pontoosuc, follows a streambed. “If you’re not from that area,” says Sheriff Jefferson, “you’ll get lost in there—all these little roads shoot off.” Colt may have been looking for a secluded spot to pull over and get some sleep or else knew that there were vacation cabins scattered around the Hollow. He got into trouble, though, because of the weather.
The road in crosses a creek. Normally, water flows beneath the roadbed through a culvert, but there’d been record rains all June, and the creek swelled until it overran the road, coating it with a thick layer of bottom mud and sand. If Colt had had an Escalade or one of the big four-wheel-drive pickups, no problem. However, once the front- wheel-drive HHR got hub deep in the muck, it stuck. Colt was not happy. When he couldn’t free the vehicle, he grabbed a shovel from the back and smashed every one of the windows. He threw the shovel into the water and then took off on foot into Hancock County’s backwoods.
Residents found the stranded Chevy at 7 a.m. Wednesday morning. After Sheriff Jefferson traced it back to Ottumwa, he was contacted by the Iowa Intelligence Fusion Center, which told him they were “100 percent convinced” that it was Colton Harris-Moore. Jefferson hadn’t gotten any advance warning, but he quickly got up to speed on Colt’s MO and put out a mass release to all the local media asking them to warn folks that Colt was likely armed and not to approach him, just call the police. In the meantime, he told everyone to lock up their homes and cars, and if they happened to have a plane, lock that up, too.
I spoke with Sheriff Jefferson several times over the days following the recovery of the HHR. Illinois-farm raised, he was serving his fourth term in office (he’s since won his fifth). And he apparently knew a thing or two about kids doing goofy things. He was raising a crop of them: six of his own, plus, over the last eighteen years, he and his wife had taken in thirty-five foster kids. “What worries me is that Colt is eventually going to graduate into something bigger.”
Jefferson had his deputies aggressively patrolling, but like law enforcement who’d chased Colt in every other jurisdiction, they were hampered by the fact that they couldn’t just go barging onto private property to do searches—especially not in a place like Happy Hollow, where folks don’t take kindly to anyone poking around their cabins, badge or not.
The sheriff felt like he was doing all he could, but it still seemed like a needle in a haystack situation. Jefferson oversees Hancock’s 816 square miles with just eight deputies and himself, plus some assorted small-town police forces spread through the county. Considering the notoriety of the case, he expected someone more useful than the media might call. “I’m surprised there’s been no help from the Feds, or that some kind of task force hasn’t called.” The Iowa Intelligence Fusion Center had collected the intelligence from their side of the line, but they said they weren’t going to actively investigate or pursue the case. Jefferson and his deputies went out and talked to everyone aviation related, which was no small task. “There’s a private airstrip about a mile and a half straight south from where he got stuck, and five small airports within twelve miles.”
MEANWHILE BACK IN WASHINGTON… Harley Davidson Ironwing was back out on the streets hoping to hook up with his old buddy Colt. While he was in prison, Harley says a Snohomish County sheriff and a corrections officer questioned him about Colt. “I told them to go fuck themselves.” Now Harley put the word out that he was a free man and ready to help Colt stay that way, too. “I’m the one person that can keep him out of prison. I guarantee it. I’ll just call in a couple of favors.”
On June 21, with Colt more than a thousand miles away, Harley’s hard-luck story took a tragic turn. His foster mother, Karen Ironwing, died of cancer. She was the one who, Harley said, he was counting on to help give him some much-needed structure outside of prison. Harley didn’t make the funeral—he still hated his foster brothers. That Friday, the twenty-fifth, Harley walked the aisles of the Stanwood Haggen grocery store. He was hungry and says he hadn’t eaten for three days. He stuffed five packages of string cheese into his pants and went for the exit. Store employees saw him and gave chase. As Harley got to the door, he spotted a Sno County deputy and turned to run the other way. The deputy caught up and tackled him, with both men tumbling into an elderly couple, knocking down an eighty-four-year-old man. The old man went to the hospital (bruised but okay) and Harley went to jail, eventually sentenced to eighteen months for third-degree assault.
ON THE SAME FRIDAY Harley got pinched for the string cheese chase, police back on the Iowa side of the Mississippi found a stolen pickup dumped at Casey’s General Store in Burlington. Colt had recrossed the river. This time, he says, he did indeed do it in a boat, and in a rowboat, much closer to Huck’s raft than the large yachts he’d stolen before. He didn’t strike out for the Big Easy, though, just struck out for the other side. Colt claims he lost a paddle along the way and had a harrowing nighttime crossing. Once in Iowa, he went north.
Casey’s lies directly across the street from Southeast Iowa Regional Airport, which was just twelve miles north of the stuck-in-the-mud Chevy HHR tied to Colt. The airport had received the Iowa DOT warning in time, but it didn’t help. A pilot taxied up to his hangar on the twenty-seventh and raised the door to trade his plane for the 2010 Ford F150 pickup he’d left inside. His truck, though, had already been gone for at least three days. A cop had even seen it on the twenty-sixth, 228 miles east at Vermilion Regional Airport in Illinois, but didn’t believe it was stolen because it hadn’t been reported yet.
The police were now two steps behind Colt, though he was doggedly, brazenly, sticking to his airport-to-
