airport MO, all the way across the country.
OUT AT THE OLD FBO building at Vermilion Airport on Thursday, June 24, thirty-nine-year-old Homer Woolslayer barbecued himself a steak and sat at a picnic table enjoying the evening. The airport was so desolate and so quiet he could hear the beacon rotating across the runway. A flight instructor and cropduster out of Tulsa, Homer first flew at eight years old, handling the stick of a Piper under the supervision of his oldest brother, who was already flying cropdusters. Always a risk taker, Homer raced motorcycles professionally until he realized he’d never make it to the top in that dangerous racket. After an ill-fated stint in his family oil field equipment business, he fell back on flying. He became a freelance instructor, and flew air ambulance missions in a Citation II jet.
In March 2010, just a few months before heading up to Vermilion, Homer had his Captain Sully moment. He had a student up in a 1976 Cessna 210 Centurion when the plane lost power on approach. Only five hundred feet above the Arkansas River with no time to maneuver, Woolslayer grabbed the controls and just had time to get the wheels down before flaring the plane onto a sandbar. “It was a nonevent,” he says with a barnstormer’s nonchalance. “There wasn’t a scratch on the plane and we didn’t bend it at all.” Unfortunately, water was being released from a dam upriver, and he could only stand there and watch as it rose and swamped his Cessna, ruining the interior and wrecking the electronics.
During the growing season, Woolslayer hires out as an itinerant cropduster. He’d gotten an offer to come up to Illinois and spray for Aero Crop Service. He’d be flying an Air Tractor 301, a tail-dragging radial-engine beast of an airplane. “It’s real hard work,” says Homer, “but there’s a lot of romance to cropdusting because it’s so dangerous. When the airplane is fully loaded, it’s barely able to fly. You have to be real careful. Lose focus for a moment and you’ll crash and kill yourself… But it’s a neat job.”
The plan was to spray ten thousand acres of corn in two weeks. Since Homer would be there only a short time, the owner of the dusting outfit, George, told him he could bunk out in an office in the airport’s defunct terminal building. Homer set up a “Kmart condo,” with an inflatable mattress and a few basics inside, and his barbecue just outside the door. The coals were still glowing as he sacked out on the twenty-fourth.
Homer didn’t get to sleep through the night, though. At 4:25 a.m., something woke him up. From his air mattress, he could see through the office window to an outside door. He heard the knob rattling and saw the silhouette of a very tall man apparently trying to get in. “What the hell? I looked at the time, it was just before the false dawn.” Homer pulled on some pants and went outside. He didn’t see anybody, but did notice something odd. “There’s a vehicle, a really nice late-model Ford pickup, that wasn’t there before. It stood out because every other car around had condensation on the windows and this one didn’t—it had to have just drove up.” Woolslayer noted that the mystery truck had Iowa plates and saw that someone had tossed a travel-size bottle of mouthwash underneath it. “I figured this guy was coming to meet an early plane and trying to get inside looking for someplace to take a leak. After a while, though, when I didn’t hear any planes coming or going, that kind of spooked me. It was weird, but finally I thought, Ah, forget it, and went back to bed.”
Homer told George about it the next morning. “He perked up, but there wasn’t much to do. He just said, ‘Gawd, Homer, nothing ever happens at this airport… Now you show up and people are sneaking around trying to get into my office.’” They laughed it off and went to work, but because the white pickup was still there at the end of the day and whoever drove it hadn’t flown off, Woolslayer had a funny feeling that the tall visitor would be back.
That evening, down at another part of the airport, Mike Vadeboncoeur was working late. He owns Midwest Aero Restorations and there’d been a lot of overtime lately as he put the finishing touches on a WWII P51 Mustang that was scheduled to appear at the big air show in Oshkosh at the end of July. At 9:45, he’d just taken a break to watch a YouTube video that his mom had sent him. The clip had a loud soundtrack, and in the sudden silence when it ended, Mike heard something outside his office. “There’s a loose tile out there and it makes a certain sound, a squeak, when someone steps on it.” Then he heard a door close. He got up and walked out into his secretary’s office, calling, “Who’s there?”
Mike hadn’t received any warnings about Colt. All he knew was that someone else was in the building. Out in the hallway, lights that are always left burning had been turned off. “It just didn’t make any sense, and I was pretty nervous.” He was also angry. Just that day at lunch he and the guys had been discussing Chicago’s strict gun laws. “I’m in favor of having weapons to protect yourself, and here I was, with somebody right outside that door, maybe with a gun, and I had nothing to defend myself with. It was a very sick feeling.”
Mike decided that staying in his office wasn’t a good idea, so he bolted outside onto the tarmac. He looked around, but there was no one there. He walked around to the front of the building… nothing. He tried the front door and it was securely locked. When he came back inside, he turned on all the lights. “I was really getting kinda spooked, but like an idiot, I grabbed the only weapon I could find, a broomstick, and went around checking every room in the building.” Everything seemed fine, and he tried to convince himself that he hadn’t really heard anything.
Down at the old terminal, Homer Woolslayer was lying on his back on top of the picnic table, belly full of barbecue and eyes full of stars. “It was a nice clear, dark night, and I was watching the sky and listening to the crickets and coyotes.” Still, he hadn’t forgotten about the prowler. “I had a feeling he’d come back at the same time.” Homer says he’s one of those people who does not need an alarm clock. “I can tell myself to wake up at a certain time… It’s the weirdest thing.” He set his internal alarm for 4:15 a.m., and it went off on schedule. “Then I just lay in bed waiting.” He didn’t have to wait long.
“Sure enough, he comes back, right on time at 4:27 a.m. I can see his silhouette, but he can’t see me.” Homer says he heard one door rattle and then the tall dark figure moved to the next. “I sat up in bed, watching him walk around trying to get in. I was a little bit nervous, and I didn’t just rush out. I mean, he was brazen. He had to know someone was inside—the air conditioner was going, and the coals were still hot out in the barbecue. I’m thinking, What happens if I go out and try to tackle this guy? If he’s desperate, he’ll kill me. If he’s not, and he’s just some harmless guy, then in a few minutes we’ll be laughing and drinking coffee. Or, if he’s somewhere in between, he’ll kick my ass and run. So I hesitated.”
Finally, Homer jumped up and went to the window. He got a good look at the guy as he was walking away. “He was very tall, had kind of an awkward gait, like the cheap white sneakers he had on didn’t fit him. He didn’t have socks on, and was wearing jean shorts and a T-shirt with a sprint car on it, like from some local, small-time speedway, and he had on a ball cap.”
Woolslayer went back to his bedroom and threw on his jeans. By the time he got outside, though, the tall guy was out of sight. “I walked clear across the airport out to the runways, about half a mile, but couldn’t find him. I think he knew exactly how to get away, he heard me scurrying around to come after him and he doubled back on me. If I’d a known he was a pro I woulda used some different tactics on him.”
SATURDAY MORNING, MIKE VADEBONCOEUR arrived at work still not sure whether he’d been imagining things the night before. He rechecked all the switches and circuit breakers and didn’t find any problems that would’ve caused the lights to go off. Then he went out to his hangar and looked around carefully. At the far corner, he noticed that there was more light than usual coming in around a door frame. “Sure enough, it’d been busted open.”
Colt had pried open the deadbolt on a hangar that housed a TBM 850, a Daher-Socate turboprop sports car of a plane, similar to a Pilatus but smaller and a bit faster. He then made his way into Mike’s hangar, which housed warbirds in various states of restoration. “I’m sure he looked at those and thought, Well, I don’t think I can start any of them,” says Mike. After that, Colt came through the doorway into the FBO, turning off the lights as he passed, then noticed Mike. “I’m sure he saw me sitting there and went, ‘Oops.’”
Homer Woolslayer says he walked around the airport with the other guys that morning and they discovered that as many as five hangars had been broken into. “I think this kid just walked into each and said, ‘Well, that’s no good, I can’t fly that plane, and I don’t want to fly that one… ’ He knew what his limitations were. Most of those planes were too sophisticated.” Homer says that even the airplanes that Colt could have flown weren’t the kind he was looking for. “He went into one hangar with a little trainer in it, a Piper Tomahawk, easy to fly, but some people call that plane the Traumahawk because they say it spins too easily… I was cracking up, because he wouldn’t even steal one of those.”
Homer and his boss talked about involving the police, but nothing was missing, “not a lightbulb. We’re saying, ‘Do we want the police out here?’ I’ll say there’s a healthy suspicion of authority around these parts.”
