Mike didn’t share that feeling, though, and called the cops. They checked around, saw the mysterious Ford pickup with Iowa plates and the broken hangar door, and they very quickly came up with a suspect: Homer Woolslayer.
“The police were very suspicious just because I was the new guy and I was living out there,” says Homer. “One of them, this freckled guy in his thirties, was real aggressive, acting like he had some kind of mental problem, saying, ‘You’re out of state and I’m running your 10-26!’ or something like that. We’re standing around the Ford and he was shaking me down, demanding my ID, acting like he was going to arrest me. I finally just started cracking up, saying, ‘Man, you’re running my license to pull up whether I’ve run a tollbooth back in Oklahoma and in the meantime you’re leaning on a stolen vehicle!’ The cop got all huffy, and I said, ‘I’m telling you, whoever did this rolled up in this Ford pickup and right now he’s somewhere within four hundred yards of where you’re standing, but instead you’re interrogating me! You’ve lost your mind. I mean, what education do you need to be a cop in Vermilion County?’”
The police did run the plates on the F150 from Burlington, but its pilot owner was still on vacation and hadn’t reported it stolen yet.
Along with the local cops, some other folks at the airport weren’t so sure about Homer Woolslayer either. “I was the only thing that had changed, so they figured it was me.” Video from the surveillance cameras sure enough showed an image of someone walking around the hangars in the middle of the night, trying doors. However, the images weren’t clear enough to be conclusive. Homer’s boss believed him, though, and wanted to make sure he was properly equipped in case the tall stranger came around again.
“These farm people and cropduster types out here in Illinois are armed and ready for anything, man,” says Woolslayer, laughing. “If some army ever tries a frontal assault on that airport, they’d lose.” His boss cracked open a special safe, and when Homer lay down on his inflatable bed that night, he was packing extreme heat: two handguns and a sawed-off pan-fed Saiga shotgun (basically a twelve-gauge machine gun). Just in case the spotlight he’d been given wasn’t bright enough, he also had parachute flares “from some Eastern Bloc country.”
Woolslayer went to sleep laughing to himself. “I’m in bed dressed like Rambo, bullets strapped over my shoulder. It would be nothing to be lying there with a shotgun waiting for a burglar back in Oklahoma, but I’m in this different state and I don’t know the rules of engagement. I already knew this one cop didn’t like me… so I started thinking I don’t know if this is such a good idea. I mean, I wasn’t going to kill him, but I was planning on scaring him and finding out what he was doing. You know, hell, if he was hungry I probably would have bought him breakfast.”
However, nothing happened at the airport that night. Rambo Woolslayer got up, stripped off his guns, and went to the local diner. As he was sitting there, he overheard a waitress talking about a friend whose car had been stolen early that morning. “I said, ‘Hey, your friend doesn’t happen to live by the airport, does she?’ She said, ‘Yes, just a couple blocks away.’ I started laughing and said, ‘I know who took her car.’” Homer went back to the airport and told his boss that it was over, the guy was gone.
THAT DAY, SUNDAY, THE owner of the Ford pickup came home and noticed it was missing. The Iowa police connected it with the stolen car query from Illinois and called the Vermilion County sheriff with the story of Colton Harris-Moore, telling him that he’d probably have another stolen car or airplane any minute now. Conveniently, Vermilion already had the report from the waitress’s friend whose car had been taken at 2 a.m. When deputies went to reinvestigate the car theft, they found a handheld GPS and an iPod left behind at the site. According to the sheriff, the GPS memory showed tracks to all the locations where Colt had committed his cross-country crimes.
When Homer Woolslayer heard about Colt, he looked around the airport and speculated that he had probably camped out in the abandoned control tower. “It’s decommissioned, but you can still get up in it.” Homer read up on the case and couldn’t understand how anyone could call Colt a bad pilot just because he’d crash-landed a couple planes. “That’s really arrogant. He knew his limitations, knew he couldn’t take a cropduster or a warbird because there’s too much torque roll for a new pilot. And the landings? This kid can’t land and walk up to an FBO, so he has to put them down in fields—and he’s been able to walk away from those landings. I think he knows how to fly, and he’s actually pretty good. I wonder if there are award banquets in prison.”
COLT HAD FINALLY OUTRUN the bad weather. Across the Midwest, skies were clear and sunny, winds calm, temperatures reaching the 80s during the day, high 60s at night. It was great weather to watch planes at the big air show, but also fine weather to fly them. Oshkosh was northwest, but Colt drove southeast.
The stolen car from Vermilion turned up 120 miles away in a church parking lot in Bloomington, Indiana. Sunday churchgoers noticed its out-of-state plates, and when they peeked in the window, they saw a purse and keys. Police arrived and established that the vehicle had been stolen, but none of the owner’s personal property left inside had been disturbed. The only thing missing was the car’s ignition key. Whether taken as a souvenir or perhaps as a courtesy to prevent the car from being restolen, it all matched Colt’s MO.
The biggest hint was that the church stood a half mile away from the Monroe County Airport.
THE MONROE COUNTY SHERIFF’S Office began receiving calls from FBI and Homeland Security agents, catching them up on the suspect and the chase. The stolen car connected to Colt made the news, and anyone who bothered to look knew that the world-famous airplane thief Colton Harris-Moore was in Bloomington, very close to a small airport.
The sheriff’s office made a call to the airport, but the manager, Bruce Payton, was off for a couple of days and the warning wasn’t spread around until they finally connected on Wednesday.
“A detective came out the morning of the thirtieth,” says Payton. “He said that I should alert people on the field to be careful and watch for this guy known as the Barefoot Bandit.” Bruce went to his office and immediately downloaded everything he could find about Colt and passed it out to all the businesses and professional pilots. He asked the two FBOs to post the info and pass the word to any pilots who flew in. One FBO, Cook Aviation, took the warning so seriously that they hired a night watchman to guard their hangars. Monroe County is a fairly large airport with about a hundred general aviation aircraft based in buildings spread out over a mile of ground. Cook’s guard wouldn’t be in any position to see what was going on at other far-flung hangars.
Payton personally called all of the corporate flight departments at the airport. “I told them there was reason to believe this person might be in the area and to take extra precautions with their aircraft.” He even stopped by the daily coffee klatch. “A few guys come down every day and sit out on the deck on the public side of the fence to watch the planes and have a cup.” Before he could tell them what was up, though, one guy had to leave. As he was riding his bike back home, he saw a “scruffy young man, very tall and slender” walking on the nearby railroad tracks.
The only people left to give the word to were the private pilots based at Monroe. Payton went to one of the boys-with-big-toys beery barbecues held regularly throughout the summer down among the seven private hangars that sit at the far southeast end of the airfield, near the start of runway 24, the shorter of Monroe’s two strips. “There were nineteen guys there that night,” says Payton. “And I briefed everyone.”
The barbecue bunch that Wednesday evening did not include all the owners, though. One who was missing was sixty-year-old John “Spider” Miller. Miller and one of his older brothers, Don, owned a 2008 Cessna Corvalis 400 TT—a plane very similar to the Cirrus SR22—that Spider had just flown out to St. Simons Island, a beach and golf destination on the Georgia coast.
Spider Miller was the middle child in a family with eleven kids, and he got his nickname early on from his habit of crawling all over everything. “When I was a young guy I used to say it was because the girls all thought I had eight hands,” he laughs. “Now that I’m an old-timer, I’ll settle for four… Actually, I’ll settle for just crawling around.” Spider’s fascination with planes began at an early age, but he didn’t become a pilot until he was forty-nine. Since then, he’s worked his way through multiple ratings and flown his Corvalis, “a great little airplane,” for both business and pleasure.
Both Miller brothers have beer distributorships. Spider is the president of Best Beers, though he prefers the title “repackage manager.” If he’d been in town that Wednesday night, he might’ve wandered down to the barbecue, as he does occasionally. “They’re all great guys, and I go more for the drinking than the eating… I actually like my product.” Instead, he was relaxing in the Georgia sunshine, getting “robbed” on the golf course.
