Jimmy orr

Jimmy Orr

Daily Features

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Sunrise 3 18 24

Cowboy State Daily is Wyoming’s largest newspaper with Wyoming’s most experienced journalists. 

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Jen kocher

Jen Kocher

Crime & Courts

With George Thorogood’s “Bad to the Bone” blaring from the cockpit tape deck, Richard Pitt maneuvered the Cessna 404 onto the paved runway in the small southern Mexican border town.

He’d done this many times before, navigating mountain passes and perilous jungle runways, all the while on the lookout for police, guerrillas and bandits wanting to steal his cargo. This load, however, was the most he’s ever carried at 600 kilos of cocaine valued at more than $27 million.

It was the heyday of drug smuggling in the 1980s, and Pitt was right in the middle of it. 

How did a kid from Thermopolis, Wyoming, and a Vietnam veteran, who had worked his tail off to become a commercial airline pilot end up smuggling for Pablo Escobar?

Well, that’s the part of his story Pitt is still working out for himself as he looks back on his life all these years later.

Some memories are more dramatic than most, Pitt told Cowboy State Daily, in his first-ever media interview. And in a life lived on the edge, that

Even before Pitt put the plane down on the runway in Palenque, Mexico, that day in 1982, he’d already had a bad feeling.

This was accelerated when he tapped the brakes and heard a popping sound that sounded a lot like a brake line. With his heart racing, Pitt fluttered the remaining brake while pulling back on the right rudder, eventually stopping at the edge of the runway as he stared down at the 12-foot drop he’d almost plummeted into.

As his hired ground crew drove up to meet him, he knew something was off. He’d soon learn that his instincts were dead on when he saw two pickups filled with Mexican military there to greet them.

“They got us,” he said. “There was no way out of it.”

Loads this size were unheard of at that time.

Pitt knew he was taking a great risk hauling so much cocaine, but his Colombian sources had thousands of kilos sitting off the north coast of Colombia that needed to be moved. They called Pitt, and he’s not a guy who declines an offer.

“I never refused anyone in need of help,” he 

 or at least thought it through more thoroughly.”

 jungle fatigues with rifles slung over their shoulders took Pitt, his two passengers and two ground crew members into custody. Dirty bags were slung over their heads as hoods as they were carted off to a Mexican army garrison, where guards took turns beating and torturing them.

Even today, Pitt has vivid flashbacks to the beatings, including being put on a block of ice where they electro-shocked his genitals.

They wanted to know the source of the cocaine, but Pitt and crew didn’t give up name

The Mexican authorities regardless hailed it a victory, declaring it the largest cocaine bust in history as they paraded the badly bruised Americans in front of the press while sensationalizing details, including adding a shootout that never happened and declaring them members of some unnamed mafia of which none were affiliated.

The Associated Press quoted the Mexican army’s statement, describing the “narco-traffickers” firing “high-powered weapons against the Mexican army, who repelled the attack.”

 were unarmed and surrendered peacefully.

Nonetheless, the headlines were also picked up by media outlets back home

where Pitt’s mom, Nora, happened to be sitting on a couch in her daughter’s home in Washington in front of the television. 

“Is that Richard?” she asked her daughter, Mary Dell.

Nora had just been to Florida to visit Pitt, his wife and young granddaughter and had been impressed by his fancy yacht and movie studio. She figured one of his movies must have made it big.

Mary Dell squinted at the screen in disbelief.

“Mom, I don’t think that has anything to do with Richard’s movie business,” she said.

This was Nora’s first inkling that her son was more than just a commercial airline pilot and movie producer.

Pitt was told this story when he returned to the states less than three months after escaping the Mexican prison. He and two other men had gotten the guards and other inmates stinking drunk on whiskey, then scaled the wall and fled about 100 miles on foot through a snake-infested jungle.

He’d keep that story to himself as he attempted to steel up the nerve to face his mother. Even today all these years later, Pitt remembers how terrified he’d been to walk into his sister’s house that day.

“It was the scariest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” he told Cowboy State Daily. “Worse than any torture.”

Pitt’s mom proceeded to glare at her son, telling him that he was probably the dumbest person she’d ever met in her life for attempting to take on the Mexican military in a shootout.

Didn’t he realize that would just have made them madder, she told him.

That it hadn’t occurred seemed beyond the point as she continued to chastise him.

 maybe he ought to step back and think about what he was doing with his life.

, Pitt has spent a lot of years thinking about his life.

Most of those years were in federal prison in Pennsylvania where he spent 28 years. He’s been out for five years

and now lives a quiet life in Denver near his daughter, where he continues trying to repair their badly damaged relationship.

but instead has a commercial driver’s license and works intermittently as a truck driver.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"He also does a lot of writing."}]

In prison, he wrote a three-part spy trilogy starring protagonist Yancy Lightfoot

 based on his own exploits. Now, he’s at work on a memoir, after a prompting from his daughter who had asked him on a prison visit why he had missed out on all those years of her life and his grandchildren.

It’s safe to say that Pitt has no shortage of material.

In fact, his own life reads like a spy novel on steroids, where it’s impossible not to periodically stop him and ask him to repeat himself.

There’s a reason that his close friends call him “the most interesting person they know.”

In fact, while in prison, a former FAA inspector and self-published writer

stole Pitt’s story and wrote a book under Pitt’s name, even using Pitt’s photo on the front cover. A fellow inmate told him about it

 at which point Pitt’s lawyer sent the plagiarist a cease-and-desist letter to shut it down.

Even Pitt seems caught off guard by his stories from time to time, which he shared over a course of several phone calls.

“To think I’m just a dumb guy from Podunk, Wyoming,” he said.

Pitt grew up in Thermopolis, a town he still reveres and even wrote a guidebook about when he was in prison.

Born to alcoholic and drug-addicted parents, Pitt said he spent the first four months of his life being left in a car while his parents were in the bar drinking. When he came down with pneumonia at 

 months, his birth dad’s brother, Milo, and his wife, Nora, stepped in to adopt him.

In his memoir, Pitt writes about being grateful that his parents gave him up.

“This is where luck stepped into my life and hit a home

His adoptive parents worked and ranched, and he grew up herding cattle and doing other ranch chores like many Wyoming kids. He writes longingly about all the lessons learned from his father out on the range, 40 miles from home.

From a young age, Pitt knew he wanted to be a pilot and didn’t consider doing anything else.

It all started with his first flight over the tiny town of Greybull, which he said he still remembers clearly to this day. It had been a generous gift from Mary Dell for his sixth birthday.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"From that moment he was hooked, Pitt said."}]

It wasn’t the views from 1,000 feet up above that captured Pitt’s imagination, but rather the mechanics of flight itself and what the pilot was doing to keep them suspended in air.

He was so mesmerized by the gauges and nobs that the pilot had to remind Pitt to look down out of the window. 

Years later in prison, Pitt would tease Mary Dell that she’d provided him with the gateway drug to smuggling.

“I think she wanted to beat me senseless, Pitt said. “But truthfully, there’s nothing I could have done to change the direction that I was going. I was addicted to adrenaline. It was my drug above all else.”

Pitt was a poor kid with a penchant for a rich man’s hobby and occupation. He had to work his way up from the bottom.

At 11, he landed a job snagging golf balls at the new driving range next to the airport where he longingly watched planes come and go. One day, he walked over and asked pilot, Mel 

, if he needed any help washing his plane.

“He must have seen my enthusiasm, because he offered me a job doing odd jobs around the airport,” he said.

In lieu of payment, Pitt asked for flying time. Eventually, he started helping other pilots with basic maintenance work, which he enjoyed, taking home airplane manuals and studying how every part fit together.

Here he also came into contact with pipeline pilots whose job it was to fly low over the buried oil pipelines running from Montana to central Wyoming to look for leaks and ruptures.

He asked if he could come along, and with his parents’ approval spent long days twisting and turning through the Bighorn Basin at 50 to 150 feet above the ground.

After high school, Pitt moved to Seattle in August 1967 to work as a flightline mechanic for Boeing. Two years later, he joined the U.S. Air Force

 where he flew C-130s and other large cargo planes in Vietnam and also became an instructor.

At 27, he finally realized his dream of becoming a commercial airline pilot for United.

His good friend and mentor David Guinn was a United pilot at the time. The two had met at a skydiving club in Maryland and became good friends. When a job opened training other pilots to fly DC-8s and 727s, he encouraged Pitt to apply.

“Richard was really the person that when he picked up a book to study something, he didn't put it down until he knew everything in it, and so I encouraged him to put in an application,” Guinn told Cowboy State Daily from his home in Texas.

He suggested Pitt send it in a brightly colored manilla envelope so it would stand out among the hundreds of other applicants.

is anybody’s guess, but Pitt got the job

. Later, Pitt also became a qualified crew member on the Boeing 727 flying passenger routes across the United States.

“He had lots of opportunities to be a good pilot, but he chose to leave the airlines,” Guinn said. “He wanted a more exciting life, I think.”

Pitt would agree with that, he said, and for him it became all about chasing the next adrenaline rush. Plus, the routine commercial flights bored him when compared to his worldwide travel in the Air Force.

At the time, Pitt was going through a divorce from his first wife, and he needed a down payment for a lake property he had his eye on 

As a new pilot still on probation, his salary was about $900 a month. At the time, he was also flying for the Air Force Reserves. He ran into a crew chief he’d known from years 

The two had been together on a flight to Laz Paz, Bolivia, they’d stopped to refuel. Pitt saw him sneak something into one of the cargo bins but looked the other way after the guy asked him not to tell anyone.

Later, the guy showed up at his place with an envelope full of 

On a chance encounter, he ran into the guy months later when they’d both landed and talked over coffee. Pitt told him about his impending divorce and need for down payment. One thing led to another, and the guy introduced him to some people.

On his first run, Pitt made almost the entire down payment for the house.

“If I hadn’t stopped for coffee, who knows where I’d be today,” he said.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Meeting Escobar"}]

Mostly Pitt worked through his cartel-affiliated contacts and middleman until one day he was called in by Pablo Escobar, the notorious “King of Cocaine” and founder of the Medellin Cartel in Colombia, who monopolized the cocaine trade in the U

Pitt had no idea why he’d be summoned but waited in line as men walked in and out of Escobar’s office assembly-line style.

When it was his turn, he sat down in the still-warm, plush green leather chair where Escobar stared at him over his desk. Men lined the back wall while others watched him from in front of the window.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Pitt shook Escobar’s hand."}]

He’d been called in, Escobar explained, because 

 had embarrassed him in front of one of his employees. Escobar was referring to Pitt’s storming into his middleman Caesar’s house to demand the $40,000 he owed him from the last load of cocaine.

Escobar wanted to know why Pitt didn’t reach out to him directly.

“I’m sorry, Don Pablo,” Pitt had said, “but I didn’t have your phone number to call you down here. Or God knows, I certainly would have.”

 except Escobar, whose right cheek barely twitched in an almost-smile. From then on, Pitt was to contact Escobar directly if he had any issues and was promised $4,000 per kilo hauled.

It was then he realized that Caesar had been skimming off the top all along and cheating him. Pitt never saw Caesar again.

Pablo Escobar composite 5 11 25

<title>🚧 Richard Pitt: Wyoming Pilot Who Smuggled Drugs For Pablo Escobar | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Richard Pitt grew up in Thermopolis and lived a life straight out of 1980s drug-running movies like “Scarface.” Decades later, he’s coming clean while also divulging details of his sordid career smuggling for the likes of Pablo Escobar.

Richard Pitt: Wyoming Pilot Who Smuggled Drugs For Pablo Escobar

Wyoming Life

Around Wyoming

Dan Campbell was illegally hunting elk antler sheds in Yellowstone Park when he disappeared more than three decades ago. 

Campbell had set off from Hellroaring Trailhead to Jardine, Montana, outside of the park's boundaries, with his dog Freckles for a four-day trek. 

However, when the 42-year-old Montana man failed to appear at the designated location and time, his girlfriend, Tracy Erb, reported him missing April 8, 1991.

Campbell is one of at least six people to mysteriously disappear in the park since the late 1960s. 

[{"type":"text","text":"There may be more, but it’s difficult to get a handle on the numbers.  "}]

Officially, the park doesn’t appear to track the missing. When asked for a list of missing people, the Yellowstone Park Public Affairs Office referred Cowboy State Daily to the 

 containing 25 missing persons cold cases for all national parks.

Campbell was the only person cited on the list to have gone missing in Yellowstone. Of the others, nine went missing in Yosemite State National Park in California while five disappeared in Grand Canyon National Park.  

The other five missing persons who disappeared in Yellowstone were culled from the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation’s 

National Missing and Unidentified Persons System

Along with Campbell, those never found include Luke Sanburg, Bruce Pike, Stuart Isaac, Kim Cumbo and 8-year-old Dennis Johnson, all of whom disappeared in the park between 1966 and 2021. 

[{"type":"text","text":"‘Bastard’ Search"}]

Campbell’s disappearance serves as an example of the challenges faced when trying to unravel the enigma of a person gone missing in Yellowstone. It also sheds light on the struggles that park rangers and search and rescue teams face in their efforts to locate individuals within the vast 2.2-million-acre park.

An incident report released by the U.S. Department of Interior gives insight into how the search unfolded for Campbell, beginning with gathering additional information about him and determining if he was actually missing in what’s called a “bastard search.”

In search and rescue terms, a "bastard" search refers to checking all the obvious locations to make sure the supposed victim isn’t sitting at home watching baseball and snacking on chips. The derogatory term, hence, describes that person who is hiding out and not missing. 

Once it was established that Campbell was indeed missing, the park dispatched ground and air crews. Spring snowstorms with up to a foot of snow slowed searchers on their weeks-long search of seven areas in the park. They found no trace of Campbell or his dog.  

[{"type":"text","text":"Warring Theories"}]

In the absence of answers, speculation abounded. Some said Campbell may have intentionally disappeared to avoid paying debts while others surmised that he thumbed a ride out of the park, fell into a hole or had a run in with a grizzly.  

His family, however, believes Campbell was likely killed by rival hunters in the corrupt, yet highly profitable, underground shed hunting market that continues to thrive today. 

Shed hunting is a popular pastime in Wyoming and elsewhere whereby collectors gather shed antlers from deer, elk and moose on public lands in the spring. Shed antlers have become popular for home décor, arts and crafts and can sell for $15 or more per pound for each antler.

It’s illegal to collect sheds in Yellowstone and other national parks, but it remains a lucrative market for poachers. 

A 1996 article in Outside Magazine outlines the “infamous antler wars” between poachers, rangers and each other in which the author describes how the lucrative industry has spiraled into small cartels carving up park territory and guarding it with semiautomatic weapons. 

Campbell’s brother Bill, likewise, did his own investigation and told the Bozeman Daily Chronicle that there had been 14 horn hunters out in the area the day Campbell went missing and that one of them heard two shots fired.

The Campbell family hired a private investigator, according to documents released by the U.S. Department of Interior in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by the Bozeman newspaper, and the Montana Criminal Investigation Bureau were also called in to help that July. 

Law enforcement, however, didn’t seem to consider homicide a possibility, prompting Campbell’s three brothers to sue former Park County Montana Sheriff Charlie Johnson for $100,000 each for legal fees and associated hardships for what they claimed was a botched investigation. 

At the heart of the lawsuit was the fact that during the course of his investigation, the sheriff confiscated – but later returned equipment – belonging to two horn hunters who were legally camping outside of the park's northern boundaries. Sheriff’s officers collected ammunition and spent cartridges but did not subject them to forensic tests, according to the Bozeman Daily Chronicle. 

This prevented them from getting fingerprints or doing other evidentiary analysis to determine if they had any involvement, the brothers stated in their lawsuit, which was later thrown out of court.

Regardless of how or why he disappeared, no signs of Campbell’s body and that of his dog have ever turned up never been located all these years later. The case remains open. 

[{"type":"text","text":"Car Crashes, Heart Attacks Top The List"}]

Apart from getting lost or criminal activity, there are many ways for people to disappear in the park. 

In his book, “Death in Yellowstone: Accidents and Foolhardiness in the First National Park,” attorney and longtime Yellowstone tour guide and park ranger Lee H. Whittlesey 

 in which people have been hurt or killed in Yellowstone. 

To date, there have been 52 deaths in the park, according to a 2022 survey by Outforia, a nature and outdoor resource, which does not specify when the deaths occurred. The most common cause of death in the park, according to the survey, is a tie at 12 each for motor vehicle crashes and heart attacks. 

The second most common cause of death is a tie between falling and a category simply classified as “undetermined” causes. Both have resulted in seven deaths each, followed by drownings that accounted for five deaths. 

Accordingly, between 2018 and 2020, Yellowstone ranked fourth of all national parks for the greatest number of search and rescues between 2018 and 2020 at 371, according to Outforia. Grand Teton National Park ranked eighth with 224 search and rescues during that same period.

[{"type":"text","text":"Odds Are Slim Of Disappearing "}]

Former park ranger Richard Jones puts no stock in what he calls “click bait” surveys that emphasize the dangers of dying or disappearing in Yellowstone or any other national park. 

Jones is the son of a former Yellowstone ranger who spent five years of his life as a boy living in the park during the 1950s at a time where bears roamed freely prior to the park implementing its bear management plan.

He started his career as a ranger in national parks in New Mexico, the Virgin Islands and Big Horn Canyon National Recreational Area and also worked in law enforcement. During his tenure as a ranger, he specialized in cave rescues and participated in hundreds of searches for people – all of whom were found.  

The odds are slim of disappearing in Yellowstone given the number of people who pass through the park each year, according to Jones. 

 Multiply this by yearly visitors to the 62 other national parks and the fact that there’s only 25 reported missing persons cold cases to date is testament to the rarity of vanishing at a national park. 

In cases where a person is reported missing, they are almost always found.

[{"type":"text","text":"However, deaths do happen and people do disappear. "}]

[{"type":"text","text":"Bodies disappear"}]

In Jones’ experience, many of those cases involve missing people who wander off, get lost, fall off cliffs or have a medical emergency that renders them incapacitated and vulnerable to the elements. 

In some instances, people deliberately go into the woods to commit suicide by falling into a raging river or scalding geyser. One such case was Il Hun Ro, a tourist from Los Angeles, whose 

 on the surface of the Abyss Pool in August 2022. 

In rare instances, missing people might get attacked by an animal, but very rarely is foul play involved, Jones said. Committing murder in a park is a lot harder than other places, he added.

“Accidents happen, but I think criminal activity is probably exceedingly, exceedingly rare,” he said, noting there are typically 700 successful missing person searches and rescues in national parks each year.  

It’s also difficult to state with full certainty that some of the missing are dead because their remains are not likely to be left undisturbed by wildlife roaming the park.

However, if a person does die, it’s likely their remains will never be found. Due to the number of animals roaming the park, bodies do not stay undeterred for long, he said. 

“If you die off in this part of the country, your body is not to going to stay around long,” he said. “There’s going to be bears, wolves, coyotes and foxes … within a week, there’s not going to be much evidence left of the body.”

Though visitors may befall dangers in state and national parks, Jones said he thinks they are still much safer than in urban parks and cities. 

The biggest danger to tourists visiting Yellowstone and other national parks in his estimation are the bison, which people tend to underestimate. 

“They’re like cows and not terribly afraid of people, but they have their own spatial distance,” he said. “You get too close, they might whack you, and you can’t get whacked by a 2000-pound animal without getting hurt.”

[{"type":"text","text":"Swept Downstream "}]

Of particular danger, Jones said, is anyone who falls into the river and gets swept downstream as in the cases of three of the people currently listed as missing whose bodies have never been recovered.  

Luke Sanburg disappeared after he was swept downstream in the Yellowstone River on June 24, 2005. The 13-year-old and his Boy Scout troop had been pushing logs into the river when one hit him and shoved him into the 50-degree water, according to reporting by the Associated Press. 

The river conditions were “unswimmable,” incident commander Tim Reid told the family.

Despite a rigorous three-day investigation along the 14-mile span of river, Sanburg's body was never found. The only clue: A set of shoes believed to be his were found in the area.

Nicholas Mostert, 20, of Salt Lake City, is another missing person presumed to have drowned. Several people witnessed him jumping into the Lower Falls of the Yellowstone River from an observation deck 308 feet above on June 16, 2009, in what appeared to be a deliberate act of suicide.

He was swept over the waterfall into a raging river roiling with nearly 6,000 cubic feet of flowing water per second, according to the 

. He was never found despite a helicopter and ground search. 

Kim Crumbo is Yellowstone’s latest missing persons case in which investigators suspect drowning. The 74-year-old Ogden, Utah, man was camping with his half-brother Mark O’Neill in September 2021 when he disappeared. Meanwhile, 

 he’d died of hypothermia. Despite extensive searching, Crumbo, a former U.S. Navy Seal, has never been found.

[{"type":"text","text":"Biggest Search In Park History"}]

The youngest person to disappear in Yellowstone is 8-year-old Dennis Johnson, who was reported missing April 12, 1966.

Johnson and his family had been visiting the park from Inyokern, Calif. They stopped in the Cascade picnic area near Canyon Village for lunch, when the boy’s seven-year-old sister wandered off. 

Johnson, and his dad, William, headed off in different directions to find the girl. William quickly located her, but his son never returned from the woods.  

Searchers scoured a 100-square mile radius around where the boy was last seen but didn’t find any traces of him or other signs of danger.

Whittlesey discusses this search in his book and said it was one of the most intensive searches in Yellowstone history. The park spent thousands of man hours in searching for Johnson by ground, air and with dogs for three weeks. 

Whittlesey, the former ranger and attorney, wrote in his book that Johnson’s brother told park officials that he thought they’d done everything possible to find him. 

Later, the family would hire a psychic to divine the teen’s whereabouts, Whittlesey reported. The psychic divined that the boy had drowned in a shallow ditch near the location he was last seen or had fallen into a canyon, according to Whittlesey. 

[{"type":"text","text":"In 58 years, no trace of Johnson has ever been found. "}]

[{"type":"text","text":"Abandoned Vehicles"}]

Just as puzzlingly are people like Bruce Parker Pike, who is perhaps the least known missing person of the six who are believed to be dead. His disappearance in early August 2006 does not appear to have been publicized by the media or recorded in the park’s news releases.

All that is known is that the 47-year-old Texas man was last seen in the Indian Creek campground. His abandoned vehicle was all searchers found and impounded, according to the DCI missing person database. 

Four years later, a second abandoned vehicle was found Sept. 26, 2010, abandoned along Grand Loop Road, which links Old Faithful and West Thumb. The keys were still in the unlocked Lexus, but its driver, 48-year-old, Stuart Isaac, of Burtonsville, Maryland, was nowhere to be found. 

Isaac’s entire trip to Yellowstone is shrouded in mystery. Prior to leaving home on Sept. 6, he left a note for his family letting them know he was going on a cross-country trip, according to the Charley Project, a website dedicated to missing person cold cases. 

There are no hiking trails in the area where his car was found, nor does he have any outdoors experience hiking or camping. 

The last person to speak to Isaac was a high school friend. Isaac had called her two days prior to disappearing. The two spoke for two hours, which she found odd as the pair rarely talked on the phone and instead emailed or texted. 

An extensive search turned up no sign of Isaac, and to date, his remains have not been found. 

[{"type":"text","text":"Hard To Find Missing People"}]

Despite huge acreage and treacherous terrain, most missing persons at Yellowstone National Park are found. But a small number of disappearances have never been solved. The reasons why are as vast as the park.

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Jimmy Orr

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Authors

Jimmy Orr

Executive Editor

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