In September 1985, the Blue Ridge region witnessed one of the most bizarre and quintessentially 80s crimes ever committed. On the morning of Thursday, September 12, Fred Meyers, an 85-year-old retired engineer, looked out his bathroom window while shaving and saw a dead body in his gravel driveway. The body was wearing a parachute, had a duffel bag tied to its waist, and had arrived in Meyers’ Knoxville, TN, neighborhood out of the clear night sky.
The dead man turned out to be 40-year-old Andrew “Drew” C. Thornton II, a former U.S. Army paratrooper, Lexington, Kentucky, narcotics officer, and lawyer turned drug smuggler.
From The Bluegrass Conspiracy: An Inside Story of Power, Greed, Drugs and Murder by Sally Denton:
“When the Knoxville police opened the three-and-a-half-foot-long duffel bag tied around Drew’s waist, they discovered thirty-four football-sized bundles of cocaine. Another bag tied to his body held dehydrated food and other survival supplies. His main parachute was still in its pack; his right hand still gripped the ripcord of his partially deployed reserve chute. He was wearing combat-style fatigues and expensive Italian shoes …”
The 77 pounds (35 kg) of cocaine in the duffel was estimated to be worth $15 million. The bags attached to Thornton also contained a 9 mm handgun and a .22 caliber derringer, multiple knives including a spring-loaded stiletto, some rope, night vision goggles, a moneybelt containing $4,800 in cash, and six gold Krugerrand coins. Thornton was also wearing a bulletproof vest.
The question of what happened to the plane he jumped from was quickly answered. From the September 12 Lexington Herald-Leader:
“Dr. Robert Lasch, a medical examiner with the Federal Aviation Administration, said late yesterday that FAA officials had found a Cessna 404 twin-engine aircraft that Thornton was thought to have parachuted from. It was found crashed in a rugged mountainous area atop Tusquitte Bald Mountain in Clay County, N.C., about 54 miles south of Knoxville. The keys to the airplane were found on the body, Lasch said.”
The Flight from Hell
In 1990, Bill Leonard, a Lexington, KY, martial arts instructor, came forward and stated that he had been duped into accompanying Thornton on the dangerous and deadly cocaine run. They were casual friends and had trained together. Thornton offered to pay him to be his bodyguard on a business trip to the Bahamas. He flew to Fort Lauderdale, where he boarded the twin-engine Cessna along with Thornton and a “swarthy-looking man.”
Leonard realized he was in over his head when the Cessna touched down at night at a swamp airstrip in Colombia, and the plane was quickly surrounded by men with submachine guns. The Colombians refueled the plane and loaded 880 pounds (400 kg) of cocaine on board. Thornton and Leonard took off at sunrise after being told that an army patrol was coming. The plane barely cleared the trees at the end of the short improvised runway.
Flying over Florida and Georgia, both men thought they were being followed by DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) jets. Thornton decided to dump most of the cocaine north of Atlanta with the intention of coming back later to retrieve it. He kept the one bag he jumped with over Knoxville. He told Leonard that they would have to jump from the plane.
Photo by Rob Hodgkins via Flickr.
Leonard had no parachute experience, but Thornton gave him a four-minute skydiving lesson and instructions to go to the Hyatt, where his girlfriend, Rebecca Sharp was staying if they got separated. He landed hard in the grass beside the runway at Home Island Airport near Fred Meyers’ neighborhood. After wandering around the airport’s perimeter looking for Thornton, he found an open convenience store; from there, he took a cab to the Hyatt.
He met Sharp and briefed her on the situation. When morning came, and they had not heard from Thornton, they started the drive to Lexington. On the way, they heard over the car radio about a parachutist found dead in a Knoxville driveway.
When the authorities investigated the plane crash and discovered the back seats had been removed, they suspected that there had been more than one duffel bag of cocaine on board. They began air and ground searches south and west of Knoxville. On Saturday, September 14, they found three duffel bags with 220 pounds (100 kg) of cocaine from a parachute in a tree in Fannin County, GA.
Three months later, a dead black bear was found in the Chattahoochee National Forest. It died from eating cocaine dropped by Thornton and Leonard. In time, it would be called the Cocaine Bear.
Sources
Denton, Sally. 2016. The Bluegrass Conspiracy. Createspace Independent Publishing Platform.
Knoxville News-Sentinel, Sunday, March 11, 1990, Page 1, “The Final Flight of Gray Leader” by Tom Chester
Lexington Herald-Leader, Thursday, September 12, 1985, Page 1, “Lexingtonian Falls to Death with $15 million in Cocaine” by Kit Wagar, Jim Warren, Valarie Honeycutt, Michael York, Jack Brammer, and Andy Mead.
Knoxville News-Sentinel, Thursday, September 12, 1985, Page 1, “Crashed Plane, Chutist Linked” by Todd Copilevitz
Raleigh News and Observer, Friday, September 13, 1985, Page 3, “Smuggler May Have Tried New Approach” (UPI)
Wikipedia: Andrew C. Thornton II
Wikipedia: Cocaine Bear
Wikipedia: Cessna 404 Titan
