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The story of Wallace “Wally” Thrasher of Pulaski has all the elements that fascinate true-crime fans: a fiery plane crash, a Bolivian drug cartel, a money-laundering scheme, colorful underworld characters, courageous cops and the enduring mystery of his disappearance.
Then there was Thrasher’s wife, Olga, who became known as “The Black Widow” in the media for her alleged involvement in a murder-for-hire plot. The charges were eventually dropped when she turned federal witness and helped bring down a major crime syndicate.
More than 40 years later, everyone from retired investigators in Southwest Virginia and Thrasher’s family to federal agents in the U.S. and authorities in Belize are still asking: “Where’s Wally?”
Did he die in another plane crash? Is he alive and hiding out on a tropical island? Was he secretly a CIA operative, as one former agent claims?
Now, many of the questions surrounding the case are being answered — and new questions are being raised — in a documentary series about the 1984 disappearance of Thrasher and the fascinating story that unfolded as a result.
‘Where’s Wally?’
Watch the trailer for “Where’s Wally?” on Peterson’s Facebook page: facebook.com/RonPetersonJr.
Southwest Virginia true crime writer Ron Peterson Jr. and director Doug Tower of Los Angeles-based Urban Legends Film Co. are making the series based on Peterson’s 2020 book, “Chasing the Squirrel: The Pursuit of Notorious Drug Smuggler Wally Thrasher.”
Law enforcement authorities have said that Thrasher made millions in the 1970s and 1980s by flying planeloads of marijuana from the Caribbean, Colombia and Belize into the sleepy airports of Southwest Virginia. Authorities believe he flew more marijuana into the United States than any other smuggler in U.S. history, according to Peterson.
His empire went up in flames in October 1984, when a plane he owned, flown by an associate, crashed into Fancy Gap Mountain in Carroll County, after becoming lost in the dense fog that often enshrouds the peak.
According to the investigators, the Beechcraft plane was carrying 570 pounds of marijuana.
The pilot and navigator had tried in vain to plot a course that would take them along U.S. 52 in Carroll County, but the plane went down in the heavily wooded slopes and exploded.
The pilot, Mark Bailey, died instantly in the fiery crash. Passenger Nelson King, who was thrown clear and miraculously survived, escaped and made off with $250,000 in cash, according to court records.
Authorities initially assumed that Thrasher died in the crash, his remains consumed by the flames.
But the investigation revealed that Thrasher did indeed survive, and reportedly patched up King and drove him to Florida for treatment of his wounds so he wouldn’t be connected to the crash.
Then he was gone.
When first responders arrived on the scene in Fancy Gap, they found burning wreckage and the plane’s illicit cargo scattered around the site. For months that followed, locals in Carroll County found bales of pot that had been thrown from, or had fallen from, the plane.
If that story wasn’t wild enough, it gets more complex and fascinating, providing a window into the 1980s War on Drugs between the Drug Enforcement Agency and drug cartels in Central and South America. The resulting investigation uncovered a drug-smuggling operation that was bringing marijuana from Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean to the U.S.
Meanwhile, Olga Thrasher was facing federal charges as an accomplice, and for allegedly trying to hire someone to kill King and recover the money he took from the crashed plane. The charges were dropped, and she received full immunity in exchange for testifying against her husband’s former associates.
Her cooperation led to an undercover DEA operation that netted the arrest and conviction of a dozen international conspirators and seized more than 700 pounds of cocaine, with a street value of $158 million. According to Peterson, it was the biggest drug bust in the history of the eastern United States and led to the downfall of Bolivian kingpin Roberto Suarez-Gomez, known as the world’s “King of Cocaine.”
But Wally Thrasher’s whereabouts remained a missing piece of the puzzle.
Even before his disappearance, Thrasher was an elusive target for state and federal agents, who had been watching him for about three years before the 1984 plane crash.
He earned the nickname “Squirrel” at Pulaski County High School, where he speedily slipped past the defense as a football player. The name stuck due to his ability to escape trouble and evade authorities.
Retired DEA agent Don Lincoln was part of the task force investigating the Thrasher case. “We couldn’t arrest him because we couldn’t catch him,” he said in the documentary.
In the months after the Fancy Gap crash, Thrasher was reported to have died in a crash in Jamaica, but investigators found out that the incident never happened and his death certificate was a forgery. Then, he was said to have perished in yet another plane crash, this one in Belize. However, evidence indicated that the crash might have been staged.
Dead or alive, The Squirrel managed to finally shake his pursuers — in 2015, federal prosecutors dropped the charges against him. In addition to the drug smuggling charges, he could have faced arrest for felony murder in the death of Bailey, because the drug plane’s pilot was killed in the act of committing a felony.
Peterson noted that authorities in Belize and the Caribbean are still looking for Thrasher. He’d be 85 years old now.
“People have heard of this guy. They have phenomenal stories about Wally,” the author said. “There was something different about him” that stood out and made him memorable to the locals.
While making the documentary, Peterson said the production was contacted by a person purporting to be an ex-CIA agent, who said he’d seen Thrasher recently in Florida.
The man also claimed that Thrasher had flown missions for the agency in the 1980s, as the CIA and DEA hunted down drug cartels in the jungles of Central and South America.
“We knew there was more to the story, so what we’ve done is finally connect all the dots and lock in the truth,” Peterson said. “Instead of scripting an ending, the ending turned out to be better than we could have imagined.”
The front page of The Galax Gazette from Oct. 19, 1984, reports the fiery plane crash on Fancy Gap Mountain. Courtesy of The Galax Gazette.
Bringing the book to life
A sold-out screening of the first episode of the “Where’s Wally?” series was held May 3 at the Millwald Theatre in Wytheville.
The day before, Peterson and the filmmakers joined many of the people interviewed for the series — including retired law enforcement officers who worked the case and the Thrashers’ son, Montana — for a media day at the Millwald.
Peterson, Tower and producer Meghann Coleman gathered onstage May 2, beneath a massive poster for the documentary. Most of the image is in the hazy orange hues of a Bolivian sunset, but Wally Thrasher’s ice-blue eyes are the focal point. He’s wearing an expression that hints at secrets only he knows — and may never tell.
Peterson said he first learned about the Thrasher case from retired Virginia State Trooper Austin Hall, with whom he worked closely as a source for his first book, “Under the Trestle,” about the 1980 disappearance of Gina Renee Hall in Radford.
He talked to more than 40 people who knew Thrasher or had pursued him as law enforcement officers.
As he interviewed Olga and Wally’s friends and associates from back in the day, “I was amazed at how innovative he was and what a good pilot he was. He had several crashes and near-misses and I was amazed at how well he kept his cool and handled a crisis.”
Peterson feels that Thrasher would have been successful at anything he put his mind to. “It seems like he liked the thrill and adrenaline rush of smuggling — not to mention the money.”
Tower read the book and reached out to Peterson with an offer to acquire the film and TV rights. The documentary has been in development for about four years, and Tower and his team have done more than 80 on-camera interviews of the key people involved in the story. The filmmakers were still shooting scenes for future episodes the week of the Millwald showing.
“Where’s Wally?” was planned as a three- to five-episode miniseries, “but if, say, Netflix or Amazon wanted more episodes, there’s definitely enough meat in the story,” Peterson said.
A few people declined to be interviewed on the record, he said, but were willing to provide background information without their names being used.
During production, a lot of new evidence came to light — most notably a young woman who said there was no way Thrasher was dead because he was her father and she was born three years after the Fancy Gap plane crash.
“It took us about two years for her to be willing to take a DNA sample, but we got it,” Tower said. They traveled to Georgia to get a DNA sample from Wally’s son for comparison.
The outcome of the DNA test hasn’t been revealed but is teased in the trailer for the documentary.
The Urban Legends Films crew displayed props from the “Where’s Wally?” documentary in the Millwald Theater lobby for the premiere. Among them are a replica state trooper uniform and a suitcase with $250,000 in movie money used in the series. Photo by Brian Funk.
Glamorizing crime?
Tower and Peterson acknowledge the moral ambiguity of Thrasher’s story.
The story is a time capsule of America’s drug war and the changing attitudes and laws regarding marijuana in particular. “What Wally was doing then, when it’s looked at through the lens of today, wasn’t something that was so bad,” Tower said.
Thrasher was breaking the law, he continued. “But he had a threshold for what he was doing.”
Indeed, Thrasher’s moral code is what earned him a grudging respect from some of those hunting him.
By the investigators’ accounts, Thrasher became involved in crime for the thrill and adventure, while using his fortune not for the furtherance of a criminal enterprise, but to provide a comfortable — even extravagant — life for his family.
According to Joe Massie, a retired Virginia State Police special agent who worked with the investigative team looking into Thrasher’s activities in the early 1980s, he never brought his “work” home, and neither Wally nor Olga used drugs.
Massie said Thrasher literally “never touched the stuff” — he had others load drugs on the plane and would leave the aircraft sitting on the runway and let others unload it.
However, Lincoln said it’s a common misconception that Thrasher never transported cocaine, only marijuana.
“At the very end, he’d move 4 or 5 [kilos] on each run,” Lincoln explained. “There was so much more money in transporting cocaine,” because you could move more of it on a plane and make more money per pound than with marijuana.
He theorizes that Thrasher started taking these higher-paying cocaine trafficking jobs to pay for his wife’s increasingly expensive tastes.
“Olga and I used to butt heads because I had a theory she didn’t agree with. Wally was making $300,000 to $700,000 per load, and she could spend it in a month,” Lincoln said with a laugh. “Wally knew he was on [the DEA’s] radar, so maybe he just decided he’d had enough,” and faked his death.
There’s a degree of respect and admiration in Lincoln’s voice when speaking of Thrasher. At a time when the DEA and other agencies were pursuing violent criminals and murderers in the world of drug trafficking, here was Wally Thrasher — a family man and worthy foe, whose pursuit became something of an obsession.
“What made Wally different was that he was never violent,” Lincoln said. “He would walk away and lose money on a deal rather than get in a fight with somebody. I always liked that. … You don’t encounter too many ‘gentleman criminals,’ but he was kind of one of them.”
“He was just a transporter, not that that relieves him of any responsibility, but he wasn’t selling drugs to little kids,” said Massie. “He could have done a lot worse.”
Tower said the story is also worth telling because Wally Thrasher is an enthralling character. “He did not have that gene of fear. He was not afraid to fly his plane to these super dangerous areas of the world, then fly home with only a drip of fuel, just 10 or 15 feet above the water,” to avoid detection. “He was an absolute daredevil.”
According to Peterson and the investigators, Thrasher has become something of a folk hero in Southwest Virginia, on par with the moonshiners of Franklin County, whose souped-up Fords could fly down backroads almost as swiftly as Wally’s plane as they eluded police. To many, he was an anti-establishment antihero who fought the law and won, in a way, by never being caught.
Lincoln said Thrasher is often revered as a Robin Hood figure, “though I don’t think he ever gave anything away.”
An unexpected legacy
Montana Thrasher remembers vividly the day in 1984 when he learned his father was missing.
“I was standing by the tree over there, eating an ice cream sandwich,” he said, pointing to a spot near the family’s cabin in Pulaski County. He was 6 years old.
Wally Thrasher hadn’t been home for a couple of weeks after the plane crash, and Montana’s mother called him into the house to tell him the news.
Montana stood amid the collection of log cabins off Little Creek Highway in Pulaski County that came to be known as the “Thrasher compound” in media reports of the 1980s.
The land was seized during the investigation and sold by the government.
“I thought he was just a pilot,” Montana said, of what he thought his father did when he was a child. “I just knew he flew people to the Bahamas and brought money home.”
(So much money, in fact, that when the Thrashers played Monopoly at the cabin, they used thousands of dollars in cash.)
When he learned the truth, Montana said he then saw his father as a kind of antihero and charming rogue. “He reminded me of ‘Smokey and the Bandit,’ with his love of life,” referring to Burt Reynolds’ iconic smuggler/truck driver movie character from the 1970s.
Montana looks so much like his dad — the same intense blue eyes; the same charisma and easy charm. He’s a reminder that Wally Thrasher wasn’t just a smuggler or a fugitive; he’s a missing and still-beloved father and husband.
Another irony is the path that Montana took in life: The son of one of the most prolific drug smugglers in American history became a cop.
Last year, Montana Thrasher retired after 20 years with the Gainesville, Georgia, police department. His retirement party was filmed for the documentary.
“We all want to wear the cape and be the hero,” he said of his career choice. “Plus, I’ve always been fascinated by the very fine line between law enforcement and criminals. They both have to have the same abilities and intellect.”
He credits his relationship with Massie, the former undercover narcotics investigator, with guiding his life’s direction.
“He was an early influence,” Montana Thrasher said. “I used to run around with his state police badge,” pretending to be a policeman.
While Olga Thrasher was in jail in Roanoke for the murder-for-hire charge, Massie picked up Montana from Wytheville and took him to see his mom.
“On the way, I let him play with the siren,” Massie recalled. “You never know how something is going to affect a little 6-year-old.”
When Olga turned federal witness, investigators believed her life was in danger. Massie was assigned to guard her and helped Olga, Montana and his sister collect their things from the cabin and relocate to safety in Georgia.
After Massie left the state police, Olga called him to come to Georgia to watch after the kids for a couple of months while she was undergoing treatment for a health issue, further cementing his bond with the family.
After losing his father, Montana said, “Joe filled that void for me.”
The former home of Wally and Olga Thrasher in Bland County was open for tours, conducted by their son, Montana Thrasher. Montana has fond memories of the cabin and his life there — which was ripped away suddenly after his father’s plane crash and the ensuing criminal investigation. Photo by Brian Funk.
Montana said those were formative moments in his young life, brought back into focus by his time staying at his childhood home while visiting for the documentary premiere.
Coming back home was “like a time machine. … It was kind of cathartic,” he said.
The day before the documentary premiere, Montana took Peterson and other visitors on a tour of the cabin. He pointed out the things — bathroom tiles, squeaky floorboards, a spiral staircase — that reminded him of his time there.
He theorized that he remembers everything at the cabin so vividly and fondly because “it was all taken away so suddenly.”
“The way we left, I think everything sort of became frozen in time,” Montana said. “If my childhood had progressed normally, I might not have held onto all these memories. It means more to me than anything to come back here and stay.”
Montana has been participating in the documentary since September 2020, when the Urban Legends crew filmed scenes at the Gainesville airport with him and his mother.
(Olga Thrasher, who now lives in Texas, was unable to attend the premiere due to health issues, but she participated in both the book and the documentary.)
Coming home was “a little sad, but overall, it’s like coming full circle,” he said. “It resonates with me here. … I feel like he’s around.”
A headline in The Southwest Times from November 1984 reports Wallace Thrasher’s apparent demise in a plane crash on Fancy Gap Mountain. Photo by Brian Funk.
The search continues
The law enforcement officers at the Millwald for the premiere joked that they wouldn’t be surprised to see Wally Thrasher come walking out on stage and reveal himself after all these years.
But for now, he remains an enigma. The one that got away. The unsolved puzzle.
Another unknown element is the future of “Where’s Wally?”
Peterson said the premiere in Wytheville received overwhelmingly positive feedback, and the filmmakers will continue their work in hopes of finding an audience.
According to Tower, the next step is to submit the documentary to the Virginia Film Festival in Richmond this summer, the Toronto Film Festival and the American Film Institute Film Festival in Los Angeles. A good reception at festivals would help them land a deal with a streaming service.
“The book ends with more questions than it does answers, but over the past five years Doug and Meghann and their team have really provided more answers to those questions,” Peterson said. “They’ve broken a lot of new ground.”
So, has his theory of Thrasher’s final fate changed between finishing the book and filming the documentary?
In his opinion, where’s Wally?
“I can’t say what happened,” Peterson answered. “It would spoil the ending.”
“]] The docuseries “Where’s Wally?” explores the colorful life and mysterious disappearance of Pulaski native Wally Thrasher. Read More
