The Bank Robber, The Fugitive, The Pilot, and The Mena Arkansas Conspiracy.

A Texas fugitive’s life on the run and ultimate death in a plane crash outside of Mena, Arkansas, added an intriguing chapter to stories about alleged CIA drug smuggling and gun running at the small airport in western Arkansas.
I interviewed dogged fugitive hunter Louis Fawcett on my True Crime Reporter® podcast to unravel part of the mystery.
The seeds of Charles Woods’ outlaw career sprouted in 1951 when at age 18, he robbed an Oak Cliff grocery store and four 711 stores in Dallas at gunpoint. "I guess I did it because I had a good reputation, knew no one would suspect me, and had it figured out mathematically,” he rationalized.
Friends and teachers thought the friendly, good-natured boy had suffered from temporary insanity.
Woods showed promise and intelligence. After serving only a year of a 5-year armed robbery sentence, the 18-year-old received a full pardon in 1951.
Woods later attended the University of Oklahoma, earning a geology degree. He obtained his pilot’s license and went to work as a geologist in Anchorage, Alaska.
"Chuck wanted to be a farmer in Honduras. So he talked my father into going with him to Honduras. At that time, he took his plane there, secured some land so they could farm on it, and bought equipment," recalled his niece Vicki Holder.
Louis Fawcett heard a different story from Woods’ brother. “He said they were flying sugarcane back from South America to the United States in a twin-engine plane. I knew immediately what he was talking about.”
Sugarcane was a euphemism for cocaine. Holder recalls that her uncle was flush with cash but suddenly had to flee South America. He abandoned his wife from El Salvador and their young son.
Back in Dallas and near bankruptcy, Woods, now 25, robbed a bank in Houston but wrecked his stolen getaway car with a paper bag filled with $7500 cash.
Woods was sent to the notorious Eastham State Prison, nicknamed the “Ham,” to serve a 25-year sentence for armed robbery. The personable inmate persuaded a prison official to let him work on a survey crew outside the prison walls. In a handwritten letter, Woods stated, “I received my basic surveying training at the University of Oklahoma. I have an engineering background, and I believe my superiors will agree that I can do good work. If I am not considered a security risk, I should like to prove myself if given the opportunity.”
Two months later, in late October of 1961, Charles Woods held a guard at knifepoint to make an escape from a prison survey crew.
His whereabouts remained a mystery to the prison system for 34 years until it was assigned to Louis Fawcett, an Investigator for the system’s Inspector General.
Fawcett followed a trail to Mena, Arkansas, where Barry Seal, a pilot with a Vietnam War-era link to the CIA, had established a drug smuggling operation at the small airport in the 1980s.
Seal, played by Tom Cruise in the movie American Made) was a notorious cocaine smuggler earning millions of dollars each month from his connection to Columbian kingpin Pablo Escobar depicted in the Narcos TV series.
After his arrest by the DEA in 1983, Seal became a government informant, playing a crucial role in operations against the Medellin cartel.
The CIA installed two hidden 35mm on board Seal's C-123K cargo plane. It was a DEA sting operation that captured images of a Sandinista Nicaraguan official loading Columbian cocaine.
President Reagan unveiled the photos in a nationwide TV address to support his case for funding a rebel army called the Contras to fight the Soviet-supported regime.
In 1986, three of the narcos Columbian hitmen armed with machine guns killed Seal as he sat behind the wheel of his Cadillac in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
Later, a cargo plane once owned by Seals was shot down carrying arms, blowing wide open the scandal known as Iran-Contra.
In 1996, 34 years after Charles Woods had escaped from a Texas prison, Louis Fawcett was assigned to find the fugitive.
Fawcett found himself entangled in the Mena Conspiracy Theory.
It had resurfaced a few years earlier when a White House reporter ambushed President Bill Clinton to ask if he knew about the alleged smuggling while he was Governor of Arkansas.
After escaping prison, Woods changed his identity to Richard Arthur Mills. married and started a family with a woman he met in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Fawcett learned that Woods, aka Richard Mills, had been working as a government contractor at the Naval Weapons Depot in McAllister, Oklahoma. “Here's a guy that was working in Oklahoma with a government-style ID card with an alias name on it. And he's going to Mena, Arkansas So, being the suspicious type of person that I am, I started looking at it at that angle, but there wasn't much point in going any further with it because I determined that he was deceased.
Fawcett discovered that Woods, aka Mills, had died in a plane crash in mid-November of 1969, eight years after his escape from prison.
The 35-year-old pilot of a single-engine Cessna 172 crashed into the base of Black Fork Mountain 25 miles northwest of Mena, Arkansas, during a violent thunderstorm. Fawcett suspects Woods was using Mena as a hub to fly around the southwest committing bank robberies and believes loot may have disappeared from the crash scene.
After Woods, aka Richard Mills, was laid to rest, his widow received the shocking news that he was prison escapee Charles Woods. “My aunt and my father sat her down after the funeral and gave her the update on his background and what had occurred and what was real,” recalled Vicki Holder. “And she was very upset. Very angry. She was in mourning, of course. She had lost her husband just recently. And she was pregnant and expecting their second child at the time.”
To this day, Fawcett wonders if Charles Woods is really buried beneath the cemetery headstone identified as Richard Mills, Boy Scout leader. Or is he sitting on a beach savoring stories of being a clandestine agent?
In the murky depths of the Mena Conspiracy Theory, the full story remains obscured by time and secrecy.