Around 8:30 a.m. everything went to hell. Swirling 60 mph winds grabbed the little plane, shook it, rolled it, threw it down toward the jagged peaks of the Cascade mountains, then slammed it back up into the darkening skies.
The morning had started out smoothly, according to plan. After a night of lashing rains driven down the runway by gusts blowing from across the Canadian border, the predawn skies cleared and fleecy air gently blanketed Orcas Island. The barometer rose and the temperature climbed to 57 degrees, about 15 warmer than expected for a mid-November morning in the far corner of the Pacific Northwest. It looked like fine flying weather—unless you’d checked the reports and saw the obvious shitstorm coming.
Pilots of small aircraft obsess about the weather. Ill winds, icing, poor visibility—all can bring your flight to a terminal, smoldering conclusion. Before the FAA considers a pilot minimally safe to solo, he must study and train intensively, racking up forty or more hours of air time sitting alongside a calm, cool flight instructor ready to instantly take over and recover from blunders that could otherwise kill them both. During ground school, student pilots learn the one surefire way to avoid trouble with dangerous weather: don’t fly in it. However, when you’re a seventeen-year-old with zero hours of official flight training strapped into a stolen airplane trying to make a quick getaway from a whole lotta law enforcement on your tail… Well, you have other things on your mind besides the weather forecast.
As the sky began to glow, teasing misty details from the island’s steep, evergreen hillsides, the teen had busied himself with final preflight preparations inside one of Orcas airport’s private hangars. More than seventy small aircraft bed down on the island, and its single runway averages nearly 150 takeoffs and landings per day. You can watch the airplane action from the parking lot, the adjacent dog park, a spot just north called Smuggler’s, or from the woods behind the airport’s flimsy deer fence. You can also spy on the comings and goings from Orcas Island’s small sheriff station—known to locals as the cop shop—that lies within badge-tossing range of the runway’s south end.
A few days earlier, one of the landings was made by a 1999 Cessna 182 Skylane, tail number N24658. The would-be thief recognized that model on sight, just as he knew every Cessna, Piper, Beech, Cirrus, and other small plane. Regardless of its challenges with impulse control and social norms, the kid’s brain functioned as an aircraft encyclopedia crammed with engine ratings, performance stats, and avionics capabilities. Flying had been his one constant dream, one soaring aspiration in an otherwise bottom-of-the-barrel life, and he’d been teaching himself about flight since childhood, obsessively paging through airplane books until their bindings disintegrated. Now, at an age when most kids spent all their feverish energy trying to wangle a sweaty hour or two with another teen in a backseat or on a basement couch, Colton Harris-Moore’s one overwhelming desire was to spend illicit time in the privacy of a hangar with a plane he planned to make his own.
This particular Cessna, he knew, offered fuel-injected reliability and a rugged, easy-to-fly airframe. It was an airborne SUV, the Ford Bronco of the skies, and he could close his eyes, project an image of the cockpit, and reach out to virtually touch every control, switch, and gauge.
The Cessna had landed, rolled out, and taxied to its home in the airport’s hangar farm. Other planes slept under the stars, tied down out on the tarmac, but Colton wanted one stored out of sight. After sundown—after the daily FedEx flight and the last of the commuter runs had taken off for Seattle and Bellingham, and the airport’s provincial terminal went dark for the night—he simply walked through the open fence.
A typical small-plane hangar features a large door for the aircraft along with one or more regular-size entrances called man doors. Plane theft is practically unheard of and few private hangars have alarm systems despite housing planes worth hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars. It took just a few seconds to jimmy open the man door. Inside, Colton switched on his headlamp and illuminated his dream.
FLIERS LOVE THEIR AIRPLANES. Passionately. During preflight inspection, a pilot caresses the frame. He runs his hands along the ship’s smooth skin, probing her flaps, stroking every inch of her propeller blades, even gently lifting her tail. It seems to go well beyond a simple safety check.
An intimate relationship with an airplane offers its pilot superhuman ability, harnessing simple physics to magical effect. Pull back on the yoke and zoom to ten thousand feet, laughing in the oppressive face of gravity that back on earth remains ready to ruin you just for tripping on the stairs or leaning too far back on a bar stool. For aficionados, planes elicit fanatical devotion.
As Colton scanned the inside of the hangar, he saw the Cessna owner’s face watching his every move. The plane belonged to Bob Rivers, a popular radio personality who lived down in Seattle and lived for flying his plane up to the San Juan Islands on the weekends. Promotion posters featuring Rivers’s smiling, silver-maned mug decorated the hangar walls.
The idea that Rivers owned and flew a small plane had been the subject of much banter on his morning radio show. He’d first had to overcome a deathly “medicate me and wake me when it’s over” fear of flying. Pilot friends and the interminable lines for the ferries heading out to the San Juans during the summer tourist season finally convinced him to reconsider the power of flight. Now he loved it, and especially loved his immaculately kept $175,000 Cessna Skylane.
Colton foraged around the hangar until he found the plane’s key inside a tackle box sitting amid a pile of stored boating gear. He climbed inside the cockpit, powered up the gauges, and saw that the tanks held enough fuel. As he expected, the Skylane’s POH sat inside the plane. The Pilot’s Operating Handbook is a detailed manual specific to every aircraft, and includes step-by-step checklists for prepping, starting, taking off, flying, and landing. It’s the plane’s Rosetta Stone.
Colton had all night to pore over the POH as well as manuals for the avionics, radio, autopilot, and GPS navigation equipment. Out of the small flock of Cessnas roosting at Orcas airport, Rivers’s was the only one outfitted with a Garmin MX200, an $8,000 add-on GPS “situational awareness” system that makes navigating similar to a video game. One of these modern GPS chartplotters linked to a plane’s mechanical and autopilot systems simplifies much of the flier’s in-flight calculations and workload. Click a cursor anywhere on the chart and the computer instantly tells a pilot how to get to his destination. It won’t get a plane up in the air, though.
Airplanes want to fly. Pick the right one, like the Skylane—not too complicated, not too powerful, stable high-wing design, built to operate at relatively slow speeds—then meticulously follow the POH checklists, and there’s a very good chance that even without taking a single flight class, you could get it up in the air. Then, however, you’re royally screwed.
Flying is full of old adages, most of them with at least a touch of dark humor. One of the most famous is: “Takeoffs are optional, but landings are mandatory.”
Inside the hangar, Colton also had all night to think about what he was about to attempt—something any rational observer would consider almost certain suicide.
AT FIRST LIGHT, DURING the blue hour before actual sunrise, Colton pressed the button to raise the hangar’s wide metal door. He unplugged the Tow Buddy from its charger and attached its beetlelike mandibles to the Cessna’s nose wheel. Using the little low-geared electric tug, he slowly rolled the one-ton plane out of its hangar. Once clear of the building, he not only walked the tug back inside the hangar, but put it in the exact spot he’d found it. Colton didn’t plug its charger back in, but that wouldn’t inconvenience Bob Rivers much considering he’d soon have no plane to use it on.
After closing the hangar door behind him, Colton climbed up into the Cessna’s left-hand seat. Like every aviation procedure, whether it’s a pilot’s first Cessna solo or thousandth sortie in a 747, starting a plane is done by checklist. The challenge, at first, is just learning where all the switches and gauges are located. For Colton, though, that wasn’t a problem. He’d spent many hours looking at this dashboard exactingly reproduced on computer simulations. Even the walls of his bedroom, instead of being hung with scantily clad pop stars, displayed posters of airplane cockpits.
He checked that the fuel tank selector, throttle, prop, and mixture were all set to their correct positions. Normally, a pilot then yells “Clear!” out the side window to warn anyone near the prop to move or risk being sliced and diced. As this was grand theft, it made sense to skip that step. Master switch on, auxiliary fuel pump on just until fuel flows, throttle back to idle. Hit the starter and feel the tingle in your privates as the 235-horsepower Lycoming whines up and the propeller begins to turn, then suddenly the pistons catch with a distinctive throaty flutter. Go rich on the mixture, throttle to 1,000 rpms. Oil pressure? Check. Lean the mixture, avionics on, navigation lights on. Ready to roll.
Taxiing presents a challenge for first-time Skylane fliers since instinctually everyone used to driving a car tries to steer with the wheel instead of the foot pedals. But Colton knew that. (And hell, he didn’t have a driver’s license either.) In fact, with all his previous study and experience, the most complex part of the entire episode to this point was adjusting the pilot’s seat to his gangly six-foot-five frame.
With so many private planes based on Orcas, none of the neighbors took special notice of the Cessna’s early-morning growls. Colton released the parking brake, taxied out of the hangar farm, and turned south toward the still-sleeping town of Eastsound. He then spun the thirty-foot-long plane until its nose aimed straight down runway 34. Blue lights focused his view down the black strip, which ended abruptly in the cold, dark waters of the Salish Sea.
Colton Harris-Moore knew more than enough to fly a small plane—in theory. Reality reared up when he pushed the throttle to the firewall. The engine roared, his heart raced, and the Cessna began to roll forward down the narrow airstrip. Lightly loaded, the plane picked up speed quickly, the blue lights flashing by faster and faster. Colton’s eyes darted back and forth between the airspeed indicator—watching it climb toward the magic number—and the end of the runway, which came closer and closer.
This was a kid, an outcast, who’d been bullied and beaten, forgotten and failed, expelled, medicated, incarcerated, and seemingly doomed to society’s lowest rung. He’d already blown a number of chances in his young life, but he wasn’t going to blow this one.
Colton kept his cool, hit his airspeed number, and pulled back on the yoke. After a breathless moment, the plane’s rumbling wheels suddenly went silent. The runway disappeared beneath him, replaced with an epic rush of euphoria.
The white plane rose to the sunrise like a phoenix, an image and reference not lost on its pilot despite his failure at formal education. Colton’s flight from the ashes of a wretched childhood, though, had taken a crooked path. He was a wanted outlaw, a wily one-kid crime wave that had swept across two tranquil islands, damaging their small communities’ sense of security. His illegal deeds had been escalating for years as he studied crime with the same intensity he brought to teaching himself how to fly. Colton had graduated from stealing food to identities, from skipping school to escaping a prison home, from assaulting a soda machine to macing a cop. He often carried a gun, and he was determined not to go back to jail.
Colton Harris-Moore had also just pulled off one of the most audacious thefts in American history—and he was only getting started.
With the sky brightening behind snow-capped Mount Baker on the Washington State mainland, the stolen Cessna turned south, its pilot gaining confidence as the plane gained altitude. After just a few minutes, Colton crossed the border from San Juan County to Island County, and his home, Camano Island, came into view. A small airport lies at the north end of Camano, but that wasn’t an option. He already had a price on his head there and his face adorned wanted posters all over the island. Colton continued on, flying unchallenged past Naval Air Station Whidbey Island, Boeing Field, and the region’s largest commercial airport, Seattle-Tacoma.
He flew along the flat lip of the continent, where, after dropping precipitously from the Cascades, bottomland spills into Puget Sound. It’s a spectacular sightseeing route with a series of volcanoes as waypoints—whenever the weather allows you to see them. The safest course to where Colton was headed called for banking east once he was south of Seattle, putting the icy, awe-inspiring bulk of Mount Rainier in his right window and following I-90 as it cut through Snoqualmie Pass past many of the locations used in David Lynch’s eerie Northwest mystery Twin Peaks.
Of course “safest” is a relative term.
Soon after takeoff, the rain had started back in. The skies closed and winds reared, gusting to 30 mph at sea level, even higher at altitude. According to the Air Safety Institute at the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA), 80 percent of all accidents in a Cessna Skylane—considered a very safe plane—result from pilot error. Of those, the greatest number of serious accidents occur because the pilot flies into bad weather. The statistics also reveal who is most likely to fly himself to death: a new pilot.
THE CASCADES ACT AS a weather wall, giving eastern and western Washington such disparate climates that you’d think you were on different continents. Air sweeping east across the coast tries to climb these steep mountains carrying heavy burdens of Pacific moisture. Like overconfident hikers, though, they can’t make it to the top without casting off much of their load. As a result, the environment changes from near–rain forest to desert in a remarkably short distance from one side of the mountains to the other. The air doesn’t give up its moisture without a fight, though.
As weather systems storm across the Cascades, wind shear between temperature gradients creates air waves shaped like ocean rollers, with the same effect on small planes as a Jet Ski feels running through a surf zone. November in the Northwest also brings tempestuous surface flows racing through sharp valleys that concentrate the winds and fire them into the sky like an antiaircraft gun. And turbulence exists even on calm days over the Cascades simply because of the push and pull of gravity reacting to the mass of the mountains. Jumbo jets at high altitude feel all these forces as sharp speed bumps and deep potholes, but their effect on a small plane skimming just above the peaks can be catastrophic. Add the rain, snow, sleet, and fog that can suddenly pounce out of the hills to swallow a plane, and you’ve got conditions that cause even experienced pilots to pucker at the thought of crossing the mountains when there’s a hint of bad weather.
On a good day, a trip across the Cascades means lively turbulence. On November 12, 2008, the atmosphere over the mountains was a frightening world of invisible whirlpools and breaking waves, with wind gusts exploding against the little Cessna like aerial depth charges. Colton later told a friend that as he flew into the mountains, the clouds closed around him, describing conditions as a whiteout. A full-on flush of fear replaced his euphoric buzz and screamed at him to either panic or freeze up—two decidedly fatal options for a pilot. One miscalculation on this already remarkably reckless flight would likely be Colton’s last. Turning around at the first hint of weather trouble would have been the only smart option, but also meant a much greater chance he’d go back to prison—and that’s not how he’d planned to play this game. In his mind, it was all or nothing. So he kept going.
Colton claims that at one point the Cessna fell into a stomach-churning nosedive toward the ground, plummeting from thirteen thousand to six thousand feet. His fright took physical form as his last meal splattered across the cockpit while he fought to keep the plane in the air.
He says he believes it took the intervention of a higher power, but he finally regained control. After what surely seemed like an eternity, the skies began to clear. Colton made it across the highest part of the Cascades and into the drier air east of the mountain range. The winds remained deadly strong, but the turbulence grew less violent. There hadn’t been any question of the plane holding together, just the pilot. But he’d made it this far. Gravity now guaranteed the plane would come back to earth—in how many pieces was up to Colton.
Around 9 a.m., the Cessna left the state of Washington and crossed into the sovereign Yakama Nation, a 1.3-million-acre reservation east of Mount Saint Helens belonging to the Palouse, Sk’in-pah, and twelve other tribes of the Columbia River plateau. It’s an area famous for having one of the world’s highest number of UFO sightings, with local aliens reportedly fond of appearing as hovering, “inquisitive” balls of light that sometimes follow motorists. In the 1960s, the reservation was also ground zero for Bigfoot sightings.
It’s good country for wildlife—regular earth animals as well as the mythical. Stands of cedar, ponderosa pine, and tamarack thin out to sagebrush as the hills climb into bald mountains. The land supports large herds of elk and black-tailed deer, along with mountain goats and lots of black bears. Thousands of wild horses also roam free on the reservation. Whether the outlaw who’d rustled the bucking Cessna in order to escape the angry sheriff acknowledged the Wild West symbolism or not didn’t matter. Colton was just searching for a place to put the plane down.
At 9:15, a small band of Yakama hunters stalking elk looked up and saw a plane circling over Mill Creek Ridge, sacred tribal ground in the shadow of 4,710-foot Satus Peak. Totally off-limits to outsiders, it’s an area the Yakama call the Place Where the Wind Lives.
To a pilot, it doesn’t matter much where the wind lives, but knowing its direction and strength is absolutely critical. Airfields have windsocks and weather instruments. Someone attempting to land out in the wild, though, has to gauge wind speed by reading natural signs: bending grasses, rippling ponds, blowing leaves. On this day, with gale force winds howling around Satus Peak, you were just as likely to see flying coyotes.
The Cessna continued to buzz the area for nearly a half hour as Colton scouted a flatish spot, tried to read the wind sign, double-checklisted landing procedures, and double-gut-checked himself. He had to mentally prepare for what pilots call an off-airport landing, which translates into English as, “Oh shit, I’m about to crash on a hillside.”
Landings—even on a perfectly level runway—are where the experience gained by repeated, supervised practice combines with a gradually earned seat-of-the-pants feel for the uneasy interface between air and ground to make an art out of the science of flight.
THE PREFERRED EMERGENCY LANDING—exactly like the preferred nonemergency landing—takes place into the wind for the simple reason that the plane will be moving slower in relation to the ground. The tyrannical side of physics says that the energy of an impact rises as a square of speed. Where the guts hit the ground, that means the faster you’re moving the greater the likelihood of crumpling, cartwheeling, fracturing, and bleeding.
The tribal police chief who rushed to the site said the wind sweeping across the ridge that morning was blowing so strong, “it was hard for a man to stand up.” Converted to mph, that’s about 50, which meant a 100 mph speed difference between landing into or with the wind.
In a steady 50, an experienced pilot could walk the plane in and gently touch down moving at only 10 or 15 mph over the ground. Complications arise, however, when the wind and runway don’t line up—like at Mill Creek that day. Loads of wildly popular YouTube clips keyworded to “crosswind landing” show the spine-chilling final approaches forced on pilots when the wind blows across the runway. In a maneuver called crabbing, the plane flies straight toward the landing spot while its nose remains pointing into the wind like a big-haired woman crossing the street facing the wrong way just so her bouffant doesn’t get blown out of place. The plane literally flies sideways until it’s very close to the ground, where the wind generally calms and where, if all goes well, the pilot can bring the nose around at the last second to face forward.
The spot Colton finally chose to put down was a small clearing at the top of a rugged switchback road where tribal hunters park their 4 × 4s before hiking into the surrounding hills. Adjacent to the clearing was another thousand feet or so of relatively flat ground covered in scrub.
He almost made it.
Evidence on the ground showed that Colton apparently crabbed the plane toward the clearing but, possibly due to the unpredictable gusts, he hit short. The impact wasn’t very violent, leaving only a small gouge in the hard-packed dirt, but the landing wasn’t over. The Cessna bounced back into the air and leapt forward, flying over the clearing and up a slight hill, then crunched back to earth, its landing gear bending and metal skeleton twisting from the force of the crash. The plane shuddered across the ground, propeller slicing through sagebrush, until it nosed over into a ditch and finally came to an abrupt stop.
After nearly four hours, the alternately thrilling and terrifying flight was over and the pilot’s heart was still beating. He’d started the morning as Colton Harris-Moore, trailer-bred juvenile delinquent and petty thief. When he popped open the door of that stolen Cessna, though, and stepped into the wilds of Washington State haunted by the legends of Sasquatch, D. B. Cooper, Twin Peaks, and Twilight, he became Colt, the new millennium’s ballsiest outlaw.
Move over Bigfoot, meet Barefoot.
The hunters had seen the Cessna circle behind the ridge once again, but it didn’t reappear. They dialed the Yakama Tribal Police and told them a plane had gone down. The police chief himself, Jimmy Shike, jumped into his SUV and raced for the road that led up into the mountains.
They say “Any landing you can walk away from is a good one.” Colt ran away from his first solo landing. He headed for the trees and had barely gotten out of sight before Chief Shike drove up to the clearing.
The chief braced himself against the wind and strode up to the Cessna, which lay nose down, ass in the air, like a paper airplane stuck in the grass. The damage didn’t look too extensive at first glance, certainly survivable, but when he didn’t see a forlorn pilot sitting beside the pranged plane, Shike expected to find someone inside the cockpit, unconscious or worse.
He peered in… no body, no blood. The chief’s first thought was that the pilot was injured and either stumbling around incoherent or trying to walk his way off the ridge to find help. The idea that this was a stolen plane never entered his mind. He got on the radio and ordered a search-and-rescue mission, calling in tracking dogs and teams from his force and the Yakima County Sheriff’s Office, along with volunteers. Then he called in the tail number of the plane to the Washington State Patrol so they could pull up the registration and find out whom he was searching for.
Bob Rivers had just gotten off the air at 10 a.m. after a typically entertaining four hours of commentary, interviews, and repartee with his radio team when his boss walked into the studio holding a cordless phone. He said there was a state policeman from Yakima who wanted to speak to Bob… because his plane had just crashed on the Indian reservation.
Rivers’s first thought was that it was a prank call, an occupational hazard when you’ve spent twenty-plus years doing comedy bits and song parodies like “Cheeseburger with Parasites” and the Christmas favorite “Buttcracker Suite.”
The cop asked if he was really speaking to Bob Rivers. “I answered yes, and waited for the punch line,” says Rivers. “But he said, ‘Oh, I’m very glad to hear your voice because, obviously, that means it wasn’t you in your plane.’”
Rivers suddenly realized the guy was serious. There must be a mistake, he told the officer. “My plane is in its hangar on Orcas Island.” No way his Cessna could have been in the air that day. He certainly hadn’t flown it, and even though friends sometimes took the plane up, they always asked first. Besides, this was definitely a no-fly day. Just an hour before, as their newswoman read the local weather, the thought that shot through pilot Bob’s weather-obsessed mind was, Boy am I glad I’m not flying in that!
The statie read out the plane’s tail number: November 2-4-6-5-8.
“Yes, that’s my number,” Rivers told him. “But a lot of people confuse the 8 with a B because tail numbers usually end with a letter.” He heard the cop relay the message to the tribal police chief who was standing next to the plane. After a moment he came back on the phone: “Nope, he says it’s definitely an 8, not a B. It’s your plane.”
RIVERS’S PHONE BEGAN RINGING off the hook: the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), FAA, San Juan County Sheriff’s Office, Bureau of Indian Affairs, and FBI. The realization that his plane had been stolen began to sink in. They had no suspects, but at least, thought Rivers, with all these organizations involved and the search teams scouring the landing site, they’d be sure to catch the crook and solve the case instantly. The thief had a forty-five-minute head start, but he was outnumbered and had experienced Yakama hunters and tracking dogs on his trail.
Then Rivers received a disheartening call. “They told me that since it was now a law enforcement matter and not a rescue that they’d called off the search so no volunteers would be endangered.”
Rivers’s hopes sank, only to be lifted again by a call from Chief Shike telling him not to worry, that there were only two ways out of the area and one of those would mean a thirty-mile hike. The chief told Rivers that his officers were keeping close watch on the only sensible route anyone would use to get off the mountain on foot.
Colt watched the searchers from his hiding place in the woods, then struck out east, taking the long route no one expected.
THE NEXT MORNING, THE thirteenth, the chief called Bob Rivers again. Bad news, he said, a logging truck driver reported seeing a white male, soaked to the skin, walking out of the Place Where the Wind Lives sometime around 5 a.m.
“I asked him about the status of the investigation, the FAA, the FBI, all the boys,” says Rivers. “He told me, ‘The investigation has been turned over to me… and I have concluded the investigation. Your insurance company may take the plane.’”
In fact, the chief insisted that Rivers remove the plane as quickly as possible because he was forced to keep one of his men up in the hills babysitting its carcass twenty-four hours a day or else, he said, the boys on the rez would shoot it to pieces just for target practice.
Tribal police collected a vomit sample but no other forensics from the plane. (Questions arose later as to the handling of the sample and delays in testing. Ultimately, it was tested three times but never came back with usable DNA.)
Rivers was crestfallen. “So that was it: white suspect, property crime, some rich guy’s toy… No one really cared and they’d never find out who took my plane.”
The one person who did know kept moving.
Dressed in just shorts, a sweatshirt, and shoes he says were two sizes too small, Colt claims he hiked for four days with no food, subsisting on two bottles of Gatorade. Toppenish Mountain east of the landing site resembles parts of the Afghan Central Highlands. Instead of the Khyber Pass, though, Colt had access to roadways cut by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. For the first day and a half even the weather cooperated, offering him unseasonably warm temperatures 20 degrees above average. After that, it stayed a balmy 60 during daylight, but fell to below freezing at night. Colt says he hiked thirty miles to the tracks of the Northern Pacific Railway, where he hopped a freight to Oregon, jumped off, stole a car, and drove it to Reno, Nevada. Colt says he spent most of the winter in Reno, staying with a friend.
Meanwhile, back on the Wild West’s watery frontier, the residents of Orcas Island woke on November 12 to a big breakfast of WTF?
As soon as he’d gotten the call from the state police, Bob Rivers phoned his friend and plane mechanic, Geoff Schussler, and asked him to go check the hangar. Schussler found a whole lot of empty where the Cessna should have been.
Two San Juan County sheriff’s deputies responded to the call. Schussler had taken great pains not to touch anything, but he says the deputies shrugged it off, giving a cursory look and telling him that “there weren’t any good surfaces” to check for prints. Schussler looked around at a lot of smooth metal and hard plastic that the thief had to touch to break in, find the key, and get the plane out of the hangar. “This was an airplane,” he says, “not a stolen bike… I thought they’d take it more seriously.”
If they had successfully lifted a print, the San Juan County Sheriff’s Office would have instantly found that their suspect had been in the system for a very long time considering his age. They would have gotten an earful about him and his MO from their law enforcement brethren down in Island County. With that information, they might have figured out that this wasn’t Colt’s first Orcas crime by a long shot. As it was, though, it’d be nine months and many more local crime scenes and victims before they even knew whom they were dealing with.
Word of the plane theft spread at small-island gossip speed—a startling velocity equaled only by the rate at which facts twist. Orcas has just five thousand full-time residents, and each exists within one degree of separation from everyone else on the fifty-seven-square-mile island. Like in any small community, but especially a small-island community, anybody’s business is everybody’s.
No one had ever heard of a plane theft before, certainly not one in a place where a puppy caught chasing chickens makes the newspaper’s police report. This was the kind of crime, though, that locals could relish. It was extremely rare, which appealed to our sense of exceptionalism. It was bizarre, which fit the eccentric nature of the island. And hardly anyone felt threatened because it wasn’t random and it was hard to identify with. Very few people are lucky enough to even have an airplane to steal, so it was like hearing that someone’s pet koala had run away. “Gee, that’s a shame… I wish I had a koala.”
No one had gotten hurt during the crime, but that wasn’t necessarily a factor for a juicy San Juans–style sin story. The county’s most famous misdeed to date had occurred in 1980, when a “kindly” old woman popped two .38 caps in her husband’s head, then had her simpleminded brother chop him up in a bathtub using a decorative battle ax before burning all the bits in a barrel.
In the spring of 2007, a body washed ashore on Orcas with its hands and feet missing. Since then, nine feet—all sans bodies—have shown up in the area’s waters from British Columbia down to Island County, making national headlines and prompting speculation of foot-fetish serial killers. The mordantly mundane reality is that people who jump off bridges or fall from boats or otherwise end up in the region’s rivers flow to the sea just like the trees that turn into the driftwood piled high on Northwest beaches. Hands and feet, like smaller branches on a floating tree, eventually come loose and the feet—usually shod in buoyant sneakers—sail off on their own journeys, eventually stepping back ashore to freak out beachcombers.
Our most recent headline-making incident occurred in March 2008, when we were treated to the electrifying work of a performance artist/eco-avenger named Gabriel Mondragon, who pulled on Playtex kitchen gloves and tried to cut one of Orcas’s power lines with a metal pole saw. His stated goal had been to wreak revenge on “rich white people” because a young orca whale had swum into a tugboat’s propeller 170 miles away in Canada. When the first lineman arrived, the anarchist’s pants were still smoking. He lost an arm, but survived.
While the occasional titillating crime or wayward body part added to island lore, the core belief on Orcas was that our wide moat of chilly Salish seawater stocked with giant Pacific octopuses and killer whales protected us from the horrifyingly random rapes, home invasions, and murders of the mainland. Bad guys knew it’d be stupid to commit a serious crime on a small island with very limited means of escape. Orcas residents enjoyed such a low crime rate and had such a comforting sense of security ingrained into their island identity that most of us never locked our doors—not cars, not homes, often not even businesses. When local sheriff’s deputies did shop-by-shop checks in Eastsound, our one little town, they regularly found open doors and windows.
A deputy once asked a young woman whose car had been taken (and quickly recovered) whether she’d left the keys inside. She replied, “Of course I did: I’m an island girl.”
There was crime on Orcas, but it occurred at such a remarkably low level that anyone who wanted to could easily persuade himself that he lived on an island embraced by only peace and serenity. Bobbing in a sea of denial.
HIGH CITY CRIME RATES didn’t drive my wife, Sandi, and I to Orcas, but as the little SUV that did slipped sideways down an icy road toward the Anacortes Ferry Terminal one cold January morning in 2007, a sense of safety and security was part of the overall flush of warmth that came when the calm sea and the islands appeared and we knew we were here for good.
We’d been living in Orlando (“Place Where Humidity Lives”), where I worked as the editor of Caribbean Travel & Life magazine. The position was intended as a short cash-replenishing pit stop in an otherwise freelance writing and photography career. Meeting Sandi convinced me to stay longer and buy a house on an oak-lined brick street in the downtown historic district. The 1917 bungalow had been listed as a unique fixer-upper opportunity. Its brass historic plaque was the only solid part of the structure, which remained standing despite the millions of termites that found its Craftsman architecture charming and its floor joists delicious.
It took more than a year to make the house livable. The night before we were to finally move in, I began to load up all my tools. I’d been hauling gear back and forth every day to a dingy garage apartment, just in case. But now why bother? We were going to be living in the house in eight hours. I left the tools in the bedroom.
When I showed up the next morning, everything was gone. Saber saw, circular saw, Sawzall, all gone. More tools, equipment, and a couple of bikes were missing from the garage. As I was calling the police, two guys inside a beater car pulled up the driveway, then immediately reversed out when they saw my truck behind the house. They’d come back to load up the rest of our stuff. I ran out of the house and into the street, but couldn’t get the plate number.
Two Orlando cops showed up four minutes after I called. They were very nice, and listened politely while I described the car and one of the guys I knew had ripped us off. He was a thirtyish downtown street stain who’d snuffled around whenever I was outside working on the house, giving me sob stories and asking if I had anything for him to do. A week before the burglary, I finally gave in and offered the guy ten bucks to help me haul a load of drywall into the garage.
He groaned like every piece he lifted was his last, then suddenly developed a limp and, when that didn’t faze me, a hacking cough. Inside the garage, he eyed the bikes and asked how much work it’d take for him to get one. Not for sale or trade, I said. Then he looked at the extension cords I had snaking around the yard and asked if I had any power tools. I gave him his ten and told him good-bye.
The cops hmmm’d and ahhhh’d at all the right spots during my tale, and even walked around the porch to look at the window the guy jimmied to get inside. When I bent down to show them the fingerprints clearly visible on the sill and asked if they were going to pull them, they both gave me pitying looks. One tore off a copy of the report, told me that’s what my insurance company wanted, and they left.
Ours was a relatively minor burglary, but it still cost thousands out-of-pocket to replace our stuff. I learned that one of the biggest aggravations is that if you’re not totally anal and haven’t itemized, cataloged, and place-mapped every single possession, you never know all that’s missing until you have reason to miss it. Where’s that antique drill my grandfather gave me? Did you see my college ring? That, though, was nothing compared to what that worthless hairbag did to our sense of security.
From the first night on, every creak of that very creaky old house might be him or one of his buddies coming back for more, or for worse. Obviously the crooks had been keeping tabs during the renovation and just waiting until there was enough loot to make breaking in worthwhile.
I made my living traveling, leaving town for about one week every month, seven nights when Sandi would have to come home to an empty house on a dark downtown lot where she could never be sure there wasn’t someone lurking. The thought of that pissed me off so much that every evening for two weeks after the burglary I walked the downtown streets with a pair of heavy work gloves in my back pocket—I didn’t want his blood literally on my hands when I beat the bogus tuberculosis out of him.
I never found him, but there wasn’t a single night spent in that house over the following six years when he wasn’t there in spirit, as the outside lights were turned on, the windows and doors double-checked, the new alarm armed, and the big dog put on duty.
WE BOUGHT PROPERTY ON Orcas Island after a single hearts-and-minds-winning visit in 2002. Each subsequent summer vacation was filled with our ideal outdoor lifestyle—kayaking, boating, scuba diving, hiking—and an expanding circle of local friends. Orcas became our sanctuary.
We’d wrap up last-minute job details, hassle through airports and across 2,600 cramped sky miles, battle the traffic up I-5 out of Seattle to the ferry terminal… and then exhale. The ferry ride offered a leisurely segue from mainland madness to the evergreen air of the San Juan Islands that demanded you take deep breaths. Some 750 islands, rocks, and reefs make up the San Juans. Ninety-seven of them have names, and Orcas has most of the superlatives: largest island, tallest mountain, deepest fjords. It’s a place where green meets blue, forests flow into the sea, and mountains climb into the sky, all within the intimate embrace of an island.
Jeremy Trumble, who owns the Inn on Orcas Island and whose parents began bringing him here when he was a child in the fifties, describes arriving like this: “When we got here, my dad suddenly started driving more calmly and us kids started behaving better. You were friendlier to people because the island just invited that—it had this aura. Somehow, Orcas made you a better person. You just wanted to enjoy every moment that you had on the island because it was such a special place.”
Sandi and I were determined to live within that Orcas aura for more than two weeks each summer. We spent every spare moment figuring out how to knock years off what was first a retirement plan, then a fifteen-, ten-, and finally five-year plan to move to Orcas full-time.
We’d been able to buy island property only because, after a life spent as a hand-to-mouth freelancer, I had a steady magazine paycheck at a time when bankers were flinging mortgage money at anyone with a pulse. Creatively maxing out our finances still bought only a small, drafty cabin with floors that flexed so much you could knock a cup off the kitchen shelf by stomping on the bedroom floor at the other end of the house. A natural history museum’s worth of dead critters clung to the fouled insulation in the crawlspace, and the plumbing sounded as if flushing the toilet angered a clan of badgers living inside the walls.
The original owners had collected rainwater to bathe in and wash their clothes, and they used an outhouse for much of their time on the property, which they named Raven Ridge. When we moved in, the outhouse remained amid a copse of young cedars, standing by with a wonderful view of the water and a fresh roll of TP.
A contractor who came out to bid on bringing the septic system up to snuff brought along an old-timer who didn’t say a word while we poked at pipes and walked off distances that’d have to be dredged down our roller coaster of a driveway. Something about the quiet islander’s thoughtful manner said “common sense,” and at the end of the tour I sidled up and asked: “If this was your property, what would you do?” He looked me up and down, gave me a slight nod, and said simply, “I’d paint the outhouse.”
Our cabin windows looked out over nothing but woods and water without a neighbor in sight. The closest lights we could see were on a Canadian island. We never even considered putting up curtains. If voyeuristic eagles and raccoons wanted revenge for all my years of watching National Geographic, so be it. At night, those bare windows turned the darkest black. On Orcas, though, the darkness was never threatening.
From Orcas you can see Vancouver Island—which has North America’s highest concentration of mountain lions. You can also see a big chunk of mainland British Columbia, which has the most black bears. Not far up the Inside Passage are islands lousy with gigantic Ursus arctos horribilus—grizzly bears. However, the most dangerous wild animal on Orcas other than our overpopulated kamikaze deer is the river otter. Each evening, our dog, Murphy, and I walked the shadowy woods. There were plenty of noises to spark primordial tingles, but you always knew that nothing lurking in the Orcas forest had any intent more nefarious than gathering nuts and nibbling leaves.
I continued traveling frequently for assignments, but now I never worried about Sandi. She was perfectly safe at home, and if she broke down on the road, the next person along would stop and either fix her car or drive her to town. Teenage girls hitchhike around the San Juan Islands without a worry, and getting a ride is so easy that longtime residents think nothing of even counting on their thumbs to get them to the ferry on time.
So we settled in happily, having only the same great concern as every other working person on Orcas: Now that we found this wonderful place, how the hell do we afford to stay here? A good number of wealthy people live on the island, and many more have summer homes. The guy in front of you in line at the hardware store may be the ex-CEO of a huge multinational, a Hollywood producer, or a sickeningly young Internet retiree who optioned out of lastbubble.com just in time. At the other end of the scale, nearly 9 percent of San Juan County residents lived below the poverty line in 2008. There are people who are homeless and there are people who squat in illegal campsites, jetsam shacks, and barely floating boats. There are tarp-topped trailers and threadbare yurts, and a number of people you regularly see around the island look like they’ve escaped from somewhere.
In between the lost souls and CEOs lay the rest of us: retirees getting by and a working middle class of small-business owners, organic farmers, county workers, carpenters and other tradesfolk, plus an eclectic mix of sculptors, potters, painters, musicians, and writers—many of whom wish they knew carpentry or some other skill that might earn them a steadier income.
The island has no industries other than real estate, construction, and seasonal tourism, so there are very few jobs that pay enough to keep you alive in a place where the price of necessities like groceries and gas are 30 percent higher than the mainland. San Juan County has the second-highest income per capita in Washington State, but its average wage is ranked thirty-fifth out of thirty-nine counties. This means that while there’s a lot of money floating around the islands, very little of it is being made by residents who have to work for a living. Most of it comes via investment income of the rich and retired (one-fifth of Orcas’s population is over sixty-five). Property costs—which are bid up by the wealthy from all over the world who discover Orcas and want to own a piece as a part-time getaway—coupled with the few jobs and low wages make it especially hard for kids born here. They grow up in this fabulous, desirable place, but then many of them find they can’t afford to stay if they ever want to own a home of their own.
While I took on every assignment I could wrangle, Sandi went to work in real estate, because if there’s one thing in this world you can count on, it’s the real estate market.
As the crash began, Sandi picked up a second and then a third job, becoming one of many, many Orcas residents who work multiple jobs in order to help their family cling to what they think is the most wonderful rock on the planet. Orcas or bust.
I was drinking a late-morning cup of tea when the news reached me about Bob Rivers’s plane.
With some 230,000 general aviation aircraft based in the United States, there have been, on average, only eight stolen each year of the last decade. Nearly all of those thefts happen near or across the Mexican border, especially in Baja, where authorities say cartel lookouts keep watch for the right kinds of planes—primarily Cessnas—then call in trained air pirates to fly them off to join drug-carrying fleets. American private pilots even refer to certain antitheft devices that fit over throttles and props as “Mexican locks.”
Of course there’s another border to the north. Ever since it became part of the United States, Orcas Island, with its scalloped shoreline, deep fjords, and dark, secluded coves, has enjoyed a storied history as a transshipment point for whatever products the era’s taxes and laws made profitable to move from Canada into the lower forty-eight. Silk, wool clothing, Chinese laborers, opium for the Chinese laborers, Prohibition whiskey, and so on came through with a wink and a nod. At its closest point, the Canadian border lies less than a five-mile boat run from Orcas’s northwest tip. The beach at the top of the island isn’t called Smuggler’s for nothing.
Today, the most popular hooch flowing south from Canada is the mind-bendingly potent wacky weed called BC Bud that, according to our local Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers, trades pound for pound with the cocaine headed north. The vast majority of drugs drive across the line hidden in trucks, but CBP has found weed, coke, and hockey bags filled with cash aboard boats crossing the 165-mile-long watery border that runs a zigzag course from the shore of the mainland, around the San Juan Islands, and out the Juan de Fuca Strait to the Pacific Ocean. The CBP’s Air and Marine base in Bellingham, just thirteen miles from Orcas, operates blistering-fast nine-hundred-horsepower patrol boats along with a Black Hawk helicopter loaded with all the high-tech surveillance goodies to keep watch on the sea border. Still, it’s the thinnest of thin blue lines.
Orcas residents who live near the airport have grown accustomed to hearing planes taking off and landing at all hours of the night. “There are a lot of legitimate reasons for planes to be operating then, especially medical evacuations,” says Bea Von Tobel, the airport manager. “But it’s also not too hard to imagine a plane coming in to drop off a bag of something and then taking off again.”
Once a bale, bag, or bad guy smuggled out of Canada made it onto Orcas Island, it or he would be close to home free. The San Juans may mentally, culturally, and psychically feel like its own independent, far-out archipelago, but it’s part of the United States. Orcas is one of four islands in the group served by Washington State Ferries, the largest ferry system in the country, third largest in the world. There are no passport checks, no Customs, and no security screenings to walk or drive onto a ferry at Orcas, and there’d only recently been some random stops at Anacortes on the mainland, where cars rolled off to drive to Anywhere, U.S.A.
“My first thought, after checking to make sure any of my pilot friends who might have borrowed the plane were okay, was that it obviously had to be taken for a drug run,” says Bob Rivers. “Everything fit. The random stops were happening. Somebody must have had a load they needed to get off Orcas, so they brought in a pilot to fly it out. Where does the plane end up? The Yakama reservation, where they have plenty of problems with drugs and gangs. Even the spot my plane landed was at the top of a road where they could have had an SUV waiting. And they weren’t worried about getting the plane out, just transporting the load. It all made sense; it had to be drugs. My plane stolen to take a joyride? Never. Especially not on a day like that!”
Rivers’s insurance agent had other ideas. “I started feeling like a suspect because all the insurance guy ever said was, ‘We’re sure it was someone you know. Who do you know who could have done this?’”
In one of many fateful connections and coincidences to emerge as Colton Harris-Moore stole his way around the Northwest, his theft of Bob Rivers’s plane actually saved a life. One of Rivers’s pilot friends had been suffering through devastating health and work problems. Things looked hopeless, so he came up with a plot to kill himself by flying a small plane up into the Cascades until the wings iced over and it fell out of the sky. When he heard about Rivers’s plane, though, he had to cancel his suicide because he knew the insurance company would never believe the coincidence of two aircraft connected to two friends going down in the same mountains, both under suspicious circumstances. He feared that his family would never collect the life insurance. So he kept living, and things ultimately turned around and got better for him.
While the insurance company grilled Bob Rivers over his crashed Cessna, the residents of Orcas went back to their lives, the theft just another twisted footnote to add to local history.
The fire blazing in their outdoor woodstove made it feel like our friends Jay Fowler and Teri Williams were telling ghost stories that cool summer evening in 2008, several months before Bob Rivers’s plane was stolen. Teri, a real estate and building permit pro, had found our home for us. Jay works as a lineman for OPALCO, which is officially called Orcas Power and Light Cooperative when things are operating okay, but is locally known as Occasional Power and Light because the electricity goes out whenever a seal farts near the underwater cable that feeds the island.
Between the two of them, they knew the island, its people, and its goings-on as well as anybody. They’d been instrumental in helping us rush our plans to move to Orcas full-time, and now, when the wine and beer were flowing after we’d just finished off a wonderful Northwest potluck of fresh-caught salmon and Dungeness crab, they were telling us there might be a crime problem.
Teri said that the top cop on Orcas had passed along a private warning about a series of strange break-ins on the island. “He said, ‘If you knew the shit that I did, you’d start locking your doors.’”
I was incredulous. We’d been living on the island full-time for over a year and a half and nothing had occurred that might cloud the idyllic image of our new home. Sandi and I discussed it on the way home and weren’t concerned enough to change anything. Besides, neither of us had even seen a house key since Christmas.
The details were sketchy anyway—just jungle-drum rumors. I figured I’d check out some of the stories floating around to see if there was anything to them. Little did I realize that what we didn’t know—including some unnerving incidents that our sheriff’s office was trying hard to keep quiet—was enough to fill a book. Our untouchable little island had already become the happy hunting ground of the twenty-first century’s first outlaw legend.
THOUGH JUST A BIT over thirteen miles wide, it can take an hour to drive from one side of Orcas to the other, as roads skirt mountains and coast around the three inlets that cut deeply into the island from the south. A seven-mile-long fjord, East Sound, nearly cuts Orcas Island in two. At the top of the waterway lies the island’s only town, creatively named Eastsound.
The town wanders back from its waterfront Main Street and climbs a slight rise. On the other side of the hill, which runs down to the ocean, lies a pocket of schools and churches and the small airport. From shore to shore—fjord to sea—Orcas is barely 1.3 miles wide at Eastsound, with the great bulk of the island hanging down to either side of town. A big-idea guy once tried to dig a canal across that narrow span so trading ships wouldn’t have to sail clear around the island and up the long sound. Fortunately he gave up after dredging only about four hundred yards, leaving what’s known as the Ditch, now used as a marina, between the airport runway and Smuggler’s Villa Resort.
Behind town on Mount Baker Road—named for its spectacular view of the closest snow-capped volcano on the mainland—lies Orcas Center, the cultural core of an island that hosts a tremendous amount of artistic and musical talent in relation to its size.
From Main, Eastsound’s shopping district runs up two streets: North Beach Road and Prune Alley, which contrary to popular belief was not named by the island’s retirees in homage to their favorite fiber. It got its name because, along with apples, pears, and strawberries, Orcas farmers once grew and exported large harvests of Italian plums.
There are no stoplights in Eastsound—or anywhere else on the island. It’s a one-horse town, though instead of a horse, there’s a cow. Her name is April, she’s twenty-three, lovably homely, and lives in a field at the end of Enchanted Forest Road. April the cow is also a perennial candidate for mayor. Since the town remains unincorporated, it has no actual government. Each year we elect an animal as honorary mayor. It costs $1 a vote, and all proceeds go to support Orcas Island Children’s House, a facility that helps local working-class families with educational day care and preschool. The fund-raising pitch for Children’s House reads in part: “money not invested in a child during this early phase may cost the emerging community member, and society, enormously in the form of a socially disruptive adulthood.”
From an adult’s perspective, the island seems an idyllic place to grow up. For some tweens and teens, though, once their hormones tell them that climbing trees and catching fish can’t possibly be the end-alls of excitement, the island becomes a big ball of boring. With nothing much to do—not to mention a very limited dating pool—kids begin looking for trouble. Some manage to limit themselves to high jinks such as Yogi Bearing picnic baskets and beer from tourists in Moran State Park. Others go further, venturing into more felonious behavior. No matter what they do, though, there’s a good chance they’ll get caught. Kids call the island Orcatraz because everywhere they turn there’s a prison guard in the form of someone who knows their parents and won’t hesitate to call them.
In the early nineties, there suddenly seemed to be a flood of serious trouble with local island kids. Orcas residents looked around and realized they had a big problem.
The single mother of one troublemaker asked Mike Stolmeier, manager of Smuggler’s Villa Resort, to accompany her son to the courthouse in Friday Harbor, the county seat, over on San Juan Island.
“There was a dozen other Orcas kids on that ferry, eighth and ninth graders, all going over to get felony charges put on them, and not one parent or even a lawyer with them,” says Stolmeier. “I thought, What a bunch of idiot parents we got around here.”
Stolmeier had been on Orcas since 1985, was raising his own teen, and saw the storm developing. “Yeah, the kids were screwed up and behaving badly, but it was as if we were eating our young. The community was after them, the cops were after them, and the prosecutor we had at the time was trying to make a reputation so he could move on to someplace else. The community overreacted and really ruined some lives—there was no way those kids would ever get a chance to try and fit back into our society. As a sociological event, it was horrible.”
Level heads in the community came up with an alternative to hiring a Chitty Chitty Bang Bang–style child catcher. They developed a number of sports, activities, and mentoring programs to give the kids something constructive to do. “These were things that should have been here for them in the first place,” says Stolmeier. “It worked for the kids who hadn’t already gotten in trouble, and things got a lot better for everybody.”
According to stats put together by one of those nonprofit programs, the Orcas Funhouse, over the last decade Orcas kids have grown significantly less drunk, stoned, and pregnant. They’ve also consistently graded above state average in testing across all subjects. And the latest numbers show that between 2000 and 2006, overall arrests of ten- to fourteen-year-olds fell 63 percent, and property crime arrests of ten- to seventeen-year-olds in San Juan County fell 83 percent.
AS FAR AS SPORTS and activities for those over twenty-one, Eastsound has the Lower Tavern. There used to be an Upper Tavern, too, which lives on in stories told whenever visitors ask what the Lower is lower than. Almost all of the stores, restaurants, and inns around Eastsound are mom-and-pops—and many just mom’s, as more than a third of all the businesses in the county are owned by women. The largest anything on Orcas is a regulation-size supermarket owned by a longtime island family. Everything else is scaled down. You won’t find superstores or fast-food drive-throughs, but you can walk from Darvill’s Books to Pawki’s for Pets to Rose’s Bakery.
Any island business that can’t cover its yearly nut by selling essentials to locals has basically a two-month window of heavy tourist traffic in July and August to keep itself afloat. In 2008, every Eastsound business suffered when Orcas’s lone large resort, Rosario, shut down for two years, eliminating nearly one hundred jobs from an island with very few to start with. One of the hardest hit was Vern’s Bayside Restaurant and Lounge.
THE FRINGE ON FIFTY-SEVEN-YEAR-OLD Belinda Landon’s groovy suede boots rarely hangs limp. She could pour drinks behind the bar, take an order from an inside table, check on the action in the little billiards room, then service the tables on the waterfront patio where Vern’s patrons soak up the sun—all in the space of about four minutes.
Landon has worked bars and restaurants since she was fourteen, and from her hard-won look and throaty voice, there’s no mistaking that she’s inhaled some smoky scenes and spent some happy hours in her forty-three years of slinging hash and pulling taps. Plainspoken Belinda is, as they say, one gal who’ll tell you whose cow ate the barley. She made her way to Orcas from Idaho twenty-five years ago with two kids and a husband. He left her and she met Vern, who had his own four kids and whose wife left him. There’s an old Orcas adage that says, “On this island, you don’t lose your spouse, you just lose your turn.”
Belinda and Vern and their collective kids hooked up, as she says, “Brady Bunch–style.” She worked at Rosario Resort back then, as did her daughter, Marion Rathbone, who also started in the food and beverage business at fourteen. Vern was a mason by trade, but ran a little café at the time and always wanted something bigger. A deal came up for what you’d think would be an ideal location for a restaurant: central waterfront, spectacular view, upstairs casual dining room, downstairs bar with space for a couple of pool tables, and a sunny patio just above the lapping waters of East Sound.
The space had a checkered history. “It had dozens of owners over the years and it always went broke,” says Belinda. “We were the only ones left stupid enough to take it.” No one, however, had tried to keep the restaurant open year-round, and Vern thought that was the secret. They opened in 1993. It was never a gold mine, but they made a go of it.
Vern died in January 2006. Then when Rosario closed in 2008 they lost a lot of regulars who’d clock out of their resort jobs and head to town for drinks. Real estate and construction evaporated in the housing bust, forcing a lot of tradesmen off the island. As the U.S. economy further tanked, everyone—locals and tourists alike—spent less. Belinda had two neck surgeries, two back surgeries, and one on her arm, but she still worked full shifts cooking, waiting tables, and tending bar, trying to keep the business alive. Her daughter, Marion, served as general manager and tried to pull in trade by playing karaoke queen down in the bar.
On August 26, 2008, a package came to Vern’s addressed to Belinda. Marion took one look and called up the vendor. Despite their guarantee that her mom would pass all FAA tests or they’d refund her money, Marion told them Belinda was not interested in Sporty’s Complete Recreational Pilot Flight Training Course. Her mom was not, at the moment, tempted to go Top Gun.
Sporty’s informed Marion that they’d received a valid online order for the six-DVD set from Belinda’s credit card. She replied that her mom didn’t know how to use a “friggin’ computer let alone order something online.” Sporty’s said they’d be happy to give her a refund.
Marion resealed the package and set it on the desk below the window unit air conditioner that cooled her small, cluttered office adjacent to the restaurant’s kitchen. She then went back to handling the hundreds of daily details it takes to keep a restaurant running.
The following morning when Marion arrived at work, her office door was already open. Everything seemed okay at first glance, but then she stepped inside and peeked around the dividing wall that formed a little storage space for office supplies and the restaurant’s safe.
“It looked like a bomb had gone off,” she says. Powder from the cement used to fill the walls of the metal safe was everywhere. A hammer from Vern’s old toolbox lay broken on the floor. Someone had used it and a crowbar to peel back the steel of the safe until the lock gave way. It’d been a major demolition job, very noisy and done on exactly the right night.
Marion felt sick to her stomach. With the rumors of break-ins happening around the island, she’d just convinced her mom to move her personal cash into the office safe instead of keeping it at home. That money was gone, as were two credit cards, Belinda’s birth certificate and social security card, and her late husband’s passport. To make matters worse, the first thing Marion had planned to do that morning was go to the bank and make her weekly deposit of cash emptied from the bar’s pull tab gambling machine. In all, more than $10,000 of uninsurable cash was missing.
The safe wasn’t empty, though.
“At the bottom was a single dollar bill and the credit card that had been used to make the online order,” says Marion. “It was folded in half, creased as if to say, ‘Here ya go, I don’t need this anymore.’”
They called the sheriff’s department. Vern’s had suffered small thefts over its sixteen years, mostly summer employees dipping into the till, but never anything major like this. “We felt violated, raped,” says Belinda. “And then, worse, our police told us we were asking for it… just because we didn’t have a security system.”
In the disorder of deputies coming in and out and still trying to get the restaurant up and running because they couldn’t afford to lose a summer day’s business—especially now—Marion forgot about the Sporty’s package. Then FedEx showed up with another box. This one contained a pair of spy cameras, two tiny, battery-powered, motion-activated cameras designed to be hidden anywhere and record several days’ worth of surveillance video. Like the flying course, the cameras had been ordered a few days earlier using Belinda’s credit card.
“All kinds of alarm bells started going off,” says Marion, who suddenly realized that the Sporty’s package had been taken along with everything in the safe. “Learn-to-fly DVDs, surveillance cameras from a company that also sells untraceable cell phones… and now whoever ordered all this also had a shitload of cash… Hello? Certainly seemed to me like it could have something to do with terrorism.”
Beyond general post-9/11 awareness, the Pacific Northwest remains extra sensitive to the potential of terrorism due to Ahmed Rassem, the Millennium Bomber. In December 1999, the Al Qaeda–trained and –funded Rassem filled a car with explosives intending to blow up passengers at an LAX terminal. He successfully drove through U.S. Immigration checks and onto a car ferry in Victoria, B.C.—a city on Vancouver Island less than ten miles from the San Juans across Haro Strait. The bomber’s plan failed only because a U.S. Customs agent named Diana Dean at the ferry’s destination in Port Angeles, Washington, sensed something wasn’t quite right and searched his car.
Marion took the cameras and her hunch to the Orcas cop shop. The deputy shrugged her off.
“I couldn’t believe it,” she says. “But there was definitely something going on, and I wasn’t going to shut up until someone listened.” So Marion called the FBI. They did listen and took a report, and an agent phoned a detective at the San Juan County Sheriff’s Office headquarters over in Friday Harbor. They decided, though, that there wasn’t much to go on.
Marion kept wondering if she was soon going to hear about a crime or terrorist attack involving a small plane. She and Belinda also had another concern: staying in business. “That money was our winter,” she says, her soft face taking on a hard glower. “We’re not rich. My mom wouldn’t have been waiting friggin’ tables if she didn’t have to.” Marion eventually did make that trip to the bank, but instead of a deposit, it was to borrow enough money to keep Vern’s open and staffed for what looked to be a lean winter.
“And then we had to borrow another fifteen grand to put in a security system.”
Mount Constitution rules over the entire east side of Orcas Island as the centerpiece of Moran State Park, a 5,200-acre Northwest wonderland of gigantic old-growth trees where mountain streams and waterfalls feed five blue lakes filled with rainbow trout and landlocked kokanee salmon. The view from the tower atop the 2,407-foot-high mountain (named for USS Constitution, aka Old Ironsides) takes in much of the San Juans as well as the Cascades running up into Canada, and, looking south, the Olympic Mountains. It’s the highest point in the San Juans, but it’s not Orcas’s most notable. That honor goes to a smaller but more distinctive geological feature on the west side of the island called Turtleback Mountain. The formation’s bulbous head and sloping shell are instantly recognizable from many miles away, and first sight of the friendly turtle is always a comforting welcome home when returning to the island.
In 2006, developers drew up plans to slice Turtleback into housing tracts. Full- and part-time San Juan County residents—including cartoonist Gary Larson, who came out of retirement to draw and donate a Far Side–ish frame showing doctors surgically removing the developers from the mountain—worked together with the San Juan Preservation Trust to raise $17 million to buy 1,576 acres and turn it into a preserve. Today Turtleback, along with approximately 20 percent of all the land in the San Juans, is protected in perpetuity.
The day after someone made off with the Sporty’s flight manuals and all of Vern’s cash, Martin and Ellen Brody (not their real names) returned to their home at the foot of Turtleback Mountain. Wooden stairs, decks, and walkways climb the slope to reach their comfortable single-story that’s partially hidden from the road behind a garden. With their back sheltered by the turtle’s shell, the Brodys face across Crow Valley, the island’s best bottomland. They can even see the small farm they bought when they first moved to Orcas from Seattle back in 1981.
“We’d been to Orcas on vacation and thought it would be the most wonderful place to live and raise a family,” says Martin. “And we were right.”
He hung out a shingle in financial services and became a gentleman farmer. “The rule was we could have any animals the kids wanted as long as they were small enough for me to chase down and tackle. Cows and horses were out, but we had sheep, goats, pigs, and chickens.”
Ellen became a beloved local teacher and spent her free time mastering woodwork. The Brodys kept the farm until their two kids graduated college, then downsized into the home on Turtleback.
“When we sold the farmhouse, the new owners asked for the keys,” remembers Ellen. “We said, ‘What keys?’ We’d never locked the doors in the sixteen years we lived there.”
Retired now, Martin and Ellen are big into taking cruises. They had one coming up, but this recent trip was a visit to see their daughter, now a Harvard professor. When they walked into their immaculately kept home, Ellen went through the galley kitchen and nearly stepped into a large puddle of water on the floor outside a bathroom.
“It was right below the skylight and I thought, Uh-oh, we’ve got a leak,” says Martin. They cleaned up the water and he added “fix leak” to his list of things to do before they left in three weeks for a monthlong Pacific cruise. Jet-lagged, they then went to bed.
“The next morning I get up and reach for my box of cereal,” says Martin. “But it was gone.” He knew he’d opened a fresh box of Honey Bunches of Oats just before they left for Boston. Ellen said she hadn’t touched it, so Martin chalked it up to a senior moment. Same thing with the missing carton of milk he was sure he’d left in the fridge.
Ellen took their suitcases into the laundry room to start the wash. When she opened the louvered doors in front of her sparkling white stackables, she instantly knew something wasn’t right. “There were two dirty fingerprints, one on the washer and one on the dryer,” she says.
Martin had no doubt—“She keeps this place spotless”—but it was Ellen who put words to the unthinkable.
“Someone’s been in our house.”
Now they went through their home, looking carefully. Ellen called out from her office that her brand-new computer netbook, bought to keep up with emails during their upcoming cruise, was gone. In the kitchen, Martin realized that the leather wallet he’d left on top of their cruise documents was also missing. True to his profession, he knew exactly how much had been in there: “Three twenties.”
Martin checked all the doors. Nothing was broken. They had only simple door-handle locks, and it appeared they were easily defeated by some kind of a slender tool like a flathead screwdriver.
They had to accept that a burglar had indeed broken in and taken a wallet and laptop. The head-shaker was that the thief had also taken a shower—leaving the puddle of water—done laundry, and eaten breakfast. Someone had eaten their porridge, sat in their chairs, maybe slept in their bed.
The losses didn’t add up to much—at least not enough to deal with the insurance hassles—so at first they decided not to report it. “He could have done anything while he was in here,” says Martin. “But nothing was damaged or even disturbed. He didn’t take Ellen’s jewelry or anything like that; he only took useful stuff.”
The following Sunday, though, after Martin went on his weekly bike ride down the valley, he heard that neighbors just up the road had surprised a burglar inside their house. The middle-aged couple had come home around 10 p.m., and as the woman opened the front door, she “startled” a slender young man over six feet tall. The burglar took off through the kitchen, knocked over a chair, and fled out the back door. Her husband chased him down the driveway, but couldn’t catch up. On his way back to the house, he found a bicycle that the burglar had apparently brought with him, so he took it inside, locking the door behind him.
They called the sheriff, and as they were waiting for a deputy to arrive, the burglar actually came back; they saw him sneaking around outside and peeking through the window. The bold young burglar disappeared as the police car pulled up. The cop investigated and discovered that the couple’s safe had been rifled, but nothing appeared to be missing. He also made a point of checking their liquor cabinet and noting it was intact—something very unusual for this type of crime with a young suspect. The couple showed him the bike and said they suspected it was the thief’s. The deputy carried the bike out to his vehicle and drove it back to the Eastsound cop shop, where he photographed it, recorded its serial number and identifying details, and then locked it inside the evidence room.
In all their years on the island, the Brodys had never heard of a burglary happening in sparsely populated Crow Valley. They felt two on the same road within such a short period of time must be related, so Martin decided he better report what had happened at their house.
He spoke to the sergeant in charge of Orcas, who had some good news and some bad. He told Martin about the getaway bike they’d confiscated at the neighbors’ home. Martin said, “Great, if you got that I’m sure that means you must be able to get fingerprints.”
“Well,” Martin says the sergeant told him, “funny thing is, we brought the bike to the station, but now it’s missing.”
Martin could not believe what he was hearing. Then he remembered something strange he’d seen on his last ride. He said, “I think I know where that bike is.” Riding along Crow Valley Road, he’d seen a bike tossed into the bushes. It was very unusual, but he didn’t stop, thinking maybe its owner was in the thickets picking blackberries. The sergeant asked what kind of bike it was and Martin told him.
“No,” said the cop, “the one we had was a black Gary Fisher with red flames painted on it.”
Martin felt a strange little buzz. “That’s funny… I have a Gary Fisher, black with red flames,” he said. “But it couldn’t have been mine because it’s here at the house—I just rode it.”
It was an odd enough coincidence that the sergeant drove out to the Brodys. Martin now remembered that his bike had seemed particularly dirty. But it’d been in the exact spot he always kept it—among the tools in their little garden shed attached to the carport—so it didn’t register more than an odd feeling. Sure enough, though, when they checked the serial number it was the same bike the police had locked away in their evidence room.
It was almost unbelievable. The only explanation was that the burglar had been staying in the Brodys’ house and using Martin’s bike to travel around and try to rip off their neighbors. (There’d also been a break-in and attempt to access the computer at a nearby hardware store, Island Supply, where deputies had found a bare footprint.) When the burglar had run off and lost the bike to the police, he followed them the three and a half miles back to Eastsound that same night. Residents near the cop shop later reported that their lawn furniture had been moved into a comfortable arrangement overlooking the station.
The burglar had run a stakeout on the police.
San Juan County doesn’t provide Orcas with twenty-four-hour police coverage. There are a couple of hours when a deputy is on call but there’s no one actively on duty. Once the cop shop closed down for the night, the incredibly ballsy burglar jimmied open the sergeant’s office window, which had no security system protecting it, not even a stick to keep it from being slid open.
Once inside, the thief had enough time to rummage around the sergeant’s desk, find the keys to the evidence room, and resteal Martin Brody’s bike.
He then rode it back to Crow Valley and returned it to its rightful owner.
THE SERGEANT LEFT THE Brodys’ without taking fingerprints off the bike. Martin and Ellen went about their day, but with a different sense of reality setting in about their island home. Was this someone with a vendetta against the police or a twisted sense of decency, or was this just a crook with a sense of humor and big brass pair?
Ellen began cleaning the house and had just wiped one of the fingerprints off the washer and dryer. Oops, she thought. The other print still looked good, though. She could clearly see the swirls with her naked eye. She called the sheriff’s office and asked if they wanted to come back out and collect it. They said no.
A couple of days later, Martin was standing at the window when he saw a flash of color in the garden. He reached for the birding binoculars he always kept handy, but came up empty. They were gone, too. The Brodys decided that before they went away again they’d better put in deadbolts. Six hundred dollars later, a locksmith had rekeyed all the knobs and drilled out the jambs and installed new locks. They went about their pleasant Orcas lives for the next several weeks, he puttering in the garden, she in her woodshop. But things weren’t quite the same. They each now kept a key with them at all times, and locked up whenever they left the property. They hoped, though, that this had all been just a freak occurrence.
ORCAS’S LOCAL NEWSPAPER, THE Islands’ Sounder, regularly runs a log from the San Juan County Sheriff’s Office. It’s a popular feature where you find short, fascinating vignettes such as “An 83-year-old Eastsound woman reported one pair of fur-lined moccasins and three almost-new pair of beige women’s underwear stolen from an unlocked old fruit-packing barn.” There was also the epic saga of two “friendly” Great Danes that got loose and went llama chasing, and the cautionary tale of a man who fired three rounds from his shotgun aiming for an otter under his porch and instead hit his neighbor in the neck (neither the llamas nor the neighbor were seriously injured). After the follow-the-bouncing-bike incidents at the Brodys’ and the cop shop, though, the only thing officially reported by San Juan County sheriff Bill Cumming was that there’d been a “security breach” at the Orcas station.
HEADING SOUTH FROM THE Brodys’, Turtleback’s shell slopes down to the water, the tip of the turtle’s tail splitting Massacre Bay from West Sound. A boaty area, West Sound is filled with bright sails tacking back and forth every summer day. Continuing west on a cliff-clinging road, you come to the tiny hamlet of Deer Harbor. Two marinas and several inns operate on this small picturesque bay. Around the same time as the Crow Valley bike caper, strange things were happening at the Deer Harbor Inn—though no one would suspect a thing until September, when the bills came due.
Deer Harbor Inn was the first resort on Orcas, renting tent cabins in the late 1800s to supplement the income from the owner’s apple orchard. A small hotel and restaurant were built after the turn of the century. Since 1982, it’s been owned by the Carpenter family, with two brothers, Matt and Ryan, running the restaurant and rental homes. In late August, someone had broken into the inn and gotten hold of Ryan’s credit card. The thief had been smart enough to not actually take the card, though, just the numbers and security code, so Ryan didn’t have a clue until he opened his statement and saw that he—or at least his identity—had ordered more than $3,000 in spy cameras and other electronics plus a $900 high-tech flight helmet. When Ryan contacted the sellers, they said that their records showed that the gear had all been successfully delivered to Orcas Island. But not, of course, to Ryan.
Back in Eastsound, someone broke through a window at Wildlife Cycles on North Beach Road. He passed over models worth three times as much to snag a particular bike—a Gary Fisher, designed for both street and rugged trail. The burglar raided the cash drawer, spilling bills across the wooden deck as he rolled his new bike out the front door. A computer company in town also suffered a breach of security, with $8,000 worth of software and equipment ordered online using its accounts. The shopping spree included hacking and spyware programs designed for identity theft, along with more infrared spy cameras.
Over at Smuggler’s, near the airport, manager Mike Stolmeier opened the door to the resort’s sauna at 10 p.m. and found a “big, tall, gangly kid” sitting inside. “We get moochers sometimes,” says Stolmeier. “So I said, ‘Okay, this isn’t working, you gotta go.’ I didn’t pay much attention to him since he didn’t give me any guff and just got up and left.”
One odd thing that Stolmeier did notice was that the kid sitting in the sauna with the heat turned up was fully clothed and had a big backpack on the bench next to him.
SEPTEMBER ROLLED AROUND AND it was time for the Brodys to cast off on their long-awaited Pacific cruise. They boarded the ship on September 19. Ellen had lugged along a large laptop since her little netbook had been stolen. As soon as they settled in, she bought a package of onboard Internet minutes, enough, she thought, to cover their entire monthlong vacation.
The first time she signed on, up popped a note from eBay congratulating her on making the winning bid for a smartphone.
“Uh-oh, we’ve got a problem,” she told Martin. The next email was from PayPal: a receipt on her account for the $320 phone. “It was the worst feeling in my life,” she says, suddenly realizing that the person who’d eaten their Honey Bunches of Oats had also scanned her home computer and found the document where she kept all her account numbers and passwords. Goldilocks had stolen her identity and was on a shopping spree.
Ellen immediately sent a flurry of emails, trying to cancel the purchase and change all her accounts. The retailer had already shipped the phone and told her to simply refuse the package. When she contacted the San Juan County Sheriff’s Office, though, they said not to do that. They asked if she’d agree to have them post a deputy inside their house, using the package as a trap. It sounded like a good plan, and the Brodys agreed.
On September 23, the local courier alerted deputies that the package had arrived on the island. The following day, police set up a stakeout at the Brodys’ with the phone left on the front porch. On the evening of the twenty-fifth, a retired schoolteacher who serves as a reserve deputy waited alone inside the house. He later told Martin Brody that around 8 p.m.—still twilight in September’s long days—he was standing in their kitchen when he heard a key slide into the deadbolt lock. The deputy hadn’t locked the door, and was very surprised to hear someone try a key because he knew the locks had just been changed.
The door swung open and in stepped a young man the deputy describes as “NBA big.” The cop yelled, “Freeze!” But the kid didn’t. Instead, his hand went to his side and then quickly came up holding something metal.
According to Brody, the ex-schoolteacher said he suddenly found himself in a fiery, choking mist of pepper spray. After firing the spray, the tall young man had immediately spun and fled back out the door. The deputy chased him outside and saw him fly off the porch without seeming to touch the stairs. Then, still moving at full speed, the suspect made the ninety-degree turn past the Brodys’ koi pond, leaped down another half flight of stairs, vaulted a railing, and scrambled across a large moss-covered boulder before vanishing into the twilight.
After his capture, Colton Harris-Moore told a similar story, with a few different details: When he went to pick up a package he’d had delivered to a rural Orcas home, he noticed that the inside lights weren’t quite the way he’d left them. He crept up to the porch, opened the door, and found himself facing a cop who was sitting in a rocking chair. Colt said the deputy aimed a laser-sighted pistol at his chest and started laughing. Colt never mentioned the pepper spray, but says he turned and ran, escaping by scaling an eight-foot-tall rock “like a vampire.”
(A third version of the story comes from the police report of the incident that San Juan County declined to release, despite multiple public records requests. I was able to see the report only after it was included in a defense filing for Colt’s federal sentencing in January 2012. In his report, the deputy admits he was sitting in the living room when the tall suspect spent “10–15 seconds attempting to unlock” the open door. He writes that after the suspect finally entered the home, “I stood up, announced myself by stating ‘Police officer, get on the ground’ and began to train the department issued taser on the subject while taking the device off safe.” He says the suspect—who Colt’s defense team agrees was Colt—immediately turned and “bolted” using “great speed and agility.” In the official report, the deputy says he didn’t see Colt fire the pepper spray, and only noticed it irritating his eyes and throat when he reentered the home after watching Colt run off.)
The Brodys got the bad news aboard ship. “They could have had him right then and there,” says Martin, “but they blew their chance.”
He and Ellen had a creepy feeling that was confirmed when they returned to Orcas and discovered that one of their new spare keys had been taken from their cupboard. They also found that one of their window locks had been disabled but made to look like it still worked. The burglar had set it up so he’d always have a way to get into their home.
They wondered why they’d been targeted again, then suddenly understood: Their cruise papers had been on the kitchen counter during his first stay in their home. “He knew exactly when we were going and how long we’d be gone,” says Martin. He also knew he had Martin’s bike to use—again.
Their phone bill and online charges showed that the burglar moved in, like an uninvited house sitter, on the same day they left. Two calls were made from their phone to the mainland Washington home of a prison buddy of Colton Harris-Moore’s.
“He thought he had a safe place to stay for a month,” says Martin. “And he would have if Ellen hadn’t checked her email.”
The Brodys rekeyed again, fixed their window lock, and added sticks to all their windows. Ellen then spent several months trying to clear the charges from their PayPal account. Half a year later they still had eye-burning traces of pepper spray on their furniture, even after multiple cleanings. Martin’s Gary Fisher bicycle—which had been stolen for the third time while they were on the cruise—was never returned.
On October 2, 2008, the Orcas Island Chamber of Commerce held a meeting to address what the Islands’ Sounder headlined as a “plague” of sophisticated burglaries. The reporting quotes Orcas deputy sergeant Steve Vierthaler telling the business owners that some of the crimes appeared to be connected and were “very subtle thefts” that included thieves using WiFi scanners to hack into people’s home networks and steal their identities.
Vierthaler was asked about the possibility of getting DNA from break-ins. “The reality is not like CSI on television,” he said. “It is hugely expensive to do lab work and the labs are hugely backlogged.” He said that DNA might be used for violent crimes, but not for thefts.
According to the Washington State Patrol, which does all the law enforcement laboratory work for San Juan County, it doesn’t cost the county a dime to send DNA samples or other forensics to their lab. The only cost is the time it takes a local deputy to collect the evidence. There are indeed backlogs, and testing is done on a priority basis with murders, rapes, and assaults taking precedence over property crimes, but a WSP lab spokesman says they work with local law enforcement on any kind of crime, especially when it’s high profile, highly publicized, or perceived to be an immediate threat to the community. With today’s computerized databases of fingerprints and DNA from known criminals (Colt’s prints and DNA had been in the system for years by this point), law enforcement experts say that not attempting to collect forensics at crime scenes is the result of poor training, bad policy, or just plain laziness.
Vierthaler told the Chamber members that all the businesses should consider alarm systems. “I would prefer a silent alarm,” he said. “But because we are so understaffed, the response time is at least ten minutes, so an audible alarm would be better.” He had some simple suggestions, too: “Leave the lights on inside and use motion detector lights outside. These people are like cockroaches: you turn on the lights and they run.”
He also suggested that everyone, at their businesses and residences, put wooden dowels in their windows. He didn’t report, however, how the sheriff’s office had recently learned firsthand the importance of that do-it-yourself tip.
RUMORS FLEW AROUND THE island—as usual—but other than a few unofficial “If you knew the shit that I did” warnings, Orcas residents were never alerted that a burglar brazen enough to break into the cop shop and even pepper spray a deputy had been stalking the island.
There were a couple more break-ins that fall, but both happened at construction operations, typical targets for local kids. Maybe, as the sergeant told the Chamber, “these things happen in cycles and end when [opportunistic burglars] get caught or leave the island.”
Then came that surreal November 12, when Bob Rivers’s airplane flew away. Burglaries dropped back to their usual low level once the Cessna took off, but the police never connected the plane theft to any of the other crimes that had happened on the island that summer because they had no forensics.
As soon as she heard about the stolen plane, Marion Rathbone went directly to the police and reminded them about the Sporty’s Flight Training Course taken from Vern’s. She’d been waiting to hear about a crime involving a plane and here it was—she felt it couldn’t be a coincidence. She says the sergeant’s response was an authoritative “You can’t learn to fly from DVDs.”
The other person on Orcas who had a clue was Ryan Carpenter, who wondered if the $900 flight helmet ordered with his credit card had just taken off.
Airline pilots call the area around the San Juan Islands “the blue hole” because the Olympic Mountains and the Vancouver Island Range hold back the roiling Pacific clouds, often leaving a pocket of clear blue air over the islands when it’s raining everywhere else in the region. It’s the same rainshadow effect that happens on the east side of the Cascades. Forks, the legendary home of the Twilight characters, lies only seventy miles west of the San Juans yet averages over a hundred inches more rain per year than falls on the islands—and nothing smells worse than wet werewolf.
The mountain defenses and location in the middle of the inland Salish Sea keep San Juan Islands winters remarkably benign considering how far north they lie. Just to the west, the Pacific coasts of the Olympic Penninsula and Vancouver Island promote “storm watching” vacations where shawl-swaddled folks sip cocoa and watch sixty-foot waves explode against the shore. The Salish Sea, though, is walled off from the open Pacific and its huge swells. In the other direction, rising dramatically in the east and visible from Orcas, Mount Baker holds the world record for highest single-season snowfall: 1999 saw it smothered with ninety-five feet of snow. However, down in the islands the sea moderates temperatures so snow and ice rarely stick around.
If there’s one month not to be in the San Juans it’s November, when the islands often take hits from major tree-toppling windstorms and the year’s hardest rains. The rest of late fall and winter are usually mild, what the Irish call “soft” days of mist and occasional drizzle with cool temperatures. Still, daylight can be in depressingly short supply this far north, and the low-slung sun seldom rises with enough strength to feel it on your face. Island residents pile Douglas fir into their wood stoves and pull together community potlucks so they can laugh away the darkness with other hardy full-timers. On Orcas, the Giving Tree goes up at Island Market and people buy presents for those local kids who’d otherwise go without at Christmas.
Then winter gives way. The buffleheads and goldeneyes fly off, replaced by spring swarms of rufous hummingbirds returning from their epic Mexican vacations. Spring is also when the San Juans’ 125 pairs of bald eagles weave the finishing touches into their massive nests atop waterfront trees, and the three resident pods of killer whales begin spending more of their time around the islands. The real start of summer doesn’t depend on the calendar but on whenever the hallowed North Pacific High chases the drizzly Aleutian Low back north. Once this semipermanent air mass takes over around the Fourth of July, the San Juans can see two months of wondrously monotonous blue skies and 72-degree days that seem to go on forever (at this latitude it’s dark for only about five hours in midsummer).
Long before any vacationing white man arrived on Orcas, its peaceful, easy summers were enjoyed by the Lummi, one of the Northern Straits Salish-speaking tribes. Lummi Indian clans moved out to the island each June and set up camps where they feasted on the plentiful salmon, crabs, and clams. The only downside to summering in the San Juans back in the day were the occasional murderous raids by Haida and Bella Bella, warlike tribes from up in the Queen Charlotte Islands and the Alaskan coast. The first white settlers in the San Juans married Salish women because they knew the skills to survive in the Pacific Northwest wilderness. However, the native women remained so afraid of the Haida that even in the last decades of the nineteenth century they’d hide themselves under blankets when sailing between islands during the summer raiding season.
From where I live in Deer Harbor, the only road to Eastsound sweeps around Massacre Bay, named for an 1857 raid that wiped out more than one hundred summering Lummi, with the surviving women and children hauled away as slaves in forty-foot-long war canoes. A beautiful little knoll just offshore also takes its name from the slaughter: Skull Island.
When I arrived in town on a brilliantly sunny Thursday, August 6, 2009, the news was that a boat had been found that morning mysteriously abandoned off Eastsound’s Waterfront Park. Boats sometimes pull their anchors or slip their knots. They’ve also been found adrift after their owners leaned across the gunwale to take a leak and disappeared overboard. But not this boat.
The sheriff quickly connected it to the report of a boat stolen from La Conner, a touristy little harbor town on the mainland about nine miles from Camano Island. The trip north to Orcas covered between thirty and thirty-five miles, depending on whether the thief took the protected Swinomish Channel up and around Anacortes, or navigated the wild waters of Deception Pass.
It wasn’t quite a forty-foot war canoe, but for the residents of Orcas Island, it was still an ominous sign.
WITHIN DAYS, KYLE ATER, owner of Orcas Homegrown Market and Gourmet Delicatessen, discovered that someone had tried to break into his organic grocery on North Beach Road. The burglar climbed to the second floor, where Ater keeps an office adjacent to a long dining room lined with windows that provide a nearly 360-degree view of downtown. He reported it to the police and asked if it might be related to the previous year’s unsolved thefts or the recent stolen boat. The deputy, he says, assured him it was just an isolated incident.
“People had been stealing stuff from Homegrown for years before I bought it,” says Ater. “Kids just walking out with beer from the cooler… and the police never did anything about it because this was just the stinky barefoot hippie place.”
Ater, who’d been on the island for eleven years, sank everything he had into buying Homegrown in 2006. He’d been burglarized shortly after taking over the grocery, and he was determined not to let anyone rip him off again. Like nearly every other Eastsound business after all the mysterious summer of ’08 troubles, Homegrown had a security and surveillance system. Ater, though, decided to take it all the way. Each evening after they closed up, he and his girlfriend, Cedra, took their two dogs, Pumpkin and Skyla, plus a loaner Rottweiler named Mattie, and camped out on the floor of the office upstairs. Kyle also bought himself a .44 Magnum revolver.
Serene Orcas Island at the height of its summer season, with tourists in killer whale T-shirts strolling the quaint downtown eating ice cream cones, now had its slender, bespectacled purveyor of natural foods and holistic health supplements patrolling the ramparts packing Dirty Harry heat.
ON AUGUST 18, MEMBERS of a prayer group noticed a short-haired young man acting oddly inside St. Francis Catholic Church, which sits kitty-corner to the airport. The guy awkwardly knelt down at the votive candles and then looked up. He wasn’t gazing as far as heaven, though. He had more secular concerns. When he spotted the surveillance cameras, he flipped a hoodie up over his head and left. He unnerved the parishioners enough that one asked for an escort to the parking lot. Two days later, someone broke into the church through a back window, busted open the sacrament room with a hammer and screwdriver, and then climbed up into the ceiling to take four of the security cameras along with the attached DVR. No money or other items were stolen, just the surveillance system. The thief left behind two cameras, but poked them toward the ceiling so they couldn’t watch him.
Somebody messing with the church went beyond the pale, and Eastsounders held their breath, wondering if St. Francis was just the beginning of another crime spree. The recession was in full swing, tourism down, and local businesses needed to squirrel away every summer dollar to get them through what could be another tough winter.
The previous year’s “plague” had briefly reminded residents that, as San Juan County sheriff Bill Cumming told me, “The San Juans do have a dark side.” A look through back issues of the Islands’ Sounder showed occasional flare-ups, with a spate of burglaries occurring every few years on Orcas, San Juan, or Lopez Island. These were almost always attributed to local meth heads.
Learning that there was even such a thing as a local meth head on Orcas rocked my idyllic-island construct. On reflection, though, it made sense. We were a rural, overwhelmingly white community in western Washington State: the perfect formula for growing tweakers. Police officers from the TV shows Cops and Washington’s Most Wanted told speed-fiend stories on Bob Rivers’s radio show, saying they’d actually responded to “meth-induced chainsaw fights” in the rustic communities not far from cosmopolitan Seattle. As one officer said: “The reason why Cops likes us so much is because we have a lot of crazy white people up here. And crazy white people make for good TV.”
Of course, like all the other crime issues, the meth problem on Orcas was at a relatively low level.
Reality took a bit of the bloom off the idyllic Orcas rose, but Sandi and I still weren’t locking our doors. We had a big dog, Murphy, a six-foot-from-nose-to-tail Leonberger, which I believe is a cross between a bouncy Tigger and a grizzly bear—at least in Murphy’s case. Once we moved to this eminently dog-friendly island, Murphy became a permanent fixture in my pickup truck, going everywhere I went with his massive head hanging out the cab’s back window like a trophy mount. With so little crime, we never felt the need to have him stay home to watch over the property. As it was, Murphy’s concept of guard-dogging wasn’t to prevent anyone from entering the house—leaving, yes, but not entering. Whenever he sensed someone outside our little cabin, instead of barking to warn them off, he silently stalked them, moving from door to door, hackles up, muscles tensed. No amount of prodding could get him to change his strategy. He’d raise a hellhound yowl if someone actually knocked, but if they were just lurking around out there, he waited with a distinct “I’m finally gonna get to eat somebody” excitement.
August 27, 2009, around 3 a.m., Murphy padded heavily into the bedroom, snuffed at the window screen, and raised his hackles. I already had my eyes half open as I’d been lying there with that strange feeling that something had woken me but I didn’t know what. The clouded moon bathed the room in just enough dim blue light to see the dog at the window. Then my eyes suddenly opened wider. All manner of deer, raccoons, mink, and other critters rustle around our cabin at night, but none of them had ever moved lumber. Murphy and I both heard the clack of wood against wood in the crawlspace.
The dirt-floor area under the cabin lies open on one end and anything could have wandered in there. It must have been a deer, I thought, because nothing else would be big enough to knock around the 2 × 4s. We listened for a while but nothing else happened. Yep, had to be a deer stumbling around, maybe drunk on huckleberries. My last thought as I rolled over and went back to sleep was, I hope it didn’t knock loose any of the plumbing.
The following night, again around 3 a.m., I woke to the sensation of someone watching me in the darkness. This would have been terrifying if I wasn’t used to living with a pony-size dog who thinks he has mind-control powers. Murphy believes if he stares down at me long and hard enough I’ll get up and do his bidding—mainly his feeding. He usually waits until after sunrise, though, so this was unusual. When he knew I was awake, he went to the window, again snuffle-snorting like a bear and raising his hackles. I sat up and listened, but couldn’t hear anything except a rare summer sprinkling of rain against the metal roof. The thought of pulling on shoes and a rain shell, finding a flashlight, stumbling around under the cabin, and then having to dry off a half acre of wet dog was too much just to chase away some dilettante critter trying to shelter from a shower. The cabin perches atop a hundred-foot cliff, which means there’s also no option of simply loosing the hound. In the past, several Orcas dogs tailing hard after deer have Thelma-and-Louised themselves off cliffs.
The drizzle passed after a couple of minutes and everything fell silent again as I slipped back to sleep.
The next morning, Jeremy Trumble woke to find there’d been a B and E at his B and B, the Inn on Orcas Island, one mile away through the woods from our cabin.
Both Jeremy and his partner, John Gibbs, had come from East Los Angeles. “I was a high school teacher in a ghetto school, but I wasn’t teaching, I was surviving,” says Trumble. “I told John about this place where my mom and dad took me in the fifties, this wonderful, wonderful island with no crime where running a B and B would be the perfect semiretirement lifestyle.”
They traveled to Orcas four times a year starting in the mid-eighties to look for just the right property. “Orcas has a drawbridge mentality, not real welcoming for development, but we persevered and in ’94 we found this property. We sat here on the grass and it was one of those August days… ”
Their six acres overlook a tidal wetland attended by stately blue herons. It took five years to get permits to replace the existing double-wide trailer with what is now an exquisite coastal inn. They finally opened in the summer of 2002.
The inn’s kitchen faces the wetland and woods beyond, and they never bothered to put curtains on the windows. Gibbs had been sitting in the kitchen working on his laptop until 11:30 the previous evening. Guests filled all the upstairs rooms, every bedroom window wide open to enjoy the cool night air. Nine cars lined the lot, outside lights lit the exterior of the inn and its surroundings.
“The doors were all locked except the French doors on the little deck off the kitchen,” says Trumble. “We never thought they needed to be locked when we had a full house and all the windows open. Our suite lies just above that deck.”
Sometime between when Gibbs went to bed and 5 a.m., when Trumble got up to start breakfast, someone walked—barefoot—through the landscaped patch around the deck and climbed up and over the railing. Dirty footprints led into the kitchen. The laptop had disappeared. The innkeepers called the police and began a long series of calls to cancel all the accounts that had been on the computer—PayPal, Amazon, credit cards.
“John’s wallet was close by and he didn’t take that,” but because of what had happened across the road at Ryan Carpenter’s Deer Harbor Inn they worried about all of their other credit cards, too. The inn represented every dime they had plus twenty years of hard work just to make it a reality. Like most other Orcas tourist-related businesses, it operated on a knife edge of profitability. The computer’s value didn’t meet their deductible, so the loss was all out-of-pocket.
“It breaks my heart that this happened on Orcas,” says Trumble. “Suddenly we had to change our lifestyle and start really watching… You’re not as safe as you thought you were.”
After the break-in, Trumble, one of the most gentle guys on the island, found himself sleeping with a baseball bat next to his bed.
The deputy who responded to the call lived just down the road aboard a boat at the Deer Harbor Marina. The same night as the burglary at the inn, someone walked down the marina’s long wooden pier and ducked behind the dockmaster’s office. He slid a thin tool between window sashes and opened a latch. Inside, he had access to a computer and the safe—with its key hanging nearby. But he left those alone and instead took only the surveillance cameras and the DVR they were attached to.
Deer Harbor Marina enjoys a brisk trade with visiting boaters. During July and August there’s rarely an open slip, with half leased to full-timers and the other half filled with boats from all over Washington and British Columbia. That night, the place was packed, the docks alive with people wandering up and down, visiting with fellow boaters, barbecuing, boiling up the day’s Dungeness crab, cocktailing, telling tall tales, and doing all the other stuff yachties do. Things quiet down in Deer Harbor after 11 p.m., but many boaters remain up on deck chatting under the brilliant stars, their voices and the creak of boats carrying far across the still water.
The marina’s showers and bathrooms sit back by the dockmaster’s office, forty yards up the pier from the marina store and the boat slips. There’s always a trickle of folks heading back and forth to the restrooms. That didn’t bother this burglar, though, who strolled from the office to the store and slid open another window. Inside, surrounded by coolers filled with beer, water, and soda, along with racks and racks of snack foods, candy, and wine as well as a complete ice cream shop, the burglar chose to take only the surveillance cameras and DVR.
Word of the break-ins quickly echoed around Deer Harbor. Now my hackles went up. There’d be no reason for someone to have gone into our crawlspace unless he was just getting out of the rain. But we’re so far at the end of the road surrounded by acres and acres of nothing but woods that even that didn’t make sense. I went underneath and found a vent pipe knocked out of place. It still had to be a deer, I thought, but Sandi and I spent an hour digging around for the single house key we owned and went to make a copy. We started taking the keys out of our cars and locking the house overnight, just like back in the city.
That night as we lay in bed with the big black window behind our heads, the woods outside seemed darker.
The action moved back to Eastsound just before Labor Day weekend, the last big opportunity for local businesses to rake in summer money. Early morning on September 1, a burglar forced his way into the popular Sunflower Café on the prime corner of Main Street and North Beach. He took $300 out of the till and $3,280 from the ATM before crossing the street to Vern’s Bayside.
Belinda and Marion had installed surveillance cameras inside and out after the 2008 hit. Now, one by one, the cameras went dark.
“He WHALED on them with his fist,” says Belinda. Then he pried open the side door and went inside the restaurant. A camera in the dining room captured a tall white male wearing a tan T-shirt walking past using a black shirt to cover his face. The burglar went directly to Marion’s office, which sits nooked away in a nonobvious spot up a short flight of stairs from the kitchen. A tiny camera mounted on the office ceiling watched as he came through the door and instantly rounded the divider to shine his flashlight at the empty space where the safe had been the year before. He swung his light around quickly, but couldn’t figure out where they’d moved it.
At that point, the computer attached to the security cameras began to beep. The burglar bolted full speed out of the office and back out the way he came.
Just down the street, Suzanne Lyons was sleeping in her jewelry store, Orcas Arts and Gifts. Lyons has had some experience with at-risk youth.
“When I lived in California,” she says, “I took in five ten-year-old boys as foster kids from really bad families, moms were hookers and everything, but I got them early enough. Four joined the service, and they all turned out okay.”
Suzanne’s family had been taking turns bunking in their little shop ever since her daughter, Erica, had been woken by a noise in the middle of the night shortly after the stolen boat had shown up. Erica went outside to check and found a very tall young man standing in the private yard between the store and their home. He calmly looked at her for a long moment, then vaulted over the six-foot-high fence and disappeared.
They called the deputies, but they couldn’t find the guy. Now, on September 1, it was Suzanne who sensed something was not right. She stepped outside.
“I was in my robe and bunny slippers,” she says, laughing. “I saw this big guy running down Main Street away from Vern’s. I wasn’t really dressed to chase him, though.”
The next morning, as word quickly spread, Eastsound’s worst fears were realized: the summertime burglar was back.
“This time,” says Belinda, “the cops took it seriously.” Sergeant Vierthaler came down to Vern’s right away and watched the security footage. He noticed something very strange about the tall young man who’d broken into the restaurant: he was barefoot.
NEAR THE TOP OF North Beach Road stands Orcas Island Hardware, affiliated with Ace Hardware, “The Helpful Place.” With so much do-it-yourselfing on the island, Orcas has always had two hardware stores. Scott Lancaster worked at one for fifteen years before buying the other in the spring of 2009. Now, five months later, late in the afternoon on September 4, the Friday of the big Labor Day weekend, Lancaster was straightening up the storage yard when he noticed that part of his chain-link fence was laid over. Odd, but nothing else was out of place, so he heaved it back into position and went home.
“That night,” he says, “it started bothering me. I’m wondering if it was pushed over by someone climbing the fence to get onto the roof of the main building. But by that time I’d sat down to a nice dinner with my wife, had a couple glasses of wine… I decided not to go back to check it out just based on a gut feeling.” Besides, he says, there’d always been a hardware store filled with tools at that spot, the building never had an alarm system, and there’d never been a problem. In fact, long ago when the building first went up, a row of its warehouse windows were installed crooked and had never closed far enough to lock. “It’s Orcas,” says Scott. “Most of the time we just left them wide open for ventilation.”
After dark, someone slipped into the yard behind Orcas Island Hardware. He climbed topsoil bags piled next to the lowest part of the warehouse roof, then pulled himself onto a higher stack of bark mulch sacks that rose another level closer to the edge of the twelve-foot-high roof. Balancing precariously atop the tower of bags, he stretched out one long leg and stepped onto the metal roof, barefoot.
The bandit sneaked around to the row of second-floor windows, slid open the one farthest from the sidewalk, and climbed inside the warehouse loft. He used a ladder to drop down into a corridor, then went into the store’s offices. The first thing he saw in the cluttered outer office was the blue glow of a TV monitor. A simple closed circuit, the system transmitted only a live picture of the store—there was no recorder. Still, the burglar switched off its impotent eye. He rummaged through the desks until he found the key to the petty cash drawer, pocketing all the paper money.
Once done with the office, he went downstairs into a B and E man’s dream: a fully stocked hardware store. The first tool he wanted was something big and strong enough to open the safe he’d spotted in the warehouse. Ace, the helpful place, had just the thing: a sixteen-pound, six-foot-long forged steel digging bar. The safe gave way. Inside sat two bank bags—one a ten-year-old KeyBank carrier, a distinctive style that isn’t used anymore. Both bags were filled with cash organized into neat bundles ready for depositing.
Then the thief went on a shopping spree. Using Ace-logoed five-gallon buckets and a clothes basket to carry the booty, he grabbed a Coleman sleeping bag, two air mattresses (one twin and one full-size), an LED headlamp, a hatchet, two axes, a maul/sledgehammer, two hammers, a crowbar, screwdrivers, six assorted padlocks and cable locks, bolt cutters, a power drill and a cordless drill, along with eight drill bits including two augers used for drilling deep, large-diameter holes—like maybe the kind you could insert a camera into. In all, the burglar took more than $5,000 worth of cash and prizes.
He lugged everything to the store’s delivery bay and used his new bolt cutters to snip off the padlock. Up went the big roller door and out he walked. The thief’s appetite was bigger than his ability to carry everything, though. He stopped across the street, ducking behind the hedge at Murphy’s vet’s office to rearrange the load that he must have ferried over in at least two trips. There he left behind the clothes basket with a bunch of the items he’d just taken, and dumped more tools into the landscaping around the real estate office where Sandi works. He kept the necessities, though, and headed off to attempt his most ambitious score. He wanted more cash, and knew the best place to find it.
WHEN ISLAND HARDWARE’S EMPLOYEES arrived the next morning, they found the place had been looted. Scott Lancaster’s first priority after seeing that the deputies were on the job scoping out the big bare footprints clearly visible on the metal roof was to make sure he could keep the store running on its busiest day. He couldn’t do that without cash, so he went to Islanders Bank and withdrew $500 from the ATM. Lancaster says that an hour later the police called him to ask if he’d noticed anything strange while he was at the bank.
There’s no better example of how little Orcas Islanders worried about crime than Islanders Bank circa that summer of 2009. Not only wasn’t there a surveillance camera or alarm inside the ATM/night deposit room, but the room also had a window that wasn’t alarmed.
The bottom of the window into the ATM room stood about ten feet off the ground. It was a single long, narrow pane less than two feet tall. The thief broke the glass and scaled the wall by stepping barefoot onto a thin foundation ledge a couple feet off the ground. He then hoisted himself up and through the window. It was a remarkably athletic move considering he did it without cutting himself to ribbons on the jagged glass. Once inside the room, he had plenty of time to attack the cash machine. He tried his new Ace drill, he tried his new crowbar, then his new sledgehammer. He made some marks, but couldn’t crack the golden egg. The acrobatic burglar finally gave up and climbed back out, leaving his tools behind.
When San Juan County sheriff Bill Cumming realized he had an attempted bank job on his hands, he called in the Feds. An FBI CSI team arrived on the island and spent some nine hours processing the scene. The first mystery was how the hell someone had gotten through that window. According to bank manager Maggie Vinson, the hole in the glass looked too small for a normal-size man to get through. She said the police looked for ladder marks but found nothing but the smudges of dirt where the burglar put his bare feet against the wall. She also said the cops at the scene theorized that maybe two guys boosted another one up, or maybe, someone joked, two strong guys picked up a little accomplice and heaved him through the window.
OTHER BUSINESSES, INCLUDING BILBO’S Festivo restaurant, were hit over the same couple of nights. Orcas residents went up in arms—many literally. Kyle Ater and his .44 still held the high ground atop Homegrown Grocery, but now it seemed like half the Eastsound business owners joined him, camping out in their stores, locked and loaded in order to protect their livelihoods.
Sheriff Cumming shifted more deputies to Orcas from the other islands and they all started pulling overtime shifts to try to catch what was evidently one big shoeless kid tearing around the island jacking businesses at will. With toe prints found at the scene of at least three break-ins, the local cops began calling their suspect the Barefoot Bandit.
Scott Lancaster walked into Island Market after his burglary and ran into manager Jason Linnes, whose family owns and runs the supermarket. Linnes told him he was sorry to hear about the theft. “That’s why we have all of the security at our store,” he said, according to Lancaster. “No way the little bastard’s going to get into our place.”
Two days later, at around 2:20 a.m. on September 8, the woman working night crew at Island Market felt so ill that she had to go home. The person she’d normally call to replace her was on vacation and the stocking was finished anyway, so she decided not to bother waking anyone up. Every day of the year except for a couple of holidays, there’s someone inside Island Market twenty-four hours a day. Now, for one short, unforeseeable period, it was left unattended. As soon as the employee left, a burglar tried to get in the back shipping door. He couldn’t force it open, so he went around to the front of the building, where on many nights there’s a police cruiser loitering in the parking lot. Not that night, though.
He crept along the side of the building until he was underneath the surveillance camera that kept watch over the front door. At 2:35 a.m., he used a crowbar to tilt the camera up, and then retreated into the shadows to make sure no one was monitoring the feed and that he hadn’t tripped an alarm. At 2:50, he came back and broke open the sliding doors. He knew there were more security cameras inside, so he held his arm across his face and walked into the store, barefoot, carrying a crowbar and hammer.
The cameras watched the tall white kid head straight to aisle 6—toilet paper, paper towels, Ziplocs—but he didn’t stop to pick up any supplies. At the back of the aisle he turned right, walked along a huge display of cold beer without snagging any, then ducked through the swinging doors into the stock area. The burglar knew exactly where he was going. He climbed a metal shelving unit to reach a surveillance camera, and whacked it with his crowbar, knocking off the lens.
There’s a big Mosler safe back there, a monolithic old-timer like you’d see Butch and Sundance blow up with a pile of dynamite. The kid didn’t even bother to try that one. Instead, he walked back out through the produce department, leaving big bare footprints on the mats, and went through the unmarked door that leads upstairs to the bathrooms and the offices. He pried open each office door until he found the electrical box and, at 3:30 a.m., he turned off the store’s lights, which are normally left burning all night. He also broke into the room that housed the security system. Inside, he began pushing buttons on the equipment until the camera feeds went dark. What he didn’t know was that he turned off only the monitor. The cameras continued to see and the DVR continued to record as he went back downstairs to his real target.
Island Market’s little ATM stands at the front of the store just behind the facade’s huge plate-glass windows, near the bird seed and bags of charcoal. The machine is one of those stand-alones, four feet high and about eighteen inches square, with a molded plastic shell covering its steel body. It held about $8,000 that night, and it certainly looked like a breachable target if you had enough time and leverage. The crook went to work with his trusty crowbar and hammer. After many, many whacks, though, he hadn’t made much of an impact on anything except the plastic. To be fair, he was hampered a bit by bad visibility: sensing that the cameras might still be recording, he’d hung a T-shirt over his head and had to peek out through its neck hole as he moved around.
The burglar realized the ATM called for more firepower and he had an idea. He jogged back to the loading dock and grabbed the handle of a battery-powered pallet jack, aka a “jigger,” a baby forklift that lets its user pick up and move a thousand pounds with little effort. He walked it like a dog on a leash back to the front of the store, then lined it up and rammed it into the ATM… over and over and over.
He worked on the ATM for an hour and ten minutes, until the little money machine looked like R2-D2 after being humped by a Transformer. Its plastic housing was pried apart, cracked, and decapitated, and its metal body crumpled. But the money box held. Barely.
“A couple more hits to the door and it would have popped open, but he kept changing angles,” says Jason Linnes. What the burglar did succeed in doing, though, was gashing his hand on the sharp plastic. He bled like a stuck pig, on the machine, on the jigger, and all over the floor. At 4:30, he ran to the deli kitchen to wash his cut in the sink. The video then shows that he either saw lights or heard something outside—a police cruiser may have driven through the lot—because he suddenly crouched down by the baguette display and froze for a few moments. This allowed a ceiling camera to get a nice clean shot suitable for framing—or at least for a wanted poster.
The burglar popped back up, showing that he’d wrapped one of his T-shirts around his cut hand. He went directly to the cleaning aisle and picked up a bottle of bleach, which he poured over the blood on the floor, the ATM, and the pallet jack in order to make the blood useless for DNA testing.
At this point he looked at the watch he wore on his right wrist. It was 4:42 a.m., and he knew exactly when he needed to get out of Dodge. He left eighteen minutes before the morning crew arrived.
The staff discovered the assault and battery on their cash machine, but not one thing was missing except the bleach, which added about three bucks to the $12,000 worth of damage done to the store.
When the deputies arrived to take a report, the employees showed them the bare footprints and all the things that’d been touched. Then they walked them over to the deli. The burglar had forgotten about that, and there was very visible, very fresh blood all over the sink. At first, according to the supermarket staff, the cops said they weren’t going to bother collecting any of it for evidence. The employees and owner were furious, though—and also all on a first-name basis with the deputies. They demanded that they collect a sample. Finally, a deputy went for a forensics kit and took a DNA swab.
Long before those results came back, though, a San Juan County detective attended a monthly information-sharing meeting with other detectives from around the region. He told the assembled officers about the trouble his county was having with a suspect they’d nicknamed the Barefoot Bandit.
“I remember getting a chuckle out of that,” says Island County Sheriff’s Office detective Ed Wallace, who was at the meeting. Wallace, however, says the name didn’t ring any bells among the Island County contingent. It might have for regular readers of the county’s Stanwood/Camano News, though, since the paper’s front-page headline back in February 2007 had been: “Camano’s barefoot bandit caught.” The story was about a teenager named Colton Harris-Moore who’d been captured by the Island County Sheriff’s Office (ICSO) after evading them for six months on a small island while continuously breaking into homes to steal everything from food to jewelry. The local paper—as well as the Seattle Times and Everett Herald—had run quite a few additional Colton stories since then, including a flurry after his escape from detention in April 2008 and resumption of his thieving ways on Camano Island, which lay just thirty miles south of Orcas.
It all finally came together—at least for law enforcement—when a San Juan County detective sent images from the Island Market surveillance camera of the suspect posing by the baguettes. Island County recognized him right away.
“We felt like a doctor giving a patient bad news,” says Wallace. “We’re afraid you have a Colton Harris-Moore problem.”
ICSO gave the San Juan sheriff Colton’s file, including a recent portrait taken by Harris-Moore himself. The eighteen-year-old’s book-length rap sheet started once upon a time when he was ten. Island County warned Sheriff Bill Cumming that Colton had run their deputies ragged. And said that when they finally caught him and thought they’d rid their island by sentencing him to three years in prison, he’d escaped. The file also included the information that Colton liked to play with guns and often armed himself with pepper spray. Island County had already filed a slew of new felony charges against Colton for crimes he’d committed since going on the lam.
Cumming made the tactical decision not to let Orcas residents know who was tearing up their island. He felt that if Colton didn’t know the sheriff’s office was on to him, the Barefoot Bandit might step out in public. He sent all the manpower he could spare to Orcas and made sure his deputies had Colton’s face burned into their memories. He put more officers in plain clothes and sent them out into Eastsound, especially after dark.
It worked—sort of. The deputies didn’t have much trouble spotting Colton, but they soon learned something about him beyond his affinity for going footloose: he was fast. Even those rare few deputies in shape to run after him were easily outdistanced. Every time he was sighted, Colton took off for the woods around town. One cop caught him in the beam of his flashlight and made a positive ID before Colton melted into the trees.
“He virtually vaporized in front of me,” said the officer.
Increasing the police patrols may have at least made Eastsound seem like a tougher target. The night following the Island Market ATM fail, the Bandit crept along the Ditch beside Smuggler’s Villa Resort. Mike Stolmeier had hosted the usual summer evening campfire for his guests and then gone to bed after making sure there were no tall strangers stretched out in the sauna. Tied up less than forty yards from the occupied villas were whale-watching and fishing boats belonging to a charter operation based at the resort. The Bandit chose a thirty-foot catamaran called Blackfish—a traditional name for killer whales. He untied one of its dock lines and jumped in. Starting Blackfish’s diesel engines isn’t as simple as turning a key; several switches get thrown to power the starters. The thief couldn’t figure that out, so he climbed back to the dock and moved to the next boat, a single-engine twenty-six-foot Harborcraft loaded down with fishing gear for the next morning’s trip. The keys were in the boat and the engine turned right over. He switched on the GPS unit, slipped the lines, and set off into what Stolmeier called a nasty night to be out boating, “jet black and raining.”
The boat thief knew where he wanted to go, though, and the GPS chartplotter offered a video game–like navigation experience as simple as steering a little avatar around the blue screen and avoiding the big beige blocks that signified hard land. Again, very simple in theory. However, Pacific Northwest reality tosses a few challenges into the mix around the San Juans. An enormous amount of water fills and empties the Salish Sea as the tides change. Currents ripping around the islands swirl into whirlpools and, when conditions are right, even pile into standing waves. Just below the surface—and thus not shown as land on charts—lie myriad jagged reefs. A painstaking count of all the islands, islets, seal haulouts, and godforsaken rocks in San Juan County comes to 743. But that’s at low tide. At high tide, only 428 of them are visible; the rest lurk beneath a thin film of water. Experienced local boaters look for hints like kelp fronds or patches of calm water that mark rocks, but that helps only during the day. Many of the known reefs are marked on charts as tiny plus signs—as in if you hit one you’ll “add” shipwrecker to your résumé. What can’t be marked, however, are those Salish Sea specialties aptly named “deadheads.”
With logging long one of the Northwest’s major industries, innumerable ex-trees have escaped booms and tugs and now roam free in the region’s waters. The logs eventually get so soggy that they barely float. Those that bob vertically with an almost invisible sliver of wood above the surface are deadheads. Running into one is like striking an iceberg. The great bulk of the log lies underwater, giving it enough mass to easily splinter a wooden hull or smash a fiberglass one. Open a hole too big for the bilge pumps and you get help fast or go swimming.
Cold water often has the final say in the Salish Sea. Even in summer the water temperature barely gets into the mid-50s. Wind up in the drink and the countdown starts—that is, if it doesn’t cause instant cardiac arrest. Depending on body type, it can take one-half to three hours for you to lose consciousness, less if you’re treading water or swimming for land.
The Bandit, though, knew how to run a boat at night, or else he was lucky once again. The GPS recorded his track as he rounded the sheer cliffs of Point Doughty and headed down President Channel between the west coast of Orcas and Waldron Island. He skirted the treacherously beautiful Wasp Islands—perennially the most popular place for visiting boaters to come to grief on the San Juans’ reefs—and steered southeast between Shaw and San Juan Island until he reached the town of Friday Harbor.
He drove the boat to the University of Washington’s Friday Harbor Labs, a marine science center. At U-Dub’s dock, he jumped off and let the $100,000 boat float away. The GPS showed the Harborcraft drifting lazily until it grounded off Shaw, where it was found the next morning.
The Barefoot Bandit ran around San Juan Island for two days, hitting a coffee hut in downtown Friday Harbor but otherwise not calling too much attention to himself. Police later discovered a hideaway secreted in a hangar at the airport where he apparently camped out.
Then, at midnight on September 11, 2009, a small plane took off from the San Juan Island airport.
IF BOB RIVERS’S CESSNA was a classic station wagon, this second plane, a sleek, 310-horsepower, composite-bodied Cirrus SR22, was a high-tech hot rod. It featured a low-wing configuration versus the Cessna’s high wing. Low wings are trickier for inexperienced pilots to land as they tend to float more near the ground. The SR22 also had a completely different steering system—a side joystick versus the Cessna’s classic two-handed wheel. Considered a safe and popular plane for its class, according to the NTSB the Cirrus SR22 still has twice the rate of fatal accidents as the Cessna 182. And remarkably, for only his second solo flight, Colton decided to fly this one at night.
The $700,000 Cirrus was equipped with two major features not found in Bob Rivers’s Cessna. First was the “glass cockpit,” a term used not for the plane’s windows, but for large dashboard video monitors that gather all the information a pilot needs on-screen rather than split among individual gauges. Fans of the new-style instruments love the amazing amount of data—weather maps, flight info, navigation, and all the plane’s mechanical systems—laid on two screens. There are some old-timers, though, who feel the glowing screens might be crowded with too much information, especially for an inexperienced flier.
“I wouldn’t recommend a new pilot start out with a glass cockpit in a Cirrus, particularly at night—too distracting, a real handful,” says Bill Anders, an Orcas Island resident who owns a Columbia 400 (aka Cessna 400 Corvalis), a slick composite plane that’s extremely similar to the Cirrus. And for Bill Anders to call anything related to flying a handful takes a lot.
Anders’s first plane ride came in 1946, when he was an eighth grader in Texas. One day as his father drove him to school, they saw a biplane sitting in a cow pasture. “This guy had a sign up, ‘Rides $15,’” remembers Anders. “I said to my dad, ‘I sure would like to do that.’”
Anders’s father had just gotten out of the navy and $15 was big money back then, “but my dad could always make deals and he made one that morning.” Anders strapped into the open cockpit of the wood-and-fabric plane and the pilot took off. Whatever his dad paid, young Bill got his money’s worth. “He even did a loop, and I thought, Boy, this is fun!”
Anders went off to school with dreams of flying adventures. “Well, on the way home that day, here was the biplane, tail up, in about a three-foot-deep hole… The pilot and his paying passenger dead. I didn’t fly for quite some time after that.”
The pull of the sky was so strong, though, that Anders became an air force fighter pilot and served in an interceptor squadron at the height of the Cold War. One of his claims to fame from that era is intercepting a Soviet Bear bomber over Europe and giving its belligerent pilot an up-close and personal middle-finger salute—decades before Tom Cruise fictitiously flipped one off in Top Gun.
Anders then topped that by going on the ultimate flight: strapped atop a huge Saturn V rocket for the Apollo 8 mission where he, Frank Borman, and Jim Lovell (of “Houston, we’ve had a problem” fame) became the first earthlings to leave their planet’s orbit and circle the moon. It was on that flight, on Christmas Eve 1968, that Anders snapped Earthrise, the shocking first view of our planet existing as just a fragile blue marble adrift in a black void.
Now seventy-eight, Bill lives on Orcas Island for much of the year, cruising aboard his big boat, Apogee, scuba diving with the SeaDoc Society, and flying as much as he can, often in service of the Heritage Flight Museum he founded in Bellingham. The museum specializes in warbirds, and we can always tell when Bill is in the neighborhood by the window-rattling grumble of a WWII P-51 Mustang or a 2,700-horsepower Korean War–era A-1 Skyraider as he does a fly-by.
One thing Bill Anders won’t do anymore, though, is fly at night in the San Juans. “Not that I’m afraid—I’ve got lots of night flying time as an interceptor pilot—but I’m always worried about the goddamn geese on the Orcas runway. You can fly over deer because they don’t jump very high. But the damn geese, they can take off.”
The pilot who took the Cirrus SR22 from San Juan Island wasn’t worried about geese or deer. Something compelled Colt back to Orcas Island that night. Once in the airplane, he could have flown away as far as his fuel would have taken him. Instead, he took off, did a short waggling course across the border into the nearby Canadian Gulf Islands, then turned around and headed straight to Orcas, where the entire island was already on high alert.
Apparently all the lights and info on the dashboard monitors didn’t bother Colt too much either, because he didn’t end up a charred dimple on Turtleback. And he didn’t panic, or he might have used the Cirrus’s most famous standard feature, a rocket-propelled last-resort parachute that erupts out of the airframe and slows its fall to a survivable speed. Instead, he went for it. One thing on his side was that the San Juans are very dark at night so the runway lights are easy to spot. Scattered home lights pierce the black mountainsides, red beacons flash atop Mount Constitution’s cell towers, and a soft yellow glow emanates from Eastsound, but other than that, it’s perfect stargazing dark.
The Bandit flew over town, sighted the runway, and touched down to the north—or tried to touch down.
“It’s a slippery plane and he lost it a bit,” says Bea Von Tobel, herself a longtime pilot. “That’s the hardest part of landing: judging how high above the ground you are, especially at night. You really need some time with an instructor who can teach you how to flare and get down comfortably. Instead, he kind of wandered off onto the grass and almost landed on the taxiway.”
Von Tobel showed up at the airport Saturday morning for the annual meeting of the Ninety-Nines, a group of women pilots, and saw the Cirrus already surrounded by yellow police tape. “He’d gotten in the plane by breaking the lock out of the door. The second thing I noticed was that he’d hit and broken one of my runway lights. All I remember thinking was that he must have really wanted to get back to Orcas to steal a plane and fly back at night. I guess he didn’t want to wait for the ferry.”
While the landing hadn’t been a thing of beauty, the plane suffered only minor damage and was flyable the next day. “He’s very lucky,” says Bill Anders. “But given the choice between skill and luck, I’ll take luck any day.”
Once again, since plane theft is such a rare occurrence, the rumors that quickly spread on the island hinted instead at a partying pilot trying to impress a girl he met at a bar over in “Sin City,” the nickname us provincial islanders have for Friday Harbor because there’s an incredible number of places where you can get a drink in town… like six.
Local police, though, knew the real story.
“AUGUST 2008: BURGLARY, COMMERCIAL burglary, commercial burglary, residential burglary… September ’08: commercial burglary, commercial burglary, commercial burglary, residential burglary… October ’08: more commercial burglaries… November 2008: airplane theft… August 2009: recovered vessel… ” San Juan County sheriff Bill Cumming tut-tutted as he read down a long list his department compiled once they realized who they were dealing with and had confirmed Colton’s MO with Island County detectives.
As tough as it was to believe, Cumming, sixty-one, realized he was up against just one extraordinarily brazen and “pretty darn bright” kid whom he now suspected of at least fifteen burglaries, along with the thefts of two planes and a couple of boats. With half the houses in San Juan County vacant for long stretches during the year, it wasn’t unusual to have teen troublemakers breaking in to raid liquor cabinets. However, in his thirty-eight years in law enforcement—thirty-one years with San Juan County, twenty-four as its sheriff—Cumming had never dealt with a suspect like Colton Harris-Moore.
“We’ve had serial burglars out here before, even people who specialized in unusual things such as entry from the water, but this is unique, this is one person being so prolific. He’s easily doubled the number of commercial burglaries we’d normally see. When you have someone that prolific in such a small area, they usually get caught.”
Another startling aspect of Colt’s spree was, of course, the boats and planes. He was suspected of stealing cars and he’d been convicted years before of taking dinghies on Camano Island, but now he was operating at an entirely different level of sophistication. And it wasn’t just the fact that he was stealing the boats and planes that was extraordinary. “We’ve recovered everything,” said Cumming, noting that Colton hadn’t tried to sell them. “He’s not taking them for joyrides; he’s taking them for transportation.”
Cumming’s job was clear: arrest Colton Harris-Moore. Pressure from the community was growing more intense after every crime. Residents still didn’t know who the suspect was; they just wanted him caught.
The evening after the stolen Cirrus showed up on Orcas, September 12, deputies flooded Eastsound determined to catch the Barefoot Bandit. They got lucky: instead of lying low for a while after the plane theft, Colt went out on the town.
The cops spotted him carrying a large bundle. According to a deputy, two officers went after him on foot while another converged by car. When Colt realized the cops were on his tail, he bolted into the street. The deputy in the car tried to sideswipe him, but missed. Colt danced away from the car and ran north through town toward the airport. Police followed, but he lost them by disappearing into a triangular patch of woods that connects the airport with the Ditch and Smuggler’s.
During the chase, Colt dropped his bundle. A deputy found it and was checking out its contents when he heard a voice sing out from the dark woods.
“You can’t catch me.”
He was right. Even though the stretch of forest was only three hundred yards long, there wasn’t enough manpower to effectively search it, and the county had no canine to try to sniff out the Barefoot Bandit. Besides, Colt already knew these woods as well as any local. Inside his bundle, the police found the sleeping bag stolen from Orcas Island Hardware, along with blankets he’d taken from an airplane stored inside a private hangar that sat at the edge of the trees where he now hid.
Another chunk of woods Colt knew well covered a peninsula called Madrona Point that dangles into East Sound. He had a campsite there complete with a pup tent, a sleeping bag, and a blanket that had gone missing from the Eastsound fire station. Colt used the camp as a base for raiding the town’s shops. Several times, deputies had chased him onto the Point, but he always seemed to vanish into thin air and thick woods.
Lummi Indians used Madrona Point as a burial ground. When the afternoon sun drops low in the sky, the large congregation of orange-barked, red-berried Pacific Madrona trees begins to glow, and it’s easy to imagine the area as a place of spirits. In the mid-eighties, a Seattle businessman who also owned much of Turtleback Mountain planned to build condos here on the island’s most sacred spot. A grassroots antidevelopment movement sprang up and eventually caught the attention of the U.S. Congress. The land was purchased and given to the Lummi Nation. The tribe managed it as an open park until numbnuts littered the area with beer bottles, used condoms, and other trash. Today, the Lummi section of Madrona Point sits behind a huge NO TRESPASSING sign at the dead end of Haven Road.
Back toward Main Street on Madrona Point lies a small group of homes, some of them the original cabins from a long-defunct resort. Island Market, Islanders Bank, and the rest of downtown Eastsound lie just a few yards away though the trees. One day as a retiree named Annette was working on a cottage she’s renovating, a friend mentioned that her old well looked to be about seven feet deep. “How can you tell?” asked Annette. The abandoned well, she knew, had been filled with approximately one ton of rocks the size of babies’ heads and sealed with a five-hundred-pound cement lid.
Not anymore, said the friend.
Someone had slid open the lid and painstakingly excavated the rocks. “They were smart enough to not just pile them around the well or I would have noticed,” says Annette. Instead, he carried each one at least a hundred feet away. Annette searched around and found the missing rocks on a dead-end gravel road nearby. Emptied to exactly six and a half feet deep, the old-fashioned well made an ideal hidey-hole. The rock walls that show above ground were covered with moss, camouflaging it during the day. Anyone inside would be invisible to infrared cameras, and even if a searcher stumbled across the well, he might not think anyone could be down there with the huge concrete lid in place.
Climb inside, though, and you realize that because the well’s stones are smooth, even a six-foot-tall middle-aged writer can reach up and slide the heavy lid back into place. So it would be no problem at all for a six-foot-five athletic teenager.
Annette believes she once even heard Colton. “I was working in the garden and heard what sounded like a big metal bowl drop and bounce—bump, bump, bump—inside the house across the road that was supposed to be empty. I thought, Holy shit, it’s the Bandit! I didn’t do a thing, didn’t even turn around, just walked away.”
She didn’t call the police that time, though she did when she found that her well had been converted into a spider hole. “They were elated,” she says, “because they kept chasing him back here and couldn’t figure out how he was disappearing.” The deputies asked her not to tell anyone about the find, and they noted it as one place to carefully search whenever he ran toward Madrona Point.
The police, however, didn’t know exactly where to look for Colt in the woods at the other side of town on the twelfth. It would be two weeks before a resident spotted another of his campsites, this one tucked into the bushes at the edge of the airport near the dog park. Colt had been able to lie back and watch two of his favorite things: planes and pooches.
The cops did at least know that he was just yards away from two previous targets: the airport and all its hangars, and the Ditch with its boats. Somehow, though, Colton slipped past the deputies, went to Brandt’s Landing Marina on the Ditch, and climbed aboard a sporty twin-engine cabin cruiser worth about $75,000. The boat he chose belonged to Jason Linnes, manager of the Island Market, which had been burglarized just four days before. The keys, as with most of the island’s boats at the time, were aboard—hidden, but not too hard to find.
“I always left the keys in the boat, and in the car, and left my house unlocked,” says Linnes, whose family has been on Orcas since the late 1800s. “I was raised that way.”
Once inside, Colton relaxed and stretched out in the berth. Sometime before daylight on the thirteenth, he fired up the engines and pulled out of the slip—no mean feat as there’s very little wiggle room at that crowded end of the marina. He managed to drive out of the Ditch without dinging any of the nearby boats, then turned on the GPS and navigated directly to Point Roberts, a geopolitical oddity that hangs off the Canadian coast but remains part of the United States.
Jason could understand his family’s market getting hit—“That was just business”—but it seemed like too much of a coincidence that out of all the boats in the Ditch, his was the one Colton picked. “The boat was more personal than the store. And one happening after the other… that was creepy. I didn’t sleep for days, wondering, Does he know me? Is he after me? Is he really gone? I didn’t have shades on my house windows before but now I have ADT installing a security system. That sucks.”
According to Linnes, as Colton brought the boat to shore the lower units of both engines hit rocks, damaging their skegs. Later that day, the U.S. Coast Guard found the boat tied to a Point Roberts mooring buoy and they towed it back to Orcas, where a San Juan County deputy found bare footprints on the swim platform.
When residents woke to the news that another of their neighbor’s boats had been stolen and found abandoned on the mainland, everyone wondered the same thing: Is it over?
We hoped so.
On an island with no industries other than real estate and tourism, the last thing you want are your adjectives changed from “serene” and “scenic” to “paranoid” and “crime-ridden.”
The precious image of a calm sea lapping the beach below a cozy-luxe cabin set amid tall firs tarnishes a bit if you have to add barbed wire and light it up like a prison camp. Public relations–wise, the only thing worse for Orcas Island than a serial criminal terrifying the blue hairs would be if our cuddly, iconic killer whales suddenly started crunching on kayaks to get at their soft, chewy insides.
The one bright spot was that word hadn’t really gotten out. The Islands’ Sounder had run its sheriff’s logs and the deputy’s cautionary tale to the Chamber the year before, but beyond our insular world, there was no story. The name Colton Harris-Moore still meant nothing outside his own Island County, and even there, no one but the police had a clue that they’d exported their troublemaker up to the San Juan Islands or that he’d begun pirating planes and yachts. Colton certainly wasn’t on the national radar.
A week after Jason Linnes’s boat was found at Point Roberts, I was certain it was all over. Whoever this guy was, he had a plan. You’d have to be defective to keep committing burglaries in the same tiny area—on an island no less—unless you were doing a hit and run. He must have reached his magic number, the dollar amount that would let him kick back on some Baja beach and tip Tecates for a year. Or suck Molsons in Canada. Whatever. It didn’t matter. He was somebody else’s problem now.
Those somebodies were, for a short while at least, the residents of Point Roberts. Point Bob is a footnote of international politics twenty miles north of Orcas Island as the crow flies—and if you don’t have a boat, that’s the best way to get there, because the other option is driving through two border crossings. This U.S. exclave illustrates what happens when uninformed bureaucrats attack. The United States and United Kingdom solved a nineteenth-century boundary dispute over the West Coast by agreeing to split the mainland territory along the 49th parallel. Problem was, nobody consulted an accurate chart. The 49 line cuts through a nub of land on what’s now called Boundary Bay, south of Vancouver. Instead of simply trading the five square miles for a wagonload of otter pelts and calling it even, the Americans decided to keep the land. It’s now a funky little outpost with 1,300 people, a marina, and a small tourist-based economy but very few other services. Point Roberts’s kids have to board buses and cross the frontier north into Canada, then loop around for a forty-minute drive to the crossing at Blaine, Washington, where they reenter the United States to get to school.
Life at Point Roberts may be full of inconveniences, but residents consider it worth the hassle for their beautiful location on the Salish Sea and, since their little community is protected by a border guard, for its security.
When Colton landed in Point Roberts, he dialed up the cell phone of his friend Josh, who he’d served time with in Green Hill School, a juvenile prison. Colt had planned a “Hey, look out the window!” kind of surprise for his buddy, but instead got a “Dude, I moved” downer. Josh had relocated to Vancouver. So Colton improvised.
Whatcom County sheriff’s deputies stationed in Point Roberts had one of their busiest days in memory when folks who owned vacation homes arrived the following weekend to discover they’d had a visitor. In the couple of days after Colton waded ashore, someone pried open the sliding glass door at one home, took a shower, and then wrapped himself in a blanket while he listened to the radio and enjoyed a can of Coke. Before he left with a stash of canned goods, he refolded the blanket and put it back on the bed. At another home, a burglar jimmied a deadbolted door, raided the fridge, and slept on the bed. At a third, someone tried to force open two deadbolts, gave up, and attempted to reach through the cat door with a barbecue fork to twist the latch, gave that up, and finally broke a window. Inside, he took a nap on the bed. A fourth Goldilocks-style break-in within the same short period qualified the rash as a plague—and potentially a spree. Then the burglaries stopped as suddenly as they had started.
Despite the threat posed by millions of hockey stick– and curling stone–wielding Canadians massed along our borders, the northern U.S. frontier remains loosely guarded. At Point Roberts, it’s a simple matter of not driving through the checkpoint and instead walking across a road and into the vowel-deprived town of Tsawwassen, British Columbia.
Once Colt reached the Canadian side, he rustled a classy dark gray BMW and drove to see his prison pal.
“He called me on my cell and said, ‘I’m right down the street,’” says twenty-three-year-old Josh. “I was pretty surprised.”
Colt didn’t seem to be nervous about law enforcement chasing him. “No, not at all, totally relaxed. He was enjoying it,” says Josh, who cruised with Colt around Vancouver.
Colt had cash—over a grand that Josh saw—and they went to a bar. Colt didn’t order alcohol, though. “He’s had a drink or two before, but he doesn’t like it,” says Josh. “No booze or drugs for him.”
The two friends who’d bonded in prison when they found out they both lived on Puget Sound had some catching up to do. “He told me about crashing one of the planes in a field and about stealing a boat out in the islands,” Josh remembers. “I think he’s totally nuts for doing the plane stuff, but he said he doesn’t care if he crashes.”
Colt had stayed in touch ever since he’d escaped custody in 2008 while Josh was still locked up. He’d called Josh from inside the Brodys’ home and from several different stolen cell phones. The calls to Green Hill caught the attention of the prison guards, but little came of it other than getting Josh, when he was released, put on a watch list. “They stopped me once at a border crossing and asked me what I knew about Colt, but that was it.”
After a nice, friendly visit, Colt asked Josh to come running with him. Josh said no. He had a good job as a framing carpenter, a beautiful girlfriend, and life was good. He didn’t feel the need to risk it all for a rush. He’d served every day of a three-year sentence and had no desire to go back to jail—or worse. Josh says things looked to be headed someplace serious when Colt gave him a peek at some of the gear he was carrying.
“He had a twelve-gauge shotgun and a nine-millimeter pistol,” says Josh. “He said he’d use them… said something like, ‘They’ll never take me alive.’”
On September 22, 2009, Sheriff Bill Cumming finally announced that the crook he suspected of causing all the trouble on Orcas over the last thirteen months was eighteen-year-old Colton Harris-Moore. “We wanted to give him a false sense of security,” Cumming said as the reason he hadn’t let the county’s residents in on it earlier.
As Cumming talked to reporters, the cops working Colt’s case down in Island County held their breath. “We’d asked Bill not to mention the airplanes.”
Island County Sheriff’s Office deputies had come across campsites in the Camano Island woods where they found newspaper clippings Colt had snipped out about himself. They were concerned that part of his motivation was a need for attention and that giving it to him would just perpetuate or, worse, escalate his actions. “We always tried to downplay him in the press,” says one ICSO officer.
Colt’s Orcas spree made the Local section in the region’s biggest newspaper, the Seattle Times. Jennifer Sullivan of the Times and other local reporters had periodically covered the highlights of Colton’s criminal career over the previous three years, and they’d spotted the fascinating nugget in Sheriff Cumming’s statement that immediately elevated a conventional “prolific teenage thief and burglar, blah blah” story to a higher level. Cumming’s information that Colt was a suspect in two airplane thefts made the top ’graph. The Times also ran a timeline of Colt’s career going back to a 2004 conviction when he was twelve.
Our tormenter had a backstory. He also had a mom.
From the Seattle Times:
“Harris-Moore’s mother, Pam Koehler (sp) of Camano Island, calls the new allegations against her son ‘crap.’
“‘I know for a fact he is not doing all of these crimes,’ Koehler said Tuesday. ‘Any time the cops can’t catch whoever is doing them, they blame it on Colt.’
“Koehler concedes her son has been interested in flying, but insists he has never taken flight lessons.”
Creston, B.C., lies snuggled into a scenic mountain valley just north of the Idaho line—a 450-mile drive east of Vancouver. South of town, alongside the squiggling run of the Kootenay River, Creston Valley Regional Airport consists of a handful of hangars and a four-thousand-foot runway where the local flying club offers classes on the hazardous art of mountain flying. Colton spent at least two nights and three days there, but didn’t sign up for a course.
On September 24, he ditched the stolen BMW at the entrance to a landfill less than half a mile away from the airport and walked across a hayfield to the fence line. Hazards to local pilots had long included a herd of elk that enjoyed the warmth of the asphalt runway on cold nights, so Creston erected an eight-foot fence around the entire 225-acre airport to keep planes from getting gored. Colt climbed the fence and set up camp in the thick woods on the west side of the airport.
Creston was a risky place to try to steal an airplane because its manager, Les Staite, lived on-site with his wife and a “yappy little Shih Tzu” that Les calls a tyrant. “Anybody comes around at all, he’s a good alarm system.”
That didn’t faze Colt, though, just made it more challenging. He staked out a spot where he could keep an eye on all six hangars and the Staites’ home. After dark, he slinked across the runway to scope out Creston’s airplane inventory.
At the first hangar, Colt leaned against his pry bar until the door lock popped. Inside, his headlamp illuminated a Wild West scene, with saddles and chaps hanging on the walls. Bush pilot Volker Scherm owned the hangar as a base for BearAir, his backcountry guiding business. He’d built a small office in the corner of the hangar, and up top he stored a collection of grizzly bear and mountain goat skins. Colt tried the office door and found it locked. He was in no hurry, though, and didn’t force it open. He’d learned long ago that people almost always hid keys nearby. Scherm kept his tucked into one of the saddles.
Skins, saddles… made sense there’d be guns close by. Colt left the hangar with Scherm’s laptop, a wad of cash, and three guns, including .32 and .22 caliber pistols. He considered BearAir’s sixties-era Cessna a dinosaur, so he passed on the plane.
Next door, Colt broke into what eighty-year-old Korean War vet Bill Piper calls his “oasis.” Piper’s mancave of a hangar features a bedroom, shower, full kitchen, and an airplane. He’s piloted everything from jets to choppers, but now flies a Piper Super Cub—a classic bush plane equally at home on wheels, skis, or floats. Again, though, the thirty-plus-year-old plane was ancient to Colt; he was interested only in the most modern models. Instead, he helped himself to a cache of Piper’s power bars, bottled water, 7Up, cans of pork and beans, and pudding packets as well as a load of his tools and a portable radio that picked up aviation frequencies.
Colton poked inside all six of Creston’s hangars and saw all the planes, but none of them was just right. He’d already spotted the perfect one—a brand-new Cessna 182 Skylane—but it wasn’t in a hangar where he could spend time prepping it out of sight. The Cessna was tied down on the main ramp just a few hundred feet in front of Les Staite’s kitchen window. Even worse, it sat in a pool of light under a streetlamp.
Despite the risk, Colt stealthed up to the plane and pried open its window to get at the door lock. He climbed inside. As a bonus, the owner had left his satellite phone in the plane. Colt pulled the satphone out of its case and fiddled with it. Everything checked out with the Cessna, so Colt retired to his campsite to wait for the right time.
The next morning, Bill Piper and the other owners discovered they’d been burglarized. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) responded and investigated, after which the hangars were locked back up and Les Staite wired the Cessna 182’s window shut as a temporary fix.
Colt sat in the woods, calmly chowing on pudding and power bars and watching all the police activity. He bided his time until nightfall, when everyone else left and Staite and his yappy dog settled down inside their house.
Colt walked back across the runway and, under the streetlight and in full view of Staite’s kitchen window, broke into the Cessna again. He took out its tow bar and attached it to the plane’s nose wheel. He then muscled the two-thousand-plus-pound plane more than five hundred feet—rolling it up a slight incline—to a dark spot beside the hangars and out of sight of Staite’s residence. Somehow, Colt did it all without alerting the tyrannical Shih Tzu.
Colt hadn’t found a key to the Cessna, but he knew he didn’t need one to start it. The planes aren’t equipped with antitheft ignition systems like modern automobiles. Colt followed the checklist procedures, then simply jammed a screwdriver into the ignition switch and wrenched it clockwise to Start. The starter whined and the propeller began to spin slowly… but the engine wouldn’t catch.
“That plane has a little quirk,” explains Staite. “You have to mess with the fuel system and know just how much fuel to give it in order to get it to fire off. You have to know your airplane.”
Colt didn’t know this particular Cessna’s idiosyncrasies, and kept cranking until the starter burned out and the battery drained. Once he realized he was grounded, he went for a vehicle. He chose a GMC Z71 half-ton pickup. There was an antitheft Club on the steering wheel, but it may not have been locked because Colt was able to remove it. His bad luck with batteries continued, though, because the truck belonged to a pilot who only flew in from Alberta every once in a while and it had been sitting so long that the battery was dead. Next Colt tried a Dodge van. He couldn’t find a hide-a-key, so he tore the ignition apart trying to hotwire it—so easy in the movies. Not in real life, though.
Colt then went to a 2009 Toyota Corolla that sat next to a hangar. He knew the car probably belonged to a pilot out on a trip, and if so, the keys would be in the hangar. All pilots share the same nightmare of leaving their car keys on a layover and getting back home to a big D’oh!
If Colt had simply cranked on the door with his crowbar like he did at the other hangars, it might have changed the course of his story. This hangar was rigged with an alarm system. Something else Colt had learned early on, though, was to carefully scope out his targets. He’d also studied up on how to defeat alarms. If he triggered this one it would automatically call the police, so he disabled it by cutting the phone line.
Just as he thought, the owner had left the key to the Corolla dangling on a hook inside the hangar. Colt grabbed it, started the car, and headed for the exit sometime before 9:30 p.m. To get in the airport’s security gate, a driver needs to punch in a code. Leaving just requires a short pause to wait for the gate to lift when it senses a car. Colt didn’t bother waiting. He rammed through the gate and drove off.
The following day a search of the airport grounds turned up soda cans, food containers, water bottles, and—in a hayfield beside the runway—one of the pistols, the .22, still in its holster. Later, Les Staite found Colt’s campsite, where he’d left a “practically new” pair of Vans sneakers.
THE U.S. BORDER IS less than a two-mile walk from the Creston airport. A kayaker could also paddle across the frontier, floating down the Kootenay River as it exchanges its Y for an I, becoming the Kootenai on the American side. But Colt was carrying a heavy load and needed a car. Controls along the world’s longest border concentrate on vehicle traffic, and Colt didn’t have a passport or driver’s license, so he ditched the Corolla in Rykerts on the Canadian side near where Canadian Route 21 turns into Idaho Highway 1. On the American side lies a tiny farm community of less than a hundred folks called Porthill (“port” of entry near a “hill”). There’s a clearcut shaved through the forest all along the border, with the threat of electronic sensors hidden along this no-go partition, but it’s not particularly risky to cross on foot.
On the Idaho side, Colt needed another car to carry his gear and loot. One quickly went missing from Porthill’s gas station. The vehicle was later found—minus the camcorder that was inside—twenty miles south, near the little town of Bonners Ferry, which sits very close to Boundary County Airport.
On September 28, a CBP officer who also served on the Boundary County Airport board got wind of the strange goings-on up in Creston that, at this point, were thought to be drug related. He decided to check his airport just in case. He found that a half-dozen hangars had been broken into.
Two days before, Pat Gardiner had put his 2005 Cessna 182 Turbo Skylane to bed after a trip to Redmond, Washington. The meter on Gardiner’s immaculate white plane with blue and silver swooshes had ticked nearly 309 hours of flying time in support of his small cattle operation. He provides prime Black Angus seed-stock to ranchers all over the region, and with the few roads that exist up in that chunk of the country forced to skirt mountains and follow river runs, a plane was an essential business tool. Says Gardiner, “It’s tough to get anywhere from Bonners Ferry without driving a month of Sundays.”
Gardiner came to Idaho ranching the long way—via public lawyering down in Los Angeles. As counsel for L.A. County back in the seventies, he created a specialized child abuse court that became a pilot project for the entire country, and he personally worked more than one thousand child abuse cases. A trip to Spokane, Washington, introduced Gardiner to the Northwest and he fell in love with the area. “The farther north you drive the greener it gets and the less people you find. I liked that.” He moved full-time to Bonners Ferry, population 2,500, in 2000 and bought his Cessna the first year the Garmin G1000 glass cockpit option became available.
After his flight to Redmond, Gardiner had checked his fuel gauge. About four and a half hours of flying time remained in the tanks and he decided to fill her up later. He locked the plane and all the hangar doors and took the keys.
Colt got into some of the other Bonners Ferry hangars by finding hidden keys. He worked under cover of darkness and lingered inside, soaking up the airplane ambience and pretending he belonged in that world. In one hangar he even relaxed and put his bare feet up against the wall while he ate a snack. But Colt was really there as a thief. He stole whatever he fancied—a GPS, a digital camera—and then moved on to the next hangar. He found a Cessna, but that one was too old. At another hangar, he came upon a $2 million six-passenger turboprop Piper Meridien, but that one was too big and fast. When he got to Pat Gardiner’s plane, though, that was just right.
The late-model 182 even had a turbo and a glass cockpit. Colton padded around the hangar, leaving a trail of bare footprints as he searched everywhere for a key. Not finding one, he jammed a screwdriver into the baggage compartment lock and tried to jimmy it open. Nothing doing, but he kept working the plane until he was finally able to pop open the passenger-side door and climb in. Everything passed inspection, but like his first night up in Creston, this was just a scouting trip. He pocketed Gardiner’s Leatherman multitool and a few other items and left, retreating to a makeshift camp where he’d stashed the bank bags from Orcas Island Hardware, the guns, and all his other gear.
When the break-ins were discovered the following morning, calls went out to the police and plane owners. Gardiner arrived at his hangar door and was shocked at what he describes as the “violence” of the break-in. He was almost afraid to see what had been done to his $340,000 airplane. “The baggage door lock was wrecked, you couldn’t even get a key in it,” he says. Other than that, though, the plane seemed okay.
The initial thought—like over on Orcas and up in Creston—was that drug runners were looking for a transport plane. Some Boundary County folks figured it was maybe some a’ them draft-dodgin’ old hippie types up in Nelson, B.C. But the thief or thieves hadn’t actually taken an aircraft, so the next theory was maybe drifters passing through looking for valuables. The police investigated and got good forensics—fingerprints and footprints were all over the hangars.
Gardiner put his hangar door back together and bolted a thick hasp through the steel wall, topping it off with the most serious padlock he could find. Not that anyone figured on further trouble. “We felt we’d been hit, things taken, a lot of damage done,” says Gardiner. “After that, you don’t think of a thief having the audacity to come back to the scene of the crime.”
Once again, Colt let the police come and do their thing and watched everyone run around patching things up, then he sneaked back after dark. This time he first went to the airport’s fixed base operator (FBO), which acts as a combination service station/concierge/rest area for pilots. The FBO is where visiting fliers gas up their planes, check the weather, get a snack, take a nap, arrange a rental car for touring or use the courtesy car for quick runs into town. Some also have bikes. Colt took the FBO’s bike, loaded it with all of his gear, and walked it the quarter mile down to Pat Gardiner’s hangar, leaving a trail of bare footprints alongside deep tire tracks.
Colt ditched the bike behind the hangar and pulled out his crowbar. He used enough force to rip the bolts through the metal, tearing off the entire hasp. Inside, he again had all night to play pilot with his new plane. He even popped the hood and checked the oil. “It wasn’t low,” says Gardiner, “but apparently he added some anyway because we found the empty can in the hangar.” Colt loaded his stuff into the plane and tossed in one of Gardiner’s sleeping bags.
At daybreak on the twenty-ninth, around 5:30 a.m., a Boundary County road crew was already on the job near the airport. Inside the fence, work continued on a new runway, with a water truck wetting the site to keep construction dust down. All the early-morning activity may have surprised Colt and forced him to rush. After he raised the hangar door and muscled the heavy plane out using a manual towbar, he placed the bar back in the hangar but didn’t close the door. If he had, his crime would not have been discovered for many hours, if not days.
Colton climbed into the Cessna’s cockpit, stuck his screwdriver in the ignition switch, and cranked it to the right. This time the engine caught.
The road guys were used to small planes buzzing in and out of the airport, but they sensed that this one was in trouble. The snarl of the Cessna’s engine sounded too high pitched, like it was overrevving. They stopped working and watched the plane accelerate along the ground to the southwest. The runway in that direction is called 2-0, but a couple witnesses said Colt didn’t bother with the runway and instead was attempting to take off from the taxiway, a narrow strip of asphalt that ran parallel to 2-0. They watched as the Cessna struggled into the air. It didn’t gain altitude nearly as fast as it should have, and was headed straight for a stand of trees.
Gardiner speculates that Colton either set the variable propeller to the wrong pitch, or left the flaps at the neutral setting, which doesn’t offer the wing extra lift for takeoff. The witnesses also said he used only half of the runway. Instead of taxiing to the end of the field, pausing to look for traffic, and then taking off, Colt exited the hangar farm at the runway’s midpoint, turned left, throttled up, and just went for it.
“That plane should have been at seven hundred feet by the time it reached the trees,” says Gardiner. Instead, at the last second and with the turbocharged engine “balls to the wall,” the Cessna barely cleared the trees.
AIRBORNE WITH ENOUGH FUEL to carry him at least seven hundred miles, Colt had choices. He’d been heading east, putting plenty of distance between himself and all the recent newspaper, TV, and Internet coverage that had plastered his photo all over northwestern Washington. Regional law enforcement at every level now had a clear bead on his MO. All the real heat, though, was limited to the two small islands where he’d made the biggest impact. If he kept moving away and could stay off the radar for a few weeks, he’d be forgotten everywhere else.
Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Oregon, Northern California, British Columbia: there was a lot of world-class secluded wilderness within his range. When millionaire adventurer Steve Fossett’s plane went down in the Sierra Nevadas it took a full year, and ultimately a lucky break, to find his remains. With Colt’s proven fearlessness at off-field landings, he had countless places where he could drop the plane and disappear into the rugged wilds. If he didn’t want to play survivalist, he could land closer to civilization and use his technical know-how to steal identities and melt into the fringes of society. He could even head back to Reno, where he’d previously been able to hole up incognito.
At this point, Colt had won. He’d escaped from a prison home. He’d escaped from two small islands where everyone was hunting him. He had a grubstake and a fast, long-range getaway vehicle. Colt had even one-upped D. B. Cooper, because he had control of the plane and could land wherever he wanted to instead of having to jump out with a parachute. In four hours, Colt could touch down more than a thousand miles away from where all his problems began and where he had the greatest chance of getting caught. He’d brought on all his current troubles because he couldn’t stomach another year and a half in a laid-back juvenile group home. Now, with more than a dozen felonies already hanging over his head, capture meant facing up to ten years in prison. And, since he’d turned eighteen the previous spring, this time it would be nasty big-boy prison. It made sense for Colt to get lost and stay that way.
Or not.
ONCE IT SAW THE Cessna clear the trees, the Boundary County road crew shrugged and went back to work. An early-bird local pilot, though, arrived at the airport and knew immediately that something was wrong.
“You out flying this morning, Pat?” he asked Gardiner on the phone a little after 7 a.m. “Nope,” came the expected answer. “Well, your hangar door is up, the back door is busted again, and your plane’s gone.” Gardiner told him to dial 911 and said he’d be right down.
After a quick look around the airport, the local police dialed their own 911. Those deep bicycle tire tracks set off alarm bells that, according to what the authorities told Pat Gardiner, rang all the way to Washington, D.C., to Janet Napolitano’s office at the Department of Homeland Security. It certainly wasn’t some drifter breaking into hangars, and drugs were the most benign explanation for a missing plane carrying a heavy load. The alternate scenario was the stuff of nightmares because there was now a missing plane potentially carrying more than six hundred pounds of anything imaginable with the range to deliver it to Spokane, Sea-Tac Airport, Whidbey Naval Air Station, Naval Base Kitsap—home to a fleet of nuclear submarines and a stockpile of nuclear weapons—or the city of Seattle.
An APB went out on the plane. The Civil Air Patrol was put on alert and missioned to check every small airfield within range. Calls also went out across the border to the Canadians. Air traffic control (ATC) radars blanketed the region and the Cessna’s Mode-C Transponder automatically squawked a transponder code that identified the plane to controllers. Surely, they’d get a quick fix.
Colton flew south, over the infamous Ruby Ridge, and down Idaho’s panhandle. Above Lake Pend Oreille, he had his chance to turn left and follow the Clark Fork River, which would have led him southeast through the mountains away from Washington. Instead, he continued south another sixty miles and then turned west. Colt added to his troubles by flying the plane across the Idaho-Washington border south of Spokane, another federal offense on top of the one he committed by carrying firearms over the Canadian border.
Colt flew on to Walla Walla, Washington, just north of the Oregon line, then turned northwest and headed for Moses Lake. Moses—named for a Sinkiuse chief—is home to Grant County International (formerly Larson Air Force Base), where Boeing and the U.S. Air Force test and train pilots to fly their heaviest jets. It’s one of the largest airports in the country, and it has stood by as an emergency landing strip during every NASA Space Shuttle mission. Grant County’s relatively endless 13,500-foot runway wasn’t Colt’s idea of a safe place to land during the day, though. He continued toward Wennatchee, where he had friends, but didn’t look for a landing spot there either. He crossed Lake Chelan, a breathtakingly cold and deep fifty-five-mile-long basin fed by Cascade snows, then once again rock-and-rolled through the turbulence over glacier-topped mountains on his way toward the town of Granite Falls.
Except for his big swing south to avoid the most dangerous sections of the Cascades, Colt now flew on a line that ran direct from Boundary County Airport back to his Camano Island home—the very heart of his problems.
The Cessna’s fuel tanks, however, couldn’t disregard the big detour. Colt knew he had to get the plane on the ground very soon. But again, he ran into trouble with the weather. As the plane’s hour meter ticked over 313, Colt found himself above rugged terrain shrouded in fog and mist. The last minutes of his flight showed some dramatically erratic flying as he desperately tried to find a landing spot before his fuel ran out.
“There’s fuel and then there’s usable fuel,” says Pat Gardiner. The Cessna 182 can run out of fuel with five gallons still in the tanks—and that’s if it’s flying straight and level. If the pilot puts the plane into an uncoordinated maneuver, such as a turn where the aileron and rudder aren’t working together to keep the plane following its nose, the fuel flow can “unport” even though there’s enough gas to keep the motor running. “Unporting” is another of those nonchalant aviation code words. In English, it means “Oh shit, why did the engine stop?”
According to investigators, Gardiner’s Cessna did some unintentional acrobatics just before landing. Colt later told a friend he was flying upside down at one point. As he got down to his last few gallons of usable fuel, he finally found a break in the mist and what he thought was a decent landing spot. From one thousand feet, it looked okay: an ice cream cone–shaped field of patchwork green and brown, roughly five hundred by nine hundred yards and separated from the banks of the Stillaguamish River by about a hundred yards of trees. Down lower, though, at the point of no return, it became obvious why there was this one treeless spot amid the forested hills: it was a logged clearcut.
The misnomer about the word “clearcut” is that the forest floor is left clear. In fact, the trees are severed several feet up the trunk, leaving behind jagged stumps anchored to the ground by strong roots. At this spot, a summer’s worth of fast-growing vegetation camouflaged a minefield. Hundreds of immovable cedar and fir stumps spiked the field, any one of which could totally destroy the plane and its pilot.
The final seconds of this flight were a terrifying blur and by all rights should have been Colt’s last. The plane was moving much too fast, faster than would be safe to land even on a perfect runway. Colt fully extended the flaps, which is correct procedure for landing, but that should happen only once the plane has already slowed to a reasonable airspeed. At the Cessna’s screaming velocity, extending the flaps was like throwing an anchor. The plane pitched steeply down toward the hillside. If he couldn’t pull out of the dive, Colt would end up as the pulpy red bull’s-eye in a singed circle of ground.
As a view of the field filled his windshield, Colt fought to pull the plane’s nose up. He throttled back to idle, but it was too late. Investigators estimate that the Cessna slammed into the clearcut at more than 115 miles per hour—twice as fast as a normal landing.
The nose wheel crumpled on impact. The plane’s two main landing gear are stronger and fairly flexible, designed to withstand hard landings, but they didn’t stand a chance against the tree stumps. Both gear were ripped off, leaving just jagged pieces of strut as the plane careened forward, ramming into stumps and logs that hammered and tore into the fuselage. The starboard elevator caught a stump and spun the Cessna, folding the front gear underneath and punching it into the plane’s nose. An explosion of dirt and shredded green erupted as the propeller chewed into the field, its blades bending like boomerangs. Bits of soil and plants rained down onto the plane and into its engine compartment as the cowling burst open.
One young tree had been spared by the loggers, but a wing nailed it. The next stump impacted just behind the passenger compartment, buckling and gashing the aluminum alloy as if it were tinfoil.
Once it hit the ground, the Cessna stopped within a snot-flinging distance of ninety feet, a deceleration equal to about seven Gs. It was more than enough force to kill anyone in the plane as he was flung forward into the cockpit controls and dashboard at more than a hundred miles an hour.
Unless… In the milliseconds after the plane hit the ground, just as Colt’s body flew forward, an airbag built into the pilot’s seat belt ignited and shot up in front of him.
“There’s no way he would have survived without that airbag,” marvels Gardiner.
It still wasn’t like falling into a pillow. “I’m sure he had injuries due to the incredible amount of Gs from the impact and from going from high speed to zero in such a short distance,” says Brad Hernke, an investigator who specializes in small-plane accidents and who went to the site for U.S. Aviation Underwriters, Inc. “It’s incredible that anyone walked away from that crash.”
Colt knew he had to get out of the plane fast in case it was about to burst into flames. He pulled the handle of the pilot’s-side door, but it wouldn’t budge. The impact had been so violent that it torqued the airframe to the point where no amount of pounding would get the door open. During flight instruction, small-plane pilots are trained to open their doors in the air if they’re heading for a rough landing. With the door opened, the closed latch prevents it from jamming shut and trapping everyone in the plane. It’s on the off-field landing checklist, but Colt hadn’t done it.
Expecting an explosion at any second, Colt lurched to the other side of the cockpit and yanked the handle on the passenger-side door. Fortunately, that one opened. He was in such a frenzy to bail out that he forgot he was still wearing the radio headset. As he clambered away from the plane, the cord became taut and ripped it off his head.
Colt retreated to a safe distance and watched. When the plane didn’t catch fire, he went back and grabbed his stuff. Knowing how quickly the police had responded way out in the hills of Yakama, Colt must have figured they’d be at the crash site within minutes because he was only four miles outside the town of Granite Falls. The last thing he did was pour motor oil over the inside of the cockpit in an attempt to hide forensic evidence.
Laden with his gear, Colt hiked into the woods. He left behind a plane that looked like a toy broken over the knee of a giant, petulant child.
GARDINER’S CESSNA NOVEMBER-2183-PAPPA HAD taken off at 5:30 a.m. with about four and a half hours of fuel. The police were called at 7 a.m. and the alarm about a possible terrorist incident went off shortly thereafter. Now, at around 10 a.m., Pat Gardiner’s plane lay crumpled on top of a clearcut hillside. Gardiner says the Cessna had been crying out, telling everyone that it had crashed. His plane was equipped with an ELT (emergency locator transmitter), a distress signal that activates via an acceleration switch and automatically begins screaming if the plane gets into trouble. Not only does it shout, “Help, I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!” but the ELT transmits the plane’s precise location. Pat’s ELT used 121.5 megahertz, a frequency that search-and-rescue satellites stopped using in February 2009 because there had been too many false alarms, but that continues to be monitored by ground stations and commercial aircraft, who should have heard the signal.
With all the attention on the stolen plane from various agencies, including Homeland Security, it seems that it would have been easy to find and track the plane during its flight. One would also expect a swarm of activity around the crash site. And there was—but not until thirty-four hours after the Cessna went down, and then only because on Thursday, October 1, a logger drove up a three-mile skid road and stumbled upon the pulverized plane squatting in the middle of his clearcut.
In rare cases (possibly Steve Fossett’s) ELTs have failed to go off or haven’t been picked up by the satellites, but from what investigators told Pat Gardiner, FAA personnel who responded to the crash site were the ones who switched off his plane’s transmitter.
IN THE DAY AND a half before the logger found the plane, the facts of the Boundary County case—bare footprints, scrounged food, the chain of boosted cars leading back to Vancouver, and the fact that this was, after all, a flipping airplane theft—came together and pointed to one suspect: Colton Harris-Moore. When the wreckage was finally discovered, the FAA, FBI, and NTSB all worked the scene along with the local Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office and—as proof they had a good idea who was responsible—a detective called in from Island County.
The forensics team took DNA samples that ultimately matched Colt. Bare footprints led from the crash site and trackers attempted to follow, but lost his trail in the woods.
Once investigators gathered all their evidence and wrapped the scene, Gardiner’s plane had its wings clipped and a logging truck lifted and slung it aboard a flatbed like a beached whale. Everything went quiet in the Granite Falls area until 8 p.m. that Sunday, when a couple that lives less than four miles from the crash site came home to find they’d been burglarized, with blankets, a sweatshirt, shoes, their passports, and a cheap .22 caliber semiauto pocket pistol missing.
A Snohomish County deputy responded and, as he and the homeowner were checking out the house, they spotted a light on the hillside behind the property. The officer called for backup, and five deputies, including canine teams, started up the hill around 11 p.m. As the police picked their way through the thick brush, the dogs started going crazy. Then, according to the homeowner, they heard the crack of a gunshot.
Acting on standard procedure, the police pulled back, called in the cavalry, and set up a perimeter. Authorities knew Colt had handled guns, and believed he’d stolen at least five of them over the last several years, but there was no evidence he’d ever threatened anyone with a firearm. However, they knew he had a big attitude problem with cops going way back, and that on Orcas he’d pepper-sprayed a deputy. The year 2009 was also a very bad one for police in western Washington State, with six officers shot dead during a three-month period. Now they believed Colt had fired a gun when cops got close to him. They weren’t going to take any chances. The pursuit of Colton Harris-Moore had just taken a deadly serious turn.
COLT TOOK OFF, TRYING get as far away as possible from where the cops thought he was. He’d been chased many times and knew how the police operated. He could move extra fast now because he was traveling lighter: back at the campsite, he’d abandoned the bank bags from Orcas Island Hardware. The money hadn’t been touched; it was still banded together. Police also found the .32 caliber handgun stolen from BearAir in Creston, B.C., and a mirror from which the crime lab would lift a nice fingerprint.
Snohomish County deputies set up a cordon, manning roadblocks to control who got in and out of the area. Over the next twenty-four hours, the woods and country roads were flooded with law enforcement. The Marysville Police Department in Sno County sent their specially trained man-tracking squads to join the K9 and SWAT teams in an attempt to run Colt to ground while the county’s MD 500 helicopter and a Department of Homeland Security Black Hawk searched from above.
Colt was close enough to the action that he later told his mom that he heard the helicopters sweeping across the forest canopy over his head.
TV and newspaper images quickly emerged of troopers—some in black, others in camouflage, all armed with assault rifles—along with an armored personnel carrier and ominous black federal government helicopter, all arrayed against a barefoot teenager running through the woods. Now nothing could hold back the story of the boy who stole airplanes. Colton Harris-Moore’s tale went nationwide, and then global.
In order to deny Colt a means of escape, the police told everyone in Granite Falls to lock up their homes and cars. Within the small community, though, some people shrugged it off. One woman not only left her keys in her SUV, but also her purse. Searchers never spotted Colt, and the manhunt was called off after a day and a half. They had no idea how he escaped until the woman’s SUV showed up ditched in the little city of Stanwood. Her purse was still inside, the contents untouched. Stanwood police also found a passport belonging to the burglarized Granite Falls homeowners sticking in the door of their headquarters. Colt might be able to use her husband’s passport, but he had no use for a female identity and wanted to return the wife’s. A truck stolen from a nearby thrift store that same night was found across the causeway on Camano Island, at a spot a half mile from the single-wide trailer where Colt grew up and where his mom still lived.
Eighteen-year-old Colton Harris-Moore, now hunted as an armed-and-dangerous fugitive, had gone home.