The spark that eventually brought Colton Harris-Moore into the world struck when his mother chose “Crazy.”
She was Pam Harris back then, and had gone to a restaurant/cocktail lounge in Lynnwood, Washington, to wait for her oldest sister. After ordering a beer, she punched up the Patsy Cline classic on the jukebox.
There were few patrons in the lounge, but two guys sitting at the bar were talking and laughing so loudly that Pam could barely hear her song. She got up from her table, fed more money into the jukebox, and played it again. The boys kept up the rough chatter, though. Pam drank her beer, lit a cigarette, and did a slow burn. When the song ended, she got up and went for “Crazy” one more time. On the way back to her table, she screeched, “Be quiet so I can hear it this time!”
That got their attention.
“One of them turned around, got up, and came across the room,” she says. “He was a big guy, muscular, and I thought, Oh God, I’m going to get hit.”
Pam tells the story without any hint that it strikes her as anything but normal that a guy would give a gal a smack in the kisser.
Born Pamela Ann Coaker in the spring of 1951, Pam was the youngest of four—three girls and a boy—spread over nine years. Her father was big in road construction in Kittitas County, Washington, just east of the Cascades, where his family had a sheep farm. According to his oldest grandchild, he was also a big drinker, afflicted with what she calls “the Coaker curse.” Pam’s mother grew up in the Dakotas as the oldest of fifteen kids in a family with a dash of Sioux blood in their veins—something the entire clan cites to explain their fondness for running around barefoot.
Pam’s mom suffered through a couple of bad marriages, lost her voicebox to cancer, and, according to family, used alcohol to help deal with the pain. Both of Pam’s parents died in their early sixties.
Pam grew up loving the outdoors, and some of her favorite early memories involve listening to her father play guitar around campfires. She also enjoyed clamming, crabbing, and fishing, even though she’s never gotten over a fear of the water. As a teen in the sixties, Pam got into the Beatles and organic gardening, dressed hippie, and wore headbands over long hair that she straightened on an ironing board.
At seventeen, she married an air force mechanic named Harry and moved to San Bernardino, California, where she gave birth to her first son, Paul. Pam loved life in California, but moved back to Washington State and then east to Missouri as Harry followed work. When Chrysler laid him off, the family returned to Washington and settled in for a few happy years. The marriage ended, according to Paul, when Harry left Pam because of her drinking.
Paul, who plans to write a book about his difficult childhood, grew up a latchkey kid, often left alone while Pam worked during the day or was out at night. From the age of six, he’d come home from school to an empty apartment, call one of his cousins, and stay on the phone until his aunt could get there to pick him up. During those years, Pam worked at a dry cleaner and then in Seattle at a series of government jobs in the accounts payable sections of the Department of the Interior, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the U.S. Navy.
The oldest of her batch of nieces and nephews remembers Pam as more of a sibling than as an adult figure. She was the “cool aunt,” with a great record collection and even a blurry picture she’d taken of the Beatles running onstage.
“We’d listen to music and go to concerts,” her niece says. “We were holding tickets to go see Lynyrd Skynyrd when they died in the plane crash.” The niece also remembers Pam telling her who her real father was and helping her get in touch with him—something that pissed off her mother, Pam’s oldest sister, to no end. “Pam always did her own thing,” she says. “She didn’t care what anybody thought about her, what they thought about the men in her life, about her drinking, or smoking ‘her weed.’ Her attitude was ‘I do what I want, when I want, how I want.’”
Another of Pam’s notable qualities was her thriftiness. “Tightwad,” says her niece. “Her apartment was always freezing in the winter because she refused to turn on the heat and pay for the electric bill.” Pam’s alcohol budget back then went to a generic econo-brew in a stark white can plainly and boldly labeled BEER.
In June 1985, Pam remarried, this time to Jerry Harris, a guy who’d dated her older sister Sandy for a couple of years. That union didn’t last long, though, and soon after it spoiled, Pam found herself in that cocktail lounge faced with the imposing six-foot figure of Gordon “Gordy” Moore bearing down on her while Patsy Cline wondered why she let herself worry.
“He walked over to my table and just said, ‘What?’ So I said, ‘I’ve been trying to listen to this song three times! Will you shut up?’ He laughed, thank God. And then he invited me up to the bar to sit with him and his friend. We had a few drinks—whiskey for him, beer on my side—and then he said, ‘Hey, you want to go to the beach tomorrow?’ I gave him my phone number and said, ‘Call me—at noon.’”
Though she doubted he would, Gordy called—at 11:59. He picked her up and, after a nice day at the beach, said he wanted to introduce her to his folks. “I thought, Well, that’s a little quick,” says Pam. “My hair was all windblown and I didn’t bring a brush, so on the way to his parents’ place he stopped and bought me one. I thought that was pretty cool.”
Gordy worked as a concrete finisher with full journeyman status and made a good hourly wage. He filled Pam’s kitchen with food every time he came over, putting so many cans on her shelves that she couldn’t shut the cupboard doors. “He met my son, Paul, and everything was cool there, too,” she says.
Gordy liked to smoke turkeys and shared Pam’s love of the outdoors, taking her, Paul, and one of Paul’s cousins camping several times.
Pam yearned to live someplace more rural than Lynnwood, a Seattle satellite primarily known for its shopping centers and convenient highway access. She was also tired of the long commute to her government job, though she made the best of it. Once during a heavy snowstorm, her bus got stuck in a drift coming home. “I told the driver she should get off and get us all pizza and beer,” says Pam. The driver refused, so Pam led a mutiny among the passengers, piloting them to a local Black Angus, where they spent the next few hours warm and toasting.
According to Pam, Gordy worked hard and when the whistle blew he enjoyed the bars. His concept of the ideal home had a pub within walking distance. Pam’s woodsy dreams, though, finally persuaded him to pool his money with what she’d raised by cashing in her retirement funds so they could buy a couple of lots on the skinny tail end of an island called Camano.
Shaped like the Pink Panther bound in a straitjacket, forty-square-mile Camano is technically an island, though it’s a drive-to. The mainland gateway is the little city of Stanwood, where a conglomeration of superstores and strip malls overwhelms the remnants of a traditional town plopped in the middle of redolently fertilized farmland watered by the Stillaguamish River. A bridge crosses the Stilly just as it deltas into the Salish Sea and offers Camano residents a twenty-four-hour umbilical to civilization—which is good and bad. The good is that people are able to live on a Pacific Northwest island with all its evergreen and coastal beauty, yet still drive to whatever they need instead of being held hostage to a ferry schedule. The bad is that because its residents have relatively easy access to other communities and services, Camano hasn’t developed its own resources like Orcas Island has been forced to, with its own kids’ programs, performing arts centers, library, museums, and high school.
In many ways, Camano sits in limbo between being a true island community and simply a suburb surrounded by water. About a third of the 13,400 Camano Islanders are retired, and many of the rest roll across the bridge twice a day as they head to and from jobs at Boeing, or in Stanwood or Seattle, or somewhere else along the I-5 corridor. Its accessibility also makes Camano a popular vacation-home market. On summer Fridays, it seems every third car crammed onto the causeway has kayaks on top or a boat on a trailer as weekenders flood the island.
Wherever you are on the island, you’re a single turn from one of the four Camano Drives: East, West, North, and South. East Camano heads down island, offering sharp views of the Cascades across Port Susan Bay. Traffic and commercial buildings peter out to nothing as you pass the Camano Plaza’s big IGA. A utilitarian stretch on the west side of East Camano Drive houses a sparse collection of county offices. Island County once encompassed a big chunk of western Washington State but was chipped away over time so that it’s now made up of just Camano and Whidbey plus a smattering of smaller islands. Whidbey, with four times the acreage and three times the population of Camano—along with the county seat, Coupeville, and a big military base—overshadows its little sister, which even geologically seems to curl defensively inside the larger island. Camano residents talk of living in Island County’s forgotten hinterlands, and since county money follows population and pull, they’re right.
It takes ninety minutes to drive the circuitous route from Camano to Coupeville. That’s about twenty minutes longer than it takes Camano residents to get to downtown Seattle. It takes that same ninety minutes for Island County police to get from their Whidbey Island headquarters to the dinky prefab that serves as base for Camano’s small group of sheriff’s deputies.
Around 70 percent of Camano remains forested with thick second-growth. Drooping cedars, showy big-leaf maples, and stately Douglas fir crowd together so tightly along some sections of road that you can’t see past the first line into the woods. Outside about a dozen small subdivisions, many of the island’s homes are hidden down long tree-lined drives. Houses run the gamut from tarped single-wides to opulent log cabins fit for gentrified Jeremiah Johnsons to modern high-windowed manses facing sweeping ocean views. As you’d expect, plots along the coastline are pricey, with values dropping dramatically as you move inland. Rough-hewn fishing and crab shacks dotted the waterfront back in the day, but most have been torn down over the last few decades, replaced with large homes. As on Orcas, many of Camano’s finest homes are seconds—occupied only on weekends or for a couple of weeks each summer.
As you continue south on the island, the houses spread out and the view is mostly wooded acreage—private property along with public land and parks—with plenty of room to roam, or hide.
Mountain View Road, near the top of Elger Bay, serves as Camano’s Mason-Dixon Line. Above the line is the bedroom community section of the island where people think nothing of making a daily trip across the causeway to civilization and its jobs. South of Mountain View, though, you hear tell of blue tarps and rednecks, primitive artists and wild-eyed ex-hippies, the cries of coyotes and the strum of banjos. And it’s all true. Sort of.
The south end of Camano is more islandy than the north part due to its distance from the bridge. It’s about a half-hour drive from the southern tip just out to Stanwood, and there aren’t many people willing to make that extra commute. That’s left the south less populated and developed. Much of the island’s long tail is only a mile wide, and you can walk that in most parts without leaving the woods except to cross the loop road. Other than retirees, many of the full-timers down here tend to be artists and survivors from the back-to-the-land movement of the late sixties and seventies. Like Orcas full-timers, South Enders cobble together a living by doing two or three different jobs. Also similar to Orcas, the south end of Camano illustrates extreme disparity in income and wealth within a remarkably small area.
“The place where time stands still and the stills still stand,” says Jack Archibald, the person most responsible for putting the capital letters on the South End. “This is hell and gone. Nobody comes down here for a Sunday drive, and we like it that way.”
Archibald moved to Camano in the seventies, “looking to get back to the land.” He drove out on a drizzly dark night and told a Realtor he had a life savings of $25,000 and wanted a roof over his head and at least five acres. “He took me to this little cabin surrounded by tall trees, lights on inside so it was glowing, chimney puffing smoke… I said, ‘I’ll take it!’”
Daylight revealed the dream cabin to be just a rickety shack complete with Visqueen windows that did nothing to keep out the winter’s cold. Replacing those sheets of plastic turned out to be an act of fate for Archibald, who’d been working as a school bus driver. “I wanted something more interesting than just plain windows, so I took a night class on how to do stained glass.” He found he had an affinity for breaking and patching glass back together. Creating spectacular installations for schools, hospitals, libraries, and public buildings became his career.
Archibald and his fellow escapees looked around their section of Camano and decided to embrace the backwoods reputation. Jack created an alter ego, Skeeter Daddle, a rural raconteur, banjo picker, and gentleman nettle farmer who, along with his South End String Band mates, branded the South End as a place frozen in time.
“One of us called the South End ‘a poor man’s paradise’ and that was dead-on because when a lot of us moved in, land was very cheap,” says Archibald. “You couldn’t believe that you didn’t have any money but still got to live in a place like this. Wow, man—utopia!”
That didn’t last. “It’s harder and harder to live on this island if you’re poor, even down here. A lot of struggling folks are kinda grandfathered in, but there are less of them all of the time. More are losing their places now because of the economy hurting real estate, which means the itinerant construction jobs go away and they can’t pay their mortgages.”
Archibald describes the South End as a mini version of Florida. “It’s rich retirees on the coast and rednecky in the middle… different worlds within a very short distance. You won’t see it on a casual drive, but in the center of the island you find some fairly impoverished people… Garbage hasn’t been picked up forever, lawn’s up, house is falling down.”
IN DECEMBER 1985, PAM and Gordy moved out of their mainland apartment and into a twenty-three-year-old, six-hundred-square-foot single-wide trailer set on five inland acres of Camano’s South End. The area remained so undeveloped back then that their dirt road didn’t even have a name, just a number, 25’55, corresponding to its longitude.
Surrounded by good clamming and crabbing waters but also within easy reach of the Cascade mountains for camping, Camano fit Pam’s dream. So did the property, with plenty of room for a big garden, chicken coop, and pigpen. Except for the clearing around the trailer, the acreage remained thickly forested, making it feel like you were in the middle of nowhere with no one else around. To Pam—never one to associate with neighbors or much of anyone else—that was perfect.
Standing at the barbecue with a beer in her hand, screened off from the rest of the world by towering walls of Douglas fir and cedar, Pam was in paradise. Gordy, without a bar within walking distance, was okay—for a while.
“Gordy was a great guy, a lot of fun,” remembers Pam’s niece, “as long as he wasn’t drinking.” With a long history of DUIs, Gordy had to pass urine tests to keep his driver’s license and get to job sites. “I got pregnant around this time, when Gordy was sober,” she says. “Pam was really doting on me, and one day Gordy says to her, ‘I don’t have any kids—why don’t we have a baby?’ and Pam said, ‘Yeah! I want another one.’”
Pam says she and Gordy tried for about five years to become pregnant, and she had to go in for some plumbing work before finally conceiving in June 1990. “When I finally did get pregnant, Gordy goes, ‘I suppose you want to get married now, don’t ya?’” she says. “I said, ‘No, Gordy, I wouldn’t do that to you.’ He didn’t really want to get married—he liked messing around too much. Gordy does what Gordy wants to do.”
Pam, at thirty-nine, became pregnant just as her twenty-year-old first son and his wife, Jacquie, had their own baby girl, Christina. Around the same time, Pam’s oldest sister—who’d also moved out to Camano and lived at the end of Road 25’55—was in the terminal stages of emphysema. In January 1991, Pam’s granddaughter died of SIDS, which, the family says, had a big effect on her. That March, Pam’s oldest sister died.
Pam skipped her sister’s funeral because, as she told her niece, she felt she was too close to term. Three weeks later, at 8:38 a.m. on March 22, 1991, at Affiliated Health Services in Mount Vernon, Skagit County, Washington, Pam gave birth to her second son.
“Paul called me and said, ‘Oh God, my mother wants to name the baby Colt, after the beer and the gun,’” says Pam’s niece. “It was Paul and Jacquie who convinced her to officially make it Colton, since at least that was a real name.”
Pam had kept Jerry Harris’s surname, and she and Gordy decided to hyphenate. The baby boy became Colton Harris-Moore.
PAM WANTED TO CELEBRATE Colt’s birth as an extra special event. “I was working for the navy back then and had a good paycheck,” she says. “And Gordy was working steady and everything was cool, so I said, ‘We’ve waited for this baby for five years, how about let’s bring him home from the hospital in a white limo?’”
Pam says she’ll never forget the limousine driver’s name: Dexter. “We had him stop at a little store on the way home. I laid the baby in the backseat and both Gordy and I went inside. When we came back, Dexter was standing outside that limo like a guard. It was cool.”
They’d rented the limo for a couple of hours, so little Colt’s next stop was the feed store. “We were raising pigs and we had to get our feed,” says Pam. “When the owner saw the limo he went in and washed his hands and put on an apron because he wanted to see the baby. He met Colt and then we loaded a couple of bags of pig feed into the trunk of the limo.”
After that, they stopped at the market on Camano to show Colt off to some of the cashiers they knew. “God, we had a lineup! People I didn’t even know lined up to see that baby,” remembers Pam. Pam and Gordy then took Colt home to the little trailer tucked out of sight among the cedar trees.
A Camano resident who was at the market that day when the limo showed up remembers turning to a friend and saying, “That kid doesn’t have a chance.”
COLT, PAM SAYS, WAS a fat, happy baby. She nicknamed him Tubby and says that from the beginning he always loved to be outside and was fascinated with anything “up.” She remembers Colt staring into the night sky as she rocked him, and says that one of his first words was “moon.”
Pam went back to work after Colt was born, dropping him off at either her sister Sandy’s or her daughter-in-law Jacquie’s before heading off for the ninety-minute commute to her job with the navy. (The women in her office had thrown her a baby shower and had given her a novelty frame that said “Time’s Baby of the Year,” a somewhat prescient gift since eighteen years later, Time would name Colt “America’s Most Wanted Teen.”) Sandy’s eighteen-acre spread on the mainland came complete with horses, dogs, cats, and chickens, and Colt showed an immediate affection for animals.
According to Pam, Gordy was “an excellent father for about the first two years. We’d even argue over who got to change the diaper.” Then Gordy started to get itchy. “He wanted a bar out his front door,” says Pam. “So I said, ‘Okay, let’s make one. We’ll open up all the windows and put a couple of kegs in here.’” That didn’t work. Gordy started stepping out on her, which led to increasingly hostile confrontations at home.
“Once he started drinking? Whoa!” says Pam’s niece. “Sloppy and mean. He turned evil… Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”
According to court records, the first report to Child Protective Services regarding Colton Harris-Moore’s welfare occurred before he turned one.
When he was about eighteen months old, Pam says she began to find Colt sitting on the floor of the trailer banging his head against the wall. Relatives remember him, as an infant, acting out of control, scrambling atop the kitchen counters in the trailer. A former neighbor reported that more than once he saw toddler-aged, diapered Colton wandering down 25’55 alone, “like a wild child.”
Before Colt turned three, Gordy was “in and out” of the home. In April 1994, Pam filed a protection order against him.
Colt was enrolled in special education preschool classes at the age of three because testing indicated he’d failed to reach normal developmental milestones. Colt’s IEP (Individualized Education Plan) concentrated on helping him with speech and articulation.
Pam also headed to school. She’d been the first in her family to attend college when she took courses in Seattle and St. Louis, and now she enrolled in Skagit Valley College. “I was planning on getting my criminal justice degree,” she says. From there she wanted to work toward her law degree and ultimately become a practicing attorney. “I know that at least I’d be an honest one.”
When Pam took a psychology class, she suddenly had an insight into what she calls Colt’s mental problems. She says that from an early age he never thought through the consequences of his actions. “We learned about brain synapses, and I said, ‘That’s it! Colt has a broken synapse.’”
With Pam out of work, though, money got tight and she quit school. “Crap just started happening, trucks breaking down, nobody to help me… so bag it.” Pam and Colt went on welfare. Gordy was supposed to pay child support, and when he didn’t, the state’s Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS) went after him. Gordy, though, had a way to get around them.
“He knew to work less than a full quarter, which is what it takes for them to find you and take your money,” says Pam. “So he just kept moving to another job.”
Gordy didn’t totally disappear, though, stopping back at the trailer every once in a while over the ensuing years. If he was flush, he’d hand Pam some cash.
Around this time Pam had a falling out with her remaining sister, Sandy, in a continuing round of family feuds. Colton would later remember that event (“when Mom alienated them”) as being painful because he was close to Aunt Sandy and loved visiting the animals. According to family members, the feuds were usually about money.
On December 4, 1994, with her sons Paul and Colt in attendance, Pam got married again, this time to forty-one-year-old Seattle native William Kohler. Bill loved fishing, heroin, and raising homing pigeons. He’d served in the army, based overseas in Germany during the sixties, and then, according to Pam, worked as a milker at dairy farms when he came back to Washington. While Colt had already begun to detest Gordy, his biological father, he warmed to Bill. The two, Pam says, did everything together, and especially bonded over taking care of the animals they kept. Colt would later say that one of his best memories of Bill was how he’d walk like a chicken when they went out in the mornings to collect eggs.
Once again, though, his mother’s choice of men left Colt with little stability at home. Pam told a counselor that Bill “was not really here much… He was a heroin addict, so he was out a lot… Colton couldn’t count on [him].”
PAM SAYS YOUNG COLT was always more than a handful. “I don’t recall ever being able to control him, ever.” She found it impossible to discipline him. “I was spanked and I’m okay,” she says, though even corporal punishment had little effect on Colt. “He was always so big and strong, even when he was little, that it took more out of me to spank him than what the spanking did to him… He just always did what he wanted.”
When Colton was four, a witness filed a complaint with Child Protective Services after seeing “a woman” grab Colt “by the hair and beat his head severely.” By this time, concerns about Colton Harris-Moore’s mental health, education, nutrition, and physical safety had been entered into every part of “the system” possible, with reports to county, state, and federal agencies tasked with child welfare.
Colton continued special ed classes until age six, when he was reassessed and determined eligible for regular grade school. He was an inquisitive kid who could laser focus on things he was interested in—like nature and airplanes—but he never clicked with school. Pam remembers only one teacher who seemed to get through to him, and she moved to another school district after Colton finished second grade. His marks were never good, and they deteriorated as he advanced until at one point he failed every class. Pam says she insisted that the school hold him back, but the controversial policy of “social promotion” kept graduating Colton to the next grade along with his age group.
Outside of school, Colton joined a youth soccer team. Pam drove him to a couple of practices and he got his picture taken with the team. The photo shows an athletic six-year-old—certainly no longer tubby—with a bright, enthusiastic smile. After the team picture and before the first game, though, Colton stopped showing up. Pam said it was because her eyes gave her trouble and she couldn’t drive him at night.
With Colton’s speed and agility, he likely would have been a star on the playing field. Parents of another boy on the soccer team who also went to grade school with Colton say that Pam never reached out about the transportation problem. “One of the other parents would have been happy to pick him up for practice. That happens all the time with kids’ sports and events off the island—people help each other out. We’re all in the same boat.”
Other than the short stint with soccer, Pam says Colt was never interested in sports. “He’d rather be out playing in the woods.”
Colton’s main playmate early on was Anne Pitser. Anne’s mom worked at the Tyee Grocery, a little market near the very bottom of Camano where Pam bought her cigarettes and beer in those days. She and Pam had babies the same year and lived close, so they brought the kids together at an early age. “I still have a book that Colt and his mom gave me for my second birthday,” says Anne. “I just always knew him.”
Anne says that all the other kids just wanted to sit around and watch TV. “I thought they were boring. I didn’t have TV, so I always had to make my own fun, and Colt was into that.”
Every day after school starting in kindergarten, Anne says she and Colt would head to one or the other’s home. At Anne’s house, they’d play board games or race on her dad’s electric slot car track. Over at Colt’s, they primarily played outside.
“Inside his house was pretty much trashed… You were wading through mountains of things to get anywhere,” she says. Instead, they’d spend their time running around with the dogs and playing in the woods. “We used to just love climbing trees. We’d find anything that had a low branch and climb on each other’s backs to get to it. We’d climb up to the very top and then be like, ‘Oh no, how do we get down?’”
Back then, Camano didn’t have its own elementary school and island kids were bused across the bridge to Stanwood. “We were the outcasts there,” says Anne. “I was the fat girl with buck teeth, and everyone hated Colt. They made fun of him, they’d throw things at him. They’d pick on him because he dressed different and maybe he didn’t bathe regularly… He was just a boy. They were mean kids.”
Tough times in school brought her and Colt even closer. “We were inseparable. He never wanted to go home when he was at my house, and when I was over there he was like, ‘No! You can’t go home yet, don’t leave!’ By the time we were in the third grade, his mom was convinced that we were going to grow up and get married.”
Anne says Colt craved attention. “He wanted to be recognized. He wanted people to look at him and say, ‘Hey, he’s the one who did that!’ If he started a science project, he wanted it to be really good so that people would praise him. But I don’t think people ever really cared.” Anne says Colton once built an elaborate treehouse in the woods by his trailer. “I was like, ‘Dude, I can’t believe you built this! It’s the coolest thing in the world!’ That made him feel really good.”
The cool fort came down, though, when Pam found out Colton had built it with lumber she’d bought for another project.
“Every once in a while at school he’d be upset,” says Anne. “I’d ask him what’s wrong and he’d be like, ‘Oh, my mom’s just stupid.’”
Colt had a really cool dad, though—or so Anne thought. “Colt was always telling me that his dad was a pilot and that there was nothing he wanted more than to grow up and fly planes like him. But I never met the dad that he talked about. I knew his mom had boyfriends, but it didn’t sound like Colt liked any of them much.”
PAM FILED FOR DIVORCE from Bill Kohler in 1998, though it was never finalized. Bill left the family several times, and before Pam would let him come back, she’d search his bags for drugs. Even when she let him stay, he’d eventually leave again. After Bill came Van Jacobsen, a man described in Child Protective Services referrals as “an alcohol or drug abuser,” and another questionable role model for Colt. Van drifted in and out of the trailer over many years. Camano locals who know him say Van is “a nice, gentle guy” whose hard living has taken its toll. Pam herself described him as “not playing with a full deck.” Neighbors say it sounded like Pam always yelled more than talked to him, but Van kept coming back.
Gordy would also occasionally show up back at the trailer, and Pam says Colt didn’t like that. “He was a drunk, and Colt wanted him to leave. They did battle around here almost every day.” Colt even argued that Gordy was not his father, insisting to Pam that it was Bill. She says she understood his feelings. “I guess if you have a shitty father you choose the next best thing.”
With a growing resentment toward Gordy—and denied Bill, who he did feel close to—Colt clung to a fantasy father, the famous flier.
Other than his lifelong fascination with “up,” Pam says she doesn’t have a clue where Colton’s love of planes originated. None of the men Colt had seen with his mom was an actual pilot. She indulged his interest, though, by buying him balsawood fliers, those featherweight model planes that American boys have been zooming around their yards since World War I. The wafer-thin wings don’t stand up to much abuse, and after a few of his rough landings splintered the wood, Pam says Colt would go into meltdown mode. When he kept crashing and breaking every plane he got his hands on, Pam decided that instead of continually buying him new ones, it was smarter to get Colt a big sheet of balsa and let him start designing and building his own aircraft.
Pam says she also took Colton across Saratoga Passage to watch the planes taking off and landing at Whidbey Naval Air Station. Twenty-one active squadrons (the Zappers, Scorpions, Grey Wolves, Fighting Marlins, Black Ravens, and others) are based at Whidbey, with more than enough thundering warbirds in the air to rattle the bedroom windows and fuel flights of fancy for all the kids in Island County.
According to what Colton later told counselors, his relationship with his mom began to deteriorate by the time he started grade school. However, they still shared a love of the outdoors. They bonded over camping trips (“Maybe I shouldn’t have taught him all that survival stuff!”) and visits to Camano’s beaches. One day Pam drove him to the top of the island and dropped him off at Utsalady Beach. “I didn’t stay because I had a headache,” she says. “When I went back to pick him up at the end of the day, Colt had built hisself a really cool Robinson Crusoe camp using sticks and towels.”
He’d also captured what Pam remembers as forty Dungeness crabs (more than six times the legal limit) and had them piled on the beach. “He had a crowd of people watching, so I told him to pick the five biggest to bring home for dinner and let the rest go.”
Colton loved Dungeness crab, Cancer magister, the Salish Sea’s most delicious bottom feeder. These muscle-bound crustaceans make East Coast blue claws look like daddy longlegs, and fresh Dungeness meat comes out in big sweet chunks. Most folks fish Dungeness using pots and traps, with only the hardiest climbing into chest waders and plodding through the frigid shallows armed with dip nets. Young Colt, however, devised a way to catch the big crabs without nets or traps. He used only his bare feet.
Impervious to the cold water as only a true Northwest island boy could be, Colt would splash into the 50-degree sea wearing just his baggies. He’d stalk or swim over the sand and swaying eel grass until he spotted the broad purplish back of a Dungeness, then maneuver behind it. The predatory crabs earn their place in the food chain by cracking rock-hard clam shells with a pair of serrated claws that can also put a serious hurtin’ on any errant finger or pinkie toe. Colt, though, would fearlessly poke his toes beneath the crab’s belly then quickly flip it up. As the crab frantically flailed the water and snapped its claws, Colt’s hand would dart in to snatch it behind the last of its ten legs, safely out of pinching range.
Colt seemed a natural for the Cub Scouts. He joined up and began working his way through the ratings. Pam says he once even won the rain-gutter regatta, a race where the scouts blow through straws to propel little wooden sailboats down water-filled rain gutters. Unfortunately, she didn’t make it there to see him win because she says she’d gone back to work and had a night shift. She says Colton ultimately had to quit the scouts because she couldn’t take him to the meetings in the winter when it was too dark for her to drive.
Before he left the Cub Scouts, Colton advanced from Bobcat to Wolf Scout. In a childhood recorded by remarkably few photos, Colt’s Wolf certificate became one of his few treasured mementos.
In 1999, just after Colton turned eight, an event occurred that Pam says sparked his bad attitude toward the police. Though money was scarce, she’d scraped together $300 to buy him a new bike for his birthday. The bike became Colton’s prize possession, a symbol of independence and a vehicle for adventures, real and imaginary.
Pam was up on the trailer’s porch when an Island County Sheriff’s Office prowler pulled into the driveway with Colton in the backseat. She walked down and asked, “What’s up?” She says the deputy just got out, walked around his car, and popped the trunk. “Is this Colt’s?” he asked, pointing at the new bike.
“I got pissed!” says Pam. “I said, ‘Yeah, I just bought it for him!’ They figured ’cause we live in this dumpy trailer and must be dirt poor that how could Colt get a bike like that, well, he must have stole it.”
Pam remembers Colton being scared.
The sheriff’s office says they have no record of the incident, but don’t doubt that it happened. They say Camano-based deputies had already been hearing complaints about Colton from neighbors (nothing made it into official police records until two years later). “Based on his history and what the guys knew about him,” says Detective Ed Wallace, “I would not doubt that upon seeing Colton on a new bike that the guys would’ve wondered, Hey, what’s going on? and taken him home. I don’t doubt it happened at all. I just doubt whether that was the pivotal dramatizing event of his life.”
The police who worked Camano Island in the 1990s and early 2000s considered the South End a trouble spot, and not without reason.
“We had a slog of bad kids around here for a while,” says Jack Archibald. “Parents didn’t know how to teach them to be students. There were people like Pam, barely hanging on, doing their own thing, letting their kids run wild. The kids naturally looked for trouble and it was easy down here because most of us didn’t lock our doors.”
“There’s a real rugged side to things on the South End,” says Bonnie Bryand in her honey-barbecue Texas twang. Bryand moved to Camano in 1994 and raised three kids on the island, including a son named Kory who is the same age as Colton. “A lot of cooking was going on down here until about five years ago.” For a while, she says, it wasn’t unusual to find meth fixings that had been tossed into the ditches.
According to Bryand, drug and alcohol abuse and a lot of single-parent homes affected an entire group of Camano kids in Colt’s generation. “On top of the problems in the households, the kids had nothing constructive to do on the island.”
Camano suddenly had its homegrown version of the Dead End Kids as the children living at the bottom of the island became known as the South End Hoodlums. They began to attract a lot of attention from the police. “When I first moved here there was only one cop on duty for the whole island and you were lucky if he’d show up when you called,” says Bryand. “Then suddenly it seemed like we had four or five per shift and they were going after these kids real hard.”
Bonnie’s husband died in a car wreck while intoxicated, and her oldest son began running with the bored kids looking for trouble. She says that once the police identified someone they thought was bad, it was very hard for that kid to break out of the cycle. “If you lived anywhere near here, you got pegged.”
Two of the troubled kids Bonnie began to see around the neighborhood appeared to have all the cards stacked against them. One was the son of a meth addict. “His mom… I tried to help her out, but she got busted. When she got out of jail you couldn’t have her around, you couldn’t trust her. They lived in an old trailer house just falling down in the woods, and she had a lot of men in and out of there.” The tweaker’s son had a friend he ran around looking for trouble with: Colton Harris-Moore.
“Those two young boys, eight or nine years old, basically ran her house, always tearing things up and stealing stuff. Of course, her being a drug addict, she didn’t really care what they did.”
Though they lived less than two miles apart, Bonnie hadn’t met or heard of Pam, but she began to see a lot of Colton. “He was out running the streets on his own from a very young age.” Colt, she says, pushed himself into her kids’ groups. “He tried to fit in, but he was real aggressive, too rough, so nobody wanted to play with him and that’s when it became a problem. He wouldn’t take ‘No.’”
Bonnie has both a niece and a nephew diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and says she recognized a lot of those behaviors in Colton. “I don’t think he ever meant to be mean, but every day my daughter would come home crying because Colt had hurt her. I’d always tell her, ‘He’s just playing with you,’ which might have been the wrong thing to say. I didn’t see Colt as a demon, though. I liked him and always felt bad for him. The kids didn’t like him, but they had no understanding of what he was dealing with. Colt didn’t see that he was different.”
It wasn’t just the kids, though, who had a problem with Colt. “Everybody shunned him,” says Bryand. “Most parents didn’t want him in their house. The main problem was that he didn’t have any manners. They thought he was disrespectful, and he was, but you’re talking [about] a really young kid and I don’t think he intended to be. It was just all he knew.” Bonnie says that Colt would invite himself into her house. “I mean no knocking, no nothing, just walk in. And then he wouldn’t be interested in the kids or me. You could be talking to him, but he’d be in his own world looking at the things we had around the house. You had to keep an eye on him because he’d take things, and then he’d wind up breaking them.”
Colt also helped himself to her kids’ bikes. “He always stole bicycles. He would just go in your yard and take one. He thought he was just borrowing it.”
Bryand’s son Kory says Camano wasn’t a great place to grow up. He had troubles with the same set of kids over in Stanwood as Colt and Anne. “It was hard… not a lot of accepting people. Me being half Mexican, they made fun of me.”
With his own outcast and South End tinge, Kory seemed a likely friend for Colt. However, he says, “Colt was always difficult to get along with.” He describes Colt as primarily a loner, though says he would get to be friendly with one or another Camano kid for a while. However, the friendships would eventually sour. “Colt’s mouth would end it,” says Kory. “He loved to argue, usually pointless arguments, and he’d always wind up calling the other kids imbeciles. That was his favorite word.” Kory says most of the arguments started because of Colt’s tall tales. “He’d make up these unimaginable stories, huge lies about his dad being a pilot and having all these big houses. Everyone already knew what his life was like and that none of it was true. He always had tore-up raggedy clothes, shoes ripped apart… ”
Colt’s longest childhood friendship was with a boy named Joel who also lived on Road 25’55, which eventually got a real name, ironic at least where Colt was concerned: Haven Place.
“Nobody wanted Colt hanging around,” Joel says. “None of the kids liked him because he was constantly antagonizing people and he bullshitted so much that it was annoying. He once brought a rusty old key into school and said it was to his helicopter. I was like, ‘C’mon, man, I know that you and your mom live in this twenty-two-foot trailer just up the road. You don’t need to tell me you have a fucking helicopter.’”
Joel says that because of how Colt acted, “we’d wind up being good friends and then enemies, sometimes in the same day. I never knew what that meant, but from the time Colt was a little kid, my mom always said that he was going to do something crazy in his lifetime.”
Colt and Joel roamed the whole of the South End on foot and by bike. They explored the woods, built tree forts, and spent a lot of time playing army. “Colt was really into the Navy SEALs and special forces. He had a mentality like he was some kind of secret agent. He’d talk in code and he was always analyzing and plotting one step ahead.”
One of Colt’s quirks, says Joel, was the way he moved through the forest. “Whenever he’d run through the woods, he’d always take his shoes off and go barefoot. He said he was able to run better and be more agile that way.”
Joel vividly remembers stopping by Pam’s trailer when he was nine years old to see if Colt was home. “I knocked on the door and his mom answered with a shotgun in my face. That was pretty intimidating as a kid. After that, my mom was like, ‘You don’t need to be dealing with those people.’”
Neighbors on Haven tell a story from the same time, in the year 2000, when a Realtor and a contractor were preparing to build a home on the lot that backs up to Pam’s. The men were hunting for the property line markers and walked up to the trailer to ask if she knew where the corners were. According to neighbors, Pam’s answer was to grab her shotgun, fire it into the air, and chase them off her property à la Granny from The Beverly Hillbillies.
When running through the woods pretending to be Navy SEALs lost its edge, Colt and Joel began concocting real secret missions. The first mischief they got into was stealing cigarettes from their mothers. “Then we’d go hide out and smoke them,” says Joel. They then progressed to what they called “ninjing,” as in ninja-ing, stealthing through the woods and creeping up to neighborhood homes. “We’d go out at night and sneak around trying to find open garages,” he says. “We’d take soda pop and stupid stuff like that.”
Joel says Colt never worried about getting caught. “He was the same way in school when we’d disrupt the class, or on the bus when we’d start fighting or something. He didn’t care if he got into trouble.”
By the time Colt, Joel, Anne, and Kory were ready for the fourth grade, Camano’s brand-new Elger Bay Elementary was ready, too. They no longer had to bus out to Stanwood, but according to Anne, the kids continued to pick on both her and Colt. At times, she says, the teasing was so relentless that Colt escaped the only way he knew how—“He ran and hid.”
From Anne’s point of view, Colt had been fine up to this stage in his life. “He’d been a really good kid until the fourth grade. He’d do his homework and was a good student, especially for things he liked. If he took an interest in something he was all over it.” But then, she says, things changed. “Suddenly Colt became a troublemaker, a rebel. He’d stand up and start talking in the middle of class and the teacher would be like, ‘You need to sit down and pay attention,’ and he’d be like, ‘Uh, no.’ So he’d get sent out into the hall. It weirded me out, the way he just suddenly changed.”
PATTY MORGAN TAUGHT COLT in fifth grade at Elger Bay Elementary, though she says that for any discussion about his actual education, you have to look to lower grades because “he’d already checked out by fifth.” Morgan says Colt didn’t want to contribute and didn’t want to do the work in her social studies class (they were studying government that year). “Mostly he would just kinda slouch in the back and not participate. He was a hard one to read.” Morgan says she attempted to engage him because she felt he could do the work if he tried. That led to her most vivid and disturbing memory of Colton. “One time I was trying to encourage him to write his assignment, and I laid my hand on his shoulder. He suddenly jerked really violently and said, ‘Don’t touch me! Don’t ever touch me!’”
“I think there were some teachers that felt bad for him,” says Kory, though he sensed that some seemed to care less about the kids they’d identified as troublemakers, including him and Colt. What he and Anne and other students from their class agree on is that Colt seemed to follow the classic arc of the bullied becoming the bully. “He went from being picked on to being the one picking on anyone he could get away with it against,” says Kory.
“He wanted to be accepted and he wanted to be just like everyone else,” says Anne. Unfortunately for her, being like everyone else at Elger Bay Elementary meant turning on the fat girl with buck teeth. “He’d make fun of me, pull my hair, throw things at me, so the whole class would laugh. No one else liked me, so he thought that if he made fun of me, then people would like him. He turned my life into a living hell… I didn’t live all of that down until high school.”
Colt wasn’t able to raise himself too far up the pecking order, though. The kids may have laughed at some of his antics, but very few wanted to hang out with him. Whenever he did reach out and make a connection, it didn’t last long.
“He was the black sheep of the school,” remembers Mike Bulmer, who was one of Colt’s few friends for a while. Also from a broken home and a veteran of mother-son battles, Mike stole his mom’s van when he was only nine years old in an attempt to flee to his dad’s place on Camano. His father got custody in time for Mike to enter fifth grade at Elger Bay Elementary. As the new kid on the island, he didn’t have any friends, so he and Colt gravitated toward each other.
Mike’s father’s property on Camano was a Shangri-la for little dudes, with BMX bikes and rugged riding trails etched throughout the acreage. Mike and his older brother even had a go-cart and paintball guns. Colt, says Mike, always wanted to be there. “My dad wouldn’t let him stay over on weekdays, but every Friday he’d come over and we’d order pizza and hang out for the weekend.” Mike says Colt didn’t have a bike of his own at the time, so he used to walk the three miles back and forth from his trailer.
Colt never invited Mike to his home. “He said his mom was always yelling at him,” remembers Mike. “One time I was at a buddy’s house on Haven and you could frikkin’ hear her screaming at Colt all the way down the road.”
Mike is another one who says his close friendship with Colt began to break down because of the tall tales. One day when Colt was over at their house, Mike’s older brother called him out on his stories and drew a circle in the dirt. “He made us fight, full-on fist contact,” says Mike. “I was the bigger kid back then and I got Colt on the ground. He looked up at me and I socked him right in the face. That made him really, really angry. I don’t know how the hell he did it because I was so much bigger, but he lifted me off and then took a fat tree branch and broke it over my head. Then he went home.”
FOR ALL THE REJECTION, Colt continued to seek companionship.
South End sculptor Shannon Kirby first met Colt when he came down her road walking his bike. She looked up from her gardening and saw a cute kid with a flat tire. “He was a little pumpkin.”
Shannon called him over and reinflated his tire. “I showed him where I kept my pump and told him it was there if he ever had another flat.” It took only five minutes to fix the bike, but then they started talking. “He was very chatty. It was like he was just starving. He just wanted someone to pay attention to him.”
Colt stayed for an entire hour. As he was leaving, Shannon told him to come back if he wanted to. A few days later, he did. “I yakked with him for a while, but for less time than before because I was busy. Finally I said, ‘Sorry, I’ve got things to do.’ I could just see his face immediately change, with this look of ‘Ugh, they always do that to me, they shut me down.’” Colt left. A short while later, Kirby’s bike pump was stolen.
The next time Shannon saw Colt was when a bunch of kids came cascading out of the woods onto her property. “They’re roughhousing and I’m watching. It was obvious Colt didn’t understand boundaries, like nobody had taught him. He was playing way too rough with this one girl. He tripped her and she fell and hurt her ankle, so I went out, helped her up, and gave her a Band-Aid. Colt was like this gangly goonball that didn’t know how to behave.”
Kirby saw Colton again years later, this time in the Stanwood Library. She said hello, but says he looked away, uncomfortable. By then she’d had another break-in that the police later tied to Colton.
In 2000, Pam took up with a man we’ll call Jimmy, a journeyman mechanic, chain-smoking Caterpillar cowboy, and hard drinker who “could put a hurtin’ on a bottle of whiskey before noon by a long shot.” Jimmy’s the kind of guy who seems to know every road and dirt logging track in the state, and when telling a story will make damn sure you know exactly what byways got you there and where every crossroad leads to. Same thing with machinery details and model numbers. Folks who know him describe Jimmy as “a lost soul,” and though in some ways he fit Pam’s predilection for bad boys, the then-forty-five-year-old had never been in any real trouble with the law beyond what he calls “some DUI bullshit.”
Jimmy hooked up with Pam while doing a land-clearing job down on Haven Place. “It was all happy-go-lucky bullshit for the first while, a good time when you were drunk,” he says. So he moved into the trailer, “shacked up, whole shit and caboodle.” He says it looked like Pam and Colton had been barely scratching by. “She wasn’t working. Nothing in the cupboard and nothing in the fridge but beer,” so he filled the trailer with food. Jimmy says he’d cook and Colton would help. He quickly learned the kid’s favorite meal. “Crab wouldn’t last a day with him in the house.”
To add to the Dickens-on-draft scene, Jimmy says that Colt’s clothes were rags. “His ass was hanging out of his underwear, so I took him and bought him a couple hundred dollars of new stuff—shoes, jeans, underwear, everything.”
Jimmy says he and Pam rarely went out. “She’s not a bar-hopper, not her scene, wouldn’t socialize with other people. She just wanted to stay home and lay on the couch drinking her beer.” He says he and Colton spent a lot of time outside, playing with Colton’s Great Pyrenees named Cody and bonding over heavy equipment. Jimmy taught Colton how to mow the lawn on a tractor, then graduated him to bigger boy’s toys. “I put him on my D7 Cat, my 440 articulated skidder, my D2 bulldozer… Hell, he could run that within a few minutes. He was a good student, real quick learner.”
Some other lessons Colton picked up on real quick were how to hotwire tractors, cars, and boats—skills Jimmy thought might come in handy someday out in the field. “I feel lower than dogshit about that,” he says now. “Never thought he’d go and do this stuff.”
Colton’s fascination with airplanes offered another connection between the two. Jimmy actually had a pilot’s license. He’d learned as a kid, hanging around a small airfield, helping out by pumping gas into planes until a friend of the family took him up and taught him to fly. Finally, Colton had met a real pilot.
“Colt was just obsessed with airplanes,” says Jimmy. “He had books about them all scattered around and he was always drawing them with crayons and colored pencils. So I started taking him to the hobby shops in Mount Vernon and Burlington and I’d buy him all kinds of plane models—some real fancy with lights that would work off batteries—and then we’d build them together.”
Soon Colt had squadrons of model planes in his room, some hanging from the ceiling posed in perpetual dives, others awaiting clearance for takeoff amid the clutter.
Jimmy also had a laptop. “We’d get on the Internet and fart around looking at airplanes. I was thinking about getting a chopper, a small experimental helicopter, two-man job. Pam would be passed out on the couch, and me and the kid would go online to look at the chopper and dream about it.”
One of Jimmy’s computer programs in particular captured young Colt’s attention: Microsoft Flight Simulator. Sitting beside Jimmy, Colt familiarized himself with the sim’s aircraft—a Learjet Model 45, a Bell 206 JetRanger helicopter, and a Cessna 182 Skylane featuring an ultrarealistic instrument panel.
Unlike a fantasy video game designed solely to inject adrenaline thrills, Flight Simulator offers an educational experience for those with the flying bug. The screen accurately renders the cockpit gauges, and to successfully get airborne a virtual pilot must learn to operate all of the plane’s controls within correct parameters. Forget to release the brakes and the plane won’t go anywhere; not enough throttle and it won’t lift off; fly too slow or pull the nose too high and the plane will stall and crash unless quickly corrected. With the sim, would-be pilots can learn to navigate between points using instruments or visual landmarks, they can fly day or night or in any kind of virtual weather, and they can practice landing at real, accurately rendered airports around the world (three hundred airports back then; three thousand in the latest version of the program).
Jimmy was impressed by how quickly Colt mastered the highly technical Flight Simulator. “I even had a joystick hooked up so it felt more realistic, and he took to it right away.”
While the models and Microsoft had Colt’s imagination reaching for the skies, life on the ground, in the trailer, began to more closely approximate hell.
“As time went along… man, she was a mean fucking drunk,” says Jimmy. “Very moody, just go into raging drunks. Looking into her eyes… she had the hate in her. She’d drink and beat up on the kid. I mean she hammered on him—we’re talking black and blue. I wouldn’t beat my dog that way. Every other day it’d happen. Maybe the kid wouldn’t clean up his room or take out the garbage, which was a joke anyway because the whole goddamn place was a hog pen, a total firetrap. She’d be half drunk and start picking on him for one thing or another, nitpick bullshit, then it would escalate and she’d start beating on him.”
Jimmy says Colt had his own anger issues, throwing fits when asked to do something he didn’t want to do. And together, mother and son brought out the worst in each other. “The poor kid would have enough of his mother nagging and nagging, and then he’d just fucking come unglued. When she got mad she’d break his toys and stuff, so it got to the point where he’d break up his own shit before she could. He’d trash out his room, kick and stomp, bitch and scream and go outside. I’d go out and calm him down and we’d sit out on the picnic table and bullshit. He’d tell me he hated her. I shouldn’t have done it, but once in a while he’d be out there crying and I’d have a beer in my hand and give him a sip.”
Jimmy never saw Colton fight back. “He was scared of her back then.”
Jimmy says the bad scenes inside the little trailer weren’t limited to mother and son. “It started to wear down real quick. Then her and I got into it one day and I ended up in Coupeville for a night.” He says he and Pam were having a shouting match in the trailer’s little living room when Pam went ass over tit behind the woodstove. “She fell over the kindling box,” says Jimmy. “But Colt thought I hit her. She yelled for Colt to go call the cops, so he went across the road to the house where a bunch of dopers lived and called the 911.”
The Island County deputies and Stanwood police came out. Pam had a shiner coming up, and they arrested Jimmy, who spent the night locked up in the Coupeville county jail. “I took a taxi back the next day and told the driver—a damn good-looking gal, charged me $100 for the ride, though—I told her to turn the cab around and have it facing the main road with the engine running and wait for me just in case. I didn’t know what [Pam] might do. I sat in the taxi for a good long time, not knowing whether to shit or go blind… then finally grew some hair on my ass, got out, and walked down the driveway. The door was open and she was sitting on the couch, fuckered up. She turned around, big old black eye. I only stayed a few days after that and then decided no way, it’s not working out.”
Island County records show that the assault charges against Jimmy were dropped.
After Jimmy, Van again became a fixture around the trailer. He and Colt mainly got along. During a later interview with counselors, Colt said that Van was only violent to him twice, while Pam was violent to him “100s of times.”
With nearly constant trouble and stress at home and at school, Colt increasingly turned inward—maintaining his fantasy life as the secret agent son of a rich pilot—and outdoors, spending as much time as possible in the woods.
Both Pam and Jimmy say they taught him survival skills: how to build fires and set up campsites, which plants were safe to eat and which ones were poisonous. Once inside the evergreens, Colton was home, kicking off his shoes to climb trees or to run full speed through the undergrowth.
“He loved being in there,” says Kory. “If you ever chased him, he’d always go for the woods. And once you were in the trees, forget it, because you’d never be able to find him but he’d know exactly where you were. You’d follow him in, but he’d disappear, then suddenly he’s behind you throwing rocks, but you still can’t see him, so you’d have to back off.”
Kory says Colt was equally at home in the woods all over Camano Island. “He knew the woods up by where we lived better than we did, and we were in there all the time.”
COLT ALSO KNEW AND loved the waterfront, wandering Camano’s coastline from top to bottom, often alone, from a very young age.
“I was out in the water, boogie boarding, just paddling around,” says Megan Wagner, “when all of a sudden I see this snorkeler coming toward me. We hardly ever saw strangers down on the beach, and this kid is coming straight at me, closer and closer. I’m thinking, Whoa, that’s really, really weird, and I start to swim away. I look back and he’s still following me! So finally I stop and turn around. He pops up and says, ‘Wow, from underwater, your legs look like Jell-O!’”
It was summer, the ideal time to be a nature-loving boy or girl on a Pacific Northwest island. Megan Wagner, at twelve, was old enough to be offended by someone commenting on her legs. And she was, at first. But looking at this ten-year-old boy[1] with the buzz cut and the big smile spreading beneath his dive mask without a trace of malice, she couldn’t help but start laughing.
He introduced himself as Colton and said, “Want to see something cool?” Megan said yes and followed as he scouted ahead in the shallow water. “Then he bends his knees and suddenly kicks his bare feet up,” says Megan. “And this huge crab comes flying off the bottom and Colton just grabs him! I thought that was the coolest thing ever.”
Colton thrust the big spidery Dungeness at Megan’s face. When she didn’t freak, it sealed their friendship. “I was pretty tomboyish, and we definitely hit it off right away,” she says. The two played together in the sea until lunchtime, when Megan’s mom, Doreen, called her back to the beach to eat. Megan asked if Colton could join them. From that point on, he became part of the Wagners’ summertime family.
The beach they picnicked on lay about 150 feet directly below the Wagners’ high-bank waterfront property on South Camano Drive, 3.3 miles south of Pam’s trailer as the raven flies. Doreen and her husband, Bill, first rented the house for a year when he worked for an aircraft company on the mainland. They loved the spot so much that later, after they moved to California and Bill started his own aeronautical engineering company, they decided to buy it as a vacation home. Along with the main house up on the treed bluff, the property came with a small beach cabin that served as a boat house for kayaks, dinghies, and other water toys.
“You didn’t want to have to go up and down that path between houses more than once,” said Doreen. “So we’d pack up in the morning and spend the whole day down there.” That “we” included Megan and her three younger sisters, along with a revolving guest list of friends and family. And Colton Harris-Moore.
“After that first day, I’d just always make an extra sandwich for him because he was always there,” said Doreen. Their Colton was a real island boy, a pint-size Tarzan. “He never had shoes and I don’t even remember him even having a shirt, just always showing up in his swim trunks with his mask in his hand.”
Every morning when the Wagners hiked down the path to the beach they found Colton waiting for them. “Then after a while,” says Doreen, “he started meeting us up at the main house so he could help cart all the stuff down to the beach.”
Once down the steep switchback trail that ran through fir, maple, and thickets of blackberries, Megan and Colton would head straight for the water. “We’d splash around, swim, walk along the beach lifting up rocks to see what kinds of animals were under there, like little crabs. At low tide we’d wade around this big rock and see who could find the biggest starfish.”
Megan says Colton amazed her with how much he knew about nature, both in and out of the water. “I remember there were these berries growing on the property and I’d always wanted to eat one, but my mom told me not to because they were poisonous. One day I look over and Colton is eating them and I’m like, ‘What are you doing?’ And he’s just, ‘Oh, they’re good, try one.’ He said they were salmonberries.”
When Bill Wagner took his summer vacation, he’d fly up to Washington in his twin-engine Westwind business jet with his private pilot, Dan, who’d stay with the Wagners on Camano. The kids had a couple of men around to run the boats, and Colton got to meet more real pilots. Bill would anchor their little cuddy cabin runabout off the beach and every day he or Dan would be out either dragging the kids behind it on inflatable tubes or pulling up pots filled with Dungeness crab. “I really enjoyed having Colt around,” says Bill. “And boy was he a spring—he never stopped moving. But he was also just the kindest, most polite little kid… and always helpful.”
“My youngest sister was six at the time,” remembers Megan, “and she freaked every time seaweed touched her leg. She’d scream because she thought a crab was going to get her. So when we waded in or out to the boat, Colton would carry her. He’d even give her piggyback rides, barefoot, up the steep dirt path when we had to go back to the house.”
Everyone knew it was time to head up when Doreen let loose one of her ear-piercing whistles. Playtime, though, didn’t stop just because they had to leave the beach.
“Colton taught us all how to climb trees,” says Megan. “We had a little fort up in a tree that was near a fence and he showed us how to climb the fence first then get into the tree.” Colton, the girls, and whatever friends they had visiting would also play tag in the woods along the driveway and the main road. Inside, Doreen set up the home’s solarium as what she called the “kids’ dormitory” for the summer, with inflatable mattresses on the floor. “It was a place where they could watch TV and play video and board games.”
Megan says her and Colton’s favorite board game was Life. Doreen remembers that the kids decided that whoever won would have the most babies when he or she grew up.
They also watched movies. The film Megan says they had playing continuously that first summer was Forrest Gump, the story of an outcast boy who becomes famous: “Run, Forrest, run.”
At dinnertime, Colton always had a place at the table. “We’d have spaghetti or macaroni and cheese,” says Megan. “And when Dad or Dan were up and we’d been out on the boat, we’d have a whole bunch of fresh crab and Colton would help clean them.” Doreen says he also always offered to help her with the dishes.
Every day, Doreen would tell Colton to call his mom and see if it was okay that he stayed for dinner. She says he’d pick up the phone, talk for a few moments, hang up, and tell her, “Yeah, it’s fine.” It didn’t take her long, though, to realize he was only pretending to call.
After dinner, in the lingering Northwest summer evenings when the sun doesn’t hit the horizon until 9 p.m., the kids would head back out to play until bedtime. “It’d get to be eight o’clock, and I’d be, ‘Okay, Colton, it’s time for you to go home.’ He’d say, ‘Okay. I’ll call my mom.’ Well, he was faking that, too, and walking back home.” No one saw the friend of his mom’s who, Colt said, dropped him off every morning, so they began to suspect that that, too, was a fib.
One evening, time slipped away so smoothly that when Doreen looked up it was 10:30, and Colton was still there. “I said, ‘Well, Colton, the girls need to go to bed, where’s your mom?’ He says, ‘Oh… she can’t pick me up, I’ll just walk.’ I said, ‘No, you’re not. Come on, we’ll give you a ride home.’” Doreen, Dan the pilot, Megan, and Colton piled into the van. “When we got over to the east side of the island, to the bottom of Haven Place,” remembers Doreen, “Colton said, ‘This is my road, this is good, just drop me off here!’ And I said, ‘No, no. I want to make sure you get home okay.’”
Megan says Colton started freaking out. “He tried to open the door and jump out while the car was moving.” So bam! Dan locked the doors, turned to Colton, and said, “Hey, listen, we don’t care what your house looks like or anything like that, we just want to make sure you get home okay.”
They pulled into the dark driveway and drove up under the cedars to the clearing. “There’s his mom and a couple guys sitting around the campfire, a case of beer on the picnic table,” says Doreen. “Colton got out and they all started hollering at him, so he just took off running for the mobile home.” Doreen told Megan to stay in the van and she got out and walked up to Pam. “I just said, ‘You know your son’s been spending a lot of time with us. I thought maybe you would want to meet me.’”
Doreen said she didn’t get much of a response from Pam. “She pretty much blew us off.” After that, Colt didn’t show up for a couple of days.
Doreen, who’d investigated child abuse as a social worker back in the Black Hills of South Dakota, had just always assumed that Colton was a latchkey kid. “Whenever I’d ask why we hadn’t seen or met his mom, he’d just say, ‘She works,’ or ‘She’s not home.’” Doreen says she hadn’t observed any classic warning signs that he came from a troubled home. “He was always clean, his hair was always buzzed neat, there were no obvious signs of physical abuse. He just seemed like a lonely little kid.”
“We never saw him with anyone else, no other friends, no other kids,” says Megan.
The Wagners were all relieved when, on the third day, they walked outside and there was Colton, waiting for them. “He looked embarrassed,” says Megan.
Doreen took him aside and sat him down. “I said, ‘Look, I’ve seen it all, don’t be ashamed about anything. I just want to make sure you’re safe and that you know you can come to me if there’s anything I can do. He said, ‘Okay,’ and that was it.”
After seeing his home, Doreen went out and bought Colt sport sandals and some T-shirts. “I thought it was weird that he was always barefoot,” says Megan, laughing, “but I guess that’s what he liked because he wasn’t too excited to get the sandals. He was just like, ‘Oh, thanks,’ and I think he only wore them to make my mom happy.”
Megan says Colton rarely talked about his home life, “other than one time when I was complaining that I didn’t like my mom’s smoking, and he said he ‘hated!’ when his mom smoked. He was all excited one day because he said he’d just bought a remote control tank off eBay and that it shot BBs. He said he hid in the woods and when his mom came out to smoke he’d fire BBs at her. He thought that was great. I was impressed just because I didn’t even know what eBay was back then and he was two years younger than me and had it figured out. He seemed really smart and actually really mature for his age.”
Colt also never told Megan his dreams for the future, but she says meeting the family’s private pilot obviously had an impact on him. “Colt told me that he thought Dan’s job was really, really cool,” she says. After getting to know Dan, Colt began telling other kids that his father was not only a pilot, but one who flew rich people all around the world. He also began to tell Pam that when he grew up he was going to become a private pilot for people like Bill Gates and Paul Allen, and work for them until he had enough money to start his own aerospace company.
At the end of that first summer, when the Wagners told him they were leaving for California, Colt was visibly disappointed. They wrote his number next to the phone and Megan promised she’d call as soon as they came back the following year. And she did. Colton again became part of the family, spending practically every glorious Pacific Northwest summer’s day with them, beaching under the ever-blue skies; swimming, boating, and crabbing in the calm waters of Saratoga Passage; playing games well into the evenings; and eating anything and everything that Doreen put in front of him. By then, Colt had already outgrown the sandals Doreen had bought him and he spent the whole time happily barefoot.
The third summer, the Wagners did more traveling and spent less time at the beach. They lost touch with their island boy. Later, Doreen ran into Colton and Pam at the Elger Bay Store, but she says he acted very uncomfortable, like he didn’t want her to talk to Pam. Doreen gave him a hug, and says that was the last time she saw him. That wasn’t the end of the Wagners’ connection to Colton, though. He’d spend quite a bit more time at their house—not that they’d know about it until they got a call from the police.
Colton’s summer days with the Wagners were moments of idealized normalcy for him. Back on Haven Place, though, things were growing uglier between him and his mother. In later interviews with counselors, Colton said it was at this age that it became clear to him the extent and damage of his mother’s alcoholism. He said that at one point he tried to give her a Bible, and another time an Alcoholics Anonymous pamphlet, but “she burned it.” Her drinking, Colton said, led to violence. One day when both Pam and her boyfriend beat him, Colton decided to take off.
AFTER JIMMY MOVED OUT of Pam’s trailer, he never expected to see or hear from Colton again. Then one day in 2001, when he was living across the bridge in Stanwood, he got a call.
“It was Colt and he was real upset. He said his mom had been beating on him. I told him, ‘If you need to get out of there, get the hell out and walk to the main road.’ I called Island Transit [the free bus that loops the island every hour] and told them what was going on. They had a driver go out for him, actually picked the kid up and delivered him right to my door. When he showed up he had bruises all over his arms and legs and a couple on his back.”
Jimmy says Colton stayed with him for ten days. Colton spent his time sketching airplanes and rocket ships in a lined notebook. He also practiced with Microsoft Flight Simulator.
“So one day,” says Jimmy, “nice day, warmish, good outdoor working weather, I’m watching this kid fly around on the computer… man, he just loved airplanes. He was a good kid, you know? He just had issues. So I say, ‘Hey, you want to do something different? You want to go there?’ and I pointed up. Well, when he finally got my drift he started grinning like a monkey eating shit.”
Jimmy drove them to a private strip owned by a friend whom he “talked out of a plane.” He walked a wide-eyed Colton up to an old Cessna 170, a 145-horsepower tail-dragger that’d been built in the 1950s. Jimmy showed him how to do the walkaround safety check, then buckled Colton into the right seat. “I got in, yelled, ‘Clear!’ and fired that bitch up. Well, Colt didn’t know what to do! He’s just going, ‘Wow.’ I said, ‘You ready?’ He gave me this funny look, like for a second he didn’t quite know… and I just said, ‘Here we go!’”
After taxiing to the end of the smoothed-dirt strip, Jimmy spun the plane around and opened up the throttle. “I wound her out and yelled, ‘Hang on, buddy!’ When I got it up to speed and started to pull back, I tell you his guts all but fell out of him!”
Jimmy leaned the little plane into a gentle bank and flew south down the spine of Camano then out over the water, turning east over the top of Hat Island and crossing Possession Sound to the mainland. He says Colt’s nervousness drained away as they gained altitude. Jimmy pointed the nose of the Cessna north toward Canada, and set her on a straight and level course at three thousand feet over the town of Marysville. Then he turned to Colton: “Put your hands on the wheel.”
Colton stared at the yoke in front of him. “He wasn’t expecting that!” says Jimmy. “I said, ‘C’mon, this ain’t no different than what you been doing on the computer.’ So he put his little hands up there and death-gripped that son of a bitch.”
Jimmy let go of the wheel on his side of the cockpit and suddenly ten-year-old Colton Harris-Moore was flying an airplane.
“Once he settled down a little, I told him to push the wheel in just a bit… The nose dipped and he goes, ‘Whoa!’ Then I had him pull back… ‘Whoa!’” Jimmy showed Colton how the trim and the flaps worked and had him reach down and put his feet on the pedals to waggle the tail back and forth. “By this time we’re almost the fuck up to Mount Vernon, so I had him put us into a turn and we came back south.” Jimmy took back the controls for the approach and landing on the narrow strip.
“He was just amazed,” says Jimmy. Over the following week, he took Colton up twice more, letting him fly the plane longer each time and further familiarizing him with the controls and instruments. Colt was in heaven.
Back on the ground, though…
“His mother finally caught up with him. She found out where he was and she’d leave messages, threatening to get me for kidnapping,” says Jimmy. “We’d come in and listen to the machine and the kid says, ‘Don’t send me home.’ He was fucking petrified. That’s when we did the recording.”
Jimmy got out a microcassette and Colton put his story on tape, which, Jimmy says, he gave to the authorities. “We ended up calling the Island County cops and we got a hold of CPS.” First to show up was a county deputy. “The kid was terrified when the cop got there, shaking like a leaf, crying and everything—he was scared of the cop,” says Jimmy. “I was trying to tell him it was going to be okay. CPS ended up carting him off, but then Pam got him back three or four days later.”
Jimmy tells this story teary-eyed. Court documents corroborate the events, referring to a CPS investigation for “negligent treatment or maltreatment” and reports “Colt being afraid to go home after being thrashed by his mother and her boyfriend.” It also quotes the police officer saying, “Colton does not want to go home to his mother Pamela… and if mother comes to get child tonight I will place him in protective custody.”
The CPS risk tag rating for this episode was listed as “high,” meaning CPS needed to have a social worker see Colton within twenty-four hours. In Washington State, CPS does not have the authority to actually take a child away from a parent, even temporarily. Only the police—through protective custody—or a judge via a court order can remove a child. In this instance, Colton was placed in protective custody and taken to a foster home. Once a child is under protective custody, DSHS, of which CPS is part, has only seventy-two hours to file a dependency petition or it must return the child to the parent.
In Colton’s case, he was returned to Pam, who said that later, when Colt would get mad at her, she’d tease him about his time in the foster home, asking if “he wanted to go back to his other mother.”
FOR HER PART, PAM denies that she was an abusive mother and blames her anger back then on her inability to control Colton. “I talked to his pediatrician about referring us to a hospital to get a brain scan because I knew something was wrong. I couldn’t just take him up there because his insurance couldn’t of covered it. I wanted to take him because he’d thrown something at me or hit me, my eye and forehead were bruised. She wouldn’t do it, and said, ‘I don’t think we have to go that far.’ I said, ‘I think we do!’”
Instead, Pam took Colton for an evaluation at Compass Health. Originally a Lutheran orphanage, Compass evolved over the past 110 years into a community-based nonprofit that provides mental health and chemical dependency services to thirteen thousand low-income children and adults—as well as the homeless and incarcerated—in Island, San Juan, Skagit, and Snohomish Counties.
In August 2001, a Compass Health clinician noted instability and sleep disturbances in ten-year-old Colton. They diagnosed him with ADHD, parent-child relational problem, and possible depression.
On September 10, 2001, a Compass clinician described Colton: “Assertive, talkative 10-year-old who can become quite angry—but the situation with mother and her boyfriend drinking, living in a tiny trailer, mother drinking all the time, and the physical abuse Colton has gotten from boyfriend makes his anger easy to understand.”
The response was to put Colton on Prozac.
DURING THOSE FIRST INTERVIEWS at Compass Health, Colton told the therapists that he’d gotten into only a few problems so far at school and that he was determined “not to get into trouble this year.”
That same month, though, Colton began to find serious trouble outside of school.
“We’d made a path through an undeveloped property on Bretland Road, just east of Haven,” says Joel, Colton’s friend and fellow ninja. “We even built a ladder to get us down the cliff to the water.” Joel says that they were walking along the beach one day when suddenly Colton ran off. “When he comes back, he’s got a fishing pole and he tells me he stole it.” The boys headed home, and by the time they made it the short distance to Haven Place, Island County deputies were already pulling up to Pam’s. “They knew right where to go,” says Joel. “Colt gave the fishing rod back to the guy he took it from so he didn’t press charges.”
Despite the lack of charges, the Island County police made an official report of the incident, naming Colton Harris-Moore as a suspected thief. He was ten and a half years old.
A PSYCHOLOGIST REPORTED THAT Prozac seemed to only increase Colton’s “agitation,” so doctors prescribed Geodon, a big-league antipsychotic strong enough to chillax a rampaging water buffalo. The drug had just been approved that year by the FDA for schizophrenia, though it was also utilized “off label” for treating mania resulting from bipolar disorder and some cases of severe ADHD. A psychological evaluation of Colton later states: “Records are not clear as to why such a potent medicine was tried, but most likely it was to assist in behavioral control.”
Compass Health also sent someone out to the trailer for in-home family counseling. Pam says Colton participated, but that she found “little benefit” from the therapists, who were “well-meaning but ineffective.”
WHEN THE CAMANO KIDS moved on to sixth grade, it was back on the bus and across the bridge to Stanwood Middle School, home of the Spartans. That’s where, from all accounts including his own, Colton completely lost whatever constructive relationship he’d ever had with school.
“Stanwood had the normal school cliques,” says Kory. “Jocks, goths, girlie girlies… and Colton couldn’t get along with anyone. When people weren’t picking on him then he’d start it. He’d argue with everyone.”
Christa Postma met Colton that year. “Colt was always getting into trouble. He was like the kid who’s always loud in class, not being quiet when he was supposed to, disrupting everything. We’d be learning something and he’d just say his opinion on it. Like he’d say whatever the teacher was saying was ‘bogus.’”
The teachers attempted to discipline Colton, but had little success. “Usually you were sent outside the class, and then after a while the teacher would go out and talk to you. If they thought you were going to behave better, then they’d bring you back in. Colt would always get brought back in… and then get kicked out again.”
Christa, who’d been diagnosed with ADHD and ADD, says she recognized a lot of the symptoms in Colton. “I know I can be really hyper and annoying without realizing it. All through middle school I was on medication for it, but Colt said he wasn’t on anything for his ADHD. He’d be hyper and annoying, and then when people called him out for it he’d get pretty upset and then he’d be a jerk to them.”
After school, Colton and Christa hung out behind the Stanwood Library. Outside of class, Christa says Colton seemed “really smart” but unable or just unwilling to use those smarts in school. “I’d be like, ‘I have to get home and do homework or my mom will kill me,’ and he’s like, ‘Oh, I don’t need to.’ He kinda resented authority and liked being able to do whatever he wanted. He’d always say how much he hated school.”
Reports from clinicians at Compass Health who interviewed Colton around this time state that he told them that his mom was becoming “increasingly angry, does not encourage school.” Colton himself estimated that from the time he started middle school he missed about half of his classes and his mom’s response was “It’s your fault, not mine.”
According to Pam, Colton would stay up all night playing video games and then be too tired to go to school the next day. His favorite game at the time was Grand Theft Auto. “Then I got interested in that one!” says Pam. “I said, ‘Give me that thing, I want to see what I can do with it.’ And then Colt went to bed and I was staying up playing it! He got up a couple hours later and said, ‘Are you still playing that?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I like killing those hookers on the sidewalk!’”
When Colton came home from middle school having failed all of his classes, Pam went to the superintendent to insist that he be held back a grade. “They said, ‘Well, we don’t do that.’”
Stanwood Middle asked Pam to come in for a crisis meeting about Colton. (Pam claims she went to every meeting they ever asked her to attend: “I was a very involved parent.”) Pam says she sat at a big table with a large group of teachers and school counselors who were trying to figure out a way to get Colton engaged in his education. “They said he was being disruptive in class, that he was basically uncontrollable… and I tend to believe that about him.” A coach suggested sports, and Pam says she pleaded, “Just don’t make him stronger! He’s strong enough.” She says she was frightened of Colt by this point, because he was getting bigger and she felt he had a serious anger problem.
The South End kids who rode Island Transit with Colton on those days he did go to school saw that anger. “He’d get really loud,” says Kory. “He’d be arguing with the other kids, and when the drivers tried to settle it down he’d curse at them and sometimes they’d throw him off the bus.”
Failing in school, virtually free of supervision at home, and rejected by almost all of his peers due to his antisocial behavior, Colton found acceptance with someone a couple years older, a curly-haired little guy the other kids called the Hobbit.
Harley Davidson Ironwing says he had a rep around Stanwood as a bad guy, and that’s why Colton Harris-Moore sought him out.
Born in Loveland, Colorado, Harley wound up in Stanwood via foster care. He and his siblings were taken away from their parents when Harley was four, and he can’t remember how many families he went through before ending up in Washington State with Karen Ironwing. Karen changed Harley’s middle name to Davidson because… well, it was apparently just too tempting.
Harley speaks with a soft drawl when he says that he doesn’t do well with authority figures, including cops and teachers. He ran away from home early and often, and told police when they caught him that he’d rather go to juvie than back home because his foster brothers beat him up all the time. Even when he was living on the streets, though, Harley attended school almost regularly and made it to eleventh grade before dropping out. However, he was only halfway through sixth grade at Stanwood Middle School when he was charged with his first felonies.
One of Harley’s claims to fame as a young hood happened April 25, 2002. “I was hanging out with my best friend one night and he got hungry,” remembers Harley. “We were near an espresso stand, so I broke in and got him a couple of those sugar cookies with the pink frosting.” It might’ve been too much sugar. “After that, we decided it’d be fun to try to blow up the police gas station.”
The following morning, the Stanwood police got a call about two kids stuck in a clothing donation drop-off box near the Thrifty Foods. A deputy helped firemen extract Harley and his best buddy from the metal container. Both boys smelled like smoke and their fingers were blackened. There seem to be few times when Harley doesn’t fess up to his crimes, and he told the deputies how, after the pink cookie caper, he set out to create a Hollywood-worthy explosion at the gas station “because we were bored.”
Harley said he dribbled diesel over the pumps, stretched out the hoses, and then stuffed newspaper in one of the nozzles. Worried it might go up before they’d gotten far enough away, Harley added another piece of paper to lengthen the fuse. He lit it and they jumped on bikes they’d stolen earlier that night. They waited… and waited… No boom. Harley tried again, but it still didn’t quite work like it does in the movies.
After confessing everything, Harley pulled out of his handcuffs and tried to escape. He made it outside, but a female officer ran him down on the street. Harley struggled, and three deputies took him to the ground, then put him in hobble restraints for one of his many rides to the Denny Youth Center.
Harley scoffs at the foster care, school, social services, and juvenile justice systems and whatever help they offered him while he was growing up. “Nothing in the system could have prevented me from becoming a crook.”
Harley was in eighth grade when Colton, then in sixth, approached him. “He reminded me a little bit of myself. He was smart, he had a problem with authority. I figured he could be another person I could do crimes with.”
As for Colton’s motivations, Harley says, “I think he was just looking for somebody that wouldn’t put him down. He didn’t have any friends, and his mom didn’t give a rat’s ass about him. He wouldn’t have gone for a criminal lifestyle if his mom had been giving him the attention I was giving him.”
Harley says there wasn’t much to teach Colton about crime. “I gave him some tips on how not to draw attention to himself. Colt used to always want to turn lights on. Bad thing for burglars! That’s how you get caught real quick.”
Thieving, according to Harley, is not so much about the skill as the will. “It’s easy to learn how to break into a house… it’s whether you can actually do it or not.” The big leap, he says, is from thinking about it and wanting to do it, to actually breaking a window and going inside someone’s house to steal their stuff.
Harley calls himself “a drug addict” and counts booze among his addictions along with weed and cocaine. However, he says the rush that comes from breaking the law goes way beyond the drug high. “It’s not the stealing,” he says. “It’s the adrenaline you get from stealing. Knowing that any moment the cops can show up!”
Colton had been feeding his adrenaline habit since he was a child, when Pam says he’d climb to the precarious tops of the hundred-foot-tall trees around the trailer. Then he found he could score big hits from “ninjing” around the neighborhood, stealing whatever caught his eye. Just like a drug, he needed more risk each time in order to achieve the same level of thrill.
Harley says they got that burglar’s buzz even knowing that if they played it smart there was little chance of getting arrested. “We knew that the odds of getting caught burglarizing a house are very low,” he says. “It’s way better than you can do in a casino.” (He’s absolutely right: the closure rate for solving burglaries in the United States is 12 percent.)
And even if they happened to get spotted in the act, there was one simple solution: “Run.” According to Harley that was an especially effective strategy in rural neighborhoods. “No cop in his right mind is going to chase you through the woods.”
As to any moral quandary, Harley says: “It ain’t hurtin’ nobody else. Everything I’ve ever stole is insured, so they’ll reimburse them and they can get something better. These are victimless crimes.”
Harley says he and Colton wandered the streets of Stanwood plotting their future. “Our ultimate plan was to steal a helicopter, land it on the roof of Costco, and steal a bunch of shit,” he says. “Colt always wanted to fly and he always said how it’d be great to steal an airplane.”
In August 2002, on his birthday, Bill Kohler died in Oklahoma. When she got the word, Pam says, “I freaked, I started breaking everything that would break, screaming and yelling.”
She says she sat eleven-year-old Colton down out at the picnic table and told him that the man he’d been closest to, the man he’d even tried to convince her was really his father, was dead. “He was very upset, and I was crying. I hugged him.”
There was no funeral. “They cremated him without even asking me… and that’s not what Bill wanted.” Pam got his ashes but says she doesn’t even know how he died. “I never did get the coroner’s report because they wanted me to pay for it and that just don’t jive with me. Paying to find out how someone died? I mean he’s dead, so why pay for it? Not cool.”
Even though Bill hadn’t been around much, Pam says that his death sent her into a steep downward spiral. “I drank a lot. I listened to Bill’s music, this beautiful American Indian music. I went into a deep depression… I’m sure it had some kind of an impact on Colt.”
Not long after Bill, their Great Pyrenees, Cody, also died. Pam got another Great Pyrenees, but gave it away when it started to suffer from seizures. After that, she took Colt to the pound and picked out Melanie, an energetic beagle, who became Colt’s constant companion.
In Pam’s narrative of Colton’s trouble with the law, she says the two deaths were the turning point when he began having problems. Five months before Bill died, though, Island County deputies responded to a silent alarm at Elger Bay Elementary School. “Myself and another deputy found Colton hiding in a closet,” says Chris Ellis, who commanded the Camano Island precinct. Colt had gathered up a pair of binoculars, a disposable camera, candy, and some change from various school desks and drawers.
“I called his mom, Pam, and said ‘This is Lieutenant Ellis from the sheriff’s office. I have your son Colton here and… ’ And she jumps in and goes, ‘What the fuck did that little asshole do now?’”
Ellis explained they’d caught Colt at the school. “She refused to come pick him up. I had a deputy take him home… he was ten years old.”
THE NEXT TIME COLTON’S name comes up in police records is January 2003, when he and another boy were caught shoplifting at the Camano Plaza Market. That April, Harley once again went outlaw to feed one of his hungry friends: he got nabbed stealing peanut butter and Snapple from Port Susan Middle School.
According to Pam, she and Colton were going hungry, too. “We starved,” she says, because money was so tight. She also says that she and Colton now fought constantly.
Colt told friends he was mad because Pam would spend all the money from their assistance check within two weeks, leaving them flat broke for the rest of the month. It was then, he says, that he first began to look at his neighbors’ houses as sources of food and money to buy food. He remembers being happy after breaking into one of his first homes, not because of the loot he found, but because he could make pancakes.
Colton continued to receive treatment at Compass Health, but later admitted to a psychologist that he didn’t tell the counselors the extent of the physical conflict between him and his mom because he was afraid they would take him away from her. However, he did tell them that Pam had been on two-week drinking binges during which she’d break things. The twelve-year-old told them, “She is in denial about her drinking.”
The Compass staff were also aware of the men Pam had coming through the trailer: “Many inappropriate father figures in the home over the time, exposing Colton to domestic violence and drug and alcohol addiction/selling.”
The most plaintive words from young Colton come from this period: “I am not happy. I am depressed. I could stay in bed all day. I need help. I am tired of this stuff.”
Clinicians reported that “Colton wants mom to stop drinking and smoking, get a job, and have food in the house. Mom refuses.”
Colt’s pleas, all the interviews, the mounting CPS complaints, the counselors’ notes… result in two more mental health diagnoses for him: intermittent explosive disorder and depressive disorder. He’s prescribed Strattera, an ADHD medication.
IN THE SPRING OF 2003, the original nuclear family had an explosive reunion. Gordy Moore showed up at the trailer on a nice May day. He and Pam started partying out in the yard and decided to fire up the grill and cook burgers.
“Gordy’s getting the barbecue-er ready and we told Colt to go inside and get the ketchup and mustard and all that,” remembers Pam. “So he does and he brings them out to the picnic table. But then all of a sudden he started taking them back in. He said, ‘I don’t want to barbecue.’ I said, ‘I don’t care if you want to or not.’ So his dad and I brought all the stuff back out and then Colt stood off a ways and threw rocks at us, mainly at his dad, rocks about the size of baseballs. And so they got in a big fight toward the backyard and they’re rolling around on the ground toward the sticker bushes.”
Colton says he got mad because his parents wouldn’t let him fix his food the way he wanted, and in his version he told police that Gordy threw him into stinging nettles, held him down by the throat, and said, “Don’t you know I have killed three men because of my anger?” The twelve-year-old took that as a threat. Colton also said he hadn’t thrown the rocks until after Gordy throttled him.
According to Colt, Pam was drunk and screaming at him throughout the incident. When he got away from Gordy, Colt ran into the trailer and called 911. That really made Pam mad. “Somebody at the school had told all the kids that if anybody hurts you, just dial 911!” she says, indignant. “So Colt did! And here come the cops!”
When Island County deputies showed up, Gordy took off through the woods. He didn’t show the same fleet-footedness as his son, though, and they quickly caught him. “Colt had some scratches on his neck,” says Pam. “I said, ‘So what?!’ But they arrested [Gordy].”
Police reported that Pam “harangued and verbally abused the officers during the arrest,” and Colt said she kept after him when the deputies left, that she “stumbled around asking, ‘What are you going to do now? They’ve taken your father away.’”
When the police ran a check on Gordy, they found he was already wanted on an outstanding warrant. He was also charged and convicted of assault in the fourth degree for nettling Colt. (Washington police records do not show any accounts of Gordy Moore killing anyone. As of May 2011, though, he is a wanted man, with an active warrant for failing to appear at court for a DUI and driving with a suspended license. His criminal record also shows an arrest in Reno, Nevada.)
Child Protective Services received another referral after the barbecue donnybrook. A case worker came out to the trailer to check and see if Colton was okay.
“I told her, ‘He’s fine,’” says Pam. But the CPS counselor said she needed to actually see him with her own eyes. “Just then Colt came running around the side of the house and I said, ‘There he is, and if you want him, go ahead and take the little bastard, ’cause I’m not jumping through any friggin’ hoops!’ You know, drug testing or any of that crap. So she said, ‘Oh no, we just wanted to make sure he was okay.’ And she left.”
AT THIS POINT, DSHS recommended Pam get treatment for chemical dependency. She refused. A social worker suggested that Pam see a counselor at Compass Health. She said no thanks. A note in Colton’s record states: “Social worker has concerns regarding this child due to mother’s possible use of drugs or alcohol; this judgment due to the men and their habits that have been in Colton’s life.” But no action was taken.
COLTON BEGAN TO STRIKE back. When he got angry at Pam, he smashed the trailer’s windows, ultimately breaking most of them. He went into rages at her drinking and her smoking, and for things like playing the TV too loud when he was trying to sleep.
“I even got headphones for my TV and he’d swear he could hear it,” says Pam. “I said, ‘That is impossible.’ So he stuck a screwdriver where my headphones went and he messed it up so I couldn’t use it anymore. Yeah, he wasn’t very nice to me at times.”
Colton scrawled “Pam is a drunk” on the door to the laundry room and began taking full beer cans away from her and putting them out along the road.
IN SEVENTH GRADE AT Stanwood Middle School, Colton once again found some solace and friendship with a girl who was outside the popular cliques.
“Colt was in a few of my classes and it quickly became obvious that there were a lot of issues between him and the other kids,” says Brandi Blackford, a blue-eyed blonde with piercings in her eyebrow, tongue, and belly button who’d just moved from Portland to Camano Island. “He argued with people a lot. He’d make little comments at everything they said. He also told everyone that his mom was a lawyer and that they lived in a big, beautiful house, but kids who knew him would call him out on it.”
Colton wound up as Brandi’s lab partner in science class. He introduced himself to her as Colton Harris, dropping the part of his name that tied him to Gordy Moore.
“Behind the lies and all the drama you could see he just wanted a friend.” Brandi became that friend for a while. Her mom would drive over to Stanwood to pick them up from school and remembers having to wait outside in the car because Colton wouldn’t leave the building until all the buses had gone—“because of kids picking on him,” says Brandi.
On the weekends or anytime school was out, Brandi and Colton went to the beach with Melanie and Cricket, Brandi’s Jack Russell terrier. “Colton never wanted to go home.”
Colt’s time outside the trailer, though, wasn’t all spent in such agreeable activities as drawing his name in the sand with Brandi. On October 8, 2003, police caught Colton with a stolen cell phone, resulting in a possession of stolen property (PSP) in the third degree charge to which he pleaded guilty and got sentenced to probation. Then on Thanksgiving of that year, Colton celebrated the harvest festival in a nontraditional way. He and three other boys met up in Stanwood for an evening of mayhem. Armed with a butane torch lighter in the apparent belief that it would work like the plasma cutters crooks use to cut open safes in the movies, Colton went to work on the door of a Stanwood mortgage office. He scorched and melted the plastic frame a bit, but nothing more, so he went old school and pried on the door until a window broke. The boys grabbed a laptop and some blank CDs and moved on to the big Thrifty Foods supermarket, where they set fire to leaflets on the community bulletin board. Then came the big target, that hated bastion of teachers, books, and dirty looks: Stanwood Middle School.
Colton got them in by hammering on the gym doors and breaking a window. Inside, they used the torch on a Pepsi machine, melting the plastic face. On their way out, they set fire to an office window and then vandalized the bus barn before finally calling it a night.
One of the kids’ dads figured out the boys had been up to no good and marched his son down to the police station to spill. The cops called Pam, saying they wanted to come out and talk to her son. At the trailer, she pointed down the hall to his room, the first door on the right beyond the little living room. The police found the door not only closed, but padlocked.
Pam said she didn’t realize Colton wasn’t home. The padlock was no problem, though: she came down the hallway with a hatchet and chopped it off the door.
The deputies stormed into the room looking for the notorious juvenile delinquent and South End bully, but pulled up short: the top of Colton’s desk was piled high with stuffed animals. “Are these Colt’s?” the surprised officers asked Pam. She assured them that they were. The cops searched the room—no Colton, no laptop—but they spotted a Sony camcorder still in its box and a wallet carrying someone else’s identification. Pam told the police that Colton said he bought the video camera at a liquidation store. The cops called bullshit, so she phoned the store—which told her no, they’d never sold Sony camcorders.
The cops finally caught up with Colton at school and he was found guilty of malicious mischief in the third degree and burglary in the third degree. The break-in and vandalism became the sixth and seventh “incident reports” in Colton’s rapidly fattening file at Stanwood Middle. They suspended him for twenty-four days and charged him for his part of the damages. “Everybody in school knew him after that,” says Mike Bulmer. “They started calling him Klepto Colt.”
Colton’s legal troubles did nothing to smooth over things at home. He and Pam made it through Christmas, but fireworks erupted on New Year’s Eve. Colton now weighed 130 pounds and stood five foot four, big and heavy for a twelve-year-old. He was no longer afraid of Pam, and this time she was the one who dialed 911 and Colton who went running into the woods when the cops arrived. Pam pressed charges, and Colton pleaded guilty to assault 4, receiving a sentence of six months probation, thirty-six hours of community restitution (aka community service), and mandatory counseling, curfew, and urinalysis.
Two weeks later when his probation officer, Aiko Barkdoll, checked to see if Colton was following Pam’s “house rules,” she told him that he’d bitten her on the forearm and hit her. Pam said that when she tried to call the police about it, Colton had grabbed the phone out of her hand and broken it. She said he’d then chased her around the property with a boat oar, and that she’d escaped only by locking herself in her pickup. When Pam finally managed to call the cops, Colton again ran off into his woods.
When Barkdoll asked Colton about the incident, he admitted that he and Pam often got into physical fights and that his anger came from her “smoking and drinking beer.” Colton also showed him scratches where Pam had clawed his arm.
In his report, the probation officer noted: “Colton and his mother share a tumultuous relationship” and have difficulty resolving problems without aggression. He also made a call to Child Protective Services regarding Colton’s welfare. He noted that when he contacted CPS, the file on Colton was active (his was at least the ninth referral to CPS for abuse or neglect of Colton so far; there would be a dozen by the time he was fourteen). Still, Barkdoll said that the CPS case worker assigned to Colton Harris-Moore claimed “little recollection of the family.”
Two days later, on January 16, 2004, after another fight with Pam, Colton was brought before a judge and had his personal recognizance revoked for “continuing assaultive and threatening behaviors toward his mother.” He was placed in juvenile detention for eleven days.
The stretch in juvie appeared to have an impact on Colton. He agreed to more counseling. Pam took him for another mental health assessment in early February, and Barkdoll noted that “Colt has been complying with mental health intervention involving both counseling and medications.”
In a later psychological evaluation, it’s noted that the one medication that seemed to work for Colton was Strattera, but that he stopped taking it with no reason given. Pam isn’t clear on the timing or the particular drug—whether it was the Prozac, Geodon, Strattera, or others—but she remembers taking him off one of them.
“He was seeing a psychiatrist who put him on some medication,” she says. “But he got so depressed on it. He sat down in my front yard next to my chair and just hung his head. And God, he would never hardly ever sit down. It scared me. So I stopped giving it to him, and I stopped taking him to that doctor because he wanted to just keep trying different medications. I said, ‘Colt’s not going to be used as a guinea pig!’”
Testing patients on different ADHD meds and antidepressants and fine-tuning the dosage before finding the most effective ones—“a trial and error process,” as the Mayo Clinic refers to it—is extremely common. It often takes as long as eight weeks for the drugs to show results.
SADLY, BY THE TIME his probation officer noted that Colt was cooperating, the adolescent had already set in motion a freight train of additional troubles for himself.
On February 6, Colton was found guilty of another PSP 3, adding six months probation and sixteen hours of community restitution. (In Colton’s early sentences, judges allowed hour-for-hour credit toward community service if Colton agreed to attend counseling and mental health treatment.) A week later, felonies were filed for the Thanksgiving tear, and Colton’s rap sheet also listed as “still pending” another burglary in the third degree, theft in the third degree, two counts of burglary in the second degree, three counts of malicious mischief, and one count of reckless burning. One week before his thirteenth birthday, Pam called the cops again after she and Colton had a fight. He was hit with assault 4.
On March 16, a walkie-talkie and a video camera disappeared from Stanwood Middle School. Five students fingered Colton. When the principal confronted him, Colton said he “could not stop stealing and did not know why.” After several rounds of phone calls from the school administrators, Pam finally admitted that the missing stuff was at the trailer and agreed to return it.
They expelled Colton for the rest of the year. His probation officer tried to use that to get him sent to juvenile prison, but the judge let him stay free with tighter restrictions. Barkdoll believed Colton snowed the judge, writing that Colt “seems to have been somewhat opportunistic in the community though presents as well behaved and remorseful when before the Court.”
In April, Colton was charged with trespassing in Stanwood. It was also the month he and Pam got a new next-door neighbor.
CAROL STAR MOVED TO Haven Place so she’d have room for her horses. She bought an existing house and cleared the land for stables and paddocks. She describes Haven as a great place to live—with a couple of exceptions. Instead of stopping by with welcome baskets, the folks along Haven came with warnings about Colt.
“People told me, ‘Do not let him in your house because he’s going to scope out what you have and come back and get it.’ They said he’d been stealing stuff in the neighborhood since he was eight years old. And that he’d even tried to steal the contractor’s Caterpillar when my house was under construction.”
From the stories, Carol half expected Damien from The Omen. She was surprised to meet, literally, the boy next door. “When you talk to him he’s a nice kid, very friendly, doesn’t look like the bogeyman.”
After all the teasing about his raggedy clothes and suspect hygiene when he was a boy, Colton had begun taking responsibility for his appearance. He took charge of the laundry at home and paid careful attention to his grooming. “He dressed well, had the best tennis shoes on, and nice clothes,” says Star. Often, though, she says she saw Colton wandering around “looking lost,” and started to feel bad for him. “I don’t think he had a lot of friends, and it seemed like he just wanted to befriend people.”
However, any camaraderie she might have had with Colton got off to a bad start when his best friend tried to eat one of hers. “Colton’s dog came into my yard, trapped my cat against a wall, and tried to kill it.” Star rushed out and saved the cat just in time. “His dog had a telephone cord around its neck, which I thought was pretty weird, but I grabbed it and tied it to my fence. I figured Colton would come over and get it eventually, and he did. I screamed at him, ‘If your dog is over here again trying to kill my cat I’m going to call the Humane Society.’ And that opened the vendetta for him… A month after that he ripped me off the first time, climbed through an open window and stole my computer, some cameras, and other electronics.”
Star says she knows it was Colton even though the police never charged him or anyone else with the crime. “The cops came and said, ‘Oh, it looks like dogs were in here running around.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, they might have because the burglar didn’t close the door and it was open all night long. Do you think the dogs stole my computer, too?’”
Even though she lived alone, Star says she was never frightened of Colton. “I don’t think he’s the type of person that would hurt somebody. The only way he could survive was to break into houses to get food and steal stuff to sell because Pam wouldn’t feed him even though she always had money to buy beer.”
Just in case, though, Star went out and bought a gun. “And when I got it, I made sure I went out back and shot it just so they knew I had one.” She says that was as much about Pam as it was about Colton.
During her six years on Haven Place, Star says she often heard Pam yelling at Colton and Van. “She used to scream at her boyfriend just like she’d scream at Colton.” At one point, Star couldn’t keep quiet any longer. “She’s screaming at Colton, saying all kinds of filthy things, and I was outside in the yard and finally yelled, ‘Shut up, Pam, I’m tired of listening to you!’ Pam screamed back, ‘Fuck you!’”
Star says another neighbor got even more fed up when Colton allegedly broke into her trailer through the skylight and stole a computer she’d been using to write a book, with no backup saved. “She was pissed!” remembers Star. “She drove over into Pam’s front yard and just sat there blasting the horn. Pam came running out of the house screaming and calling the police.” According to Star, the neighbor yelled back that she just wanted Pam to know what it felt like to be disturbed like she’d been when she was ripped off by her son.
FINALLY, SUMMER ARRIVED on Camano. Residents and vacation homeowners scraped and repainted their boat bottoms, strung fresh line on their fishing reels, and readied their crab pots and clam rakes. Elger Bay Grocery stocked up on bait and beer, and Friday traffic piled up on the bridge. Skies went blue, seas laid down, and days stretched out. It was a great time to be an island boy with a faithful dog and access to a boat.
It was also a good time to own waterfront property at Utsalady Point, like Glen Kramer and his wife. In 1998, they moved full-time into a home that’s been in his family since 1957. Houses on the point stand gable to gable atop narrow lots, but their yards roll straight onto a fine gray sand beach dimpled with white clam shells.
In summertime, boats pass back and forth across the serene blue background of Skagit Bay, providing Utsalady residents an ever-changing view. As if the sunny scene could get more bucolic, Glen Kramer regularly saw a young boy buzzing by aboard a small outboard boat, his beagle up at the bow, its nose in the breeze. In the back of Kramer’s mind he thought it unusual that every day the boy and his dog were on a different boat, but he shrugged it off.
On the twenty-second of July, Glen and his wife came home after a short trip to Stanwood. He glanced out the window and instantly noticed that his dinghy was gone. A quick scan with binoculars picked up a strange scene.
“Here’s this kid a ways down the beach carrying my outboard—I could tell it was mine because I’d bought it used from a rental outfit and it still had their big silver sticker.”
Kramer hurried down and approached the lanky boy he recognized as the same one he’d seen zipping around. Colton was just about to attach his motor to someone else’s boat, a Zodiac inflatable.
“I said, ‘Hey, that’s my outboard! What are you doing?’” says Kramer. “And he instantly started in on a story, saying, ‘Some sailboaters found your dinghy drifting offshore and asked me to take the engine off and switch it over to their Zodiac.’”
The kid’s obvious gift of gab momentarily stunned Kramer. “He could really think on his feet, but his story made no sense. I asked him where the boaters were and he said they’d gone off sailing for a while. I look around, and here he’d dragged my boat up the beach and hidden it amid the trees. I told him I didn’t believe him, and he just walked off.”
Not only impressed with the kid’s golden tongue but also his strength, Glen had to call his wife to help him muscle their boat back to the water. He reattached his outboard and then looked at the Zodiac and the gas cans lying beside it. “I knew the boat didn’t belong there, so I decided to tow it over to my beach and try to find the owner.”
Glen’s wife suggested they call the Island County sheriff. Glen simply told them he’d caught a young boy stealing his boat. The deputies knew exactly who to look for. “It wasn’t ten minutes later that they came rolling up the driveway with the same kid in the back of the police car. I identified him and they said they’d arrest him, but that he’d be right out again because he was only thirteen.”
Not too long after the police left, another vehicle came up to the Kramers’ home, this time a battered little pickup. Glen looked out and saw the same kid, now in the passenger seat, with a woman he presumed was his mother or grandmother driving. He figured she’d brought him back to apologize for taking the boat, and went out to meet them.
According to Glen, Pam Kohler got out of the truck and started right in on him, saying: “You stoled our gas cans!”
“What are you talking about?” asked Glen, stunned for the second time that day.
“You stoled our gas cans and we want them back,” Pam kept insisting.
Sensing this was not an argument worth having, Glen told Pam, “Well, you tell your son they’re back wherever he stole that Zodiac from because I put the gas cans inside it and the owner’s already come and taken his boat.” Then he walked back into his house.
As the Utsalady neighbors began comparing notes, they found that a number of their boats had been moved around. Several that had older two-cycle outboards had their engines ruined. Glen says they believed that Pam had been bringing Colton up to their neighborhood all summer long. “She was dumping him off at the boat ramp with gas cans.” Even though Colton was sophisticated enough to mix and match engines and boats to create just the little cruising package he wanted, he apparently didn’t know that the two-cycle outboards needed oil mixed in with the fuel. “He was using plain gas and just running each boat until the engine seized up, and then he’d take another one.”
When he got hauled before the judge, Colton was found guilty of theft in the second and third degrees and sentenced to fifty days in juvie plus forty-eight hours community service and six months probation.
“COLTON AND I ‘DATED’ in eighth grade, as eighth graders do,” says Brandi. “Holding hands as we walked to class, going to movies… ” After they’d been dating for a few weeks, though, Colton stopped showing up for school. He’d been sent to juvie, but hadn’t told anyone he was going away. “I couldn’t get ahold of him and had no idea where he was.” Brandi says that when Colton finally returned to school, he was very tan. “He told everyone he’d been in the Bahamas.”
Brandi says everything to do with Colton turned even worse in the eighth grade. “Things really got out of control,” she says. “The kids got even meaner to Colton.” One day, he and Brandi were hanging out at the Stanwood playground when two boys Colton had trouble with walked up. “I said, ‘Colton, let’s just go,’ but he said, ‘No, we’re fine.’ They yelled, ‘Hey, fag, you need to leave.’ When Colton refused, they grabbed him and pushed him up against the jungle gym. I was begging them to please just leave him alone and they kept asking me why I was hanging out with this ‘piece of shit.’ Colton tried to get away and one of them pulled out a knife and said he was going to stab him. I was crying and grabbed my phone and told them I was calling the cops. They pushed Colton down, kicked him in the stomach, and walked away.”
Brandi called her mom, who rushed across the bridge to pick them up. “She took us back to our house and asked Colton if he wanted to call his mother. He came up with some story that she was out of town. You could see by the look in his eyes that he was on his own. His mom wasn’t out of town, but she wasn’t going to do anything to help him anyways, so why bother? He didn’t act scared, but I know he was.”
BACK AT THE TRAILER, the horror show escalated to the point where, in November 2004, it actually appeared that Haven Place was haunted. The tires on Pam’s pickup kept inexplicably going flat. Then one night as she sat in her lawn chair having a smoke and a beer, she started hearing things hit the ground all around her. She called the cops, but they couldn’t find anyone.
Night after night it happened: batteries, tent stakes, a croquet ball, screwdrivers, all mysteriously fell out of the sky, often hitting the trailer. Pam says that every time she left home, someone went in and took things—a bag of potatoes, socket wrenches, circular saw blades—and then later threw them back at her and the trailer. She says whoever it was threw flour around inside and put human excrement in her freezer. A can of corn came crashing through one of the trailer’s few remaining glass windows. The other windows, which Colton had broken and were covered in plastic sheeting, were soon after slashed with a box cutter.
One evening as she and Colton were walking in the door of the trailer, Pam says she heard a bang. When she looked, there was a circular saw blade stuck in the door jamb.
Pam says she called the police every night for a month, but they never found anyone. She fired salvos of buckshot and profanities into the woods, but it kept happening. Then disturbing messages began to show up. The same plywood door where Colton had earlier written “Pam is a drunk” was now covered with spray-painted threats: “I’m sick of you,” “Bitch,” “Die,” and “You Will Die—5 hours.” On the floor was written: “Fuck’n Bitch I’ll Kill U” and “Die Bitch.”
The police kept showing up, but weren’t happy about the shotgun. “The cops told me that they would never come here again if I kept the shotgun loaded, and that if I did, I better never come to the door with it or they’d shoot me,” Pam said.
Pam thought her neighbors to the east were responsible. They’d accused Colton of stealing a $3,000 car stereo. Pam insisted Colton wouldn’t do that because “we already have a radio in every room of the house.” The neighbors reported the theft, but said Island County deputies declined to take fingerprints and told them that it was probably Colton who’d taken it.
Pam saw the cops talking to the neighbors a couple of times, but the attacks continued. Desperate, she called Bev and Geof Davis.
RARE ARE THE HARD-LUCK childhood stories with happy endings that do not include a teacher, a coach, a mentor, a local cop, an uncle, a grandmother… someone who grabs the kid at the right time—often by the scruff of the neck—and gives him whatever it is he needs to set him on the right path.
For Colton Harris-Moore, Bev and Geof Davis could have been those people.
Bev and Geof moved to Camano in 1977 and live on a seventeen-acre South End family compound that’s sort of a down-to-earth mossneck Nirvana, a whimsical backwoods Disneyland, with creeks and woods and quirky yard art and bridges and trolls and fanciful inventions and old gas pumps and summer-camp signs and Wild West memorabilia and guns and trucks and tractors and cool old cars.
They share the acreage with Bev’s mom and her sister, and usually at least one person who’s in need of a place to stay or a leg up. South Enders know Geof and Bev to be generous, some say to a fault. “Geof, especially,” says Chris Ellis, “is a sweeper of lost souls. He sweeps them up and gives them a hand.” The Davises have helped people most others consider untouchables, like a guy known locally as Stinky Steve (“You’d understand the name if you ever picked him up hitchhiking”). Bev and Geof, though, understand troubles, having seen more than their share, and those experiences have made them remarkably nonjudgmental.
They both grew up with alcoholic, verbally abusive fathers. Bev herself became an alcoholic, and when she finally saw the damage it was doing to her family, she sucked it up and quit. When she did, Geof stopped drinking, too, out of solidarity, even though he didn’t have a problem.
Geof Davis is the kind of guy who makes you feel that if you could just better yourself to a point halfway between what you are and where he’s at, then you’d be a good man. Unassuming to an absolute, he also gives you hope by admitting he wasn’t always this way.
A genuine Northwest cowboy, Geof grew up on a five-thousand-acre spread along the Yakima River—though he wasn’t left a blade of grass when his stepmother died. He competed in rodeos, worked as a Forest Service horseman, and then became a fire watcher when his bronc-busted legs couldn’t take riding anymore. He worked a full life doing guy stuff: construction, and driving dump trucks, tractors, and eighteen-wheelers. Geof says that for a long time he had no use for other people—“Hated them, that’s how I was raised”—but he got over that in a big way. Common in those kinds of sea-change stories, there’s a woman to thank. In Geof’s case, it’s Bev, who, when she smiles over her reading glasses, looks an awful lot like Mrs. Santa Claus. Which fits…
One year as Christmas neared, Geof told Bev he wanted a Santa suit. She did up his eyebrows and rosy cheeks, and Geof went driving around Camano in his 1940 Ford pickup handing out candy canes. That began an entire decade of Geof as the island’s Saint Nick. Santa’s tour eventually grew to a traffic-stopping parade of Christmas light–covered classic cars that escorted Geof to nursing homes and then to the poorest parts of town to deliver thousands of dollars’ worth of donated toys to needy kids.
Geof is as gregarious as Bev is reclusive. He’s always out and about and there are very few people on Camano he doesn’t know. He first met Pam Kohler when Colton was just a small child, and says she already had a reputation on the island.
“There’s some people around here, my God, they’d a shot her if they had the chance,” says Geof. “She was drinking a lot more heavily back then… she was bad. And crimey sakes, when she drinks she can use more cuss words than Carter has pills.” Geof, though, saw her simply as a troubled woman with a young boy, struggling to get by. As he does with many folks he meets in the community, he told Pam to give him a call if she ever needed help. Still, he and Bev were surprised when she did call some time later, asking for a $50 loan. Even more so when she said she’d leave them her shotgun for collateral. “After that we always called her Shotgun Pam,” Bev says, laughing.
Whenever Pam called, needing a loan for a new old truck or whatever, “for some stupid reason, I’d always go over and help,” says Geof. The reason, though, was Colt.
For anyone who didn’t have a dad around, but especially for a rough-and-tumble young boy, Geof would be the guy you’d want to take you under his wing. He’s a big man, rugged yet gentle, and plainspoken with a lot of hard-won wisdom. Best, there’s still an awful lot of playful boy left in him, even though his seventy-year-old body now has more titanium in it than the Terminator.
Geof has tried to help at least eight at-risk kids on the island. “All the misfits,” he says kindly. Some haven’t responded. “I’ve had to kick some of them off, but others are doing okay. They come up to me and now they’re married and making it, and they say, ‘Thanks for getting me on the right track.’”
Geof remembers coming across eleven-year-old Colton hitchhiking along the main road because he’d been booted off the Island Transit bus for cursing at the driver. Geof pulled over and they got to talking. “I knew Pam’s story, and I’d heard about what was going on with Colt in school. It sounded to me like they’d all just sort of shut their eyes to him when there were times they could’ve helped. And CPS… they suck, they didn’t do what they should have done. I understand they’re understaffed, but that still doesn’t give them the right to not help a kid, especially when they knew he was troubled. So I’m looking at Colton and thinking here’s a kid that just doesn’t have a chance in life.”
When Pam told Bev about the mysterious attacks happening at the trailer, Bev said she and Geof would come out next time. Things started mysteriously flying around again the very next night, so the Davises put on dark clothes and drove to Haven. Bev took photos of the damage and graffiti while Geof hunted around the black woods for any sign of intruders. As Bev went to put her camera away, “BAM! something hit our car, hard. I turned and saw Colton standing on the lawn with his arms folded.”
The next time Bev and Pam were on the phone, Colt yelled out that he heard something and saw a shadow. He went outside and came back with a note. Pam couldn’t make out the words, so Colt read it: “You have until Dec 9th.” Bev heard Colton tell his mother, “See! That isn’t my handwriting, is it?”
Later than night, Pam found another note hanging on a nail: “Death doesn’t hurt, but your dying will.” A third note said: “This is the kind of note that will be sent to your relatives when you die on Dec. 9th.”
Bev says Pam was terrified, and understandably so. She was living alone with just her young teenage son in the middle of thick dark woods and under attack every night. Even though Pam told Bev she trusted “no one!” Bev hoped that helping her through these night terrors might break through what she saw as Pam’s denial about her drinking and lifestyle. She also hoped it would give her and Geof a shot at helping Colton. They went as far as setting up security cameras, alarms, and motion-detecting lights around the trailer. Within minutes of Colton putting in a tape, the camera captured a figure running back and forth in front of it. The police, though, told Bev and Geof that they believed it was Colt on the video and that he was responsible for all of it. They told them he was “a bad seed.”
By early December, someone was setting fires on the trailer’s front porch. The police showed up and this time questioned Colton and Pam separately. They told Pam that they’d had the notes analyzed and that it was Colton’s handwriting. They also said they’d been hiding in her woods with night vision and had seen him running around throwing things. Pam said, “Bullshit!” and told them that even if Colton did write the notes, there was no way he could have thrown saw blades and other things she believed came at her when Colton was standing close by. One cop told her, “Say the word, Pam, and we’ll arrest him right now.”
“The hell you will,” she said, and grabbed Colton, telling him not to say anything more to the deputies.
One positive thing that came from all the drama was that Geof spent time with Colton. After finding Colt walking alone along the main road again, they got to talking about boats. “He really perked up with that,” says Geof. “So I said, ‘Well, I know some people down there on the water, maybe we can find someone with a cool boat.’” Guys Geof knew had rebuilt a tiny steamboat, and he introduced them to Colton. “Colt went right up and got to talking to these two old-timers, asking them all kinds of questions about the boat. Next thing, he’s asking me if he can go for a ride with them. I said, ‘Sure, you can.’ So I sat and waited for him. Crimey sakes, they had him out there for two hours—he loved it!”
After that, every time Geof found Colton out along the road—which was often—he picked him up and took him along wherever he was going. Geof says he felt Colton wasn’t quite normal, “but I disagree with a lot of those initials they saddle kids with, ADD and that… I think if they had the right parenting, if the kid got the right response from their family, I don’t think you’d have all those initials. Every child has trouble paying attention and acting proper if they haven’t been brought up right.”
Colton impressed Geof in a lot of ways. “He was a nice kid, polite and smart. Man, he knew the name of every airplane out there. He’d rattle off names right and left, then start describing each one of them for me. I’m thinking, This kid knows more than Boeing!”
DURING ONE OF THE fruitless searches for the invisible tormenters at the trailer, Bev took Colton aside and asked what she could do to help him. “He said that if I could get his mom to quit drinking that would be the best thing,” she says. He told her, “She thinks that I’m the problem, but she doesn’t realize that she has the problem… When I’m grown and gone she’ll see that.” Bev told Colton that no matter what his mom did, he was old enough to start making some of his own choices. She said he could start making some new friends, and promised that she and Geof would help him get involved with some constructive activities that would get him out of the house and wouldn’t end up with him thrown in juvie. She offered to take him to Alateen and said, “Don’t count on your mom to make changes: you do it!
“I talked for quite a while and Colt was silent,” says Bev, who wrote everything that transpired during this time in long, detailed letters to her sister. “Then he started, and it was like he couldn’t stop, it was like one big sentence. He told me he never has friends over because of the dump he lives in and how his mom is mean to him and everyone else, and anybody new that comes over gets met with a shotgun, and that he can tell if she’s drunk or not by how she says hello on the phone and how he doesn’t feel like going home if he hears her drunk hello, and how she tells him to give her gas money or she won’t pick him up, and how he’s glad when she runs out of money each month because then she can’t buy beer, and that she spends several hundred dollars a month on cigarettes and beer and that money could be used to fix the place up! He said, ‘I don’t even know what she does all day,’ because he does all the cleaning and the laundry. He told me about a friend of his whose mother was so nice, ‘if Scott even gets a mosquito bite, his mom is right there looking at it and medicating it!’ He said, ‘Scott’s mom is pretty, and they live in a nice house, and I just wish my mom could be like that. I told my mom how nice Scott’s mom was and she said, “Well, goody for her! She’s probably in debt up to her eyeballs!” My mom just doesn’t understand that they aren’t in debt, they work, and I asked her, “Why don’t you get a job like a normal person?” and she said, “Why, Colton? So you can have all the pretty little toys you want and be a spoiled rotten brat? You want all that shit, get out and get yourself a job!” ’”
Bev assured Colton that they’d help him if he started to take some responsibility for his life.
The following day, Bev stopped by after delivering Santa Geof to Stanwood for the yearly parade. “Pam was sitting outside in her truck drinking and smoking, but Colton had obviously been working his butt off cleaning the yard and driveway, creating a huge pile of junk. He’d even trimmed a lilac bush and strung Christmas lights on it.” Bev praised him effusively, and says he was very proud of his work.
Later, a local deputy Bev knew called her. “He told me I was ‘maybe too nice’ getting involved with Colton and Pam.” The deputy said he thought that out of all the teens he’d ever dealt with in his many years on the island, Colton was “the worst of the worst.” He also said he thought it was “way too late for Colton, that he’s already gone.” Bev’s own mother also warned her away because of stories she’d heard from a friend working at the school.
Bev promised everyone that she’d be careful, but told them she still wanted to help Colt and, if possible, even Pam. She said she’d put her trust in God and repeatedly asked her friends and family to pray for all of them.
The next time Bev went over to Pam’s, a knife whizzed past her shoulder from Colton’s direction and almost hit Melanie. Bev confronted Colt, but he denied everything and told her, “I never want to see you again as long as I live!”
Bev asked Pam to send Colton away for a couple of days to see if the incidents stopped. Pam said she couldn’t because last time he went to the one place that would take him he stole the homeowner’s bank card. She added that “Colton’s dad was a credit card thief.” Bev also found that Colton had been rifling through her purse, taking cash.
Bev wrote to her sister that all the notes about the entire episode should eventually go to an author, “for their book about Colton, when he’s in prison and when Pam gets drunk and shoots herself or someone else, or when Colton kills her. The only hope for these people is some sort of institution—for both of them!”
BEV AND GEOF DIDN’T give up, though. When Pam called to say Colton brought home his first A in math, Geof picked him up from school, took him go-cart racing, and bought him a remote control Hummer as a reward. Bev and Geof also hauled away mountains of junk—old toilets, car parts, and so on—that Colton had gathered when he cleaned up the property. “We really felt he hated living in a pig sty,” so one day while Colton was at school, Bev says she and Geof went to the trailer to “swamp” his room. It’d been so crapped up that Colton was sleeping in with Pam. They spent four hours picking up and sweeping out. They laid down wall-to-wall carpet, installed a new bed, and put up shelves. The final touch was a throw rug with big glow-in-the-dark bare feet on it.
Pam warned them that Colton would freak if anyone touched his stuff, and made Bev and Geof promise to be there when he came home from school because she said she was “tired of the bruises.” When they told Colton they’d fixed up his room, he yelled at Pam and ran into the trailer. After a few tense minutes, he came out and walked up to Bev. He handed her a Snickers bar, saying, “For all you’ve done.”
After each promising moment, Bev thought that things would settle down in the trailer. The poltergeist, though, continued to terrorize Haven Place. “Colt called me, laughing,” says Bev. “He held up the phone and I can hear the shotgun going off in the background and a drunken Pam screaming, ‘That’s right, you motherfucker son of a bitch, goddammit you come out, you lily-livered chickenshit!’ And Colt’s just cracking up.”
Pam decided her next strategy to catch the perpetrators would be to lie under the trailer and shoot them with a BB gun. Geof told Colton that he’d come by and do some target practice with him. Colton was excited and repeatedly called Bev, saying, “Mom wants to know when Geof is coming by to shoot BBs with me.” When the day came, though, Geof was busy and stopped by to tell Colton he had to postpone. Before Geof could get home, Colton called Bev and told her. Geof was met by an angry Mrs. Claus, or rather Mrs. Claws, who told him in no uncertain terms that this was a kid who’d been disappointed by adults all his life and Geof better get his ass back there. Geof turned right around, and he and Colton shot the BB gun for hours. Colt turned out to be a crack shot, excellent at picking off his mortal enemy: Pam’s beer cans. Plink, plink, plink.
It felt to Bev and Geof that they were on the verge of a major breakthrough. Then it all came crashing down.
THE OLD-TIMERS WHO’D taken Colton out on their steamboat told Geof they’d be happy to show him the shop where they’d rebuilt the boat and made the parts. Geof asked Colton if he wanted to go, and got an enthusiastic “Yes!” They planned for Geof to pick Colton up that Saturday.
“A couple of days later,” remembers Bev, “I answer the phone. It’s Pam and she is mad. I ask her what’s up and she says, ‘Just put Geof on the phone!’” Geof gets on and has his ears fried.
“She demands to know why I’m taking her son away from her,” says Geof. “I told her that’s not what I was doing, but she says, ‘Well, that’s all he talks about, he wants to go everywhere with you and you keep taking him places! I don’t know who you think you are. He is my son, not yours! So just back off!’ She got vicious, told me off, and threatened to get a restraining order on me. So I said, ‘Fine, if you don’t want me to see him I won’t.’ And so I just backed off because… wow… that’s Pam. I didn’t want any trouble.”
“We just then felt it was all hopeless and we weren’t equipped to deal with it,” says Bev. “It was very hard on us to realize we couldn’t help that poor boy except to be there if he ever called.”
The night raids on the trailer eventually stopped. Pam maintains it was neighbors, while the police believe it was Colt. They may both be right. There was a lot of anger toward Pam and Colt in that neighborhood. One of Colt’s former friends says he knew a father and son who lived there at the time who “hated” Pam and Colt and wouldn’t have hesitated to make their life hell as revenge for thefts they blamed on Colt. The graffiti and many of the coincidences in Bev’s exhaustive catalog of events, though, suggest Colt was responsible for much of it. No charges were ever filed against anyone.
On March 1, 2005, the employees at the Stanwood Library arrived to find three windows broken. Beneath one of the windows were footprints made by someone hoisting himself up to the eight-foot-high sill. There was also blood splatter from the burglar apparently cutting himself on the glass. Once inside, he took the $61 in the cash box.
The Washington State Police crime lab tested the blood and found there was only a 1-in-150,000,000,000,000,000 chance that it hadn’t dripped from Colton Harris-Moore. “I think that one’s bullshit,” says Pam. “Why would he go in the library? I don’t think they even collect fines for overdue books anymore.”
On March 7, Colton was sent to Echo Glen Children’s Center, a medium/maximum-security juvenile facility in Snoqualmie, Washington, sentenced to six weeks for theft 2 and theft 3. From this point on, there wasn’t a single moment in Colton Harris-Moore’s life when he wasn’t under investigation, wanted on warrant, or actually serving time.
Colt left Echo Glen at the end of April, and in May was again expelled from Stanwood Middle, this time for “continual disruption to the educational process and danger to self and others.” The expulsion led to another week in juvie because getting into trouble in school was a violation of his parole. Pam told the court that Colton wasn’t following “reasonable household rules,” which also violated his parole.
On November 22, another alarm went off at Elger Bay Elementary School. When the deputies arrived, they found Pam’s black Mazda pickup in the parking lot, filled with stolen computer equipment. Inside the school, they discovered shoe prints and Colton’s fingerprints. They impounded Pam’s truck and arrested Colton for the theft of an Apple computer and accessories.
By December 2005, at least twelve referrals to Child Protective Services had been recorded regarding Colton. Whenever there was a big fight at home now, though, Colton ended up going to jail. On Pearl Harbor Day, another domestic disturbance call led to Colton’s being arrested again for assault on Pam.
Despite failing grades and multiple suspensions and expulsions, the schools continued to socially promote Colton. He was enrolled in high school and then, in a last-ditch effort to keep him in the educational system, he was transferred to a high school with alternative programs. However, the school reported to the court that Colton didn’t attend classes, another parole violation. He also didn’t show up for his community service, and then he got hit with another PSP in the first degree.
Colton served another fifteen days, and by the time he got out, the police already had another piping hot arrest warrant ready to serve, this one for the Stanwood Library job. Deputies went to the trailer to collect him, but Colton ran off into his woods. He was now beyond catch-22: he had to go to school or violate his probation, but if he showed up at class the police would nab him on the outstanding warrant. So Colton went on the lam for the first time.
Though the Haven Place trailer was still more like the Thunderdome (Colton told a psychologist that it was during this time in 2006 when “she told me that she wished I would die”), he sometimes stayed with Pam. Other nights, the fugitive camped in the woods. The rest of the time, police believe, he either squatted inside unoccupied homes or crashed with friends, successfully eluding capture for two months. Island County deputies swung by the trailer every so often and noticed a leaning tower of pizza boxes in the bushes. Playing a hunch, they asked the pizza place to let them know the next time they had a delivery to Pam’s address. According to the Island County Sheriff’s Office, one officer donned the pizza guy’s jacket and cap and carried the pie to the door. He saw the silhouette of someone peeking out the window at him, but the disguise worked, because the door opened and there stood Colton expecting some tasty ’za. Instead, the cop gave him a big smile and said, “Hello, Colt.”
It was revenge of the Noid. Colton turned to Pam, deflated. She looked up, realized what had happened, and told the officers preparing to cuff her son, “That was a good idea!”
IN JUNE 2006, COLTON began serving a thirty-day sentence at the Denney Juvenile Detention Center for the Stanwood Library burglary. At his hearing, his probation officer offered the court this assessment: “Colton is a fifteen-year-old young man with extensive criminal history with juvenile court. Colton and his mother live alone on Camano Island. She continues to minimize his criminal behavior and make excuses for him. The one positive thing that Colton has going is that he doesn’t use drugs or alcohol.”
ACCORDING TO KORY BRYAND who was also doing short stints in juvenile detention, Colton had as much trouble getting along with the kids in juvie as he did on the outside. “All the guys in there had problems with him. Colt would just talk crap all the time. The only reason guys weren’t beating him up is that nobody wanted to go on lockdown.” The threat of being confined to his room without privileges didn’t worry Colt, though. “He got put on lockdown for backtalking the COs [corrections officers].”
While Colt was inside, Island County deputies were busy investigating a stolen credit card that was used in May to make ATM withdrawals and to buy a laptop and wireless router—cash and goodies worth $3,708.57. They traced it to Colton.
“Colt always had money from credit cards,” says Harley. “That’s how you could tell he was smart… you have to be pretty smart to get the pin off a credit card.”
Mike Bulmer remembers that even back in middle school Colton had a debit card hidden in the woods. “He’d say, ‘Don’t follow me,’ and he’d go off and get the card and then we’d go get the money out of an ATM. He’d give me some and some other guys some, like he was doing it to kinda get friends.”
Colton walked out of the detention center on July 7… now really determined not to go back.
During Colton’s legal limbo, he and Pam headed off island for a family reunion. They arrived at Sandy’s spread in Arlington with Pam’s little pickup loaded down with bales of hay they’d picked up for a relative’s horses.
“I hadn’t seen him for a long time,” says Colt’s oldest cousin. “He gets out of the truck, tall, thin, and barefoot.” Colt, she says, visited with Sandy’s horses and played croquet with his second cousins while the adults hung out and talked. “When Colt came over to the picnic table where the adults were, he was very polite and quiet.” Once he felt comfortable, she says, his sense of humor started to come out. “We’re all smart-asses in our family, and he fit in. He also had that typical teenage sarcasm.” Colt spoke a lot about Melanie: “He kept saying how much he loved that dog.” His other big topic was airplanes.
“It’s wide open out there, with a lot of planes flying overhead, and every one that flew by, Colt was ‘Oh that’s a blah blah blah blah’; he knew every detail about every plane. I was amazed.” Someone at the table asked him what he wanted to be. “He said, ‘I’m going to be a pilot.’ We all knew that he’d been getting into trouble, and Sandy said, ‘If you keep out of jail.’”
Colt, says his cousin, was calm and cool “until Pam started needling at him. She told us about his violent rages when he starts running around screaming and tearing things up. She said that one night she was on the computer and Colt wanted to use it. She wouldn’t get off, so he picked it up and threw it out the window.”
That image, says his cousin, didn’t fit the Colt they saw in front of them, who was “quiet and respectful to all the other adults.” It was obvious, though, that there were issues between him and Pam. “They just sat there sparring, she’d push his buttons and they’d fight over anything and everything… really weird.”
She says Pam complained that Colton had stopped taking his meds. Colt said that he stopped because he didn’t like them. “She also told us that Colt wouldn’t go to therapy anymore ‘because he thinks he knows more than they do.’”
His cousin says Colt got madder and madder until he finally ran off to the horse barn. “Pam yelled after him, ‘Yeah, run away, that’s what you always do, Colt, run away!’”
ON JULY 14, 2006, THE Island County prosecutor filed two counts for the credit card crime: theft in the first degree and a PSP. Colt was ordered to appear before the court. Knowing there could be only one outcome from the hearing—more jail time—he skipped it. On July 28, a warrant was issued for his arrest and Colton Harris-Moore was once again a kid on the lam.
The fact that he was on a small island with limited room to run didn’t faze Colton. He took one of Pam’s tents and set up a campsite in the thick brush at the front southwest corner of her Haven Place property. He set up fallback camps at other spots and, according to Harley, he also spent time sheltering with people willing to help him. Colt didn’t just lie low and hide out, though; he actually stepped up his criminal activities.
For one thing, he had to feed himself and he’d learned the hard way that it wasn’t as simple as waiting for the pizza guy to show up. Fortunately, all of his childhood ramblings around the island came in very handy. He knew every forest path and every backyard in the South End. He also knew the trusting nature of the community, where few people bothered to lock their doors or worried about security.
It was a battle of wits, and I guess I lost,” laughs Jack Boyle (not his real name).
Jack certainly didn’t come to the battle unarmed. He has a graduate degree in nuclear engineering from MIT and a forty-year career at a prestigious university—nine as dean of the graduate school.
Jack and his wife, Louise, bought a piece of South End Camano back in 1978. Their two acres straddled South Camano Drive, with the building site atop a 140-foot bluff overlooking the waters of Saratoga Passage. The other acre was across the road, a thickly wooded buffer that backed up to an undeveloped patch at the top of Haven Place. The Boyles and their kids camped on the property until 1991, when they built a summer home.
“We’d been told to only use local people when we built or we’d run into all kinds of trouble with permits and things,” says Louise. “There’s a lot of insider stuff that goes on. The people in the interior of the island are all full-time residents and they kind of own the island, while a lot of people on the coast are just vacation homeowners and are looked on as interlopers.” She says the split goes beyond who spends the most time on the island. “Waterfront property is very expensive, interior property very cheap, and that tends to cause a social divide. It’s really two cultures.”
Still, the Boyles loved the island and their terrific view. In 2002, the now-retired couple decided to give Camano a full-time try. When designing their vacation home, they hadn’t bothered planning for all the storage space necessary in a permanent home. Island folks usually even go beyond that and keep a large larder so they don’t have to hit the grocery store as often. To rectify the situation, the Boyles enclosed the crawlspace beneath the house, creating a basement. Part was walled off as a little workshop for Jack’s tools, and another room served as a wine cellar, which they kept fully stocked with about a hundred bottles. The rest was space for household stuff and, because the kitchen didn’t have enough cabinet room, food. The big freezer and shelves were filled with everything from frozen fruit to Frappuccinos.
The Boyles found themselves going down to the basement several times a day and never thought of locking the door. In late 2004, Louise began having little inklings that something was off. “I’d always be saying to myself, ‘I could’ve sworn I bought a case of Coke,’ or ‘I knew I had this or that in the food reserves.’ I’d go down and the shelves were looking empty.” This went on for more than a year. “I kept thinking, I’m losing it,” she says, laughing.
Then, one evening in the summer of 2006, Louise asked Jack to take a gallon of milk down to the basement fridge. The next morning when he went to get it for breakfast, it was gone. Now they definitely knew they weren’t imagining things. Jack went out and bought a lock for the door. “Half the time we’d forget the key and have to come back up,” says Jack. So they hid the key on a hook underneath the trellis near the door. “It probably took him three seconds to find that.”
Not long after they’d put the lock on, the Boyles were woken at midnight by an alarm going off next door. Someone had stolen Jack’s bolt cutters out of the basement and used them to cut a padlock off the neighbor’s storage shed. The next morning, they found the bolt cutters on the path that led through their woods to Haven Place.
Jack and Louise began to talk to neighbors and discovered that there were a lot of similar things going on. Then an Island County detective came to their door. He showed them a picture of Colton, saying the department had good reason to believe he was the one breaking into area homes. The cop asked if they’d noticed their front door. “There were pry marks where someone had stuck a crowbar and tried to force the door open,” says Jack. In their front garden, Louise’s cat statue had been tipped over, “obviously someone looking for a hidden key.” Someone had also tried to pry open their locked mailbox.
The Boyles had installed a security system when their home was built, but never used it unless they were going out of town. Now they began to turn it on every night. Knowing that the basement key “hidden” under the trellis was still the weak link, Jack bought an expensive combination lock that didn’t use a key but opened with a punch code.
So… the Boyles were more than surprised when a neighbor who’d come up for the weekend went into the woods across the road to clear some brush and surprised a burglar in Frappuccino delicto. The perp took off through the trees toward Haven Place before the neighbor got a look at him, but he left behind his partially consumed, highly caffeinated picnic. He’d polished off a can of Diet Coke, four Nature Valley Sweet & Salty bars, a jar of gourmet jelly, and at least two Starbucks Frappuccinos, leaving behind all the empty wrappers and jars, along with nine Fraps out of a twelve-pack and a Ziploc of frozen strawberries.
The neighbor called Jack, who went up the trail and couldn’t believe his eyes. “That’s our stuff!” He went to his basement and found the door closed and locked. Inside, though, the cupboard was most definitely bare.
They called the sheriff but say they just got a shrug. This kind of thing and worse was happening all over the South End and the deputies didn’t have the time or inclination to investigate a minor pantry raid. It was up to Jack to put on his figurative tweed thinking cap, go Sherlock, and try to solve a classic “locked room” mystery.
“I finally remembered that when I first bought the fancy lock I’d spread out the parts and instructions in the basement, but didn’t get it installed that first day.” On a hunch, Jack went to his filing cabinet and pulled out the paperwork for the lock. “One page was missing,” he laughs. “The page with the combination. He’d gotten in, figured it all out, and only taken that one page.”
Jack reset the combination, but their stuff continued to walk away: two-thirds of a case of Diet Coke, half a case of classic Coke, more specialty jellies, an eight-pack of tuna, a carton of protein bars…
The basement door lies beneath their bedroom window and Louise’s superpower is her hearing. A number of times she awoke in the middle of the night to the sound of their neighbor’s hot tub going when they weren’t on the island, and she’s sure Colton was sneaking in for soaks. But she never heard anyone rummaging in the basement. Again and again they’d set their security system—which showed all doors alarmed—then go to bed. No alarms would go off, but they’d get up to find that more stuff was missing—more snack bars, two cans of whipped cream, Dijon mustard, flaxseed meal…
It drove Jack crazy. One day he opened the door and it finally struck him. The basement alarm worked via a sensor in the door jamb and a magnet on the door itself. When the door closed, the magnet armed the switch. If the door opened, pulling the magnet away, the alarm went off. Now, staring at the door, something didn’t look quite right. Jack suddenly realized what it was. “He’d unscrewed the magnet from the door and glued it to the sensor so it would never go off!”
Jack was impressed. Despite the fact they were always home during the burglaries, they say they never felt threatened. Unlike a “typical” invasion by teens, they also say there was never any malicious damage, nothing else was ever disturbed in the basement, and the wine and hard liquor were never even touched.
To Jack, it was more like trying to outsmart a Mensa-level raccoon. He bought motion detectors and positioned them around the house. Each one went off with a separate custom recording that would alert them: “Someone at basement door,” “Someone at front door,” and so on. They were very high-tech.
Next to go missing were a box of Kleenex, Ziploc bags, more fancy jam, one of Jack’s backpacks, a bunch of drill bits, and two boxes of Christmas lights. “The most poignant,” says Louise, who kept a running tally, “were the Christmas lights.”
“I couldn’t figure out for a long time how he got around the motion detectors,” says Jack. “Then I finally pulled down one of the sensors. Here he’d taken the batteries out and then put it back up so I wouldn’t know it was disabled.”
It got to the absurd state that after each raid Jack would automatically walk up into the woods knowing that he’d find a trail of wrappers, cans, and other litter scattered along the path that lead directly to Haven Place. This raccoon had no compunction about crapping up the forest. After calling the police, Jack would go out to clean up.
It wasn’t until months later that the Boyles noticed that the cordless phone they kept in the basement was missing. They found it in their neighbor’s dog house, which sat within range of the transmitter. The black Lab never used its dog house and was quickly ruled out as a suspect.
Other homes along Camano Drive were also getting hit multiple times for things like food and bikes, and the police told residents that they suspected Colton in all of it. Across the island from the Boyles’ and a mile south of Pam’s cabin, Maxine K., a grandmother of eighteen, discovered that someone was foraging in her garage freezer, scarfing up ice cream and frozen pizzas along with whatever canned food was on the shelves. She and her husband would find the empty boxes and containers in the nearby woods, and even found evidence of a fire where she believes the burglar was cooking the food. Knowing that it was Colton—whom she referred to as “Island Boy” and says she felt sorry for—at first she didn’t even bother calling the police.
Not everyone was taking the thefts in stride, though. One of the Boyles’ neighbors, “summer people,” says Louise, made it clear that if he had the opportunity inside his house, he wouldn’t hesitate to shoot Colt. “There was a lot of that around the island,” she says.
Still, many of the South Enders empathized with a rebellious kid who’d grown up in miserable circumstances and was now forced to hide out in the woods and Yogi Bear his meals. Colton lost some sympathy, though, when people learned he wasn’t just taking Frappuccinos and frozen pizzas.
As easily as he could get into the Boyles’ basement no matter what the security measures, Colt could get inside almost anyone’s house. And while he’d refused to study for school, he did plenty of homework when it came to burglaries.
“Colt would call and say, ‘Hey, come on out to Camano, I found some houses,” says Harley, who was living in Everett when Colt went on the lam. “I was still on probation and I didn’t want to go out there, but he said he’d pay me plus split whatever we got.”
Harley says he’d take the bus out to the island and Colt would pick him up at the stop. “He’d already have a stolen car.” Harley says he and Colt took cars only for transportation—borrowing them to get from burglary job to job—and never tried to sell them. “One house, we took the car and drove it around and then took it back exactly where we got it. We even cleaned it up and all.”
Harley says “you’d be amazed” how many houses they could hit in one night. Usually, he says, Colt had already done the prep work, identifying the houses and sometimes even greasing their way inside. “He had keys to some of them… ” Harley hints that someone was providing the keys to Colt, but police believe that Colt more likely just sniffed around until he found the emergency keys that people squirrel away under welcome mats, flowerpots, conspicuous rocks, garden gnomes, or on top of door frames—all the obvious places that we homeowners think are so clever. Harley says that if Colt didn’t have the key it was still no problem: “We’d just break in.”
Harley’s criteria for a good target: “Any home where nobody’s at.”
Once inside, they were primarily looking for jewelry and cash, but didn’t limit themselves if something struck their fancy. “I took a couple of pool sticks, two piece, alligator skin case,” says Harley. But taking things like that had particular risks. “My mom could tell that I’d stolen them and she confiscated them.”
No amount of cash was too little for Harley to pick up, and he was incredulous that Colton passed up change. “He just left that alone, wasn’t interested! I was like, ‘Cool, I’ll take it, I need it for bus fare anyway.’ I had about $120 worth of change just from houses out there.”
Harley also searched homes for drugs and booze but says Colt never did. “I did enough of that for both of us.” And though he says he was never afraid during a job, Harley carried a gun. “I carried it because I could… and because I’m not allowed to have ’em, so it was doing what I do best: being rebellious.” He says he knew about the serious penalties for carrying a firearm during a crime. “I knew I would never get caught with it. All you gotta do is hit the woods, and I knew plenty of places I could dump it.”
At the end of their night shift, Harley would head back to Everett with his share of the loot. He says they fenced what they could, and he’d wait for the next call from Colt to come out and work the island again.
THE BURGLARIES WITH HARLEY were old-school B and Es: get in and loot the place. Residents came home to find that everything of any value that could be easily carried had been taken. Colt twisted the standard a little because he’d also take things any professional burglar would ignore but that he wanted—not to fence but to play with. Things like remote control toys. At the same time, though, he began to hone sophisticated skills and to develop his own brand of more delicate crime that mixed ballsy blue-collar burglaries with white-collar computer capers. For these jobs, Colt preferred to work alone.
Colt had always been fascinated with technology, and tech gear was one of his top targets. Friends say that before they knew he was burglarizing local homes, they always wondered how dirt-poor Colt always had the latest iPod and other gadgets. Like every other kid of his generation, Colt was more than proficient at computers. Early on he also discovered the power and possibilities of the Internet, both for benign uses—his Myspace profile under the user name Harris90210 listed his occupation as “pilot”—and as a tool for learning about and committing crimes. The Web, even more than his frontier island, was the real contemporary Wild West. To a budding outlaw, it offered everything from untraceable ways to stay connected with friends and family, to aerial surveillance photos of targets, and complete research on potential victims. It also provided step-by-step instructions on criminal techniques.
Say a wrong-crowd kid lets you in on a secret: you can open almost any door lock using something called a bump key. Google it up, then go to YouTube and find a helpful selection of how-tos on using bump keys to open locks in two or three seconds without leaving any sign of forced entry. As a bonus, they offer easy instructions on how to make them. Why bother, though, when the sponsored links that pop up along with the search results include several “ask no questions” online shops where for about $30 you can order a full set that will get you into practically any house in the country? Ah, but you need a credit card to order the keys and you don’t have one. That calls for identity theft.
There are lots of ways crooks go about ID theft. Colton dabbled in the simplest form: stealing credit card offers out of mailboxes, filling them out, and then intercepting the cards. However, he also realized that if you can ninja yourself in and out of someone’s house without them knowing you’ve been there, forget about it, you’ve got the keys to the kingdom.
Colt’s combination of twenty-first-century tech savviness and nineteenth-century outlaw cojones came together to create a remarkably effective criminal. He wasn’t some Cheetos-stained hacker trying to break past software firewalls. This was a guy who would physically break into your home and make himself comfortable while using your computer, Internet connection, and good credit against you.
Boot up the ubiquitous home computer… If you’re one of the few who actually bother to password protect your system, it takes a few extra minutes to reboot it with an easily available password-breaking program the thief brought on a USB stick. Once he’s logged on, chances are you’ve saved your Amazon, eBay, PayPal, and other account passwords in the Web browser and they’ll fill in automatically. If not, they’re probably all listed on a document saved on the hard drive, or else sticky noted somewhere close to the computer. The credit card info for payment is either saved as a default for the retailer accounts, or the cards themselves are in the house ready to be entered into the online form. Click click: residential burglary at a whole new level.
Traditional thieves are stuck with whatever’s lying around the house, hoping for jewelry, electronics, and guns that are easily converted into cash. However, a burglar on the lam determined to remain in the same small area has got to be careful about trusting local fences. He’s also not too comfortable walking into retail stores to buy new clothes, the latest music and tech toys, self-defense equipment, and other necessities. What does he do, though, if, when he breaks into your home, you don’t have the kind of laptop he wants, or the latest-generation iPod, or your clothes don’t fit him? No worries: he just uses your credit cards and computer to order whatever he wants. It’s custom burglary with convenient overnight shipping. The challenge is making sure you don’t have a clue that he’s been in your house—that way you probably won’t know what happened until the credit card bill arrives a month later.
Delivery is another tricky part. Colt obviously couldn’t have illegal purchases delivered to any address connected to him, his mom, or any known associates because that would give the authorities a paper trail. So that basically left three options: have it delivered to the credit card owner’s legitimate address, use an unsuspecting third party, or create a fake address. Colt ultimately used all these methods. Another aspect of the rural, trusting nature that helped him get away with things for so long on Camano and later on Orcas was the unofficial “island rules” used by delivery companies. With homes typically so far apart from one another and from the roads, drivers have little compunction about leaving packages on porches, ripe for the picking.
The innovative crimes, the “subtle” thefts where he sneaked in and out without the homeowner realizing anything was amiss, became one of Colton’s identifying MOs. Together with the numerous joint operations with Harley during this period, the Island County Sheriff’s Office suspected Colt was involved in dozens of burglaries and car prowls on Camano during a period of just a few months. The Stanwood/Camano News listed more burglaries each week, and word quickly got around that it wasn’t just food and necessities going missing. Camano residents began to lose sympathy for Colton Harris-Moore, as well as their patience with the Island County Sheriff’s Office.
To add to the pressure, it was an election year. One of the new candidates for sheriff, Mark C. Brown, was an ex-navy officer who served thirty-plus years in the Washington State Patrol. Colton’s crime spree had become such an issue that one of Brown’s campaign pledges was that, if elected, catching Colton Harris-Moore would be one of his department’s top priorities.
Not that the deputies weren’t already trying. “We had many other things going on in the county that we’d be better off spending our department’s time and money on,” says Detective Ed Wallace. “But we started setting up special operations to try to catch Colton.”
Each time the sheriff’s office sent a team out after Colt it meant pulling manpower off much busier Whidbey Island to reinforce the few Camano deputies. Still, they began moving officers and burning up overtime out of an already tight budget. The first place they targeted, naturally, was Haven Place.
“THE POLICE ASKED TO use my property to keep watch for Colt,” says Carol Star. “I gave them permission, but they were so obvious! They came in black SUVs and parked in the street. They came up my driveway wearing camouflage makeup and carrying machine guns, and were so loud I could hear them inside my house. They weren’t sneaking up on anyone. I told them, ‘You guys need to come in an old beat-up van or something, and you’re making too much noise.’ So one of them says, ‘Well, we want him to know that the police are around.’ Yeah, then why would you be wearing camouflage uniforms and makeup!?”
The deputies were able to infiltrate Haven Place stealthily enough at least once, though. “Some of us were in the trees at the bottom of the road, others in the bushes closer to Pam’s,” says Wallace, who was part of the six-person team detailed to try to catch Colton.
Ed Wallace is a cop’s cop, in shape and not only a detective but a member of the Hard Entry and Arrest Team (HEAT) that busts into meth houses and does the county’s other dangerous dirty work. A second-generation Island County deputy, Wallace, at forty, already had twenty years of policing under his belt plus a stint as an army MP. In a small force (Island County has the smallest sheriff’s department, per capita, in Washington State) staff gets spread around. Wallace also serves as the department’s computer expert, and he drew the short straw and became its public information officer, tasked with dealing with the media. The Colton Harris-Moore case had Wallace wearing all of his different hats. What he wanted most, though, like all the Island County cops, was to catch him.
“Colt always counted on us playing by the rules,” says Wallace, noting that the fugitive banked on officers’ professionalism. The deputies did carry Tasers, but Wallace says no one who got within the sixteen-foot range ever felt he had a good enough shot at Colt.
Time after time, deputies waded into the sea of waist-high ferns that filled the understory beneath Camano’s tall second-growth trees to search for Colt. Especially in the summer, you can’t see fifty feet into the woods. You’d literally have to stumble onto someone or his camp as long as he kept it low profile. But even finding his camp didn’t mean cornering Colt. “He’d set up one camp to live in that had several escape routes,” says Chris Ellis. “Then he’d have several backup camps stocked with food and water in case he had to run. He always had a plan. Colton Harris-Moore was a thinking criminal by the time he was ten years old. And he wasn’t afraid. We searched one of his sites and found out later that he’d been sitting in a tree fifty feet above our heads watching us the whole time.”
All year long, Pacific Northwest forest floors remain a maze of fallen branches and slick, moss-covered logs, which made it dangerous, when they did spot him, to give chase. As Colt and Harley knew, the police were reticent to go running into the woods, with reason. One Camano deputy who chased Colt through the trees injured his knee so badly that he was out of work for several weeks.
That night on Haven Place was one of many close encounters the Island County cops had with Colton Harris-Moore during his run. “One of our guys was moving down the road and thought he heard footsteps,” says Wallace. “He froze and brought up his night vision, and here’s Colt, sauntering right down the middle of the road about twenty feet away. He lit him up with his flashlight and we jumped out, but Colt’s a gazelle and off he goes. He makes it to the woods and is running to beat all hell. We tried to chase him down, but frankly, I’m not going to run blindly through the trees and lose an eye or break a leg for a burglary suspect.”
ON SEPTEMBER 16, TWO Island County deputies arrived at the trailer. According to Pam’s sister Sandy, Pam called 911 three times during this six-and-a-half-month period to tell police that Colt was on the property and for them to come get him.
No one answered the door, but one of the deputies spotted a few items that he recognized as reported stolen—all remote control toys: a boat, a helicopter, and little ZipZap cars. There was obviously a lot more evidence around, so they arranged a search warrant. Pam still wasn’t there when the cops returned, so they climbed into the trailer through a window. They didn’t find anything inside, and began searching the rest of the property. Colt saw the cops and melted into the woods before they reached his campsite. He didn’t go far, though, and watched as the deputies struck the motherlode.
Some items they found were of obvious fenceable value, and others were useful, like the Swiss army knife, six flashlights, and four sets of binoculars—it always helps to have a spare or three. Some things, though, like the toys, seemed to have simply struck Colt’s fancy. A partial list of stolen property recovered from his campsite and a couple of caches around Pam’s lot showed his omnivorous habits.
Deputies found nine cell phones, two GPS units, four laptops (two PCs and two Macs), a video and two still cameras, an iPod and three other music players, a box of .38 bullets, several watches, eleven jewelry boxes filled with everything from pearl necklaces to pink costume jewelry, a motorcycle helmet, six Playboy magazines, a telescope, a Trek mountain bike, fireworks, wire cutters, a motion sensor, a beard trimmer, two calendars, and a commemorative Boeing coin. They found dozens of credit cards and a social security card, a health insurance card, a driver’s license, a military ID, a birth certificate, a checkbook, and personal mail, all in the names of various Camano victims. The cops also hauled away Colt’s personal items, like his clothes, nail clippers, ChapStick, medications, and size fourteen sneakers. After they’d gathered up all the loot, they added Colt’s dog, Melanie, who’d been faithfully guarding the campsite. They drove off, leaving behind a receipt.
Once the coast was clear, Colt came out of the woods and scribbled a note to Pam (spelling intact):
MOM, cops were here everythings on lockdown. I’m leaving 4-Wennachi won’t be back est. 2 month. I’ll contact you they took Mell. I’m going to have my affiliates take care of that. P.S.—Cops wanna play hu!? Well its not no lil game… It’s war! & tell them that.
Pam called the sheriff’s office and told them about the note. When a deputy came to collect it, she also handed over a stolen laser construction level that had been inside the trailer.
Police say they never followed up on the one clue in the note: “leaving 4-Wennachi.” But apparently the sunny town of Wenatchee on the Columbia River east of the Cascades became a safe haven for Colton at least twice when he was on the run over the following years.
CASA, THE CAMANO ANIMAL Shelter Association, is the island’s home for homeless dogs and cats. It consists of a compound of metal buildings and fenced yards exactly one-quarter mile from the tiny Island County Sheriff’s Office cop shop on East Camano Drive—so close that you can walk or drive between them without leaving the parking lots of various county buildings. CASA has a contract with the county to temporarily house impounded pets, and that’s where the deputies took Melanie at least twice while Colt was at large.
“They were chasing Colt through the woods one night,” says Pam, “and he called me on his cell phone saying come get his dog because he had to let go of her. So I drove down—it wasn’t even half a block away—and this lady officer says, ‘You can’t have her because she’s evidence.’ And I said, ‘What is she gonna do, get up on the stand and testify?’”
From all available records, it appears Melanie stayed faithful to Colt: the cops were never able to get her to roll over and speak.
At least one of the times they grabbed Melanie, the cops did it specifically to try to lure Colt into coming to rescue her. If this was a war, Melanie was, for a while, a POW.
North and east of CASA lie patches of woods, and that’s where a squad of deputies hid to wait for Colt. To ensure their success, they also stationed two deputies inside the animal shelter. Anyone approaching the CASA compound had to cross at least one road and some open ground before getting to the building or the little copse of trees just south of the fenced dog pens. If the officers outside saw someone approaching, they’d radio the inside team. If somehow Colt or an “affiliate” was able to sneak up to the building unseen, the deputies inside would hear him breaking in and would call in the outside troops. They all settled in, daring Colt to try to break Melanie out of the slammer. They waited… and waited… and waited. Sometime in the night, the ambush went askew. According to a source familiar with the operation, the officers inside CASA left their positions because they got cold. They snuck out stealthily so Colt, if he was watching, wouldn’t see them and realize it was a trap. They did such a good job, though, that the cops staked out in the woods didn’t know they’d left.
The inside officers eventually returned to their post and once again the trap was set. Only one problem: no bait. Melanie was gone. Someone had gotten past the surveillance, found the right cage, sprang Melanie, and then made it out again—this time with beagle in tow—all without being seen. Or heard, as anyone who’s ever walked into a kennel knows the racket the dogs make whenever someone new walks in.
That’s the kind of stuff legends are made of.
If Colton left the island after the tent raid, he didn’t leave for long. In early October, he escalated his war against law enforcement by stealing a digital camera from a Washington State Patrol car. Shortly after, he showed up at the trailer to play paparazzi, taking several pictures of Van. On the twentieth of that month, an Island County deputy taking another swing through the woods around Pam’s reported that he heard someone “crashing through the brush” and suspected it was Colton. He gave chase and stumbled onto another campsite. Melanie was there again, tied to a tree. A search recovered two cell phones and a copy of Flight Training magazine addressed to Eric Moore at Pam’s address. Records show that Colton had been receiving the magazine designed for student pilots for at least six months.
The deputy also found a camera, the Canon Powershot stolen from the WSP police car. A quick scroll through the photos showed a smiling face that the deputies instantly recognized as Van Jacobsen. One of the photos showed Van mugging for the photographer with his finger up his nose. The cops asked Van to come down for a chat and he admitted that Colt had come by and taken pictures.
In the November election, Mark Brown won the Island County sheriff’s job and prepared to take over the following January. He would inherit a force with budget issues and the inability to catch a teenage serial burglar running wild on the skinny south end of Camano Island.
With the heat increasing, Colt began to concentrate on the less-invasive custom credit card thefts. Maxine K., the spritely eighty-something grandma who’d been losing ice cream and pizza, received a call from the Kitsap County Sheriff’s Office. Lying just south of Island County, Kitsap is a fragmented peninsula that branches into Puget Sound between the Seattle-Tacoma metro area and the Olympic Peninsula. A Kitsap deputy told Maxine that one of their residents who’d been visiting Camano had an unauthorized online charge on his credit card and that the package was scheduled to be delivered to her house.
When the package arrived, Maxine called the Island County Sheriff’s Office. A deputy came out and, according to Maxine, said, “Hmmm,” and went back to the office to figure out what to do, leaving the package with her. In the meantime, a power company service truck showed up to deal with an outage next door. Maxine’s phone rang.
“It was some fella who said, ‘I’m so-and-so and I live at the end of your street… ’” Maxine, who’d been living there full-time for fifteen years and had island connections going back much longer, replied, “No, you don’t. Nobody by that name lives here.
“He asked me why the power company truck was out front… I was very suspicious of him.” After Maxine hung up with the mystery caller, the Island County deputy phoned back and told Maxine that they couldn’t take the package, saying that “it was Kitsap County’s problem.” Maxine told the deputy about the strange caller. The deputy ran the name and told Maxine that it was the name of a resident, but not anyone living where the caller said he did. And it definitely wasn’t someone who lived where he could see the power company truck near Maxine’s. It was, said the deputy, the name of one of Pam Kohler’s neighbors on Haven Place.
At this moment, Island County had a clear bead on Colton; he’d even baited his own trap. Maxine couldn’t believe it when the deputy told her they weren’t going to do anything about it.
Maxine had brought the package inside, but when the Island County Sheriff’s Office told her and her elderly husband they were on their own, her husband said, “Forget this,” and set the box outside. Their house sits a good thirty yards from the main road and isn’t visible from the street—no casual passerby could see the package.
“Of course,” says Maxine, “the next morning it was gone.”
The police still didn’t come out, but Maxine and her husband found tracks and figured out where Colt had been hiding. At the top of their driveway, above a sign that reads CAMP RUNAMUCK, is a forest-green plywood treehouse they’d built for their grandkids. It was a pretty luxe structure in its day, accessed by a ladder and featuring a Plexiglas window that provides a nice view of the front of the house—ideal to see deliveries.
LOCAL KIDS LIKE KORY occasionally ran across Colton as he roamed the island. “He always had that dog with him… I don’t know how he fed it.” Kory says that at first, none of the South End kids had any thought of turning Colton in. Most of them were having their own troubles with the deputies. That didn’t mean Colton was safe, though. He had a close shave after leaving a house Kory says he’d just burgled. “We saw him head into the woods and one of the guys who lived at the house came out, drunk, with a bottle of booze in one hand and a shotgun in the other. He was pissed because he said Colton had stolen some of his electronics, and he shot at him, trying to hit him. He missed, though, and then Colton was gone into the trees.”
Colton himself was seldom without a weapon of some sort, often a knife, but according to Harley and the police, there were also handguns. “Colt had done a burglary in which we knew guns were taken,” says Chris Ellis. “He’d escalated to being armed and then graduated to guns. My deputies and I knew from that point on that any interactions with him might be deadly.” Colton said he packed a gun because he was associating with some tough guys around this time and he was nervous about them possibly coming after him. Harley—all five feet six inches and 135 pounds—was actually the duo’s muscle instead of Colton, who now stood six-foot-two.
“Colt had a couple of kids trying to jack him for money,” says Harley. “I stopped them. I may be short, but I grow a couple of inches when I’m mad… Colt always said I was like a blowfish that way.”
Colton’s childhood friend, Anne, had started dating Harley a few months before his and Colt’s crime spree became the talk of the town. “He smoked pot and had friends who could get alcohol, so he was cool… It was kinda a bad-boy thing,” says Anne. “And here Harley turns out to be this perfectly polite, immaculate gentleman. Never said a bad thing about anyone. Even my dad, who hates everyone, was impressed and thought he was a great guy.”
Harley, though, didn’t tell Anne what he and her old friend Colton were up to, and she only found out when she got into a bit of trouble herself. “I got caught shoplifting, and me and my best friend are in the back of the Stanwood police car talking about how we were going to tell Harley about it. Suddenly the cop slams on the brakes, turns around, and says, ‘You don’t mean Harley Ironwing, do you?’ And I’m like, ‘Umm, yes, why?’ When we got to the cop shop, he started questioning me about Harley and Colt breaking into places and do I know anything about it. I’m like, ‘No, but I’m gonna beat his ass when I see him.’”
In January, Sheriff Mark Brown was sworn in and immediately ordered more resources sent to Camano to catch Colton, saying that the fifteen-year-old was “causing havoc over there.” Brown attended a community meeting held on the island to address the increasing anger and frustration. Residents came with questions, including, says Chris Ellis, “Why can’t you do your f’n job?” According to the Boyles and others who attended, the sheriff didn’t have many answers. “He didn’t share any information,” says Louise. Instead, he spent most of the time seemingly blaming the victims. “He asked, ‘Well, how many of you have a locking mailbox? How many of you have security lights outside?’ He just kept slamming us, and when at one point I mentioned that we had been out of town when something happened, he said, ‘See, you go out of town all the time.’ I was so mad.”
Brown said he was giving the community some much-needed straight talk about what was making them such easy targets.
The meeting illustrated growing fractures in the community regarding Colton. “Colt had been driving us crazy for a long time, and we really wanted him caught,” says Louise. “But we didn’t want him harmed and we didn’t think he ought to be put in prison for the rest of his life.” However, she says that a lot of those who came out were very hostile. “There was a lot of talk of guns, questions for the sheriff on where to buy them and where to go for shooting practice. I think a lot of people were more scared than they needed to be. And not just the old people. There was a young woman, around nineteen, and she was so terrified that when her husband drove in to work at four-thirty in the morning, she’d drag herself out of bed so he could drop her off in Stanwood at a fast-food place until the sun came up and she’d feel safe enough to take a bus back home. She was just shaking, petrified, when she told her story.”
Louise says the sheriff and other deputies did nothing to allay those fears. The word that went out was to form neighborhood watches and to be careful if you saw Colton because he could be dangerous. “We got the sense that the deputies were embarrassed because they couldn’t catch him and so they wanted to kill him, that’s why they were talking so much about him having guns.”
Kory says that there was a certain subgroup of “bad-ass cops” on Camano at that time. He’d had some experiences similar to Colton’s, including being on the run under an Island County warrant for a year. “Those guys kept showing up at my mom’s house basically telling her that they were going to beat me up when they caught me.” Kory says the same deputies were letting it be known around the island that it was not going to be pretty when they caught up with Colton. “Part of the reason he kept running was because he didn’t want to get hurt.”
“What my boys [the Camano deputies] were dealing with at the time was that there were people on the South End who were helping Colt, leaving food out for him,” says Chris Ellis. “We could never prove it, but there was no way he was doing what he was without help. On the other extreme, we had people telling us, ‘Why don’t you just shoot his ass?’ I had one guy come in to my office to tell me he’d been out in the woods with his compound bow, looking for Colt. He said, ‘Silent death, man!’ I told him, ‘Thanks for your help, but take your bow home.’ Of course, it was an embarrassment to the sheriff’s office that we couldn’t catch Colt. So I think the actual statement was, ‘We need to catch him before somebody gets hurt,’ and it was implied that Colt might be that somebody.”
Bev and Geof Davis say that the tension on the island had built to an incredible level. They heard the threats and feared Colton would end up beaten or worse, so Bev wrote Colton an email:
Hi Colt,
We’d ask how’s it going but we know all is not going well. We are writing to let you know we pray for you daily. We pray that you’ll be safe, warm and dry. We are so sorry that we weren’t able to do anything to help you Colton! We sure did want to. Geof thinks of you every time he sees the boat show ads on TV or some other function he thinks you’d enjoy going to.
There is nothing that any of us can do now to change the past, but there is your future to look to. It CAN become a GOOD life for you Colton!
You have already won all of the battles with the Camano Cops. They can’t catch you and they know it now! Why don’t you quit while you’re the winner?
Geof and I will go with you ANYTIME you are ready. We will take pictures of you before we go so we have proof that you didn’t have any scratches or bruises. We will see to it that you aren’t hurt!
We are VERY afraid for you Colton. The cops are making it seem like you are dangerous and that makes it VERY dangerous for you! Homeowners and cops will now be forgiven for shooting you and I’m sure a lot of the cops want to! PLEASE email me and tell me it’s NOT true that you are packing! If you are… your death will be justified. You are only 15 Colton. That is too young to die. At least in jail you’ll be fed, have a bed and be warm. And I’ll bet you’ll be out in 3 months. PLEASE Colton! Turn yourself in before you get badly hurt or killed. Like I said, Geof and I will do ANYTHING for you that we can. Anytime you’re ready!
Please go in now while it’s still your choice. Go in a winner!
If you have a gun… GET RID OF IT! Bring it to me if it’s not stolen… I’ll buy it!
Love,
Geof and Bev
IF YOU NEED HELP, ASK GOD
IF YOU DON’T NEED HELP, THANK GOD
After the police found several of his camps, Colton developed a group of what he considered safe houses, unattended homes where he hid out. He moved among them, never staying too long. At one of them, on Sea Song Lane one mile south of Pam’s trailer, he used the owner’s computer to send and receive messages on his 90210 Myspace account and to check emails sent to his mellenie010@hotmail.com address. He also used the homeowner’s computer to do some online shopping.
Apparently looking for some last-minute Christmas gifts, Colt ordered three containers of bear mace on December 23. He bought them using the name of a local resident who was away on a three-week vacation with his wife. While they were gone, Colt had been Goldilocksing in their home: sleeping in their bed, showering in their bathroom, eating in their kitchen, and even motoring around the island in their Mercedes.
On January 17, at 5:58 a.m., the Sea Song computer was booted up again, this time in an attempt to purchase a membership on Barelytwinks.com using the identity of a seventy-two-year-old Camano woman who was battling breast cancer—definitely not the demo of Barelytwinks, a site dedicated to images of slender young gay men, aka Twinkies or Twinks.
A few days later, Colton was online at Sea Song all night, until nearly 6 a.m. He shopped at the designer clothing Web site Raffaello Network, then ordered a computer program called Evidence Eraser. At 5:45 a.m., he read an email from pam@camano.net about buying property on a private island in South America.
On January 22, a deputy on patrol in his black ICSO Dodge Charger spotted a Ford Expedition doing 68 in a 40. The officer U-turned and popped on his lights, expecting the driver to pull over. Nope. Instead, the driver of the big SUV gunned it and took off with the Charger in pursuit. The chase didn’t last long, though, as the Ford screeched into a sharp turn onto a side street. The tires had no chance of holding the three-ton truck on track and it skidded off the road, taking out a STOP sign and smashing into a tree. Both doors instantly swung open and two guys bailed. The deputy recognized Harley Davidson Ironwing jumping out of the passenger side before both suspects escaped on foot.
The Expedition turned out to be stolen, and later that week Colton wrote an email that read: “Do I have a story to tell you involving a driver of a 2007 Expedition with Harley as a passenger and a cop.” He sent another message to the email address Babygirl that reads: “I can’t get into any more trouble, I’m wanted state-wide.”
On the twenty-seventh, though, Colton was back shopping for trouble, ordering $33 worth of bump keys and more pepper spray under the name Jim Pettyjohn, a victim who at this point had no clue that a burglar had been in and out of his home more than once while he, his wife, and their dogs had been asleep in the next room.
SHERIFF BROWN DETAILED EVEN more deputies to Camano and put out a request for the public to step up their participation in the capture of Colton Harris-Moore, asking them to call a tip line with any information. Wanted posters featuring both Colton and Harley were plastered onto nearly every storefront on the island.
Brown also used a system of E-lerts, emails that kept residents apprised of updates in the chase and solicited leads. Tips poured in. “We got them every day and chased them all down,” says Chris Ellis. “Some didn’t pan out. One caller said, ‘I think I saw Colton Harris-Moore, he’s got a dog and a backpack on,’ so we rolled. It turned out to be a black guy about five-foot-eight tall.” Other calls were more promising. On February 1, a tip came in from a housekeeper who suspected Colton had been staying inside a home she took care of on South Camano Drive, about three hundred yards north of the Sea Song house. One deputy responded and entered the home, while a second arrived later, at 6:30 p.m., just as a truck was pulling down the driveway. The officer ducked behind a horse trailer and let the truck pass without challenging it. When he got to the house, the other deputy told him that someone had been inside and “he just stole the truck.”
While they were talking, headlights came back up the drive. The cops split up and took cover as Colton and Harley walked into the kitchen. One deputy, positioned in a bedroom, was close enough to hear the burglars talking as well as the chatter from the police scanner one of them was carrying. He heard them mention a credit card, happy that it had a $15,000 limit. One of them, presumably Colt, told the other expansively, “Order anything you want.”
One then asked the other if he brought “the bullet.” The answer was yes, and the deputy listened to what he described as the sounds of a round inserted into a clip and the clip jacked into a handgun. He then heard Colton tell Harley, “The apple juice is for you.” As Harley was about to take a sip, the deputy jumped out of the bedroom and shouted, “Stop! Police!”
Harley says the cop came out with his gun drawn. The officer says Harley froze for a second and dropped the glass of juice, which shattered on the floor. Colt was already out the door.
As the deputy yelled, “On the ground!” Harley snapped out of it and followed Colt. The cop held his fire, and both fugitives got away.
THE FOLLOWING DAY, ANOTHER hot tip came in: it was delivery time for a package that Colton had shipped to the victim of an earlier burglary. He’d put in a special request that the package be dropped off at the home’s gate, a rock-and-wrought-iron affair complete with lion statues protecting a driveway lined with tall cedars. Two deputies fixed up a decoy Express Mail package and, at 5:45 p.m., already dark, dropped it off, then hid in the woods across the street. A half hour later, a vehicle slowly cruised by. The cops then heard footsteps on the gravel drive. Both deputies saw Colton, dressed in a dark sweatshirt and baggy jeans, going for the package. One ran across the street shining his flashlight and yelling, “Stop, Colton! Sheriff’s office. You’re under arrest!” Colton took off, but not before grabbing the box. The deputies chased him, but Colton vaulted a fence into a horse pasture and then easily outdistanced them. The last they saw of him was as he rounded a barn and ducked into the dark woods. Word had gone out, though, that if there was any chance at all of catching him, pull out the stops and run Colton down. The deputies called it in and Sheriff Brown loosed the hounds.
Island County and Snohomish County deputies responded and set up a containment perimeter. K9 teams loped in from both Everett and Marysville, and followed Colton’s trail into the trees. The dogs searched until 8:48, but couldn’t track him down. The only thing the police came away with was their fake package, which Colton had dropped in the pasture.
With the close calls coming more frequently, Colton decided to head someplace where he felt safe.
On February 8, Dave, a neighbor of the Wagners’—Colton’s summer family from a few years back—was out taking a walk when he saw a tall teen near the top of the Wagners’ driveway. It was already dark, and the kid had what Dave described as a “miner’s lamp,” meaning a headlamp, on top of his baseball cap. As they passed, Colton said, “Good evening. Nice night for a walk, huh?” Dave answered, “Yeah,” and continued toward his house. Something didn’t feel right, though, and he swung around to take another look. The kid had vanished. Like everyone else on the island, Dave knew about all the recent break-ins. He hurried into his yard, where he could see the waterfront side of the Wagners’ house. Lights were burning inside, so he called Doreen Wagner.
“I told him we had a couple of lights on timers,” remembers Doreen. “But he said there was a bright light on in the back bathroom where I knew we only had a little night-light.” Dave told Doreen that they’d been having trouble with a burglar on the island and this could be him. He hung up and called the cops, telling them he thought he had just seen Colton Harris-Moore and knew where he was hiding.
Inside the Wagners’ summer house, Colton grabbed a bottle of water and popped a Hungry-Man TV dinner in the oven. He’d already washed his previous night’s dishes and placed them neatly in the sink drainer. He’d also made his bed and hung up his bathroom towels. According to Bill Wagner, he’d even vacuumed. Again and again over the course of his time on the run, whenever Colt stole into people’s lives by staying in their homes or driving their cars or boats, he seemed to go out of his way to prove, maybe just to himself, that if he had nice things he could take care of them—that it wasn’t his fault he grew up in a dumpy trailer.
Colt lifted the television off its stand and put it on the floor so its light wouldn’t be as noticeable from the outside. Now he was ready to just chill.
The first Island County cop who arrived at the Wagners’ was a plainclothes detective. He pulled up in an unmarked car shortly after 9 p.m. and quietly approached the house on foot. Other than the glow coming through the trees from a few neighboring homes and the distant twinkle of lights on Whidbey Island, the area was completely dark. The detective inspected the front of the house, found nothing amiss, and then walked around the corner toward the side facing the water.
Inside, Colton took his Hungry-Man out of the oven and forked it onto a plate. He carried the food and water over to the TV and sat down on the floor to eat.
As the detective cautiously stepped along the side of the house, trying to keep silent and out of sight so he could surprise whoever was inside, he was suddenly blasted by a blinding light. He’d walked under a motion detector.
The cop continued around to the back of the house and found the sliding glass door opened slightly. He got on the radio, called for backup, and waited outside until two more deputies showed up. When they entered the home, the first thing they noticed was the smell of food. They cleared the place room by room, but Colton, of course, was gone; he’d bolted out the back door the second he saw the lights pop on. What the cops did find, though, was evidence that Colton had been using the Wagners’ home for quite a while—and taking good care of it.
Nothing was missing except for food. None of the Wagners’ belongings was out of place, all the beer was still in the fridge, even a big jar of change had been left untouched. In a closet they found a sleeping bag with some of Colton’s things rolled up inside. All the beds were made, but one of the officers noticed a strange lump under the covers in the master bedroom. It was a black can of UDAP Bear Spray, the magnum size.
Down in California, Doreen hadn’t connected anything to her little Tarzan, but asked Megan to look up the Camano News online to see if there was anything about the rash of burglaries. “I Google it and see this mug shot, and I’m like, ‘Oh my God!’” says Megan. “My mom had already gone to bed, and I yell up, ‘It’s Colt who’s breaking into these houses!’”
The police already knew Colton’s fearless affinity for going back to crime sites, so they asked the Wagners for permission to install a silent alarm at their home and wired it to the cop shop.
COLTON WENT TWO MILES UP the west side of the island, back to the yellow, lap-sided home with six steep gables on Sea Song Lane. Despite Harley’s lesson about nighttime burglaries—Don’t turn on the lights!—Colton flipped on a light in one of the property’s outbuildings. A woman who lives in the farmhouse across the street spotted it and told her husband. He looked over but the Sea Song house itself—partially screened by tall evergreens along the fence line—was dark.
The next evening, a cold and clear Friday, February 9, Colton was inside the house and back on the homeowner’s computer. Across the street, the neighbors had been keeping an eye out and suddenly saw a light in the window. This time they called the police.
At 7:49 p.m., Colton opened his mellenie010 email and saw the letter from Bev pleading that he turn himself in. If it swayed him in the slightest, he didn’t have a chance to act on it. By coincidence, Geof Davis was a mile south of Sea Song, over at the Mabana Fire Station, where there was a meeting going on. The subject: what to do about Colton Harris-Moore. There was a deputy there, and a radio call came in at 8:15 saying that two Island County cops were just up the road and had someone cornered inside a home. They believed it was Colton. Geof and the deputy jumped into a car and drove to Sea Song.
A detective on scene noticed a second-floor gable window was open. He called out, “Colton? Colton?” More police arrived and pulled on tactical gear. Colton peeked out the window and saw he had no chance of escape. He picked up the phone and called his mom.
Colton told Pam where he was and said that a SWAT team had him surrounded. He was in a panic, “What do I do? What do I do?” Pam told him that he was going to turn himself in, but that he should wait until she got there.
“Colton?” The detective continued to call up to the window. Finally, Colt answered, saying he was talking to his mom.
Pam hung up and immediately called Bev. She told her she was scared that the cops were going to hurt Colt and that she wanted to get as many people over there as possible. Bev said she was on her way. “It was easy to find the right place,” says Bev. “There were already so many cop cars there with their lights flashing. They’d blocked off the road south of the house and a crowd was starting to gather.”
At least a dozen officers from Island and Snohomish Counties arrived on scene. Cops in tactical gear spread out around the home while the others manned the front and kept the civilians back. Even Sheriff Mark Brown showed up.
Bev found Pam, who was with Van. Pam says she asked the police if she could go in and get Colt, but they refused. The homeowner’s brother arrived and told the police where they could find a key. “Word started spreading around that Colt might have a gun,” says Bev. “It was very melodramatic, and I started wondering maybe they actually were doing it so they could hurt him.” She asked Pam and Van to take her hands and said a prayer for Colt’s safety.
Another ten minutes went by and Colton still refused to come out. Deputies finally put Pam on the phone and asked her to “talk him out.” Pam told Colt that there were plenty of witnesses around and even a couple of TV cameras, which was both good news and bad news as far as Colton was concerned. They talked for ten minutes and then Pam put Bev on the phone.
“I told him to just come out, that no one’s going to hurt him and the cops aren’t going to go away… He said, ‘I know… but could you just go home? This is embarrassing, I don’t want you to see me like this!’ I told him okay, that I’d leave.”
A minute or so later, at 9:30 p.m., Colt was outside and in handcuffs, being led to a squad car. His nearly seven-month run was over.
THE COPS MIRANDIZED COLT and transported him to the Island County Juvenile Detention Facility. Colton didn’t have a firearm when he was taken into custody, though he was loaded for bear with another pepper spray canister. During questioning by a detective, Colton says he never had a gun on him, just a knife, but the cop asked about three specific handguns—a .45 Ruger, a Glock, and a Walther PPK. “You guys don’t need to worry about that,” Colton told him. “They’re not going to be taken out, you know, shot at people and everything.”
When the detective pressed about a .45 caliber slug found in one of the houses he was staying in, Colton told him, “I wasn’t the one who shot the gun. I’m the big fish in the pond… Well, I’m not the big fish in the pond. That’s all I have to say. You can talk to Harley [about the guns] because he’ll be more willing to talk than I am because, you know, he doesn’t care if people come after him, so let him get chased and shot and everything… I don’t even know what stole property you’re talking about… I’m not the connected one here who knows where everything is… I’m not going to tell anybody because of my personal safety and my mom’s that need to be put into consideration in this… They’ve threatened to dispose of her truck and my dog.”
Aside from these shadowy figures, Colton’s main worry was the media, which he universally refered to as “the paparazzi.” He told the detective, “I just don’t want this to be on the news.”
The following day, Sheriff Mark Brown held a “We got him!” town hall meeting at the Camano Grange. It wasn’t a victory parade. He faced tough questions from the large crowd who wanted to know why it took so long and why he hadn’t caught Harley yet. Everyone, though, was happy Colton was finally in custody and most were glad it ended peacefully.
Following Colton’s capture, Dave Pinkham wrote an editorial in the Stanwood/Camano News: “The Colton Harris story will soon be out of the headlines. Will we then forget to analyze how this boy came to fall between the cracks? Will the larger problem gradually fade from our consciousness? Or will we face the question: Was there something that could have been done differently or better in this case? Did this have to occur?”
A FEW DAYS LATER, Harley saw the writing on the wall—or, more accurately, saw wanted posters on every wall that now featured just his mug on them. He turned himself in. When a detective asked about the night he and Colton were in a home and the deputies jumped out at them, Harley said Colt had a Ruger .45 pistol, but that it wasn’t loaded. When the detective asked why he ran when the deputy told him to stop, Harley answered, “Old habits.”
In March, Harley pleaded guilty to first-degree criminal trespass and second-degree taking a motor vehicle without permission. He was sentenced to “up to 50 weeks” in a juvenile facility.
Colton had a more complicated path through the juvenile justice system. He was charged with twenty-three crimes against a dozen victims. Counts included theft, obstructing a law enforcement officer, and multiple counts of residential burglary, computer trespass, and possession of stolen property. Colt was held on $10,000 bail, which a judge then raised to $35,000. That didn’t matter, though: no one was going to spring him. Pam said, “I don’t ever bail anybody, I don’t care who it is.”
As Colton approached the courtroom for his first hearing—buzz-cut hair and wearing an orange jumpsuit and sandals with white socks, hands cuffed to a waist belt and chains around his ankles—he peeked inside the door and instantly reared back. He’d spotted the photographers and a TV camera. “Paparazzi,” he groaned.
Along with what they felt was plenty of evidence—much of it from the stolen property found at his campsite on Pam’s property—the prosecutor’s office filed impact statements in which victims told of still-missing favorite pieces of jewelry, having to pay large insurance deductibles, feeling insecure in their homes. One mother wrote of having to console her young children for weeks after a fire had been set in their home, allegedly as a diversion when they came home and surprised the burglar, who ran past the kids as he escaped.
One woman, whose property was found at Colton’s campsite and whose fifty-five-year-old husband died of a heart attack about a week after the burglary, wrote that he’d “defiled the sanctity of our home. Hopefully the sentence will help and not hurt.”
The court appointed Rachel Miyoshi, who’d been in practice for four years, as Colt’s defense attorney. Like most adults who spent time with Colton, Rachel immediately liked the teen and found him very smart. Rachel hired Shauna Snyder, a private investigator, to help with the case. Between working as a PI and a paralegal, Shauna had twenty years of experience doing defense research and had worked a lot of juvenile cases. She considered Colton the poster child for someone marked for attention by the local police after getting into trouble at a young age. “I think that Pam gave him some of that bad reputation with the police, too, because she’s such a hard-ass.” Shauna says she’d never met someone quite like Pam, who showed up with both barrels blazing.
“She wasn’t the most receptive to listening,” says Shauna. “And she is distrustful, so it was hard to explain to her that they had stuff on him. She had this thing that he’s just getting the blame, a scapegoat, that he didn’t really do it. Ironically, though, she was the one that turned him in for most of it. She turned him in for the tent that was on the property with all the stolen stuff. They didn’t have a clue about that. Had she not, they never would have had any of it. I mean, she hurt him.”
Still, Pam was adamant that Colton should not plead guilty to anything. “Pam would come into the office threatening to kick everyone’s ass… ‘Fuck them, blah blah blah.’ But then I’d talk to her, and by the time she left she’d be offering to take us all out for beers,” says Shauna. “So we got along great. She was engaged in the case and she was genuinely concerned. And it seemed to me like she’s the only one Colton gave a shit about. He understood that his mom was like who she was. But you know… it’s his mom.”
Shauna reviewed the police work: “Sloppy… and the reports are like illiterate. He probably did all these things, but they just didn’t have the evidence.” She says the county was also looking for victim restitution of around $36,000. “We whittled that down to something like $600 just by tracking who got their stuff recovered.”
When she went to the juvenile detention facility for her first meeting with Colton, Shauna didn’t know what to expect. “Some kids are kinda scary. You’re sitting locked in the cage with them and who knows if the jailer is around. Or else the kid might put on an attitude—‘Fuck the cops,’ or ‘I can do thirty days standing on my head’—acting rough and tough to cover that they’re shaking inside. But Colton wasn’t like either of those. He had no pretense. He was unassuming, polite, very calm, and stoic.”
The only time Shauna saw Colton react strongly was when partway through that three-hour first meeting a guard brought in his lunch. “He said, ‘I’m not going to eat this crap,’” she says. “And it did look like shit, some kind of bean medley. He said, ‘I’ll drink the juice,’ then he put the rest of the cafeteria tray on the ground like dog food.”
Shauna says that at first Pam had Colton convinced that the county didn’t have much on him. “I told him, ‘They don’t have you for all of it, but they’ve nailed you for some of it. Let me walk you through,’ and I meticulously showed him page by page.” She says Colton sat calmly and didn’t say much until she explained how they nailed him for his Web usage. “He wanted to see how they did the IP mapping, and how they’d subpoenaed the email records. Some of the Internet providers refused to give their records to the police, and he was very interested in knowing which ones.”
Shauna’s overall impression of Colton was that he was “a nice kid” and nothing like the sociopaths she’d dealt with before. “The vandalism stuff like the fire and the shot fired in the house, that only happened when Harley was there, not when Colton was on his own,” she says.
In preparing his defense, Rachel Miyoshi reviewed not only Colton’s criminal record, but also his school, health, and CPS files. In April, the court approved her request to hire Delton Young, PhD, at county expense. Bellevue-based Dr. Young is a psychologist with thirty years’ experience, including nine years at Harvard Medical School. He’s also the author of the book Wayward Kids: Understanding and Treating Antisocial Youth, in which he makes the argument that the only way to successfully combat juvenile crime is to understand the psychological, social, and biological factors that cause it.
Dr. Young reviewed all the records and then met with Colton for interviews and testing, which included an IQ exam, the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children. His report states: “Given that Colton has only superficially participated in school for several years, these scores are reasonably strong and suggest that his intellectual capacities are easily in the average range.” He also found the now-sixteen-year-old Colton to be relatively mature.
The full evaluation, filed June 15, referred to the dozen Child Protective Services reports and covered Colton’s past mental health diagnoses and treatments, including “a wide range of psychiatric medications including antidepressants, stimulant medications, mood stabilizers, and even an anti-psychotic medication.”
Dr. Young recounted the teen’s pattern of destructive behavior, and admitted, “On paper, Colton resembles the picture of an emerging antisocial character—violating the rights of others and neglecting his own individual development (e.g., education).” However, he found several factors that he believed showed that Colton was “not a typical antisocial youth.”
Colton’s violent episodes, Young noted, appeared to be limited to fights with his mother. He didn’t use drugs or alcohol, a fact that separated him from the vast majority of antisocial youth. “By Colton’s account (and that of numerous available records) Colton’s mother has been heavily affected by alcohol abuse throughout Colton’s developmental years; and there has been a variety of men in the home who had their own alcohol and drug addictions. Colton understands that both his parents have had severe substance abuse problems, and he wishes to avoid complicating his life further with drugs or alcohol.” Young also found that “Colton does not externalize blame and responsibility for his actions. He readily acknowledges his poor choices… He holds out some hope of taking up a much healthier developmental track in the future.”
During their meeting, Colton told Young about his issues with insomnia, low energy, poor appetite, depression, and anger, but said that even though he knew he was eventually going to be caught and “locked up,” he felt better in every aspect when he was out on the run as opposed to when he was at home. “He reports that for many years he has felt depressed when he is around home and his mother.”
Dr. Young concluded that Colton’s primary issue was “long-term, agitated and self-defeating depression” caused by his upbringing, which “precluded the development of basic trust and psychological health of the child.” Young traced Colton’s social anxiety, deep resentment, impulsiveness, and lack of focus and interest in schoolwork to that depression. He provided several DSM diagnoses; the most serious was the continuing depression stemming from “many years of stressful, unstable and even abusive home environment.” He also reported that Colton still suffered with parent-child relational problem, “a serious psychiatric problem located not within the child, but between the child and his parent.” Young reiterated that “a good part of his self-defeating and defiant behaviors can be traced to an accumulation of resentment, hostility and despair in that maternal relationship.”
Colton told the psychologist that he understood he needed help from mental health professionals and said that his number-one worry was “his future.”
Young wrote that “Colton is the kind of teen whose psychological development could be hardened into an uncaring and unhopeful young man if compelled to spend lengthy periods in JRA [Juvenile Rehabilitation Administration] institutions. What he needs most at this point is to associate with healthier peers, teachers and other adults; and to get to work and school.”
Colton was clearly not happy being locked up, but told Young that some times were worse than others. “He was able to relate that his mood drops precipitously after he has a telephone call from his mother. He fears that his mother wants him to get a long sentence.”
Looking ahead to Colton’s eventual release, Dr. Young’s report said that “Colton surely cannot be expected to stay on a positive course living in his mother’s home,” and mentioned that his aunt Sandy offered to provide him with a home and structure. Sandy wrote a letter to the judge describing her ranch and the animals that Colton had shown interest in and said, “We would play a positive role in his life.”
JUVENILE COURTS DON’T WORK the same as the adult court system. There’s no trial by jury, just adjudication by a judge. The test for guilt is a preponderance of evidence, not “guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.” Despite that, Colton’s defense team felt the county had little to go on for many of the charges.
“We whittled it down from the twenty-three to three that they could probably prove,” says Shauna Snyder. “There was only one they had absolute proof on and that was the house they caught him in. The other two counts, they had some proof, so we took the deal instead of having to go to trial on all twenty-three. Plus they were threatening to pile on even more charges if we didn’t take the deal. It would have been a mess to go to trial.”
For the county, a deal that resulted in serious incarceration time made sense. “He’d become known in our office as a frequent flier,” says Island County prosecutor Greg Banks. Banks had been serving as prosecutor since 1999, but says Colton stood out among juvenile offenders. “For a young kid, he had been through the system a lot.” Each of those previous times, Banks says the system had been more than fair. “With juveniles, rarely do we just bring the hammer down. The idea is to try to rehabilitate them, and the system is designed with more flexibility than the adult justice system.” Banks notes that a number of times Colton had been given community service instead of detention, and credit had been given for attending therapy.
“There were services provided to Colton along the way,” he says. “Most of the time we have pretty good results, but Colton was a glaring exception. He’d been escalating, really shaking up the community. Now we had evidence that he and Harley were in possession of a gun, so it seemed like the best way to protect the people of Island County was to incarcerate him.”
The deal they struck had Colton plead guilty to three charges, each with a sentence of fifty-two weeks, to be served consecutively. On any one of these felony counts, the maximum sentence for a juvenile could have been detention until his twenty-first birthday, which in Colt’s case would have meant about five years from the time of his arrest.
Prepared to take the three-year sentence, there was still one more big hurdle for Colton: appearing in a public courtroom. Rachel Miyoshi says Colton begged her to try to get cameras banned. When she couldn’t, his next priority was getting a haircut. Says Shauna Snyder, “We had to file a whole motion to get a barber in the jail because Colton didn’t want to go to court if his hair wasn’t cut.”
Judges have discretion as to where juveniles serve their time. In Colton’s case, the judge looked at his history of successfully eluding the police and punched his ticket for Green Hill School, the highest-security facility in Washington State’s JRA. Seventy-five miles south of Seattle in the town of Chehalis, Green Hill accepts only male prisoners, and along with those convicted in JRA it also houses juveniles sentenced as adults under the state’s Department of Corrections. Any kid convicted of murder in Washington State goes to Green Hill until he’s eighteen and transfers out to adult prison.
Despite its maximum/medium-security designation, Green Hill is no Alcatraz. A fence surrounds the school and shop buildings, a gymnasium, and the housing units. Inside, though, it feels more like a school with extra security—that is, until the occasional hell breaks loose. The kids can’t go home at night, but otherwise, Green Hill’s general rules—no talking when moving between buildings, but liberal policies on cursing—seem looser than a Catholic grade school.
Colton arrived and, like all prisoners, was assigned to a high-security intake unit for his first thirty days so the staff could get a behavioral assessment. In this unit, called Birch (all housing units are named after trees), kids go to classes, eat, and recreate separately from the general population. Staff look over their records and closely watch how they behave, then send them either to a sex offender unit, drug and alcohol education unit, or general population housing.
During intake, the boys are given their uniforms: white sneakers, navy blue pants, and green T-shirts, sweatshirts, and jackets. They’re told the house rules and about honor levels, which offer increased privileges in exchange for good behavior. Honor Level IV can nab a detainee a private room with his own TV and PlayStation. The kids are also instructed from day one that they can get out of Green Hill asap via what’s called a CRA, community risk assessment. The CRA is a mandatory report card completed for each juvenile inmate every ninety days. Based on a point system, two consecutive low-score CRAs count as a “get out of jail free” card. Depending on the exact scores, kids can either be sent home if they’ve served their minimum sentence or to a low-security community facility, aka group home, aka halfway house.
After his thirty days in Birch, Colton was transferred to Maple Living Unit in the general population. Maple had ten rooms per wing, including two special Level IV honor rooms. Staff say that typically they try to limit the number of kids per wing to twelve or thirteen, with a few doubled up and the rest single-bunked. Other than assigned roommates, “the kids are never allowed in each other’s rooms.” There’s a video game console in each wing’s common area, and that’s also where the guys hang out to play cards and watch TV.
The daily grind at Green Hill means school from 8 a.m. until lunch, then back to the housing unit for a while, then back to school until 4 p.m. Kids work on their high school diplomas, GEDs, or pre-college courses, and get vocational training in computers, metal shop, vehicle maintenance, and landscaping. Along with classes, the kids go to various meetings, like AA and NA (Narcotics Anonymous), depending on their issues. Green Hill staff say that about 95 percent of the kids come in with substance-abuse problems. All the boys also take part in therapy.
Washington’s JRA uses the Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) treatment model. “Most of the kids we get don’t know how to appropriately interact with people or deal with stress or their own emotions,” says one longtime staffer. “DBT offers one-on-one counseling, skills acquisitions groups, and milieu therapy, which is a monitoring of their activities in the environment to see what other interventions and coaching are needed.”
After school, the kids get one hour of recreation and then they’re sent back to their housing unit, where they can watch TV and play video games until bedtime. Each boy is allowed a ten-minute phone call every night, and can request a second. Parents can call in, and the kids can call out collect. On weekends, they’re allowed outside to play baseball, football, and gang war.
MS-13, Surenos, Nortenos, Bloods, Crips… according to staff and former inmates, Green Hill has “tons of gang activity.” The gangs take part in frequent race-based beat downs, including choreographed events where they’ll start numerous fights at the same time in order to overwhelm the guards’ abilities to respond. Serious infractions of the rules are punished by a timeout in Intense Management Unit (IMU), where bad boys are put on lockdown twenty-three hours a day. Not every kid coming into Green Hill has to pledge to a gang, though. “There are groups of kids that aren’t involved,” says a staff member. “It’s like high school, there are different cliques… like over here you have the cheerleaders, and over here you have the Crips.”
“I stayed out of the gangs, and so did Colt,” says Josh from Point Roberts. “But there were still a lot of fights and lots of people just running up on guys and beating them up.” Josh was sentenced to three years in Green Hill for malicious mischief—“I stole a boat and wrecked it on a beach”—and for intimidating a witness. When Colt arrived at Maple Unit, he and Josh found out they lived not too far away from each other on Puget Sound. “We got pretty tight,” says Josh. Colt told him that his dad had been in the army. “And he said his mom used to be a sheriff, but he didn’t get along with her.”
Josh says Colton stood out among the kids at Green Hill. “Colt was a nice guy and smart, really smart.” Proof, he says, was that Colton read books and studied subjects other than what they were forced to for class. “He knows things, uses a lot of big words.” Staff at Green Hill say the average reading level inside is about fifth grade, so any book learnin’ can come off as smart. According to Josh, Colton had three specific interests he liked to study: “Criminology, psychology, and flying.”
One of Colt’s favorite books while in Green Hill was a psychology text on how to diagnose various disorders. At one point, says Pam, Colt called and diagnosed her with ADHD and post-traumatic stress disorder.
According to Josh, a lot of Colton’s airplane research came from the guards. “He talked about wanting to fly a lot. And you could ask the guards to look up stuff for you online. It was up to them whether they’d give it to you or not, but he asked for a bunch of information on flying, and they downloaded it for him.”
The kids don’t have Internet access themselves, but staff members say they’d do research for them as a reward, “a motivational tool to stay in treatment.” One of Green Hill’s computers also had a flight simulator on it, and Colton jumped on that as often as possible.
Another thing about Colt that stood out was his manner. “He didn’t swear at all, which was really rare,” and it wasn’t long before he started having trouble with the other boys. “Guys picked on him a lot in there,” says Josh. “They’d punk him, take his stuff, and push him around, smack him. He wouldn’t fight back, which made it worse.”
In a shark tank milieu like juvie, acting less than tough can get you turned into chum. But it wasn’t just Colton’s atypical big-word vocabulary and his annoying habit of diagnosing other kids’ mental problems that got him punked.
“He made a bad name for himself with his mouth,” says Josh. “He’d say some really creepy things, like that when he got out his plan was ‘I’m going to take over the world.’ Everyone would laugh at him, but he was totally serious about it. It was kind of mad scientist stuff. He didn’t quite have the plan together, not many details—he was still plotting—but he was going big, getting a lot of money, and he didn’t want to earn it, just wanted to steal it all.”
Colt, says Josh, made no secret of his plans—or anything else that popped into his mind—and that’s what caused problems. “He just told people all of his thoughts and they’d turn around and tell him he was stupid and should shut up.” Colton would back off for a bit, “but then he’d run his mouth back at them. He’d keep at it when they told him to stop, so then when he’d go back to his room, someone would run in right behind him and pound him. This went on the entire time he was in there. He’s smart, but he has his mind in the wrong place.”
Colt’s battles with the other kids stayed below the radar of the guards and counselors, which was important, because getting caught fighting meant a bad mark on his all-important CRA. The one part of his master plan for taking over the world that Colt did already have plotted was getting out of high-security Green Hill and into a fenceless group home as soon as possible. And for that, he needed those consecutive good report cards.
“He always went to school and always did what you told him,” says a Green Hill staff member. “In a lot of respects he was a pleasure to deal with. You’d say bedtime is nine p.m. and he’d always be in his room at nine. He was always friendly with the staff… but you just had this feeling about him.” The staffer says they could sense the wheels turning in Colton’s head. “He was pretty quick, bright, but also criminally sophisticated in that he was a planner, a thinker… he was heads and shoulders above the other kids in those respects.”
The majority of boys at Green Hill had crappy upbringings, coming from broken homes often darkened by neglect, abuse, and substance problems. Many were fighting mental health issues along with their own booze or drug monkeys, and plenty had run wild on the streets from a young age. The programs and therapies in JRA are designed to break through to those kids able and/or willing to be salvaged.
Colton’s particular makeup, though, made him difficult to treat. “He was psychologically and intellectually very mature, but emotionally immature,” says one staff member who worked with him. “He never took any of our ‘shaping the future’ stuff seriously. In therapy, he would always have smart answers, never true answers.”
They say that Colton wouldn’t open up to the counselors, which was an integral part of getting him help. “He’d never truly say this is the kind of home life I had, or this is what I was lacking growing up and so I want to change this, deal with this to move on… I think that by the time Colton got to us he was past the point of being able to open those floodgates and tell you what he wanted.”
Instead, staffers say Colton put his efforts toward manipulation. “It was as if he had this intense grudge against the system and felt that however he could beat it he’d beat it instead of working within it to better himself.”
Beating the juvenile prison system meant one thing for Colton: getting two good CRAs. And the way that’s set up, it was a piece of cake for him. The CRA is a simple form asking nine “yes” or “no” questions along with two that have a third option: “moderate.” Depending on the question, each answer coincides with a point score—0 for a no and up to 12 points for a yes. Inmates shoot for scores under 20 to go home, under 25 to go to a community facility/group home.
The questions that staff have input on are: In the previous ninety days, has the “client” escaped or attempted escape? Assaulted anyone? Not complied with core requirements (gone to school, etc.)? Not shown appropriate response to problems? Had hostile responses to frustration? Used chemicals or alcohol? Victimized peers? At least moderately participated in specialized programming? Been charged with another crime in prison?
By the CRA scorecard, a “client” could commit multiple assaults, victimize other kids, or get caught using drugs and still score low enough to go home. For Colton, who did none of those things, it was a walk in the park.
“We couldn’t give Colt points to keep him here,” says a staff member who saw him every shift. “There’s no middle ground on any of the questions, and the worst part about that form is that there’s no place for subjective comments.”
The staff didn’t want to keep Colton around just because he was such a pleasure to deal with. “We all knew what was going to happen. We knew he was just acting good so he could get to a group home and escape.”
This wasn’t just a gut feeling. Colton hadn’t kept his escape plan secret, and the information made its way to the guards. “Three or four weeks prior to his release, there were notes in Colt’s tracking saying that he should be considered an escape risk because he’s making escape plans.”
There’s no question on the CRA form that asks, “Is the ‘client’ planning an escape?” However, the tracking notes would have been part of the overall review before Colton was released to a group home. Even if his scores weren’t high enough to keep Colton in the secure facility, there was one fail-safe built into the form, an “administrative override” that could have denied his release. “There’s no way he should have passed,” says a staffer, “but they went ahead and released him.”
Unfortunately for Colton, his plan worked. At Green Hill, he’d been attending classes and doing relatively well. He was reading college-level psychology books and studying more about flying. He wasn’t taking full advantage of the therapy offered, but maybe a little more time would have brought about a breakthrough. His buddy Josh, who’d also been a dropout, walked away after spending a full three years at Green Hill with a GED, a clean slate, and a determination not to get into trouble again.
There’s no telling if more time would have rehabilitated Colt—but it might have. What’s certain is that releasing him when written records showed he was actively planning an escape set the stage for dozens of additional victims and millions of dollars in damages and costs associated with Colt’s next run.
ON VALENTINE’S DAY 2008, just over a year after he was arrested and about seven months after he’d been sent to Green Hill, Colton was transferred to the Griffin Home Residential Treatment Center. Griffin sits on a nicely wooded six acres just across the railroad tracks from the shore of Lake Washington in Renton, a Seattle suburb. He was placed in a homelike setting with eleven other boys and given a routine similar to that at Green Hill, with schooling, therapy, and behavior classes.
The residence’s doors are alarmed and kids are supposed to be under twenty-four-hour supervision, but security is low-key by design. Group homes are transitional phases between prison and the community, providing boundaries and structure while easing offenders back into society. For someone like Colton, it could offer a nice, safe place to live, more education, and more counseling to help him overcome his socialization issues. For someone like Colton, though, it was also still a cage.
Colton began grumbling shortly after he got to Griffin. He called Pam to complain about the drug and alcohol classes they made him attend even though he didn’t have a substance-abuse problem. “He said, ‘Mom, do I have to go?’ And I told him just do what they tell you,” remembers Pam. Colton also told her that the counselors were trying to “brainwash” him via therapy.
If the brainwashing was to convince Colton that there were more important things in life than money and the trappings of wealth, it didn’t work. While in Griffin, he created a remarkably prescient collage from photos, words, and phrases clipped out of magazines. It even has the words “Buyer’s Guide” pasted in. Topped with “World of Comfort and Style” and an image of a twin-engine business jet captioned “May I Have Another,” the collage has one hopeful self-identifier, “Profession: Pilot.” The rest is: “Money, Money,” “Wealth,” “Dollars,” “Keep It,” “Get More,” “Passion,” “Enjoy the Taste,” “Live Richly.” “Make Money, Not Mistakes.”
The artwork includes a stack of gold bars, a Jet Ski, three smartphones, two cruise ships, and a yacht. The largest single image is a Rolex. Fashion-wise, Colton added the logos of Gucci, Chanel, Hugo Boss, DKNY, Guess, and Armani (whose products appear twice), all adjacent to the word “Sexy.” For his idea of suitable transportation, there were images of a Porsche, Lexus, Audi, Jaguar, Land Rover, and Lincoln, as well as two Cadillac symbols, and right below a martini (presumably shaken, not stirred), the logo for Aston Martin, James Bond’s favorite getaway car. Dead center is a cruise ship with a line below it saying “See what you’re missing.” There are tourism logos for Mexico and the Caribbean. To pay for it all, Colton included a baker’s dozen of credit cards.
The collage, laminated on regal purple construction paper, is shockingly crass-spirational, a two-dimensional episode of MTV Cribs.
The only two things that didn’t quite fit with all the bling were a large image of a piece of strawberry cheesecake and a small photo of a border collie. The artwork screamed of everything Colton felt he’d been denied and was determined to get. On the back it also showed a quiet protest: he signed it “Colton Harris-,” actually leaving the hyphen but dropping his attachment to Gordy Moore.
Pam says she went to visit Colton “in all the slammers,” though the memories kind of run together for her. At one, she brought him some new clothes. “Of course he told me exactly what to get… and just the shoes were a hundred dollars!” Another time she carefully packed along a robin’s egg that she’d found. “We used to go looking for them in the spring, so I asked the guard if I could give it to him… They said no, so I could only show it to him through the glass.”
Colton told Pam he was having headaches from the lighting in Griffin. She says they had a doctor see him, but not an optometrist like he wanted. As a solution, she says, they let him wear sunglasses inside. Then on Monday, April 28, he called home and told Pam they wouldn’t let him wear his shades anymore, presumably because it was causing problems with the other kids.
The following evening, after less than eleven weeks at Griffin Home, Colton pulled on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, laced up his white Adidas, and snuck out a window between bed checks. The windows weren’t alarmed, and staff didn’t realize he was gone until an hour later. Griffin called the local police at 10:40 p.m. to report the escape. They also phoned Pam.
“A guard called me to say Colt left,” she remembers. “I just said, ‘Son of a bitch.’”
In my interviews with Megan and Doreen Wagner, they said these events happened when Colt was between ten and twelve years old. In a burglary report, the police quote Bill Wagner as saying it was when Colt was between thirteen and fifteen. There is no dispute the events happened, just about the exact years.