Colton’s escape from Griffin was a local news item the next day, which is how, Ed Wallace says, the Island County Sheriff’s Office first heard about it. As far as anyone knew, he was safely tucked away for another twenty-two months. Sheriff Mark Brown immediately reactivated his E-lert system to tell Camano residents to lock up and keep a lookout. He and other county officials didn’t hide their displeasure.
“I couldn’t believe it,” says prosecutor Greg Banks. “This is a kid who was very good at running away and eluding police… Didn’t they know how hard it was to catch him the first time? Now we have to do it all over again?” Banks and the sheriff suspected that Colton would head home to Camano. “That’s where he was comfortable and that’s where he was successful,” says Banks. “The woods and all those empty vacation homes were still there.”
Josh Flickner, whose family owns the Elger Bay Grocery at the top of the South End, and who served as head of the local chamber of commerce, says the residents were outraged. “It was ‘You did what with him!?’”
Pam heard from Colt soon after his escape. “I think as soon as he left he was sorry,” she says. “The way he was talking it sounded like he regretted it.” Pam, for once, found herself in agreement with Sheriff Mark Brown—they even spoke—and they both relayed through the media calls for Colton to turn himself in. If he had, he would have been sent back to Green Hill with another twenty-eight days tacked on to his original sentence. He would also have had a tougher time scoring low enough to be released to another group home before serving his full sentence. But that’s all he had hanging over his head at that point: his original time plus a month.
Colton had choices. He could go back to juvenile prison for about two years, pay his dues, and then try to move on with his life. Or he could leave the area and attempt to start over—not easy for a seventeen-year-old with no money, no job skills, not even a driver’s license, but kids run off and try it every day. Or he could head back to Camano, where he’d instantly be “most wanted” and be right back playing nonstop hide-and-seek with the cops.
Getting back into the game had to be attractive in some respects. Colt had been successful for a long time and mainlined lots of juicy adrenaline hits along the way. He’d honed and expanded his criminal repertoire, and by examining the evidence from his last arrest, he’d schooled himself on mistakes to avoid. Going back to Camano would be like repeating a level in a video game: it’s easy up to the point the Zerg, Slicers, Flood zombies, or po-po got you the last time you played. After that, it gets even more fun, more challenging, and more rewarding adrenaline-wise. Sure the cops would be waiting, sure he’d be back in a place with limited room to run and only one way out, but that’s the exact setup for any good video game or action movie—and this was a kid who felt he was equal parts James Bond and Rambo.
Besides, as Colton had told Dr. Young: he slept better, felt better, and was happier when he was on the run.
Colt pressed reset and headed for Camano.
ONE THING COLT WOULDN’T be doing was hooking up with his old riding buddy Harley Davidson Ironwing. Harley had served his time for the Camano spree and made it back out onto the streets. He gave the straight life his best shot. “I worked a steady job for a day,” he says. “I worked all Valentine’s Day in the flower shop where my mom worked in order to get a bouquet of flowers to give to my friend. It was boring… not as much fun as breaking into places… but better.”
Not long after that, though, “fun” and easier money beat “better.” Harley went back to the flower shop after hours. He busted a window and found about $150. “Then I broke in the salon next door because I knew they had two cash registers.” Harley got only $20 from the salon. That kinda cash didn’t last long. He needed a bigger score, and who has more money than God?
On Sunday, March 30, Harley went to Stanwood’s Cedarhome Baptist Church, because he “saw they had money.” It was his mom’s church, and it did have cash, thousands tucked away in a big safe in the basement. One of the core beliefs at Cedarhome is “We value giving as an act of trust in God,” and surely there were people there who would’ve reached out to help Harley. There’s no thrill, though, in receiving charity.
While the faithful were upstairs hearing the Word, Harley crept downstairs to dip into the collection. However, the pastor bore witness and called the cops. When they arrived, Harley took off with police and parishioners in pursuit. And thus the Hobbit was smote.
Harley went to prison just a month before Colton escaped from the group home. His getting pinched, says Harley, ruined their plans for the big helicopter raid on Costco.
THE FIRST PLACE YOU’D figure anyone would look for Colton would be the trailer, and that’s just where he went. “It was raining,” says Pam. “Colt came in and ran right into his room. I waited out in the living room while he was looking around for something. When he came back out I said, ‘Did you find whatever it was?’ He said no. I said, ‘If you’re looking down in the heat vent, I took a whole bunch of papers out of there and burned them.’ And he went, ‘Oh!’ He was heading right back out the door again, and I said, ‘Wait a minute.’ I hugged him, and he was soaking wet from the rain.”
Pam was surprised by how tall Colt had gotten. The green-eyed towhead she’d nicknamed Tubby now towered over her and had to stoop to get inside the door. He’d grown into a slender, brown-haired giant at least six feet four inches tall. “He always seemed to shoot up when he was in the slammers,” she says. Colt’s height was a surprise. Gordy is six foot. Pam stands five-eight. Pam’s mom was five-two, and her father wasn’t tall either. Her grandfather, she says, was so small they called him Shorty. Pam can only attribute Colt’s height to her well water, saying her vegetables always came up oversized, too.
In the Camano cop shop and over in the Coupeville headquarters, the police expected “the call” any day. “We knew it was coming,” says Ed Wallace. “Sooner or later we’d see a crime that fit Colt’s MO.”
Pam says she called the sheriff’s office soon after Colt came home. She says she told them where she thought he was staying and said that if they escorted her, she’d take them there. She says, though, that “they never bothered.” The police say that at one point they told her, “Okay, show us,” and she then refused.
One of the next calls to the police came from Maxine. On May 8, just two days after her husband passed away, her mailbox was stolen for the second time. “I called the sheriff’s office,” she says. “But they didn’t come out.” The grandmother of eighteen says she still wasn’t scared of Colton, and in fact she still felt sorry for him. Nonetheless, she started locking her doors for the first time since she moved to Camano. That didn’t stop the raids, though, and once again pizza, ice cream, and any money she’d left lying around began to disappear. Most bewildering to her was how Colton was able to do it without alerting her little dog, Emma, who greets strangers who approach the house with teeny but effective barks and growls.
On May 11, Colton played paparazzo. He used an Olympus digital camera to shoot twenty self-portraits, including some sultry poses. He also took a shot of a big pile of crabs he’d caught by hand. The island boy was back in his element, feasting on Dungeness.
Just a third of a mile up Camano Drive from Maxine’s, homeowners who had experienced a peckish poltergeist during Colton’s previous run found their freezer emptied again, too. Sheriff Mark Brown himself came out and told them that Colt was definitely back on Camano and that they were getting a number of similar complaints. Brown said he didn’t want word to get out, though, in order to avoid media attention that would let Colt know they were on to him.
Brown approved overtime for his deputies and once again pulled officers off Whidbey for special Colt duty on Camano. He also ordered his cops to use every trick and technology at their disposal. He didn’t want another drawn-out, money-and-morale-sapping chase. In 2006, along with food, the homeowners near Maxine had also lost a bike, which had eventually been recovered. Brown now asked them for permission to install a motion detector that would alert the cop shop if anyone broke in. They said yes… and so were pretty surprised to wake up not long afterward to find that the same bike had been stolen again, this time out of a garage equipped with a police-installed alarm system.
The same thing happened on the other side of the island, to the neighbor one house south of Jack and Louise Boyle, just past the far end of Haven Place. A bike stolen from their garage had been recovered, and the owners alarmed the building. Someone came along and took the new security as a challenge. He defeated it by stealthily removing a window without breaking the glass, then reaching in and ripping out the alarm system control box. The thief went to all that trouble simply to resteal the same bike.
Almost every time the Camano deputies recovered a stolen bike and returned it to its owner, it would be retaken. Whoever was doing this seemed to take delight in punking the police. On July 3, Colt re-declared war directly on Island County by breaking into the county annex, stealing a safe and sinking it in a pond.
Over at the Boyles’, where Jack had previously lost several rounds and lots of his wife’s strawberries, he’d had a full year to add layers of security. It worked. This time not a single Frappuccino or Christmas decoration disappeared out of their basement, even though there was ample evidence that Colton was active all around their neighborhood.
To the north of the Boyles, Sharon and Dan Stevens owned the hot tub that they believed Colton regularly soaked in, as well as the dog house where they’d found the Boyles’ phone. Sharon is a volunteer court-appointed special advocate who has represented abused and neglected children for more than twenty years. However, she works in King County (Seattle), not Island County, so never had an opportunity to know Colton.
“I would have loved to have gotten my hands on this kid when he was seven or eight,” she says. “It’s outrageous… between the school, the authorities, CPS investigators… somebody should have intervened.” Sharon believes the entire system, which in some cases can lead to a parent fighting to keep custody of a child simply for the extra government assistance funds, needs improving. She says she was very disappointed when Colton escaped. “It’s sad that instead of taking the help, that Colton came back to the same life and crimes. Some of these kids are lost.”
Sharon and her husband, Dan, both in their mid-seventies, came up to Camano for a short stay and were woken by their black Lab’s insistent barking. They went out to investigate and found a trail of belongings scattered across their yard. First it looked to them as if someone had approached the house and been scared off by the dog, dropping two very large sneakers and a DVD case as he fled. Then they spotted other droppings that could explain the hurried run: a pile of human excrement squatted near the playhouse. The Lab either scared the crap out of him, or the prowler had been in the middle of relieving himself when the pooch sniffed trouble and started barking. Either way, he left in a hurry when the dog went off and the lights went on. As the shoes were found far apart—one by the playhouse and the other up by the road—it appeared the guy kicked them off as he started running for the woods leading toward Haven Place.
Sharon and Dan began to find a number of other things on their property now that Colton was back on the loose. Most interesting was a note. They discovered the yellow Post-it on the switchback trail that leads from their home down to the beach. It’s Colton writing to Colton, thinking things through on paper. He was back to collecting safe houses, potential targets, and credit cards. Part of the note appears to be about a certain name, noting “lost $ moved.” Below that are reminders: “#1 of 2,” with “2” circled, and “Use $ 4 orig pkg.” A guess would be that he used the dollar sign as a symbol for credit cards, and he kept track by numbering them.
The real insight, though, came after his $ figuring.
“Peroll [sic of “parole”] 5 months? Think if otherwise. I might be out Christmas?—home?”
Colton was considering the kind of deal he’d accept to turn himself in. He didn’t know that an escaped felon, even a juvenile, doesn’t hold any cards when it comes to making a deal. The last word he wrote was the big question: Where would he go to live whenever he did get out of prison? “Home?”
Colton’s decision on the first question about whether to turn himself in was clear by his actions: he never approached anyone looking for a deal. He chose freedom, regardless of the risk.
With the note, a bottle of aftershave, shoes, and other souvenirs of Colton’s continual presence on her property, Sharon says she still never became one of those afraid of him. “I don’t think he’s a scary kid or ever wants to hurt anybody… I think he’s always been looking for survival.”
THE LOSS OF HIS Post-it appeared to be another lesson for Colt. He needed a better place to entrust his important notes and thoughts, and switched to a journal. In it he kept his important digits—some of which happened to be other people’s credit card numbers and security codes.
Colton also had to solve a logistical problem. How can someone who’s essentially homeless receive all the stuff he ordered online with stolen credit cards? He solved this with a brilliantly simple ploy. In many rural areas, mail carriers don’t deliver house to house, especially on a dead-end road like Haven Place. At Haven, residents put all their mailboxes at the bottom of the road where it hits Camano Drive. So Colton added a mailbox near his mom’s and made up his own address: 550 Haven Place.
Legitimate addresses on Haven start in the 700s and go up to 1100, so the not-so-bright move was failing to pick a number within that range. An obviously nonexistent address might work with some of the shadier online retailers, but surely big-bank credit card companies would check a little more closely to see if such an address actually existed on the planet.
On June 5, a Seattle couple, Jackie and Paul, arrived at their vacation home on Shady Lane—just behind the Wagners’ summer home. They stayed for three and a half days, never leaving the house. They don’t store financial records on Camano and don’t keep computers there. Still, two days later, Paul’s social security number was used to apply for credit cards from seven companies. The address used on all applications was 550 Haven Place. At least one of the cards was approved, delivered to the fake address, collected, and activated.
Mail carriers continued to service the phony mailbox for some time. Chase delivered a credit card to 550 Haven in the name of a Camano resident who’d been burglarized while he was out on a fishing trip. The card was used to pay for $39.95 worth of research on PeopleFinders.com (creepy slogan: “Find anyone, anywhere”) and $29.95 on another stalker-friendly identity collection site. Colt also used it to shop for necessities such as police scanners on Amazon.com. Chase Bank records show the same card used at 3:34 a.m. on the sixteenth of June to withdraw $300 from an ATM on Camano. The following morning, four more attempts were made for $200, $300, $300, and $500. When police pulled the bank’s security footage, it showed Colton Harris-Moore standing at the ATM punching numbers.
WITH EXTRA POLICE PATROLS detailed specifically to track him down and residents back up in arms, if Colton was worried about anything it didn’t show on his face. On July 8, he spread a Hilly brand jacket onto a bed of ferns and lay back to pose for another private photo shoot. Dressed in a black polo sporting the Mercedes-Benz logo, with his iPod earbuds inserted, and a diet green tea bottle and a portable power supply by his side, Colton stretched out his long arm and took a series of eleven photos of himself with a Nikon Coolpix camera that he’d stolen from a Camano resident three days earlier. A number of shots featured different come-hither looks. Another was an eyes-closed fail. And then there was one frame in which he wore an enigmatic, barely perceptible Mona Lisa smile, a look that would come to be both fawned over and ridiculed for the next two years as it was reproduced again and again ad nauseam.
You could speculate that by taking so many pictures of himself Colt was making up for a childhood deprived of snapshots. Or, as the police believed, that he enjoyed a narcissistic personality disorder. Another explanation is that Colt’s self-portraiture simply fit his generation’s penchant for self-broadcasting and self-dramatizing. His peers were continually taking photos of themselves and posting them on social media. For the millennials, few things happen without a visual record, and sites like Facebook encourage them to broadcast mini reality shows about themselves. Throughout his run, Colt kept in contact with people both by phone and the Internet. It’s easy to assume he took photos of himself in various locations to send to friends.
Colton deleted all the photos from the Nikon’s capture card. But he didn’t format it, which would have permanently gotten rid of them. Instead, the images remained lurking as little digital ones and zeros that would come back to haunt him.
ONE OF THE PEOPLE Colt kept in touch with while he was on the lam was Josh, who remained behind the fence at Green Hill. “He started calling here, asking to talk to his buddy,” says a staff member at the prison. “We reported it to the administration, but they wouldn’t let us call the cops. We wanted to get a trace, but they wouldn’t let us do anything. They just told us to monitor the calls, which we did.”
Josh says he wasn’t too surprised when Colton called. “He told me that his plan worked, that he’d escaped, and that he was back having fun doing what he likes: running around staying one step ahead of everyone.” Josh describes Colton’s manner as unnaturally calm despite knowing that he was again being hunted. “He was happy, totally relaxed… It was kinda weird… nuts. But that’s what he lives for.”
Colton called often just to bullshit, says Josh. “He was just seeing how everything was going. He never said where he was and I didn’t want to know details, but sometimes he’d call from places he’d broken into, other times from a cell phone, usually late at night.”
Police later recovered stolen cell phones with dozens of calls to Green Hill School, which Colton had programmed into the phones’ memories as “Ghs.” Each call to the school was monitored by staff who could only sit back and listen while Colton boasted of his escape and his future impact.
“We knew he was doing stuff, and there was nothing we could do about it,” says a staff member. “Colton told [Josh]: ‘Watch the news because I’m going to be all over it.’”
COLTON’S MAILBOX RUSE CONTINUED to work until one of his victims got word from multiple credit card companies that someone had applied for cards using his name and the 550 Haven Place address. He notified the sheriff, and a deputy found the mailbox. The police left it in place, though, and told the postmaster to contact them if anything came through addressed to 550. It wasn’t long before they got a call.
The next package for 550 Haven Place was too large to fit in the box. Working with the police, the mail carrier left a note asking how the addressee would like it delivered. Colton answered and even helpfully provided a plastic bag, telling the mailman to just wrap the package in the bag and leave it.
Before the carrier’s next round, Island County deputies and detectives secreted themselves into the woods all around the bottom of Haven Place. The package was delivered and placed on top of the 550 mailbox. Haven residents came and went, picking up their mail, not knowing that an entire squad of cops was watching from behind trees. Then a familiar vehicle approached. Pam Kohler got out of her truck and checked her mailbox. She then looked over at the package on top of 550 and began speaking to someone on a cell phone. Deputies strained to hear what she was saying, but couldn’t make it out. Pam left the package alone, got back into her pickup, and drove off.
The cops were totally keyed, suspecting Pam had just let Colton know his package had arrived. They waited… and waited… “We had that stakeout manned for about forty-eight hours,” says Detective Ed Wallace, who took shifts in the woods. Finally, though, they gave up and pulled out, taking the package and the mailbox. The lab successfully pulled Colton’s fingerprint off the note to the mail carrier.
Born and bred in west Texas with the tarrying twang to prove it, Jimmy Pettyjohn drove through Snoqualamie Pass back in 1989. At its western end, the pass opens up on a stunning view. “I’ve been a waterman all my life even though I had to drive five hundred miles in any direction to hit wet back in Texas,” said seventy-year-old Pettyjohn, who passed away December 2010. “Well, I got that first look at Puget Sound and said, ‘Wow, I’m not going back!’”
The Pettyjohns settled on the east side of Camano’s South End, in a modern log home kept humming by visiting grandkids. “Doors and windows always open, never take the keys out of cars… and we’re retired, so we’re here all the time. Never worried about crime.”
The first hint of trouble was a charge on Jimmy’s American Express for $107.90 worth of Pepper Power Bear Spray from UDAP out of Bozeman, Montana. It’s a product specially formulated by the survivor of a grizzly attack to blast a fog of pain so nasty it’d force Smokey the Bear to leave a campfire unattended.
Jimmy had never ordered any such thing, so he called AmEx and they absolved the charge. Simple mistake somewhere… He hadn’t noticed anything amiss in his house, no clue that anyone had broken in, and Jimmy saw no reason to quit the old habit of leaving his billfold in its customary place on a shelf above his computer. Pettyjohn’s PC sat in a room off the garage that he used as a workshop/man cave/heavy smoking den—with the smoke provided by both a steady stream of cigarettes and a big stainless-steel barbecue (yes, the barbecue is indoors… he was Texan). On the edge of the shelf above his monitor there’s a peg. That’s where Jimmy always hung his wedding ring and his gold Rolex when he had some puttering to do. Something else he’d come to realize was a bad habit.
On the morning of July 9, Camano’s indoor barbecue king ambled into his cave and reached for his Rolex. The watch was gone. Surprisingly, though, his wedding ring still hung on the peg. “I really cherish that ring, been wearing it for fifty years, and if he took that my feelings woulda goddamn sure been hurt… But he didn’t.”
Pettyjohn was so relieved, figuring he’d gotten off easy, that he never even reported the theft. He didn’t notice anything else out of place. His wallet sat on its shelf, all the credit cards accounted for and all in exactly the right order he kept them.
Two days after the burglary, a package arrived addressed to Pettyjohn. He’d ordered a book from Amazon, and signed for the FedEx figuring this was it. “Open it up and it was a couple little electronic devices and a tiny CD,” he says. “I think, Oh shit, they sent me one of those new electronic books.” Jimmy put the gadgets in a Ziploc and wrote the date on it in case he had to return them. He put that on a table in his sanctuary. “I’m thinking the gran’kids would be over on the weekend and show me how to install it.” He used the FedEx box to store the nuts and bolts from a swing set he was dismantling out in the yard.
When his clan came over a couple days later, he went to show them the devices. They looked everywhere, but the gadgets were gone. Pettyjohn realized that a thief must have been watching for the delivery and then broken into his home again to steal the package. “He’d paid for overnight… I think thieves spare no expense on the shipping.” Jimmy couldn’t ignore it this time. “I got to callin’ the sheriff and told him about it, but they didn’t do anything.”
He didn’t let it drop, though. “I called around on my own and got the outfit in Austin that shipped the package [Scancity] and found out that the electronic things were a couple of credit card–swiping devices. Called the sheriff back and told them that, and that’s when they finally got interested.”
Jimmy did the legwork and provided the sheriff with a printout of the card reader specs. They were “Mini 123s,” tiny 1.2-ounce battery-powered gizmos that fit in your palm and record the numbers off credit cards’ magnetic strips. Two of the $230 devices had been ordered, and each could store 2,500 swiped credit cards. The deputy took prints off a window where Pettyjohn’s wife noticed the screen had been removed, and asked Jimmy to dump out the nuts and bolts so he could take the FedEx box.
“This is Camano Island… I never bothered to think too much about locks, and didn’t have any lights outside,” said Pettyjohn, who grew up in the oil field construction business and served in the army, taking “a government-paid vacation to Southeast Asia for a year.” The idea that someone had been brazen enough to come into his house at least three times, including the 2006 credit card theft, made him start to think about security. A freaky thing about the burglaries was that the Pettyjohns have two dogs, “a yappin’ poodle” and a long-haired dachshund, which both make noise at a pin drop. “He had to be pretty damn stealthy.”
After Jimmy got back from Vietnam, he’d decided to never pick up another gun. And he didn’t—until these break-ins convinced him otherwise. “I didn’t want to see him get hurt… He wasn’t doing near as bad a things as some kids his age… But we’re retired and here all the time. We were home, just behind that door when he came in here. That concerned us.” One of the Pettyjohns’ three daughters was worried enough to buy them two guns; another friend gave him a Glock. “And now I’ve got the place lit up like an all-night liquor store. It is a shame.”
Colton Harris-Moore stole some of Camano’s charm from Jimmy Pettyjohn, which is tough to forgive, but if things had been just a little bit different, the transplanted Texan and the Barefoot Bandit could have been buds. The two are simpatico on at least one passion.
“When I was growing up in Amarillo, I always used to hang at the local airport… even did my homework there. Back then the CAA (precursor to the FAA) would give you your pilot’s license at fourteen, same age you could get your driver’s license.” Jimmy’s dad had been an “airplane driver” in World War II, and always owned a plane because he had business all over Texas. “I turned fourteen on a Sunday, but took my check ride on Saturday when I was still thirteen,” said Pettyjohn, “which makes me the youngest pilot ever licensed in the United States.”
Pettyjohn kept a plane on Camano, “a souped-up Piper Cub.” He loved to take off from the island and fly around Mount Baker, giving air tours to his kids, grandkids, friends, and even the deputy who came out to investigate the stolen credit card swipers.
Two weeks after his Rolex disappeared, Pettyjohn’s credit card statements started arriving. “The Discover card bill came in and had $485.44 worth of iTunes purchases.” The Pettyjohns had about as much use for iTunes as they had for anti–grizzly bear spray. “Then Visa comes in with all these other electronics ordered on it and over $300 on PayPal. That’s when I realized he’d gotten every goddamn credit card out of my billfold and copied down the number and the little three-digit code on the back and then put them back just exactly where they were so I never noticed. Pretty clever… nitwit kid.”
ON JULY 18, 2008, Colton pulled one of his least clever moves. It was a nice evening for a drive, and he tooled around the South End in a shiny black Mercedes. Always mindful of the people who’d teased him about his raggedy clothes and crappy trailer, Colton stopped by at least one home to shout out, “Who’s poor now?!”
The Mercedes hadn’t been reported stolen, so Colton could have driven forever with little chance of getting spotted—if he’d driven well. Instead, he flew around the island, speeding and swerving along the tree-lined roads. At around 11:30 p.m., he was doing 69 mph in a 50 when he blew by another black car, an ICSO deputy’s Charger. The cop watched as the Mercedes crossed both the center and the fog lines. He popped his blue light, but rather than pull over, the Mercedes took off.
The short car chase ended as the Mercedes turned into the parking lot of the Elger Bay Café with the cop car right on its tail. The driver wasn’t giving up, though, just trying to put the odds in his favor by switching from a car chase to a foot pursuit. As the officer and a reserve-deputy intern watched in disbelief, Camano’s “most wanted” leaped out of the Mercedes while it was still moving and then ran down an embankment toward the woods. The Mercedes continued to roll, heading toward a big propane tank that feeds the restaurant.
The cop slammed his car into park and jumped out, but he was too late to stop the Mercedes. Fortunately, it barely missed the propane tank, though now looked like it was about to drive over the twenty-foot-high drop-off behind the café. Before it reached the edge, however, the car hit a large plastic trash Dumpster and finally came to a stop. With Colton beating feet into the darkness, the deputy began to give chase. Then, however, he realized that the car or the trash can had clipped the gas line where it entered the building. The deputy ran to his patrol car, backed it away from the propane tank, and called in the fire department to handle that potentially explosive situation. Next he radioed for backup to try to corner Colt.
All available Island County officers responded to the call and set a perimeter. A Snohomish County dog team and the Marysville “manhunters” arrived to try to track Colt down. Just a half mile west of the parking lot, though, private woods led directly into the large expanse of Camano Island State Park. Once again, as soon as he hit the trees, Colt was as good as gone.
The cops’ disappointment, however, soon turned to cheer when they checked out the Mercedes. A quick run of the plates came back to Carol Star, Colton and Pam’s next-door neighbor who was away on a trip. “The cops called and I told them that if the keys were in the car that meant he’d broken into my house,” remembers Star. She says Colton had taken down part of a trellis and used it as a ladder to get onto her roof where he tried to get in through the skylight. “It was bolted on too good, though, so he crowbarred open the slider door. I’d just gone to Costco, and he hit my pantry looking for food. He took muffins and a nice fresh mango—didn’t touch the beer. My car keys were hanging in the pantry.”
Star’s car gave Island County a motor vehicle theft charge against Colton, but that was just the tip of the eventual iceberg of an indictment. When Colton bailed out, he left behind a backpack he’d stolen from Star’s home. A peek inside revealed digital cameras, cell phones, a GPS, and other recently stolen property including a wallet containing credit cards reported missing just two days before. When a deputy lifted the backpack, underneath lay a $30,000 infrared camera that had been taken from the South End’s Mabana Fire Station. The police applied for a warrant and, when approved, spilled all the backpack’s contents onto a table in their evidence room.
The magnetic card readers taken from Jimmy Pettyjohn’s place were there—one of the readers had already swiped two Camano residents’ credit cards. A compact mirror held Colton’s thumbprint. A further bounty of evidence came from a journal that conveniently had the name Colton Harris written on the inside cover. Its pages contained lists of the names and credit card numbers of burglary and identity theft victims.
The cell phones, cameras, and other digital equipment from the backpack were turned over to Detective Ed Wallace, who’s also certified as a seized computer evidence recovery specialist. A stolen pink Motorola V3 phone had been used to call Green Hill School twenty-one times. It had also called the residence and work numbers of two different burglary victims, presumably to check if they were home. Another phone had been used to call Pam, Green Hill, and the real estate office where another burglary victim worked. When Wallace got to the cameras, he ran special software that recovered dozens of deleted photos. Another bingo: Colton Harris-Moore was staring right at him in frame after frame.
The Mercedes story instantly flashed across the island—usually told presuming that Colt had purposely tried to blow up the propane tank. Mark Brown decided he had to end the media blackout. With all the evidence he’d left behind in the car, Colton obviously knew they were on to him now anyway. They chose the shot of Colton lying in the ferns and sent it out to the local press, figuring a recent photo and description along with a request for information would lead, once again, to a quick capture. Brown also set up another town hall meeting at the Mabana Fire Station.
Maxine, the Boyles, Jimmy Pettyjohn, and many others went to that meeting on July 23, 2008. Neighbors there began organizing block watches and citizen patrols, and as Pettyjohn remembered, “There were a lot of people there who were buying guns and saying let’s get something done here.”
After the Mercedes crash cost him all his credit card numbers and put an intense amount of heat on his tail, Colt decided to vamoose. They continued to search for him on Camano, burning through the sheriff’s office budget on overtime hours, but there were no new reliable sightings. Some burglaries kept occurring on the island and many residents had come to assume that every crime they heard about must be connected to Colton. The police didn’t believe that, though, because these didn’t fit his MO. After several months with no Colt-like break-ins, Island County authorities started to believe that he’d gone into hibernation. He’d actually just gotten on a ferry.
To the north of Camano, the San Juan Islands were an orchard filled with juicy, low-hanging fruit. One out of every three homes in the county was a vacation property—3,300 houses that lay empty for long stretches of the year. Colton had four main islands to choose from, and he chose well. Orcas offered the thickest woods, most rugged terrain, and windiest roads, making it easy for a kid who liked to run and hide in the forest, and hard for cops chasing him to get anywhere fast. The island is 43 percent larger than Camano yet has only about a third of the population—enough people to provide plenty of prey while at the same time ensuring there’d be only a token police force to protect them. Because their island was considered so incredibly safe, Orcas residents and all the businesses in sleepy little Eastsound were the ideal unsuspecting targets.
The timing couldn’t have been better for Colt. It was the height of the summer season, with plenty of strangers on Orcas. His was the best-known face just south of the border in Island County, but he could have walked Eastsound, shopped the shops, and hitchhiked the roads with little fear of being identified that first summer—or most of the second.
For Orcas in 2008, Colton came and went like a phantom—the bike stolen from the cop shop evidence room, the deputy pepper-sprayed, the flight manuals ordered and stolen out of Vern’s, and so on—until finally in November Bob Rivers’s plane went native and crashed on the reservation. Island County knew who they were chasing, but the connection was never made to the Orcas troubles.
While Colt says he then spent the winter in Reno between jaunts to see his friends in Wenatchee and a side trip down to Sacramento, the Island County prosecutor filed ten charges against him. The warrant included car theft, attempting to elude, malicious mischief, three counts of identity theft, and three counts of possession of stolen property. He’d also been charged as an adult for “flight to avoid prosecution.”
With all that hanging over his head in May 2009, Colton left the safety of Nevada and once again went home. Maybe springtime on the Salish Sea was just too beautiful to pass up. Maybe he found the straight life boring and needed to get back in the adrenaline game. Maybe he missed his mom. Whatever the reason, Colt arrived back on Camano and quickly escalated his “war” against the police to a level unprecedented in Island County history.
In the wee hours of June 19, 2009, Colt broke into a car parked outside the house where its driver lay sleeping. The vehicle was a black-and-gold cop car, its driver an ICSO deputy. Colt had previously busted into a statie’s patrol car and taken his camera. This time, he took everything: the officer’s cell phone, digital camera, Panasonic Toughbook, breathalyzer, even his ticket book. What got Sheriff Mark Brown, his entire force, and all the Camano residents really torqued, though, was that he also took the deputy’s Smith and Wesson MP-15 assault rifle and a supply of ammunition.
Colton had his war. Island County Sheriff’s Office pulled out all the stops. “We started really leaning on CIs, confidential informants,” says Detective Ed Wallace. “We had some pretty heavy stuff over these people’s heads to give us leverage, and I believe they would have gladly given us information if they had any. Instead, they told us they hadn’t seen this kid and didn’t know who he was hanging with.”
With Colton living, as Wallace describes it, “off the grid,” he was much harder to track than the typical thief. “We had other burglars working Camano at the same time, people responsible for stealing much, much more property than Colton, and we were catching them because they drove cars, they pawned stuff for money, they associated with other people. They had friends. Colt didn’t.
“We began to use game cameras in places where we knew he was operating,” says Wallace. The camouflaged and motion-activated digital cameras are the same tools used by hunters to study the movements of their prey and by researchers to catch glimpses of the most elusive animals. The police also set out a decoy vehicle hoping Colton would steal it or at least snoop inside. Wallace was among the officers who staked out the bait car along one of Colt’s regular routes. Sure enough, says Wallace, late that night he came riding down the road on a bike. Officers gave chase, but once again the speedy teen immediately went for the woods, dropping the bike and losing the cops on foot.
Deputies spent hours combing the South End woods on and off duty. Two weeks after the cop car was ransacked, they found a campsite in thick woods a little over half a mile from Pam’s property. A bike and a Ziploc filled with phone cards that were there one day and gone the next told them Colt was actively using the camp. They set up a stakeout, but Colt sniffed this one out, too, and didn’t return. When the cops gave up waiting and took apart the site to collect evidence, they found the stolen breathalyzer, an ICSO tag, and the deputy’s cell phone with Colt’s fingerprints on it. They didn’t, however, find the assault rifle.
With too many close calls, and with the anger and fear rising on Camano, Colt bolted back to greener pastures on Orcas in the summer of 2009. It was after that spree—when he hit businesses all across the island and stole a plane and two boats, the last one starting him to Canada and eventually Idaho to take the Cessna he crashed in Granite Falls—that everyone finally knew about the Barefoot Bandit.
October 2009, Orcas Island. Like a diesel-drinking tyrannosaurus, the big excavator lunged forward and bit down on a pile of stumps and branches. It reared back with a quarter ton of wood clamped in its jaws and swung back over the top of the bonfire. A huge shower of sparks and flames erupted as the pieces fell. Embers alighted on the branches of a big Doug fir thirty feet above our heads. They glowed momentarily, then slowly blinked out. The intense rush of heat from the massive stoking had us all grabbing our beers and retreating a few yards. Now all eyes turned toward the night sky, curious to see if the trees were going to catch fire. Along with using heavy equipment to feed the blaze, the fact that burning season wasn’t open yet made this a fairly typical full-timers backyard party. Summers may see a lot of second-homers hosting garden soirees, but fall and winter are when the rough-hewn and hunkered cut loose.
Enormous homemade barbecues held big slabs of beef and pork plus an entire side-hill salmon—the wink-wink nickname for local deer shot out of season. Out in the driveway, a good percentage of rigs were illegal in one way or another—cracked windshields, expired tags, bad lights… This wasn’t an outlaw gathering, though, just regular island folks, if not pillars then at least upstanding 2 × 4s of the community. Islands tend to draw those with strong individualist and antiauthoritarian streaks, creating live-and-let-live communities that are, at the same time, knit tighter than they’d be on the mainland because of the shared experiences and hardships. Orcas is the eighth island I’ve lived on and it’s certainly no exception. The reason no one was concerned about the illicit bonfire was because about half the fire department—including the guy at the controls of the excavator—was crowded around it, drinks in hand.
Colton Harris-Moore had been off the island for more than a month—we hoped—but the topic flared whenever a little more information leaked out. Everyone on the island seemed to have part of the “untold” stories, but fragments from different events melded like an octopus orgy, and to find the truth you had to carefully pry apart all the slippery bits. No wonder the Internet buzzed with misinformation, when fact so quickly morphed into fiction even at ground zero. The police remained tight-lipped. “I’m very cognizant of the fact I don’t want to be part of the problem with this young man by giving him notoriety, creating myths behind him that endanger the community and do not bode well for him in the long run,” said Sheriff Bill Cumming. The cat burglar was out of the bag, though. The information vacuum quickly filled with rumors that simply added to Colt’s growing legend.
Very few details had come out about his childhood, but Colt was engendering sympathy from some on the island, especially women and especially those who’d raised teenagers. At the other extreme, several guys filled with beery bravado stood around the bonfire discussing ways to lure Colt into their homes so they could legally take care of him—with extreme prejudice.
A few folks found some satisfaction in the fact that Colt had run the local deputies ragged. One retired contractor who embodies a definite Orcas archetype—Will Geer–ish with gray beard, long hair, overalls on top of flannel—and who’d dealt with all the deputies during his thirty-plus years on the island, said he was glad Colt was “sticking it to ’em.”
There’s a delicate balance in policing a place like this where small-town affairs are under an even more powerful microscope because it’s an island. The news a couple of years back that two additional deputies had been hired for Orcas and that their salaries would be paid for by the expected increase in revenue from the tickets they’d be writing was not met with a ticker-tape parade. When the new guys arrived and pulled over what seemed like half the island within the first three weeks, there was almost an uprising until they stood down to a tolerable islandlike level of officiousness.
People don’t dislike the officers in the islands—they’re neighbors, too—but there’s a different relationship from that in a large city or any other place that has more police coverage. Here, depending on when you call and what part of the island you live in, a 911 could have a cop to you in five minutes or an hour. No one is under any assumption that they’ll be right there when you need them. They can’t. It’s a tiny department, and unlike almost every other place in the country, there are no overlapping jurisdictions to offer backup. Most rural areas have a sheriff’s office plus state police and maybe even a small city police department that can all work together. In San Juan County, it’s just one sheriff’s office spread out to cover all the islands. If something happens that overwhelms the small contingent on one island, officers need to fly or boat over from another, with the weather and sea conditions coming into play.
So in most cases, folks on Orcas know that the police aren’t going to be there in time to save them if the hockey-masked serial killer comes to call. Out on our fringe of the island where there’s a much better chance of getting a quick response from a volunteer firefighter than a cop, I’ve told Sandi that if anyone ever breaks in she should light him on fire. It’s another reason people here tend to be more self-reliant—and why many are armed (the seemingly redneck—or mossneck—trappings of guns and chainsaws and “Keep your government ass off my property” rants cross the partisan divide here, a county that votes heavily Democratic).
WITHOUT MUCH OPPORTUNITY FOR cavalry-like heroism, or much success at fighting the obvious problems like the handful of meth heads everyone knows about, the most visible parts of the deputies’ jobs are speeding tickets and DUI stops, neither of which is very popular with many residents. Their other main task is handling ugly domestic disputes. It’s not an enviable job, and the deputies are not paid well in a place that’s very expensive to live. At this point in time, the turnover rate for deputies was high, the training opportunities low. The fact that a kid had now come back two summers in a row and burglarized at will made it easy for some people to bring out the Barney Fife references.
But communities get the police force they want and are willing to pay for. Residents of the San Juan Islands bristle at zero tolerance and won’t pay for a cop on every corner. Colt really had chosen well. The department had few deputies, no canine units, no helicopter, no SWAT team, no trained “manhunters.” And while Sheriff Cumming, a nationally ranked racquetball player, might have been in good enough shape to chase Colt up Orcas Island’s hills, his local deputies weren’t.
Bill Cumming says that in his thirty-eight years in policing and criminal justice, he’d never faced someone like Colton Harris-Moore. Colt was a cop’s nightmare. He was stone-cold sober, not prone to druggie desperation and mistakes. He kept to himself instead of associating with other known criminals. While he didn’t have, as he’d told his mom, an Einstein-level IQ, he was more than smart enough. Despite his history of impulse control problems, he’d become a patient, calculating thief. And he always had an escape strategy: Run! Colt never wavered or hesitated, just ran, and ran for the woods where he’d trained himself to run and hide since he could walk. The cops carried all their gear along with extra pounds and additional years. They never had a chance in a foot race.
They did have chances at stakeouts, though, and Colt still got away. Of course, the San Juan County deputies hadn’t done worse than any other department that chased Colt over the previous eighteen months. He’d gotten away from everyone, including all the SWAT teams, manhunters, and helicopters they could throw at him in Granite Falls.
Through it all, the people who spoke with Colt said he was “relaxed,” “calm,” and “enjoying it.” Whether this was pathological, or a sign of hopelessness about his future, or just evidence of a steel sack, Colt’s willingness to take ridiculous risks was both what would make him the most famous outlaw of his generation and prove to be his greatest weakness.
WITH A LITTLE EMOTIONAL distance from his end-of-summer tear around Orcas, there was an almost universal acknowledgment among the bonfire-and-barbecue crowd of at least Colt’s moxie. Parts of his story resonated with the romanticized character of this frontier island. He was canny and resourceful, able to survive with all the odds stacked against him. Whatever appreciation there was, however, no one wanted to see him on Orcas again. Few doubted he’d be back, though, unless he was killed or captured before then. As one deputy told me, “I just hope he’s caught before it’s our turn again.”
Despite the nods to Colt’s abilities, there remained a gulf between what the vast majority of residents on Orcas and Camano were feeling about him and how a growing number of people across the country and around the world saw Colt. In early October, the first Facebook page dedicated to Colt went up and starting collecting members, eventually numbering almost a hundred thousand. An Internet fan club also went live, and T-shirts began flying out of a Seattle shop emblazoned with Colt’s face and, ironically, the words “Momma Tried”—from the Merle Haggard tune.
WHEN I LEARNED THAT the crook who turned our open, trusting community into Paranoid Park was a feral kid with a Wild West name who’d come from just downstream to roam our woods barefoot while using high-tech spy tools to steal our identities, I put aside my other writing projects. I felt I had a personal stake in finding out the truth behind this Jesse James Bond. After digging out the reams of records on Colt down at the Island County courthouse, learning about his childhood and finding out that he wasn’t a typical drug-addled, violent punk, I was hooked.
The beginning of the truth about Colton Harris-Moore lay south, on Camano Island. After the hour-long ferry ride from Orcas to the mainland, the drive between Anacortes and Camano runs through Skagit Valley. It’s a great back-road drive at the right times of year. In spring, the valley erupts in an acid trip of colors as millions of tulips bloom. Wintertime brings thousands of snow geese and trumpeter swans that form drifts along the farmland furrows and occasionally lift off in huge honking blizzards of white. Driving through on the day before Halloween, though, there wasn’t much to slow down for.
In normal times, talk on Camano tends toward fishing and crabbing. In the fall of 2009, though, it was all about Colt. The wanted posters were back up, rewards were offered by the local chamber of commerce and Crime Stoppers, and Sheriff Mark Brown was trying to keep his cool. After the plane thefts brought the case a higher profile, more law enforcement started pitching in to help catch Colt. Snohomish County’s manhunter teams worked the island, and other agencies lent Brown helicopter support whenever there was a solid sighting. Island County deputies began camping out in garages and backyards where Colt was known to forage.
Now “the cops meant business,” says Maxine, who had canine teams sniffing around her property trying to pick up Colt’s trail. She told police that even after being hit eight times, she still wasn’t afraid of Island Boy. “A female deputy said, ‘Well, you should be.’”
Local kids ventured into the woods looking for Colt and a piece of the reward money. They found two more of his campsites behind the mailboxes at the east end of Haven Place. The police also found several camps tied to Colt, some with stolen property, others with keepsakes surprising for someone who professed to have such disdain for the press. “Colton was collecting all the news clippings about himself,” says Ed Wallace.
Islanders say the cops were embarrassed and getting more pissed every time Colt made news. More off-duty deputies began stalking the woods. Even rangers at the local parks beat the bushes on their lunch hours.
The media repeatedly shorthanded Colt as a Catch Me If You Can–style action hero and the Northwest’s new Robin Hood. Then they’d thrust cameras in Sheriff Mark Brown’s face to get his reaction.
One crew finally got what it wanted. When Canadian CBC TV asked about the fan clubs and Colt’s hero status, Brown’s round and ruddy face turned a new, threatening hue.
“He’s certainly not my hero,” he said, then added ominously, “I hope that you and I and everybody else, when he does make that fatal mistake, are not responsible for something other than an arrest being made without an incident.”
The tenor of Brown’s response heartened those villagers already carrying flaming torches. And it horrified others.
“The mentality here on Camano when all this started was ridiculous,” says Maria (not her real name), a local woman who, a few years before, supervised Colt while he did community service at the park where she works. “Not a lot goes on out here, so when something does happen it gets blown out of proportion.”
Maria previously worked for years as a crisis worker in Bellingham, counseling at-risk youth who included those she calls “the worst of the worst, extreme cases, kids that were too psychologically wounded to stay in juvie.” She saw hundreds run through the system. “I had experience with children that came from some of the most horrific environments you can imagine, and we [society] still had these expectations that they were going to behave and fit in like any other child. I loved my job, but it just became too much for me.” That experience, though, gave her the confidence to volunteer to take on Colt even though he already had a reputation as trouble.
Maria says Pam dropped him off the first two days but then stopped. She didn’t know how he made the twenty-mile round-trip the rest of the week. “He showed up every day without any food or anything to drink, and he was expected to work all day outdoors. So I fed him, gave him water, and he was just so very grateful.”
Despite his reputation, Colt struck her as “a good-hearted kid who’d always been looked at with negative expectations and didn’t have a lot of motivation to feel good about his life. Yet give a kid like Colton a chance, some stability, look at them with some possibility, and they tend to shine. Colton took this opportunity and he just worked his butt off, sawing and hauling wood, pulling weeds and cutting brush to create a picnic area.”
She said Colton was quiet, a bit shy, that he didn’t talk much except about the work at hand. “He had just a ridiculous amount of knowledge about the plants and what would grow here. He struck me as being really smart, so I started to ask his opinion and advice and he instantly perked up and became really engaged. I told him he might have a job here when he graduates and he said, ‘You think so? All right, right on.’”
Colton gave her plenty of great ideas for plantings, but Maria explained that she had a very tight budget and couldn’t afford to buy new plants.
“When he left, he said, ‘Thank you so much,’ and he wanted to know if he had any more community service to work out, would I be willing to have him here, and I said, ‘Absolutely, in a heartbeat!’ It was an absolute pleasure working with him.”
Two weeks later, Colton rode his bike ten miles back to the park. “He was kinda shy, handed me three small bags and just said, ‘Here.’ He’d remembered about the budget and went out and hand-harvested seeds from local flowers that he thought would grow well in the park. I said, ‘Oh my God, thank you so much!’ And he’s like, ‘Yeah, all right. Well, I guess I’ll go, bye.’ He started to walk away but then turned around and said, ‘Thank you for being so nice to me.’ I was literally teary-eyed.”
AS I CONTINUED SOUTH on Camano, Maria’s take had me thinking of Huck Finn. Huck, whose life’s theme was freedom and escape—from rules, schoolin’, and his drunk dad who’d locked him in that backwoods cabin. Huck, who did what he had to do to survive, including “borrowing” what he needed, like food, clothing, and canoes. Was Colton just a kid who’d struck out on his own to escape a bad home and then got swept along in a big current of circumstance? Were our yachts and planes just fancy rafts transporting him from one test of his relative morality to the next?
On the way to my first visit to Pam and Colt’s home, I stopped at the little back-country commercial oasis a half mile south of Elger Bay Elementary School. There’s a general store and a nice little café that both carry the Elger Bay name. Together they serve as the dining, grocery-shopping, gas- and propane-filling, mailing, DVD-renting, fishing, hunting, and banking center (via an ATM) for the South End. An antique Coca-Cola sign and a big community bulletin board decorate the outside of the grocery. There’s an elaborate jerky display near the entrance, and the fine wines and crab bait are just a few steps apart. It is truly a convenience store.
It’s also the South End’s social and gossip center.
“Local people come in here and when you say, ‘How are you today?’ you really hear how they are today,” laughed Kara Weber, a longtime islander who works at the store. “And when anything happens on the island, the phone here starts ringing.”
Over the past three years, Colton and his mom had kept the phone busy at Elger Bay, with both talk about them and between them. “She thinks her phone is tapped, so she comes down here and uses the pay phone to talk to him.”
Chances were decent, said Kara, that the next person walking in would be a crime victim. “A guy who comes in the store got hit and had just gotten his insurance in place when that little bugger hit him again! Another local woman had her credit cards stolen and we caught Colt in here on video using them to take money out of the ATM. I’ve heard the term ‘Robin Hood’… well, this guy isn’t stealing from the rich and giving to the poor. There used to be a feeling around here that if they need it that bad, then there, take it. But after it just kept happening and happening, then people got really pissed off. It’s certainly hurt the confidence we had in our sheriff’s department. When this all started I got a dog, and Joe is the kind to eat first and ask questions later.”
Despite her consistent denials that she ever helped Colt while he was on the lam, Pam Kohler’s involvement is a constant subject of speculation in the area. Kara said there were rumors of a trap door in the trailer, even a tunnel so Colton could come and go without the police seeing. Kara was at the counter one day back in 2008, after Colton had escaped from the prison home and was back committing burglaries on the island. “Pam comes in and pulls out a Ziploc full of money like I’ve never seen. What really threw me is we’re talking about a woman that’s on assistance.”
Kara can soften a bit talking about Colton. “He didn’t stand a chance. He truly went through hell and I think this all boils down to what he went through as a kid.” But then she turns angry again when she considers what he did to her community. “He knows right from wrong—if not, why would he run from the cops? He’s smart, too; the problem is that he’s just using it for the wrong things. He figured out the electricity timing, just like Josh thought he would.”
Josh is Josh Flickner, whose family has owned and operated Elger Bay Grocery for eighteen years. The electrical event was when the Washington DOT announced that they were cutting power to Camano overnight as part of the new bridge construction. The warning provided a save the date for would-be thieves who knew exactly when the entire island would go lights out.
With Colton back on the island, Flickner—who was also head of the local chamber of commerce—called Sheriff Brown and suggested that he station deputies at his grocery and other likely targets. Flickner says his idea went nowhere, so his sister and another employee camped out in the store. In the middle of the night, they awoke to someone tearing the deadbolt out of the back door. They saw the silhouette of a man, “about six-five, same build as Colton, carrying a big empty trash bag,” says Flickner. “They said, ‘Hello?’ and he just calmly turned around and left.”
Josh had become the voice of local anti-Colt sentiment. “All he’s doing is hurting people—financially, psychologically, he’s hurting people, yet here we are putting him on a pedestal, glorifying him, idolizing him. He’s got a Facebook site… I want to vomit, okay?”
Josh disagreed with Sheriff Brown on tactics. “I think we could have caught him two years ago. I know about sixty guys that would’ve volunteered to comb the woods in the south end of the island—it’s not that wide. A sheriff has the power to deputize citizens, but he said no, he’d never do that. People are getting really frustrated when the sheriff says don’t take it into your own hands while every day more people are victimized.”
Josh said Pam still came into the store regularly. “She buys $2 of gas, cigarettes, and six-packs of Busch Ice. We talk to her and half the time she’s in denial and the other half she’s talking about how proud she is of Colt. Now she’s being quoted in Time magazine. Our society is so sad.”
Josh remembers Colton coming into the store as a young boy. “There was always something shady about him. I remember looking into his eyes and something did not look right… just a look of malicious intent… I lean toward saying evil.”
I left Elger Bay Grocery wondering whether I was looking for Huckleberry Finn or Michael Myers from Halloween. It was the thirtieth of October, and Josh’s account of young Colton resembled Donald Pleasence’s “child with the devil’s eyes” monologue from the horror movie.
The one issue everyone seemed to agree on was Colton’s mother, Pam. Kara told me that all the neighbors are scared of her “because of the shotgun… They don’t know how far she’ll go.”
From what local reporters and police told me, I was the first writer invited to the trailer. I’d written Pam a letter, telling her a little about my background. I said I felt I could empathize with all sides of the story. I knew a number of the victims, lived in one of the affected communities, and had cops in my close family. By Colton’s age, I’d also had a few scrapes with the law, and a few years after that I wound up halfway around the world in the Republic of Maldives working at an island resort with David Friedland, a former New Jersey state senator who’d faked his death in the Bahamas to escape racketeering charges. Friedland ascended to number- one most-wanted fugitive status, hunted ceaselessly by the feds and Interpol. I saw that pressure firsthand. I also belatedly understood what my escapades did to my parents. All they knew was that I was somewhere overseas where my day-to-day life involved charging tourists to watch me stick dead fish in my mouth and feed them to wild sharks—I’d thoughtfully sent them video footage. For nearly two years, my parents spent their nights not knowing whether I’d end up lost at sea, decapitated by a shark, or locked away in some fetid fourth-world prison.
I was also an adrenaline junkie, and had even soloed an amphibious ultralight airplane after the sketchiest of instruction. I told Pam that my experiences might give me some insight into what both she and Colton were going through.
ON HAVEN PLACE, I slowed to a crawl at a low point in the swaybacked road where damper soil encouraged a thick stand of cedars. I first passed by what looked like just a narrow gap between trees but turned out to be a driveway. When I backed up I saw the two big WARNING NO TRESPASSING signs. I turned into the cavelike entrance, branches reaching out to hiss and scratch the length of my truck. I stopped under a large tree beside three other pickups in varying states of decay. Two of them, including a cool 1966 Chevy, were far down entropy road; the other was a typical island clunker rig that still looked drivable. An orange bowling ball lay in tall grass next to the broken tin skeleton of a kiddie pool filled with many summers’ worth of browned cedar branchlets.
I ducked under a final, dripping bough and entered a small clearing. A moldering, moss-stained single-wide trailer home slumped across the space. About a hundred feet of flat lawn stretched in front, with a picnic table and rock fire pit. A smaller clearing behind the trailer led to a garden, an animal pen, and a chicken house.
An extra room and a deck had been cobbled onto the narrow trailer at some point over the years. I climbed a wobbly stack of cinder blocks that stood in for steps up to the deck. Looking out from atop the rain-slicked planks, it was a beautiful, tranquil piece of property completely screened by billowing drapes of cedar and Douglas fir, everything a deep evergreen in the misty overcast. The trailer, the junk, the aluminum shed frozen in mid-collapse, the camper decaying under the trees—nothing was really so far out of a certain ordinary for around here.
At the far side of the clearing, in a natural grotto amid the soaring cathedral of hundred-foot trees, stood some kind of statue. It was about four feet high, indistinct, but I could make out a head and outstretched arms. It might be a Virgin Mary.
“That’s an armadilla that used to stand outside a liquor store,” said Pam Kohler. “The chickens got to it, though, and pecked off some of the Styrofoam.” The statue, she said, was on the property when she bought it twenty-four years ago.
Dressed in a sagging gray sweater over white pants and house slippers, fifty-eight-year-old Pam was hunched over and moving slow, as if life had her weighed down. Beneath brown hair her eyes were milky blue and tired. Nicotined fingernails and ashtrays filled with Pall Mall butts floating in a black ooze of ash and rainwater explained the load of gravel in her voice.
She invited me in and the door opened directly into a small living room with a brown couch facing a wood stove and TV. She said her antenna pulls in a few broadcast channels, but mainly she listens to the radio or watches movies—Westerns are her favorites—on the TV in her bedroom. She used to have a DVD player, she said, but had to sell it, so she watches VHS tapes.
Even accounting for the overcast day, it was dim inside. The windows that weren’t broken and covered with plywood were obscured by newspapers “to keep the reporters and the cops from looking in.” A sallow light filtered through, matching the cloying scent of cigarettes.
Pam calls the trailer “dumpy” and she’s not wrong. She said she’d been cleaning for a week in anticipation of a visitor, a childhood friend of her late husband who’d been writing to her every week from prison. Now he was getting out after serving a thirty-seven-year sentence and was going to live at the trailer “to protect me and Colt. Nobody’s going to mess with me once he gets here.”
Melanie, Colton’s dog, greeted me with her tail wagging at 100 rpm. “I think she’s some kind of hunting dog,” said Pam. “This summer she got one of the biggest snakes I’ve ever seen, and then some kind of rodent.” Melanie also snagged a neighborhood chicken that day, whose fresh carcass I almost stepped in out on the lawn.
According to Pam, Mel also has a nose for money. She told me the story of a couple who moved their travel trailer onto her property for a while. “They stayed one night and never came back, so Colt and I went in. We found hypodermic needles in there… Melanie kept scratching at one of the seats, so I said to Colt, ‘Let’s break in there and see what it is.’ There was a hundred and seventy-some dollars in there. Colt grabbed it and the chase was on!” She laughed.
Just last month, Mel found something else unusual on the property. “She was barking out in the yard, so I walk over and it’s a SWAT guy hiding in the trees in his full G.I. Joe outfit.” Melanie, Mel, or Meeshee, as Colt sometimes calls her, has plenty of experience sniffing the police. “You can always tell when they’re around because they all wear foo foo,” says Pam, meaning cologne.
All the jurisdictions except the Mounties had been there, including the FBI and officers from an auto theft task force who, Pam said, told her they thought Colt had stolen between forty and sixty cars. “Those guys brought me a plate of chocolate chip cookies,” Pam said. “It’s all weird.” Other cops brought cans of dog food for Melanie. The FBI agents, she said, had been professional so far, but she had a big, long-standing problem with the Island County deputies, who she described as “bumbling idiots.”
“Everything that happens on this island they blame on Colt. I’m sure he’s done some of these things… but he’d have to be sixty or seventy years old to have done all the things Mark Brown says he’s done.”
We sat at a small kitchen table, Pam drinking coffee. The fridge went bad, so she has only a dorm-size. Plus, she said, “Vacuum broke down, wash machine broke down, my truck broke down, all within forty-eight hours.” The ceiling’s falling down in patches, too, but there’s a new wood laminate floor that Pam told me Colt had installed for her before he last went to “the slammer.”
A friend gave her a dishwasher, and she also has plenty of music. While on the lam, Colt had sent her a couple of iPods preloaded with Michael Jackson and Patsy Cline—“Colt thinks she’s got a beautiful voice.” Colt has wide-ranging taste in music, from the latest rap to Ol’ Blue Eyes, and one of Pam’s favorite memories is dancing with him out on the deck to Sinatra’s “Summer Wind.”
She was adamant that Colt wasn’t living out in the woods. He’d told her he was staying in a house protected by high-tech surveillance equipment. He had his own room, TV, and computer. The people who own the house were a recently married couple and there were also two men a bit older than Colt living there, one of whom was ex-military. Pam called those guys “Colt’s goons.” Colt, she said, had free access to the family’s big SUV and did computer work for them, getting paid $600 a week. The wife was a chef into organic food, though Colt asked her to stop cooking it for him because he was trying to put on weight. Once, the chef even cooked Pam a gourmet meal that someone delivered to her mailbox at the end of Haven. Pam says the family also gave her a Bose Wave radio. “I had to pawn it once for money, and they ran the serial number to make sure it wasn’t stolen—and it wasn’t.”
Pam said the police knew all these details. “I started thinking maybe they didn’t want to find Colt,” she said. “That way they could go to the public and say, ‘We can’t catch this kid because we don’t have enough manpower. We need more money.’”
The mystery family had now moved off Camano, but Pam said she didn’t know where. Colt still stayed with them, though, proof that he had no reason to be breaking into people’s houses or businesses. When I mention that police had found his fingerprints at crime scenes, she said, “I know for a fact that Colt doesn’t leave fingerprints. In fact, I have a pair of my gloves that he used to wear… those little ones that stretch to any size, real soft.”
Pam said the deputies had been following her. “They think I’m hiding him, but I’m not, and I don’t know where he is… and wouldn’t tell them if I did.”
Her mail had recently stopped for a week, so she called an FBI agent who’d left his card. “He said, ‘We don’t do that, but maybe Island County cops were taking it.’ The next day all of my mail showed up. There’s just too many weird things going on.”
Pam was sure they had her phone bugged, and maybe the trailer and her truck. Her prison pen pal, she said, was going to sweep the place for listening devices when he got there. She said she was suspicious and leery of everything. “One of these sheriffs that was here yesterday, he told me he knows a colonel in the army, that he can get Colt in touch with him and go into special forces… And I don’t believe it. I don’t believe anything anybody ever tells me. I never have.”
After Granite Falls, a Snohomish County police officer called her. “He said, ‘I’m at a crash site and Colt’s name has been mentioned.’ And I thought he meant a car crash! I said, ‘Where are the people?’ He said there was nobody there. He wasn’t giving me any information… I asked if an aid car had taken Colt to the hospital, and he just said nobody’s here. So I asked, ‘Well, are there like body parts or what?’”
The officer finally told her it was a plane crash.
“I was pretty shocked. I really don’t believe Colt flew any planes… but if he did, I am very, very proud of him because he woulda had to teach himself. And if he is flying them, then I hope he wears a parachute and works on his landings.”
I find that Pam has a sense of humor, albeit a rough one, though it doesn’t sound like she gets to exercise it much. And she admitted to being prickly. “Fucking-A right I’m hard to get along with! I don’t have any friends, I don’t associate with anybody. I only leave the property to go to the store if I have to. I don’t like people, I don’t like relatives… ”
Pam wasn’t working and said she was now disabled. Social Security denied her benefits, but she was fighting them and hoped the money would kick in before she lost the property for failure to pay taxes (it did after, she says, she was diagnosed with a broken back). She said her widow’s benefits stopped when Colt turned eighteen, and she once had to consider selling the Camano land. “Colt just freaked out: ‘But Mom, I wanted to show my kids all the trees I’ve climbed!’”
No friends, no money, no family around… Pam was leading an insular life even for an islander. Her older son, Colt’s half brother, Paul, fell off a three-story roof twelve years ago and is disabled, living on the mainland. Now the one family member she said she was close to had been on the lam for eighteen months.
Pam asked the FBI to find Colt’s father, Gordon Moore. “I think he oughta be out here worrying just as much as me!” She tried to get ahold of Moore herself by calling the last place she knew he was staying. “He was living with this old lady and she told me, ‘He’s not here and he better never come back!’ She had this little tiny rat dog, yippin’, and it musta drove him nuts, and I guess he took it outside and killed it… That sounds like Gordy.”
She said Colt doesn’t take after his father. “Colt decided by himself that he didn’t like Gordy. I would say that was a good call.” Colton, she said, loves animals. He even had a pet spider out by a patch of holly trees. “He fed it for years,” Pam said. “He’d get bugs and throw them into its web and it would run over and wrap them up. One time when he called [from out on the run] I said, ‘You want me to keep feeding that spider for you?’ And he goes, ‘Oh, Mom, you don’t have ta.’ I said ‘I will if you want me to.’”
During another of their recent calls, Pam told Colton she was doing some cleaning. He was, she said, very concerned about his stuffed animal collection. “I told him they were fine, that I put them in a Rubbermaid for him.” Nonchalant about getting chased through dark woods by SWAT teams and Black Hawk helicopters, the famous Barefoot Bandit was worried about whether his plush puppies were well cared for.
There were no photos and few personal touches on display in the trailer besides a couple of fish and animal knickknacks that Pam said were Colt’s. “We didn’t take many pictures,” she said. Pam thought the self-portrait of Colt run with all the news stories was terrible, but said she liked the one from the Island Market security camera on Orcas that was now featured on wanted posters. “Colt said that’s not him, but it looks like him to me… and I think that’s a good picture of him… if it’s him.”
Pam said she and Colt kept up on everything by telephone, that he called her frequently on an untraceable phone “like the president has.” Whenever they heard clicks or static on the line, Colt said it was the FBI listening in and he “says derogatory things to them.” She said they talked for hours each time he called.
“We always laugh on the phone. I mean laugh hard, really hard. And some people may not see the humor in things that him and I see. Some of it is probably not very… definitely not politically correct. I am pretty prejudiced because of Vietnam, never really got over it, and Colt knows that. He always brings up something that makes me laugh about Orientals.”
Colt was following the press about himself and Pam said he’d been getting angry at her lately for talking to the media. “I told him it’s the only way to get his side of the story out there.”
What her calls to radio shows, interviews in the local papers, and even call-ins to cable TV shows seemed to be doing, mostly, was to inadvertently deflect heat off Colt and onto her. She’d made herself an easy target, the one clear villain in the story, and had become a two-dimensional quote machine. Her gruff phone manner and gravelly “hisselfs” evoked Granny Clampett or, as some of the local cops referred to her around the station, Momma from the movie Throw Momma from the Train. When she told the hosts of Seattle’s Ron and Don Show that Colt said his IQ tested three points below that of Einstein, one of them quipped that it sounded like hers was three points below room temperature.
Though her interviews didn’t get beyond the “I’m proud he can fly planes” soundbites, the narrative Pam was trying to tell was that she could never control Colt, and “no one in the school system ever tried to help him,” the social service people were “well-meaning but useless,” and the deputies never tried to help the local kids. According to her, Colt was a good-hearted kid who loved the outdoors and airplanes, and who didn’t steal because he needed to, “but because he can.”
I asked Pam if she had any regrets about her part in Colt’s upbringing. She said her biggest mistake was not moving Colton out of Island County once she realized everyone had it in for him.
I ASKED IF COLTON had a plan. “Kids always have plans… whether they’re good or bad.” At one point, she said, Colt had given her the tail number of an airplane and said she should be ready to meet him. “He wants to come get me and me be with him. Go live the good life.”
Colt’s idea of the good life, she said, was “having a yacht and living on a tropical island.” The only way he’d ever talked of earning that good life was being a pilot. “I told him, ‘You graduate and we’ll send you to flight school.’ Evidently he don’t need flight school.”
He did, however, recently tell Pam: “Don’t be surprised if you get a strange phone call one day from either the government or a private company that wants to hire me to do secret work.” She said Colt assured her that he wouldn’t do anything for the federal government unless he had a twenty-year contract.
She stressed a number of times that she was proud of Colt for his abilities, including being able to evade helicopters and SWAT teams. “He’s doing it because he likes to see if he can. He thinks it’s easy—he’s said that. And he’s sure making them look like fools.”
When a radio interviewer once prodded Pam, saying it sounded like she was rooting for him, she said, “Of course! I’m his mother!”
I ASKED IF PAM thought Colt might be doing some of these things for the press attention. “No, he’s his own person, very much. He’s not going to do anything because of what’s in the media.”
She said he was, however, following the news and his fan club online. “He laughs, reads me a few things over the phone, and we crack up. I told him the other day that when this is over, you have your pick of any woman, they’re in love with you.” I asked about his reaction to that. “He don’t care, he’s not into a girlfriend. He’s got other things on his mind.”
It didn’t seem contradictory to Pam that Colt thought the media coverage was absurd and yet he’d told her to be ready to drag the old gate across the driveway because he was planning “something big” that would have “the paparazzi” crawling all over the place.
With that warning and the recent story from Granite Falls, Pam seemed fatalistic about Colt’s chances, saying she didn’t think he’d make it out alive, “not if he took a shot at those cops.” She said that “everyone makes their life plan before they come to this earth,” so “whatever Colt’s going to go through, whatever’s gonna happen is gonna happen, he planned it that way… It’s predetermined.”
Pam said she was trying to get Colt a bulletproof vest. I asked if he told her he wanted one. “I don’t care if he does or not. I’m getting him one and he’s going to wear it. Sometimes a mother has to put her foot down.”
WHEN I STOPPED BY the next day to take photos of Melanie, it appeared that it soon wouldn’t be safe for anyone to put his foot down around Pam’s property. Her friend had arrived the previous evening. There was a big contractor bag filled with empty Busch Ice cans on the deck. Inside, Pam was doing her version of coquettish. She’d apparently been able to leave behind the weirdness for at least a few hours. For me, it was a whole new level. While Pam happily chatted on the phone, I sat at the kitchen table with Tim. Both physically and in his calmly menacing manner, he reminded me of David Carradine in Kung Fu. I wasn’t surprised when he told me of his martial arts prowess. He said he didin’t want to be identified because he had enemies from his time in prison. He was in there, he said, because he “broke a cop.” He added, kind of unnecessarily, that he had a real problem with authority.
Tim also told me that if he wanted to, he could find anyone—anyone—in two days. I wanted to tell him that things have changed a little in the last thirty-seven years, and now a ten-year-old with a Web connection can find anyone in two minutes… but I didn’t. It didn’t seem like the time for jokes. Instead, it was booby-trap time.
Tim picked up a shotgun shell and hunting knife, and patiently showed me how he was carving away the ends of the shell casings to empty the pellets while leaving the wad and gunpowder in place. Then, he explained, you simply add a cap that impacts the primer when stepped on, and bury it out in the yard. Voilà, a homemade “toe-popper.” It wouldn’t kill anybody, he said… unless of course he went into shock. It was just designed to blow off part of a foot. To complement the poppers, he planned on adding camouflaged nail boards, poor-man pungi sticks, most effective when dipped in shit.
Pam said these would keep the media and the police away. I questioned the wisdom of setting booby traps for the police. “If I put a sign down at the end of my driveway saying ‘Property Is Booby Trapped, Enter at Your Own Risk,’ I think that covers me… And I don’t care if it does or not. I’m not gonna have cops running around my property at all hours of the day and night… It’s just unnerving.”
They never made the “Booby Trapped” notice, but Tim did paint IF YOU GO PAST THIS SIGN YOU WILL BE SHOT on a big piece of plywood and posted it at the front of the drive.
My Outside magazine story about Colt hit the newsstands in mid-January 2010. I heard from a number of locals how unhappy they were that I was giving this kid, who was “a media creation,” national attention. Better, one said, that we should keep silent so it would all just go away.
Friends joked with Sandi that because of the story, Colt was sure to come back to the island now and pay me a visit.
According to Pam, though, Colton already knew who I was. “He checks out everyone I talk to,” she said. “And he’s been reading your Web thing.” Since there was no conclusion to the story by my deadline, I’d begun posting updates on a blog called Outlaws & Outcasts. Colt followed the posts as well as the Web sites that carried my travel-adventure stories.
Three weeks later, on February 10 at around 11 p.m., aviation authorities keeping guard over the antiterrorist no-fly zone wrapped around the Vancouver Olympics noted a small plane taking off from Anacortes Airport. The exclusion zone dipped to just north of Orcas Island, and any aircraft entering it had to utilize a special transponder code. This one wasn’t transmitting the correct signal. ATC tracked the plane as it flew an erratic course, teasing along the no-go line, but they kept from pulling the trigger on any of their contingency plans, such as launching fighters armed with Sidewinder suppositories. They monitored the plane until it disappeared from radar over Orcas, and then forgot all about it.
The plane, a $650,000 Cirrus SR22—the same model Colt had stolen for his first night flight—touched down at the north end of the Orcas runway and was found bogged down in the muddy grass alongside the airstrip. It was a decent landing in that at least the plane was still flyable, with only minor damage to a gear cowling.
At 8:15 the following morning, Kyle Ater opened the door to his Homegrown Grocery and saw cartoonish bare feet drawn on the floor. He figured it was an employee prank. “I thought, Oh, these won’t be hard to clean up because it’s just chalk. Then I took a couple more steps into the store and saw the tills laid out on the floor and water pouring out of the sink.”
The footprints trailed all around the store, up and down the aisles, ending at the side door with a “C-Ya!” The cash drawer was smashed open. “I went over to the sink to turn it off, and the security system was in there, underwater, along with my pliers, knife sharpeners, and a screwdriver.” He called the police. “I’d been getting a whole new level of service from them since all the Colt stuff started because of the media attention.” Kyle put on rubber gloves to keep from contaminating the scene and the officers arrived quickly. “But Steve Vierthaler told me, ‘Don’t worry, we won’t be sending anything to the crime lab because they won’t be able to look at it for a year.’”
Kyle says he and the deputies were thinking the break-in was a copycat because Colt had never done anything like draw footprints. “While they’re shooting pictures, though, a radio call comes in saying, ‘We’ve got a plane in the grass at the airport.’ We all hear this and instantly everyone says, ‘It is him!’”
The cops ran out of Homegrown and rushed to the plane, which had been sitting on the field for eight hours before airport manager Bea Von Tobel arrived, saw it, and thought, Oh no, not him again. The red-and-white Cirrus was pulled out of the mud and towed into a hangar belonging to Chuck Stewart (not his real name), the wealthy former CEO of a sportswear company.
Kyle wasn’t really surprised to hear about the plane. It meant that Colt had finally got him. “He was mad that I’d beat him the previous year, that I’d kept him from breaking in by staying here every night for two months while he hit all those other businesses in town.”
Sleeping on the floor with a .44 Magnum strapped to his leg hadn’t played well with the mild-mannered organic grocer. “The stress caused a huge spike in my blood pressure, so I had to start taking my Chinese herbs. I couldn’t keep staying here forever, though. It was exhausting. I needed to be at home in my own bed. So I basically spent all my year’s profits on this security system.” Kyle upgraded to a top-shelf sixteen-channel, high-resolution night-vision “really bad-ass system” that he could monitor from home on the Internet and communicate with via his iPhone. “It gave me a false sense of security… I mean this is a health food store; how many levels of surveillance do I need?”
A total of $1,200 was gone from the tills. The key to the upstairs office had been in the cash drawer, but it wasn’t used. Instead, the office door had been busted open. The business’s main computer was destroyed. “He thought the central server was the security backup, so he broke it open and jumped up and down on it, shattering the cards.” The actual surveillance system was in a self-contained unit. Colt had tilted all the cameras down and unhooked them from the system, then realized the monitor also housed the memory. “He cracked it open to reach in and see if there was a hard drive. He would have gotten it if he took out the twenty-four screws, but there wasn’t a Phillips-head around. So instead, he put it in the sink and turned on the water.”
Downstairs in the store, working by the light from the beer and wine displays fronting the walk-in cooler, Colt raised all the covers over the vegetables bins and slid open all the deli cases. “He left them open and we had to throw out all the food,” says Kyle. He didn’t touch any of the beer or wine, but Kyle was sure he took some organic produce. He also went into the walk-in and took an entire two-by-three-foot baker’s tray loaded with raw meat-and-cheese croissants that were proofing. “No way you could think they were ready to eat,” says Kyle.
Colt also lifted a big hunk of dessert, an entire organic cheesecake. This one was blueberry, not strawberry like on his shopping list collage, but close enough.
AS SOON AS I turned on my phone that morning, it rang with news of the stolen plane. Already, though, the Homegrown story had twisted into “the police dusted the floor and found footprints.” I got to Kyle’s expecting evidence of human footprints and instead had to laugh when I saw all the big “goofy foots” drawn on the floor. They even kind of fit in with the hippie vibe.
The first thing that struck me about the footprints was that there were a lot of them—thirty-nine, so many that they almost created a paisley pattern on the floor. Nothing about Colt said “Hitchcock fan,” so I assumed it wasn’t an homage to The 39 Steps. The drawings weren’t terribly intricate, but each had an arched shape and five toes, so it must have taken fifteen minutes or so to move around the store and chalk them all. Why take the risk of pausing in the middle of committing a felony to do all that? If you wanted to send a message, wouldn’t two feet have done it just as well as thirty-nine? While it could have been manic overkill, it looked to me more like Colt telling us how confident he was in his skills versus the police. He wasn’t afraid of dawdling at a crime scene. The smashed and drowned security system, though, seemed twisted. Why go to all that trouble to make sure no images of you survived at the same time you signed your autograph thirty-nine times? Of course other than his own self-portraits, Colt was severely camera shy.
The “C-Ya!” he tagged onto the end was in jaunty bold letters. Knowing the extent Kyle had gone to keep Colt out of his store, it was easily seen as a “Na na, you can’t stop me, I’m smarter than you!”—the same kind of tweak as restealing a bike out of a police station, or breaking a dog out of a pound, or returning again and again to take food from a home that kept upping its security measures. For a gamer, it was a great challenge.
When I went to the airport and saw the spot where the Cirrus ended up in the grass, something else occurred to me. The plane apparently landed at the north end of the runway and stopped quickly. That’s the quiet end of the airport bordered by the Ditch, a field and woods, so it made sense to land there just to make sure no one saw you run off. But it also made perfect sense if your real plan was to land, run to town for a quick snack and to leave your mark à la Zorro, and then take off again. That would be an all-time “You can’t catch me!” Secret-Agent Double-0 Smart-Ass, level 30 game move. It would take two daring night flights and two landings, the ultimate in-your-face to all those who’d been joking online that Colt must not have read the second half of the flight manual.
He’d told Pam to get ready for the paparazzi…
Two guests at Smuggler’s Villa reported hearing a plane revving its engine again and again at 4 a.m. that morning—as if the pilot was trying to get it unstuck. The timing fit.
One last detail that struck me about Homegrown is that the footprints were drawn with chalk from the menu board. Was the tag a spur-of-the moment decision—he saw the chalk and a bell went off? Or did he already know Homegrown so well that he knew the chalk would be there?
A local Eastsound woman later told me she’d seen someone suspicious in Homegrown the previous fall. “He caught my eye because he was extremely tall, barefoot at a time of year when even the barefoot folks around here are wearing shoes, and because he had this shit-eating grin on his face.” When Colt’s photo ran in the paper, she recognized his face even though there’d been something slightly different in his appearance. “When I saw him, he had on a dreadlock wig.”
Pam told me that Colt said he’d been going out in public in disguises, telling her, “You wouldn’t even know me, Mom.” He never said, though, whether one of his characters was Rasta Harris-Moore.
THE ONE UNASSAILABLY DISTURBING fact was that Colt was now embracing the Barefoot Bandit persona. He was actively courting the media. No, he wasn’t its creation, but he was digging the attention. Later, we learned that Colt had already been on the island in January, hiding inside Chuck Stewart’s hangar. To take the chill off a cold winter’s night, Colt squeezed his six-foot-five frame inside a Mini Cooper stored in the hangar and turned on the seat warmers. He stole a notebook and flashlight out of the glove compartment, and in a detail the cops—all amateur psychologists—love, he broke off one of the side mirrors to look at himself and feed what they believed was his narcissistic personality disorder.
What the visit to Stewart’s hangar meant was that Colt had been able to move on and off Orcas without being noticed, without having to steal a boat or a plane. The Anacortes plane was a prank done solely for the thrill and the headlines. That kind of behavior tacked on to the guns and the cop teasing meant that the danger to both Colt and everyone else had cranked up immeasurably.
THE FEBRUARY SUN SANK behind the islands at 5:30 p.m. Back home, after an uncomfortable talk with Sandi about being more vigilant, taking the keys out of her car, locking down the house, and using the new safe, the woods around our cabin once again seemed darker.
Where was he? If he had planned a hit and run, he was probably still looking for a quick way off the island. Flying was out, as the wind picked up wildly after dark. And surely the police now had eyes on the marinas. Or not.
At eight, I drove to Deer Harbor Marina to look for Colt or for people looking for Colt, and didn’t see either. By nine, I was in Eastsound and went to the airport and the Ditch and drove up and down the streets. Everything looked deserted. I drove down Orcas’s own Haven Road and parked by the Odd Fellows Hall, about 150 yards away from the huge NO TRESPASSING sign that marked the ancient Indian burial ground at Madrona Point.
Walking down the road, I expected a cop or FBI agent to jump out at any moment. This spot seemed a no-brainer for a stakeout, so I hunched my six-foot frame even shorter so no one could mistake me for the Bandit. Once I passed the warning sign and lost the glow of Eastsound, though, size didn’t matter. It was a black, moonless night and no one could see a thing. I kept to the path only by altering course whenever I tripped over a rock or bush. Slowly my eyes adjusted to the point where I could see a faint radiance of water and sky through the crowd of black, skeletal silhouettes of madrona trees to the west. About fifteen minutes in, I stopped and sat on a log. I couldn’t see or smell any campfires. The only option seemed to be to sit and listen. However, by this point the wind was gusting over 30 mph, hissing loudly through the trees. A regiment of infantry could have marched by without my hearing them. If Colt was heading in or out, though, he’d have to use this trail. Then I wondered what the hell I’d do if he did.
The cold wind cleared the skies, and stars came out above the trees, which were being whipped into a frenzy. Every big gust broke more widow makers out of the tall firs, the branches cracking like gunshots and then crashing to the ground. It was not a good night to be camping or hiding in the woods.
It also wasn’t a good night to be sitting there. I got up and started to trip my way back down the path. Just as I reached the huge gnarly Doug fir that guards the entrance, a long, agonized screech came out of the black woods. A raccoon was decapitating a squirrel or something… I didn’t stop to find out. I drove home thinking that along with dealing with some crappy weather, if Colt was spending a lot of time in the woods he must be having some wild, spooky nights.
Back at the cabin, I settled in to transcribe notes. Then at midnight, the dog went off. Murphy rushed from door to door inside the tiny cabin. As soon as I opened the front door, he growled and lunged outside. I grabbed him by the scruff but he dragged me off the porch, determined to get at whatever was under the house. I wrestled him back inside. Sandi, who’d been pretty cavalier about things up to this point, was wide-eyed. Murphy had never done anything like that in his three years on Orcas.
While I was in town earlier that day after hearing Colt had returned, I’d gone by our storage unit. It took me over an hour of digging through boxes but I finally found something I hadn’t seen since packing it away in Orlando. Now I pushed a handful of shells into the twelve-gauge pistol-grip “street sweeper” shotgun. “Probably nothing,” I said, shrugging, then went outside, telling Sandi to lock the door behind me.
There was nothing under the house. I walked up to the parking pad and no one was there either. I checked the cars, I snuck up on the outhouse and peeked inside. Then I hiked up the long driveway that cuts through the woods. I felt like an idiot, but I called out to Colt several times.
THERE WAS NO SIGN of Colt that night or the next. Any hope that he might’ve hightailed it off the island again was dashed the following day, though, when word spread that Chuck Stewart’s hangar had been broken into again.
The Olympics happening just fifty miles north meant an already increased security presence in the region, and Orcas suddenly got the attention of a host of federal agencies along with additional state and local law enforcement. At the same time, a number of islanders decided that they’d had enough and suited up for some Colt wrangling. It was an entertaining mix. One father-and-son team patrolling the Eastsound streets dressed in full camo gear spotted movement in the bushes and rushed in to grab what turned out to be two FBI agents. A baker heading to work at 5 a.m. rounded a corner and saw two guys peering into his restaurant with night-vision goggles—more FBI agents. Anyone male near town in a car or on foot between dusk and dawn was a target. One acquaintance who drove to the gym early each morning in his rattling pickup got stopped again and again.
The FBI also set up a camera in Bea Von Tobel’s airport office and fed video to their Seattle field office of every plane arriving or departing Orcas. Officially, though, the FBI continued to say they were not interested in the case of what was merely a local miscreant.
At the north end of the island, U.S. Coast Guard cutters cruised back and forth just offshore with their chase boats lowered, ready to snatch up anything trying to bolt out of the Ditch. Along with the coasties, DHS Customs and Border Protection 900- and 1,200-horsepower Interceptor Class patrol boats circled Orcas, sweeping the island and surrounding waters with their FLIR (forward-looking infrared, aka thermal imaging) and radar. U.S. Navy warships stood by along the border focusing their surveillance equipment on anything that moved. There were so many electromagnetic waves sweeping the area that we figured everyone on the island was now sterile.
SMUGGLER’S RESORT, SITUATED RIGHT on the Ditch and adjacent to the airport, served as a convenient base for all kinds of agents now sent on stealthy missions to capture Colt. They all came to Orcas undercover and, this being a small island, kept their secrets sometimes as long as fifteen minutes.
“They had multiple layers of undercover people here,” says Smuggler’s Mike Stolmeier. “I got different groups of from one to four guys staying in the condos and being real vague about their visits. But they’d always request the unit closest to the airport and then they’d casually try to pay with government credit cards. ‘Oh, we’re on leave from Iraq for a month.’ Yeah, right you guys… this is what you would do if you’re on a one-month leave, come to Orcas off-season when there’s nobody here and nothing to do. My favorite was a couple of guys, outdoorsy types, who’d been looking around and then came in acting real nonchalant and started asking questions about the marina and the airport and ‘Gee, does anything unusual ever happen around here?’ So I said, ‘Yeah, occasionally we get guys acting kind of suspicious.’ They didn’t get it, and one asked, ‘So you’ve actually seen people acting suspicious?’ I handed him a slip of paper with their license plate written on it, and said, ‘Yes, the two guys in this car.’
“The biggest batch were four guys who stayed a full week. Definitely tactical types, go-get-’em thirty-somethings, in and out of the condo all day and all night. They were dressed Eddie Bauer–style—trying to fit in on the island. Only thing was that they weren’t fishing.”
Some of the sightings were FBI tactical units, but there were other acronyms involved as well. The Department of Defense won’t confirm anything other than to say they “kept in touch with other agencies” about Colton Harris-Moore’s adventures on Orcas, but a couple of sources claim the DOD had their guys out here at least checking out the situation if not actively searching. One thing Colt probably didn’t know was that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has a vacation home on the island. Secretary Gates declined to comment on whether he pulled a few strings to be neighborly and try to end the crime spree, but when things started escalating, some residents were pulling for him to send in Delta Force.
It was also an election year, and sixty-two-year-old Bill Cumming was widely expected to run for sheriff again. The longer the hunt dragged on, though, the more disgruntled his electorate. With federal help, San Juan County deputies baited a trap for Colt, leaving the keys in a white Chevy pickup rigged with tracking devices and hidden cameras. They even parked it outside a hangar. The day after they secretly set it up, an islander driving members of the high school golf team passed the airport. The kids all pointed to the pickup: “There’s the decoy the cops put out!”
Five days after the Homegrown break-in, Sheriff Cumming put out a notice telling all San Juan County residents to consider getting alarm systems, and asking us to “wipe down all your surfaces,” like windows and doorknobs to make it easier for the cops to get fingerprints, and smooth our gravel driveways so they’d be able to find footprints and tire tracks when we got hit.
For the few island residents not already feeling paranoid, that did it. Good night and good luck.
THE FEDERAL FRENZY ON Orcas died down after about two weeks of the “undercover” agents coming up empty. FBI and DHS assets remained on call, though. Orcas went back to not even having twenty-four-hour police coverage. From 5 to 6 a.m. every morning, the island had no deputies on duty, a fact obvious to anyone who kept watch on the cop shop.
On Sunday morning, February 28, the sole young deputy manning the graveyard shift left the station and drove his police cruiser home to Deer Harbor. It’s a twenty-five-minute drive, one way; forty minutes during the summer when chances are you’ll be behind an “I brake for trees” tourist; or twenty minutes if you ignore the speed limits and risk offing yourself via a deer through the windshield or a skid off the cliff into Massacre Bay.
As soon as Colt knew the town was left unguarded, he came out of the shadows and approached Orcas Island Hardware. After the previous summer’s burglary, owner Scott Lancaster had called Colt a “cockroach” during a TV interview. That gave the Barefoot Bandit three possible reasons for coming back: replenishing his tool collection, collecting more cash, and revenge. Or maybe he was just stopping by to do a return: he brought along the bolt cutters he’d stolen in the first burglary.
Scott had moved the piles of bagged mulch that Colt climbed the last time. He’d pulled the pallets far enough away from the sloping roof that he didn’t think even Spider-Man could jump across to the building.
Colt once again scaled the tower of bags and then leaped, barefoot, across the void and onto the dew-slicked metal roof. His footprints led to each corner of the building, where they show he squatted like a gargoyle gazing out over the sleeping town. Satisfied the coast was clear, he went to the same warehouse window he’d found open last time. Scott, though, had jammed 2 × 4s into every frame, making them impossible to lift. Colt padded around the roof looking for another way in. He pried up a piece of metal siding, but realized it would take too long to make an opening large enough for him to squeeze through. He went back to the window, busted a small hole in the corner, then used a screwdriver to poke away the 2 × 4. The window slid open and he ducked through.
When the Cirrus showed up and Homegrown got hit, Scott had told his wife that he was going to start sleeping in the hardware store. “You idiot,” she said. “We spent four thousand dollars on that fancy new security system just so you wouldn’t have to do anything like that.”
As Colt started to climb down out of the loft, his body heat lit up an infrared sensor, tripping a silent alarm at 5:28 a.m. (In a stroke of luck for Colt, it was only almost silent.) Unaware that the security system was already calling the sheriff’s office, he continued down to the ground floor and went to the door leading to the shop. It had always been left open before the first break-in, but it was now locked. Colt went to work with pry tools.
Meanwhile at his home outside of town, Scott received a 5:30 wake-up call from the alarm company and jumped out of bed. When the alert went to the police dispatcher in Friday Harbor, they contacted the on-call deputy. Even though officers lived just a few minutes away from the hardware store, dispatch called the deputy who’d just gotten off shift and was aboard his boat all the way out in Deer Harbor. It took him forty minutes to get back to town.
Inside the warehouse, Colt wasn’t getting anywhere with the metal-framed commercial door, so finally he busted its window, reached through, and unlocked it. When he pushed it open, though, something was wrong. He could hear a little buzzer going off up at the front counter.
Scott arrived at the store ten minutes after he got the call. He went directly to the back and looked up at the window Colt had used before. “It was still dark so I couldn’t see too well, but it looked wrong.” Then he waited. “I didn’t want to go in until the deputy got there. I had this gut feeling that Colton was in there or else still close by, watching.”
The deputy arrived a half hour later and waited until a second showed up before entering the store. They walked down the display aisles to the back and found the bolt cutters. But Colt was gone.
Just down the street at Homegrown, Kyle had been back manning his tower ever since the break-in. He’d had many more hours to, in his words, “obsess” about Colt, and says he was starting to believe the kid might be a werewolf. That night, Kyle had been very uneasy. “It was the full moon, and I knew he’d be active, running through the woods growling and howling.” Kyle and Cedra had seen what they describe as a white wolf lying in a doorway across the street at 11 p.m. “Our dogs would usually be like ‘Let me at ’em,’ but they were really spooked by this thing.”
Later, the sound of footsteps in the courtyard between Homegrown and the yoga studio woke Kyle. He went down and found a deputy passing through. “He said nothing was going on, but yeah, right… the town was starting to get all ruffled up.”
The ruffling was unlike anything ever seen before on Orcas Island. Within a couple of hours, Whatcom County SWAT, Washington State Patrol, K9 teams with German shepherds, and all available San Juan County deputies were fanning out across Eastsound. Townsfolk hoping for a sleep-in Sunday were rudely awakened by the incessant brain-rattling thwops and sharp turbine whine of an ebony Homeland Security UH 60-A Black Hawk helicopter that showed up to tightly circle the town again and again and again for hours.
Idyllic Orcas Island looked like a war zone. Residents gathered at windows and on the street, craning their necks to watch the helicopter, and then shaking their heads as men in body armor with automatic weapons strode up and down the roads.
From the limited search perimeter both the helicopter and the ground forces were using, it was apparent they felt Colt had gone to ground within a very small area around town. However, he’d had at least a ninety-minute head start before any meaningful search began and was known to just run full out whenever threatened. I’m no manhunter, but a full five hours after Colt slipped out of the hardware store it looked like they were working a perimeter that Stephen Hawking could have run past in less than an hour and a half.
All day long, Scott Lancaster says local guys were driving up, guns in their cars, saying they were going to put a stop to this. “I thought, This is not good.”
With all the obvious law enforcement activity around the airport, including the Black Hawk using it as an Orcas base, you’d think Colt would head to one of the far corners of the island and hunker down. Instead, he did the exact opposite. The kid who loved planes couldn’t stay away from them.
At former astronaut Bill Anders’s hangar, his assistant noticed powder on the floor. “Later we realized it was from someone lifting and moving the ceiling tiles, as if they were looking for a security system or a place to hide up there,” says Bill. At the time, though, they didn’t think too much of it since nothing was missing and they hadn’t noticed any forced entry. Bill put his Cessna 400 to bed in the hangar as usual, with the keys left hanging from the plane’s baggage compartment door. “I always did that because then I know for sure the mags aren’t left hot,” he says. He left the island for two weeks, and when he came back, he found the plane’s POH sitting out, open, on a small table next to the airplane.
“That never leaves the plane,” says Anders.
The ceiling dust and the POH mysteries were explained when a San Juan County detective found pry marks on Anders’s doors. When they pulled up the records for the hangar’s phone line, they revealed a number of calls to Pam Kohler.
The remaining mystery was why the plane, a sitting duck for two weeks, hadn’t been stolen. Anders always gassed up at his museum, and hadn’t bothered to stop before his last trip, knowing he needed only a small amount of fuel to make the hop back to Bellingham. Colt would have figured out there wasn’t enough fuel to take him far simply by turning on the gauges. Still, Colt studied up on the Cessna 400, aka Columbia—a model he had never flown before. Maybe next time he came back to Anders’s hangar he’d find it with filled tanks… or maybe he’d find another 400 somewhere else when the time was right.
POSSIBLE COLT SIGHTINGS NOW poured in to the police. Bill Cumming laughed when he told me, “Any kid on Orcas who’s at least six feet tall is getting a lot of attention.” A friend who lives on low-bank waterfront just down the road saw a shadowy character she’s sure was Colton kayaking past her home very late on a February night, navigating by headlamp. The San Juans are one of the world’s best places for sea kayaking. There’s endless interest along the miles of serrated coastline, with views through clear water down into kelp forests and rocky reefs covered in purple starfish. Paddlers off the west coast of San Juan Island often get the privilege of seeing killer whales at eye level. However, kayaking in the San Juans is a daylight sport. Boat and ferry traffic, treacherous currents, and unforgiving cold water make midnight paddling in a major channel in the middle of winter almost as foolhardy as flying a plane without taking a class. The headlamp fit Colt’s MO, as did bucking conventional wisdom. Later that night, she heard someone trip over her garden wall.
Still, though, the most reliable sightings came from around the airport area. When sheriff’s deputies took a close look at the hangars, they found four more besides Bill Anders’s and Chuck Stewart’s that had evidence someone had gotten inside to snoop around. And they suspected Colt had broken into even more. Just north of the hangars, a local guy who’d been hired to keep watch over the Ditch twice saw someone lurking among cars in the lot. He says that both times when he went to check it out, a big guy he identified as Colt stood up, got right in his face, and “intimidated the hell” out of him before turning and running off into the woods.
Colt’s Winter Olympics stunt had, as expected, brought a flood of press attention and thousands of new members to his fan clubs who all rooted for him to “Fly, Colton, Fly” and never give up. Around this time I tracked down Colt’s prison buddy Josh, who told me about the guns and Colt’s “They’ll never take me alive” boast. Then Pam told me Colt was sure he’d get twenty years if he got caught. She also said he recently told her he’s “done with people.” Together with Colt’s history of depression, all of this convinced me that the danger had ratcheted up to the point where somebody was going to die: Colt, a cop, or an innocent bystander. I could easily envision one of the many elderly folks on Orcas or Camano finding him in their home and keeling over from a heart attack.
Since Colt was reading my blog, I decided to cross the line and address him directly. On March 9, I wrote a post titled “What Should Colton Do?” I told him that no way was he going to get twenty years if he gave himself up, but he would if somebody got hurt, even by accident. I told him it was easy for those sitting at home to type “Keep running!” because he was providing entertainment and vicarious thrills. When he died, though, or was sitting in a cell, they’d just go back to playing video games. I wrote that the only smart choice if he wanted to eventually go for his dream of being a real pilot was to turn himself in.
CHUCK STEWART’S BIG HANGAR is the closest one to Smuggler’s and the Ditch. Colt had taken an interest in that building from the beginning: blankets stolen from it in 2008 were found at one of Colt’s campsites. He’d been back inside several times since then to study the POHs for Stewart’s two planes. Deputies responded to each call, but couldn’t figure out how anyone had gotten in. Colt’s first peek into Stewart’s hangar had to be a hallelujah moment. Stewart’s aircraft were dream machines for anyone interested in flying. One, a $4 million Swiss-made Pilatus, is the hottest single-engine turboprop on the planet. Used by everyone from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to air force special forces, the Pilatus carries up to ten people and cruises at more than 300 mph with a range over two thousand miles. It’s also built to use short runways and land on rough dirt or grass strips. At nearly fifty feet long with a fifty-three-foot wingspan, the three-ton Pilatus was a magnitude more plane than Colt had ever attempted. However, a look at the POH revealed something very tempting. Its stall speed was only 5 mph higher than that of the Cirrus, which Colt had successfully landed twice.
Stewart’s other aircraft was an amphibious DeHavilland Beaver, the ultimate bush plane. With its floats bolted on, the Beaver offered a pilot leaving Orcas Island access to the entire Inside Passage, with countless isolated inlets and bays in British Columbia. It would mean another huge leap in skill and luck to safely land on the water, but if the plan was ever to kiss society good-bye and get lost in the wilderness, here was the ideal vehicle.
The sweetener, especially for a teenage boy, was that both of Stewart’s planes had very cool custom paint jobs, with vibrant black-and-blue smoke and waves streaming along the sides of their bright white fuselages. Actually, forget the teenagers: boys of every age on Orcas coveted those planes, as well as Stewart’s hangar, which also had a two-story pilots’ lounge built inside. As a model for a dream life, Stewart’s would be irresistible to Colt. Beyond the hangar filled with fantasy planes and the clubhouse, Stewart lived in a large waterfront compound on the west side of Orcas with a dock and water toys. He was fabulously wealthy, had a jet plane by the time he was forty, and hobnobbed with famous sports stars. The part of Stewart’s life that would have been alien to Colt, considering the take-it philosophy he’d espoused to Harley and Josh, is that Chuck had worked for it all.
Leading citizens in the Orcas community, Chuck Stewart and his wife raised their boys here, worked with local sports teams, provided support for numerous charities, and even built a school on the island. “He was one of the guys that was always there when I needed him,” says Ray Clever, a former Orcas deputy who had a short list of wealthy residents—“my sugar daddies”—who he counted on to support various programs he started to help local youth, especially at-risk kids.
Clever spent twenty-six years as a San Juan County cop after starting his law enforcement career in California. He went through the Los Angeles Police Academy and reminisces fondly about the days when it was permissible to choke people out. “My favorite was the time I choked out two lawyers at the same time. They’d dined and dashed on a $300 tab, and when I stopped them they told me to ‘fuck off’ and started to walk away. I got one in each arm and choked them unconscious. The fact that they were lawyers was just a bonus.”
Clever acknowledges that he was “a little jerk at times” with his newfound police power. “Every cop has to go through that. If they tell you that they haven’t they’re a lying son of a bitch.” One day a veteran who’d seen it all pulled him aside. “He reminded me that I wore a police uniform, not a judge’s robe, and that my badge wasn’t big enough to hide behind but it was big enough that it was going to hurt when someone shoved it up my ass.”
On his very first day on the job in the San Juans, Clever became one of the investigating officers for a five-year-long case, the famous Lopez Island bang-bang, chop-chop, burn-barrel murder featured in the Ann Rule book No Regrets. During his years working on Orcas, Clever was regarded by some as “the only real cop the island ever had.” Others remember him for once shooting and wounding a suspect who attacked him, leading to a lawsuit that the county’s insurance company settled.
Clever remained aggressive—“In my younger days, no one I chased ever got away”—but he was able to adjust to small-island community policing so well that parents of kids flirting with trouble would have him come over to put the fear of God and jail into them, after which, to those who chose the right path, he became Uncle Ray.
At sixty-five, the former all-American swimmer has added some girth around the middle, but it’s like the meat on a summer bear—solid. Clever retired from the force before Colt became an issue, but was pissed that someone was running rampant on Orcas and picking on his friends. And he wasn’t impressed with how well the sheriff’s office had done against Colt so far.
The sheriff, though, was taking the Stewart break-ins seriously. According to Clever, one of the island’s young deputies was detailed to set up a one-man stakeout inside Chuck’s hangar. He spent an entire night there, and later told other officers that he’d been very uneasy inside the dark, echoing hangar. He said he had a creepy feeling that someone was watching him. He kept hearing noises that didn’t make sense and said he was very happy once daybreak came.
Meanwhile, the FBI (still officially not interested in the case) was running a trap and trace on Pam Kohler’s phone line. They saw that calls had been made from a number belonging to Chuck Stewart. According to Clever, when they contacted Stewart and told him about the trace, there was a chilling When a Stranger Calls moment because the phone calling Pam’s number wasn’t the one in the hangar. On March 11 and 15, calls had been made from inside Stewart’s house.
Even more disturbing, says Clever, was that the family had been home on the dates the late-night calls were made. Chuck Stewart was incensed that someone was messing with his family. “If [Chuck] himself could have laid hands on this kid there would have been bloodshed. He would have torn him apart; he was that angry.” Chuck wanted action and his connections went well beyond local government. He had friends in very high places and, according to Clever, an FBI official flew in from Washington, D.C., to kick some asses into gear.
Together, Sheriff Cumming and the FBI came up with an elaborate plan to finally put an end to the Barefoot Bandit’s run. Since Colt had taken such an interest in and was apparently tracking Chuck Stewart, they’d set a trap at his home. Tactically, the place seemed ideal. Stewart’s property lies on two scalloped beaches in an area called Lover’s Cove at the base of Turtleback Mountain, just north of the turtle’s head. The mountain here rises precipitously to over one thousand feet in less than half a mile—so ridiculously rugged and steep that when trying to go uphill you’re forced to scramble on all fours. Two narrow gorges that feed down to the cove would funnel anyone trying to escape into narrow choke points. There are only five homes on that section of coast, with just two private roads leading in and out. To the west lay the 45-degree water and deadly currents of President Channel.
Even though the terrain negated Colt’s sheer speed, the authorities still had to be prepared to chase him on foot, something the Orcas deputies were not up to. The plan called for an elite FBI tactical team—gung ho, highly trained, and in excellent shape—to form a heavily armed ring around the outside of the house. The other part of the trap would be laid inside the home, where two FBI supervising agents and the San Juan County detective who’d been in charge of the Colton case from the beginning would be waiting to grab him. Local deputies would seal the roads and form the outer perimeter. Cumming also had the nuclear option, with a Homeland Security Black Hawk, a Whatcom County Sheriff’s helicopter, dog teams from Whatcom and Snohomish Counties, tactically trained Homeland Security agents, and two five-man teams of Marysville manhunters all standing by to launch into the operation if needed. In all, there were thirty-five local and federal law enforcement officers and all their high-tech assets arrayed against one barefoot teenager. On paper, it seemed a lock.
The operation was planned for St. Paddy’s Day, March 17. The Stewarts went off island, leaving their home and hangar irresistibly empty. It was cold, a damp 40 degrees at sunset, when a large group of us began to gather east of town. We kept warm with fiddles, bodhrans, brown bread, and Jameson, and for once it seemed like operational security held because there wasn’t a word around the bonfire about the Lover’s Cove stakeout. While we ramped up the craic, a delivery truck made its way down the winding road etched into the steep hillside leading to the Stewarts’ place. No one knew where Colt was and whether he had the area under surveillance, so the commercial van was used to secretly infiltrate the cop and two agents into the house. The inner trap was set.
Meanwhile, the FBI tactical team was still on the mainland, racing down I-5. That’s when the best-laid plans started to go awry.
Living in the San Juans means dealing with the ferries. Each island gets a quota of cars on every boat. In the winter, you can arrive at the terminal a half hour before a sailing and still get on. At the other extreme is the Fourth of July weekend, when a line of cars can back up into downtown Anacortes and you may have to wait eight hours to get on a ferry. Residents know to plan their summer lives so they never have to leave on a Sunday or come back on a Friday unless it’s a dire emergency. The rest of the year, you know to adjust your schedule to allow enough time to get to the ferry landing. The FBI declined a Freedom of Information Act request for the details of their St. Paddy’s Day ferry travel, but, simply put, the highly trained tactical team missed the boat.
If an Orcas resident misses the ferry and it’s just a matter of making him late for dinner, he curses and then heads back into Anacortes to load up on relatively cheap groceries and gas, and maybe gets a fast-food fix at the McDonald’s. If, however, it’s very important that he get out to the island and can’t wait for the next boat, there are a number of options. Two different small airlines fly from Anacortes to Orcas for $69 a person. For $350, a fast charter boat will run small groups and their gear to Orcas in less than a third of the time it takes on the ferry. So, if you positively, absolutely have to get there, no problem. Now, if you’re an FBI tactical team that’s going to be late for the big stakeout, you have those options plus even more. Your federal brethren in Homeland Security have super-speedy 1,200-horsepower interceptor boats, in both Coast Guard and Customs and Border Patrol flavors, based just up the shoreline in Bellingham. Plus you have San Juan County’s own Sheriff’s Office boat available. There’s no reasonable excuse why the FBI team wasn’t able to get to Orcas on time. But they didn’t.
This left the two FBI special agents and the San Juan detective inside the Stewarts’ house with a choice: stay inside or move outside. Colt had already proven he could escape stakeouts set up inside homes just by turning and running. The only time he’d ever been caught was when he was found inside a home and then bottled up from the outside. The story from a San Juan deputy who worked the case is that the three did move outside the home for a while, but then went back inside because they got cold. (When that detail leaked out, Orcas residents began to call it the Cabela’s moment because if the cops had worn their longjohns, they would’ve been comfy enough to wait outside and probably could have caught Colt.)
When the FBI SWAT team finally made it to the island, they were met by an Orcas deputy and led out past Jack Cadden’s Bonny Brook Farm to the private switchback road that heads toward Lover’s Cove. It was decision time again: go all the way to Stewart’s and risk scaring Colt off if he was already lurking nearby, or hold back and wait. They decided to wait and parked on a small patch of ground where several driveways converged about a mile from the target house.
After midnight, a truck approached the crossroads. According to Ray Clever, the FBI agents and Orcas deputy let it pass unchallenged. Any local islander seeing a cop car or a mysterious black SUV parked on the side of his residential road would have stopped to ask what was happening. The person driving this truck, though, kept going. Another suspicious fact about the truck was that it belonged to the Stewarts; it was the one they’d left at their hangar.
And, of course, Colt was driving it.
COLT DROVE TOWARD THE Stewarts’ home, but stopped short and parked the truck sideways across the road, blocking anyone from driving in or out. It appeared he smelled a trap, probably from sighting the vehicle parked at the crossroads. The odd thing is that instead of taking off into the woods, Colt continued on foot up to Chuck Stewart’s house. Game on.
There are two stories told by different San Juan County police officers at this point. One says that as Colt was about to open the front door, he heard motion in the house and turned and ran. The other says that Colt actually opened the front door, walked in, and flipped on all the lights.
Conventional wisdom would be that hitting the lights was a stupid move on Colt’s part. Actually, by Clever’s thinking, it was brilliant.
“If he’d come in and left the lights off, and there were people in there that knew how to play this game, they’d have come out of the dark and taken him down. So instead, he surprises them by turning on the lights. The FBI agents hesitate just for a moment, thinking, Well, maybe this is somebody that belongs here. The kid’s got it preplanned… He doesn’t hesitate. He one-eighties and he’s gone.”
When he heard the agents react, Colt turned and ran off into the darkness. Sheriff Cumming later reported that Colt was positively identified, and from what one of the officers told a local resident, they were close enough to see that he had night-vision equipment.
At 1:15 a.m., Bill Cumming lit the bat signal. Colt was trapped down in Lover’s Cove, but the sheriff didn’t want to take any chances. He called in all the backup and reinforcements at his disposal. Even if Colt was only a property criminal, this kid had embarrassed his department, cost it the confidence of residents, and pissed off VIPs. He’d now get the full shock-and-awe treatment. Deputies sealed off the roads. The FAA even set up a temporary flight restriction (TFR) around the entire west side of Orcas in order to clear the airspace.
The sheriff’s office put out word that a capture was imminent. Mission accomplished.
BACK NEAR THE TOP of the road leading to Lover’s Cove, Henry and Donna McNeil had been asleep for hours. Donna works as postmistress at the Orcas Landing office, and her family has been on the island since pioneer days. Donna grew up with her grandparents’ stories of how during the Depression folks on Orcas who knew how to hunt and fish helped feed their neighbors who didn’t. She was raised as a throwback island gal, crabbing, fishing, and hunting, even earning her high school spending money by selling raccoon pelts. As a young girl, she rode her horse all over Turtleback, and knows every one of its deer trails and skidder roads. She’d seen a lot of things on the mountain, but never expected anything like this.
The dogs went on alert first, which woke Donna up at 1:30 a.m. “Then there was this grumbling that got louder and louder, and suddenly the whole house is filled with light shooting in all the windows and skylights.” Waking up into what looked like a scene from an alien invasion movie, Donna jumped out of bed and ran to the door. Down on Jack Cadden’s field, a Black Hawk was dropping off the manhunters. “We had no idea what was going on. We never expected Colt to come out here; he was an Eastsound problem, so we had no clue.” The helicopter took off and came right at them, stopping only one hundred feet away and hovering at eye level over the road that ran next to their hilltop house. “The pilot turned on a red light in the cockpit so we could see him,” says Donna. “And then he waved.”
The chopper would move down toward the cove and sweep the area, then come back to hover near their house, over and over. Donna turned on her police scanner and could tell they were chasing someone. At 3:30 a.m., they saw a light out in the trees and Donna called the sheriff’s office. “They told me, ‘Just stay in your house,’ but wouldn’t give me any more information.” That didn’t sit well with Henry. “Horseshit, this is my property,” so he strapped on a .45 under his bathrobe and went out in his moccasins to check around. As he walked to the edge of the woods, he saw flashlights swinging, heard voices hollering back and forth and radios going off, and saw dark figures moving through his private skeet-shooting range. One of the lights caught Henry in its beam and immediately men started shouting, “Halt! FBI! FBI! FBI!” Henry held up his hands and shouted back, “Homeowner! Homeowner!”
The FBI tactical guys asked Henry to go back inside, but he told them he was going to look around his property. He went over to an old blue pickup parked on a patch of clay that’d turned mucky from the recent rains. Henry shined his light on the ground to make sure he didn’t step in the mud, and checked inside the truck.
Donna called the county again, demanding some information. Finally, a deputy pulled into their driveway and said that they were after Colton Harris-Moore. Donna told him about the abandoned farmhouse back in the woods on her parents’ property. “He sluffed it off, saying, ‘We don’t think he’s gotten this far. He was spotted down at the crossroads.’”
HOMELAND SECURITY CALLS THEIR UH-60 Black Hawks “tactical apprehension aircraft,” and outfits them with cutting-edge catch-’em gear. The copters’ Star Safire FLIR is so sensitive that it can zoom in not only on a warm body, but just on the residual heat where someone has touched an object. It makes tracking someone who’s barefoot even easier than if he were wearing shoes because he leaves a trail of warm footprints that show up white against the cold ground. Conditions were ideal, as it’d dropped into the mid-30s, making warm bodies stand out even brighter. One thing Colt had going for him was the tree cover, since Orcas is primarily forested in evergreens. The thick layers of fir and cedar acted as insulation to hide his thermal signature. Unlike the Ace Hardware chase, though, the searchers knew basically where Colt was. He might be able to hide from the Black Hawk by finding a big fleshy cedar and hunkering down underneath, but as soon as he stopped moving, the dogs should have caught up to him.
Since they had information that Colt used police scanners, the searchers even used a special tactical frequency he couldn’t eavesdrop on. That, though, caused communications trouble since not all the cops had the same radios. Turtleback also blocked signals, and an Orcas deputy had to station his vehicle on the road just beside the McNeils’ so he could relay messages among the teams.
Early in the morning of what was now the eighteenth, a request went out to the Orcas Island Fire Department Auxiliaries to set up a big pancake breakfast for the search teams. Everyone assumed it was going to be a celebration.
The Orcas rumor mill also had to put on extra workers once the sun came up. Reliable word varied from “They’ve got him trapped against a cliff” to “cornered in a shed” to “He went in the water.” TV reporters were tipped off and Seattle crews started toward the island. As the hours passed, though, it became apparent—at least to locals—that things weren’t wired as tight as they appeared.
Tactical hunter teams started going from house to house, waking residents for permission to search their properties. One resident asked if there was any danger. “Don’t worry,” he was told. “We have Turtleback Mountain surrounded.”
It’s not wise to laugh at someone holding an automatic weapon, but anyone who knew Orcas could tell you that unless the U.S. Army’s Tenth Mountain Division was also deployed out in the bushes, there was no way Turtleback was surrounded.
AFTER DONNA MCNEIL LEFT for work, Henry went back out to walk the property. He stopped at the chicken coop to make sure the birds were okay and found a surprise—no eggs. They’d been off the island on the seventeenth, and the hens had been laying five a day all month. There should have been ten eggs. It’s hard to imagine someone running from a helicopter stopping to pick up eggs, but they never found an explanation. It also lends some credibility to the idea of searching every “farmhouse, henhouse, outhouse, and dog house.”
Whether or not there was a fly-by egg heist, the next thing Henry found was less equivocal. In what had been a smooth patch of clay mud near his pickup three hours before, he now found a big bare footprint. He called the police and Donna, who came back home to find a yard filled with black cars with no license plates. Seven guys—FBI, Marysville troopers in full camo, Homeland Security agents in all-black tactical gear, and deputies from Snohomish and San Juan Counties—were all puzzling over the print like they were Bigfoot fanatics. They also spotted a number of partials and a second full footprint near the chicken coop. “The head FBI agent said, ‘No, that’s not his print,’” says Henry. “He said it was too small, like a size nine.” (A professional tracker hired by CBS News later estimated that the prints were made by someone who wore a size thirteen shoe.) “Then he asked us if we’d been running around barefoot that night. Yeah, right.”
Whoever made the tracks appeared to have been making a detour around the deputy sitting in his truck relaying radio calls. Henry asked why they weren’t bringing a dog up since the prints were certainly fresh enough to track. “They told us that the dog team had gone back to the mainland at five-thirty a.m.”
Donna asked the searchers if they’d found anything at the old farmhouse. “They all looked at each other. The Orcas deputy hadn’t told anyone about it. They got all excited, so I asked them if they wanted me to take them to it. They said, ‘No, ma’am, these are professional trackers.’” It was full light out, and Donna says she described exactly how to get there. More than thirty minutes later, she says, a call came in from the professional trackers reporting that they’d gotten lost heading to the two-story farmhouse a quarter mile away.
THE SEARCH CONTINUED THROUGHOUT the day. Local squad cars crawled down Crow Valley Road with their trunks open and filled with piles of Marysville manhunters, legs and rifle barrels sticking out. The FBI agents charged past in black vehicles, driving back and forth from one fruitless hot tip to another. Roadblocks were set up, taken down, and then set up again on the same roads. The Black Hawk and sheriff’s copter continued to sweep the terrain with their surveillance pods while patrol boats scanned the shoreline.
At 3 p.m., Sheriff Cumming told the troops to start winding down. At 4:11, he put out a press release: “The extensive, intense search for Colton Harris-Moore on Orcas Island has now been scaled back to an ongoing investigation… This is an ongoing, multi-agency investigation involving both county and mainland-based law enforcement agencies. Therefore, no interviews and no additional, specific details of the search activity or the investigation will be available.”
THERE WAS A STRANGE reaction on the island. On the one hand, many people thought the big paramilitary overkill was ridiculous. However, there were now also a lot more folks officially scared. The story that this was just a nonconfrontational property thief and squatter didn’t jive with black helicopters roaring around all night and day, and heavily armed men going door to door. Local authorities on tourist- and retiree-sensitive Orcas had long given the sense that this kid was just a nuisance. If he’d been a serious threat, like a murderer or a rapist, then they’d have really gone after him and, boom, it’d all be over. But now everyone wondered: If this was someone who’d been leaving behind a trail of bodies instead of just bare footprints, what would they be doing? Sending in helicopters, manhunters, dog teams, and the FBI? Done, done, done, and done. With no results.
Evidence that a lot of residents were thinking about their personal security was the sudden rush of orders with our local gun dealer for “less-lethal” rubber bullets. Designed to stop someone without killing him, these shotgun rounds used to be called nonlethal, but depending on where they hit the target, they weren’t.
One of the last tips on the eighteenth came from Carolyn Ashby, who’d been sitting at her kitchen table in Crow Valley, three-quarters of a mile from Turtleback, watching the helicopters. At 3:30 p.m., she and her daughter spotted a “great big” man dressed in a black hoodie acting very strange in one of their cow pastures. While Carolyn was on the phone with the police dispatcher, she lost sight of the guy. “I carried the phone out onto the porch, and suddenly he walked out from behind a shed. I said, ‘There he is!’ and he took off running. He ran through the tall grass uphill… I’ve chased cows through that field and it’s not easy.” Ashby’s Holsteins and horses lifted their heads and watched the stranger run by. “They must have been thinking, Oh boy, he’s in trouble, because the cows know they get in trouble whenever they break into that field.”
A deputy responded and a helicopter hovered over their property for about an hour, but to no avail. “My son-in-law is six-four and they swooped down on him, but they could never find the guy in the field.”
Carolyn and her husband Eb’s grandsons are the fifth generation of their family on Orcas. In all their time here, she says nothing like this had ever happened. “Things just aren’t the same anymore. My daughter takes a baseball bat when she goes out at night to get wood. When you let the dogs out after dark and they take off after something, you’re scared to open the door and let them back in because you don’t know what’s out there. You feel trapped inside your own house.”
A number of older folks took the threat so seriously that they started planning to move off the island. They could take the added expense, the long trips to get mainland medical treatment, the extra day it took to get anywhere else in the country to see grandchildren, and all the other inconveniences of living in the San Juans because it was such a peaceful and safe setting. But they hadn’t signed up for Black Hawks chasing fugitives through their backyards.
Down on his 120-acre spread at the base of Turtleback where he raises cattle, eighty-five-year-old Jack Cadden had been rooting for Colt to wise up, quit his shenanigans, and go off and get a life somewhere. “He was a smart bastard, kept the deputies busy. If he’d a put all that smarts to a good use he woulda made something out of himself. To tell you the truth, I kinda hoped they never would catch him.”
When Jack found out that it was because of Colt that the “son-of-a-bitch helicopter” kept waking him up, he did something that he’d never done in his seventy-eight years on Orcas: “First time I’ve ever locked a goddamn door on this island!”
That a guy like Jack was locking his doors says something. As a seventeen-year-old marine, Jack took part in the invasions of Guam and Okinawa, got shot twice, and came home with two Purple Hearts, a Silver Star, and a Japanese sword that, Jack says, “one of their officers didn’t need anymore.”
Jack Cadden ain’t scared of the dark or anything else. Now, though, because of Colt he had to leave lights burning all night.
If Colt came into his house, Jack said, he’d just handle it. “If he made me, I woulda shot him in the leg or foot or something.”
Unlike other guys who’d been puffing up and talking about shooting people during all this, you had to take Jack seriously. And though I know he would’ve given Colt every opportunity to back away before putting an extra hole in him, Jack actually had previous experience shooting at barefoot guys. And that’s worth a quick Farmer Jack story:
“This is back in the days when there was quite a batch of hippies around the island—crazy bastards. Nancy and I were sitting eating breakfast, and here comes this strange-looking guy across the field. I picked up the old twelve-gauge that I kept loaded in the corner and went out on the porch. Well, sure enough he comes up toward the house. I said, ‘I don’t know what the hell you want around here, but you better get gone.’ He picked up a stick and started waving it around, so I let one fly right over his head. Man, he took off down the road, right across that sharp crushed rock, barefooted! I came back in and Nancy’d called the law. About a half hour later, this sheriff’s car comes up the driveway and they had the guy in the backseat. They says, ‘Is this the guy?’ And I said, ‘Sure looks like him. What did you bring him back here for… you want me to shoot him now?’ They said, ‘Oh no no no no!’”
SPECULATION BY THE EVENING of the eighteenth was that Colt lay crumpled on the rocks below the west coast cliffs. Other stories circulated that Turtleback was riddled with caves and that’s where he was hiding. A detective called Donna McNeil to ask where the caves were, and she explained that though there was a mine shaft from an old gold mine, it was now in a homeowner’s front yard and had been filled in. She did tell them about a couple of quarries on the mountain, and says that a search near one of them turned up a campsite tied to Colt.
FBI agents and Marysville manhunters stayed on the island after the big chase and canvassed homes around Turtleback, asking the residents if they knew “any good hiding places,” but turned up nothing. Months later, hikers stumbled upon a campsite on the mountain where it rises to a commanding view above Crow Valley. It was a spot less than a mile and a half from Stewart’s and only a half mile from the Brodys’ home. The camp was littered with water bottles, food wrappers, and three Pilot’s Operating Handbooks taken from airplanes.
There were a couple strange incidents in the days after the big chase, both in an area between Turtleback and Eastsound. In one, a man came home to find his shower running.
Then, remarkably, on March 22, Colt went back to Chuck Stewart’s home. He broke in and stole Mrs. Stewart’s set of keys, bottles of Pellegrino water, and one of her son’s sweatshirts. The Black Hawk launched, but again found nothing. On the twenty-sixth, Chuck climbed into his Pilatus and saw that the plane’s POH had been pulled out and opened up to the “start” checklist. Then on April 1, his caretaker discovered that the hangar’s alarm system had been tampered with.
One night during all this activity—he’s not sure exactly which—Josh got a phone call. “Colt was inside a hangar he’d broken into. He called late and said he could hear the helicopters flying around. We didn’t talk long, though. He said he had to run.” Josh says Colt’s manner was just like always: “Totally relaxed.”
After that, Colt lay very low. There were no credible sightings for several weeks. The police believed—or at least wanted to believe—that their massive show of force had chased him off the island. Residents, though, seemed tuned to something, some energy that Colt brought to the island. It was the same feeling you get when you’re walking through grizzly bear or cougar country—that little background buzz, a tickle on the neck. And that was still around.
In our cabin it’d become an uncomfortable running joke. Every time we heard a strange noise in the night, either Sandi or I would yell out, “Knock it off, Colt, we’re trying to sleep!” Then we’d laugh. And then we’d listen harder.
Murphy felt it, or maybe he was just feeding off everyone around him. He definitely acted more alert as we did our daily two-mile hike through the Deer Harbor woods. There was one spot not far from the cabin where several days in a row he stopped and stared into the trees, refusing to budge until I put all my weight on the leash. Since early March, there’d been a persistent rumor on Orcas that there was a $500,000 reward for capturing Colt. Where before there’d been just a few vigilante types roaming Eastsound, now there were guys all over the island arming themselves and taking to the trees. I emailed Sheriff Cumming, asking him to make some kind of statement saying there was no such huge reward (at this time there was a total of $3,000 offered among rewards posted by Orcas, Camano, and Crime Stoppers). But he never put the rumor to rest. It occurred to me that the cops had no reason to quash it since the supposed big reward put a whole lot of camo-wearing, off-season deer-hunting, shit-kicking mossnecks out in the field shaking the bushes. Plus, with only a $3,000 reward, it was just as likely that one of these guys would shoot Colt and mount him over his fireplace instead of turning him in.
With the rumored bounty on top of all the anger, it wasn’t the safest time to go traipsing through people’s woods. After Murphy stopped at the same spot the third time, I called the neighbor and asked if I could hike in to check it out. I found what looked like the perfect campsite, but no one was around and there was no evidence except for a large pile of scat. I ran down the possible suspects: too big for a raccoon, too far from the water and not fishy enough for an otter, no stray dogs around… The only wild animal in the area big enough would be a deer, but their droppings are usually in Milk Dud form… What the hell was I doing? This kid actually had me kneeling in the woods examining excrement like Kolchak the Crap Stalker.
IF I WAS GOING goofy, at least I wasn’t alone. Most of the people I spoke to admitted they’d been calling out to shadows and noises in the dark woods. Five days after the big Lover’s Cove debacle, I spent an evening manning the Eastsound lookout atop Homegrown with Kyle and his .44 Magnum. He hadn’t been getting much sleep since the break-in.
“This store makes a million noises,” said Kyle. “Refrigerators clicking on and off, the wind flapping the vents, birds landing on the skylight… One night I heard this banging downstairs, grabbed the gun, and ran down, but there’s nothing there. We figured out later it was Pumpkin’s tail wagging. Another time we scared the shit out of one of the deputies who’d climbed up the outside stairs because he thought he saw something up here. The dogs heard him and I come running out of the office in my underwear with the gun, and we’re yelling, ‘Hold it right there!’ at each other. So yeah, we’re nervous, but you’re only paranoid if he’s not out there… and we know he is.”
It was a quiet night in town, but every ten minutes or so, someone would walk by and Kyle would jump up. “See!” It seemed like suddenly every kid on Orcas was at least six-three and wore a hoodie that made him look taller. Kyle had bumped into some of the young guys wandering around. “They were out there packing Tasers, looking for Colt.” Kyle’s theory was that some of the other kids out wandering at night were actually helping Colt: “Maybe they’re acting like decoys.”
The speculation about whether Colt had help on Orcas seemed to end when investigators reportedly found a note written in what looked like a female’s handwriting that he’d left behind in Stewart’s truck. According to a detective familiar with the case, the note was addressed to Colt and warned him about a deputy who lived in a marina, presumably Deer Harbor. It also gave directions to a home and it included tips such as which car to look for in order to tell if the owners were around. The note discussed a plan for stealing a boat and heading for Alaska. “It talked about finding a long-range cruising boat,” says the detective. “And appeared to involve at least two people other than Colt, although we wondered whether Colt had invented all this and planted it as a diversion to throw us off his trail.”
There were about a dozen boats moored at Deer Harbor Marina that could make the six-hundred-mile journey to Alaska without having to risk stopping for fuel. Cruising-style boats trade speed for long range, though, so there’d certainly be a lot of opportunities for the authorities to spot a boat during the approximately seventy-five-hour trip. But it had to be an attractive thought. If you ran only at night and laid up in one of the myriad secluded coves during daylight, chances of discovery were much less. And when you got wherever you were going, you’d have a comfortable floating home. Paint over the boat’s name, and it’s not inconceivable that you could anchor someplace almost indefinitely. The issue then would be, as usual, feeding yourself. The other problem was timing. Usually only commercial fishermen make that trip outside the calmer summer season. Winter winds and waves make the exposed stretch between the north end of Vancouver Island and the start of the Inside Passage a rough place for even large ships.
WHEN KYLE PULLED OUT his insurance file the day he got hit, he discovered something disturbing beyond how much the cash loss and $5,000 in damage was going to cost him out-of-pocket. “Not long after I bought Homegrown in 2006, I had a break-in. When I looked at those records, I realized that other than the chalk footprints, it was the exact same burglary. Same method and place of entry, same way of laying out the tills. It was total déjà vu.” In the previous break-in Kyle lost high-tech goodies, a cutting-edge laptop, and an external hard drive loaded with all of his music. The crime was never solved or even really investigated. Kyle, though, was now sure it had been Colt.
“He waits until you think he’s gone and you let your guard down and then he strikes again.” Kyle was convinced Colt was feeding off the island’s energy. “It feels like I’m going to wake up and he’ll be leaning over about to bite my neck.”
COLT’S FASCINATION WITH RETURNING to hit the same places was very unnerving. In April, two events happened that involved previous victims. One seems like just another opportunistic break-in, while the other was much more unsettling.
At 11:15 p.m. on the eleventh, the telltale turbine scream of a Black Hawk tore the air just above our cabin. My first thought was that it was heading to Lover’s Cove again, and I wasn’t looking forward to spending the night making small talk with a deputy manning the roadblock. As I walked outside, though, I could still hear the helicopter. Up the hill where our knoll falls into what we call the Dark Forest, the Black Hawk’s blinking red light showed through the trees. It was close. I jumped in my truck and drove to where Deer Harbor narrows to a fifty-foot bottleneck between the bay and a shallow wetland. The Channel Road Bridge crosses at that spot; it’s the only way those of us living on the west side of Deer Harbor can get to anywhere else on the island. I stopped in the middle of the bridge and watched the helicopter as it hovered almost directly above, its brilliant NightSun spotlight hunting the woods and fields of Cayou Caye.
Earlier in the day, Ryan Carpenter, owner of the Deer Harbor Inn Restaurant whose credit cards were used to order spy cameras and a flight helmet in 2008, had gone to do some work on a house he rents out. The three-bedroom home sits high atop a hill, its windows offering a gorgeous view of the entire harbor. Ryan walked into the living room and noticed that the wooden blinds had been lowered. “They were old and didn’t work too well, and whoever lowered them broke bits and pieces off trying to get them down.” Ryan switched on a light and saw that someone had been playing house.
He had cooked popcorn and eaten it by candlelight—leaving a pool of wax on the floor. Next to the wax sat a water bottle and a couple recent newspapers. One of them, a copy of the Islands’ Sounder, was marked “Lobby” and had been taken from the Inn at Orcas Island, just down the road.
Conveniently for whoever had been inside snacking and reading, Ryan himself had moved a king-size mattress into the living room from a bedroom where he’d been working on the oak floors.
Ryan didn’t call the police. Instead he called his brother. “I told him that the Barefoot Bandit had been there and maybe we could catch him for the reward.”
Ryan worked his shift at the restaurant, and was walking home at nightfall when he noticed a light burning in the rental. He figured he must have left it on. “I stopped home to tell my wife I was going over to turn it off. Then I stepped back outside, looked over, and it was already off. That’s when I got a little scared.” He called 911 and the sheriff’s office told him someone would be right there. He then called his brother, Matt, who grabbed a baseball bat and came over. “The adrenaline was pumping,” says Ryan. “And we’re waiting and waiting.”
After forty minutes, they couldn’t take it anymore and, together with their innkeeper and his dog, they went across the road to the house. The innkeeper went in the front door while Ryan went in the back. No one was in the house, but the Sounder and Seattle Times were gone. “It’s like he just came back for the newspapers.” When they went back outside, they heard something or someone crashing through the woods. “It could have been a deer, but didn’t sound like it.”
Ryan says that fifteen minutes after they went into the house, he saw the first deputy. “They reprimanded us for going in before they got there because it could have been dangerous, but it seemed like it took them a long time to get there.”
The Black Hawk arrived two hours after Ryan called and stayed on station until after midnight, delighting local residents who got to stay up late and make shadow puppets when its spotlight shined in their windows.
With the action so close, neighbors now said they planned on putting a sign at the bottom of our road directing Colt to my cabin.
THE NEXT COLTONESQUE EVENT that month was more serious. Chuck Stewart and his wife were in their bedroom overlooking President Channel. A light suddenly appeared out on the black water. Tug boats pulling log booms and the occasional commercial fisherman traverse the passage between Orcas and Waldron Island at night in April, but few other boats. The light swung back and forth, but it looked too small for a boat’s spotlight. As it came closer, they realized it was a headlamp worn by someone in a kayak paddling toward their property. They knew no sane kayaker—or even a tourist—would be out there at night.
They immediately called 911 and Sheriff Bill Cumming himself jumped into the police boat over on San Juan Island along with two deputies. The sheriff put the lash to Guardian’s turbo diesels and the thirty-five-foot aluminum catamaran (bought with money from a drug seizure) made it on scene even before an Orcas deputy could get there by car from Eastsound. Pulling up off Stewart’s beach, they fired up an infrared scope and spotted a figure approaching the house from the water. The Stewarts have a dock, but like everyone else, they remove the lower, floating portion for the winter. This meant the Guardian was unable to let the deputies off. The Orcas officer in his patrol vehicle then came down the hill with his lights flashing, and the suspect fled into the night. It seemed almost inconceivable that the same guy who’d walked into an ambush that put thirty-five cops on his ass would come back to the same place and try it again.
“After that,” says Ray Clever, “I said enough of this bullshit. Here’s [Chuck’s] wife, petite blonde, just the soul of an angel, generous and kind, and she’s terrified in her own home. She was ready to close down the school, take everything they own, and get the hell off Orcas. She was in tears, asking me to get her a gun and teach her how to shoot. That really got to me. I called [Chuck] and said, ‘I’m yours, won’t cost you a dime, how can I help?’”
Clever went out to their home to check out its security and came up with some self-defense responses in case they had any more unwanted visitors.
Next he and Chuck went to the hangar. By now there was evidence that Colt had been in there at least four times, but the police still had no idea how he was entering. There were no pry marks on the man door or the large hangar door, so the supposition was that he’d been using a key, though no keys had been missing until the seventeenth.
They stepped inside the man door at the southwest corner and Ray began a methodical scan. “We started at the floor level—anything out of place? Any panels loose? No.” They surveyed 360 degrees and then looked higher. As they were checking out the north end of the hangar, where the two-story pilots’ lounge with its kitchen and sleeping area stood as a building inside a building, Chuck noticed something. The hangar has translucent fiberglass panels that act as vertical skylights, and there was one small section, a six-inch strip, that looked brighter than normal near the top of the lounge. Chuck said, “That’s not right.” The pilots’ lounge doesn’t reach the top of the hangar, so there’s a gap between its plywood roof and the ceiling. “We walked up and tried to open the attic door,” says Clever. “We can’t budge it. That ain’t right either.”
They went outside. Attached to the north end of the huge hangar is a shed-roofed storage building. There were crush marks on the downspouts coming off the roof. They pulled out a ladder and climbed up onto the roof that starts about ten feet off the ground. “We walk up to where it’s attached to the side of the hangar and there are two piles of human shit up against the wall.”
The light strip they’d noticed was a gap where Colt had cut out the fiberglass panel and then replaced it, creating a hatch. “We pulled that off, lean in, and here’s a mattress, food, gallon jugs of water, clothing, stuff like [Chuck’s] son’s BlackBerry that’d been taken out of their house, an iPhone, a whole box of junk.” Colt had taken stamps, scissors, bed linens, an insulated mug, a DVD, a mirror, even Glass Plus from the Stewart home to outfit his hideaway in their hangar. He also had a sleeping bag and piss jars. “Then we find the .22 handgun that’d been stolen over in Granite Falls after that plane crash. Then, finally, we find the flight manual from the plane he took from Anacortes in February.”
They left everything where it was and replaced the hatch. Clever’s cop juices were flowing and he told Stewart that this would be the place to catch Colt. Chuck Stewart agreed to fund a private stakeout.
CLEVER DIDN’T THINK APPREHENDING Colt would be easy. “He’s not some scared kid, he’s out there planning, and it has worked well for him for a long time.”
It would take some time to put together his Orcas A-team and gather some special equipment, but Ray didn’t want to risk missing Colt. He decided to start running the stakeout with just his thirty-five-year-old protégé, Vitaly. They set up in a storage unit near Stewart’s hangar, but ran into a snag the very first night. The storage unit had an alarm system, which had been turned off. However, unbeknownst to them, it was programmed to automatically reset. When Ray opened the door, the alarm went off and an Orcas deputy responded. “If Colt had been watching, he might have seen us,” says Ray. “But it’s next door, so we didn’t worry too much that we were blown.”
Over the next week, the stakeout evolved into an elaborate trap. Ray met with John Gorton, Orcas Island’s English-born octogenarian electronics wiz who, after twelve years as a radar engineer with the RAF, spent the rest of his career working on top-secret defense systems for Hughes Aircraft. Gorton moved to Orcas twenty-one years ago at the same time as the Stewarts, and has known the family since then. He runs a video production company on the island, and has been asked to set up a few surveillance systems over the years. Before Colt, though, the jobs tended to be Orcas in nature, such as setting up night-vision cameras for someone who wanted to know who was knicking the fruit off his apple trees.
For Stewart’s hangar, Gorton designed a system using a series of audio and infrared video sensors that fed monitors in the storage unit. They knew they had a challenge because of Colt’s obsession with surveillance equipment. “The problem with infrared cameras,” says Gorton, “is that in a pitch-dark room, you can see the illumination diodes if you know what to look for.” Gorton, though, had a connection in the tech business who sent him a prototype of a new kind of IR camera, one with a totally invisible light source.
The cameras and microphones would let the stakeout team know when Colt was inside the hangar. Clever and Stewart felt sure that Colt was planning on coming back for the Pilatus. “Once he climbed down from his nest to the hangar floor, we had him,” says Clever. The first thing they’d done was replace the hangar’s locks. There’d been deadbolts with knobs on the inside—one twist and you’re out the door. Now, you needed a key to get in and to get out. All the locks had also been rekeyed so there was no chance Colt had a copy.
Once Colt entered the hangar, three of the four-member team would rush out of the storage unit and cover the exits while the other kept watch at the monitors. Vitaly, says Clever, is the fastest guy he’s ever seen. “He could run that boy down, no doubt.” Ray also recruited two men he does martial arts training with, Chuck Silva and a local high school teacher, Corey Wiscomb.
Corey had been at the center of a recent Colt-related controversy. He’d given students in his Math with Business Applications class a challenge: come up with a business and launch it online within four hours. These were all Orcas kids living through the biggest news event to ever hit the island. They understandably thought of Colt, and designed a T-shirt that showed a silhouette of someone running from other figures and a cop car, with text that read: “You Betta’ Run, Colt, Run.”
There’d been some local students on Colt’s Facebook pages urging him on, but those were underclassmen. These guys and gals doing the T-shirt were seniors, and they said they understood the problems that the Barefoot Bandit was causing in their community. Groups of Orcas High boys were even heading out into the woods on weekends to search for Colt. The words on the T-shirt, they said, meant “We’re coming to get you!” Their plan was to donate all proceeds from sales to Colt’s local victims, and they stated such on the Web page. It seemed like a no-brainer to the kids. With the atmosphere of fear and hate growing on the island, their project even had a sweet touch of doe-eyed idealism to it. “We thought it might help start the community’s healing process,” says student Alison O’Toole.
The project became a twofer. Along with the practical experience of starting a business, the kids also got a civics lesson. A number of islanders went apeshit on them. One business owner said that if they didn’t immediately pull it all down, he’d refuse to ever let any Orcas High School student into his store again. There was also a referendum coming up on a bond for repairs on school buildings, and some folks threatened that they’d fight against it if the kids didn’t cease and desist. “We were totally shocked by the reaction,” says student Sam Prado.
The final decision was supposedly left up to the students, but there was a flurry of phone calls that went much higher than the twelfth grade. Ultimately the kids backed down, getting a cold-water baptism in small-town politics.
One of the reasons Ray Clever says he asked Corey to help with the stakeout was because he knew he’d “taken crap for the T-shirt thing.” The main reason, though, was because he and Chuck Silva are what Clever calls “bloody proficient” fighters. “If Colt put up a struggle, it would not have gone well for the young man.”
Not that the plan was to let it get to hand-to-hand combat. Chuck Stewart outfitted Clever’s team with bulletproof vests, shotguns loaded with less-lethal baton rounds “to knock him down,” and Tasers “to sizzle him like bacon.” They also carried high-powered strobes designed to disorient him. Clever would be the only one armed with lethal ammo. “I had no intention of shooting him… unless he presented, then all bets were off.”
Ray asked the sheriff for a police radio so if it all went down, his posse could keep in touch with the deputies to make sure everyone knew where everyone else was and make sure nobody got shot accidentally. Instead of a radio, they sent a police scanner, which Ray took as a slap in the face. Just in case, he outfitted his team in bright red T-shirts and got word to all the Orcas deputies to not shoot the guys in red.
After Ray told the sheriff about finding the gun in Colt’s nest, Bill Cumming wrote an email to all the Orcas deputies, saying, “This information raises the threat level… You are to use this information as though he is armed and take all appropriate precautions with him. Also, under no circumstances are any of you (us) to discuss this information with anyone other than those who NEED to know.”
Ray and his team continued to work their day jobs, then every evening at dusk they sneaked into the storage unit, where they took turns watching the monitors and sleeping on a mattress laid on the cement floor.
While the Clever team lay in wait for Colt, others were actively tracking him through the Orcas woods. Colt not only had manhunters on his trail, but now, most fittingly, a Sasquatch hunter. Seventy-year-old Richard Grover brought his four decades of experience in tracking Bigfoot to the search for the elusive Barefoot. A real hope would be that he’d bag both: find Colt and Bigfoot so Orcas could score some more tourist traffic. Grover hunted around Orcas using a dowsing rod tuned to certain energies. Deputies say he actually scared up a teenager wandering through the woods, but unfortunately it turned out to be neither Colt nor a postpubescent Sasquatch.
ON MAY 10, I got a call from Pam. The FBI agents had been by again. “They told me a boat was stolen off Orcas about a week ago and they think Colt mighta done it.” They asked Pam if she knew where Colt was headed. She told them no. Then she says they told her it might not matter anyway, because the boat hadn’t turned up anywhere and that could mean it sank.
“They always try to affect me, get me to cry, but it takes a lot to get me to cry. I told them Colt’s a good swimmer. They said, ‘Yeah, but the water’s so cold now that he’d get hypothermia and drown… ’ So I asked them how long it takes for a body to float up. They said a couple of weeks.”
I’d never heard Pam shaken up like this. She’d been philosophically fatalistic, but the FBI saying Colt could already be lost beneath the frigid waters seemed to hit her with a cold splash of reality.
She hadn’t heard from Colt in months, and asked me if I’d write a post on my blog telling Colt to give her a sign that he was alive. One thing her manner told me—and I presume told the agents—is that she really had no clue where Colt was. I figured the FBI was just trying a particularly heartless tactic to try to shake some information out of her. But… maybe they were telling the truth.
It made sense. Things had been very quiet on the island; no Colt sightings for a month. With the Orcas ferries and airport under surveillance, if he didn’t have someone to hide him in his or her trunk, then stealing a boat would be the easiest way off. I checked the marinas for reports of stolen boats, and there were none. But the island also has many private docks, and there are plenty of dinghies and kayaks beached in waterfront yards. A very strong kayaker who knew how to read a current chart could island hop to the mainland. He’d have to cross a shipping lane, though, presumably at night when ships don’t see or stop for kayaks because the radar reflections off the low-riding craft are about the same as a floating tree branch.
Setting sail on these waters at night whether in a kayak or small boat always entails some risk. The Salish Sea’s cold currents claim paddlers and boaters even when they’re not skulking around in the dark. The more I thought about it, the more likely it seemed that Colt could indeed be dead, a blanched body wrapped in kelp on some lonely pebbled shoreline. It was a disturbing image that had a stronger effect on me than I expected. So late that afternoon, I wrote a short blog post telling Colt that his mom was worried and asking that he give her a sign to let her know he was okay.
The next morning, May 11, as I rounded the curve to drive onto Channel Road Bridge, I suddenly slammed on the brakes. There was a thirteen-foot-long bare foot taking up the entire right-hand lane. I guess you could consider that a sign.
If Colt did it, I was glad he wasn’t dead. At the same time, though, it was a little chilling. I felt like the planchette just moved itself across the Ouija board. I scanned the woods surrounding the slough, sensing that I was being watched.
The footprint didn’t look like the thirty-nine left on Homegrown’s floor. Of course the difficulty factor between drawing eighteen-inch-long feet with fat chalk and running up and down a bridge in the middle of the night with a can of black spray paint outlining a foot the size of a Volkswagen Beetle is immense, so artistic allowances must be made. I stood on top of my truck and took a photo, which I emailed to Bev Davis to show Pam. Word came back right away that Pam was positive Colt had painted it for her.
Pam told me she called up the FBI agents and verbally thumbed her nose at them, saying that Colt was definitely alive and now she did know where he was, so there.
LATE THAT NIGHT, A rock or something else hard hit the metal roof of our cabin. Once again I found myself standing outside in my boxers staring into the blackness. This time, though, I didn’t bring a gun. The footprint on the bridge was about communicating, not threatening. No one showed himself or answered my calls except for a lonely screech owl. If the big foot on the bridge was an “I’m okay,” it was also a “good-bye,” because that was the last sign of the Barefoot Bandit on Orcas Island.
It was also the stepping off point for the most famous outlaw road trip since Dillinger’s last run.