Colt’s next flight was aboard the U.S. Marshall’s Con Air. The Feds transported him back to Washington State and placed him in solitary confinement at the SeaTac Federal Detention Center. After waiving his Sixth Amendment right to a speedy trial, Colt’s attorneys John Henry Browne and Emma Scanlon began an attempt to herd cats in the form of a dozen prosecutors representing a multitude of victims and politically beholden to the affected communities. Browne’s strategy was to create a “global” plea deal for Colt that wrapped all the federal and state charges into one package.
Meanwhile, it was an election year. In Island County, Mark Brown ran unopposed and won his second term as sheriff—though there was at least one write-in vote for Colton Harris-Moore. Since 2008, budget problems have forced the Island County sheriff’s office to ax a quarter of its deputies. At the same time, the money crunch also hurt the county’s ability to do anything with at-risk youth other than lock them up. According to prosecutor Greg Banks, new evidence-based interdiction programs had been enjoying “great success at reducing the amount of juvenile crime and incarceration” in the county. However, he says, the best of these programs were being cut due to budget.
Down on Camano, Colt’s mom, Pam Kohler, remained in the public eye by calling local reporters and radio programs and pumping out quotes. After the tsunami hit Japan in March 2011, she went on a radio show to say that Colt could fly over relief supplies. On Seattle’s Ron and Don Show, she complained that someone had stolen her IF YOU GO PAST THIS SIGN YOU WILL BE SHOT sign. Ron, speaking for all the listeners howling at their radios, said to her, “These kids that steal things, I can’t stand them.”
THROUGH HIS ATTORNEYS AND in messages passed to friends on the outside, Colt repeatedly said he felt bad for his victims, and even that he regretted hurting or killing the planes. Colt’s victims responded to this in various ways. The owners of the three planes Colt “killed” each had significant out-of-pocket financial losses after insurance settlements. Seattle radio personality Bob Rivers, however, says he isn’t holding a grudge.
“I was irresponsible in my youth, and honestly didn’t get my shit together until I was thirty-three, so I can empathize with a young guy who made bad decisions,” said Rivers. “He also had a tough upbringing. On the other hand, in my charity work I’ve seen kids whose disadvantages make Colton’s childhood look like a cakewalk—and some of them his age are studying to be doctors. I’m glad Colton was caught, and he needs to pay his dues, but I hope he finds a way to have a good future.”
In Indiana, Spider Miller, whose plane Colt took to the Bahamas, said sending Colt to jail for a long time wouldn’t do Colt or the victims any good. He wished the kid could instead be sentenced to something more constructive, “like having to wash a lot of airplanes.”
Out in Idaho, though, former attorney Pat Gardiner thought whatever prison sentence they gave Colt wouldn’t be long enough. When asked by prosecutors to submit a victim impact statement, Gardiner wrote that “Colton Harris-Moore represents a severe danger to the public and will most likely revert to his old ways as soon as he’s released.”
One person who knows Colt well, and passionately felt he deserved a break, is Bev Davis. Bev’s faith in Colt was sorely tested during those strange episodes at the trailer back when he was fourteen, and then again later when she learned he’d been carrying a gun while on the lam. She feared Colt’s run would end tragically. “I’m astounded, given his life, that he didn’t lash out and really hurt someone—or commit suicide. That showed real strength of character.”
When Colt was captured, Bev again reached out a caring hand, and he responded. They began communicating regularly by phone and email. “I’m amazed at the change in him,” she says. “At how much more mature he is than when I last saw him. He truly understands the impact of his actions, and he’s sincerely sorry for the damage he’s caused, especially to the people of Orcas and Camano Islands.”
Bev says that Colt has adapted to prison life fairly well. “But that’s not a big surprise, since he’s already had a lot of practice at dysfunction, discomfort, pain, and fear in his young life. He’s an extraordinary person, and I know in my heart that when he gets out he will be okay and he’ll lead a productive life—like the one he would have had if his circumstances had been different.” Bev says that she’s only one of many who are willing to help Colt transition back into society. Already, friends have pledged to pay for special counseling while he’s in prison, and for college when he gets out.
Colt says that when he’s released, he wants to study aeronautical engineering, and hopes to someday launch that aircraft design company.
COLT’S GLOBAL PLEA PROVED unworkable, so the charges were split into two batches. On Friday, June 17, 2011, he pleaded guilty to seven federal charges including bank burglary for the Islanders Bank attempt on Orcas; two counts of interstate transport of a stolen aircraft for the Idaho and Indiana plane thefts; foreign transport of a stolen firearm for carrying a .32 pistol across the Canadian border; interstate transport of a stolen vessel for his Columbia River crossing; and piloting an aircraft without a valid airman’s certificate for the Anacortes-to-Orcas Island flight during the Winter Olympics.
As part of the same plea, Colt admitted responsibility for more than twenty-five other crimes committed outside Washington State during his cross-country run, from stealing eyeglasses to Escalades, pistols to pleasure boats, to “threatening to inflict physical harm” on Kelly Kneifl in his South Dakota basement. The sentencing recommendation calls for sixty-three to seventy-eight months in prison plus additional time on probation. The plea also stated that the monetary loss attributable to just these federal and state crimes was “not less than $1,409,438.” Of that, Colt agreed to pay $959,438 in restitution to the victims.
As for how a high school dropout could ever begin to pay that kind of restitution in just a single lifetime, a full quarter of the document’s twenty-eight pages dealt solely with Colt’s ability to tell or sell his story. U.S. Attorney Jenny Durkin said that the agreement ensured that Colt would never personally make a dime off his crimes. Even once he’s paid back the victims in full, Colt agrees to forfeit to the government any money he earns from anything related to his crimes or tagged “Barefoot Bandit,” whether movies, books, commercial endorsements, video games, Happy Meal toys, or toe rings. With so many kids looking at Colt as a hero, the prosecutors wanted to send a clear “crime doesn’t pay” message to all of his fans, followers, and potential imitators.
All during his run, even as he became more and more famous and appeared to court the media attention, Colt steadfastly maintained that he would never tell his story. He finally agreed to sell his life rights only once the reality of restitution set in. Normally, crime victims receive piddly payments stretched over many years. Signing away his story rights, difficult as it was for Colt, enables his victims to recoup their losses quickly if a movie gets made. It was also a valuable bargaining chip in the overall plea deal, and could allow him to walk out of jail debt-free as opposed to having his paychecks docked for the rest of his life. As to signing away the money itself, Colt says that was the easy part because he never wanted himself or anyone in his family to make anything off his story.
Shortly after the federal plea was filed, Colt entered into a film contract with 20th Century Fox, which had already optioned this book. If cameras start rolling, more than $1 million will go to Colt’s victims. Even with the movie deal, though, there are parts of his story that Colt refuses to tell. While he admits that he occasionally met and even stayed with friends at times during his run, Colt is never going to name them.
TALK OF THE MOVIE deal again brought up the phenomena of Colt’s large number of fans. Throughout his run, many commentators seemed to take the idea of people rooting for the outlaw Colt as a sign of the apocalypse. Colt himself said he didn’t understand and recoils at the attention—seeing no disconnect between feeling that way and the facts of him signing notes “The Barefoot Bandit,” drawing thirty-nine footprints on the floor of a burglarized grocery store, repeatedly committing high-profile airplane thefts, and telling friends and even new acquaintances to watch for him on the news. The only real surprise, however, is that anyone, including Colt, could claim they’re shocked that he attracted so much notice.
The Great Recession was as fertile a ground for Colton Harris-Moore to emerge as an outlaw hero as the Great Depression was for John Dillinger. The Internet and social networks simply ensured that Colt became a world-famous outlaw at warp speed compared to all those who’d gone before him.
Even though Dillinger and his gang went on a tear across the country that left a dozen dead—including cops and bystanders—people rallied to him just as they would seventy-five years later to Colt, who was much, much safer to root for because he hadn’t physically hurt anyone. In Dillinger’s Wild Ride, Elliot Gorn quotes people of the gunslinger’s day venting in ways remarkably similar to Colt’s Facebook defenders about what they saw as a corrupt system rigged against the common man. “If folks had jobs and could feed themselves, if government protected citizens from the banks that preyed on them… they wouldn’t make heroes of men like Dillinger.”
According to professor Graham Seal, author of The Outlaw Legend and one of the world’s foremost authorities on outlaws both historical and in folklore, to break into the pantheon of great outlaw heroes, the person must go beyond common criminality. “He needs a few actual or mythical characteristics, such as the ability to elude capture… and he needs a bit of style.” Colt had all that, plus a sense of humor, which always helps.
Americans like to believe that our national character still includes a little bit of the frontier outlaw. And compared to most outlaws, Colt was easy to get behind. He was a clean-cut rural kid who was nonconfrontational and hadn’t killed anyone yet. The most repeated plea on his Facebook pages was “Don’t hurt anyone!”
In all outlaw stories, though, the victims are forgotten. They get in the way of the fun, and the outlaw’s fans prefer they’d just exist in the background with their hands in the air. Stopping to look at them slows down the tale and risks impugning the character of the sympathetic bandit. In Colt’s case, some of his supporters caricatured and dehumanized the victims simply as “rich people” and thus somehow deserving of having their stuff and their security stolen. The fact that Colt also stole from middle-class folks and those running mom-and-pop businesses was an inconvenience best ignored. The last refuge was the “So what? They’re insured,” rationalization, obviously made by those who’d never had to deal with an “insured” loss.
ON DECEMBER 16, 2011, Colt stepped into an Island County courtroom to face sentencing for thirty-two Washington State charges. Judge Vicki Churchill, the same judge who sentenced Colt in 2007, presided. Colt’s attorneys filed a mitigation package that presented a narrative of Colt’s early years. It was the most damning report yet of his mother’s “toxic presence that shaped his childhood.” Much of it was in Colt’s own words: “My mom is also a heavy alcoholic… No question that her entire life, house, family and friend relationships have been ravaged by her alcoholism.” Colt talked about Gordy Moore, too, recalling an argument in the trailer about child support payments, when Gordy “literally picked my mom up and threw her across the room,” the event that Colt says Pam claims is when she broke her back.
A large part of the defense’s argument for granting Colt leniency was based on the assertion by the psychiatrist Dr. Richard Adler: that Colt suffers from Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders. The diagnosis was based on numerous neuropsychological tests and on the testimony of Pam Kohler’s brother, Ed Coaker. Coaker said of Pam, “When Pam drinks one beer she gets mean, and when she drinks two beers she wants to fight. But, Pam drinks twenty beers… she would drink until she couldn’t hardly walk.” Coaker admitted to drinking with Pam while she was carrying Colt and claimed “her pregnancy didn’t affect her drinking whatsoever.”
The other revelation from Ed Coaker was his claim that Pam had met at least two of the men who shared the trailer with her and Colt, including Bill Kohler, through prison pen-pal programs.
The mitigation report also took the state CPS system and Stanwood-Camano school district to task for letting Colt “fall through the cracks.” Dr. Adler notes that “All of the CPS investigations were closed in short order, ironically due to mother’s lack of cooperation.”
Colt says he loves his mother and wants her to be happy. Her alcoholism, though, “is the number one, and as far as I am concerned, the only problem my mom has that prevented a friendship with me.” As of press time, Colt has been in Seattle for seventeen months, but has not yet seen Pam.
ON THE WASHINGTON STATE side of things, Greg Banks from Island County and Randy Gaylord from San Juan County told the judge that they’d taken Colt’s rough childhood and his nonviolence into account in recommending that she give him the high end of the sentencing range: nine years and eight months.
After the prosecution and defense had finished their presentations, Judge Churchill recessed for twenty minutes then came back into court and made a remarkable speech:
I think this case is a tragedy in many ways, but it’s also a triumph of the human spirit. I sympathize with the defendant due to the terrible upbringing he had. As one investigator indicated, “it was a mind-numbing absence of hope.” It was a tragedy he had to steal food… to endure the taunts and jeers of classmates… that he had an alcoholic and abusive mother… We can all shake our heads and wonder how did this all happen, and more importantly, how can we keep it from happening to another child?
Judge Churchill said that in reviewing Colton’s upbringing and the psychological reports of his mental health issues, “I was struck that I could have been reading the history of a mass murderer… I could have been reading about a drug-addicted, alcoholic, abusive young man who followed in the path of his mother. Yet I was not reading that story. That is the triumph of Colton Harris-Moore. He has survived.”
Sitting in the courtroom, it felt like the judge was about to let Colt walk out a free man or maybe give him a medal. But there came a “nevertheless… ” Judge Churchill said she was elected to uphold the law, was bound by the state’s sentencing reform act, and needed to protect the public. She acknowledged that “Mr. Harris-Moore has an extensive criminal history, and a high offender score.” She said, though, that because she felt he was remorseful, contrite, and because he was paying full restitution—“something that is unique in cases like this”—she would give Colt the minimum sentence allowed within the standard range: seven years and three months. She ended with, “I wish him well.”
Colt, who was ready to accept the max, was happy and relieved with the judgment. Churchill tacked on the $292,167 in restitution owed to the San Juan and Island County victims, and Colt was taken away.
Colt’s federal and state sentences will run concurrent, but the state clock does not begin counting down until he turns twenty-one on March 22, 2012. With time off for good behavior, he could be stepping out of a Washington State prison in time for his twenty-fifth birthday.
UP HERE IN SAN JUAN COUNTY, Sheriff Bill Cumming decided not to run for another term. After a tough, mudslinging election, voters chose new blood in fifty-one-year-old Rob Nou, who says his policy is that deputies should collect forensics from every crime scene possible.
Unsurprisingly, the crime rate on Orcas Island dropped after Colt left. I suspect that it might remain even lower than what it was before he arrived. Because of Colt, residents are much more conscious of the potential for crime. Many homes and almost all businesses are wired with burglar alarms and surveillance systems. Unfortunately, the relaxed, open-door atmosphere is a thing of the past.
Sandi, Murphy, and I remain perched on Raven Ridge, our mossy little patch of Northwest paradise. I think of Colt every night as I go around and check the cabin doors. It’s not a happy chore. Ironically, Colt says he chose to come to Orcas Island mainly for the same reason we did: because it’s such a peaceful, beautiful place. Colt even says he spent most of his time here in Deer Harbor, but says that while he did see me a number of times, he was not the one we heard under the cabin. Murphy, for one, is not convinced.
After piecing together what I know of Colt’s entire life, though, there’s no anger, just frustration and sadness. I feel both for the victims that are still affected, and also for Colt due to the past events that were out of his control coupled with his own bad choices that will result in him spending years behind bars. But I also have hope for his future.
I realize now that Colt’s big smiles in the Bahamas were also a sign of his remarkable resiliency. Colt appears to have sloughed off his negative identity as an alienated bad boy and now sees himself as a student. It’s certainly better that his energies go toward planning for college instead of plotting helicopter attacks on Costco.
Colt reached out through a friend to say that although he doesn’t like the idea of the book and movie about him because he thinks it will make it harder to eventually melt into anonymity and live that “normal” life he so craves, he doesn’t hold it against me. He also said that he hopes we can go kayaking or hiking on Turtleback Mountain together when he gets out.
I look forward to that. Though I’m glad he didn’t ask me to go flying.