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.