The Barefoot Bandit

by Bob Friel

  Vierthaler told the Chamber members that all the businesses should consider alarm systems. “I would prefer a silent alarm,” he said. “But because we are so understaffed, the response time is at least ten minutes, so an audible alarm would be better.” He had some simple suggestions, too: “Leave the lights on inside and use motion detector lights outside. These people are like cockroaches: you turn on the lights and they run.”

  He also suggested that everyone, at their businesses and residences, put wooden dowels in their windows. He didn’t report, however, how the sheriff’s office had recently learned firsthand the importance of that do-it-yourself tip.

  RUMORS FLEW AROUND THE island—as usual—but other than a few unofficial “If you knew the shit that I did” warnings, Orcas residents were never alerted that a burglar brazen enough to break into the cop shop and even pepper spray a deputy had been stalking the island.

  There were a couple more break-ins that fall, but both happened at construction operations, typical targets for local kids. Maybe, as the sergeant told the Chamber, “these things happen in cycles and end when [opportunistic burglars] get caught or leave the island.”

  Then came that surreal November 12, when Bob Rivers’s airplane flew away. Burglaries dropped back to their usual low level once the Cessna took off, but the police never connected the plane theft to any of the other crimes that had happened on the island that summer because they had no forensics.

  As soon as she heard about the stolen plane, Marion Rathbone went directly to the police and reminded them about the Sporty’s Flight Training Course taken from Vern’s. She’d been waiting to hear about a crime involving a plane and here it was—she felt it couldn’t be a coincidence. She says the sergeant’s response was an authoritative “You can’t learn to fly from DVDs.”

  The other person on Orcas who had a clue was Ryan Carpenter, who wondered if the $900 flight helmet ordered with his credit card had just taken off.

  Chapter 8

  Airline pilots call the area around the San Juan Islands “the blue hole” because the Olympic Mountains and the Vancouver Island Range hold back the roiling Pacific clouds, often leaving a pocket of clear blue air over the islands when it’s raining everywhere else in the region. It’s the same rainshadow effect that happens on the east side of the Cascades. Forks, the legendary home of the Twilight characters, lies only seventy miles west of the San Juans yet averages over a hundred inches more rain per year than falls on the islands—and nothing smells worse than wet werewolf.

  The mountain defenses and location in the middle of the inland Salish Sea keep San Juan Islands winters remarkably benign considering how far north they lie. Just to the west, the Pacific coasts of the Olympic Penninsula and Vancouver Island promote “storm watching” vacations where shawl-swaddled folks sip cocoa and watch sixty-foot waves explode against the shore. The Salish Sea, though, is walled off from the open Pacific and its huge swells. In the other direction, rising dramatically in the east and visible from Orcas, Mount Baker holds the world record for highest single-season snowfall: 1999 saw it smothered with ninety-five feet of snow. However, down in the islands the sea moderates temperatures so snow and ice rarely stick around.

  If there’s one month not to be in the San Juans it’s November, when the islands often take hits from major tree-toppling windstorms and the year’s hardest rains. The rest of late fall and winter are usually mild, what the Irish call “soft” days of mist and occasional drizzle with cool temperatures. Still, daylight can be in depressingly short supply this far north, and the low-slung sun seldom rises with enough strength to feel it on your face. Island residents pile Douglas fir into their wood stoves and pull together community potlucks so they can laugh away the darkness with other hardy full-timers. On Orcas, the Giving Tree goes up at Island Market and people buy presents for those local kids who’d otherwise go without at Christmas.

  Then winter gives way. The buffleheads and goldeneyes fly off, replaced by spring swarms of rufous hummingbirds returning from their epic Mexican vacations. Spring is also when the San Juans’ 125 pairs of bald eagles weave the finishing touches into their massive nests atop waterfront trees, and the three resident pods of killer whales begin spending more of their time around the islands. The real start of summer doesn’t depend on the calendar but on whenever the hallowed North Pacific High chases the drizzly Aleutian Low back north. Once this semipermanent air mass takes over around the Fourth of July, the San Juans can see two months of wondrously monotonous blue skies and 72-degree days that seem to go on forever (at this latitude it’s dark for only about five hours in midsummer).

  Long before any vacationing white man arrived on Orcas, its peaceful, easy summers were enjoyed by the Lummi, one of the Northern Straits Salish-speaking tribes. Lummi Indian clans moved out to the island each June and set up camps where they feasted on the plentiful salmon, crabs, and clams. The only downside to summering in the San Juans back in the day were the occasional murderous raids by Haida and Bella Bella, warlike tribes from up in the Queen Charlotte Islands and the Alaskan coast. The first white settlers in the San Juans married Salish women because they knew the skills to survive in the Pacific Northwest wilderness. However, the native women remained so afraid of the Haida that even in the last decades of the nineteenth century they’d hide themselves under blankets when sailing between islands during the summer raiding season.

  From where I live in Deer Harbor, the only road to Eastsound sweeps around Massacre Bay, named for an 1857 raid that wiped out more than one hundred summering Lummi, with the surviving women and children hauled away as slaves in forty-foot-long war canoes. A beautiful little knoll just offshore also takes its name from the slaughter: Skull Island.

  When I arrived in town on a brilliantly sunny Thursday, August 6, 2009, the news was that a boat had been found that morning mysteriously abandoned off Eastsound’s Waterfront Park. Boats sometimes pull their anchors or slip their knots. They’ve also been found adrift after their owners leaned across the gunwale to take a leak and disappeared overboard. But not this boat.

  The sheriff quickly connected it to the report of a boat stolen from La Conner, a touristy little harbor town on the mainland about nine miles from Camano Island. The trip north to Orcas covered between thirty and thirty-five miles, depending on whether the thief took the protected Swinomish Channel up and around Anacortes, or navigated the wild waters of Deception Pass.

  It wasn’t quite a forty-foot war canoe, but for the residents of Orcas Island, it was still an ominous sign.

  WITHIN DAYS, KYLE ATER, owner of Orcas Homegrown Market and Gourmet Delicatessen, discovered that someone had tried to break into his organic grocery on North Beach Road. The burglar climbed to the second floor, where Ater keeps an office adjacent to a long dining room lined with windows that provide a nearly 360-degree view of downtown. He reported it to the police and asked if it might be related to the previous year’s unsolved thefts or the recent stolen boat. The deputy, he says, assured him it was just an isolated incident.

  “People had been stealing stuff from Homegrown for years before I bought it,” says Ater. “Kids just walking out with beer from the cooler… and the police never did anything about it because this was just the stinky barefoot hippie place.”

  Ater, who’d been on the island for eleven years, sank everything he had into buying Homegrown in 2006. He’d been burglarized shortly after taking over the grocery, and he was determined not to let anyone rip him off again. Like nearly every other Eastsound business after all the mysterious summer of ’08 troubles, Homegrown had a security and surveillance system. Ater, though, decided to take it all the way. Each evening after they closed up, he and his girlfriend, Cedra, took their two dogs, Pumpkin and Skyla, plus a loaner Rottweiler named Mattie, and camped out on the floor of the office upstairs. Kyle also bought himself a .44 Magnum revolver.

  Serene Orcas Island at the height of its summer season, with tourists in killer whale T-shirts strolling the q
uaint downtown eating ice cream cones, now had its slender, bespectacled purveyor of natural foods and holistic health supplements patrolling the ramparts packing Dirty Harry heat.

  ON AUGUST 18, MEMBERS of a prayer group noticed a short-haired young man acting oddly inside St. Francis Catholic Church, which sits kitty-corner to the airport. The guy awkwardly knelt down at the votive candles and then looked up. He wasn’t gazing as far as heaven, though. He had more secular concerns. When he spotted the surveillance cameras, he flipped a hoodie up over his head and left. He unnerved the parishioners enough that one asked for an escort to the parking lot. Two days later, someone broke into the church through a back window, busted open the sacrament room with a hammer and screwdriver, and then climbed up into the ceiling to take four of the security cameras along with the attached DVR. No money or other items were stolen, just the surveillance system. The thief left behind two cameras, but poked them toward the ceiling so they couldn’t watch him.

  Somebody messing with the church went beyond the pale, and Eastsounders held their breath, wondering if St. Francis was just the beginning of another crime spree. The recession was in full swing, tourism down, and local businesses needed to squirrel away every summer dollar to get them through what could be another tough winter.

  The previous year’s “plague” had briefly reminded residents that, as San Juan County sheriff Bill Cumming told me, “The San Juans do have a dark side.” A look through back issues of the Islands’ Sounder showed occasional flare-ups, with a spate of burglaries occurring every few years on Orcas, San Juan, or Lopez Island. These were almost always attributed to local meth heads.

  Learning that there was even such a thing as a local meth head on Orcas rocked my idyllic-island construct. On reflection, though, it made sense. We were a rural, overwhelmingly white community in western Washington State: the perfect formula for growing tweakers. Police officers from the TV shows Cops and Washington’s Most Wanted told speed-fiend stories on Bob Rivers’s radio show, saying they’d actually responded to “meth-induced chainsaw fights” in the rustic communities not far from cosmopolitan Seattle. As one officer said: “The reason why Cops likes us so much is because we have a lot of crazy white people up here. And crazy white people make for good TV.”

  Of course, like all the other crime issues, the meth problem on Orcas was at a relatively low level.

  Reality took a bit of the bloom off the idyllic Orcas rose, but Sandi and I still weren’t locking our doors. We had a big dog, Murphy, a six-foot-from-nose-to-tail Leonberger, which I believe is a cross between a bouncy Tigger and a grizzly bear—at least in Murphy’s case. Once we moved to this eminently dog-friendly island, Murphy became a permanent fixture in my pickup truck, going everywhere I went with his massive head hanging out the cab’s back window like a trophy mount. With so little crime, we never felt the need to have him stay home to watch over the property. As it was, Murphy’s concept of guard-dogging wasn’t to prevent anyone from entering the house—leaving, yes, but not entering. Whenever he sensed someone outside our little cabin, instead of barking to warn them off, he silently stalked them, moving from door to door, hackles up, muscles tensed. No amount of prodding could get him to change his strategy. He’d raise a hellhound yowl if someone actually knocked, but if they were just lurking around out there, he waited with a distinct “I’m finally gonna get to eat somebody” excitement.

  August 27, 2009, around 3 a.m., Murphy padded heavily into the bedroom, snuffed at the window screen, and raised his hackles. I already had my eyes half open as I’d been lying there with that strange feeling that something had woken me but I didn’t know what. The clouded moon bathed the room in just enough dim blue light to see the dog at the window. Then my eyes suddenly opened wider. All manner of deer, raccoons, mink, and other critters rustle around our cabin at night, but none of them had ever moved lumber. Murphy and I both heard the clack of wood against wood in the crawlspace.

  The dirt-floor area under the cabin lies open on one end and anything could have wandered in there. It must have been a deer, I thought, because nothing else would be big enough to knock around the 2 × 4s. We listened for a while but nothing else happened. Yep, had to be a deer stumbling around, maybe drunk on huckleberries. My last thought as I rolled over and went back to sleep was, I hope it didn’t knock loose any of the plumbing.

  The following night, again around 3 a.m., I woke to the sensation of someone watching me in the darkness. This would have been terrifying if I wasn’t used to living with a pony-size dog who thinks he has mind-control powers. Murphy believes if he stares down at me long and hard enough I’ll get up and do his bidding—mainly his feeding. He usually waits until after sunrise, though, so this was unusual. When he knew I was awake, he went to the window, again snuffle-snorting like a bear and raising his hackles. I sat up and listened, but couldn’t hear anything except a rare summer sprinkling of rain against the metal roof. The thought of pulling on shoes and a rain shell, finding a flashlight, stumbling around under the cabin, and then having to dry off a half acre of wet dog was too much just to chase away some dilettante critter trying to shelter from a shower. The cabin perches atop a hundred-foot cliff, which means there’s also no option of simply loosing the hound. In the past, several Orcas dogs tailing hard after deer have Thelma-and-Louised themselves off cliffs.

  The drizzle passed after a couple of minutes and everything fell silent again as I slipped back to sleep.

  The next morning, Jeremy Trumble woke to find there’d been a B and E at his B and B, the Inn on Orcas Island, one mile away through the woods from our cabin.

  Both Jeremy and his partner, John Gibbs, had come from East Los Angeles. “I was a high school teacher in a ghetto school, but I wasn’t teaching, I was surviving,” says Trumble. “I told John about this place where my mom and dad took me in the fifties, this wonderful, wonderful island with no crime where running a B and B would be the perfect semiretirement lifestyle.”

  They traveled to Orcas four times a year starting in the mid-eighties to look for just the right property. “Orcas has a drawbridge mentality, not real welcoming for development, but we persevered and in ’94 we found this property. We sat here on the grass and it was one of those August days… ”

  Their six acres overlook a tidal wetland attended by stately blue herons. It took five years to get permits to replace the existing double-wide trailer with what is now an exquisite coastal inn. They finally opened in the summer of 2002.

  The inn’s kitchen faces the wetland and woods beyond, and they never bothered to put curtains on the windows. Gibbs had been sitting in the kitchen working on his laptop until 11:30 the previous evening. Guests filled all the upstairs rooms, every bedroom window wide open to enjoy the cool night air. Nine cars lined the lot, outside lights lit the exterior of the inn and its surroundings.

  “The doors were all locked except the French doors on the little deck off the kitchen,” says Trumble. “We never thought they needed to be locked when we had a full house and all the windows open. Our suite lies just above that deck.”

  Sometime between when Gibbs went to bed and 5 a.m., when Trumble got up to start breakfast, someone walked—barefoot—through the landscaped patch around the deck and climbed up and over the railing. Dirty footprints led into the kitchen. The laptop had disappeared. The innkeepers called the police and began a long series of calls to cancel all the accounts that had been on the computer—PayPal, Amazon, credit cards.

  “John’s wallet was close by and he didn’t take that,” but because of what had happened across the road at Ryan Carpenter’s Deer Harbor Inn they worried about all of their other credit cards, too. The inn represented every dime they had plus twenty years of hard work just to make it a reality. Like most other Orcas tourist-related businesses, it operated on a knife edge of profitability. The computer’s value didn’t meet their deductible, so the loss was all out-of-pocket.

  “It breaks my heart that this happened on Orcas,” says Tru
mble. “Suddenly we had to change our lifestyle and start really watching… You’re not as safe as you thought you were.”

  After the break-in, Trumble, one of the most gentle guys on the island, found himself sleeping with a baseball bat next to his bed.

  The deputy who responded to the call lived just down the road aboard a boat at the Deer Harbor Marina. The same night as the burglary at the inn, someone walked down the marina’s long wooden pier and ducked behind the dockmaster’s office. He slid a thin tool between window sashes and opened a latch. Inside, he had access to a computer and the safe—with its key hanging nearby. But he left those alone and instead took only the surveillance cameras and the DVR they were attached to.

  Deer Harbor Marina enjoys a brisk trade with visiting boaters. During July and August there’s rarely an open slip, with half leased to full-timers and the other half filled with boats from all over Washington and British Columbia. That night, the place was packed, the docks alive with people wandering up and down, visiting with fellow boaters, barbecuing, boiling up the day’s Dungeness crab, cocktailing, telling tall tales, and doing all the other stuff yachties do. Things quiet down in Deer Harbor after 11 p.m., but many boaters remain up on deck chatting under the brilliant stars, their voices and the creak of boats carrying far across the still water.

  The marina’s showers and bathrooms sit back by the dockmaster’s office, forty yards up the pier from the marina store and the boat slips. There’s always a trickle of folks heading back and forth to the restrooms. That didn’t bother this burglar, though, who strolled from the office to the store and slid open another window. Inside, surrounded by coolers filled with beer, water, and soda, along with racks and racks of snack foods, candy, and wine as well as a complete ice cream shop, the burglar chose to take only the surveillance cameras and DVR.