The Barefoot Bandit

by Bob Friel

  Word of the break-ins quickly echoed around Deer Harbor. Now my hackles went up. There’d be no reason for someone to have gone into our crawlspace unless he was just getting out of the rain. But we’re so far at the end of the road surrounded by acres and acres of nothing but woods that even that didn’t make sense. I went underneath and found a vent pipe knocked out of place. It still had to be a deer, I thought, but Sandi and I spent an hour digging around for the single house key we owned and went to make a copy. We started taking the keys out of our cars and locking the house overnight, just like back in the city.

  That night as we lay in bed with the big black window behind our heads, the woods outside seemed darker.

  * * *

  The action moved back to Eastsound just before Labor Day weekend, the last big opportunity for local businesses to rake in summer money. Early morning on September 1, a burglar forced his way into the popular Sunflower Café on the prime corner of Main Street and North Beach. He took $300 out of the till and $3,280 from the ATM before crossing the street to Vern’s Bayside.

  Belinda and Marion had installed surveillance cameras inside and out after the 2008 hit. Now, one by one, the cameras went dark.

  “He WHALED on them with his fist,” says Belinda. Then he pried open the side door and went inside the restaurant. A camera in the dining room captured a tall white male wearing a tan T-shirt walking past using a black shirt to cover his face. The burglar went directly to Marion’s office, which sits nooked away in a nonobvious spot up a short flight of stairs from the kitchen. A tiny camera mounted on the office ceiling watched as he came through the door and instantly rounded the divider to shine his flashlight at the empty space where the safe had been the year before. He swung his light around quickly, but couldn’t figure out where they’d moved it.

  At that point, the computer attached to the security cameras began to beep. The burglar bolted full speed out of the office and back out the way he came.

  Just down the street, Suzanne Lyons was sleeping in her jewelry store, Orcas Arts and Gifts. Lyons has had some experience with at-risk youth.

  “When I lived in California,” she says, “I took in five ten-year-old boys as foster kids from really bad families, moms were hookers and everything, but I got them early enough. Four joined the service, and they all turned out okay.”

  Suzanne’s family had been taking turns bunking in their little shop ever since her daughter, Erica, had been woken by a noise in the middle of the night shortly after the stolen boat had shown up. Erica went outside to check and found a very tall young man standing in the private yard between the store and their home. He calmly looked at her for a long moment, then vaulted over the six-foot-high fence and disappeared.

  They called the deputies, but they couldn’t find the guy. Now, on September 1, it was Suzanne who sensed something was not right. She stepped outside.

  “I was in my robe and bunny slippers,” she says, laughing. “I saw this big guy running down Main Street away from Vern’s. I wasn’t really dressed to chase him, though.”

  The next morning, as word quickly spread, Eastsound’s worst fears were realized: the summertime burglar was back.

  “This time,” says Belinda, “the cops took it seriously.” Sergeant Vierthaler came down to Vern’s right away and watched the security footage. He noticed something very strange about the tall young man who’d broken into the restaurant: he was barefoot.

  NEAR THE TOP OF North Beach Road stands Orcas Island Hardware, affiliated with Ace Hardware, “The Helpful Place.” With so much do-it-yourselfing on the island, Orcas has always had two hardware stores. Scott Lancaster worked at one for fifteen years before buying the other in the spring of 2009. Now, five months later, late in the afternoon on September 4, the Friday of the big Labor Day weekend, Lancaster was straightening up the storage yard when he noticed that part of his chain-link fence was laid over. Odd, but nothing else was out of place, so he heaved it back into position and went home.

  “That night,” he says, “it started bothering me. I’m wondering if it was pushed over by someone climbing the fence to get onto the roof of the main building. But by that time I’d sat down to a nice dinner with my wife, had a couple glasses of wine… I decided not to go back to check it out just based on a gut feeling.” Besides, he says, there’d always been a hardware store filled with tools at that spot, the building never had an alarm system, and there’d never been a problem. In fact, long ago when the building first went up, a row of its warehouse windows were installed crooked and had never closed far enough to lock. “It’s Orcas,” says Scott. “Most of the time we just left them wide open for ventilation.”

  After dark, someone slipped into the yard behind Orcas Island Hardware. He climbed topsoil bags piled next to the lowest part of the warehouse roof, then pulled himself onto a higher stack of bark mulch sacks that rose another level closer to the edge of the twelve-foot-high roof. Balancing precariously atop the tower of bags, he stretched out one long leg and stepped onto the metal roof, barefoot.

  The bandit sneaked around to the row of second-floor windows, slid open the one farthest from the sidewalk, and climbed inside the warehouse loft. He used a ladder to drop down into a corridor, then went into the store’s offices. The first thing he saw in the cluttered outer office was the blue glow of a TV monitor. A simple closed circuit, the system transmitted only a live picture of the store—there was no recorder. Still, the burglar switched off its impotent eye. He rummaged through the desks until he found the key to the petty cash drawer, pocketing all the paper money.

  Once done with the office, he went downstairs into a B and E man’s dream: a fully stocked hardware store. The first tool he wanted was something big and strong enough to open the safe he’d spotted in the warehouse. Ace, the helpful place, had just the thing: a sixteen-pound, six-foot-long forged steel digging bar. The safe gave way. Inside sat two bank bags—one a ten-year-old KeyBank carrier, a distinctive style that isn’t used anymore. Both bags were filled with cash organized into neat bundles ready for depositing.

  Then the thief went on a shopping spree. Using Ace-logoed five-gallon buckets and a clothes basket to carry the booty, he grabbed a Coleman sleeping bag, two air mattresses (one twin and one full-size), an LED headlamp, a hatchet, two axes, a maul/sledgehammer, two hammers, a crowbar, screwdrivers, six assorted padlocks and cable locks, bolt cutters, a power drill and a cordless drill, along with eight drill bits including two augers used for drilling deep, large-diameter holes—like maybe the kind you could insert a camera into. In all, the burglar took more than $5,000 worth of cash and prizes.

  He lugged everything to the store’s delivery bay and used his new bolt cutters to snip off the padlock. Up went the big roller door and out he walked. The thief’s appetite was bigger than his ability to carry everything, though. He stopped across the street, ducking behind the hedge at Murphy’s vet’s office to rearrange the load that he must have ferried over in at least two trips. There he left behind the clothes basket with a bunch of the items he’d just taken, and dumped more tools into the landscaping around the real estate office where Sandi works. He kept the necessities, though, and headed off to attempt his most ambitious score. He wanted more cash, and knew the best place to find it.

  WHEN ISLAND HARDWARE’S EMPLOYEES arrived the next morning, they found the place had been looted. Scott Lancaster’s first priority after seeing that the deputies were on the job scoping out the big bare footprints clearly visible on the metal roof was to make sure he could keep the store running on its busiest day. He couldn’t do that without cash, so he went to Islanders Bank and withdrew $500 from the ATM. Lancaster says that an hour later the police called him to ask if he’d noticed anything strange while he was at the bank.

  There’s no better example of how little Orcas Islanders worried about crime than Islanders Bank circa that summer of 2009. Not only wasn’t there a surveillance camera or alarm inside the ATM/night deposit room, but the room also had a
window that wasn’t alarmed.

  The bottom of the window into the ATM room stood about ten feet off the ground. It was a single long, narrow pane less than two feet tall. The thief broke the glass and scaled the wall by stepping barefoot onto a thin foundation ledge a couple feet off the ground. He then hoisted himself up and through the window. It was a remarkably athletic move considering he did it without cutting himself to ribbons on the jagged glass. Once inside the room, he had plenty of time to attack the cash machine. He tried his new Ace drill, he tried his new crowbar, then his new sledgehammer. He made some marks, but couldn’t crack the golden egg. The acrobatic burglar finally gave up and climbed back out, leaving his tools behind.

  When San Juan County sheriff Bill Cumming realized he had an attempted bank job on his hands, he called in the Feds. An FBI CSI team arrived on the island and spent some nine hours processing the scene. The first mystery was how the hell someone had gotten through that window. According to bank manager Maggie Vinson, the hole in the glass looked too small for a normal-size man to get through. She said the police looked for ladder marks but found nothing but the smudges of dirt where the burglar put his bare feet against the wall. She also said the cops at the scene theorized that maybe two guys boosted another one up, or maybe, someone joked, two strong guys picked up a little accomplice and heaved him through the window.

  OTHER BUSINESSES, INCLUDING BILBO’S Festivo restaurant, were hit over the same couple of nights. Orcas residents went up in arms—many literally. Kyle Ater and his .44 still held the high ground atop Homegrown Grocery, but now it seemed like half the Eastsound business owners joined him, camping out in their stores, locked and loaded in order to protect their livelihoods.

  Sheriff Cumming shifted more deputies to Orcas from the other islands and they all started pulling overtime shifts to try to catch what was evidently one big shoeless kid tearing around the island jacking businesses at will. With toe prints found at the scene of at least three break-ins, the local cops began calling their suspect the Barefoot Bandit.

  Scott Lancaster walked into Island Market after his burglary and ran into manager Jason Linnes, whose family owns and runs the supermarket. Linnes told him he was sorry to hear about the theft. “That’s why we have all of the security at our store,” he said, according to Lancaster. “No way the little bastard’s going to get into our place.”

  Two days later, at around 2:20 a.m. on September 8, the woman working night crew at Island Market felt so ill that she had to go home. The person she’d normally call to replace her was on vacation and the stocking was finished anyway, so she decided not to bother waking anyone up. Every day of the year except for a couple of holidays, there’s someone inside Island Market twenty-four hours a day. Now, for one short, unforeseeable period, it was left unattended. As soon as the employee left, a burglar tried to get in the back shipping door. He couldn’t force it open, so he went around to the front of the building, where on many nights there’s a police cruiser loitering in the parking lot. Not that night, though.

  He crept along the side of the building until he was underneath the surveillance camera that kept watch over the front door. At 2:35 a.m., he used a crowbar to tilt the camera up, and then retreated into the shadows to make sure no one was monitoring the feed and that he hadn’t tripped an alarm. At 2:50, he came back and broke open the sliding doors. He knew there were more security cameras inside, so he held his arm across his face and walked into the store, barefoot, carrying a crowbar and hammer.

  The cameras watched the tall white kid head straight to aisle 6—toilet paper, paper towels, Ziplocs—but he didn’t stop to pick up any supplies. At the back of the aisle he turned right, walked along a huge display of cold beer without snagging any, then ducked through the swinging doors into the stock area. The burglar knew exactly where he was going. He climbed a metal shelving unit to reach a surveillance camera, and whacked it with his crowbar, knocking off the lens.

  There’s a big Mosler safe back there, a monolithic old-timer like you’d see Butch and Sundance blow up with a pile of dynamite. The kid didn’t even bother to try that one. Instead, he walked back out through the produce department, leaving big bare footprints on the mats, and went through the unmarked door that leads upstairs to the bathrooms and the offices. He pried open each office door until he found the electrical box and, at 3:30 a.m., he turned off the store’s lights, which are normally left burning all night. He also broke into the room that housed the security system. Inside, he began pushing buttons on the equipment until the camera feeds went dark. What he didn’t know was that he turned off only the monitor. The cameras continued to see and the DVR continued to record as he went back downstairs to his real target.

  Island Market’s little ATM stands at the front of the store just behind the facade’s huge plate-glass windows, near the bird seed and bags of charcoal. The machine is one of those stand-alones, four feet high and about eighteen inches square, with a molded plastic shell covering its steel body. It held about $8,000 that night, and it certainly looked like a breachable target if you had enough time and leverage. The crook went to work with his trusty crowbar and hammer. After many, many whacks, though, he hadn’t made much of an impact on anything except the plastic. To be fair, he was hampered a bit by bad visibility: sensing that the cameras might still be recording, he’d hung a T-shirt over his head and had to peek out through its neck hole as he moved around.

  The burglar realized the ATM called for more firepower and he had an idea. He jogged back to the loading dock and grabbed the handle of a battery-powered pallet jack, aka a “jigger,” a baby forklift that lets its user pick up and move a thousand pounds with little effort. He walked it like a dog on a leash back to the front of the store, then lined it up and rammed it into the ATM… over and over and over.

  He worked on the ATM for an hour and ten minutes, until the little money machine looked like R2-D2 after being humped by a Transformer. Its plastic housing was pried apart, cracked, and decapitated, and its metal body crumpled. But the money box held. Barely.

  “A couple more hits to the door and it would have popped open, but he kept changing angles,” says Jason Linnes. What the burglar did succeed in doing, though, was gashing his hand on the sharp plastic. He bled like a stuck pig, on the machine, on the jigger, and all over the floor. At 4:30, he ran to the deli kitchen to wash his cut in the sink. The video then shows that he either saw lights or heard something outside—a police cruiser may have driven through the lot—because he suddenly crouched down by the baguette display and froze for a few moments. This allowed a ceiling camera to get a nice clean shot suitable for framing—or at least for a wanted poster.

  The burglar popped back up, showing that he’d wrapped one of his T-shirts around his cut hand. He went directly to the cleaning aisle and picked up a bottle of bleach, which he poured over the blood on the floor, the ATM, and the pallet jack in order to make the blood useless for DNA testing.

  At this point he looked at the watch he wore on his right wrist. It was 4:42 a.m., and he knew exactly when he needed to get out of Dodge. He left eighteen minutes before the morning crew arrived.

  The staff discovered the assault and battery on their cash machine, but not one thing was missing except the bleach, which added about three bucks to the $12,000 worth of damage done to the store.

  When the deputies arrived to take a report, the employees showed them the bare footprints and all the things that’d been touched. Then they walked them over to the deli. The burglar had forgotten about that, and there was very visible, very fresh blood all over the sink. At first, according to the supermarket staff, the cops said they weren’t going to bother collecting any of it for evidence. The employees and owner were furious, though—and also all on a first-name basis with the deputies. They demanded that they collect a sample. Finally, a deputy went for a forensics kit and took a DNA swab.

  Long before those results came back, though, a San Juan County detective attended a monthly info
rmation-sharing meeting with other detectives from around the region. He told the assembled officers about the trouble his county was having with a suspect they’d nicknamed the Barefoot Bandit.

  “I remember getting a chuckle out of that,” says Island County Sheriff’s Office detective Ed Wallace, who was at the meeting. Wallace, however, says the name didn’t ring any bells among the Island County contingent. It might have for regular readers of the county’s Stanwood/Camano News, though, since the paper’s front-page headline back in February 2007 had been: “Camano’s barefoot bandit caught.” The story was about a teenager named Colton Harris-Moore who’d been captured by the Island County Sheriff’s Office (ICSO) after evading them for six months on a small island while continuously breaking into homes to steal everything from food to jewelry. The local paper—as well as the Seattle Times and Everett Herald—had run quite a few additional Colton stories since then, including a flurry after his escape from detention in April 2008 and resumption of his thieving ways on Camano Island, which lay just thirty miles south of Orcas.

  It all finally came together—at least for law enforcement—when a San Juan County detective sent images from the Island Market surveillance camera of the suspect posing by the baguettes. Island County recognized him right away.

  “We felt like a doctor giving a patient bad news,” says Wallace. “We’re afraid you have a Colton Harris-Moore problem.”

  ICSO gave the San Juan sheriff Colton’s file, including a recent portrait taken by Harris-Moore himself. The eighteen-year-old’s book-length rap sheet started once upon a time when he was ten. Island County warned Sheriff Bill Cumming that Colton had run their deputies ragged. And said that when they finally caught him and thought they’d rid their island by sentencing him to three years in prison, he’d escaped. The file also included the information that Colton liked to play with guns and often armed himself with pepper spray. Island County had already filed a slew of new felony charges against Colton for crimes he’d committed since going on the lam.