by Bob Friel
Cumming made the tactical decision not to let Orcas residents know who was tearing up their island. He felt that if Colton didn’t know the sheriff’s office was on to him, the Barefoot Bandit might step out in public. He sent all the manpower he could spare to Orcas and made sure his deputies had Colton’s face burned into their memories. He put more officers in plain clothes and sent them out into Eastsound, especially after dark.
It worked—sort of. The deputies didn’t have much trouble spotting Colton, but they soon learned something about him beyond his affinity for going footloose: he was fast. Even those rare few deputies in shape to run after him were easily outdistanced. Every time he was sighted, Colton took off for the woods around town. One cop caught him in the beam of his flashlight and made a positive ID before Colton melted into the trees.
“He virtually vaporized in front of me,” said the officer.
Increasing the police patrols may have at least made Eastsound seem like a tougher target. The night following the Island Market ATM fail, the Bandit crept along the Ditch beside Smuggler’s Villa Resort. Mike Stolmeier had hosted the usual summer evening campfire for his guests and then gone to bed after making sure there were no tall strangers stretched out in the sauna. Tied up less than forty yards from the occupied villas were whale-watching and fishing boats belonging to a charter operation based at the resort. The Bandit chose a thirty-foot catamaran called Blackfish—a traditional name for killer whales. He untied one of its dock lines and jumped in. Starting Blackfish’s diesel engines isn’t as simple as turning a key; several switches get thrown to power the starters. The thief couldn’t figure that out, so he climbed back to the dock and moved to the next boat, a single-engine twenty-six-foot Harborcraft loaded down with fishing gear for the next morning’s trip. The keys were in the boat and the engine turned right over. He switched on the GPS unit, slipped the lines, and set off into what Stolmeier called a nasty night to be out boating, “jet black and raining.”
The boat thief knew where he wanted to go, though, and the GPS chartplotter offered a video game–like navigation experience as simple as steering a little avatar around the blue screen and avoiding the big beige blocks that signified hard land. Again, very simple in theory. However, Pacific Northwest reality tosses a few challenges into the mix around the San Juans. An enormous amount of water fills and empties the Salish Sea as the tides change. Currents ripping around the islands swirl into whirlpools and, when conditions are right, even pile into standing waves. Just below the surface—and thus not shown as land on charts—lie myriad jagged reefs. A painstaking count of all the islands, islets, seal haulouts, and godforsaken rocks in San Juan County comes to 743. But that’s at low tide. At high tide, only 428 of them are visible; the rest lurk beneath a thin film of water. Experienced local boaters look for hints like kelp fronds or patches of calm water that mark rocks, but that helps only during the day. Many of the known reefs are marked on charts as tiny plus signs—as in if you hit one you’ll “add” shipwrecker to your résumé. What can’t be marked, however, are those Salish Sea specialties aptly named “deadheads.”
With logging long one of the Northwest’s major industries, innumerable ex-trees have escaped booms and tugs and now roam free in the region’s waters. The logs eventually get so soggy that they barely float. Those that bob vertically with an almost invisible sliver of wood above the surface are deadheads. Running into one is like striking an iceberg. The great bulk of the log lies underwater, giving it enough mass to easily splinter a wooden hull or smash a fiberglass one. Open a hole too big for the bilge pumps and you get help fast or go swimming.
Cold water often has the final say in the Salish Sea. Even in summer the water temperature barely gets into the mid-50s. Wind up in the drink and the countdown starts—that is, if it doesn’t cause instant cardiac arrest. Depending on body type, it can take one-half to three hours for you to lose consciousness, less if you’re treading water or swimming for land.
The Bandit, though, knew how to run a boat at night, or else he was lucky once again. The GPS recorded his track as he rounded the sheer cliffs of Point Doughty and headed down President Channel between the west coast of Orcas and Waldron Island. He skirted the treacherously beautiful Wasp Islands—perennially the most popular place for visiting boaters to come to grief on the San Juans’ reefs—and steered southeast between Shaw and San Juan Island until he reached the town of Friday Harbor.
He drove the boat to the University of Washington’s Friday Harbor Labs, a marine science center. At U-Dub’s dock, he jumped off and let the $100,000 boat float away. The GPS showed the Harborcraft drifting lazily until it grounded off Shaw, where it was found the next morning.
The Barefoot Bandit ran around San Juan Island for two days, hitting a coffee hut in downtown Friday Harbor but otherwise not calling too much attention to himself. Police later discovered a hideaway secreted in a hangar at the airport where he apparently camped out.
Then, at midnight on September 11, 2009, a small plane took off from the San Juan Island airport.
IF BOB RIVERS’S CESSNA was a classic station wagon, this second plane, a sleek, 310-horsepower, composite-bodied Cirrus SR22, was a high-tech hot rod. It featured a low-wing configuration versus the Cessna’s high wing. Low wings are trickier for inexperienced pilots to land as they tend to float more near the ground. The SR22 also had a completely different steering system—a side joystick versus the Cessna’s classic two-handed wheel. Considered a safe and popular plane for its class, according to the NTSB the Cirrus SR22 still has twice the rate of fatal accidents as the Cessna 182. And remarkably, for only his second solo flight, Colton decided to fly this one at night.
The $700,000 Cirrus was equipped with two major features not found in Bob Rivers’s Cessna. First was the “glass cockpit,” a term used not for the plane’s windows, but for large dashboard video monitors that gather all the information a pilot needs on-screen rather than split among individual gauges. Fans of the new-style instruments love the amazing amount of data—weather maps, flight info, navigation, and all the plane’s mechanical systems—laid on two screens. There are some old-timers, though, who feel the glowing screens might be crowded with too much information, especially for an inexperienced flier.
“I wouldn’t recommend a new pilot start out with a glass cockpit in a Cirrus, particularly at night—too distracting, a real handful,” says Bill Anders, an Orcas Island resident who owns a Columbia 400 (aka Cessna 400 Corvalis), a slick composite plane that’s extremely similar to the Cirrus. And for Bill Anders to call anything related to flying a handful takes a lot.
Anders’s first plane ride came in 1946, when he was an eighth grader in Texas. One day as his father drove him to school, they saw a biplane sitting in a cow pasture. “This guy had a sign up, ‘Rides $15,’” remembers Anders. “I said to my dad, ‘I sure would like to do that.’”
Anders’s father had just gotten out of the navy and $15 was big money back then, “but my dad could always make deals and he made one that morning.” Anders strapped into the open cockpit of the wood-and-fabric plane and the pilot took off. Whatever his dad paid, young Bill got his money’s worth. “He even did a loop, and I thought, Boy, this is fun!”
Anders went off to school with dreams of flying adventures. “Well, on the way home that day, here was the biplane, tail up, in about a three-foot-deep hole… The pilot and his paying passenger dead. I didn’t fly for quite some time after that.”
The pull of the sky was so strong, though, that Anders became an air force fighter pilot and served in an interceptor squadron at the height of the Cold War. One of his claims to fame from that era is intercepting a Soviet Bear bomber over Europe and giving its belligerent pilot an up-close and personal middle-finger salute—decades before Tom Cruise fictitiously flipped one off in Top Gun.
Anders then topped that by going on the ultimate flight: strapped atop a huge Saturn V rocket for the Apollo 8 mission where he, Frank Borman, and Jim Lovell
(of “Houston, we’ve had a problem” fame) became the first earthlings to leave their planet’s orbit and circle the moon. It was on that flight, on Christmas Eve 1968, that Anders snapped Earthrise, the shocking first view of our planet existing as just a fragile blue marble adrift in a black void.
Now seventy-eight, Bill lives on Orcas Island for much of the year, cruising aboard his big boat, Apogee, scuba diving with the SeaDoc Society, and flying as much as he can, often in service of the Heritage Flight Museum he founded in Bellingham. The museum specializes in warbirds, and we can always tell when Bill is in the neighborhood by the window-rattling grumble of a WWII P-51 Mustang or a 2,700-horsepower Korean War–era A-1 Skyraider as he does a fly-by.
One thing Bill Anders won’t do anymore, though, is fly at night in the San Juans. “Not that I’m afraid—I’ve got lots of night flying time as an interceptor pilot—but I’m always worried about the goddamn geese on the Orcas runway. You can fly over deer because they don’t jump very high. But the damn geese, they can take off.”
The pilot who took the Cirrus SR22 from San Juan Island wasn’t worried about geese or deer. Something compelled Colt back to Orcas Island that night. Once in the airplane, he could have flown away as far as his fuel would have taken him. Instead, he took off, did a short waggling course across the border into the nearby Canadian Gulf Islands, then turned around and headed straight to Orcas, where the entire island was already on high alert.
Apparently all the lights and info on the dashboard monitors didn’t bother Colt too much either, because he didn’t end up a charred dimple on Turtleback. And he didn’t panic, or he might have used the Cirrus’s most famous standard feature, a rocket-propelled last-resort parachute that erupts out of the airframe and slows its fall to a survivable speed. Instead, he went for it. One thing on his side was that the San Juans are very dark at night so the runway lights are easy to spot. Scattered home lights pierce the black mountainsides, red beacons flash atop Mount Constitution’s cell towers, and a soft yellow glow emanates from Eastsound, but other than that, it’s perfect stargazing dark.
The Bandit flew over town, sighted the runway, and touched down to the north—or tried to touch down.
“It’s a slippery plane and he lost it a bit,” says Bea Von Tobel, herself a longtime pilot. “That’s the hardest part of landing: judging how high above the ground you are, especially at night. You really need some time with an instructor who can teach you how to flare and get down comfortably. Instead, he kind of wandered off onto the grass and almost landed on the taxiway.”
Von Tobel showed up at the airport Saturday morning for the annual meeting of the Ninety-Nines, a group of women pilots, and saw the Cirrus already surrounded by yellow police tape. “He’d gotten in the plane by breaking the lock out of the door. The second thing I noticed was that he’d hit and broken one of my runway lights. All I remember thinking was that he must have really wanted to get back to Orcas to steal a plane and fly back at night. I guess he didn’t want to wait for the ferry.”
While the landing hadn’t been a thing of beauty, the plane suffered only minor damage and was flyable the next day. “He’s very lucky,” says Bill Anders. “But given the choice between skill and luck, I’ll take luck any day.”
Once again, since plane theft is such a rare occurrence, the rumors that quickly spread on the island hinted instead at a partying pilot trying to impress a girl he met at a bar over in “Sin City,” the nickname us provincial islanders have for Friday Harbor because there’s an incredible number of places where you can get a drink in town… like six.
Local police, though, knew the real story.
“AUGUST 2008: BURGLARY, COMMERCIAL burglary, commercial burglary, residential burglary… September ’08: commercial burglary, commercial burglary, commercial burglary, residential burglary… October ’08: more commercial burglaries… November 2008: airplane theft… August 2009: recovered vessel… ” San Juan County sheriff Bill Cumming tut-tutted as he read down a long list his department compiled once they realized who they were dealing with and had confirmed Colton’s MO with Island County detectives.
As tough as it was to believe, Cumming, sixty-one, realized he was up against just one extraordinarily brazen and “pretty darn bright” kid whom he now suspected of at least fifteen burglaries, along with the thefts of two planes and a couple of boats. With half the houses in San Juan County vacant for long stretches during the year, it wasn’t unusual to have teen troublemakers breaking in to raid liquor cabinets. However, in his thirty-eight years in law enforcement—thirty-one years with San Juan County, twenty-four as its sheriff—Cumming had never dealt with a suspect like Colton Harris-Moore.
“We’ve had serial burglars out here before, even people who specialized in unusual things such as entry from the water, but this is unique, this is one person being so prolific. He’s easily doubled the number of commercial burglaries we’d normally see. When you have someone that prolific in such a small area, they usually get caught.”
Another startling aspect of Colt’s spree was, of course, the boats and planes. He was suspected of stealing cars and he’d been convicted years before of taking dinghies on Camano Island, but now he was operating at an entirely different level of sophistication. And it wasn’t just the fact that he was stealing the boats and planes that was extraordinary. “We’ve recovered everything,” said Cumming, noting that Colton hadn’t tried to sell them. “He’s not taking them for joyrides; he’s taking them for transportation.”
Cumming’s job was clear: arrest Colton Harris-Moore. Pressure from the community was growing more intense after every crime. Residents still didn’t know who the suspect was; they just wanted him caught.
The evening after the stolen Cirrus showed up on Orcas, September 12, deputies flooded Eastsound determined to catch the Barefoot Bandit. They got lucky: instead of lying low for a while after the plane theft, Colt went out on the town.
The cops spotted him carrying a large bundle. According to a deputy, two officers went after him on foot while another converged by car. When Colt realized the cops were on his tail, he bolted into the street. The deputy in the car tried to sideswipe him, but missed. Colt danced away from the car and ran north through town toward the airport. Police followed, but he lost them by disappearing into a triangular patch of woods that connects the airport with the Ditch and Smuggler’s.
During the chase, Colt dropped his bundle. A deputy found it and was checking out its contents when he heard a voice sing out from the dark woods.
“You can’t catch me.”
He was right. Even though the stretch of forest was only three hundred yards long, there wasn’t enough manpower to effectively search it, and the county had no canine to try to sniff out the Barefoot Bandit. Besides, Colt already knew these woods as well as any local. Inside his bundle, the police found the sleeping bag stolen from Orcas Island Hardware, along with blankets he’d taken from an airplane stored inside a private hangar that sat at the edge of the trees where he now hid.
Another chunk of woods Colt knew well covered a peninsula called Madrona Point that dangles into East Sound. He had a campsite there complete with a pup tent, a sleeping bag, and a blanket that had gone missing from the Eastsound fire station. Colt used the camp as a base for raiding the town’s shops. Several times, deputies had chased him onto the Point, but he always seemed to vanish into thin air and thick woods.
Lummi Indians used Madrona Point as a burial ground. When the afternoon sun drops low in the sky, the large congregation of orange-barked, red-berried Pacific Madrona trees begins to glow, and it’s easy to imagine the area as a place of spirits. In the mid-eighties, a Seattle businessman who also owned much of Turtleback Mountain planned to build condos here on the island’s most sacred spot. A grassroots antidevelopment movement sprang up and eventually caught the attention of the U.S. Congress. The land was purchased and given to the Lummi Nation. The tribe managed it as an open park until numbnuts littered the area w
ith beer bottles, used condoms, and other trash. Today, the Lummi section of Madrona Point sits behind a huge NO TRESPASSING sign at the dead end of Haven Road.
Back toward Main Street on Madrona Point lies a small group of homes, some of them the original cabins from a long-defunct resort. Island Market, Islanders Bank, and the rest of downtown Eastsound lie just a few yards away though the trees. One day as a retiree named Annette was working on a cottage she’s renovating, a friend mentioned that her old well looked to be about seven feet deep. “How can you tell?” asked Annette. The abandoned well, she knew, had been filled with approximately one ton of rocks the size of babies’ heads and sealed with a five-hundred-pound cement lid.
Not anymore, said the friend.
Someone had slid open the lid and painstakingly excavated the rocks. “They were smart enough to not just pile them around the well or I would have noticed,” says Annette. Instead, he carried each one at least a hundred feet away. Annette searched around and found the missing rocks on a dead-end gravel road nearby. Emptied to exactly six and a half feet deep, the old-fashioned well made an ideal hidey-hole. The rock walls that show above ground were covered with moss, camouflaging it during the day. Anyone inside would be invisible to infrared cameras, and even if a searcher stumbled across the well, he might not think anyone could be down there with the huge concrete lid in place.
Climb inside, though, and you realize that because the well’s stones are smooth, even a six-foot-tall middle-aged writer can reach up and slide the heavy lid back into place. So it would be no problem at all for a six-foot-five athletic teenager.