by Bob Friel
“There’s no way he would have survived without that airbag,” marvels Gardiner.
It still wasn’t like falling into a pillow. “I’m sure he had injuries due to the incredible amount of Gs from the impact and from going from high speed to zero in such a short distance,” says Brad Hernke, an investigator who specializes in small-plane accidents and who went to the site for U.S. Aviation Underwriters, Inc. “It’s incredible that anyone walked away from that crash.”
Colt knew he had to get out of the plane fast in case it was about to burst into flames. He pulled the handle of the pilot’s-side door, but it wouldn’t budge. The impact had been so violent that it torqued the airframe to the point where no amount of pounding would get the door open. During flight instruction, small-plane pilots are trained to open their doors in the air if they’re heading for a rough landing. With the door opened, the closed latch prevents it from jamming shut and trapping everyone in the plane. It’s on the off-field landing checklist, but Colt hadn’t done it.
Expecting an explosion at any second, Colt lurched to the other side of the cockpit and yanked the handle on the passenger-side door. Fortunately, that one opened. He was in such a frenzy to bail out that he forgot he was still wearing the radio headset. As he clambered away from the plane, the cord became taut and ripped it off his head.
Colt retreated to a safe distance and watched. When the plane didn’t catch fire, he went back and grabbed his stuff. Knowing how quickly the police had responded way out in the hills of Yakama, Colt must have figured they’d be at the crash site within minutes because he was only four miles outside the town of Granite Falls. The last thing he did was pour motor oil over the inside of the cockpit in an attempt to hide forensic evidence.
Laden with his gear, Colt hiked into the woods. He left behind a plane that looked like a toy broken over the knee of a giant, petulant child.
GARDINER’S CESSNA NOVEMBER-2183-PAPPA HAD taken off at 5:30 a.m. with about four and a half hours of fuel. The police were called at 7 a.m. and the alarm about a possible terrorist incident went off shortly thereafter. Now, at around 10 a.m., Pat Gardiner’s plane lay crumpled on top of a clearcut hillside. Gardiner says the Cessna had been crying out, telling everyone that it had crashed. His plane was equipped with an ELT (emergency locator transmitter), a distress signal that activates via an acceleration switch and automatically begins screaming if the plane gets into trouble. Not only does it shout, “Help, I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!” but the ELT transmits the plane’s precise location. Pat’s ELT used 121.5 megahertz, a frequency that search-and-rescue satellites stopped using in February 2009 because there had been too many false alarms, but that continues to be monitored by ground stations and commercial aircraft, who should have heard the signal.
With all the attention on the stolen plane from various agencies, including Homeland Security, it seems that it would have been easy to find and track the plane during its flight. One would also expect a swarm of activity around the crash site. And there was—but not until thirty-four hours after the Cessna went down, and then only because on Thursday, October 1, a logger drove up a three-mile skid road and stumbled upon the pulverized plane squatting in the middle of his clearcut.
In rare cases (possibly Steve Fossett’s) ELTs have failed to go off or haven’t been picked up by the satellites, but from what investigators told Pat Gardiner, FAA personnel who responded to the crash site were the ones who switched off his plane’s transmitter.
IN THE DAY AND a half before the logger found the plane, the facts of the Boundary County case—bare footprints, scrounged food, the chain of boosted cars leading back to Vancouver, and the fact that this was, after all, a flipping airplane theft—came together and pointed to one suspect: Colton Harris-Moore. When the wreckage was finally discovered, the FAA, FBI, and NTSB all worked the scene along with the local Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office and—as proof they had a good idea who was responsible—a detective called in from Island County.
The forensics team took DNA samples that ultimately matched Colt. Bare footprints led from the crash site and trackers attempted to follow, but lost his trail in the woods.
Once investigators gathered all their evidence and wrapped the scene, Gardiner’s plane had its wings clipped and a logging truck lifted and slung it aboard a flatbed like a beached whale. Everything went quiet in the Granite Falls area until 8 p.m. that Sunday, when a couple that lives less than four miles from the crash site came home to find they’d been burglarized, with blankets, a sweatshirt, shoes, their passports, and a cheap .22 caliber semiauto pocket pistol missing.
A Snohomish County deputy responded and, as he and the homeowner were checking out the house, they spotted a light on the hillside behind the property. The officer called for backup, and five deputies, including canine teams, started up the hill around 11 p.m. As the police picked their way through the thick brush, the dogs started going crazy. Then, according to the homeowner, they heard the crack of a gunshot.
Acting on standard procedure, the police pulled back, called in the cavalry, and set up a perimeter. Authorities knew Colt had handled guns, and believed he’d stolen at least five of them over the last several years, but there was no evidence he’d ever threatened anyone with a firearm. However, they knew he had a big attitude problem with cops going way back, and that on Orcas he’d pepper-sprayed a deputy. The year 2009 was also a very bad one for police in western Washington State, with six officers shot dead during a three-month period. Now they believed Colt had fired a gun when cops got close to him. They weren’t going to take any chances. The pursuit of Colton Harris-Moore had just taken a deadly serious turn.
COLT TOOK OFF, TRYING get as far away as possible from where the cops thought he was. He’d been chased many times and knew how the police operated. He could move extra fast now because he was traveling lighter: back at the campsite, he’d abandoned the bank bags from Orcas Island Hardware. The money hadn’t been touched; it was still banded together. Police also found the .32 caliber handgun stolen from BearAir in Creston, B.C., and a mirror from which the crime lab would lift a nice fingerprint.
Snohomish County deputies set up a cordon, manning roadblocks to control who got in and out of the area. Over the next twenty-four hours, the woods and country roads were flooded with law enforcement. The Marysville Police Department in Sno County sent their specially trained man-tracking squads to join the K9 and SWAT teams in an attempt to run Colt to ground while the county’s MD 500 helicopter and a Department of Homeland Security Black Hawk searched from above.
Colt was close enough to the action that he later told his mom that he heard the helicopters sweeping across the forest canopy over his head.
TV and newspaper images quickly emerged of troopers—some in black, others in camouflage, all armed with assault rifles—along with an armored personnel carrier and ominous black federal government helicopter, all arrayed against a barefoot teenager running through the woods. Now nothing could hold back the story of the boy who stole airplanes. Colton Harris-Moore’s tale went nationwide, and then global.
In order to deny Colt a means of escape, the police told everyone in Granite Falls to lock up their homes and cars. Within the small community, though, some people shrugged it off. One woman not only left her keys in her SUV, but also her purse. Searchers never spotted Colt, and the manhunt was called off after a day and a half. They had no idea how he escaped until the woman’s SUV showed up ditched in the little city of Stanwood. Her purse was still inside, the contents untouched. Stanwood police also found a passport belonging to the burglarized Granite Falls homeowners sticking in the door of their headquarters. Colt might be able to use her husband’s passport, but he had no use for a female identity and wanted to return the wife’s. A truck stolen from a nearby thrift store that same night was found across the causeway on Camano Island, at a spot a half mile from the single-wide trailer where Colt grew up and where his mom still lived.
Eighteen-year-old C
olton Harris-Moore, now hunted as an armed-and-dangerous fugitive, had gone home.
Part 2
THE CAMANO KID
Chapter 11
The spark that eventually brought Colton Harris-Moore into the world struck when his mother chose “Crazy.”
She was Pam Harris back then, and had gone to a restaurant/cocktail lounge in Lynnwood, Washington, to wait for her oldest sister. After ordering a beer, she punched up the Patsy Cline classic on the jukebox.
There were few patrons in the lounge, but two guys sitting at the bar were talking and laughing so loudly that Pam could barely hear her song. She got up from her table, fed more money into the jukebox, and played it again. The boys kept up the rough chatter, though. Pam drank her beer, lit a cigarette, and did a slow burn. When the song ended, she got up and went for “Crazy” one more time. On the way back to her table, she screeched, “Be quiet so I can hear it this time!”
That got their attention.
“One of them turned around, got up, and came across the room,” she says. “He was a big guy, muscular, and I thought, Oh God, I’m going to get hit.”
Pam tells the story without any hint that it strikes her as anything but normal that a guy would give a gal a smack in the kisser.
Born Pamela Ann Coaker in the spring of 1951, Pam was the youngest of four—three girls and a boy—spread over nine years. Her father was big in road construction in Kittitas County, Washington, just east of the Cascades, where his family had a sheep farm. According to his oldest grandchild, he was also a big drinker, afflicted with what she calls “the Coaker curse.” Pam’s mother grew up in the Dakotas as the oldest of fifteen kids in a family with a dash of Sioux blood in their veins—something the entire clan cites to explain their fondness for running around barefoot.
Pam’s mom suffered through a couple of bad marriages, lost her voicebox to cancer, and, according to family, used alcohol to help deal with the pain. Both of Pam’s parents died in their early sixties.
Pam grew up loving the outdoors, and some of her favorite early memories involve listening to her father play guitar around campfires. She also enjoyed clamming, crabbing, and fishing, even though she’s never gotten over a fear of the water. As a teen in the sixties, Pam got into the Beatles and organic gardening, dressed hippie, and wore headbands over long hair that she straightened on an ironing board.
At seventeen, she married an air force mechanic named Harry and moved to San Bernardino, California, where she gave birth to her first son, Paul. Pam loved life in California, but moved back to Washington State and then east to Missouri as Harry followed work. When Chrysler laid him off, the family returned to Washington and settled in for a few happy years. The marriage ended, according to Paul, when Harry left Pam because of her drinking.
Paul, who plans to write a book about his difficult childhood, grew up a latchkey kid, often left alone while Pam worked during the day or was out at night. From the age of six, he’d come home from school to an empty apartment, call one of his cousins, and stay on the phone until his aunt could get there to pick him up. During those years, Pam worked at a dry cleaner and then in Seattle at a series of government jobs in the accounts payable sections of the Department of the Interior, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the U.S. Navy.
The oldest of her batch of nieces and nephews remembers Pam as more of a sibling than as an adult figure. She was the “cool aunt,” with a great record collection and even a blurry picture she’d taken of the Beatles running onstage.
“We’d listen to music and go to concerts,” her niece says. “We were holding tickets to go see Lynyrd Skynyrd when they died in the plane crash.” The niece also remembers Pam telling her who her real father was and helping her get in touch with him—something that pissed off her mother, Pam’s oldest sister, to no end. “Pam always did her own thing,” she says. “She didn’t care what anybody thought about her, what they thought about the men in her life, about her drinking, or smoking ‘her weed.’ Her attitude was ‘I do what I want, when I want, how I want.’”
Another of Pam’s notable qualities was her thriftiness. “Tightwad,” says her niece. “Her apartment was always freezing in the winter because she refused to turn on the heat and pay for the electric bill.” Pam’s alcohol budget back then went to a generic econo-brew in a stark white can plainly and boldly labeled BEER.
In June 1985, Pam remarried, this time to Jerry Harris, a guy who’d dated her older sister Sandy for a couple of years. That union didn’t last long, though, and soon after it spoiled, Pam found herself in that cocktail lounge faced with the imposing six-foot figure of Gordon “Gordy” Moore bearing down on her while Patsy Cline wondered why she let herself worry.
“He walked over to my table and just said, ‘What?’ So I said, ‘I’ve been trying to listen to this song three times! Will you shut up?’ He laughed, thank God. And then he invited me up to the bar to sit with him and his friend. We had a few drinks—whiskey for him, beer on my side—and then he said, ‘Hey, you want to go to the beach tomorrow?’ I gave him my phone number and said, ‘Call me—at noon.’”
Though she doubted he would, Gordy called—at 11:59. He picked her up and, after a nice day at the beach, said he wanted to introduce her to his folks. “I thought, Well, that’s a little quick,” says Pam. “My hair was all windblown and I didn’t bring a brush, so on the way to his parents’ place he stopped and bought me one. I thought that was pretty cool.”
Gordy worked as a concrete finisher with full journeyman status and made a good hourly wage. He filled Pam’s kitchen with food every time he came over, putting so many cans on her shelves that she couldn’t shut the cupboard doors. “He met my son, Paul, and everything was cool there, too,” she says.
Gordy liked to smoke turkeys and shared Pam’s love of the outdoors, taking her, Paul, and one of Paul’s cousins camping several times.
Pam yearned to live someplace more rural than Lynnwood, a Seattle satellite primarily known for its shopping centers and convenient highway access. She was also tired of the long commute to her government job, though she made the best of it. Once during a heavy snowstorm, her bus got stuck in a drift coming home. “I told the driver she should get off and get us all pizza and beer,” says Pam. The driver refused, so Pam led a mutiny among the passengers, piloting them to a local Black Angus, where they spent the next few hours warm and toasting.
According to Pam, Gordy worked hard and when the whistle blew he enjoyed the bars. His concept of the ideal home had a pub within walking distance. Pam’s woodsy dreams, though, finally persuaded him to pool his money with what she’d raised by cashing in her retirement funds so they could buy a couple of lots on the skinny tail end of an island called Camano.
Shaped like the Pink Panther bound in a straitjacket, forty-square-mile Camano is technically an island, though it’s a drive-to. The mainland gateway is the little city of Stanwood, where a conglomeration of superstores and strip malls overwhelms the remnants of a traditional town plopped in the middle of redolently fertilized farmland watered by the Stillaguamish River. A bridge crosses the Stilly just as it deltas into the Salish Sea and offers Camano residents a twenty-four-hour umbilical to civilization—which is good and bad. The good is that people are able to live on a Pacific Northwest island with all its evergreen and coastal beauty, yet still drive to whatever they need instead of being held hostage to a ferry schedule. The bad is that because its residents have relatively easy access to other communities and services, Camano hasn’t developed its own resources like Orcas Island has been forced to, with its own kids’ programs, performing arts centers, library, museums, and high school.
In many ways, Camano sits in limbo between being a true island community and simply a suburb surrounded by water. About a third of the 13,400 Camano Islanders are retired, and many of the rest roll across the bridge twice a day as they head to and from jobs at Boeing, or in Stanwood or Seattle, or somewhere else along the I-5 corridor. Its
accessibility also makes Camano a popular vacation-home market. On summer Fridays, it seems every third car crammed onto the causeway has kayaks on top or a boat on a trailer as weekenders flood the island.
Wherever you are on the island, you’re a single turn from one of the four Camano Drives: East, West, North, and South. East Camano heads down island, offering sharp views of the Cascades across Port Susan Bay. Traffic and commercial buildings peter out to nothing as you pass the Camano Plaza’s big IGA. A utilitarian stretch on the west side of East Camano Drive houses a sparse collection of county offices. Island County once encompassed a big chunk of western Washington State but was chipped away over time so that it’s now made up of just Camano and Whidbey plus a smattering of smaller islands. Whidbey, with four times the acreage and three times the population of Camano—along with the county seat, Coupeville, and a big military base—overshadows its little sister, which even geologically seems to curl defensively inside the larger island. Camano residents talk of living in Island County’s forgotten hinterlands, and since county money follows population and pull, they’re right.
It takes ninety minutes to drive the circuitous route from Camano to Coupeville. That’s about twenty minutes longer than it takes Camano residents to get to downtown Seattle. It takes that same ninety minutes for Island County police to get from their Whidbey Island headquarters to the dinky prefab that serves as base for Camano’s small group of sheriff’s deputies.
Around 70 percent of Camano remains forested with thick second-growth. Drooping cedars, showy big-leaf maples, and stately Douglas fir crowd together so tightly along some sections of road that you can’t see past the first line into the woods. Outside about a dozen small subdivisions, many of the island’s homes are hidden down long tree-lined drives. Houses run the gamut from tarped single-wides to opulent log cabins fit for gentrified Jeremiah Johnsons to modern high-windowed manses facing sweeping ocean views. As you’d expect, plots along the coastline are pricey, with values dropping dramatically as you move inland. Rough-hewn fishing and crab shacks dotted the waterfront back in the day, but most have been torn down over the last few decades, replaced with large homes. As on Orcas, many of Camano’s finest homes are seconds—occupied only on weekends or for a couple of weeks each summer.