by Bob Friel
As you continue south on the island, the houses spread out and the view is mostly wooded acreage—private property along with public land and parks—with plenty of room to roam, or hide.
Mountain View Road, near the top of Elger Bay, serves as Camano’s Mason-Dixon Line. Above the line is the bedroom community section of the island where people think nothing of making a daily trip across the causeway to civilization and its jobs. South of Mountain View, though, you hear tell of blue tarps and rednecks, primitive artists and wild-eyed ex-hippies, the cries of coyotes and the strum of banjos. And it’s all true. Sort of.
The south end of Camano is more islandy than the north part due to its distance from the bridge. It’s about a half-hour drive from the southern tip just out to Stanwood, and there aren’t many people willing to make that extra commute. That’s left the south less populated and developed. Much of the island’s long tail is only a mile wide, and you can walk that in most parts without leaving the woods except to cross the loop road. Other than retirees, many of the full-timers down here tend to be artists and survivors from the back-to-the-land movement of the late sixties and seventies. Like Orcas full-timers, South Enders cobble together a living by doing two or three different jobs. Also similar to Orcas, the south end of Camano illustrates extreme disparity in income and wealth within a remarkably small area.
“The place where time stands still and the stills still stand,” says Jack Archibald, the person most responsible for putting the capital letters on the South End. “This is hell and gone. Nobody comes down here for a Sunday drive, and we like it that way.”
Archibald moved to Camano in the seventies, “looking to get back to the land.” He drove out on a drizzly dark night and told a Realtor he had a life savings of $25,000 and wanted a roof over his head and at least five acres. “He took me to this little cabin surrounded by tall trees, lights on inside so it was glowing, chimney puffing smoke… I said, ‘I’ll take it!’”
Daylight revealed the dream cabin to be just a rickety shack complete with Visqueen windows that did nothing to keep out the winter’s cold. Replacing those sheets of plastic turned out to be an act of fate for Archibald, who’d been working as a school bus driver. “I wanted something more interesting than just plain windows, so I took a night class on how to do stained glass.” He found he had an affinity for breaking and patching glass back together. Creating spectacular installations for schools, hospitals, libraries, and public buildings became his career.
Archibald and his fellow escapees looked around their section of Camano and decided to embrace the backwoods reputation. Jack created an alter ego, Skeeter Daddle, a rural raconteur, banjo picker, and gentleman nettle farmer who, along with his South End String Band mates, branded the South End as a place frozen in time.
“One of us called the South End ‘a poor man’s paradise’ and that was dead-on because when a lot of us moved in, land was very cheap,” says Archibald. “You couldn’t believe that you didn’t have any money but still got to live in a place like this. Wow, man—utopia!”
That didn’t last. “It’s harder and harder to live on this island if you’re poor, even down here. A lot of struggling folks are kinda grandfathered in, but there are less of them all of the time. More are losing their places now because of the economy hurting real estate, which means the itinerant construction jobs go away and they can’t pay their mortgages.”
Archibald describes the South End as a mini version of Florida. “It’s rich retirees on the coast and rednecky in the middle… different worlds within a very short distance. You won’t see it on a casual drive, but in the center of the island you find some fairly impoverished people… Garbage hasn’t been picked up forever, lawn’s up, house is falling down.”
IN DECEMBER 1985, PAM and Gordy moved out of their mainland apartment and into a twenty-three-year-old, six-hundred-square-foot single-wide trailer set on five inland acres of Camano’s South End. The area remained so undeveloped back then that their dirt road didn’t even have a name, just a number, 25’55, corresponding to its longitude.
Surrounded by good clamming and crabbing waters but also within easy reach of the Cascade mountains for camping, Camano fit Pam’s dream. So did the property, with plenty of room for a big garden, chicken coop, and pigpen. Except for the clearing around the trailer, the acreage remained thickly forested, making it feel like you were in the middle of nowhere with no one else around. To Pam—never one to associate with neighbors or much of anyone else—that was perfect.
Standing at the barbecue with a beer in her hand, screened off from the rest of the world by towering walls of Douglas fir and cedar, Pam was in paradise. Gordy, without a bar within walking distance, was okay—for a while.
“Gordy was a great guy, a lot of fun,” remembers Pam’s niece, “as long as he wasn’t drinking.” With a long history of DUIs, Gordy had to pass urine tests to keep his driver’s license and get to job sites. “I got pregnant around this time, when Gordy was sober,” she says. “Pam was really doting on me, and one day Gordy says to her, ‘I don’t have any kids—why don’t we have a baby?’ and Pam said, ‘Yeah! I want another one.’”
Pam says she and Gordy tried for about five years to become pregnant, and she had to go in for some plumbing work before finally conceiving in June 1990. “When I finally did get pregnant, Gordy goes, ‘I suppose you want to get married now, don’t ya?’” she says. “I said, ‘No, Gordy, I wouldn’t do that to you.’ He didn’t really want to get married—he liked messing around too much. Gordy does what Gordy wants to do.”
Pam, at thirty-nine, became pregnant just as her twenty-year-old first son and his wife, Jacquie, had their own baby girl, Christina. Around the same time, Pam’s oldest sister—who’d also moved out to Camano and lived at the end of Road 25’55—was in the terminal stages of emphysema. In January 1991, Pam’s granddaughter died of SIDS, which, the family says, had a big effect on her. That March, Pam’s oldest sister died.
Pam skipped her sister’s funeral because, as she told her niece, she felt she was too close to term. Three weeks later, at 8:38 a.m. on March 22, 1991, at Affiliated Health Services in Mount Vernon, Skagit County, Washington, Pam gave birth to her second son.
“Paul called me and said, ‘Oh God, my mother wants to name the baby Colt, after the beer and the gun,’” says Pam’s niece. “It was Paul and Jacquie who convinced her to officially make it Colton, since at least that was a real name.”
Pam had kept Jerry Harris’s surname, and she and Gordy decided to hyphenate. The baby boy became Colton Harris-Moore.
PAM WANTED TO CELEBRATE Colt’s birth as an extra special event. “I was working for the navy back then and had a good paycheck,” she says. “And Gordy was working steady and everything was cool, so I said, ‘We’ve waited for this baby for five years, how about let’s bring him home from the hospital in a white limo?’”
Pam says she’ll never forget the limousine driver’s name: Dexter. “We had him stop at a little store on the way home. I laid the baby in the backseat and both Gordy and I went inside. When we came back, Dexter was standing outside that limo like a guard. It was cool.”
They’d rented the limo for a couple of hours, so little Colt’s next stop was the feed store. “We were raising pigs and we had to get our feed,” says Pam. “When the owner saw the limo he went in and washed his hands and put on an apron because he wanted to see the baby. He met Colt and then we loaded a couple of bags of pig feed into the trunk of the limo.”
After that, they stopped at the market on Camano to show Colt off to some of the cashiers they knew. “God, we had a lineup! People I didn’t even know lined up to see that baby,” remembers Pam. Pam and Gordy then took Colt home to the little trailer tucked out of sight among the cedar trees.
A Camano resident who was at the market that day when the limo showed up remembers turning to a friend and saying, “That kid doesn’t have a chance.”
COLT, PAM SAYS, WAS a fat, happy baby. She
nicknamed him Tubby and says that from the beginning he always loved to be outside and was fascinated with anything “up.” She remembers Colt staring into the night sky as she rocked him, and says that one of his first words was “moon.”
Pam went back to work after Colt was born, dropping him off at either her sister Sandy’s or her daughter-in-law Jacquie’s before heading off for the ninety-minute commute to her job with the navy. (The women in her office had thrown her a baby shower and had given her a novelty frame that said “Time’s Baby of the Year,” a somewhat prescient gift since eighteen years later, Time would name Colt “America’s Most Wanted Teen.”) Sandy’s eighteen-acre spread on the mainland came complete with horses, dogs, cats, and chickens, and Colt showed an immediate affection for animals.
According to Pam, Gordy was “an excellent father for about the first two years. We’d even argue over who got to change the diaper.” Then Gordy started to get itchy. “He wanted a bar out his front door,” says Pam. “So I said, ‘Okay, let’s make one. We’ll open up all the windows and put a couple of kegs in here.’” That didn’t work. Gordy started stepping out on her, which led to increasingly hostile confrontations at home.
“Once he started drinking? Whoa!” says Pam’s niece. “Sloppy and mean. He turned evil… Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”
According to court records, the first report to Child Protective Services regarding Colton Harris-Moore’s welfare occurred before he turned one.
When he was about eighteen months old, Pam says she began to find Colt sitting on the floor of the trailer banging his head against the wall. Relatives remember him, as an infant, acting out of control, scrambling atop the kitchen counters in the trailer. A former neighbor reported that more than once he saw toddler-aged, diapered Colton wandering down 25’55 alone, “like a wild child.”
Before Colt turned three, Gordy was “in and out” of the home. In April 1994, Pam filed a protection order against him.
Colt was enrolled in special education preschool classes at the age of three because testing indicated he’d failed to reach normal developmental milestones. Colt’s IEP (Individualized Education Plan) concentrated on helping him with speech and articulation.
Pam also headed to school. She’d been the first in her family to attend college when she took courses in Seattle and St. Louis, and now she enrolled in Skagit Valley College. “I was planning on getting my criminal justice degree,” she says. From there she wanted to work toward her law degree and ultimately become a practicing attorney. “I know that at least I’d be an honest one.”
When Pam took a psychology class, she suddenly had an insight into what she calls Colt’s mental problems. She says that from an early age he never thought through the consequences of his actions. “We learned about brain synapses, and I said, ‘That’s it! Colt has a broken synapse.’”
With Pam out of work, though, money got tight and she quit school. “Crap just started happening, trucks breaking down, nobody to help me… so bag it.” Pam and Colt went on welfare. Gordy was supposed to pay child support, and when he didn’t, the state’s Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS) went after him. Gordy, though, had a way to get around them.
“He knew to work less than a full quarter, which is what it takes for them to find you and take your money,” says Pam. “So he just kept moving to another job.”
Gordy didn’t totally disappear, though, stopping back at the trailer every once in a while over the ensuing years. If he was flush, he’d hand Pam some cash.
Around this time Pam had a falling out with her remaining sister, Sandy, in a continuing round of family feuds. Colton would later remember that event (“when Mom alienated them”) as being painful because he was close to Aunt Sandy and loved visiting the animals. According to family members, the feuds were usually about money.
On December 4, 1994, with her sons Paul and Colt in attendance, Pam got married again, this time to forty-one-year-old Seattle native William Kohler. Bill loved fishing, heroin, and raising homing pigeons. He’d served in the army, based overseas in Germany during the sixties, and then, according to Pam, worked as a milker at dairy farms when he came back to Washington. While Colt had already begun to detest Gordy, his biological father, he warmed to Bill. The two, Pam says, did everything together, and especially bonded over taking care of the animals they kept. Colt would later say that one of his best memories of Bill was how he’d walk like a chicken when they went out in the mornings to collect eggs.
Once again, though, his mother’s choice of men left Colt with little stability at home. Pam told a counselor that Bill “was not really here much… He was a heroin addict, so he was out a lot… Colton couldn’t count on [him].”
PAM SAYS YOUNG COLT was always more than a handful. “I don’t recall ever being able to control him, ever.” She found it impossible to discipline him. “I was spanked and I’m okay,” she says, though even corporal punishment had little effect on Colt. “He was always so big and strong, even when he was little, that it took more out of me to spank him than what the spanking did to him… He just always did what he wanted.”
When Colton was four, a witness filed a complaint with Child Protective Services after seeing “a woman” grab Colt “by the hair and beat his head severely.” By this time, concerns about Colton Harris-Moore’s mental health, education, nutrition, and physical safety had been entered into every part of “the system” possible, with reports to county, state, and federal agencies tasked with child welfare.
Colton continued special ed classes until age six, when he was reassessed and determined eligible for regular grade school. He was an inquisitive kid who could laser focus on things he was interested in—like nature and airplanes—but he never clicked with school. Pam remembers only one teacher who seemed to get through to him, and she moved to another school district after Colton finished second grade. His marks were never good, and they deteriorated as he advanced until at one point he failed every class. Pam says she insisted that the school hold him back, but the controversial policy of “social promotion” kept graduating Colton to the next grade along with his age group.
Outside of school, Colton joined a youth soccer team. Pam drove him to a couple of practices and he got his picture taken with the team. The photo shows an athletic six-year-old—certainly no longer tubby—with a bright, enthusiastic smile. After the team picture and before the first game, though, Colton stopped showing up. Pam said it was because her eyes gave her trouble and she couldn’t drive him at night.
With Colton’s speed and agility, he likely would have been a star on the playing field. Parents of another boy on the soccer team who also went to grade school with Colton say that Pam never reached out about the transportation problem. “One of the other parents would have been happy to pick him up for practice. That happens all the time with kids’ sports and events off the island—people help each other out. We’re all in the same boat.”
Other than the short stint with soccer, Pam says Colt was never interested in sports. “He’d rather be out playing in the woods.”
Colton’s main playmate early on was Anne Pitser. Anne’s mom worked at the Tyee Grocery, a little market near the very bottom of Camano where Pam bought her cigarettes and beer in those days. She and Pam had babies the same year and lived close, so they brought the kids together at an early age. “I still have a book that Colt and his mom gave me for my second birthday,” says Anne. “I just always knew him.”
Anne says that all the other kids just wanted to sit around and watch TV. “I thought they were boring. I didn’t have TV, so I always had to make my own fun, and Colt was into that.”
Every day after school starting in kindergarten, Anne says she and Colt would head to one or the other’s home. At Anne’s house, they’d play board games or race on her dad’s electric slot car track. Over at Colt’s, they primarily played outside.
“Inside his house was pretty much trashed… You were wading through mountains of things to ge
t anywhere,” she says. Instead, they’d spend their time running around with the dogs and playing in the woods. “We used to just love climbing trees. We’d find anything that had a low branch and climb on each other’s backs to get to it. We’d climb up to the very top and then be like, ‘Oh no, how do we get down?’”
Back then, Camano didn’t have its own elementary school and island kids were bused across the bridge to Stanwood. “We were the outcasts there,” says Anne. “I was the fat girl with buck teeth, and everyone hated Colt. They made fun of him, they’d throw things at him. They’d pick on him because he dressed different and maybe he didn’t bathe regularly… He was just a boy. They were mean kids.”
Tough times in school brought her and Colt even closer. “We were inseparable. He never wanted to go home when he was at my house, and when I was over there he was like, ‘No! You can’t go home yet, don’t leave!’ By the time we were in the third grade, his mom was convinced that we were going to grow up and get married.”
Anne says Colt craved attention. “He wanted to be recognized. He wanted people to look at him and say, ‘Hey, he’s the one who did that!’ If he started a science project, he wanted it to be really good so that people would praise him. But I don’t think people ever really cared.” Anne says Colton once built an elaborate treehouse in the woods by his trailer. “I was like, ‘Dude, I can’t believe you built this! It’s the coolest thing in the world!’ That made him feel really good.”