The Barefoot Bandit

by Bob Friel

When Colton came home from middle school having failed all of his classes, Pam went to the superintendent to insist that he be held back a grade. “They said, ‘Well, we don’t do that.’”

  Stanwood Middle asked Pam to come in for a crisis meeting about Colton. (Pam claims she went to every meeting they ever asked her to attend: “I was a very involved parent.”) Pam says she sat at a big table with a large group of teachers and school counselors who were trying to figure out a way to get Colton engaged in his education. “They said he was being disruptive in class, that he was basically uncontrollable… and I tend to believe that about him.” A coach suggested sports, and Pam says she pleaded, “Just don’t make him stronger! He’s strong enough.” She says she was frightened of Colt by this point, because he was getting bigger and she felt he had a serious anger problem.

  The South End kids who rode Island Transit with Colton on those days he did go to school saw that anger. “He’d get really loud,” says Kory. “He’d be arguing with the other kids, and when the drivers tried to settle it down he’d curse at them and sometimes they’d throw him off the bus.”

  Failing in school, virtually free of supervision at home, and rejected by almost all of his peers due to his antisocial behavior, Colton found acceptance with someone a couple years older, a curly-haired little guy the other kids called the Hobbit.

  Harley Davidson Ironwing says he had a rep around Stanwood as a bad guy, and that’s why Colton Harris-Moore sought him out.

  Born in Loveland, Colorado, Harley wound up in Stanwood via foster care. He and his siblings were taken away from their parents when Harley was four, and he can’t remember how many families he went through before ending up in Washington State with Karen Ironwing. Karen changed Harley’s middle name to Davidson because… well, it was apparently just too tempting.

  Harley speaks with a soft drawl when he says that he doesn’t do well with authority figures, including cops and teachers. He ran away from home early and often, and told police when they caught him that he’d rather go to juvie than back home because his foster brothers beat him up all the time. Even when he was living on the streets, though, Harley attended school almost regularly and made it to eleventh grade before dropping out. However, he was only halfway through sixth grade at Stanwood Middle School when he was charged with his first felonies.

  One of Harley’s claims to fame as a young hood happened April 25, 2002. “I was hanging out with my best friend one night and he got hungry,” remembers Harley. “We were near an espresso stand, so I broke in and got him a couple of those sugar cookies with the pink frosting.” It might’ve been too much sugar. “After that, we decided it’d be fun to try to blow up the police gas station.”

  The following morning, the Stanwood police got a call about two kids stuck in a clothing donation drop-off box near the Thrifty Foods. A deputy helped firemen extract Harley and his best buddy from the metal container. Both boys smelled like smoke and their fingers were blackened. There seem to be few times when Harley doesn’t fess up to his crimes, and he told the deputies how, after the pink cookie caper, he set out to create a Hollywood-worthy explosion at the gas station “because we were bored.”

  Harley said he dribbled diesel over the pumps, stretched out the hoses, and then stuffed newspaper in one of the nozzles. Worried it might go up before they’d gotten far enough away, Harley added another piece of paper to lengthen the fuse. He lit it and they jumped on bikes they’d stolen earlier that night. They waited… and waited… No boom. Harley tried again, but it still didn’t quite work like it does in the movies.

  After confessing everything, Harley pulled out of his handcuffs and tried to escape. He made it outside, but a female officer ran him down on the street. Harley struggled, and three deputies took him to the ground, then put him in hobble restraints for one of his many rides to the Denny Youth Center.

  Harley scoffs at the foster care, school, social services, and juvenile justice systems and whatever help they offered him while he was growing up. “Nothing in the system could have prevented me from becoming a crook.”

  Harley was in eighth grade when Colton, then in sixth, approached him. “He reminded me a little bit of myself. He was smart, he had a problem with authority. I figured he could be another person I could do crimes with.”

  As for Colton’s motivations, Harley says, “I think he was just looking for somebody that wouldn’t put him down. He didn’t have any friends, and his mom didn’t give a rat’s ass about him. He wouldn’t have gone for a criminal lifestyle if his mom had been giving him the attention I was giving him.”

  Harley says there wasn’t much to teach Colton about crime. “I gave him some tips on how not to draw attention to himself. Colt used to always want to turn lights on. Bad thing for burglars! That’s how you get caught real quick.”

  Thieving, according to Harley, is not so much about the skill as the will. “It’s easy to learn how to break into a house… it’s whether you can actually do it or not.” The big leap, he says, is from thinking about it and wanting to do it, to actually breaking a window and going inside someone’s house to steal their stuff.

  Harley calls himself “a drug addict” and counts booze among his addictions along with weed and cocaine. However, he says the rush that comes from breaking the law goes way beyond the drug high. “It’s not the stealing,” he says. “It’s the adrenaline you get from stealing. Knowing that any moment the cops can show up!”

  Colton had been feeding his adrenaline habit since he was a child, when Pam says he’d climb to the precarious tops of the hundred-foot-tall trees around the trailer. Then he found he could score big hits from “ninjing” around the neighborhood, stealing whatever caught his eye. Just like a drug, he needed more risk each time in order to achieve the same level of thrill.

  Harley says they got that burglar’s buzz even knowing that if they played it smart there was little chance of getting arrested. “We knew that the odds of getting caught burglarizing a house are very low,” he says. “It’s way better than you can do in a casino.” (He’s absolutely right: the closure rate for solving burglaries in the United States is 12 percent.)

  And even if they happened to get spotted in the act, there was one simple solution: “Run.” According to Harley that was an especially effective strategy in rural neighborhoods. “No cop in his right mind is going to chase you through the woods.”

  As to any moral quandary, Harley says: “It ain’t hurtin’ nobody else. Everything I’ve ever stole is insured, so they’ll reimburse them and they can get something better. These are victimless crimes.”

  Harley says he and Colton wandered the streets of Stanwood plotting their future. “Our ultimate plan was to steal a helicopter, land it on the roof of Costco, and steal a bunch of shit,” he says. “Colt always wanted to fly and he always said how it’d be great to steal an airplane.”

  Chapter 16

  In August 2002, on his birthday, Bill Kohler died in Oklahoma. When she got the word, Pam says, “I freaked, I started breaking everything that would break, screaming and yelling.”

  She says she sat eleven-year-old Colton down out at the picnic table and told him that the man he’d been closest to, the man he’d even tried to convince her was really his father, was dead. “He was very upset, and I was crying. I hugged him.”

  There was no funeral. “They cremated him without even asking me… and that’s not what Bill wanted.” Pam got his ashes but says she doesn’t even know how he died. “I never did get the coroner’s report because they wanted me to pay for it and that just don’t jive with me. Paying to find out how someone died? I mean he’s dead, so why pay for it? Not cool.”

  Even though Bill hadn’t been around much, Pam says that his death sent her into a steep downward spiral. “I drank a lot. I listened to Bill’s music, this beautiful American Indian music. I went into a deep depression… I’m sure it had some kind of an impact on Colt.”

  Not long after Bill, their Great Pyrenees, Cody, a
lso died. Pam got another Great Pyrenees, but gave it away when it started to suffer from seizures. After that, she took Colt to the pound and picked out Melanie, an energetic beagle, who became Colt’s constant companion.

  In Pam’s narrative of Colton’s trouble with the law, she says the two deaths were the turning point when he began having problems. Five months before Bill died, though, Island County deputies responded to a silent alarm at Elger Bay Elementary School. “Myself and another deputy found Colton hiding in a closet,” says Chris Ellis, who commanded the Camano Island precinct. Colt had gathered up a pair of binoculars, a disposable camera, candy, and some change from various school desks and drawers.

  “I called his mom, Pam, and said ‘This is Lieutenant Ellis from the sheriff’s office. I have your son Colton here and… ’ And she jumps in and goes, ‘What the fuck did that little asshole do now?’”

  Ellis explained they’d caught Colt at the school. “She refused to come pick him up. I had a deputy take him home… he was ten years old.”

  THE NEXT TIME COLTON’S name comes up in police records is January 2003, when he and another boy were caught shoplifting at the Camano Plaza Market. That April, Harley once again went outlaw to feed one of his hungry friends: he got nabbed stealing peanut butter and Snapple from Port Susan Middle School.

  According to Pam, she and Colton were going hungry, too. “We starved,” she says, because money was so tight. She also says that she and Colton now fought constantly.

  Colt told friends he was mad because Pam would spend all the money from their assistance check within two weeks, leaving them flat broke for the rest of the month. It was then, he says, that he first began to look at his neighbors’ houses as sources of food and money to buy food. He remembers being happy after breaking into one of his first homes, not because of the loot he found, but because he could make pancakes.

  Colton continued to receive treatment at Compass Health, but later admitted to a psychologist that he didn’t tell the counselors the extent of the physical conflict between him and his mom because he was afraid they would take him away from her. However, he did tell them that Pam had been on two-week drinking binges during which she’d break things. The twelve-year-old told them, “She is in denial about her drinking.”

  The Compass staff were also aware of the men Pam had coming through the trailer: “Many inappropriate father figures in the home over the time, exposing Colton to domestic violence and drug and alcohol addiction/selling.”

  The most plaintive words from young Colton come from this period: “I am not happy. I am depressed. I could stay in bed all day. I need help. I am tired of this stuff.”

  Clinicians reported that “Colton wants mom to stop drinking and smoking, get a job, and have food in the house. Mom refuses.”

  Colt’s pleas, all the interviews, the mounting CPS complaints, the counselors’ notes… result in two more mental health diagnoses for him: intermittent explosive disorder and depressive disorder. He’s prescribed Strattera, an ADHD medication.

  IN THE SPRING OF 2003, the original nuclear family had an explosive reunion. Gordy Moore showed up at the trailer on a nice May day. He and Pam started partying out in the yard and decided to fire up the grill and cook burgers.

  “Gordy’s getting the barbecue-er ready and we told Colt to go inside and get the ketchup and mustard and all that,” remembers Pam. “So he does and he brings them out to the picnic table. But then all of a sudden he started taking them back in. He said, ‘I don’t want to barbecue.’ I said, ‘I don’t care if you want to or not.’ So his dad and I brought all the stuff back out and then Colt stood off a ways and threw rocks at us, mainly at his dad, rocks about the size of baseballs. And so they got in a big fight toward the backyard and they’re rolling around on the ground toward the sticker bushes.”

  Colton says he got mad because his parents wouldn’t let him fix his food the way he wanted, and in his version he told police that Gordy threw him into stinging nettles, held him down by the throat, and said, “Don’t you know I have killed three men because of my anger?” The twelve-year-old took that as a threat. Colton also said he hadn’t thrown the rocks until after Gordy throttled him.

  According to Colt, Pam was drunk and screaming at him throughout the incident. When he got away from Gordy, Colt ran into the trailer and called 911. That really made Pam mad. “Somebody at the school had told all the kids that if anybody hurts you, just dial 911!” she says, indignant. “So Colt did! And here come the cops!”

  When Island County deputies showed up, Gordy took off through the woods. He didn’t show the same fleet-footedness as his son, though, and they quickly caught him. “Colt had some scratches on his neck,” says Pam. “I said, ‘So what?!’ But they arrested [Gordy].”

  Police reported that Pam “harangued and verbally abused the officers during the arrest,” and Colt said she kept after him when the deputies left, that she “stumbled around asking, ‘What are you going to do now? They’ve taken your father away.’”

  When the police ran a check on Gordy, they found he was already wanted on an outstanding warrant. He was also charged and convicted of assault in the fourth degree for nettling Colt. (Washington police records do not show any accounts of Gordy Moore killing anyone. As of May 2011, though, he is a wanted man, with an active warrant for failing to appear at court for a DUI and driving with a suspended license. His criminal record also shows an arrest in Reno, Nevada.)

  Child Protective Services received another referral after the barbecue donnybrook. A case worker came out to the trailer to check and see if Colton was okay.

  “I told her, ‘He’s fine,’” says Pam. But the CPS counselor said she needed to actually see him with her own eyes. “Just then Colt came running around the side of the house and I said, ‘There he is, and if you want him, go ahead and take the little bastard, ’cause I’m not jumping through any friggin’ hoops!’ You know, drug testing or any of that crap. So she said, ‘Oh no, we just wanted to make sure he was okay.’ And she left.”

  AT THIS POINT, DSHS recommended Pam get treatment for chemical dependency. She refused. A social worker suggested that Pam see a counselor at Compass Health. She said no thanks. A note in Colton’s record states: “Social worker has concerns regarding this child due to mother’s possible use of drugs or alcohol; this judgment due to the men and their habits that have been in Colton’s life.” But no action was taken.

  COLTON BEGAN TO STRIKE back. When he got angry at Pam, he smashed the trailer’s windows, ultimately breaking most of them. He went into rages at her drinking and her smoking, and for things like playing the TV too loud when he was trying to sleep.

  “I even got headphones for my TV and he’d swear he could hear it,” says Pam. “I said, ‘That is impossible.’ So he stuck a screwdriver where my headphones went and he messed it up so I couldn’t use it anymore. Yeah, he wasn’t very nice to me at times.”

  Colton scrawled “Pam is a drunk” on the door to the laundry room and began taking full beer cans away from her and putting them out along the road.

  IN SEVENTH GRADE AT Stanwood Middle School, Colton once again found some solace and friendship with a girl who was outside the popular cliques.

  “Colt was in a few of my classes and it quickly became obvious that there were a lot of issues between him and the other kids,” says Brandi Blackford, a blue-eyed blonde with piercings in her eyebrow, tongue, and belly button who’d just moved from Portland to Camano Island. “He argued with people a lot. He’d make little comments at everything they said. He also told everyone that his mom was a lawyer and that they lived in a big, beautiful house, but kids who knew him would call him out on it.”

  Colton wound up as Brandi’s lab partner in science class. He introduced himself to her as Colton Harris, dropping the part of his name that tied him to Gordy Moore.

  “Behind the lies and all the drama you could see he just wanted a friend.” Brandi became that friend for a while. Her mom would drive over
to Stanwood to pick them up from school and remembers having to wait outside in the car because Colton wouldn’t leave the building until all the buses had gone—“because of kids picking on him,” says Brandi.

  On the weekends or anytime school was out, Brandi and Colton went to the beach with Melanie and Cricket, Brandi’s Jack Russell terrier. “Colton never wanted to go home.”

  Colt’s time outside the trailer, though, wasn’t all spent in such agreeable activities as drawing his name in the sand with Brandi. On October 8, 2003, police caught Colton with a stolen cell phone, resulting in a possession of stolen property (PSP) in the third degree charge to which he pleaded guilty and got sentenced to probation. Then on Thanksgiving of that year, Colton celebrated the harvest festival in a nontraditional way. He and three other boys met up in Stanwood for an evening of mayhem. Armed with a butane torch lighter in the apparent belief that it would work like the plasma cutters crooks use to cut open safes in the movies, Colton went to work on the door of a Stanwood mortgage office. He scorched and melted the plastic frame a bit, but nothing more, so he went old school and pried on the door until a window broke. The boys grabbed a laptop and some blank CDs and moved on to the big Thrifty Foods supermarket, where they set fire to leaflets on the community bulletin board. Then came the big target, that hated bastion of teachers, books, and dirty looks: Stanwood Middle School.

  Colton got them in by hammering on the gym doors and breaking a window. Inside, they used the torch on a Pepsi machine, melting the plastic face. On their way out, they set fire to an office window and then vandalized the bus barn before finally calling it a night.

  One of the kids’ dads figured out the boys had been up to no good and marched his son down to the police station to spill. The cops called Pam, saying they wanted to come out and talk to her son. At the trailer, she pointed down the hall to his room, the first door on the right beyond the little living room. The police found the door not only closed, but padlocked.