The Barefoot Bandit

by Bob Friel

  Pam said she didn’t realize Colton wasn’t home. The padlock was no problem, though: she came down the hallway with a hatchet and chopped it off the door.

  The deputies stormed into the room looking for the notorious juvenile delinquent and South End bully, but pulled up short: the top of Colton’s desk was piled high with stuffed animals. “Are these Colt’s?” the surprised officers asked Pam. She assured them that they were. The cops searched the room—no Colton, no laptop—but they spotted a Sony camcorder still in its box and a wallet carrying someone else’s identification. Pam told the police that Colton said he bought the video camera at a liquidation store. The cops called bullshit, so she phoned the store—which told her no, they’d never sold Sony camcorders.

  The cops finally caught up with Colton at school and he was found guilty of malicious mischief in the third degree and burglary in the third degree. The break-in and vandalism became the sixth and seventh “incident reports” in Colton’s rapidly fattening file at Stanwood Middle. They suspended him for twenty-four days and charged him for his part of the damages. “Everybody in school knew him after that,” says Mike Bulmer. “They started calling him Klepto Colt.”

  Colton’s legal troubles did nothing to smooth over things at home. He and Pam made it through Christmas, but fireworks erupted on New Year’s Eve. Colton now weighed 130 pounds and stood five foot four, big and heavy for a twelve-year-old. He was no longer afraid of Pam, and this time she was the one who dialed 911 and Colton who went running into the woods when the cops arrived. Pam pressed charges, and Colton pleaded guilty to assault 4, receiving a sentence of six months probation, thirty-six hours of community restitution (aka community service), and mandatory counseling, curfew, and urinalysis.

  Two weeks later when his probation officer, Aiko Barkdoll, checked to see if Colton was following Pam’s “house rules,” she told him that he’d bitten her on the forearm and hit her. Pam said that when she tried to call the police about it, Colton had grabbed the phone out of her hand and broken it. She said he’d then chased her around the property with a boat oar, and that she’d escaped only by locking herself in her pickup. When Pam finally managed to call the cops, Colton again ran off into his woods.

  When Barkdoll asked Colton about the incident, he admitted that he and Pam often got into physical fights and that his anger came from her “smoking and drinking beer.” Colton also showed him scratches where Pam had clawed his arm.

  In his report, the probation officer noted: “Colton and his mother share a tumultuous relationship” and have difficulty resolving problems without aggression. He also made a call to Child Protective Services regarding Colton’s welfare. He noted that when he contacted CPS, the file on Colton was active (his was at least the ninth referral to CPS for abuse or neglect of Colton so far; there would be a dozen by the time he was fourteen). Still, Barkdoll said that the CPS case worker assigned to Colton Harris-Moore claimed “little recollection of the family.”

  Two days later, on January 16, 2004, after another fight with Pam, Colton was brought before a judge and had his personal recognizance revoked for “continuing assaultive and threatening behaviors toward his mother.” He was placed in juvenile detention for eleven days.

  The stretch in juvie appeared to have an impact on Colton. He agreed to more counseling. Pam took him for another mental health assessment in early February, and Barkdoll noted that “Colt has been complying with mental health intervention involving both counseling and medications.”

  In a later psychological evaluation, it’s noted that the one medication that seemed to work for Colton was Strattera, but that he stopped taking it with no reason given. Pam isn’t clear on the timing or the particular drug—whether it was the Prozac, Geodon, Strattera, or others—but she remembers taking him off one of them.

  “He was seeing a psychiatrist who put him on some medication,” she says. “But he got so depressed on it. He sat down in my front yard next to my chair and just hung his head. And God, he would never hardly ever sit down. It scared me. So I stopped giving it to him, and I stopped taking him to that doctor because he wanted to just keep trying different medications. I said, ‘Colt’s not going to be used as a guinea pig!’”

  Testing patients on different ADHD meds and antidepressants and fine-tuning the dosage before finding the most effective ones—“a trial and error process,” as the Mayo Clinic refers to it—is extremely common. It often takes as long as eight weeks for the drugs to show results.

  SADLY, BY THE TIME his probation officer noted that Colt was cooperating, the adolescent had already set in motion a freight train of additional troubles for himself.

  On February 6, Colton was found guilty of another PSP 3, adding six months probation and sixteen hours of community restitution. (In Colton’s early sentences, judges allowed hour-for-hour credit toward community service if Colton agreed to attend counseling and mental health treatment.) A week later, felonies were filed for the Thanksgiving tear, and Colton’s rap sheet also listed as “still pending” another burglary in the third degree, theft in the third degree, two counts of burglary in the second degree, three counts of malicious mischief, and one count of reckless burning. One week before his thirteenth birthday, Pam called the cops again after she and Colton had a fight. He was hit with assault 4.

  On March 16, a walkie-talkie and a video camera disappeared from Stanwood Middle School. Five students fingered Colton. When the principal confronted him, Colton said he “could not stop stealing and did not know why.” After several rounds of phone calls from the school administrators, Pam finally admitted that the missing stuff was at the trailer and agreed to return it.

  They expelled Colton for the rest of the year. His probation officer tried to use that to get him sent to juvenile prison, but the judge let him stay free with tighter restrictions. Barkdoll believed Colton snowed the judge, writing that Colt “seems to have been somewhat opportunistic in the community though presents as well behaved and remorseful when before the Court.”

  In April, Colton was charged with trespassing in Stanwood. It was also the month he and Pam got a new next-door neighbor.

  CAROL STAR MOVED TO Haven Place so she’d have room for her horses. She bought an existing house and cleared the land for stables and paddocks. She describes Haven as a great place to live—with a couple of exceptions. Instead of stopping by with welcome baskets, the folks along Haven came with warnings about Colt.

  “People told me, ‘Do not let him in your house because he’s going to scope out what you have and come back and get it.’ They said he’d been stealing stuff in the neighborhood since he was eight years old. And that he’d even tried to steal the contractor’s Caterpillar when my house was under construction.”

  From the stories, Carol half expected Damien from The Omen. She was surprised to meet, literally, the boy next door. “When you talk to him he’s a nice kid, very friendly, doesn’t look like the bogeyman.”

  After all the teasing about his raggedy clothes and suspect hygiene when he was a boy, Colton had begun taking responsibility for his appearance. He took charge of the laundry at home and paid careful attention to his grooming. “He dressed well, had the best tennis shoes on, and nice clothes,” says Star. Often, though, she says she saw Colton wandering around “looking lost,” and started to feel bad for him. “I don’t think he had a lot of friends, and it seemed like he just wanted to befriend people.”

  However, any camaraderie she might have had with Colton got off to a bad start when his best friend tried to eat one of hers. “Colton’s dog came into my yard, trapped my cat against a wall, and tried to kill it.” Star rushed out and saved the cat just in time. “His dog had a telephone cord around its neck, which I thought was pretty weird, but I grabbed it and tied it to my fence. I figured Colton would come over and get it eventually, and he did. I screamed at him, ‘If your dog is over here again trying to kill my cat I’m going to call the Humane Society.’ And that opened the vendetta for him… A
month after that he ripped me off the first time, climbed through an open window and stole my computer, some cameras, and other electronics.”

  Star says she knows it was Colton even though the police never charged him or anyone else with the crime. “The cops came and said, ‘Oh, it looks like dogs were in here running around.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, they might have because the burglar didn’t close the door and it was open all night long. Do you think the dogs stole my computer, too?’”

  Even though she lived alone, Star says she was never frightened of Colton. “I don’t think he’s the type of person that would hurt somebody. The only way he could survive was to break into houses to get food and steal stuff to sell because Pam wouldn’t feed him even though she always had money to buy beer.”

  Just in case, though, Star went out and bought a gun. “And when I got it, I made sure I went out back and shot it just so they knew I had one.” She says that was as much about Pam as it was about Colton.

  During her six years on Haven Place, Star says she often heard Pam yelling at Colton and Van. “She used to scream at her boyfriend just like she’d scream at Colton.” At one point, Star couldn’t keep quiet any longer. “She’s screaming at Colton, saying all kinds of filthy things, and I was outside in the yard and finally yelled, ‘Shut up, Pam, I’m tired of listening to you!’ Pam screamed back, ‘Fuck you!’”

  Star says another neighbor got even more fed up when Colton allegedly broke into her trailer through the skylight and stole a computer she’d been using to write a book, with no backup saved. “She was pissed!” remembers Star. “She drove over into Pam’s front yard and just sat there blasting the horn. Pam came running out of the house screaming and calling the police.” According to Star, the neighbor yelled back that she just wanted Pam to know what it felt like to be disturbed like she’d been when she was ripped off by her son.

  FINALLY, SUMMER ARRIVED on Camano. Residents and vacation homeowners scraped and repainted their boat bottoms, strung fresh line on their fishing reels, and readied their crab pots and clam rakes. Elger Bay Grocery stocked up on bait and beer, and Friday traffic piled up on the bridge. Skies went blue, seas laid down, and days stretched out. It was a great time to be an island boy with a faithful dog and access to a boat.

  It was also a good time to own waterfront property at Utsalady Point, like Glen Kramer and his wife. In 1998, they moved full-time into a home that’s been in his family since 1957. Houses on the point stand gable to gable atop narrow lots, but their yards roll straight onto a fine gray sand beach dimpled with white clam shells.

  In summertime, boats pass back and forth across the serene blue background of Skagit Bay, providing Utsalady residents an ever-changing view. As if the sunny scene could get more bucolic, Glen Kramer regularly saw a young boy buzzing by aboard a small outboard boat, his beagle up at the bow, its nose in the breeze. In the back of Kramer’s mind he thought it unusual that every day the boy and his dog were on a different boat, but he shrugged it off.

  On the twenty-second of July, Glen and his wife came home after a short trip to Stanwood. He glanced out the window and instantly noticed that his dinghy was gone. A quick scan with binoculars picked up a strange scene.

  “Here’s this kid a ways down the beach carrying my outboard—I could tell it was mine because I’d bought it used from a rental outfit and it still had their big silver sticker.”

  Kramer hurried down and approached the lanky boy he recognized as the same one he’d seen zipping around. Colton was just about to attach his motor to someone else’s boat, a Zodiac inflatable.

  “I said, ‘Hey, that’s my outboard! What are you doing?’” says Kramer. “And he instantly started in on a story, saying, ‘Some sailboaters found your dinghy drifting offshore and asked me to take the engine off and switch it over to their Zodiac.’”

  The kid’s obvious gift of gab momentarily stunned Kramer. “He could really think on his feet, but his story made no sense. I asked him where the boaters were and he said they’d gone off sailing for a while. I look around, and here he’d dragged my boat up the beach and hidden it amid the trees. I told him I didn’t believe him, and he just walked off.”

  Not only impressed with the kid’s golden tongue but also his strength, Glen had to call his wife to help him muscle their boat back to the water. He reattached his outboard and then looked at the Zodiac and the gas cans lying beside it. “I knew the boat didn’t belong there, so I decided to tow it over to my beach and try to find the owner.”

  Glen’s wife suggested they call the Island County sheriff. Glen simply told them he’d caught a young boy stealing his boat. The deputies knew exactly who to look for. “It wasn’t ten minutes later that they came rolling up the driveway with the same kid in the back of the police car. I identified him and they said they’d arrest him, but that he’d be right out again because he was only thirteen.”

  Not too long after the police left, another vehicle came up to the Kramers’ home, this time a battered little pickup. Glen looked out and saw the same kid, now in the passenger seat, with a woman he presumed was his mother or grandmother driving. He figured she’d brought him back to apologize for taking the boat, and went out to meet them.

  According to Glen, Pam Kohler got out of the truck and started right in on him, saying: “You stoled our gas cans!”

  “What are you talking about?” asked Glen, stunned for the second time that day.

  “You stoled our gas cans and we want them back,” Pam kept insisting.

  Sensing this was not an argument worth having, Glen told Pam, “Well, you tell your son they’re back wherever he stole that Zodiac from because I put the gas cans inside it and the owner’s already come and taken his boat.” Then he walked back into his house.

  As the Utsalady neighbors began comparing notes, they found that a number of their boats had been moved around. Several that had older two-cycle outboards had their engines ruined. Glen says they believed that Pam had been bringing Colton up to their neighborhood all summer long. “She was dumping him off at the boat ramp with gas cans.” Even though Colton was sophisticated enough to mix and match engines and boats to create just the little cruising package he wanted, he apparently didn’t know that the two-cycle outboards needed oil mixed in with the fuel. “He was using plain gas and just running each boat until the engine seized up, and then he’d take another one.”

  When he got hauled before the judge, Colton was found guilty of theft in the second and third degrees and sentenced to fifty days in juvie plus forty-eight hours community service and six months probation.

  “COLTON AND I ‘DATED’ in eighth grade, as eighth graders do,” says Brandi. “Holding hands as we walked to class, going to movies… ” After they’d been dating for a few weeks, though, Colton stopped showing up for school. He’d been sent to juvie, but hadn’t told anyone he was going away. “I couldn’t get ahold of him and had no idea where he was.” Brandi says that when Colton finally returned to school, he was very tan. “He told everyone he’d been in the Bahamas.”

  Brandi says everything to do with Colton turned even worse in the eighth grade. “Things really got out of control,” she says. “The kids got even meaner to Colton.” One day, he and Brandi were hanging out at the Stanwood playground when two boys Colton had trouble with walked up. “I said, ‘Colton, let’s just go,’ but he said, ‘No, we’re fine.’ They yelled, ‘Hey, fag, you need to leave.’ When Colton refused, they grabbed him and pushed him up against the jungle gym. I was begging them to please just leave him alone and they kept asking me why I was hanging out with this ‘piece of shit.’ Colton tried to get away and one of them pulled out a knife and said he was going to stab him. I was crying and grabbed my phone and told them I was calling the cops. They pushed Colton down, kicked him in the stomach, and walked away.”

  Brandi called her mom, who rushed across the bridge to pick them up. “She took us back to our house and asked Colton if he wanted to call his mother. He came up with so
me story that she was out of town. You could see by the look in his eyes that he was on his own. His mom wasn’t out of town, but she wasn’t going to do anything to help him anyways, so why bother? He didn’t act scared, but I know he was.”

  BACK AT THE TRAILER, the horror show escalated to the point where, in November 2004, it actually appeared that Haven Place was haunted. The tires on Pam’s pickup kept inexplicably going flat. Then one night as she sat in her lawn chair having a smoke and a beer, she started hearing things hit the ground all around her. She called the cops, but they couldn’t find anyone.

  Night after night it happened: batteries, tent stakes, a croquet ball, screwdrivers, all mysteriously fell out of the sky, often hitting the trailer. Pam says that every time she left home, someone went in and took things—a bag of potatoes, socket wrenches, circular saw blades—and then later threw them back at her and the trailer. She says whoever it was threw flour around inside and put human excrement in her freezer. A can of corn came crashing through one of the trailer’s few remaining glass windows. The other windows, which Colton had broken and were covered in plastic sheeting, were soon after slashed with a box cutter.

  One evening as she and Colton were walking in the door of the trailer, Pam says she heard a bang. When she looked, there was a circular saw blade stuck in the door jamb.

  Pam says she called the police every night for a month, but they never found anyone. She fired salvos of buckshot and profanities into the woods, but it kept happening. Then disturbing messages began to show up. The same plywood door where Colton had earlier written “Pam is a drunk” was now covered with spray-painted threats: “I’m sick of you,” “Bitch,” “Die,” and “You Will Die—5 hours.” On the floor was written: “Fuck’n Bitch I’ll Kill U” and “Die Bitch.”