by Bob Friel
The police kept showing up, but weren’t happy about the shotgun. “The cops told me that they would never come here again if I kept the shotgun loaded, and that if I did, I better never come to the door with it or they’d shoot me,” Pam said.
Pam thought her neighbors to the east were responsible. They’d accused Colton of stealing a $3,000 car stereo. Pam insisted Colton wouldn’t do that because “we already have a radio in every room of the house.” The neighbors reported the theft, but said Island County deputies declined to take fingerprints and told them that it was probably Colton who’d taken it.
Pam saw the cops talking to the neighbors a couple of times, but the attacks continued. Desperate, she called Bev and Geof Davis.
RARE ARE THE HARD-LUCK childhood stories with happy endings that do not include a teacher, a coach, a mentor, a local cop, an uncle, a grandmother… someone who grabs the kid at the right time—often by the scruff of the neck—and gives him whatever it is he needs to set him on the right path.
For Colton Harris-Moore, Bev and Geof Davis could have been those people.
Bev and Geof moved to Camano in 1977 and live on a seventeen-acre South End family compound that’s sort of a down-to-earth mossneck Nirvana, a whimsical backwoods Disneyland, with creeks and woods and quirky yard art and bridges and trolls and fanciful inventions and old gas pumps and summer-camp signs and Wild West memorabilia and guns and trucks and tractors and cool old cars.
They share the acreage with Bev’s mom and her sister, and usually at least one person who’s in need of a place to stay or a leg up. South Enders know Geof and Bev to be generous, some say to a fault. “Geof, especially,” says Chris Ellis, “is a sweeper of lost souls. He sweeps them up and gives them a hand.” The Davises have helped people most others consider untouchables, like a guy known locally as Stinky Steve (“You’d understand the name if you ever picked him up hitchhiking”). Bev and Geof, though, understand troubles, having seen more than their share, and those experiences have made them remarkably nonjudgmental.
They both grew up with alcoholic, verbally abusive fathers. Bev herself became an alcoholic, and when she finally saw the damage it was doing to her family, she sucked it up and quit. When she did, Geof stopped drinking, too, out of solidarity, even though he didn’t have a problem.
Geof Davis is the kind of guy who makes you feel that if you could just better yourself to a point halfway between what you are and where he’s at, then you’d be a good man. Unassuming to an absolute, he also gives you hope by admitting he wasn’t always this way.
A genuine Northwest cowboy, Geof grew up on a five-thousand-acre spread along the Yakima River—though he wasn’t left a blade of grass when his stepmother died. He competed in rodeos, worked as a Forest Service horseman, and then became a fire watcher when his bronc-busted legs couldn’t take riding anymore. He worked a full life doing guy stuff: construction, and driving dump trucks, tractors, and eighteen-wheelers. Geof says that for a long time he had no use for other people—“Hated them, that’s how I was raised”—but he got over that in a big way. Common in those kinds of sea-change stories, there’s a woman to thank. In Geof’s case, it’s Bev, who, when she smiles over her reading glasses, looks an awful lot like Mrs. Santa Claus. Which fits…
One year as Christmas neared, Geof told Bev he wanted a Santa suit. She did up his eyebrows and rosy cheeks, and Geof went driving around Camano in his 1940 Ford pickup handing out candy canes. That began an entire decade of Geof as the island’s Saint Nick. Santa’s tour eventually grew to a traffic-stopping parade of Christmas light–covered classic cars that escorted Geof to nursing homes and then to the poorest parts of town to deliver thousands of dollars’ worth of donated toys to needy kids.
Geof is as gregarious as Bev is reclusive. He’s always out and about and there are very few people on Camano he doesn’t know. He first met Pam Kohler when Colton was just a small child, and says she already had a reputation on the island.
“There’s some people around here, my God, they’d a shot her if they had the chance,” says Geof. “She was drinking a lot more heavily back then… she was bad. And crimey sakes, when she drinks she can use more cuss words than Carter has pills.” Geof, though, saw her simply as a troubled woman with a young boy, struggling to get by. As he does with many folks he meets in the community, he told Pam to give him a call if she ever needed help. Still, he and Bev were surprised when she did call some time later, asking for a $50 loan. Even more so when she said she’d leave them her shotgun for collateral. “After that we always called her Shotgun Pam,” Bev says, laughing.
Whenever Pam called, needing a loan for a new old truck or whatever, “for some stupid reason, I’d always go over and help,” says Geof. The reason, though, was Colt.
For anyone who didn’t have a dad around, but especially for a rough-and-tumble young boy, Geof would be the guy you’d want to take you under his wing. He’s a big man, rugged yet gentle, and plainspoken with a lot of hard-won wisdom. Best, there’s still an awful lot of playful boy left in him, even though his seventy-year-old body now has more titanium in it than the Terminator.
Geof has tried to help at least eight at-risk kids on the island. “All the misfits,” he says kindly. Some haven’t responded. “I’ve had to kick some of them off, but others are doing okay. They come up to me and now they’re married and making it, and they say, ‘Thanks for getting me on the right track.’”
Geof remembers coming across eleven-year-old Colton hitchhiking along the main road because he’d been booted off the Island Transit bus for cursing at the driver. Geof pulled over and they got to talking. “I knew Pam’s story, and I’d heard about what was going on with Colt in school. It sounded to me like they’d all just sort of shut their eyes to him when there were times they could’ve helped. And CPS… they suck, they didn’t do what they should have done. I understand they’re understaffed, but that still doesn’t give them the right to not help a kid, especially when they knew he was troubled. So I’m looking at Colton and thinking here’s a kid that just doesn’t have a chance in life.”
When Pam told Bev about the mysterious attacks happening at the trailer, Bev said she and Geof would come out next time. Things started mysteriously flying around again the very next night, so the Davises put on dark clothes and drove to Haven. Bev took photos of the damage and graffiti while Geof hunted around the black woods for any sign of intruders. As Bev went to put her camera away, “BAM! something hit our car, hard. I turned and saw Colton standing on the lawn with his arms folded.”
The next time Bev and Pam were on the phone, Colt yelled out that he heard something and saw a shadow. He went outside and came back with a note. Pam couldn’t make out the words, so Colt read it: “You have until Dec 9th.” Bev heard Colton tell his mother, “See! That isn’t my handwriting, is it?”
Later than night, Pam found another note hanging on a nail: “Death doesn’t hurt, but your dying will.” A third note said: “This is the kind of note that will be sent to your relatives when you die on Dec. 9th.”
Bev says Pam was terrified, and understandably so. She was living alone with just her young teenage son in the middle of thick dark woods and under attack every night. Even though Pam told Bev she trusted “no one!” Bev hoped that helping her through these night terrors might break through what she saw as Pam’s denial about her drinking and lifestyle. She also hoped it would give her and Geof a shot at helping Colton. They went as far as setting up security cameras, alarms, and motion-detecting lights around the trailer. Within minutes of Colton putting in a tape, the camera captured a figure running back and forth in front of it. The police, though, told Bev and Geof that they believed it was Colt on the video and that he was responsible for all of it. They told them he was “a bad seed.”
By early December, someone was setting fires on the trailer’s front porch. The police showed up and this time questioned Colton and Pam separately. They told Pam that they’d had the notes analyzed and that it
was Colton’s handwriting. They also said they’d been hiding in her woods with night vision and had seen him running around throwing things. Pam said, “Bullshit!” and told them that even if Colton did write the notes, there was no way he could have thrown saw blades and other things she believed came at her when Colton was standing close by. One cop told her, “Say the word, Pam, and we’ll arrest him right now.”
“The hell you will,” she said, and grabbed Colton, telling him not to say anything more to the deputies.
One positive thing that came from all the drama was that Geof spent time with Colton. After finding Colt walking alone along the main road again, they got to talking about boats. “He really perked up with that,” says Geof. “So I said, ‘Well, I know some people down there on the water, maybe we can find someone with a cool boat.’” Guys Geof knew had rebuilt a tiny steamboat, and he introduced them to Colton. “Colt went right up and got to talking to these two old-timers, asking them all kinds of questions about the boat. Next thing, he’s asking me if he can go for a ride with them. I said, ‘Sure, you can.’ So I sat and waited for him. Crimey sakes, they had him out there for two hours—he loved it!”
After that, every time Geof found Colton out along the road—which was often—he picked him up and took him along wherever he was going. Geof says he felt Colton wasn’t quite normal, “but I disagree with a lot of those initials they saddle kids with, ADD and that… I think if they had the right parenting, if the kid got the right response from their family, I don’t think you’d have all those initials. Every child has trouble paying attention and acting proper if they haven’t been brought up right.”
Colton impressed Geof in a lot of ways. “He was a nice kid, polite and smart. Man, he knew the name of every airplane out there. He’d rattle off names right and left, then start describing each one of them for me. I’m thinking, This kid knows more than Boeing!”
DURING ONE OF THE fruitless searches for the invisible tormenters at the trailer, Bev took Colton aside and asked what she could do to help him. “He said that if I could get his mom to quit drinking that would be the best thing,” she says. He told her, “She thinks that I’m the problem, but she doesn’t realize that she has the problem… When I’m grown and gone she’ll see that.” Bev told Colton that no matter what his mom did, he was old enough to start making some of his own choices. She said he could start making some new friends, and promised that she and Geof would help him get involved with some constructive activities that would get him out of the house and wouldn’t end up with him thrown in juvie. She offered to take him to Alateen and said, “Don’t count on your mom to make changes: you do it!
“I talked for quite a while and Colt was silent,” says Bev, who wrote everything that transpired during this time in long, detailed letters to her sister. “Then he started, and it was like he couldn’t stop, it was like one big sentence. He told me he never has friends over because of the dump he lives in and how his mom is mean to him and everyone else, and anybody new that comes over gets met with a shotgun, and that he can tell if she’s drunk or not by how she says hello on the phone and how he doesn’t feel like going home if he hears her drunk hello, and how she tells him to give her gas money or she won’t pick him up, and how he’s glad when she runs out of money each month because then she can’t buy beer, and that she spends several hundred dollars a month on cigarettes and beer and that money could be used to fix the place up! He said, ‘I don’t even know what she does all day,’ because he does all the cleaning and the laundry. He told me about a friend of his whose mother was so nice, ‘if Scott even gets a mosquito bite, his mom is right there looking at it and medicating it!’ He said, ‘Scott’s mom is pretty, and they live in a nice house, and I just wish my mom could be like that. I told my mom how nice Scott’s mom was and she said, “Well, goody for her! She’s probably in debt up to her eyeballs!” My mom just doesn’t understand that they aren’t in debt, they work, and I asked her, “Why don’t you get a job like a normal person?” and she said, “Why, Colton? So you can have all the pretty little toys you want and be a spoiled rotten brat? You want all that shit, get out and get yourself a job!” ’”
Bev assured Colton that they’d help him if he started to take some responsibility for his life.
The following day, Bev stopped by after delivering Santa Geof to Stanwood for the yearly parade. “Pam was sitting outside in her truck drinking and smoking, but Colton had obviously been working his butt off cleaning the yard and driveway, creating a huge pile of junk. He’d even trimmed a lilac bush and strung Christmas lights on it.” Bev praised him effusively, and says he was very proud of his work.
Later, a local deputy Bev knew called her. “He told me I was ‘maybe too nice’ getting involved with Colton and Pam.” The deputy said he thought that out of all the teens he’d ever dealt with in his many years on the island, Colton was “the worst of the worst.” He also said he thought it was “way too late for Colton, that he’s already gone.” Bev’s own mother also warned her away because of stories she’d heard from a friend working at the school.
Bev promised everyone that she’d be careful, but told them she still wanted to help Colt and, if possible, even Pam. She said she’d put her trust in God and repeatedly asked her friends and family to pray for all of them.
The next time Bev went over to Pam’s, a knife whizzed past her shoulder from Colton’s direction and almost hit Melanie. Bev confronted Colt, but he denied everything and told her, “I never want to see you again as long as I live!”
Bev asked Pam to send Colton away for a couple of days to see if the incidents stopped. Pam said she couldn’t because last time he went to the one place that would take him he stole the homeowner’s bank card. She added that “Colton’s dad was a credit card thief.” Bev also found that Colton had been rifling through her purse, taking cash.
Bev wrote to her sister that all the notes about the entire episode should eventually go to an author, “for their book about Colton, when he’s in prison and when Pam gets drunk and shoots herself or someone else, or when Colton kills her. The only hope for these people is some sort of institution—for both of them!”
BEV AND GEOF DIDN’T give up, though. When Pam called to say Colton brought home his first A in math, Geof picked him up from school, took him go-cart racing, and bought him a remote control Hummer as a reward. Bev and Geof also hauled away mountains of junk—old toilets, car parts, and so on—that Colton had gathered when he cleaned up the property. “We really felt he hated living in a pig sty,” so one day while Colton was at school, Bev says she and Geof went to the trailer to “swamp” his room. It’d been so crapped up that Colton was sleeping in with Pam. They spent four hours picking up and sweeping out. They laid down wall-to-wall carpet, installed a new bed, and put up shelves. The final touch was a throw rug with big glow-in-the-dark bare feet on it.
Pam warned them that Colton would freak if anyone touched his stuff, and made Bev and Geof promise to be there when he came home from school because she said she was “tired of the bruises.” When they told Colton they’d fixed up his room, he yelled at Pam and ran into the trailer. After a few tense minutes, he came out and walked up to Bev. He handed her a Snickers bar, saying, “For all you’ve done.”
After each promising moment, Bev thought that things would settle down in the trailer. The poltergeist, though, continued to terrorize Haven Place. “Colt called me, laughing,” says Bev. “He held up the phone and I can hear the shotgun going off in the background and a drunken Pam screaming, ‘That’s right, you motherfucker son of a bitch, goddammit you come out, you lily-livered chickenshit!’ And Colt’s just cracking up.”
Pam decided her next strategy to catch the perpetrators would be to lie under the trailer and shoot them with a BB gun. Geof told Colton that he’d come by and do some target practice with him. Colton was excited and repeatedly called Bev, saying, “Mom wants to know when Geof is coming by to shoot BBs with me.” When the day came, thoug
h, Geof was busy and stopped by to tell Colton he had to postpone. Before Geof could get home, Colton called Bev and told her. Geof was met by an angry Mrs. Claus, or rather Mrs. Claws, who told him in no uncertain terms that this was a kid who’d been disappointed by adults all his life and Geof better get his ass back there. Geof turned right around, and he and Colton shot the BB gun for hours. Colt turned out to be a crack shot, excellent at picking off his mortal enemy: Pam’s beer cans. Plink, plink, plink.
It felt to Bev and Geof that they were on the verge of a major breakthrough. Then it all came crashing down.
THE OLD-TIMERS WHO’D taken Colton out on their steamboat told Geof they’d be happy to show him the shop where they’d rebuilt the boat and made the parts. Geof asked Colton if he wanted to go, and got an enthusiastic “Yes!” They planned for Geof to pick Colton up that Saturday.
“A couple of days later,” remembers Bev, “I answer the phone. It’s Pam and she is mad. I ask her what’s up and she says, ‘Just put Geof on the phone!’” Geof gets on and has his ears fried.
“She demands to know why I’m taking her son away from her,” says Geof. “I told her that’s not what I was doing, but she says, ‘Well, that’s all he talks about, he wants to go everywhere with you and you keep taking him places! I don’t know who you think you are. He is my son, not yours! So just back off!’ She got vicious, told me off, and threatened to get a restraining order on me. So I said, ‘Fine, if you don’t want me to see him I won’t.’ And so I just backed off because… wow… that’s Pam. I didn’t want any trouble.”
“We just then felt it was all hopeless and we weren’t equipped to deal with it,” says Bev. “It was very hard on us to realize we couldn’t help that poor boy except to be there if he ever called.”
The night raids on the trailer eventually stopped. Pam maintains it was neighbors, while the police believe it was Colt. They may both be right. There was a lot of anger toward Pam and Colt in that neighborhood. One of Colt’s former friends says he knew a father and son who lived there at the time who “hated” Pam and Colt and wouldn’t have hesitated to make their life hell as revenge for thefts they blamed on Colt. The graffiti and many of the coincidences in Bev’s exhaustive catalog of events, though, suggest Colt was responsible for much of it. No charges were ever filed against anyone.