The Barefoot Bandit

by Bob Friel

  Sharon and Dan began to find a number of other things on their property now that Colton was back on the loose. Most interesting was a note. They discovered the yellow Post-it on the switchback trail that leads from their home down to the beach. It’s Colton writing to Colton, thinking things through on paper. He was back to collecting safe houses, potential targets, and credit cards. Part of the note appears to be about a certain name, noting “lost $ moved.” Below that are reminders: “#1 of 2,” with “2” circled, and “Use $ 4 orig pkg.” A guess would be that he used the dollar sign as a symbol for credit cards, and he kept track by numbering them.

  The real insight, though, came after his $ figuring.

  “Peroll [sic of “parole”] 5 months? Think if otherwise. I might be out Christmas?—home?”

  Colton was considering the kind of deal he’d accept to turn himself in. He didn’t know that an escaped felon, even a juvenile, doesn’t hold any cards when it comes to making a deal. The last word he wrote was the big question: Where would he go to live whenever he did get out of prison? “Home?”

  Colton’s decision on the first question about whether to turn himself in was clear by his actions: he never approached anyone looking for a deal. He chose freedom, regardless of the risk.

  With the note, a bottle of aftershave, shoes, and other souvenirs of Colton’s continual presence on her property, Sharon says she still never became one of those afraid of him. “I don’t think he’s a scary kid or ever wants to hurt anybody… I think he’s always been looking for survival.”

  THE LOSS OF HIS Post-it appeared to be another lesson for Colt. He needed a better place to entrust his important notes and thoughts, and switched to a journal. In it he kept his important digits—some of which happened to be other people’s credit card numbers and security codes.

  Colton also had to solve a logistical problem. How can someone who’s essentially homeless receive all the stuff he ordered online with stolen credit cards? He solved this with a brilliantly simple ploy. In many rural areas, mail carriers don’t deliver house to house, especially on a dead-end road like Haven Place. At Haven, residents put all their mailboxes at the bottom of the road where it hits Camano Drive. So Colton added a mailbox near his mom’s and made up his own address: 550 Haven Place.

  Legitimate addresses on Haven start in the 700s and go up to 1100, so the not-so-bright move was failing to pick a number within that range. An obviously nonexistent address might work with some of the shadier online retailers, but surely big-bank credit card companies would check a little more closely to see if such an address actually existed on the planet.

  On June 5, a Seattle couple, Jackie and Paul, arrived at their vacation home on Shady Lane—just behind the Wagners’ summer home. They stayed for three and a half days, never leaving the house. They don’t store financial records on Camano and don’t keep computers there. Still, two days later, Paul’s social security number was used to apply for credit cards from seven companies. The address used on all applications was 550 Haven Place. At least one of the cards was approved, delivered to the fake address, collected, and activated.

  Mail carriers continued to service the phony mailbox for some time. Chase delivered a credit card to 550 Haven in the name of a Camano resident who’d been burglarized while he was out on a fishing trip. The card was used to pay for $39.95 worth of research on PeopleFinders.com (creepy slogan: “Find anyone, anywhere”) and $29.95 on another stalker-friendly identity collection site. Colt also used it to shop for necessities such as police scanners on Amazon.com. Chase Bank records show the same card used at 3:34 a.m. on the sixteenth of June to withdraw $300 from an ATM on Camano. The following morning, four more attempts were made for $200, $300, $300, and $500. When police pulled the bank’s security footage, it showed Colton Harris-Moore standing at the ATM punching numbers.

  WITH EXTRA POLICE PATROLS detailed specifically to track him down and residents back up in arms, if Colton was worried about anything it didn’t show on his face. On July 8, he spread a Hilly brand jacket onto a bed of ferns and lay back to pose for another private photo shoot. Dressed in a black polo sporting the Mercedes-Benz logo, with his iPod earbuds inserted, and a diet green tea bottle and a portable power supply by his side, Colton stretched out his long arm and took a series of eleven photos of himself with a Nikon Coolpix camera that he’d stolen from a Camano resident three days earlier. A number of shots featured different come-hither looks. Another was an eyes-closed fail. And then there was one frame in which he wore an enigmatic, barely perceptible Mona Lisa smile, a look that would come to be both fawned over and ridiculed for the next two years as it was reproduced again and again ad nauseam.

  You could speculate that by taking so many pictures of himself Colt was making up for a childhood deprived of snapshots. Or, as the police believed, that he enjoyed a narcissistic personality disorder. Another explanation is that Colt’s self-portraiture simply fit his generation’s penchant for self-broadcasting and self-dramatizing. His peers were continually taking photos of themselves and posting them on social media. For the millennials, few things happen without a visual record, and sites like Facebook encourage them to broadcast mini reality shows about themselves. Throughout his run, Colt kept in contact with people both by phone and the Internet. It’s easy to assume he took photos of himself in various locations to send to friends.

  Colton deleted all the photos from the Nikon’s capture card. But he didn’t format it, which would have permanently gotten rid of them. Instead, the images remained lurking as little digital ones and zeros that would come back to haunt him.

  ONE OF THE PEOPLE Colt kept in touch with while he was on the lam was Josh, who remained behind the fence at Green Hill. “He started calling here, asking to talk to his buddy,” says a staff member at the prison. “We reported it to the administration, but they wouldn’t let us call the cops. We wanted to get a trace, but they wouldn’t let us do anything. They just told us to monitor the calls, which we did.”

  Josh says he wasn’t too surprised when Colton called. “He told me that his plan worked, that he’d escaped, and that he was back having fun doing what he likes: running around staying one step ahead of everyone.” Josh describes Colton’s manner as unnaturally calm despite knowing that he was again being hunted. “He was happy, totally relaxed… It was kinda weird… nuts. But that’s what he lives for.”

  Colton called often just to bullshit, says Josh. “He was just seeing how everything was going. He never said where he was and I didn’t want to know details, but sometimes he’d call from places he’d broken into, other times from a cell phone, usually late at night.”

  Police later recovered stolen cell phones with dozens of calls to Green Hill School, which Colton had programmed into the phones’ memories as “Ghs.” Each call to the school was monitored by staff who could only sit back and listen while Colton boasted of his escape and his future impact.

  “We knew he was doing stuff, and there was nothing we could do about it,” says a staff member. “Colton told [Josh]: ‘Watch the news because I’m going to be all over it.’”

  COLTON’S MAILBOX RUSE CONTINUED to work until one of his victims got word from multiple credit card companies that someone had applied for cards using his name and the 550 Haven Place address. He notified the sheriff, and a deputy found the mailbox. The police left it in place, though, and told the postmaster to contact them if anything came through addressed to 550. It wasn’t long before they got a call.

  The next package for 550 Haven Place was too large to fit in the box. Working with the police, the mail carrier left a note asking how the addressee would like it delivered. Colton answered and even helpfully provided a plastic bag, telling the mailman to just wrap the package in the bag and leave it.

  Before the carrier’s next round, Island County deputies and detectives secreted themselves into the woods all around the bottom of Haven Place. The package was delivered and placed on top of the 550 mailbox. Haven residents cam
e and went, picking up their mail, not knowing that an entire squad of cops was watching from behind trees. Then a familiar vehicle approached. Pam Kohler got out of her truck and checked her mailbox. She then looked over at the package on top of 550 and began speaking to someone on a cell phone. Deputies strained to hear what she was saying, but couldn’t make it out. Pam left the package alone, got back into her pickup, and drove off.

  The cops were totally keyed, suspecting Pam had just let Colton know his package had arrived. They waited… and waited… “We had that stakeout manned for about forty-eight hours,” says Detective Ed Wallace, who took shifts in the woods. Finally, though, they gave up and pulled out, taking the package and the mailbox. The lab successfully pulled Colton’s fingerprint off the note to the mail carrier.

  * * *

  Born and bred in west Texas with the tarrying twang to prove it, Jimmy Pettyjohn drove through Snoqualamie Pass back in 1989. At its western end, the pass opens up on a stunning view. “I’ve been a waterman all my life even though I had to drive five hundred miles in any direction to hit wet back in Texas,” said seventy-year-old Pettyjohn, who passed away December 2010. “Well, I got that first look at Puget Sound and said, ‘Wow, I’m not going back!’”

  The Pettyjohns settled on the east side of Camano’s South End, in a modern log home kept humming by visiting grandkids. “Doors and windows always open, never take the keys out of cars… and we’re retired, so we’re here all the time. Never worried about crime.”

  The first hint of trouble was a charge on Jimmy’s American Express for $107.90 worth of Pepper Power Bear Spray from UDAP out of Bozeman, Montana. It’s a product specially formulated by the survivor of a grizzly attack to blast a fog of pain so nasty it’d force Smokey the Bear to leave a campfire unattended.

  Jimmy had never ordered any such thing, so he called AmEx and they absolved the charge. Simple mistake somewhere… He hadn’t noticed anything amiss in his house, no clue that anyone had broken in, and Jimmy saw no reason to quit the old habit of leaving his billfold in its customary place on a shelf above his computer. Pettyjohn’s PC sat in a room off the garage that he used as a workshop/man cave/heavy smoking den—with the smoke provided by both a steady stream of cigarettes and a big stainless-steel barbecue (yes, the barbecue is indoors… he was Texan). On the edge of the shelf above his monitor there’s a peg. That’s where Jimmy always hung his wedding ring and his gold Rolex when he had some puttering to do. Something else he’d come to realize was a bad habit.

  On the morning of July 9, Camano’s indoor barbecue king ambled into his cave and reached for his Rolex. The watch was gone. Surprisingly, though, his wedding ring still hung on the peg. “I really cherish that ring, been wearing it for fifty years, and if he took that my feelings woulda goddamn sure been hurt… But he didn’t.”

  Pettyjohn was so relieved, figuring he’d gotten off easy, that he never even reported the theft. He didn’t notice anything else out of place. His wallet sat on its shelf, all the credit cards accounted for and all in exactly the right order he kept them.

  Two days after the burglary, a package arrived addressed to Pettyjohn. He’d ordered a book from Amazon, and signed for the FedEx figuring this was it. “Open it up and it was a couple little electronic devices and a tiny CD,” he says. “I think, Oh shit, they sent me one of those new electronic books.” Jimmy put the gadgets in a Ziploc and wrote the date on it in case he had to return them. He put that on a table in his sanctuary. “I’m thinking the gran’kids would be over on the weekend and show me how to install it.” He used the FedEx box to store the nuts and bolts from a swing set he was dismantling out in the yard.

  When his clan came over a couple days later, he went to show them the devices. They looked everywhere, but the gadgets were gone. Pettyjohn realized that a thief must have been watching for the delivery and then broken into his home again to steal the package. “He’d paid for overnight… I think thieves spare no expense on the shipping.” Jimmy couldn’t ignore it this time. “I got to callin’ the sheriff and told him about it, but they didn’t do anything.”

  He didn’t let it drop, though. “I called around on my own and got the outfit in Austin that shipped the package [Scancity] and found out that the electronic things were a couple of credit card–swiping devices. Called the sheriff back and told them that, and that’s when they finally got interested.”

  Jimmy did the legwork and provided the sheriff with a printout of the card reader specs. They were “Mini 123s,” tiny 1.2-ounce battery-powered gizmos that fit in your palm and record the numbers off credit cards’ magnetic strips. Two of the $230 devices had been ordered, and each could store 2,500 swiped credit cards. The deputy took prints off a window where Pettyjohn’s wife noticed the screen had been removed, and asked Jimmy to dump out the nuts and bolts so he could take the FedEx box.

  “This is Camano Island… I never bothered to think too much about locks, and didn’t have any lights outside,” said Pettyjohn, who grew up in the oil field construction business and served in the army, taking “a government-paid vacation to Southeast Asia for a year.” The idea that someone had been brazen enough to come into his house at least three times, including the 2006 credit card theft, made him start to think about security. A freaky thing about the burglaries was that the Pettyjohns have two dogs, “a yappin’ poodle” and a long-haired dachshund, which both make noise at a pin drop. “He had to be pretty damn stealthy.”

  After Jimmy got back from Vietnam, he’d decided to never pick up another gun. And he didn’t—until these break-ins convinced him otherwise. “I didn’t want to see him get hurt… He wasn’t doing near as bad a things as some kids his age… But we’re retired and here all the time. We were home, just behind that door when he came in here. That concerned us.” One of the Pettyjohns’ three daughters was worried enough to buy them two guns; another friend gave him a Glock. “And now I’ve got the place lit up like an all-night liquor store. It is a shame.”

  Colton Harris-Moore stole some of Camano’s charm from Jimmy Pettyjohn, which is tough to forgive, but if things had been just a little bit different, the transplanted Texan and the Barefoot Bandit could have been buds. The two are simpatico on at least one passion.

  “When I was growing up in Amarillo, I always used to hang at the local airport… even did my homework there. Back then the CAA (precursor to the FAA) would give you your pilot’s license at fourteen, same age you could get your driver’s license.” Jimmy’s dad had been an “airplane driver” in World War II, and always owned a plane because he had business all over Texas. “I turned fourteen on a Sunday, but took my check ride on Saturday when I was still thirteen,” said Pettyjohn, “which makes me the youngest pilot ever licensed in the United States.”

  Pettyjohn kept a plane on Camano, “a souped-up Piper Cub.” He loved to take off from the island and fly around Mount Baker, giving air tours to his kids, grandkids, friends, and even the deputy who came out to investigate the stolen credit card swipers.

  Two weeks after his Rolex disappeared, Pettyjohn’s credit card statements started arriving. “The Discover card bill came in and had $485.44 worth of iTunes purchases.” The Pettyjohns had about as much use for iTunes as they had for anti–grizzly bear spray. “Then Visa comes in with all these other electronics ordered on it and over $300 on PayPal. That’s when I realized he’d gotten every goddamn credit card out of my billfold and copied down the number and the little three-digit code on the back and then put them back just exactly where they were so I never noticed. Pretty clever… nitwit kid.”

  ON JULY 18, 2008, Colton pulled one of his least clever moves. It was a nice evening for a drive, and he tooled around the South End in a shiny black Mercedes. Always mindful of the people who’d teased him about his raggedy clothes and crappy trailer, Colton stopped by at least one home to shout out, “Who’s poor now?!”

  The Mercedes hadn’t been reported stolen, so Colton could have driven forever with little chance of getting
spotted—if he’d driven well. Instead, he flew around the island, speeding and swerving along the tree-lined roads. At around 11:30 p.m., he was doing 69 mph in a 50 when he blew by another black car, an ICSO deputy’s Charger. The cop watched as the Mercedes crossed both the center and the fog lines. He popped his blue light, but rather than pull over, the Mercedes took off.

  The short car chase ended as the Mercedes turned into the parking lot of the Elger Bay Café with the cop car right on its tail. The driver wasn’t giving up, though, just trying to put the odds in his favor by switching from a car chase to a foot pursuit. As the officer and a reserve-deputy intern watched in disbelief, Camano’s “most wanted” leaped out of the Mercedes while it was still moving and then ran down an embankment toward the woods. The Mercedes continued to roll, heading toward a big propane tank that feeds the restaurant.

  The cop slammed his car into park and jumped out, but he was too late to stop the Mercedes. Fortunately, it barely missed the propane tank, though now looked like it was about to drive over the twenty-foot-high drop-off behind the café. Before it reached the edge, however, the car hit a large plastic trash Dumpster and finally came to a stop. With Colton beating feet into the darkness, the deputy began to give chase. Then, however, he realized that the car or the trash can had clipped the gas line where it entered the building. The deputy ran to his patrol car, backed it away from the propane tank, and called in the fire department to handle that potentially explosive situation. Next he radioed for backup to try to corner Colt.