The Barefoot Bandit

by Bob Friel

  All available Island County officers responded to the call and set a perimeter. A Snohomish County dog team and the Marysville “manhunters” arrived to try to track Colt down. Just a half mile west of the parking lot, though, private woods led directly into the large expanse of Camano Island State Park. Once again, as soon as he hit the trees, Colt was as good as gone.

  The cops’ disappointment, however, soon turned to cheer when they checked out the Mercedes. A quick run of the plates came back to Carol Star, Colton and Pam’s next-door neighbor who was away on a trip. “The cops called and I told them that if the keys were in the car that meant he’d broken into my house,” remembers Star. She says Colton had taken down part of a trellis and used it as a ladder to get onto her roof where he tried to get in through the skylight. “It was bolted on too good, though, so he crowbarred open the slider door. I’d just gone to Costco, and he hit my pantry looking for food. He took muffins and a nice fresh mango—didn’t touch the beer. My car keys were hanging in the pantry.”

  Star’s car gave Island County a motor vehicle theft charge against Colton, but that was just the tip of the eventual iceberg of an indictment. When Colton bailed out, he left behind a backpack he’d stolen from Star’s home. A peek inside revealed digital cameras, cell phones, a GPS, and other recently stolen property including a wallet containing credit cards reported missing just two days before. When a deputy lifted the backpack, underneath lay a $30,000 infrared camera that had been taken from the South End’s Mabana Fire Station. The police applied for a warrant and, when approved, spilled all the backpack’s contents onto a table in their evidence room.

  The magnetic card readers taken from Jimmy Pettyjohn’s place were there—one of the readers had already swiped two Camano residents’ credit cards. A compact mirror held Colton’s thumbprint. A further bounty of evidence came from a journal that conveniently had the name Colton Harris written on the inside cover. Its pages contained lists of the names and credit card numbers of burglary and identity theft victims.

  The cell phones, cameras, and other digital equipment from the backpack were turned over to Detective Ed Wallace, who’s also certified as a seized computer evidence recovery specialist. A stolen pink Motorola V3 phone had been used to call Green Hill School twenty-one times. It had also called the residence and work numbers of two different burglary victims, presumably to check if they were home. Another phone had been used to call Pam, Green Hill, and the real estate office where another burglary victim worked. When Wallace got to the cameras, he ran special software that recovered dozens of deleted photos. Another bingo: Colton Harris-Moore was staring right at him in frame after frame.

  The Mercedes story instantly flashed across the island—usually told presuming that Colt had purposely tried to blow up the propane tank. Mark Brown decided he had to end the media blackout. With all the evidence he’d left behind in the car, Colton obviously knew they were on to him now anyway. They chose the shot of Colton lying in the ferns and sent it out to the local press, figuring a recent photo and description along with a request for information would lead, once again, to a quick capture. Brown also set up another town hall meeting at the Mabana Fire Station.

  Maxine, the Boyles, Jimmy Pettyjohn, and many others went to that meeting on July 23, 2008. Neighbors there began organizing block watches and citizen patrols, and as Pettyjohn remembered, “There were a lot of people there who were buying guns and saying let’s get something done here.”

  * * *

  After the Mercedes crash cost him all his credit card numbers and put an intense amount of heat on his tail, Colt decided to vamoose. They continued to search for him on Camano, burning through the sheriff’s office budget on overtime hours, but there were no new reliable sightings. Some burglaries kept occurring on the island and many residents had come to assume that every crime they heard about must be connected to Colton. The police didn’t believe that, though, because these didn’t fit his MO. After several months with no Colt-like break-ins, Island County authorities started to believe that he’d gone into hibernation. He’d actually just gotten on a ferry.

  To the north of Camano, the San Juan Islands were an orchard filled with juicy, low-hanging fruit. One out of every three homes in the county was a vacation property—3,300 houses that lay empty for long stretches of the year. Colton had four main islands to choose from, and he chose well. Orcas offered the thickest woods, most rugged terrain, and windiest roads, making it easy for a kid who liked to run and hide in the forest, and hard for cops chasing him to get anywhere fast. The island is 43 percent larger than Camano yet has only about a third of the population—enough people to provide plenty of prey while at the same time ensuring there’d be only a token police force to protect them. Because their island was considered so incredibly safe, Orcas residents and all the businesses in sleepy little Eastsound were the ideal unsuspecting targets.

  The timing couldn’t have been better for Colt. It was the height of the summer season, with plenty of strangers on Orcas. His was the best-known face just south of the border in Island County, but he could have walked Eastsound, shopped the shops, and hitchhiked the roads with little fear of being identified that first summer—or most of the second.

  For Orcas in 2008, Colton came and went like a phantom—the bike stolen from the cop shop evidence room, the deputy pepper-sprayed, the flight manuals ordered and stolen out of Vern’s, and so on—until finally in November Bob Rivers’s plane went native and crashed on the reservation. Island County knew who they were chasing, but the connection was never made to the Orcas troubles.

  While Colt says he then spent the winter in Reno between jaunts to see his friends in Wenatchee and a side trip down to Sacramento, the Island County prosecutor filed ten charges against him. The warrant included car theft, attempting to elude, malicious mischief, three counts of identity theft, and three counts of possession of stolen property. He’d also been charged as an adult for “flight to avoid prosecution.”

  With all that hanging over his head in May 2009, Colton left the safety of Nevada and once again went home. Maybe springtime on the Salish Sea was just too beautiful to pass up. Maybe he found the straight life boring and needed to get back in the adrenaline game. Maybe he missed his mom. Whatever the reason, Colt arrived back on Camano and quickly escalated his “war” against the police to a level unprecedented in Island County history.

  In the wee hours of June 19, 2009, Colt broke into a car parked outside the house where its driver lay sleeping. The vehicle was a black-and-gold cop car, its driver an ICSO deputy. Colt had previously busted into a statie’s patrol car and taken his camera. This time, he took everything: the officer’s cell phone, digital camera, Panasonic Toughbook, breathalyzer, even his ticket book. What got Sheriff Mark Brown, his entire force, and all the Camano residents really torqued, though, was that he also took the deputy’s Smith and Wesson MP-15 assault rifle and a supply of ammunition.

  Colton had his war. Island County Sheriff’s Office pulled out all the stops. “We started really leaning on CIs, confidential informants,” says Detective Ed Wallace. “We had some pretty heavy stuff over these people’s heads to give us leverage, and I believe they would have gladly given us information if they had any. Instead, they told us they hadn’t seen this kid and didn’t know who he was hanging with.”

  With Colton living, as Wallace describes it, “off the grid,” he was much harder to track than the typical thief. “We had other burglars working Camano at the same time, people responsible for stealing much, much more property than Colton, and we were catching them because they drove cars, they pawned stuff for money, they associated with other people. They had friends. Colt didn’t.

  “We began to use game cameras in places where we knew he was operating,” says Wallace. The camouflaged and motion-activated digital cameras are the same tools used by hunters to study the movements of their prey and by researchers to catch glimpses of the most elusive animals. The police also set out a decoy v
ehicle hoping Colton would steal it or at least snoop inside. Wallace was among the officers who staked out the bait car along one of Colt’s regular routes. Sure enough, says Wallace, late that night he came riding down the road on a bike. Officers gave chase, but once again the speedy teen immediately went for the woods, dropping the bike and losing the cops on foot.

  Deputies spent hours combing the South End woods on and off duty. Two weeks after the cop car was ransacked, they found a campsite in thick woods a little over half a mile from Pam’s property. A bike and a Ziploc filled with phone cards that were there one day and gone the next told them Colt was actively using the camp. They set up a stakeout, but Colt sniffed this one out, too, and didn’t return. When the cops gave up waiting and took apart the site to collect evidence, they found the stolen breathalyzer, an ICSO tag, and the deputy’s cell phone with Colt’s fingerprints on it. They didn’t, however, find the assault rifle.

  With too many close calls, and with the anger and fear rising on Camano, Colt bolted back to greener pastures on Orcas in the summer of 2009. It was after that spree—when he hit businesses all across the island and stole a plane and two boats, the last one starting him to Canada and eventually Idaho to take the Cessna he crashed in Granite Falls—that everyone finally knew about the Barefoot Bandit.

  * * *

  October 2009, Orcas Island. Like a diesel-drinking tyrannosaurus, the big excavator lunged forward and bit down on a pile of stumps and branches. It reared back with a quarter ton of wood clamped in its jaws and swung back over the top of the bonfire. A huge shower of sparks and flames erupted as the pieces fell. Embers alighted on the branches of a big Doug fir thirty feet above our heads. They glowed momentarily, then slowly blinked out. The intense rush of heat from the massive stoking had us all grabbing our beers and retreating a few yards. Now all eyes turned toward the night sky, curious to see if the trees were going to catch fire. Along with using heavy equipment to feed the blaze, the fact that burning season wasn’t open yet made this a fairly typical full-timers backyard party. Summers may see a lot of second-homers hosting garden soirees, but fall and winter are when the rough-hewn and hunkered cut loose.

  Enormous homemade barbecues held big slabs of beef and pork plus an entire side-hill salmon—the wink-wink nickname for local deer shot out of season. Out in the driveway, a good percentage of rigs were illegal in one way or another—cracked windshields, expired tags, bad lights… This wasn’t an outlaw gathering, though, just regular island folks, if not pillars then at least upstanding 2 × 4s of the community. Islands tend to draw those with strong individualist and antiauthoritarian streaks, creating live-and-let-live communities that are, at the same time, knit tighter than they’d be on the mainland because of the shared experiences and hardships. Orcas is the eighth island I’ve lived on and it’s certainly no exception. The reason no one was concerned about the illicit bonfire was because about half the fire department—including the guy at the controls of the excavator—was crowded around it, drinks in hand.

  Colton Harris-Moore had been off the island for more than a month—we hoped—but the topic flared whenever a little more information leaked out. Everyone on the island seemed to have part of the “untold” stories, but fragments from different events melded like an octopus orgy, and to find the truth you had to carefully pry apart all the slippery bits. No wonder the Internet buzzed with misinformation, when fact so quickly morphed into fiction even at ground zero. The police remained tight-lipped. “I’m very cognizant of the fact I don’t want to be part of the problem with this young man by giving him notoriety, creating myths behind him that endanger the community and do not bode well for him in the long run,” said Sheriff Bill Cumming. The cat burglar was out of the bag, though. The information vacuum quickly filled with rumors that simply added to Colt’s growing legend.

  Very few details had come out about his childhood, but Colt was engendering sympathy from some on the island, especially women and especially those who’d raised teenagers. At the other extreme, several guys filled with beery bravado stood around the bonfire discussing ways to lure Colt into their homes so they could legally take care of him—with extreme prejudice.

  A few folks found some satisfaction in the fact that Colt had run the local deputies ragged. One retired contractor who embodies a definite Orcas archetype—Will Geer–ish with gray beard, long hair, overalls on top of flannel—and who’d dealt with all the deputies during his thirty-plus years on the island, said he was glad Colt was “sticking it to ’em.”

  There’s a delicate balance in policing a place like this where small-town affairs are under an even more powerful microscope because it’s an island. The news a couple of years back that two additional deputies had been hired for Orcas and that their salaries would be paid for by the expected increase in revenue from the tickets they’d be writing was not met with a ticker-tape parade. When the new guys arrived and pulled over what seemed like half the island within the first three weeks, there was almost an uprising until they stood down to a tolerable islandlike level of officiousness.

  People don’t dislike the officers in the islands—they’re neighbors, too—but there’s a different relationship from that in a large city or any other place that has more police coverage. Here, depending on when you call and what part of the island you live in, a 911 could have a cop to you in five minutes or an hour. No one is under any assumption that they’ll be right there when you need them. They can’t. It’s a tiny department, and unlike almost every other place in the country, there are no overlapping jurisdictions to offer backup. Most rural areas have a sheriff’s office plus state police and maybe even a small city police department that can all work together. In San Juan County, it’s just one sheriff’s office spread out to cover all the islands. If something happens that overwhelms the small contingent on one island, officers need to fly or boat over from another, with the weather and sea conditions coming into play.

  So in most cases, folks on Orcas know that the police aren’t going to be there in time to save them if the hockey-masked serial killer comes to call. Out on our fringe of the island where there’s a much better chance of getting a quick response from a volunteer firefighter than a cop, I’ve told Sandi that if anyone ever breaks in she should light him on fire. It’s another reason people here tend to be more self-reliant—and why many are armed (the seemingly redneck—or mossneck—trappings of guns and chainsaws and “Keep your government ass off my property” rants cross the partisan divide here, a county that votes heavily Democratic).

  WITHOUT MUCH OPPORTUNITY FOR cavalry-like heroism, or much success at fighting the obvious problems like the handful of meth heads everyone knows about, the most visible parts of the deputies’ jobs are speeding tickets and DUI stops, neither of which is very popular with many residents. Their other main task is handling ugly domestic disputes. It’s not an enviable job, and the deputies are not paid well in a place that’s very expensive to live. At this point in time, the turnover rate for deputies was high, the training opportunities low. The fact that a kid had now come back two summers in a row and burglarized at will made it easy for some people to bring out the Barney Fife references.

  But communities get the police force they want and are willing to pay for. Residents of the San Juan Islands bristle at zero tolerance and won’t pay for a cop on every corner. Colt really had chosen well. The department had few deputies, no canine units, no helicopter, no SWAT team, no trained “manhunters.” And while Sheriff Cumming, a nationally ranked racquetball player, might have been in good enough shape to chase Colt up Orcas Island’s hills, his local deputies weren’t.

  Bill Cumming says that in his thirty-eight years in policing and criminal justice, he’d never faced someone like Colton Harris-Moore. Colt was a cop’s nightmare. He was stone-cold sober, not prone to druggie desperation and mistakes. He kept to himself instead of associating with other known criminals. While he didn’t have, as he’d told his mom, an Einstein-level IQ, he was m
ore than smart enough. Despite his history of impulse control problems, he’d become a patient, calculating thief. And he always had an escape strategy: Run! Colt never wavered or hesitated, just ran, and ran for the woods where he’d trained himself to run and hide since he could walk. The cops carried all their gear along with extra pounds and additional years. They never had a chance in a foot race.

  They did have chances at stakeouts, though, and Colt still got away. Of course, the San Juan County deputies hadn’t done worse than any other department that chased Colt over the previous eighteen months. He’d gotten away from everyone, including all the SWAT teams, manhunters, and helicopters they could throw at him in Granite Falls.

  Through it all, the people who spoke with Colt said he was “relaxed,” “calm,” and “enjoying it.” Whether this was pathological, or a sign of hopelessness about his future, or just evidence of a steel sack, Colt’s willingness to take ridiculous risks was both what would make him the most famous outlaw of his generation and prove to be his greatest weakness.

  WITH A LITTLE EMOTIONAL distance from his end-of-summer tear around Orcas, there was an almost universal acknowledgment among the bonfire-and-barbecue crowd of at least Colt’s moxie. Parts of his story resonated with the romanticized character of this frontier island. He was canny and resourceful, able to survive with all the odds stacked against him. Whatever appreciation there was, however, no one wanted to see him on Orcas again. Few doubted he’d be back, though, unless he was killed or captured before then. As one deputy told me, “I just hope he’s caught before it’s our turn again.”