The Barefoot Bandit

by Bob Friel

  Despite the nods to Colt’s abilities, there remained a gulf between what the vast majority of residents on Orcas and Camano were feeling about him and how a growing number of people across the country and around the world saw Colt. In early October, the first Facebook page dedicated to Colt went up and starting collecting members, eventually numbering almost a hundred thousand. An Internet fan club also went live, and T-shirts began flying out of a Seattle shop emblazoned with Colt’s face and, ironically, the words “Momma Tried”—from the Merle Haggard tune.

  WHEN I LEARNED THAT the crook who turned our open, trusting community into Paranoid Park was a feral kid with a Wild West name who’d come from just downstream to roam our woods barefoot while using high-tech spy tools to steal our identities, I put aside my other writing projects. I felt I had a personal stake in finding out the truth behind this Jesse James Bond. After digging out the reams of records on Colt down at the Island County courthouse, learning about his childhood and finding out that he wasn’t a typical drug-addled, violent punk, I was hooked.

  Chapter 22

  The beginning of the truth about Colton Harris-Moore lay south, on Camano Island. After the hour-long ferry ride from Orcas to the mainland, the drive between Anacortes and Camano runs through Skagit Valley. It’s a great back-road drive at the right times of year. In spring, the valley erupts in an acid trip of colors as millions of tulips bloom. Wintertime brings thousands of snow geese and trumpeter swans that form drifts along the farmland furrows and occasionally lift off in huge honking blizzards of white. Driving through on the day before Halloween, though, there wasn’t much to slow down for.

  In normal times, talk on Camano tends toward fishing and crabbing. In the fall of 2009, though, it was all about Colt. The wanted posters were back up, rewards were offered by the local chamber of commerce and Crime Stoppers, and Sheriff Mark Brown was trying to keep his cool. After the plane thefts brought the case a higher profile, more law enforcement started pitching in to help catch Colt. Snohomish County’s manhunter teams worked the island, and other agencies lent Brown helicopter support whenever there was a solid sighting. Island County deputies began camping out in garages and backyards where Colt was known to forage.

  Now “the cops meant business,” says Maxine, who had canine teams sniffing around her property trying to pick up Colt’s trail. She told police that even after being hit eight times, she still wasn’t afraid of Island Boy. “A female deputy said, ‘Well, you should be.’”

  Local kids ventured into the woods looking for Colt and a piece of the reward money. They found two more of his campsites behind the mailboxes at the east end of Haven Place. The police also found several camps tied to Colt, some with stolen property, others with keepsakes surprising for someone who professed to have such disdain for the press. “Colton was collecting all the news clippings about himself,” says Ed Wallace.

  Islanders say the cops were embarrassed and getting more pissed every time Colt made news. More off-duty deputies began stalking the woods. Even rangers at the local parks beat the bushes on their lunch hours.

  The media repeatedly shorthanded Colt as a Catch Me If You Can–style action hero and the Northwest’s new Robin Hood. Then they’d thrust cameras in Sheriff Mark Brown’s face to get his reaction.

  One crew finally got what it wanted. When Canadian CBC TV asked about the fan clubs and Colt’s hero status, Brown’s round and ruddy face turned a new, threatening hue.

  “He’s certainly not my hero,” he said, then added ominously, “I hope that you and I and everybody else, when he does make that fatal mistake, are not responsible for something other than an arrest being made without an incident.”

  The tenor of Brown’s response heartened those villagers already carrying flaming torches. And it horrified others.

  “The mentality here on Camano when all this started was ridiculous,” says Maria (not her real name), a local woman who, a few years before, supervised Colt while he did community service at the park where she works. “Not a lot goes on out here, so when something does happen it gets blown out of proportion.”

  Maria previously worked for years as a crisis worker in Bellingham, counseling at-risk youth who included those she calls “the worst of the worst, extreme cases, kids that were too psychologically wounded to stay in juvie.” She saw hundreds run through the system. “I had experience with children that came from some of the most horrific environments you can imagine, and we [society] still had these expectations that they were going to behave and fit in like any other child. I loved my job, but it just became too much for me.” That experience, though, gave her the confidence to volunteer to take on Colt even though he already had a reputation as trouble.

  Maria says Pam dropped him off the first two days but then stopped. She didn’t know how he made the twenty-mile round-trip the rest of the week. “He showed up every day without any food or anything to drink, and he was expected to work all day outdoors. So I fed him, gave him water, and he was just so very grateful.”

  Despite his reputation, Colt struck her as “a good-hearted kid who’d always been looked at with negative expectations and didn’t have a lot of motivation to feel good about his life. Yet give a kid like Colton a chance, some stability, look at them with some possibility, and they tend to shine. Colton took this opportunity and he just worked his butt off, sawing and hauling wood, pulling weeds and cutting brush to create a picnic area.”

  She said Colton was quiet, a bit shy, that he didn’t talk much except about the work at hand. “He had just a ridiculous amount of knowledge about the plants and what would grow here. He struck me as being really smart, so I started to ask his opinion and advice and he instantly perked up and became really engaged. I told him he might have a job here when he graduates and he said, ‘You think so? All right, right on.’”

  Colton gave her plenty of great ideas for plantings, but Maria explained that she had a very tight budget and couldn’t afford to buy new plants.

  “When he left, he said, ‘Thank you so much,’ and he wanted to know if he had any more community service to work out, would I be willing to have him here, and I said, ‘Absolutely, in a heartbeat!’ It was an absolute pleasure working with him.”

  Two weeks later, Colton rode his bike ten miles back to the park. “He was kinda shy, handed me three small bags and just said, ‘Here.’ He’d remembered about the budget and went out and hand-harvested seeds from local flowers that he thought would grow well in the park. I said, ‘Oh my God, thank you so much!’ And he’s like, ‘Yeah, all right. Well, I guess I’ll go, bye.’ He started to walk away but then turned around and said, ‘Thank you for being so nice to me.’ I was literally teary-eyed.”

  AS I CONTINUED SOUTH on Camano, Maria’s take had me thinking of Huck Finn. Huck, whose life’s theme was freedom and escape—from rules, schoolin’, and his drunk dad who’d locked him in that backwoods cabin. Huck, who did what he had to do to survive, including “borrowing” what he needed, like food, clothing, and canoes. Was Colton just a kid who’d struck out on his own to escape a bad home and then got swept along in a big current of circumstance? Were our yachts and planes just fancy rafts transporting him from one test of his relative morality to the next?

  On the way to my first visit to Pam and Colt’s home, I stopped at the little back-country commercial oasis a half mile south of Elger Bay Elementary School. There’s a general store and a nice little café that both carry the Elger Bay name. Together they serve as the dining, grocery-shopping, gas- and propane-filling, mailing, DVD-renting, fishing, hunting, and banking center (via an ATM) for the South End. An antique Coca-Cola sign and a big community bulletin board decorate the outside of the grocery. There’s an elaborate jerky display near the entrance, and the fine wines and crab bait are just a few steps apart. It is truly a convenience store.

  It’s also the South End’s social and gossip center.

  “Local people come in here and when you say, ‘How are you today?’ you r
eally hear how they are today,” laughed Kara Weber, a longtime islander who works at the store. “And when anything happens on the island, the phone here starts ringing.”

  Over the past three years, Colton and his mom had kept the phone busy at Elger Bay, with both talk about them and between them. “She thinks her phone is tapped, so she comes down here and uses the pay phone to talk to him.”

  Chances were decent, said Kara, that the next person walking in would be a crime victim. “A guy who comes in the store got hit and had just gotten his insurance in place when that little bugger hit him again! Another local woman had her credit cards stolen and we caught Colt in here on video using them to take money out of the ATM. I’ve heard the term ‘Robin Hood’… well, this guy isn’t stealing from the rich and giving to the poor. There used to be a feeling around here that if they need it that bad, then there, take it. But after it just kept happening and happening, then people got really pissed off. It’s certainly hurt the confidence we had in our sheriff’s department. When this all started I got a dog, and Joe is the kind to eat first and ask questions later.”

  Despite her consistent denials that she ever helped Colt while he was on the lam, Pam Kohler’s involvement is a constant subject of speculation in the area. Kara said there were rumors of a trap door in the trailer, even a tunnel so Colton could come and go without the police seeing. Kara was at the counter one day back in 2008, after Colton had escaped from the prison home and was back committing burglaries on the island. “Pam comes in and pulls out a Ziploc full of money like I’ve never seen. What really threw me is we’re talking about a woman that’s on assistance.”

  Kara can soften a bit talking about Colton. “He didn’t stand a chance. He truly went through hell and I think this all boils down to what he went through as a kid.” But then she turns angry again when she considers what he did to her community. “He knows right from wrong—if not, why would he run from the cops? He’s smart, too; the problem is that he’s just using it for the wrong things. He figured out the electricity timing, just like Josh thought he would.”

  Josh is Josh Flickner, whose family has owned and operated Elger Bay Grocery for eighteen years. The electrical event was when the Washington DOT announced that they were cutting power to Camano overnight as part of the new bridge construction. The warning provided a save the date for would-be thieves who knew exactly when the entire island would go lights out.

  With Colton back on the island, Flickner—who was also head of the local chamber of commerce—called Sheriff Brown and suggested that he station deputies at his grocery and other likely targets. Flickner says his idea went nowhere, so his sister and another employee camped out in the store. In the middle of the night, they awoke to someone tearing the deadbolt out of the back door. They saw the silhouette of a man, “about six-five, same build as Colton, carrying a big empty trash bag,” says Flickner. “They said, ‘Hello?’ and he just calmly turned around and left.”

  Josh had become the voice of local anti-Colt sentiment. “All he’s doing is hurting people—financially, psychologically, he’s hurting people, yet here we are putting him on a pedestal, glorifying him, idolizing him. He’s got a Facebook site… I want to vomit, okay?”

  Josh disagreed with Sheriff Brown on tactics. “I think we could have caught him two years ago. I know about sixty guys that would’ve volunteered to comb the woods in the south end of the island—it’s not that wide. A sheriff has the power to deputize citizens, but he said no, he’d never do that. People are getting really frustrated when the sheriff says don’t take it into your own hands while every day more people are victimized.”

  Josh said Pam still came into the store regularly. “She buys $2 of gas, cigarettes, and six-packs of Busch Ice. We talk to her and half the time she’s in denial and the other half she’s talking about how proud she is of Colt. Now she’s being quoted in Time magazine. Our society is so sad.”

  Josh remembers Colton coming into the store as a young boy. “There was always something shady about him. I remember looking into his eyes and something did not look right… just a look of malicious intent… I lean toward saying evil.”

  I left Elger Bay Grocery wondering whether I was looking for Huckleberry Finn or Michael Myers from Halloween. It was the thirtieth of October, and Josh’s account of young Colton resembled Donald Pleasence’s “child with the devil’s eyes” monologue from the horror movie.

  The one issue everyone seemed to agree on was Colton’s mother, Pam. Kara told me that all the neighbors are scared of her “because of the shotgun… They don’t know how far she’ll go.”

  From what local reporters and police told me, I was the first writer invited to the trailer. I’d written Pam a letter, telling her a little about my background. I said I felt I could empathize with all sides of the story. I knew a number of the victims, lived in one of the affected communities, and had cops in my close family. By Colton’s age, I’d also had a few scrapes with the law, and a few years after that I wound up halfway around the world in the Republic of Maldives working at an island resort with David Friedland, a former New Jersey state senator who’d faked his death in the Bahamas to escape racketeering charges. Friedland ascended to number- one most-wanted fugitive status, hunted ceaselessly by the feds and Interpol. I saw that pressure firsthand. I also belatedly understood what my escapades did to my parents. All they knew was that I was somewhere overseas where my day-to-day life involved charging tourists to watch me stick dead fish in my mouth and feed them to wild sharks—I’d thoughtfully sent them video footage. For nearly two years, my parents spent their nights not knowing whether I’d end up lost at sea, decapitated by a shark, or locked away in some fetid fourth-world prison.

  I was also an adrenaline junkie, and had even soloed an amphibious ultralight airplane after the sketchiest of instruction. I told Pam that my experiences might give me some insight into what both she and Colton were going through.

  ON HAVEN PLACE, I slowed to a crawl at a low point in the swaybacked road where damper soil encouraged a thick stand of cedars. I first passed by what looked like just a narrow gap between trees but turned out to be a driveway. When I backed up I saw the two big WARNING NO TRESPASSING signs. I turned into the cavelike entrance, branches reaching out to hiss and scratch the length of my truck. I stopped under a large tree beside three other pickups in varying states of decay. Two of them, including a cool 1966 Chevy, were far down entropy road; the other was a typical island clunker rig that still looked drivable. An orange bowling ball lay in tall grass next to the broken tin skeleton of a kiddie pool filled with many summers’ worth of browned cedar branchlets.

  I ducked under a final, dripping bough and entered a small clearing. A moldering, moss-stained single-wide trailer home slumped across the space. About a hundred feet of flat lawn stretched in front, with a picnic table and rock fire pit. A smaller clearing behind the trailer led to a garden, an animal pen, and a chicken house.

  An extra room and a deck had been cobbled onto the narrow trailer at some point over the years. I climbed a wobbly stack of cinder blocks that stood in for steps up to the deck. Looking out from atop the rain-slicked planks, it was a beautiful, tranquil piece of property completely screened by billowing drapes of cedar and Douglas fir, everything a deep evergreen in the misty overcast. The trailer, the junk, the aluminum shed frozen in mid-collapse, the camper decaying under the trees—nothing was really so far out of a certain ordinary for around here.

  At the far side of the clearing, in a natural grotto amid the soaring cathedral of hundred-foot trees, stood some kind of statue. It was about four feet high, indistinct, but I could make out a head and outstretched arms. It might be a Virgin Mary.

  “That’s an armadilla that used to stand outside a liquor store,” said Pam Kohler. “The chickens got to it, though, and pecked off some of the Styrofoam.” The statue, she said, was on the property when she bought it twenty-four years ago.

  Dressed in a sagging gray sweater over
white pants and house slippers, fifty-eight-year-old Pam was hunched over and moving slow, as if life had her weighed down. Beneath brown hair her eyes were milky blue and tired. Nicotined fingernails and ashtrays filled with Pall Mall butts floating in a black ooze of ash and rainwater explained the load of gravel in her voice.

  She invited me in and the door opened directly into a small living room with a brown couch facing a wood stove and TV. She said her antenna pulls in a few broadcast channels, but mainly she listens to the radio or watches movies—Westerns are her favorites—on the TV in her bedroom. She used to have a DVD player, she said, but had to sell it, so she watches VHS tapes.

  Even accounting for the overcast day, it was dim inside. The windows that weren’t broken and covered with plywood were obscured by newspapers “to keep the reporters and the cops from looking in.” A sallow light filtered through, matching the cloying scent of cigarettes.

  Pam calls the trailer “dumpy” and she’s not wrong. She said she’d been cleaning for a week in anticipation of a visitor, a childhood friend of her late husband who’d been writing to her every week from prison. Now he was getting out after serving a thirty-seven-year sentence and was going to live at the trailer “to protect me and Colt. Nobody’s going to mess with me once he gets here.”

  Melanie, Colton’s dog, greeted me with her tail wagging at 100 rpm. “I think she’s some kind of hunting dog,” said Pam. “This summer she got one of the biggest snakes I’ve ever seen, and then some kind of rodent.” Melanie also snagged a neighborhood chicken that day, whose fresh carcass I almost stepped in out on the lawn.

  According to Pam, Mel also has a nose for money. She told me the story of a couple who moved their travel trailer onto her property for a while. “They stayed one night and never came back, so Colt and I went in. We found hypodermic needles in there… Melanie kept scratching at one of the seats, so I said to Colt, ‘Let’s break in there and see what it is.’ There was a hundred and seventy-some dollars in there. Colt grabbed it and the chase was on!” She laughed.