The Barefoot Bandit

by Bob Friel

  Just last month, Mel found something else unusual on the property. “She was barking out in the yard, so I walk over and it’s a SWAT guy hiding in the trees in his full G.I. Joe outfit.” Melanie, Mel, or Meeshee, as Colt sometimes calls her, has plenty of experience sniffing the police. “You can always tell when they’re around because they all wear foo foo,” says Pam, meaning cologne.

  All the jurisdictions except the Mounties had been there, including the FBI and officers from an auto theft task force who, Pam said, told her they thought Colt had stolen between forty and sixty cars. “Those guys brought me a plate of chocolate chip cookies,” Pam said. “It’s all weird.” Other cops brought cans of dog food for Melanie. The FBI agents, she said, had been professional so far, but she had a big, long-standing problem with the Island County deputies, who she described as “bumbling idiots.”

  “Everything that happens on this island they blame on Colt. I’m sure he’s done some of these things… but he’d have to be sixty or seventy years old to have done all the things Mark Brown says he’s done.”

  We sat at a small kitchen table, Pam drinking coffee. The fridge went bad, so she has only a dorm-size. Plus, she said, “Vacuum broke down, wash machine broke down, my truck broke down, all within forty-eight hours.” The ceiling’s falling down in patches, too, but there’s a new wood laminate floor that Pam told me Colt had installed for her before he last went to “the slammer.”

  A friend gave her a dishwasher, and she also has plenty of music. While on the lam, Colt had sent her a couple of iPods preloaded with Michael Jackson and Patsy Cline—“Colt thinks she’s got a beautiful voice.” Colt has wide-ranging taste in music, from the latest rap to Ol’ Blue Eyes, and one of Pam’s favorite memories is dancing with him out on the deck to Sinatra’s “Summer Wind.”

  She was adamant that Colt wasn’t living out in the woods. He’d told her he was staying in a house protected by high-tech surveillance equipment. He had his own room, TV, and computer. The people who own the house were a recently married couple and there were also two men a bit older than Colt living there, one of whom was ex-military. Pam called those guys “Colt’s goons.” Colt, she said, had free access to the family’s big SUV and did computer work for them, getting paid $600 a week. The wife was a chef into organic food, though Colt asked her to stop cooking it for him because he was trying to put on weight. Once, the chef even cooked Pam a gourmet meal that someone delivered to her mailbox at the end of Haven. Pam says the family also gave her a Bose Wave radio. “I had to pawn it once for money, and they ran the serial number to make sure it wasn’t stolen—and it wasn’t.”

  Pam said the police knew all these details. “I started thinking maybe they didn’t want to find Colt,” she said. “That way they could go to the public and say, ‘We can’t catch this kid because we don’t have enough manpower. We need more money.’”

  The mystery family had now moved off Camano, but Pam said she didn’t know where. Colt still stayed with them, though, proof that he had no reason to be breaking into people’s houses or businesses. When I mention that police had found his fingerprints at crime scenes, she said, “I know for a fact that Colt doesn’t leave fingerprints. In fact, I have a pair of my gloves that he used to wear… those little ones that stretch to any size, real soft.”

  Pam said the deputies had been following her. “They think I’m hiding him, but I’m not, and I don’t know where he is… and wouldn’t tell them if I did.”

  Her mail had recently stopped for a week, so she called an FBI agent who’d left his card. “He said, ‘We don’t do that, but maybe Island County cops were taking it.’ The next day all of my mail showed up. There’s just too many weird things going on.”

  Pam was sure they had her phone bugged, and maybe the trailer and her truck. Her prison pen pal, she said, was going to sweep the place for listening devices when he got there. She said she was suspicious and leery of everything. “One of these sheriffs that was here yesterday, he told me he knows a colonel in the army, that he can get Colt in touch with him and go into special forces… And I don’t believe it. I don’t believe anything anybody ever tells me. I never have.”

  After Granite Falls, a Snohomish County police officer called her. “He said, ‘I’m at a crash site and Colt’s name has been mentioned.’ And I thought he meant a car crash! I said, ‘Where are the people?’ He said there was nobody there. He wasn’t giving me any information… I asked if an aid car had taken Colt to the hospital, and he just said nobody’s here. So I asked, ‘Well, are there like body parts or what?’”

  The officer finally told her it was a plane crash.

  “I was pretty shocked. I really don’t believe Colt flew any planes… but if he did, I am very, very proud of him because he woulda had to teach himself. And if he is flying them, then I hope he wears a parachute and works on his landings.”

  I find that Pam has a sense of humor, albeit a rough one, though it doesn’t sound like she gets to exercise it much. And she admitted to being prickly. “Fucking-A right I’m hard to get along with! I don’t have any friends, I don’t associate with anybody. I only leave the property to go to the store if I have to. I don’t like people, I don’t like relatives… ”

  Pam wasn’t working and said she was now disabled. Social Security denied her benefits, but she was fighting them and hoped the money would kick in before she lost the property for failure to pay taxes (it did after, she says, she was diagnosed with a broken back). She said her widow’s benefits stopped when Colt turned eighteen, and she once had to consider selling the Camano land. “Colt just freaked out: ‘But Mom, I wanted to show my kids all the trees I’ve climbed!’”

  No friends, no money, no family around… Pam was leading an insular life even for an islander. Her older son, Colt’s half brother, Paul, fell off a three-story roof twelve years ago and is disabled, living on the mainland. Now the one family member she said she was close to had been on the lam for eighteen months.

  Pam asked the FBI to find Colt’s father, Gordon Moore. “I think he oughta be out here worrying just as much as me!” She tried to get ahold of Moore herself by calling the last place she knew he was staying. “He was living with this old lady and she told me, ‘He’s not here and he better never come back!’ She had this little tiny rat dog, yippin’, and it musta drove him nuts, and I guess he took it outside and killed it… That sounds like Gordy.”

  She said Colt doesn’t take after his father. “Colt decided by himself that he didn’t like Gordy. I would say that was a good call.” Colton, she said, loves animals. He even had a pet spider out by a patch of holly trees. “He fed it for years,” Pam said. “He’d get bugs and throw them into its web and it would run over and wrap them up. One time when he called [from out on the run] I said, ‘You want me to keep feeding that spider for you?’ And he goes, ‘Oh, Mom, you don’t have ta.’ I said ‘I will if you want me to.’”

  During another of their recent calls, Pam told Colton she was doing some cleaning. He was, she said, very concerned about his stuffed animal collection. “I told him they were fine, that I put them in a Rubbermaid for him.” Nonchalant about getting chased through dark woods by SWAT teams and Black Hawk helicopters, the famous Barefoot Bandit was worried about whether his plush puppies were well cared for.

  There were no photos and few personal touches on display in the trailer besides a couple of fish and animal knickknacks that Pam said were Colt’s. “We didn’t take many pictures,” she said. Pam thought the self-portrait of Colt run with all the news stories was terrible, but said she liked the one from the Island Market security camera on Orcas that was now featured on wanted posters. “Colt said that’s not him, but it looks like him to me… and I think that’s a good picture of him… if it’s him.”

  Pam said she and Colt kept up on everything by telephone, that he called her frequently on an untraceable phone “like the president has.” Whenever they heard clicks or static on the line, Colt said it was the FBI listen
ing in and he “says derogatory things to them.” She said they talked for hours each time he called.

  “We always laugh on the phone. I mean laugh hard, really hard. And some people may not see the humor in things that him and I see. Some of it is probably not very… definitely not politically correct. I am pretty prejudiced because of Vietnam, never really got over it, and Colt knows that. He always brings up something that makes me laugh about Orientals.”

  Colt was following the press about himself and Pam said he’d been getting angry at her lately for talking to the media. “I told him it’s the only way to get his side of the story out there.”

  What her calls to radio shows, interviews in the local papers, and even call-ins to cable TV shows seemed to be doing, mostly, was to inadvertently deflect heat off Colt and onto her. She’d made herself an easy target, the one clear villain in the story, and had become a two-dimensional quote machine. Her gruff phone manner and gravelly “hisselfs” evoked Granny Clampett or, as some of the local cops referred to her around the station, Momma from the movie Throw Momma from the Train. When she told the hosts of Seattle’s Ron and Don Show that Colt said his IQ tested three points below that of Einstein, one of them quipped that it sounded like hers was three points below room temperature.

  Though her interviews didn’t get beyond the “I’m proud he can fly planes” soundbites, the narrative Pam was trying to tell was that she could never control Colt, and “no one in the school system ever tried to help him,” the social service people were “well-meaning but useless,” and the deputies never tried to help the local kids. According to her, Colt was a good-hearted kid who loved the outdoors and airplanes, and who didn’t steal because he needed to, “but because he can.”

  I asked Pam if she had any regrets about her part in Colt’s upbringing. She said her biggest mistake was not moving Colton out of Island County once she realized everyone had it in for him.

  I ASKED IF COLTON had a plan. “Kids always have plans… whether they’re good or bad.” At one point, she said, Colt had given her the tail number of an airplane and said she should be ready to meet him. “He wants to come get me and me be with him. Go live the good life.”

  Colt’s idea of the good life, she said, was “having a yacht and living on a tropical island.” The only way he’d ever talked of earning that good life was being a pilot. “I told him, ‘You graduate and we’ll send you to flight school.’ Evidently he don’t need flight school.”

  He did, however, recently tell Pam: “Don’t be surprised if you get a strange phone call one day from either the government or a private company that wants to hire me to do secret work.” She said Colt assured her that he wouldn’t do anything for the federal government unless he had a twenty-year contract.

  She stressed a number of times that she was proud of Colt for his abilities, including being able to evade helicopters and SWAT teams. “He’s doing it because he likes to see if he can. He thinks it’s easy—he’s said that. And he’s sure making them look like fools.”

  When a radio interviewer once prodded Pam, saying it sounded like she was rooting for him, she said, “Of course! I’m his mother!”

  I ASKED IF PAM thought Colt might be doing some of these things for the press attention. “No, he’s his own person, very much. He’s not going to do anything because of what’s in the media.”

  She said he was, however, following the news and his fan club online. “He laughs, reads me a few things over the phone, and we crack up. I told him the other day that when this is over, you have your pick of any woman, they’re in love with you.” I asked about his reaction to that. “He don’t care, he’s not into a girlfriend. He’s got other things on his mind.”

  It didn’t seem contradictory to Pam that Colt thought the media coverage was absurd and yet he’d told her to be ready to drag the old gate across the driveway because he was planning “something big” that would have “the paparazzi” crawling all over the place.

  With that warning and the recent story from Granite Falls, Pam seemed fatalistic about Colt’s chances, saying she didn’t think he’d make it out alive, “not if he took a shot at those cops.” She said that “everyone makes their life plan before they come to this earth,” so “whatever Colt’s going to go through, whatever’s gonna happen is gonna happen, he planned it that way… It’s predetermined.”

  Pam said she was trying to get Colt a bulletproof vest. I asked if he told her he wanted one. “I don’t care if he does or not. I’m getting him one and he’s going to wear it. Sometimes a mother has to put her foot down.”

  WHEN I STOPPED BY the next day to take photos of Melanie, it appeared that it soon wouldn’t be safe for anyone to put his foot down around Pam’s property. Her friend had arrived the previous evening. There was a big contractor bag filled with empty Busch Ice cans on the deck. Inside, Pam was doing her version of coquettish. She’d apparently been able to leave behind the weirdness for at least a few hours. For me, it was a whole new level. While Pam happily chatted on the phone, I sat at the kitchen table with Tim. Both physically and in his calmly menacing manner, he reminded me of David Carradine in Kung Fu. I wasn’t surprised when he told me of his martial arts prowess. He said he didin’t want to be identified because he had enemies from his time in prison. He was in there, he said, because he “broke a cop.” He added, kind of unnecessarily, that he had a real problem with authority.

  Tim also told me that if he wanted to, he could find anyone—anyone—in two days. I wanted to tell him that things have changed a little in the last thirty-seven years, and now a ten-year-old with a Web connection can find anyone in two minutes… but I didn’t. It didn’t seem like the time for jokes. Instead, it was booby-trap time.

  Tim picked up a shotgun shell and hunting knife, and patiently showed me how he was carving away the ends of the shell casings to empty the pellets while leaving the wad and gunpowder in place. Then, he explained, you simply add a cap that impacts the primer when stepped on, and bury it out in the yard. Voilà, a homemade “toe-popper.” It wouldn’t kill anybody, he said… unless of course he went into shock. It was just designed to blow off part of a foot. To complement the poppers, he planned on adding camouflaged nail boards, poor-man pungi sticks, most effective when dipped in shit.

  Pam said these would keep the media and the police away. I questioned the wisdom of setting booby traps for the police. “If I put a sign down at the end of my driveway saying ‘Property Is Booby Trapped, Enter at Your Own Risk,’ I think that covers me… And I don’t care if it does or not. I’m not gonna have cops running around my property at all hours of the day and night… It’s just unnerving.”

  They never made the “Booby Trapped” notice, but Tim did paint IF YOU GO PAST THIS SIGN YOU WILL BE SHOT on a big piece of plywood and posted it at the front of the drive.

  Chapter 23

  My Outside magazine story about Colt hit the newsstands in mid-January 2010. I heard from a number of locals how unhappy they were that I was giving this kid, who was “a media creation,” national attention. Better, one said, that we should keep silent so it would all just go away.

  Friends joked with Sandi that because of the story, Colt was sure to come back to the island now and pay me a visit.

  According to Pam, though, Colton already knew who I was. “He checks out everyone I talk to,” she said. “And he’s been reading your Web thing.” Since there was no conclusion to the story by my deadline, I’d begun posting updates on a blog called Outlaws & Outcasts. Colt followed the posts as well as the Web sites that carried my travel-adventure stories.

  Three weeks later, on February 10 at around 11 p.m., aviation authorities keeping guard over the antiterrorist no-fly zone wrapped around the Vancouver Olympics noted a small plane taking off from Anacortes Airport. The exclusion zone dipped to just north of Orcas Island, and any aircraft entering it had to utilize a special transponder code. This one wasn’t transmitting the correct signal. ATC tracked the plane as it flew an
erratic course, teasing along the no-go line, but they kept from pulling the trigger on any of their contingency plans, such as launching fighters armed with Sidewinder suppositories. They monitored the plane until it disappeared from radar over Orcas, and then forgot all about it.

  The plane, a $650,000 Cirrus SR22—the same model Colt had stolen for his first night flight—touched down at the north end of the Orcas runway and was found bogged down in the muddy grass alongside the airstrip. It was a decent landing in that at least the plane was still flyable, with only minor damage to a gear cowling.

  At 8:15 the following morning, Kyle Ater opened the door to his Homegrown Grocery and saw cartoonish bare feet drawn on the floor. He figured it was an employee prank. “I thought, Oh, these won’t be hard to clean up because it’s just chalk. Then I took a couple more steps into the store and saw the tills laid out on the floor and water pouring out of the sink.”

  The footprints trailed all around the store, up and down the aisles, ending at the side door with a “C-Ya!” The cash drawer was smashed open. “I went over to the sink to turn it off, and the security system was in there, underwater, along with my pliers, knife sharpeners, and a screwdriver.” He called the police. “I’d been getting a whole new level of service from them since all the Colt stuff started because of the media attention.” Kyle put on rubber gloves to keep from contaminating the scene and the officers arrived quickly. “But Steve Vierthaler told me, ‘Don’t worry, we won’t be sending anything to the crime lab because they won’t be able to look at it for a year.’”

  Kyle says he and the deputies were thinking the break-in was a copycat because Colt had never done anything like draw footprints. “While they’re shooting pictures, though, a radio call comes in saying, ‘We’ve got a plane in the grass at the airport.’ We all hear this and instantly everyone says, ‘It is him!’”