by Bob Friel
Tucked in behind Cape Disappointment lies the Port of Ilwaco, the closest marina to the infamous Columbia River sandbar or, as it’s known to mariners the world over, simply “the Bar”—often said with a shudder. More than two thousand vessels have sunk around the Bar, which is the most crowded crypt in a stretch of Northwest coast called the Graveyard of the Pacific. What makes the area so perilous is the battle between the outflow of the mighty river and the Pacific’s winds and waves that takes place atop the huge sandbar. In the right (wrong) conditions, the mouth of the Columbia can transform from a tremulous smooth swell to twenty-foot-tall breakers in the time it takes to ask, “Where’d we put the life jackets?”
The seas here are so consistently hellish that the U.S. Coast Guard bases its National Motor Lifeboat School at Ilwaco in order to train Guardies to handle anything the ocean can throw at them. The guard also mans a busy search-and-rescue base at Cape Disappointment that includes three lifeboats specially designed to operate in Bar conditions, which means being able to roll over and then right themselves and keep going with only minor soiling of the crew’s survival suits.
That said… there’s excellent salmon fishing just outside the mouth of the Columbia, which makes Ilwaco a great place to keep a boat as long as you know what you’re doing and always respect the Bar. Larry Johnson of Tumwater, Washington, keeps his Fat Cat there during the summer. Fat Cat is a thirty-four-foot Ocean Sport Roamer, a muscular twin-diesel $400,000-plus fishing machine built, coincidentally, at a small factory on Camano Island. Larry had used his boat Memorial Day, then put her safely to bed in her slip that evening. Boaters are second only to plane owners in their obsessive relationships with their craft, and Larry even has a sort of baby monitor for his. “There’s a webcam at the port that you can control by computer, so I sign on and check the boat every day.”
Not that he thought there was much to worry about. Boat theft didn’t happen at Ilwaco. The marina had security cameras and, as a bonus, a woman lived full-time aboard her boat moored next to Fat Cat. Larry kept his boat locked, but like many folks who have to travel long distances to their marinas, he kept a key squirreled away, hidden under gear, just in case he ever forgot his.
The surveillance camera sweeping the port showed Fat Cat right where she should be at midnight on the thirty-first. At 12:45 a.m., though, it showed an empty slip. In the meantime, Colt had crept aboard, rooted around the cockpit (on a boat, the cockpit is the open deck area behind the cabin, not, as on a plane, the place where the driver sits), and found the key. Once inside, Colt unsnapped all the window curtains, carefully rolled them up, and stowed them neatly on a shelf. He started the engines, cast off, and motored out of the marina.
To get where he wanted—across the Columbia to the town of Warrenton—Colt had to thread his way down a snaky channel that winds around several small islands and past constantly shifting sandbars just to reach the river. Charts of the area are cluttered with icons for sunken ships along with notations that even some navigational buoys aren’t marked because their positions have to be changed so often due to the deceptive sands. The channel took him right past the Cape Disappointment Coast Guard station, where he would have had to slow to “No Wake” speed alongside their dock.
Just past the station there’s a beach jutting into the channel that would have been invisible on this dark night with just a sliver of moon hidden behind an overcast sky. Around that and past Sand Island, the Fat Cat would finally be in the river.
Once on the river, Colt could open up the throttles, but the danger wasn’t over. The most perilous part of the Columbia is actually crossing the Bar, and Colt didn’t have to do that, though, as Larry says, “he was close enough to spit on it.” Even behind the Bar the crossing can be hairy, with sloppy seas to contend with, and on the other side Colt had to snug into the Oregon shoreline to avoid grounding on the Desdemona Sands. Then he needed to pick out the flashing beacons marking the Skipanon Waterway against the lights of Warrenton, Oregon, a town of five thousand built on tidal flats across Youngs Bay from Astoria. Colt made it and motored down the Skipanon to a commercial pier north of town. He docked the boat, tied her up, shut her down, locked the door, and put the key back in its hiding place.
Tuesday morning, Larry logged on and pulled up the Port of Ilwaco camera. “I couldn’t believe it,” he says. “I downloaded the image three or four times and then called the port.” The marina sent someone down to the slip and called him back, confirming his boat was gone. Larry phoned the coast guard while Ilwaco called all the marinas around Washington and Oregon. They soon got a call from Warrenton that they’d found Fat Cat at their dock, tied up among much larger commercial fishing boats. When Larry heard where it was, he assumed that it had been taken by someone very experienced with boats and with navigating the local waters.
More evidence of that came when he arrived at the boat. “There wasn’t even any cosmetic damage.” The boat has a full electronics package, with integrated radar and chartplotter, but it didn’t look like that had been used. “The covers were on the electronics, switches off, and there were no new tracks saved on the plotter.” That really puzzled Larry. “With the channels poorly marked and the Bar out there, to have done that at night without navigation equipment… I don’t know how you’d do it. He got real lucky.”
One explanation is that Colt carried his own portable GPS unit—he’d stolen plenty of them by this time. With lots of time to plan, he could pull up charts on his laptop, plot his routes, then transfer them to a GPS. That doesn’t make what he did easy. He still had to contend with everything Mother Nature could dish up, and he had to drive the boat across a big black expanse of moving water while navigating from a tiny screen.
“Why you would steal a boat to get to Warrenton I have no idea,” says Larry. “It takes a long time and you have all the risks out on the river. Instead, you can drive a car across the bridge and be there in a few minutes.” And conditions weren’t ideal: Larry couldn’t bring his Fat Cat back to Ilwaco for several days because the river was raging with eight-foot swells.
The Warrenton chief of police, Mathew Workman, says that as soon as they recovered the stolen boat, Colt was the prime suspect. “Mr. Moore had been put on our radar… and we fully expected to have something else happen in the area because that seemed to be his MO. When we didn’t have anything reported stolen that day, we were concerned he could be staying in one of the vacation homes that we have around here.”
Workman, forty-two, was a twenty-year police veteran who’d been chief in Warrenton since October 2008. He says that he got the word out to all Clatsop County police to be on the lookout. “Then I contacted the TITAN Fusion Center down here and asked if they could put something out to all law enforcement in the area.”
TITAN Fusion Centers are a post-9/11 Homeland Security big fix that allows local, state, and federal law enforcement to share intelligence and connect the dots on a broad range of subjects, including gangs, organized crime, and serial criminals working a local area, as well as activities that might be terrorism related. Workman says he was told that the information he presented to the Fusion Center didn’t “meet their criteria” for forwarding it among other agencies.
Despite TITAN’s turndown, law enforcement in Clatsop County, Oregon, as well as Pacific County and Island County, Washington, and the FBI, all knew that Colton Harris-Moore was in Warrenton. And anyone with a twitching EEG knew about his predilections for airplanes. For some reason, though, no law enforcement agency made the obvious move to get in touch with the first place that would come to mind when wondering what Colt would do next. Less than two miles from where he docked the Fat Cat lay the Warrenton-Astoria Regional Airport, offering two scenic runways on the shores of the Columbia. John Overholser, the airport manager, says that he received no word, no warning, and had no idea that the Barefoot Bandit was even in Oregon.
At some point on the first, Colt made his way from the Warrenton commercial dock to the airport. Insi
de the fence that evening, a Cessna 185 sat unattended out on the ramp. It was a proverbially dark and stormy night, one when pilots with hundreds of hours in the left seats of airplanes they know by heart would beg off taking them up. But someone walked through the rain and gusty winds out to the Cessna. Regardless of the weather, the 185 had some things going against it as sensible transportation for Colt. This model sits on two big front wheels with just a tiny turnable gear under the vertical stabilizer to keep its butt off the ground. The configuration gives the aircraft a distinct nose-up attitude—thus the nickname for this style: tail-dragger. The vast majority of early planes had this setup, though nowadays almost all designs incorporate the tricycle-style wheels like the 182s and the Cirrus.
Cessna stopped building 185s back in 1985. Colt always said he preferred newer models, and landing tail-draggers takes much more practice as they have the tendency to tip over on their noses or ground loop (spin in a circle). But out came a flathead screwdriver to try to pry open the plane’s doors. Nothing gave easily, though, and he may not have been trying too hard. If he had gotten inside, he would have found the fuel tanks empty.
Colt, police say, then headed for the small terminal. An outside light illuminated a window that looked like the easiest entry point, so he unscrewed the light fixture and laid it on the ground. He untwisted the bulb until it went out, throwing that side of the building into darkness. His trusty screwdriver made short work of the window latch and he climbed inside. It turned out to be a kitchen, and as Colt stepped down, his foot landed on the stove, bending one of the burners. The only stuff in the kitchen was, according to Rich Rasmussen who works at the airport for Hertz, “some pretty nasty food… been expired a long time,” so Colt moved on to the rental car office.
The door to the Hertz office had some play in it, so first Colt tried to jimmy the lock. That didn’t work, so he simply put a shoulder to it and busted it open. It appears he didn’t dawdle in the office—two hundred dollars were left behind in the desk—and instead just picked two sets of keys out of a glass bowl, one labeled for a Dodge Journey, the other for a Ford Fusion. The Dodge was right out front.
WHILE COLT WAS BOATING across state lines and shopping planes in Oregon, residents back on Camano Island were gathering for a meeting at the Elger Bay Elementary School. It had been set up by Josh Flickner and David Peters to introduce the community to Mike Rocha and his team. Some locals, though, weren’t too receptive to the idea of armed bounty hunters skulking around the island. One woman said she wasn’t comfortable having them walking through their backyards with automatic weapons. Rocha reassured her, saying they wouldn’t do that. “We carry semiautomatics,” he said. That got a laugh. What didn’t was when one older guy stood up and said of Colt, “Most of us want him dead!” The crowd of more than two hundred responded with groans. Flickner got up and said the man wasn’t speaking for anyone but himself. The “dead!” quote, though, made the evening news.
Rocha told the crowd his men were already out working the island. Sheriff Brown wasn’t at the meeting but announced that he wouldn’t be sharing any information with any private group, including bounty hunters. That certainly seemed accurate, because while the bounty hunters began shaking the bushes on Camano, the police and anyone paying attention knew Colt was already south of the state border.
AT 7:30 A.M. ON the second, Rich Rasmussen noticed that the Dodge Journey was missing. Last thing he expected, though, was that it had been stolen. He figured another Hertz employee had borrowed it. What made more of an impact on him was that the key to his office door was working much better. “It’d usually catch a little and you’d have to wiggle it… That morning it just turned,” he says. “I thought maybe it was a miracle.” When word came back that the Dodge wasn’t with Hertz staff, Rich called the cops. “They said, ‘We’ve been waiting for your call.’” The police told the airport manager, John Overholser, that once the stolen boat showed up, they figured it was just a matter of sitting by the phone and sooner or later they’d get a call about something else getting ripped off.
COLT DROVE THE DODGE Journey south on Highway 101—the Bandit with no driver’s license cruising one of the world’s great road trip routes. From the time he dropped the C-note at the vet’s in Raymond, he’d had the Pacific Ocean beside him nearly the entire time. The only downside to 101 in Washington and Oregon is trying to ignore the patchwork of clearcuts that make the region look like a green dog with mange. Of course since Colt traveled nocturnally, he missed most of the sights. South of Seaside, Oregon, he veered southeast into Yamhill County, Oregon’s wine country.
He ditched the wagon in Dayton and made his way three miles to McMinnville at the north end of the Willamette Valley, thirty-eight miles south of Portland. If Colt hadn’t been on the lam, this would be a natural stop. The town hosts the country’s second-largest annual UFO Festival—only the one in Roswell, New Mexico, is bigger—which seems like it might attract a kid who specialized in unidentified flying. The serious draw, though, is the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum, retirement home for Howard Hughes’s famous flying cargo ship, the Spruce Goose, the largest airplane ever built. The Goose (actually made of birch) is housed in a gigantic glass-walled hangar that’s lit up beautifully at night.
Just across Salmon River Highway from the museum lies McMinnville Municipal Airport, a busy little hub that serves as a base for more than 130 prop planes, jets, helicopters, and gliders. The cluster of businesses and offices on the field include the FBO/flying school Cirrus Aviation along with Northwest Air Repair, and the ten-thousand-square-foot area command of the Oregon State Police—a big-ass cop shop. There’s also a National Guard armory on the property, and just south of that lies Airport Park, a heavily wooded campground that’s open to the public. Fliers who come to McMinnville to check out the museum often camp at the park, which runs practically right onto the taxiway.
Northwest Air Repair is owned by U.K.-born Graham Goad, who also serves as the airport’s manager. His younger brother Adam worked at McMinnville as a flight instructor for a helicopter company.
According to Graham, the first weirdness happened on Thursday, June 3, “when Connie, who works at the FBO, went to get her lunch out of the fridge and noticed it was gone.” Lunch-bag larceny wasn’t a common occurrence at McMinnville. No one made a big deal out of it, though—some folks just aren’t that fanatical about their food. And some folks are. When Graham walked into his hangar office on Monday the seventh, he immediately noticed that something was horribly, horribly wrong: three of his Johnsonville Beddar with Cheddar brats were missing.
Graham loves those fat tubes of beefy cheesy goodness. Often he’ll just nuke a couple in the microwave and gobble them down without even bothering to bun ’em or add fixings. He doesn’t take brat banditry lightly, and with a notorious forager known to be in the area, he quickly came up with a suspect. “My brother Adam has a key to my shop and he sticks his head in my fridge all the time.”
Adam, though, swore up and down that he didn’t do it. Graham scratched his bald head and almost had himself convinced that he just might have been eating so many himself that he’d lost count. But then he noticed a couple more odd things around the office. His computer had been reset, and his WiFi signal booster had been unplugged, disabling the camera that sent images of his shop to his desktop throughout the day. Minor, compared to the missing hot dogs, but still evidence that something fishy was going on.
BACK IN WASHINGTON ON June 3, another bizarre twist. An anonymous donor made a public offer to Colt: turn yourself in and I’ll give you $50,000. The offer was made through Jim Johanson, an Edmunds-based attorney and former state rep whom fugitive-recoverer Mike Rocha described as “a friend of our company.” Johanson says the donors were “just some people that didn’t want to see anything bad happen to Colt or anyone else, like law enforcement.” Part of the deal was that Johanson would also represent Colt pro bono, “no strings attached.” The free lawyer and $50 grand in “no longer
walking around” money had a deadline, though, set to expire June 8 at 3 p.m.
I couldn’t find a law enforcement officer anywhere who’d ever heard of such a thing as allowing a fugitive to basically collect a bounty on himself. If it worked, it could start a whole new trend. Go directly to jail and do collect your $200.
“He’s not gonna turn himself in,” said Pam. “Give up your freedom for a lousy fifty thousand dollars! What the hell can you do with that small amount of money? Maybe get a really nice car.”
The deadline came and went without a peep from Colt. The prospective donors have remained anonymous.
ON WEDNESDAY MORNING, JUNE 9, Graham Goad arrived at his McMinnville shop and noticed that the back door was unlocked. Inside his office, Graham’s computer screen wasn’t how he’d left it and his wireless booster was again unplugged. He called Adam in and demanded to know if he’d been messing with his stuff. Again, Adam pleaded innocent. Then it was his turn. He pulled his head out of his brother’s fridge and asked, “Graham, how many hot dogs did you eat yesterday?”
Oh no, Graham thought, not now, not when he’d just stocked up on the special smoked sausage dogs. Graham did some quick hot dog calculus that put Captain Queeg’s geometric strawberry logic to shame. He ran the figures again and double-checked the net number of wieners left in the wrapper. The result was inescapable: six dogs had fled the pack.
“That’s when I realized, ‘Hey, somebody’s been in here!’”
Graham walked over to the FBO for a cup of joe and mentioned the theft. “One of the people there said, ‘Ho ho ho, maybe it’s the Barefoot Bandit!’”