Devil's Defender

by John Browne

  But here is the beginning of the unbelievable part: Robert Perez was the sex crimes investigator for the Wenatchee Police Department, and he was actively and aggressively investigating the charges (most of which were unbelievable) made by his own foster daughters. He charged some individuals with over six thousand counts each of rape or molestation. His investigation was blindly accepted by the prosecutor, the chief of police, and most important, the only newspaper in town, the Wenatchee World. You would think that any reasonable prosecutor would be greatly concerned about a policeman charging one person with over six thousand counts of child abuse. Same with the local newspaper and the local judges. No, the town’s power brokers circled the wagons.

  Detective Perez was a zealot. If you can imagine a blond George Costanza wearing ugly short-sleeved shirts, pants hiked over his belly fat, and handcuffs and a 9 millimeter always visible on his belt, you get the picture. To demonstrate his power and insanity, if you questioned his tactics, you would become a suspect in his investigation. A social worker and a reporter who went public with complaints about Perez were soon accused of being part of the Circle.

  The original allegations by the foster children escalated from a few supposed perpetrators to the involvement of Pastor Roberson’s entire church, where, according to Perez, there were rampant sex and rituals on the altar involving intercourse with children as young as six. There were, according to Perez, orgies in the basement of the church involving masturbation and the insertion of objects into the victims, and at another location, where the same participants allegedly wore dark robes and sunglasses.

  Such escalation of details is typically a telltale sign of a false allegation. There has, in fact, never been a proven “sex ring” in the United States, despite public opinion—and hysteria—to the contrary. It is also true that very few child sex abusers are female, yet about half of Detective Perez’s suspects were women.

  Through intimidation and outright lies, Perez secured other witnesses to support the allegations of his foster daughters. Many of the defendants and coerced witnesses were uneducated, could not read or write, and/or had IQs of seventy or below. No matter to Perez. He even had illiterate suspects sign confessions, which he claimed they read before they signed. This didn’t seem to bother the judges though, who supported the prosecutions in every way possible. It seemed like the whole system in Wenatchee had lost its mind.

  At one point we found a document from an old case in which the police chief had been critical of Perez for, among other things, “targeting people” and intimidation. The Wenatchee World ran a story about how inappropriate it was for us to use such information. No mention of the substance of the complaints against good ole Bob Perez.

  He, the other cops, and the social workers never recorded interviews, and destroyed their notes, leaving only their versions of what the witnesses had said. (One social worker complained and within one week was charged with crimes related to the sex ring.)

  The worst of the corruption came from the public defenders. Most public defenders are honorable, hardworking advocates. In Wenatchee they were hacks. Many pled their clients guilty with no investigation.

  So into this scene I walked with my trusted investigator. We smelled a corrupt prosecution and a broken system. We were the first team not beholden to the local system. We put in over two hundred hours investigating the case and saw all the flaws. We discovered that Perez and a social worker had taken one of his foster daughters on a drive past every house where members of the church lived, and according to Perez and the social worker, his foster daughter picked out every house of church members where rituals and abuse occurred. This later became know in our investigation as the Parade of Homes. We learned that Perez would punish his foster children, even physically, if they were reluctant to testify.

  My team realized that most of the local public defenders were conduits for information to the prosecutor’s office. As a result we did not share our investigation with these attorneys. On one occasion there was a group meeting of all the defense lawyers involved, twenty or more. But we kept our investigation to ourselves and later learned that one of the public defenders was reporting directly to the prosecutor and Perez.

  Donna Rodriguez, our client, became a defendant through a pattern of intimidation tactics Perez used on others. She was a member of Pastor Roberson’s church and therefore, in Perez’s mind, a likely member of the sex ring. He went to Donna’s daughter’s school and called her out for a six-hour interrogation. He told Donna’s daughter that if she did not implicate her mother and assist his investigation, he would have Donna arrested in five minutes. The daughter insisted that she had never been molested and Donna did not even know some of the people Perez was talking about. Finally, on the threat of having her mother arrested, the daughter said “Whatever” to Perez. Donna was arrested and taken to jail February 2, 1995, and charged with several counts of child rape and molestation. What Perez did not know was that Donna’s daughter recanted the day after and did so on camera.

  We interviewed Perez’s foster daughters, whose story fell apart, and we developed damaging information about Perez and demonstrated the absurdity of all the allegations. All charges against Donna were dismissed on August 8, 1995. Within months the entire story collapsed. Most of the accused were released without prejudice, and Perez’s “sex ring” was deemed a fiction.

  21

  COLTON HARRIS-MOORE

  By the time I got a call from journalist Bob Friel in June 2010, teenager Colton Harris-Moore had become a part of local folklore. The Island County, Washington, Sheriff’s Department suspected Harris-Moore in hundreds of burglaries on his native Camano Island and surrounding islands, including the theft of cars and airplanes. When deputies found footprints at the crime scenes—barefoot prints—the media latched onto a legend. The so-called Barefoot Bandit, still at large after a two-year crime spree, was a source of international fascination.

  Friel had written a profile of Harris-Moore for Outside magazine and was maintaining a blog about the young pilot’s exploits, Outlaws and Outcasts—a blog, it was assumed, Colton was reading. Friel asked me if he could announce on the blog that I was willing to represent Colton once he was in custody and include my cell phone number so Colton could reach me.

  “Why not?” I said. “Do it.”

  Later that day Friel posted the following:

  Here’s a big news flash: John Henry Browne, a criminal defense attorney who many people consider the best in the entire state of Washington, says that he’s willing to represent Colton Harris-Moore.

  Colt, I don’t know if you realize the significance of this, but it’s huge. Look Browne up . . . and then call him on his cell. . . . Anything you say to him or ask him about is 100% confidential.

  We know you could run forever, Colt. The problem with that, though, is exactly that: You’ll be running forever, always looking over your shoulder. Now, however, you know you can end this on your terms and have your own “dream team” lawyer to give you the best defense possible.

  You’ve still got choices, and this seems like an easy one.

  A day or so later I received a call from Pam Kohler, Colton’s mother. She said the family had no money to pay me for my services. I said, “Fine, send me a dollar.” And she did.

  My office got to work on the case, and as I learned more about my young, elusive client, I not only grew to like him but also came to realize the deck had been stacked against him from the very beginning.

  When Pam Kohler was pregnant in late 1990 and early 1991, she smoked constantly and drank heavily at least once a week, joining her brother at the bar and throwing back drinks until she could barely walk. After her son Colton was born, in March 1991, she continued to drink. She was a mean drunk, prone to telling her son things like “I wish you had been born dead.”

  Raised by Pam and the various, often abusive men who came in and out of her life, Colton lived in constant fear. And hunger. Pam rarely kept food in the single-wide, two-be
droom trailer parked on five acres in a remote part of Camano Island. In elementary school Colton started to break into nearby homes, where he’d go straight to the kitchen and stock up on food. “I only took small food items,” he later told my investigator, “to avoid suspicion of a break-in so that I could come back the next time I was hungry.” At age thirteen Colton broke into his school to pilfer candy—and was immediately caught while slinking out of the building.

  The deputy decided not to arrest him and instead admonished him on the evils of theft and drove him home. But the incident further cemented what had become, since he was a child, a distrustful, contentious relationship between Colton and the Island County Sheriff’s Department. When Colton received a new bike as a gift—one of the few possessions he ever had—deputies were convinced he stole it, and escorted him and the new bike home, where they confronted Pam. From her they learned, to their embarrassment, that something nice actually belonged to Colton.

  The bicycle was an anomaly in a childhood marked by want, abuse, and hunger. Child Protective Services was called on Colton’s behalf twelve times before he turned fifteen years old. No real action was ever taken, and he was never removed from his home.

  By then Colton was ready to take matters into his own hands. In August 2006 he ran away. He roamed the island like a ghost, living in the woods and breaking into vacant vacation homes to appropriate electronics—laptops, cell phones, cameras—and food. He evaded sheriff’s deputies for six months before they caught him.

  The state sentenced him to three years of incarceration and placed him in Green Hill School, a maximum-security detention center in Chehalis, Washington, reserved for the worst juvenile offenders. Six months later he was transferred to the relatively posh Griffin Home, a transitional housing unit in a Seattle suburb, with a great record for reforming its occupants. At first Colton was excited about Griffin, because it looked like a shot at a real education, one that might even allow him to study aviation and help fulfill his dream of becoming a pilot. He was deflated when a counselor told him, “You will never be a pilot.” In late April 2008 Colton slipped out a window and escaped.

  Here’s what got me: Griffin was, by all measures, the best place Colton could have served out his sentence. But he ran, and looking at his case file, I couldn’t for the life of me understand why.

  After he left Griffin, Colton stole—and then crashed—a Mercedes and disappeared into the woods on Camano. For the next two years he was an apparition. People reported seeing him all over the islands.

  In November 2008 he took a single-engine Cessna—after teaching himself how to fly by reading the owner’s manual—and got as far as Yakima County, three hundred miles away in eastern Washington, before crashing. He emerged from the wreckage and hiked some fifty miles into the hamlet of White Swan, Washington, jacked a car, and rolled down to California, where he connected with a friend and cooled his heels.

  Back on Camano Island nine months later, the stealing spree continued. And the legend grew. A Colton Harris-Moore Facebook page collected more than forty thousand fans. A screen-printer in Seattle produced a T-shirt with Colton’s face below the words MOMMA TRIED (a nod to the song “Mama Tried” by Merle Haggard) and said he was donating some of the proceeds toward Colton’s legal defense fund. (Neither Colton nor I ever saw a dollar of it!)

  But while my client had allies in Seattle, and all over the world for that matter, the locals he grew up around—particularly those whom he’d allegedly stolen from—considered him a menace. One San Juan Islander sold coffee mugs, T-shirts, and other paraphernalia that featured my client as a hapless delinquent. Sample T-shirt: COLTON HARRIS-MOORE, TURN YOURSELF IN AND WE’LL GIVE YOU THE SECOND HALF OF THE FLIGHT MANUAL, YOU KNOW, THE PART ABOUT LANDING. He said he’d donate 25 percent of his proceeds toward a reward for anyone with information that resulted in Colton’s arrest.

  My client climbed into his second airplane on September 11, 2009, in Friday Harbor, took off, and headed for nearby Canada. But remembering he’d left his iPod on Orcas Island (what can I say, he was eighteen and not good at prioritizing), he circled back and landed on Orcas to retrieve it. There he stole a boat and headed for the US mainland, where he pinched a car, making his way to Bonners Ferry, Idaho. Another stolen plane took him back to Washington, as far as Granite Falls, before he crash-landed.

  He returned to Camano, where he lived in the woods and continued to break into homes. When he’d sneak a call to his mother on a stolen cell phone, she was anything but helpful. Rather than pleading with him to turn himself in, she encouraged him to run, at one point saying, “You will probably be killed if you get caught.”

  It’s important to point out that Colton was never violent, that although he started to keep a handgun close by for protection, he in fact avoided violent confrontation at every turn. During one incident, as he pilfered food from a refrigerator, an old man walked into the kitchen and issued a simple “Hi.” My client, clearly more frightened than the old man, bolted from the house.

  In June 2010, right around the time I heard from journalist Bob Friel and Colton’s mother, Colton fled across the country, stealing cars and boats along the way. In South Dakota he broke into what he thought was a vacant home to do laundry. When he heard the owners, a man and woman, come home around 3:00 AM, he locked the door. At the sound of the lock the woman shrieked and the man broke down the door and chased Colton, who called out, “I am trying to get out of your house.” The couple decided to let Colton leave, and he slipped out of a window in the basement.

  On July 4, feeling the pressure of what had become a nationwide manhunt, Colton stole a Cessna in Bloomington, Indiana. He flew it more than a thousand miles before crash-landing in the Bahamas. Seven days later, after a high-speed boat chase that involved authorities opening fire on Colton’s boat, my client was caught and arrested.

  I met him for the first time about a month later. How to describe him? Colton is an unusually bright young man. Tall, like me, but quiet and soft spoken (not like me). We liked each other instantly. He also warmed up to another lawyer in my firm, Emma Scanlan. As far as I could tell, we were the first adults Colton had trusted in his life.

  He was charged with nearly seventy crimes in six states and two different countries. Prosecutors wanted him in prison for twenty years. Emma and I were determined to see that didn’t happen.

  In court the San Juan prosecutor made a fool of himself. He said to Island County Superior Court judge Vickie Churchill—and I’m paraphrasing here—“The victims on Orcas Island were not just regular people. These were really substantial people of wealth and power.”

  I couldn’t believe it. You don’t say, “Oh, the victims are wealthy; therefore it means more!” I remember whispering to Colton, “He just shot himself in the foot.” That drew a smile from Colton, a big smile—the first I’d ever seen on his face.

  The other prosecutor continued with the foot shooting. He told the judge—again, I’m paraphrasing—“The newspaper headlines tomorrow should read JUDGE IMPOSES HARSH SENTENCE ON COLTON HARRIS-MOORE.” Basically he was telling the judge what she should do. A big no-no.

  Fortunately, the judge saw in Colton what Emma and I saw: a gifted young man who had a hard childhood and had made some big mistakes. The fact that no one was hurt during his two-and-a-half-year crime spree worked in his favor, but there was also his Colt-ness, which I can only describe as fierce independence.

  When the judge asked him why, back in 2008, he had fled from the relatively comfortable confines of the Griffin Home halfway house, Colton said he wanted to go back to Green Hill School, the maximum-security juvenile detention center. This stunned the courtroom, me included.

  “Why on earth would you want to go back there?” Judge Churchill asked.

  “Because Griffin was trying to change who I am,” Colton answered.

  We’re talking about someone who was seventeen years old at the time of his escape. (I wish I had been as confident in who I was at that age.)r />
  Emma and I were able to get the prosecutors on board with a deal: All the charges against Colton would be consolidated. All money Colton made from an impending movie deal—which he didn’t want a dime of—would go toward restitution to the victims of his crimes.

  Before she leveled the sentence—less than seven years—it was Judge Churchill’s turn to stun the courtroom. She detailed all she had learned via reports submitted to the court about Colton’s rotten upbringing. And then she said:

  I was struck that I could have been reading a history of a mass murderer or someone who indiscriminately killed without any remorse. I could have been reading about a drug addicted, alcoholic, abusive young man who followed in the path of his mother. Yet I was not reading that story. That is the triumph of the human spirit and the triumph of Colton Harris-Moore.

  Indeed, Colton, one of my favorite clients to date, truly is a triumph. Another attorney and I were able to connect him with an engineer at Boeing who now meets with him in prison once a month. Colton is studying aeronautical engineering. He’s twenty-five now. He’ll be free soon. A movie about his life is in development. (Robert Zemeckis is rumored to direct.) Per our agreement, all proceeds will go to those Colton stole from.

  In his very last court appearance, in May 2013, for a minor matter related to his crimes in Skagit County, Washington, my client wrote a statement for the judge that, two years into his sentence, shined with optimism:

  The past is a story absolutely separate from the future. The past holds experiences and lessons I’ll learn from for the rest of my life, but my future is precisely what I make it. If there is any truth I’ve learned, it is that absolutely anything is possible. When this is over and I regain my freedom, I will bring everything I am working towards into reality. I am working with amazing people.