by Bob Friel
“It was right below the skylight and I thought, Uh-oh, we’ve got a leak,” says Martin. They cleaned up the water and he added “fix leak” to his list of things to do before they left in three weeks for a monthlong Pacific cruise. Jet-lagged, they then went to bed.
“The next morning I get up and reach for my box of cereal,” says Martin. “But it was gone.” He knew he’d opened a fresh box of Honey Bunches of Oats just before they left for Boston. Ellen said she hadn’t touched it, so Martin chalked it up to a senior moment. Same thing with the missing carton of milk he was sure he’d left in the fridge.
Ellen took their suitcases into the laundry room to start the wash. When she opened the louvered doors in front of her sparkling white stackables, she instantly knew something wasn’t right. “There were two dirty fingerprints, one on the washer and one on the dryer,” she says.
Martin had no doubt—“She keeps this place spotless”—but it was Ellen who put words to the unthinkable.
“Someone’s been in our house.”
Now they went through their home, looking carefully. Ellen called out from her office that her brand-new computer netbook, bought to keep up with emails during their upcoming cruise, was gone. In the kitchen, Martin realized that the leather wallet he’d left on top of their cruise documents was also missing. True to his profession, he knew exactly how much had been in there: “Three twenties.”
Martin checked all the doors. Nothing was broken. They had only simple door-handle locks, and it appeared they were easily defeated by some kind of a slender tool like a flathead screwdriver.
They had to accept that a burglar had indeed broken in and taken a wallet and laptop. The head-shaker was that the thief had also taken a shower—leaving the puddle of water—done laundry, and eaten breakfast. Someone had eaten their porridge, sat in their chairs, maybe slept in their bed.
The losses didn’t add up to much—at least not enough to deal with the insurance hassles—so at first they decided not to report it. “He could have done anything while he was in here,” says Martin. “But nothing was damaged or even disturbed. He didn’t take Ellen’s jewelry or anything like that; he only took useful stuff.”
The following Sunday, though, after Martin went on his weekly bike ride down the valley, he heard that neighbors just up the road had surprised a burglar inside their house. The middle-aged couple had come home around 10 p.m., and as the woman opened the front door, she “startled” a slender young man over six feet tall. The burglar took off through the kitchen, knocked over a chair, and fled out the back door. Her husband chased him down the driveway, but couldn’t catch up. On his way back to the house, he found a bicycle that the burglar had apparently brought with him, so he took it inside, locking the door behind him.
They called the sheriff, and as they were waiting for a deputy to arrive, the burglar actually came back; they saw him sneaking around outside and peeking through the window. The bold young burglar disappeared as the police car pulled up. The cop investigated and discovered that the couple’s safe had been rifled, but nothing appeared to be missing. He also made a point of checking their liquor cabinet and noting it was intact—something very unusual for this type of crime with a young suspect. The couple showed him the bike and said they suspected it was the thief’s. The deputy carried the bike out to his vehicle and drove it back to the Eastsound cop shop, where he photographed it, recorded its serial number and identifying details, and then locked it inside the evidence room.
In all their years on the island, the Brodys had never heard of a burglary happening in sparsely populated Crow Valley. They felt two on the same road within such a short period of time must be related, so Martin decided he better report what had happened at their house.
He spoke to the sergeant in charge of Orcas, who had some good news and some bad. He told Martin about the getaway bike they’d confiscated at the neighbors’ home. Martin said, “Great, if you got that I’m sure that means you must be able to get fingerprints.”
“Well,” Martin says the sergeant told him, “funny thing is, we brought the bike to the station, but now it’s missing.”
Martin could not believe what he was hearing. Then he remembered something strange he’d seen on his last ride. He said, “I think I know where that bike is.” Riding along Crow Valley Road, he’d seen a bike tossed into the bushes. It was very unusual, but he didn’t stop, thinking maybe its owner was in the thickets picking blackberries. The sergeant asked what kind of bike it was and Martin told him.
“No,” said the cop, “the one we had was a black Gary Fisher with red flames painted on it.”
Martin felt a strange little buzz. “That’s funny… I have a Gary Fisher, black with red flames,” he said. “But it couldn’t have been mine because it’s here at the house—I just rode it.”
It was an odd enough coincidence that the sergeant drove out to the Brodys. Martin now remembered that his bike had seemed particularly dirty. But it’d been in the exact spot he always kept it—among the tools in their little garden shed attached to the carport—so it didn’t register more than an odd feeling. Sure enough, though, when they checked the serial number it was the same bike the police had locked away in their evidence room.
It was almost unbelievable. The only explanation was that the burglar had been staying in the Brodys’ house and using Martin’s bike to travel around and try to rip off their neighbors. (There’d also been a break-in and attempt to access the computer at a nearby hardware store, Island Supply, where deputies had found a bare footprint.) When the burglar had run off and lost the bike to the police, he followed them the three and a half miles back to Eastsound that same night. Residents near the cop shop later reported that their lawn furniture had been moved into a comfortable arrangement overlooking the station.
The burglar had run a stakeout on the police.
San Juan County doesn’t provide Orcas with twenty-four-hour police coverage. There are a couple of hours when a deputy is on call but there’s no one actively on duty. Once the cop shop closed down for the night, the incredibly ballsy burglar jimmied open the sergeant’s office window, which had no security system protecting it, not even a stick to keep it from being slid open.
Once inside, the thief had enough time to rummage around the sergeant’s desk, find the keys to the evidence room, and resteal Martin Brody’s bike.
He then rode it back to Crow Valley and returned it to its rightful owner.
THE SERGEANT LEFT THE Brodys’ without taking fingerprints off the bike. Martin and Ellen went about their day, but with a different sense of reality setting in about their island home. Was this someone with a vendetta against the police or a twisted sense of decency, or was this just a crook with a sense of humor and big brass pair?
Ellen began cleaning the house and had just wiped one of the fingerprints off the washer and dryer. Oops, she thought. The other print still looked good, though. She could clearly see the swirls with her naked eye. She called the sheriff’s office and asked if they wanted to come back out and collect it. They said no.
A couple of days later, Martin was standing at the window when he saw a flash of color in the garden. He reached for the birding binoculars he always kept handy, but came up empty. They were gone, too. The Brodys decided that before they went away again they’d better put in deadbolts. Six hundred dollars later, a locksmith had rekeyed all the knobs and drilled out the jambs and installed new locks. They went about their pleasant Orcas lives for the next several weeks, he puttering in the garden, she in her woodshop. But things weren’t quite the same. They each now kept a key with them at all times, and locked up whenever they left the property. They hoped, though, that this had all been just a freak occurrence.
ORCAS’S LOCAL NEWSPAPER, THE Islands’ Sounder, regularly runs a log from the San Juan County Sheriff’s Office. It’s a popular feature where you find short, fascinating vignettes such as “An 83-year-old Eastsound woman reported one pair of fur-lined moccasins and th
ree almost-new pair of beige women’s underwear stolen from an unlocked old fruit-packing barn.” There was also the epic saga of two “friendly” Great Danes that got loose and went llama chasing, and the cautionary tale of a man who fired three rounds from his shotgun aiming for an otter under his porch and instead hit his neighbor in the neck (neither the llamas nor the neighbor were seriously injured). After the follow-the-bouncing-bike incidents at the Brodys’ and the cop shop, though, the only thing officially reported by San Juan County sheriff Bill Cumming was that there’d been a “security breach” at the Orcas station.
HEADING SOUTH FROM THE Brodys’, Turtleback’s shell slopes down to the water, the tip of the turtle’s tail splitting Massacre Bay from West Sound. A boaty area, West Sound is filled with bright sails tacking back and forth every summer day. Continuing west on a cliff-clinging road, you come to the tiny hamlet of Deer Harbor. Two marinas and several inns operate on this small picturesque bay. Around the same time as the Crow Valley bike caper, strange things were happening at the Deer Harbor Inn—though no one would suspect a thing until September, when the bills came due.
Deer Harbor Inn was the first resort on Orcas, renting tent cabins in the late 1800s to supplement the income from the owner’s apple orchard. A small hotel and restaurant were built after the turn of the century. Since 1982, it’s been owned by the Carpenter family, with two brothers, Matt and Ryan, running the restaurant and rental homes. In late August, someone had broken into the inn and gotten hold of Ryan’s credit card. The thief had been smart enough to not actually take the card, though, just the numbers and security code, so Ryan didn’t have a clue until he opened his statement and saw that he—or at least his identity—had ordered more than $3,000 in spy cameras and other electronics plus a $900 high-tech flight helmet. When Ryan contacted the sellers, they said that their records showed that the gear had all been successfully delivered to Orcas Island. But not, of course, to Ryan.
Back in Eastsound, someone broke through a window at Wildlife Cycles on North Beach Road. He passed over models worth three times as much to snag a particular bike—a Gary Fisher, designed for both street and rugged trail. The burglar raided the cash drawer, spilling bills across the wooden deck as he rolled his new bike out the front door. A computer company in town also suffered a breach of security, with $8,000 worth of software and equipment ordered online using its accounts. The shopping spree included hacking and spyware programs designed for identity theft, along with more infrared spy cameras.
Over at Smuggler’s, near the airport, manager Mike Stolmeier opened the door to the resort’s sauna at 10 p.m. and found a “big, tall, gangly kid” sitting inside. “We get moochers sometimes,” says Stolmeier. “So I said, ‘Okay, this isn’t working, you gotta go.’ I didn’t pay much attention to him since he didn’t give me any guff and just got up and left.”
One odd thing that Stolmeier did notice was that the kid sitting in the sauna with the heat turned up was fully clothed and had a big backpack on the bench next to him.
SEPTEMBER ROLLED AROUND AND it was time for the Brodys to cast off on their long-awaited Pacific cruise. They boarded the ship on September 19. Ellen had lugged along a large laptop since her little netbook had been stolen. As soon as they settled in, she bought a package of onboard Internet minutes, enough, she thought, to cover their entire monthlong vacation.
The first time she signed on, up popped a note from eBay congratulating her on making the winning bid for a smartphone.
“Uh-oh, we’ve got a problem,” she told Martin. The next email was from PayPal: a receipt on her account for the $320 phone. “It was the worst feeling in my life,” she says, suddenly realizing that the person who’d eaten their Honey Bunches of Oats had also scanned her home computer and found the document where she kept all her account numbers and passwords. Goldilocks had stolen her identity and was on a shopping spree.
Ellen immediately sent a flurry of emails, trying to cancel the purchase and change all her accounts. The retailer had already shipped the phone and told her to simply refuse the package. When she contacted the San Juan County Sheriff’s Office, though, they said not to do that. They asked if she’d agree to have them post a deputy inside their house, using the package as a trap. It sounded like a good plan, and the Brodys agreed.
On September 23, the local courier alerted deputies that the package had arrived on the island. The following day, police set up a stakeout at the Brodys’ with the phone left on the front porch. On the evening of the twenty-fifth, a retired schoolteacher who serves as a reserve deputy waited alone inside the house. He later told Martin Brody that around 8 p.m.—still twilight in September’s long days—he was standing in their kitchen when he heard a key slide into the deadbolt lock. The deputy hadn’t locked the door, and was very surprised to hear someone try a key because he knew the locks had just been changed.
The door swung open and in stepped a young man the deputy describes as “NBA big.” The cop yelled, “Freeze!” But the kid didn’t. Instead, his hand went to his side and then quickly came up holding something metal.
According to Brody, the ex-schoolteacher said he suddenly found himself in a fiery, choking mist of pepper spray. After firing the spray, the tall young man had immediately spun and fled back out the door. The deputy chased him outside and saw him fly off the porch without seeming to touch the stairs. Then, still moving at full speed, the suspect made the ninety-degree turn past the Brodys’ koi pond, leaped down another half flight of stairs, vaulted a railing, and scrambled across a large moss-covered boulder before vanishing into the twilight.
After his capture, Colton Harris-Moore told a similar story, with a few different details: When he went to pick up a package he’d had delivered to a rural Orcas home, he noticed that the inside lights weren’t quite the way he’d left them. He crept up to the porch, opened the door, and found himself facing a cop who was sitting in a rocking chair. Colt said the deputy aimed a laser-sighted pistol at his chest and started laughing. Colt never mentioned the pepper spray, but says he turned and ran, escaping by scaling an eight-foot-tall rock “like a vampire.”
(A third version of the story comes from the police report of the incident that San Juan County declined to release, despite multiple public records requests. I was able to see the report only after it was included in a defense filing for Colt’s federal sentencing in January 2012. In his report, the deputy admits he was sitting in the living room when the tall suspect spent “10–15 seconds attempting to unlock” the open door. He writes that after the suspect finally entered the home, “I stood up, announced myself by stating ‘Police officer, get on the ground’ and began to train the department issued taser on the subject while taking the device off safe.” He says the suspect—who Colt’s defense team agrees was Colt—immediately turned and “bolted” using “great speed and agility.” In the official report, the deputy says he didn’t see Colt fire the pepper spray, and only noticed it irritating his eyes and throat when he reentered the home after watching Colt run off.)
The Brodys got the bad news aboard ship. “They could have had him right then and there,” says Martin, “but they blew their chance.”
He and Ellen had a creepy feeling that was confirmed when they returned to Orcas and discovered that one of their new spare keys had been taken from their cupboard. They also found that one of their window locks had been disabled but made to look like it still worked. The burglar had set it up so he’d always have a way to get into their home.
They wondered why they’d been targeted again, then suddenly understood: Their cruise papers had been on the kitchen counter during his first stay in their home. “He knew exactly when we were going and how long we’d be gone,” says Martin. He also knew he had Martin’s bike to use—again.
Their phone bill and online charges showed that the burglar moved in, like an uninvited house sitter, on the same day they left. Two calls were made from their phone to the mainland Washington home of a prison buddy of Co
lton Harris-Moore’s.
“He thought he had a safe place to stay for a month,” says Martin. “And he would have if Ellen hadn’t checked her email.”
The Brodys rekeyed again, fixed their window lock, and added sticks to all their windows. Ellen then spent several months trying to clear the charges from their PayPal account. Half a year later they still had eye-burning traces of pepper spray on their furniture, even after multiple cleanings. Martin’s Gary Fisher bicycle—which had been stolen for the third time while they were on the cruise—was never returned.
* * *
On October 2, 2008, the Orcas Island Chamber of Commerce held a meeting to address what the Islands’ Sounder headlined as a “plague” of sophisticated burglaries. The reporting quotes Orcas deputy sergeant Steve Vierthaler telling the business owners that some of the crimes appeared to be connected and were “very subtle thefts” that included thieves using WiFi scanners to hack into people’s home networks and steal their identities.
Vierthaler was asked about the possibility of getting DNA from break-ins. “The reality is not like CSI on television,” he said. “It is hugely expensive to do lab work and the labs are hugely backlogged.” He said that DNA might be used for violent crimes, but not for thefts.
According to the Washington State Patrol, which does all the law enforcement laboratory work for San Juan County, it doesn’t cost the county a dime to send DNA samples or other forensics to their lab. The only cost is the time it takes a local deputy to collect the evidence. There are indeed backlogs, and testing is done on a priority basis with murders, rapes, and assaults taking precedence over property crimes, but a WSP lab spokesman says they work with local law enforcement on any kind of crime, especially when it’s high profile, highly publicized, or perceived to be an immediate threat to the community. With today’s computerized databases of fingerprints and DNA from known criminals (Colt’s prints and DNA had been in the system for years by this point), law enforcement experts say that not attempting to collect forensics at crime scenes is the result of poor training, bad policy, or just plain laziness.
