by Bob Friel
Annette believes she once even heard Colton. “I was working in the garden and heard what sounded like a big metal bowl drop and bounce—bump, bump, bump—inside the house across the road that was supposed to be empty. I thought, Holy shit, it’s the Bandit! I didn’t do a thing, didn’t even turn around, just walked away.”
She didn’t call the police that time, though she did when she found that her well had been converted into a spider hole. “They were elated,” she says, “because they kept chasing him back here and couldn’t figure out how he was disappearing.” The deputies asked her not to tell anyone about the find, and they noted it as one place to carefully search whenever he ran toward Madrona Point.
The police, however, didn’t know exactly where to look for Colt in the woods at the other side of town on the twelfth. It would be two weeks before a resident spotted another of his campsites, this one tucked into the bushes at the edge of the airport near the dog park. Colt had been able to lie back and watch two of his favorite things: planes and pooches.
The cops did at least know that he was just yards away from two previous targets: the airport and all its hangars, and the Ditch with its boats. Somehow, though, Colton slipped past the deputies, went to Brandt’s Landing Marina on the Ditch, and climbed aboard a sporty twin-engine cabin cruiser worth about $75,000. The boat he chose belonged to Jason Linnes, manager of the Island Market, which had been burglarized just four days before. The keys, as with most of the island’s boats at the time, were aboard—hidden, but not too hard to find.
“I always left the keys in the boat, and in the car, and left my house unlocked,” says Linnes, whose family has been on Orcas since the late 1800s. “I was raised that way.”
Once inside, Colton relaxed and stretched out in the berth. Sometime before daylight on the thirteenth, he fired up the engines and pulled out of the slip—no mean feat as there’s very little wiggle room at that crowded end of the marina. He managed to drive out of the Ditch without dinging any of the nearby boats, then turned on the GPS and navigated directly to Point Roberts, a geopolitical oddity that hangs off the Canadian coast but remains part of the United States.
Jason could understand his family’s market getting hit—“That was just business”—but it seemed like too much of a coincidence that out of all the boats in the Ditch, his was the one Colton picked. “The boat was more personal than the store. And one happening after the other… that was creepy. I didn’t sleep for days, wondering, Does he know me? Is he after me? Is he really gone? I didn’t have shades on my house windows before but now I have ADT installing a security system. That sucks.”
According to Linnes, as Colton brought the boat to shore the lower units of both engines hit rocks, damaging their skegs. Later that day, the U.S. Coast Guard found the boat tied to a Point Roberts mooring buoy and they towed it back to Orcas, where a San Juan County deputy found bare footprints on the swim platform.
When residents woke to the news that another of their neighbor’s boats had been stolen and found abandoned on the mainland, everyone wondered the same thing: Is it over?
Chapter 9
We hoped so.
On an island with no industries other than real estate and tourism, the last thing you want are your adjectives changed from “serene” and “scenic” to “paranoid” and “crime-ridden.”
The precious image of a calm sea lapping the beach below a cozy-luxe cabin set amid tall firs tarnishes a bit if you have to add barbed wire and light it up like a prison camp. Public relations–wise, the only thing worse for Orcas Island than a serial criminal terrifying the blue hairs would be if our cuddly, iconic killer whales suddenly started crunching on kayaks to get at their soft, chewy insides.
The one bright spot was that word hadn’t really gotten out. The Islands’ Sounder had run its sheriff’s logs and the deputy’s cautionary tale to the Chamber the year before, but beyond our insular world, there was no story. The name Colton Harris-Moore still meant nothing outside his own Island County, and even there, no one but the police had a clue that they’d exported their troublemaker up to the San Juan Islands or that he’d begun pirating planes and yachts. Colton certainly wasn’t on the national radar.
A week after Jason Linnes’s boat was found at Point Roberts, I was certain it was all over. Whoever this guy was, he had a plan. You’d have to be defective to keep committing burglaries in the same tiny area—on an island no less—unless you were doing a hit and run. He must have reached his magic number, the dollar amount that would let him kick back on some Baja beach and tip Tecates for a year. Or suck Molsons in Canada. Whatever. It didn’t matter. He was somebody else’s problem now.
Those somebodies were, for a short while at least, the residents of Point Roberts. Point Bob is a footnote of international politics twenty miles north of Orcas Island as the crow flies—and if you don’t have a boat, that’s the best way to get there, because the other option is driving through two border crossings. This U.S. exclave illustrates what happens when uninformed bureaucrats attack. The United States and United Kingdom solved a nineteenth-century boundary dispute over the West Coast by agreeing to split the mainland territory along the 49th parallel. Problem was, nobody consulted an accurate chart. The 49 line cuts through a nub of land on what’s now called Boundary Bay, south of Vancouver. Instead of simply trading the five square miles for a wagonload of otter pelts and calling it even, the Americans decided to keep the land. It’s now a funky little outpost with 1,300 people, a marina, and a small tourist-based economy but very few other services. Point Roberts’s kids have to board buses and cross the frontier north into Canada, then loop around for a forty-minute drive to the crossing at Blaine, Washington, where they reenter the United States to get to school.
Life at Point Roberts may be full of inconveniences, but residents consider it worth the hassle for their beautiful location on the Salish Sea and, since their little community is protected by a border guard, for its security.
When Colton landed in Point Roberts, he dialed up the cell phone of his friend Josh, who he’d served time with in Green Hill School, a juvenile prison. Colt had planned a “Hey, look out the window!” kind of surprise for his buddy, but instead got a “Dude, I moved” downer. Josh had relocated to Vancouver. So Colton improvised.
Whatcom County sheriff’s deputies stationed in Point Roberts had one of their busiest days in memory when folks who owned vacation homes arrived the following weekend to discover they’d had a visitor. In the couple of days after Colton waded ashore, someone pried open the sliding glass door at one home, took a shower, and then wrapped himself in a blanket while he listened to the radio and enjoyed a can of Coke. Before he left with a stash of canned goods, he refolded the blanket and put it back on the bed. At another home, a burglar jimmied a deadbolted door, raided the fridge, and slept on the bed. At a third, someone tried to force open two deadbolts, gave up, and attempted to reach through the cat door with a barbecue fork to twist the latch, gave that up, and finally broke a window. Inside, he took a nap on the bed. A fourth Goldilocks-style break-in within the same short period qualified the rash as a plague—and potentially a spree. Then the burglaries stopped as suddenly as they had started.
Despite the threat posed by millions of hockey stick– and curling stone–wielding Canadians massed along our borders, the northern U.S. frontier remains loosely guarded. At Point Roberts, it’s a simple matter of not driving through the checkpoint and instead walking across a road and into the vowel-deprived town of Tsawwassen, British Columbia.
Once Colt reached the Canadian side, he rustled a classy dark gray BMW and drove to see his prison pal.
“He called me on my cell and said, ‘I’m right down the street,’” says twenty-three-year-old Josh. “I was pretty surprised.”
Colt didn’t seem to be nervous about law enforcement chasing him. “No, not at all, totally relaxed. He was enjoying it,” says Josh, who cruised with Colt around Vancouver.
Colt had cash—
over a grand that Josh saw—and they went to a bar. Colt didn’t order alcohol, though. “He’s had a drink or two before, but he doesn’t like it,” says Josh. “No booze or drugs for him.”
The two friends who’d bonded in prison when they found out they both lived on Puget Sound had some catching up to do. “He told me about crashing one of the planes in a field and about stealing a boat out in the islands,” Josh remembers. “I think he’s totally nuts for doing the plane stuff, but he said he doesn’t care if he crashes.”
Colt had stayed in touch ever since he’d escaped custody in 2008 while Josh was still locked up. He’d called Josh from inside the Brodys’ home and from several different stolen cell phones. The calls to Green Hill caught the attention of the prison guards, but little came of it other than getting Josh, when he was released, put on a watch list. “They stopped me once at a border crossing and asked me what I knew about Colt, but that was it.”
After a nice, friendly visit, Colt asked Josh to come running with him. Josh said no. He had a good job as a framing carpenter, a beautiful girlfriend, and life was good. He didn’t feel the need to risk it all for a rush. He’d served every day of a three-year sentence and had no desire to go back to jail—or worse. Josh says things looked to be headed someplace serious when Colt gave him a peek at some of the gear he was carrying.
“He had a twelve-gauge shotgun and a nine-millimeter pistol,” says Josh. “He said he’d use them… said something like, ‘They’ll never take me alive.’”
* * *
On September 22, 2009, Sheriff Bill Cumming finally announced that the crook he suspected of causing all the trouble on Orcas over the last thirteen months was eighteen-year-old Colton Harris-Moore. “We wanted to give him a false sense of security,” Cumming said as the reason he hadn’t let the county’s residents in on it earlier.
As Cumming talked to reporters, the cops working Colt’s case down in Island County held their breath. “We’d asked Bill not to mention the airplanes.”
Island County Sheriff’s Office deputies had come across campsites in the Camano Island woods where they found newspaper clippings Colt had snipped out about himself. They were concerned that part of his motivation was a need for attention and that giving it to him would just perpetuate or, worse, escalate his actions. “We always tried to downplay him in the press,” says one ICSO officer.
Colt’s Orcas spree made the Local section in the region’s biggest newspaper, the Seattle Times. Jennifer Sullivan of the Times and other local reporters had periodically covered the highlights of Colton’s criminal career over the previous three years, and they’d spotted the fascinating nugget in Sheriff Cumming’s statement that immediately elevated a conventional “prolific teenage thief and burglar, blah blah” story to a higher level. Cumming’s information that Colt was a suspect in two airplane thefts made the top ’graph. The Times also ran a timeline of Colt’s career going back to a 2004 conviction when he was twelve.
Our tormenter had a backstory. He also had a mom.
From the Seattle Times:
“Harris-Moore’s mother, Pam Koehler (sp) of Camano Island, calls the new allegations against her son ‘crap.’
“‘I know for a fact he is not doing all of these crimes,’ Koehler said Tuesday. ‘Any time the cops can’t catch whoever is doing them, they blame it on Colt.’
“Koehler concedes her son has been interested in flying, but insists he has never taken flight lessons.”
Chapter 10
Creston, B.C., lies snuggled into a scenic mountain valley just north of the Idaho line—a 450-mile drive east of Vancouver. South of town, alongside the squiggling run of the Kootenay River, Creston Valley Regional Airport consists of a handful of hangars and a four-thousand-foot runway where the local flying club offers classes on the hazardous art of mountain flying. Colton spent at least two nights and three days there, but didn’t sign up for a course.
On September 24, he ditched the stolen BMW at the entrance to a landfill less than half a mile away from the airport and walked across a hayfield to the fence line. Hazards to local pilots had long included a herd of elk that enjoyed the warmth of the asphalt runway on cold nights, so Creston erected an eight-foot fence around the entire 225-acre airport to keep planes from getting gored. Colt climbed the fence and set up camp in the thick woods on the west side of the airport.
Creston was a risky place to try to steal an airplane because its manager, Les Staite, lived on-site with his wife and a “yappy little Shih Tzu” that Les calls a tyrant. “Anybody comes around at all, he’s a good alarm system.”
That didn’t faze Colt, though, just made it more challenging. He staked out a spot where he could keep an eye on all six hangars and the Staites’ home. After dark, he slinked across the runway to scope out Creston’s airplane inventory.
At the first hangar, Colt leaned against his pry bar until the door lock popped. Inside, his headlamp illuminated a Wild West scene, with saddles and chaps hanging on the walls. Bush pilot Volker Scherm owned the hangar as a base for BearAir, his backcountry guiding business. He’d built a small office in the corner of the hangar, and up top he stored a collection of grizzly bear and mountain goat skins. Colt tried the office door and found it locked. He was in no hurry, though, and didn’t force it open. He’d learned long ago that people almost always hid keys nearby. Scherm kept his tucked into one of the saddles.
Skins, saddles… made sense there’d be guns close by. Colt left the hangar with Scherm’s laptop, a wad of cash, and three guns, including .32 and .22 caliber pistols. He considered BearAir’s sixties-era Cessna a dinosaur, so he passed on the plane.
Next door, Colt broke into what eighty-year-old Korean War vet Bill Piper calls his “oasis.” Piper’s mancave of a hangar features a bedroom, shower, full kitchen, and an airplane. He’s piloted everything from jets to choppers, but now flies a Piper Super Cub—a classic bush plane equally at home on wheels, skis, or floats. Again, though, the thirty-plus-year-old plane was ancient to Colt; he was interested only in the most modern models. Instead, he helped himself to a cache of Piper’s power bars, bottled water, 7Up, cans of pork and beans, and pudding packets as well as a load of his tools and a portable radio that picked up aviation frequencies.
Colton poked inside all six of Creston’s hangars and saw all the planes, but none of them was just right. He’d already spotted the perfect one—a brand-new Cessna 182 Skylane—but it wasn’t in a hangar where he could spend time prepping it out of sight. The Cessna was tied down on the main ramp just a few hundred feet in front of Les Staite’s kitchen window. Even worse, it sat in a pool of light under a streetlamp.
Despite the risk, Colt stealthed up to the plane and pried open its window to get at the door lock. He climbed inside. As a bonus, the owner had left his satellite phone in the plane. Colt pulled the satphone out of its case and fiddled with it. Everything checked out with the Cessna, so Colt retired to his campsite to wait for the right time.
The next morning, Bill Piper and the other owners discovered they’d been burglarized. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) responded and investigated, after which the hangars were locked back up and Les Staite wired the Cessna 182’s window shut as a temporary fix.
Colt sat in the woods, calmly chowing on pudding and power bars and watching all the police activity. He bided his time until nightfall, when everyone else left and Staite and his yappy dog settled down inside their house.
Colt walked back across the runway and, under the streetlight and in full view of Staite’s kitchen window, broke into the Cessna again. He took out its tow bar and attached it to the plane’s nose wheel. He then muscled the two-thousand-plus-pound plane more than five hundred feet—rolling it up a slight incline—to a dark spot beside the hangars and out of sight of Staite’s residence. Somehow, Colt did it all without alerting the tyrannical Shih Tzu.
Colt hadn’t found a key to the Cessna, but he knew he didn’t need one to start it. The planes aren’t equipped
with antitheft ignition systems like modern automobiles. Colt followed the checklist procedures, then simply jammed a screwdriver into the ignition switch and wrenched it clockwise to Start. The starter whined and the propeller began to spin slowly… but the engine wouldn’t catch.
“That plane has a little quirk,” explains Staite. “You have to mess with the fuel system and know just how much fuel to give it in order to get it to fire off. You have to know your airplane.”
Colt didn’t know this particular Cessna’s idiosyncrasies, and kept cranking until the starter burned out and the battery drained. Once he realized he was grounded, he went for a vehicle. He chose a GMC Z71 half-ton pickup. There was an antitheft Club on the steering wheel, but it may not have been locked because Colt was able to remove it. His bad luck with batteries continued, though, because the truck belonged to a pilot who only flew in from Alberta every once in a while and it had been sitting so long that the battery was dead. Next Colt tried a Dodge van. He couldn’t find a hide-a-key, so he tore the ignition apart trying to hotwire it—so easy in the movies. Not in real life, though.
Colt then went to a 2009 Toyota Corolla that sat next to a hangar. He knew the car probably belonged to a pilot out on a trip, and if so, the keys would be in the hangar. All pilots share the same nightmare of leaving their car keys on a layover and getting back home to a big D’oh!
If Colt had simply cranked on the door with his crowbar like he did at the other hangars, it might have changed the course of his story. This hangar was rigged with an alarm system. Something else Colt had learned early on, though, was to carefully scope out his targets. He’d also studied up on how to defeat alarms. If he triggered this one it would automatically call the police, so he disabled it by cutting the phone line.
Just as he thought, the owner had left the key to the Corolla dangling on a hook inside the hangar. Colt grabbed it, started the car, and headed for the exit sometime before 9:30 p.m. To get in the airport’s security gate, a driver needs to punch in a code. Leaving just requires a short pause to wait for the gate to lift when it senses a car. Colt didn’t bother waiting. He rammed through the gate and drove off.
