by Bob Friel
Mike’s father’s property on Camano was a Shangri-la for little dudes, with BMX bikes and rugged riding trails etched throughout the acreage. Mike and his older brother even had a go-cart and paintball guns. Colt, says Mike, always wanted to be there. “My dad wouldn’t let him stay over on weekdays, but every Friday he’d come over and we’d order pizza and hang out for the weekend.” Mike says Colt didn’t have a bike of his own at the time, so he used to walk the three miles back and forth from his trailer.
Colt never invited Mike to his home. “He said his mom was always yelling at him,” remembers Mike. “One time I was at a buddy’s house on Haven and you could frikkin’ hear her screaming at Colt all the way down the road.”
Mike is another one who says his close friendship with Colt began to break down because of the tall tales. One day when Colt was over at their house, Mike’s older brother called him out on his stories and drew a circle in the dirt. “He made us fight, full-on fist contact,” says Mike. “I was the bigger kid back then and I got Colt on the ground. He looked up at me and I socked him right in the face. That made him really, really angry. I don’t know how the hell he did it because I was so much bigger, but he lifted me off and then took a fat tree branch and broke it over my head. Then he went home.”
FOR ALL THE REJECTION, Colt continued to seek companionship.
South End sculptor Shannon Kirby first met Colt when he came down her road walking his bike. She looked up from her gardening and saw a cute kid with a flat tire. “He was a little pumpkin.”
Shannon called him over and reinflated his tire. “I showed him where I kept my pump and told him it was there if he ever had another flat.” It took only five minutes to fix the bike, but then they started talking. “He was very chatty. It was like he was just starving. He just wanted someone to pay attention to him.”
Colt stayed for an entire hour. As he was leaving, Shannon told him to come back if he wanted to. A few days later, he did. “I yakked with him for a while, but for less time than before because I was busy. Finally I said, ‘Sorry, I’ve got things to do.’ I could just see his face immediately change, with this look of ‘Ugh, they always do that to me, they shut me down.’” Colt left. A short while later, Kirby’s bike pump was stolen.
The next time Shannon saw Colt was when a bunch of kids came cascading out of the woods onto her property. “They’re roughhousing and I’m watching. It was obvious Colt didn’t understand boundaries, like nobody had taught him. He was playing way too rough with this one girl. He tripped her and she fell and hurt her ankle, so I went out, helped her up, and gave her a Band-Aid. Colt was like this gangly goonball that didn’t know how to behave.”
Kirby saw Colton again years later, this time in the Stanwood Library. She said hello, but says he looked away, uncomfortable. By then she’d had another break-in that the police later tied to Colton.
Chapter 13
In 2000, Pam took up with a man we’ll call Jimmy, a journeyman mechanic, chain-smoking Caterpillar cowboy, and hard drinker who “could put a hurtin’ on a bottle of whiskey before noon by a long shot.” Jimmy’s the kind of guy who seems to know every road and dirt logging track in the state, and when telling a story will make damn sure you know exactly what byways got you there and where every crossroad leads to. Same thing with machinery details and model numbers. Folks who know him describe Jimmy as “a lost soul,” and though in some ways he fit Pam’s predilection for bad boys, the then-forty-five-year-old had never been in any real trouble with the law beyond what he calls “some DUI bullshit.”
Jimmy hooked up with Pam while doing a land-clearing job down on Haven Place. “It was all happy-go-lucky bullshit for the first while, a good time when you were drunk,” he says. So he moved into the trailer, “shacked up, whole shit and caboodle.” He says it looked like Pam and Colton had been barely scratching by. “She wasn’t working. Nothing in the cupboard and nothing in the fridge but beer,” so he filled the trailer with food. Jimmy says he’d cook and Colton would help. He quickly learned the kid’s favorite meal. “Crab wouldn’t last a day with him in the house.”
To add to the Dickens-on-draft scene, Jimmy says that Colt’s clothes were rags. “His ass was hanging out of his underwear, so I took him and bought him a couple hundred dollars of new stuff—shoes, jeans, underwear, everything.”
Jimmy says he and Pam rarely went out. “She’s not a bar-hopper, not her scene, wouldn’t socialize with other people. She just wanted to stay home and lay on the couch drinking her beer.” He says he and Colton spent a lot of time outside, playing with Colton’s Great Pyrenees named Cody and bonding over heavy equipment. Jimmy taught Colton how to mow the lawn on a tractor, then graduated him to bigger boy’s toys. “I put him on my D7 Cat, my 440 articulated skidder, my D2 bulldozer… Hell, he could run that within a few minutes. He was a good student, real quick learner.”
Some other lessons Colton picked up on real quick were how to hotwire tractors, cars, and boats—skills Jimmy thought might come in handy someday out in the field. “I feel lower than dogshit about that,” he says now. “Never thought he’d go and do this stuff.”
Colton’s fascination with airplanes offered another connection between the two. Jimmy actually had a pilot’s license. He’d learned as a kid, hanging around a small airfield, helping out by pumping gas into planes until a friend of the family took him up and taught him to fly. Finally, Colton had met a real pilot.
“Colt was just obsessed with airplanes,” says Jimmy. “He had books about them all scattered around and he was always drawing them with crayons and colored pencils. So I started taking him to the hobby shops in Mount Vernon and Burlington and I’d buy him all kinds of plane models—some real fancy with lights that would work off batteries—and then we’d build them together.”
Soon Colt had squadrons of model planes in his room, some hanging from the ceiling posed in perpetual dives, others awaiting clearance for takeoff amid the clutter.
Jimmy also had a laptop. “We’d get on the Internet and fart around looking at airplanes. I was thinking about getting a chopper, a small experimental helicopter, two-man job. Pam would be passed out on the couch, and me and the kid would go online to look at the chopper and dream about it.”
One of Jimmy’s computer programs in particular captured young Colt’s attention: Microsoft Flight Simulator. Sitting beside Jimmy, Colt familiarized himself with the sim’s aircraft—a Learjet Model 45, a Bell 206 JetRanger helicopter, and a Cessna 182 Skylane featuring an ultrarealistic instrument panel.
Unlike a fantasy video game designed solely to inject adrenaline thrills, Flight Simulator offers an educational experience for those with the flying bug. The screen accurately renders the cockpit gauges, and to successfully get airborne a virtual pilot must learn to operate all of the plane’s controls within correct parameters. Forget to release the brakes and the plane won’t go anywhere; not enough throttle and it won’t lift off; fly too slow or pull the nose too high and the plane will stall and crash unless quickly corrected. With the sim, would-be pilots can learn to navigate between points using instruments or visual landmarks, they can fly day or night or in any kind of virtual weather, and they can practice landing at real, accurately rendered airports around the world (three hundred airports back then; three thousand in the latest version of the program).
Jimmy was impressed by how quickly Colt mastered the highly technical Flight Simulator. “I even had a joystick hooked up so it felt more realistic, and he took to it right away.”
While the models and Microsoft had Colt’s imagination reaching for the skies, life on the ground, in the trailer, began to more closely approximate hell.
“As time went along… man, she was a mean fucking drunk,” says Jimmy. “Very moody, just go into raging drunks. Looking into her eyes… she had the hate in her. She’d drink and beat up on the kid. I mean she hammered on him—we’re talking black and blue. I wouldn’t beat my dog that way. Every other day it’d happen. Maybe the
kid wouldn’t clean up his room or take out the garbage, which was a joke anyway because the whole goddamn place was a hog pen, a total firetrap. She’d be half drunk and start picking on him for one thing or another, nitpick bullshit, then it would escalate and she’d start beating on him.”
Jimmy says Colt had his own anger issues, throwing fits when asked to do something he didn’t want to do. And together, mother and son brought out the worst in each other. “The poor kid would have enough of his mother nagging and nagging, and then he’d just fucking come unglued. When she got mad she’d break his toys and stuff, so it got to the point where he’d break up his own shit before she could. He’d trash out his room, kick and stomp, bitch and scream and go outside. I’d go out and calm him down and we’d sit out on the picnic table and bullshit. He’d tell me he hated her. I shouldn’t have done it, but once in a while he’d be out there crying and I’d have a beer in my hand and give him a sip.”
Jimmy never saw Colton fight back. “He was scared of her back then.”
Jimmy says the bad scenes inside the little trailer weren’t limited to mother and son. “It started to wear down real quick. Then her and I got into it one day and I ended up in Coupeville for a night.” He says he and Pam were having a shouting match in the trailer’s little living room when Pam went ass over tit behind the woodstove. “She fell over the kindling box,” says Jimmy. “But Colt thought I hit her. She yelled for Colt to go call the cops, so he went across the road to the house where a bunch of dopers lived and called the 911.”
The Island County deputies and Stanwood police came out. Pam had a shiner coming up, and they arrested Jimmy, who spent the night locked up in the Coupeville county jail. “I took a taxi back the next day and told the driver—a damn good-looking gal, charged me $100 for the ride, though—I told her to turn the cab around and have it facing the main road with the engine running and wait for me just in case. I didn’t know what [Pam] might do. I sat in the taxi for a good long time, not knowing whether to shit or go blind… then finally grew some hair on my ass, got out, and walked down the driveway. The door was open and she was sitting on the couch, fuckered up. She turned around, big old black eye. I only stayed a few days after that and then decided no way, it’s not working out.”
Island County records show that the assault charges against Jimmy were dropped.
After Jimmy, Van again became a fixture around the trailer. He and Colt mainly got along. During a later interview with counselors, Colt said that Van was only violent to him twice, while Pam was violent to him “100s of times.”
Chapter 14
With nearly constant trouble and stress at home and at school, Colt increasingly turned inward—maintaining his fantasy life as the secret agent son of a rich pilot—and outdoors, spending as much time as possible in the woods.
Both Pam and Jimmy say they taught him survival skills: how to build fires and set up campsites, which plants were safe to eat and which ones were poisonous. Once inside the evergreens, Colton was home, kicking off his shoes to climb trees or to run full speed through the undergrowth.
“He loved being in there,” says Kory. “If you ever chased him, he’d always go for the woods. And once you were in the trees, forget it, because you’d never be able to find him but he’d know exactly where you were. You’d follow him in, but he’d disappear, then suddenly he’s behind you throwing rocks, but you still can’t see him, so you’d have to back off.”
Kory says Colt was equally at home in the woods all over Camano Island. “He knew the woods up by where we lived better than we did, and we were in there all the time.”
COLT ALSO KNEW AND loved the waterfront, wandering Camano’s coastline from top to bottom, often alone, from a very young age.
“I was out in the water, boogie boarding, just paddling around,” says Megan Wagner, “when all of a sudden I see this snorkeler coming toward me. We hardly ever saw strangers down on the beach, and this kid is coming straight at me, closer and closer. I’m thinking, Whoa, that’s really, really weird, and I start to swim away. I look back and he’s still following me! So finally I stop and turn around. He pops up and says, ‘Wow, from underwater, your legs look like Jell-O!’”
It was summer, the ideal time to be a nature-loving boy or girl on a Pacific Northwest island. Megan Wagner, at twelve, was old enough to be offended by someone commenting on her legs. And she was, at first. But looking at this ten-year-old boy[1] with the buzz cut and the big smile spreading beneath his dive mask without a trace of malice, she couldn’t help but start laughing.
He introduced himself as Colton and said, “Want to see something cool?” Megan said yes and followed as he scouted ahead in the shallow water. “Then he bends his knees and suddenly kicks his bare feet up,” says Megan. “And this huge crab comes flying off the bottom and Colton just grabs him! I thought that was the coolest thing ever.”
Colton thrust the big spidery Dungeness at Megan’s face. When she didn’t freak, it sealed their friendship. “I was pretty tomboyish, and we definitely hit it off right away,” she says. The two played together in the sea until lunchtime, when Megan’s mom, Doreen, called her back to the beach to eat. Megan asked if Colton could join them. From that point on, he became part of the Wagners’ summertime family.
The beach they picnicked on lay about 150 feet directly below the Wagners’ high-bank waterfront property on South Camano Drive, 3.3 miles south of Pam’s trailer as the raven flies. Doreen and her husband, Bill, first rented the house for a year when he worked for an aircraft company on the mainland. They loved the spot so much that later, after they moved to California and Bill started his own aeronautical engineering company, they decided to buy it as a vacation home. Along with the main house up on the treed bluff, the property came with a small beach cabin that served as a boat house for kayaks, dinghies, and other water toys.
“You didn’t want to have to go up and down that path between houses more than once,” said Doreen. “So we’d pack up in the morning and spend the whole day down there.” That “we” included Megan and her three younger sisters, along with a revolving guest list of friends and family. And Colton Harris-Moore.
“After that first day, I’d just always make an extra sandwich for him because he was always there,” said Doreen. Their Colton was a real island boy, a pint-size Tarzan. “He never had shoes and I don’t even remember him even having a shirt, just always showing up in his swim trunks with his mask in his hand.”
Every morning when the Wagners hiked down the path to the beach they found Colton waiting for them. “Then after a while,” says Doreen, “he started meeting us up at the main house so he could help cart all the stuff down to the beach.”
Once down the steep switchback trail that ran through fir, maple, and thickets of blackberries, Megan and Colton would head straight for the water. “We’d splash around, swim, walk along the beach lifting up rocks to see what kinds of animals were under there, like little crabs. At low tide we’d wade around this big rock and see who could find the biggest starfish.”
Megan says Colton amazed her with how much he knew about nature, both in and out of the water. “I remember there were these berries growing on the property and I’d always wanted to eat one, but my mom told me not to because they were poisonous. One day I look over and Colton is eating them and I’m like, ‘What are you doing?’ And he’s just, ‘Oh, they’re good, try one.’ He said they were salmonberries.”
When Bill Wagner took his summer vacation, he’d fly up to Washington in his twin-engine Westwind business jet with his private pilot, Dan, who’d stay with the Wagners on Camano. The kids had a couple of men around to run the boats, and Colton got to meet more real pilots. Bill would anchor their little cuddy cabin runabout off the beach and every day he or Dan would be out either dragging the kids behind it on inflatable tubes or pulling up pots filled with Dungeness crab. “I really enjoyed having Colt around,” says Bill. “And boy was he a spring—he never stopped moving. But he was al
so just the kindest, most polite little kid… and always helpful.”
“My youngest sister was six at the time,” remembers Megan, “and she freaked every time seaweed touched her leg. She’d scream because she thought a crab was going to get her. So when we waded in or out to the boat, Colton would carry her. He’d even give her piggyback rides, barefoot, up the steep dirt path when we had to go back to the house.”
Everyone knew it was time to head up when Doreen let loose one of her ear-piercing whistles. Playtime, though, didn’t stop just because they had to leave the beach.
“Colton taught us all how to climb trees,” says Megan. “We had a little fort up in a tree that was near a fence and he showed us how to climb the fence first then get into the tree.” Colton, the girls, and whatever friends they had visiting would also play tag in the woods along the driveway and the main road. Inside, Doreen set up the home’s solarium as what she called the “kids’ dormitory” for the summer, with inflatable mattresses on the floor. “It was a place where they could watch TV and play video and board games.”
Megan says her and Colton’s favorite board game was Life. Doreen remembers that the kids decided that whoever won would have the most babies when he or she grew up.
They also watched movies. The film Megan says they had playing continuously that first summer was Forrest Gump, the story of an outcast boy who becomes famous: “Run, Forrest, run.”
At dinnertime, Colton always had a place at the table. “We’d have spaghetti or macaroni and cheese,” says Megan. “And when Dad or Dan were up and we’d been out on the boat, we’d have a whole bunch of fresh crab and Colton would help clean them.” Doreen says he also always offered to help her with the dishes.
