The Barefoot Bandit

by Bob Friel

  Other homes along Camano Drive were also getting hit multiple times for things like food and bikes, and the police told residents that they suspected Colton in all of it. Across the island from the Boyles’ and a mile south of Pam’s cabin, Maxine K., a grandmother of eighteen, discovered that someone was foraging in her garage freezer, scarfing up ice cream and frozen pizzas along with whatever canned food was on the shelves. She and her husband would find the empty boxes and containers in the nearby woods, and even found evidence of a fire where she believes the burglar was cooking the food. Knowing that it was Colton—whom she referred to as “Island Boy” and says she felt sorry for—at first she didn’t even bother calling the police.

  Not everyone was taking the thefts in stride, though. One of the Boyles’ neighbors, “summer people,” says Louise, made it clear that if he had the opportunity inside his house, he wouldn’t hesitate to shoot Colt. “There was a lot of that around the island,” she says.

  Still, many of the South Enders empathized with a rebellious kid who’d grown up in miserable circumstances and was now forced to hide out in the woods and Yogi Bear his meals. Colton lost some sympathy, though, when people learned he wasn’t just taking Frappuccinos and frozen pizzas.

  As easily as he could get into the Boyles’ basement no matter what the security measures, Colt could get inside almost anyone’s house. And while he’d refused to study for school, he did plenty of homework when it came to burglaries.

  “Colt would call and say, ‘Hey, come on out to Camano, I found some houses,” says Harley, who was living in Everett when Colt went on the lam. “I was still on probation and I didn’t want to go out there, but he said he’d pay me plus split whatever we got.”

  Harley says he’d take the bus out to the island and Colt would pick him up at the stop. “He’d already have a stolen car.” Harley says he and Colt took cars only for transportation—borrowing them to get from burglary job to job—and never tried to sell them. “One house, we took the car and drove it around and then took it back exactly where we got it. We even cleaned it up and all.”

  Harley says “you’d be amazed” how many houses they could hit in one night. Usually, he says, Colt had already done the prep work, identifying the houses and sometimes even greasing their way inside. “He had keys to some of them… ” Harley hints that someone was providing the keys to Colt, but police believe that Colt more likely just sniffed around until he found the emergency keys that people squirrel away under welcome mats, flowerpots, conspicuous rocks, garden gnomes, or on top of door frames—all the obvious places that we homeowners think are so clever. Harley says that if Colt didn’t have the key it was still no problem: “We’d just break in.”

  Harley’s criteria for a good target: “Any home where nobody’s at.”

  Once inside, they were primarily looking for jewelry and cash, but didn’t limit themselves if something struck their fancy. “I took a couple of pool sticks, two piece, alligator skin case,” says Harley. But taking things like that had particular risks. “My mom could tell that I’d stolen them and she confiscated them.”

  No amount of cash was too little for Harley to pick up, and he was incredulous that Colton passed up change. “He just left that alone, wasn’t interested! I was like, ‘Cool, I’ll take it, I need it for bus fare anyway.’ I had about $120 worth of change just from houses out there.”

  Harley also searched homes for drugs and booze but says Colt never did. “I did enough of that for both of us.” And though he says he was never afraid during a job, Harley carried a gun. “I carried it because I could… and because I’m not allowed to have ’em, so it was doing what I do best: being rebellious.” He says he knew about the serious penalties for carrying a firearm during a crime. “I knew I would never get caught with it. All you gotta do is hit the woods, and I knew plenty of places I could dump it.”

  At the end of their night shift, Harley would head back to Everett with his share of the loot. He says they fenced what they could, and he’d wait for the next call from Colt to come out and work the island again.

  THE BURGLARIES WITH HARLEY were old-school B and Es: get in and loot the place. Residents came home to find that everything of any value that could be easily carried had been taken. Colt twisted the standard a little because he’d also take things any professional burglar would ignore but that he wanted—not to fence but to play with. Things like remote control toys. At the same time, though, he began to hone sophisticated skills and to develop his own brand of more delicate crime that mixed ballsy blue-collar burglaries with white-collar computer capers. For these jobs, Colt preferred to work alone.

  Colt had always been fascinated with technology, and tech gear was one of his top targets. Friends say that before they knew he was burglarizing local homes, they always wondered how dirt-poor Colt always had the latest iPod and other gadgets. Like every other kid of his generation, Colt was more than proficient at computers. Early on he also discovered the power and possibilities of the Internet, both for benign uses—his Myspace profile under the user name Harris90210 listed his occupation as “pilot”—and as a tool for learning about and committing crimes. The Web, even more than his frontier island, was the real contemporary Wild West. To a budding outlaw, it offered everything from untraceable ways to stay connected with friends and family, to aerial surveillance photos of targets, and complete research on potential victims. It also provided step-by-step instructions on criminal techniques.

  Say a wrong-crowd kid lets you in on a secret: you can open almost any door lock using something called a bump key. Google it up, then go to YouTube and find a helpful selection of how-tos on using bump keys to open locks in two or three seconds without leaving any sign of forced entry. As a bonus, they offer easy instructions on how to make them. Why bother, though, when the sponsored links that pop up along with the search results include several “ask no questions” online shops where for about $30 you can order a full set that will get you into practically any house in the country? Ah, but you need a credit card to order the keys and you don’t have one. That calls for identity theft.

  There are lots of ways crooks go about ID theft. Colton dabbled in the simplest form: stealing credit card offers out of mailboxes, filling them out, and then intercepting the cards. However, he also realized that if you can ninja yourself in and out of someone’s house without them knowing you’ve been there, forget about it, you’ve got the keys to the kingdom.

  Colt’s combination of twenty-first-century tech savviness and nineteenth-century outlaw cojones came together to create a remarkably effective criminal. He wasn’t some Cheetos-stained hacker trying to break past software firewalls. This was a guy who would physically break into your home and make himself comfortable while using your computer, Internet connection, and good credit against you.

  Boot up the ubiquitous home computer… If you’re one of the few who actually bother to password protect your system, it takes a few extra minutes to reboot it with an easily available password-breaking program the thief brought on a USB stick. Once he’s logged on, chances are you’ve saved your Amazon, eBay, PayPal, and other account passwords in the Web browser and they’ll fill in automatically. If not, they’re probably all listed on a document saved on the hard drive, or else sticky noted somewhere close to the computer. The credit card info for payment is either saved as a default for the retailer accounts, or the cards themselves are in the house ready to be entered into the online form. Click click: residential burglary at a whole new level.

  Traditional thieves are stuck with whatever’s lying around the house, hoping for jewelry, electronics, and guns that are easily converted into cash. However, a burglar on the lam determined to remain in the same small area has got to be careful about trusting local fences. He’s also not too comfortable walking into retail stores to buy new clothes, the latest music and tech toys, self-defense equipment, and other necessities. What does he do, though, if, when he breaks into your home, you don’t have the k
ind of laptop he wants, or the latest-generation iPod, or your clothes don’t fit him? No worries: he just uses your credit cards and computer to order whatever he wants. It’s custom burglary with convenient overnight shipping. The challenge is making sure you don’t have a clue that he’s been in your house—that way you probably won’t know what happened until the credit card bill arrives a month later.

  Delivery is another tricky part. Colt obviously couldn’t have illegal purchases delivered to any address connected to him, his mom, or any known associates because that would give the authorities a paper trail. So that basically left three options: have it delivered to the credit card owner’s legitimate address, use an unsuspecting third party, or create a fake address. Colt ultimately used all these methods. Another aspect of the rural, trusting nature that helped him get away with things for so long on Camano and later on Orcas was the unofficial “island rules” used by delivery companies. With homes typically so far apart from one another and from the roads, drivers have little compunction about leaving packages on porches, ripe for the picking.

  The innovative crimes, the “subtle” thefts where he sneaked in and out without the homeowner realizing anything was amiss, became one of Colton’s identifying MOs. Together with the numerous joint operations with Harley during this period, the Island County Sheriff’s Office suspected Colt was involved in dozens of burglaries and car prowls on Camano during a period of just a few months. The Stanwood/Camano News listed more burglaries each week, and word quickly got around that it wasn’t just food and necessities going missing. Camano residents began to lose sympathy for Colton Harris-Moore, as well as their patience with the Island County Sheriff’s Office.

  To add to the pressure, it was an election year. One of the new candidates for sheriff, Mark C. Brown, was an ex-navy officer who served thirty-plus years in the Washington State Patrol. Colton’s crime spree had become such an issue that one of Brown’s campaign pledges was that, if elected, catching Colton Harris-Moore would be one of his department’s top priorities.

  Not that the deputies weren’t already trying. “We had many other things going on in the county that we’d be better off spending our department’s time and money on,” says Detective Ed Wallace. “But we started setting up special operations to try to catch Colton.”

  Each time the sheriff’s office sent a team out after Colt it meant pulling manpower off much busier Whidbey Island to reinforce the few Camano deputies. Still, they began moving officers and burning up overtime out of an already tight budget. The first place they targeted, naturally, was Haven Place.

  “THE POLICE ASKED TO use my property to keep watch for Colt,” says Carol Star. “I gave them permission, but they were so obvious! They came in black SUVs and parked in the street. They came up my driveway wearing camouflage makeup and carrying machine guns, and were so loud I could hear them inside my house. They weren’t sneaking up on anyone. I told them, ‘You guys need to come in an old beat-up van or something, and you’re making too much noise.’ So one of them says, ‘Well, we want him to know that the police are around.’ Yeah, then why would you be wearing camouflage uniforms and makeup!?”

  The deputies were able to infiltrate Haven Place stealthily enough at least once, though. “Some of us were in the trees at the bottom of the road, others in the bushes closer to Pam’s,” says Wallace, who was part of the six-person team detailed to try to catch Colton.

  Ed Wallace is a cop’s cop, in shape and not only a detective but a member of the Hard Entry and Arrest Team (HEAT) that busts into meth houses and does the county’s other dangerous dirty work. A second-generation Island County deputy, Wallace, at forty, already had twenty years of policing under his belt plus a stint as an army MP. In a small force (Island County has the smallest sheriff’s department, per capita, in Washington State) staff gets spread around. Wallace also serves as the department’s computer expert, and he drew the short straw and became its public information officer, tasked with dealing with the media. The Colton Harris-Moore case had Wallace wearing all of his different hats. What he wanted most, though, like all the Island County cops, was to catch him.

  “Colt always counted on us playing by the rules,” says Wallace, noting that the fugitive banked on officers’ professionalism. The deputies did carry Tasers, but Wallace says no one who got within the sixteen-foot range ever felt he had a good enough shot at Colt.

  Time after time, deputies waded into the sea of waist-high ferns that filled the understory beneath Camano’s tall second-growth trees to search for Colt. Especially in the summer, you can’t see fifty feet into the woods. You’d literally have to stumble onto someone or his camp as long as he kept it low profile. But even finding his camp didn’t mean cornering Colt. “He’d set up one camp to live in that had several escape routes,” says Chris Ellis. “Then he’d have several backup camps stocked with food and water in case he had to run. He always had a plan. Colton Harris-Moore was a thinking criminal by the time he was ten years old. And he wasn’t afraid. We searched one of his sites and found out later that he’d been sitting in a tree fifty feet above our heads watching us the whole time.”

  All year long, Pacific Northwest forest floors remain a maze of fallen branches and slick, moss-covered logs, which made it dangerous, when they did spot him, to give chase. As Colt and Harley knew, the police were reticent to go running into the woods, with reason. One Camano deputy who chased Colt through the trees injured his knee so badly that he was out of work for several weeks.

  That night on Haven Place was one of many close encounters the Island County cops had with Colton Harris-Moore during his run. “One of our guys was moving down the road and thought he heard footsteps,” says Wallace. “He froze and brought up his night vision, and here’s Colt, sauntering right down the middle of the road about twenty feet away. He lit him up with his flashlight and we jumped out, but Colt’s a gazelle and off he goes. He makes it to the woods and is running to beat all hell. We tried to chase him down, but frankly, I’m not going to run blindly through the trees and lose an eye or break a leg for a burglary suspect.”

  ON SEPTEMBER 16, TWO Island County deputies arrived at the trailer. According to Pam’s sister Sandy, Pam called 911 three times during this six-and-a-half-month period to tell police that Colt was on the property and for them to come get him.

  No one answered the door, but one of the deputies spotted a few items that he recognized as reported stolen—all remote control toys: a boat, a helicopter, and little ZipZap cars. There was obviously a lot more evidence around, so they arranged a search warrant. Pam still wasn’t there when the cops returned, so they climbed into the trailer through a window. They didn’t find anything inside, and began searching the rest of the property. Colt saw the cops and melted into the woods before they reached his campsite. He didn’t go far, though, and watched as the deputies struck the motherlode.

  Some items they found were of obvious fenceable value, and others were useful, like the Swiss army knife, six flashlights, and four sets of binoculars—it always helps to have a spare or three. Some things, though, like the toys, seemed to have simply struck Colt’s fancy. A partial list of stolen property recovered from his campsite and a couple of caches around Pam’s lot showed his omnivorous habits.

  Deputies found nine cell phones, two GPS units, four laptops (two PCs and two Macs), a video and two still cameras, an iPod and three other music players, a box of .38 bullets, several watches, eleven jewelry boxes filled with everything from pearl necklaces to pink costume jewelry, a motorcycle helmet, six Playboy magazines, a telescope, a Trek mountain bike, fireworks, wire cutters, a motion sensor, a beard trimmer, two calendars, and a commemorative Boeing coin. They found dozens of credit cards and a social security card, a health insurance card, a driver’s license, a military ID, a birth certificate, a checkbook, and personal mail, all in the names of various Camano victims. The cops also hauled away Colt’s personal items, like his clothes, nail clippers, ChapStick, medications, and
size fourteen sneakers. After they’d gathered up all the loot, they added Colt’s dog, Melanie, who’d been faithfully guarding the campsite. They drove off, leaving behind a receipt.

  Once the coast was clear, Colt came out of the woods and scribbled a note to Pam (spelling intact):

  MOM, cops were here everythings on lockdown. I’m leaving 4-Wennachi won’t be back est. 2 month. I’ll contact you they took Mell. I’m going to have my affiliates take care of that. P.S.—Cops wanna play hu!? Well its not no lil game… It’s war! & tell them that.

  Pam called the sheriff’s office and told them about the note. When a deputy came to collect it, she also handed over a stolen laser construction level that had been inside the trailer.

  Police say they never followed up on the one clue in the note: “leaving 4-Wennachi.” But apparently the sunny town of Wenatchee on the Columbia River east of the Cascades became a safe haven for Colton at least twice when he was on the run over the following years.

  CASA, THE CAMANO ANIMAL Shelter Association, is the island’s home for homeless dogs and cats. It consists of a compound of metal buildings and fenced yards exactly one-quarter mile from the tiny Island County Sheriff’s Office cop shop on East Camano Drive—so close that you can walk or drive between them without leaving the parking lots of various county buildings. CASA has a contract with the county to temporarily house impounded pets, and that’s where the deputies took Melanie at least twice while Colt was at large.

  “They were chasing Colt through the woods one night,” says Pam, “and he called me on his cell phone saying come get his dog because he had to let go of her. So I drove down—it wasn’t even half a block away—and this lady officer says, ‘You can’t have her because she’s evidence.’ And I said, ‘What is she gonna do, get up on the stand and testify?’”