The Barefoot Bandit

by Bob Friel

  One then asked the other if he brought “the bullet.” The answer was yes, and the deputy listened to what he described as the sounds of a round inserted into a clip and the clip jacked into a handgun. He then heard Colton tell Harley, “The apple juice is for you.” As Harley was about to take a sip, the deputy jumped out of the bedroom and shouted, “Stop! Police!”

  Harley says the cop came out with his gun drawn. The officer says Harley froze for a second and dropped the glass of juice, which shattered on the floor. Colt was already out the door.

  As the deputy yelled, “On the ground!” Harley snapped out of it and followed Colt. The cop held his fire, and both fugitives got away.

  THE FOLLOWING DAY, ANOTHER hot tip came in: it was delivery time for a package that Colton had shipped to the victim of an earlier burglary. He’d put in a special request that the package be dropped off at the home’s gate, a rock-and-wrought-iron affair complete with lion statues protecting a driveway lined with tall cedars. Two deputies fixed up a decoy Express Mail package and, at 5:45 p.m., already dark, dropped it off, then hid in the woods across the street. A half hour later, a vehicle slowly cruised by. The cops then heard footsteps on the gravel drive. Both deputies saw Colton, dressed in a dark sweatshirt and baggy jeans, going for the package. One ran across the street shining his flashlight and yelling, “Stop, Colton! Sheriff’s office. You’re under arrest!” Colton took off, but not before grabbing the box. The deputies chased him, but Colton vaulted a fence into a horse pasture and then easily outdistanced them. The last they saw of him was as he rounded a barn and ducked into the dark woods. Word had gone out, though, that if there was any chance at all of catching him, pull out the stops and run Colton down. The deputies called it in and Sheriff Brown loosed the hounds.

  Island County and Snohomish County deputies responded and set up a containment perimeter. K9 teams loped in from both Everett and Marysville, and followed Colton’s trail into the trees. The dogs searched until 8:48, but couldn’t track him down. The only thing the police came away with was their fake package, which Colton had dropped in the pasture.

  * * *

  With the close calls coming more frequently, Colton decided to head someplace where he felt safe.

  On February 8, Dave, a neighbor of the Wagners’—Colton’s summer family from a few years back—was out taking a walk when he saw a tall teen near the top of the Wagners’ driveway. It was already dark, and the kid had what Dave described as a “miner’s lamp,” meaning a headlamp, on top of his baseball cap. As they passed, Colton said, “Good evening. Nice night for a walk, huh?” Dave answered, “Yeah,” and continued toward his house. Something didn’t feel right, though, and he swung around to take another look. The kid had vanished. Like everyone else on the island, Dave knew about all the recent break-ins. He hurried into his yard, where he could see the waterfront side of the Wagners’ house. Lights were burning inside, so he called Doreen Wagner.

  “I told him we had a couple of lights on timers,” remembers Doreen. “But he said there was a bright light on in the back bathroom where I knew we only had a little night-light.” Dave told Doreen that they’d been having trouble with a burglar on the island and this could be him. He hung up and called the cops, telling them he thought he had just seen Colton Harris-Moore and knew where he was hiding.

  Inside the Wagners’ summer house, Colton grabbed a bottle of water and popped a Hungry-Man TV dinner in the oven. He’d already washed his previous night’s dishes and placed them neatly in the sink drainer. He’d also made his bed and hung up his bathroom towels. According to Bill Wagner, he’d even vacuumed. Again and again over the course of his time on the run, whenever Colt stole into people’s lives by staying in their homes or driving their cars or boats, he seemed to go out of his way to prove, maybe just to himself, that if he had nice things he could take care of them—that it wasn’t his fault he grew up in a dumpy trailer.

  Colt lifted the television off its stand and put it on the floor so its light wouldn’t be as noticeable from the outside. Now he was ready to just chill.

  The first Island County cop who arrived at the Wagners’ was a plainclothes detective. He pulled up in an unmarked car shortly after 9 p.m. and quietly approached the house on foot. Other than the glow coming through the trees from a few neighboring homes and the distant twinkle of lights on Whidbey Island, the area was completely dark. The detective inspected the front of the house, found nothing amiss, and then walked around the corner toward the side facing the water.

  Inside, Colton took his Hungry-Man out of the oven and forked it onto a plate. He carried the food and water over to the TV and sat down on the floor to eat.

  As the detective cautiously stepped along the side of the house, trying to keep silent and out of sight so he could surprise whoever was inside, he was suddenly blasted by a blinding light. He’d walked under a motion detector.

  The cop continued around to the back of the house and found the sliding glass door opened slightly. He got on the radio, called for backup, and waited outside until two more deputies showed up. When they entered the home, the first thing they noticed was the smell of food. They cleared the place room by room, but Colton, of course, was gone; he’d bolted out the back door the second he saw the lights pop on. What the cops did find, though, was evidence that Colton had been using the Wagners’ home for quite a while—and taking good care of it.

  Nothing was missing except for food. None of the Wagners’ belongings was out of place, all the beer was still in the fridge, even a big jar of change had been left untouched. In a closet they found a sleeping bag with some of Colton’s things rolled up inside. All the beds were made, but one of the officers noticed a strange lump under the covers in the master bedroom. It was a black can of UDAP Bear Spray, the magnum size.

  Down in California, Doreen hadn’t connected anything to her little Tarzan, but asked Megan to look up the Camano News online to see if there was anything about the rash of burglaries. “I Google it and see this mug shot, and I’m like, ‘Oh my God!’” says Megan. “My mom had already gone to bed, and I yell up, ‘It’s Colt who’s breaking into these houses!’”

  The police already knew Colton’s fearless affinity for going back to crime sites, so they asked the Wagners for permission to install a silent alarm at their home and wired it to the cop shop.

  COLTON WENT TWO MILES UP the west side of the island, back to the yellow, lap-sided home with six steep gables on Sea Song Lane. Despite Harley’s lesson about nighttime burglaries—Don’t turn on the lights!—Colton flipped on a light in one of the property’s outbuildings. A woman who lives in the farmhouse across the street spotted it and told her husband. He looked over but the Sea Song house itself—partially screened by tall evergreens along the fence line—was dark.

  The next evening, a cold and clear Friday, February 9, Colton was inside the house and back on the homeowner’s computer. Across the street, the neighbors had been keeping an eye out and suddenly saw a light in the window. This time they called the police.

  At 7:49 p.m., Colton opened his mellenie010 email and saw the letter from Bev pleading that he turn himself in. If it swayed him in the slightest, he didn’t have a chance to act on it. By coincidence, Geof Davis was a mile south of Sea Song, over at the Mabana Fire Station, where there was a meeting going on. The subject: what to do about Colton Harris-Moore. There was a deputy there, and a radio call came in at 8:15 saying that two Island County cops were just up the road and had someone cornered inside a home. They believed it was Colton. Geof and the deputy jumped into a car and drove to Sea Song.

  A detective on scene noticed a second-floor gable window was open. He called out, “Colton? Colton?” More police arrived and pulled on tactical gear. Colton peeked out the window and saw he had no chance of escape. He picked up the phone and called his mom.

  Colton told Pam where he was and said that a SWAT team had him surrounded. He was in a panic, “What do I do? What do I do?” Pam told him that he wa
s going to turn himself in, but that he should wait until she got there.

  “Colton?” The detective continued to call up to the window. Finally, Colt answered, saying he was talking to his mom.

  Pam hung up and immediately called Bev. She told her she was scared that the cops were going to hurt Colt and that she wanted to get as many people over there as possible. Bev said she was on her way. “It was easy to find the right place,” says Bev. “There were already so many cop cars there with their lights flashing. They’d blocked off the road south of the house and a crowd was starting to gather.”

  At least a dozen officers from Island and Snohomish Counties arrived on scene. Cops in tactical gear spread out around the home while the others manned the front and kept the civilians back. Even Sheriff Mark Brown showed up.

  Bev found Pam, who was with Van. Pam says she asked the police if she could go in and get Colt, but they refused. The homeowner’s brother arrived and told the police where they could find a key. “Word started spreading around that Colt might have a gun,” says Bev. “It was very melodramatic, and I started wondering maybe they actually were doing it so they could hurt him.” She asked Pam and Van to take her hands and said a prayer for Colt’s safety.

  Another ten minutes went by and Colton still refused to come out. Deputies finally put Pam on the phone and asked her to “talk him out.” Pam told Colt that there were plenty of witnesses around and even a couple of TV cameras, which was both good news and bad news as far as Colton was concerned. They talked for ten minutes and then Pam put Bev on the phone.

  “I told him to just come out, that no one’s going to hurt him and the cops aren’t going to go away… He said, ‘I know… but could you just go home? This is embarrassing, I don’t want you to see me like this!’ I told him okay, that I’d leave.”

  A minute or so later, at 9:30 p.m., Colt was outside and in handcuffs, being led to a squad car. His nearly seven-month run was over.

  THE COPS MIRANDIZED COLT and transported him to the Island County Juvenile Detention Facility. Colton didn’t have a firearm when he was taken into custody, though he was loaded for bear with another pepper spray canister. During questioning by a detective, Colton says he never had a gun on him, just a knife, but the cop asked about three specific handguns—a .45 Ruger, a Glock, and a Walther PPK. “You guys don’t need to worry about that,” Colton told him. “They’re not going to be taken out, you know, shot at people and everything.”

  When the detective pressed about a .45 caliber slug found in one of the houses he was staying in, Colton told him, “I wasn’t the one who shot the gun. I’m the big fish in the pond… Well, I’m not the big fish in the pond. That’s all I have to say. You can talk to Harley [about the guns] because he’ll be more willing to talk than I am because, you know, he doesn’t care if people come after him, so let him get chased and shot and everything… I don’t even know what stole property you’re talking about… I’m not the connected one here who knows where everything is… I’m not going to tell anybody because of my personal safety and my mom’s that need to be put into consideration in this… They’ve threatened to dispose of her truck and my dog.”

  Aside from these shadowy figures, Colton’s main worry was the media, which he universally refered to as “the paparazzi.” He told the detective, “I just don’t want this to be on the news.”

  The following day, Sheriff Mark Brown held a “We got him!” town hall meeting at the Camano Grange. It wasn’t a victory parade. He faced tough questions from the large crowd who wanted to know why it took so long and why he hadn’t caught Harley yet. Everyone, though, was happy Colton was finally in custody and most were glad it ended peacefully.

  Following Colton’s capture, Dave Pinkham wrote an editorial in the Stanwood/Camano News: “The Colton Harris story will soon be out of the headlines. Will we then forget to analyze how this boy came to fall between the cracks? Will the larger problem gradually fade from our consciousness? Or will we face the question: Was there something that could have been done differently or better in this case? Did this have to occur?”

  A FEW DAYS LATER, Harley saw the writing on the wall—or, more accurately, saw wanted posters on every wall that now featured just his mug on them. He turned himself in. When a detective asked about the night he and Colton were in a home and the deputies jumped out at them, Harley said Colt had a Ruger .45 pistol, but that it wasn’t loaded. When the detective asked why he ran when the deputy told him to stop, Harley answered, “Old habits.”

  In March, Harley pleaded guilty to first-degree criminal trespass and second-degree taking a motor vehicle without permission. He was sentenced to “up to 50 weeks” in a juvenile facility.

  Colton had a more complicated path through the juvenile justice system. He was charged with twenty-three crimes against a dozen victims. Counts included theft, obstructing a law enforcement officer, and multiple counts of residential burglary, computer trespass, and possession of stolen property. Colt was held on $10,000 bail, which a judge then raised to $35,000. That didn’t matter, though: no one was going to spring him. Pam said, “I don’t ever bail anybody, I don’t care who it is.”

  As Colton approached the courtroom for his first hearing—buzz-cut hair and wearing an orange jumpsuit and sandals with white socks, hands cuffed to a waist belt and chains around his ankles—he peeked inside the door and instantly reared back. He’d spotted the photographers and a TV camera. “Paparazzi,” he groaned.

  Along with what they felt was plenty of evidence—much of it from the stolen property found at his campsite on Pam’s property—the prosecutor’s office filed impact statements in which victims told of still-missing favorite pieces of jewelry, having to pay large insurance deductibles, feeling insecure in their homes. One mother wrote of having to console her young children for weeks after a fire had been set in their home, allegedly as a diversion when they came home and surprised the burglar, who ran past the kids as he escaped.

  One woman, whose property was found at Colton’s campsite and whose fifty-five-year-old husband died of a heart attack about a week after the burglary, wrote that he’d “defiled the sanctity of our home. Hopefully the sentence will help and not hurt.”

  The court appointed Rachel Miyoshi, who’d been in practice for four years, as Colt’s defense attorney. Like most adults who spent time with Colton, Rachel immediately liked the teen and found him very smart. Rachel hired Shauna Snyder, a private investigator, to help with the case. Between working as a PI and a paralegal, Shauna had twenty years of experience doing defense research and had worked a lot of juvenile cases. She considered Colton the poster child for someone marked for attention by the local police after getting into trouble at a young age. “I think that Pam gave him some of that bad reputation with the police, too, because she’s such a hard-ass.” Shauna says she’d never met someone quite like Pam, who showed up with both barrels blazing.

  “She wasn’t the most receptive to listening,” says Shauna. “And she is distrustful, so it was hard to explain to her that they had stuff on him. She had this thing that he’s just getting the blame, a scapegoat, that he didn’t really do it. Ironically, though, she was the one that turned him in for most of it. She turned him in for the tent that was on the property with all the stolen stuff. They didn’t have a clue about that. Had she not, they never would have had any of it. I mean, she hurt him.”

  Still, Pam was adamant that Colton should not plead guilty to anything. “Pam would come into the office threatening to kick everyone’s ass… ‘Fuck them, blah blah blah.’ But then I’d talk to her, and by the time she left she’d be offering to take us all out for beers,” says Shauna. “So we got along great. She was engaged in the case and she was genuinely concerned. And it seemed to me like she’s the only one Colton gave a shit about. He understood that his mom was like who she was. But you know… it’s his mom.”

  Shauna reviewed the police work: “Sloppy… and the reports are like illiterate. He probably did al
l these things, but they just didn’t have the evidence.” She says the county was also looking for victim restitution of around $36,000. “We whittled that down to something like $600 just by tracking who got their stuff recovered.”

  When she went to the juvenile detention facility for her first meeting with Colton, Shauna didn’t know what to expect. “Some kids are kinda scary. You’re sitting locked in the cage with them and who knows if the jailer is around. Or else the kid might put on an attitude—‘Fuck the cops,’ or ‘I can do thirty days standing on my head’—acting rough and tough to cover that they’re shaking inside. But Colton wasn’t like either of those. He had no pretense. He was unassuming, polite, very calm, and stoic.”

  The only time Shauna saw Colton react strongly was when partway through that three-hour first meeting a guard brought in his lunch. “He said, ‘I’m not going to eat this crap,’” she says. “And it did look like shit, some kind of bean medley. He said, ‘I’ll drink the juice,’ then he put the rest of the cafeteria tray on the ground like dog food.”

  Shauna says that at first Pam had Colton convinced that the county didn’t have much on him. “I told him, ‘They don’t have you for all of it, but they’ve nailed you for some of it. Let me walk you through,’ and I meticulously showed him page by page.” She says Colton sat calmly and didn’t say much until she explained how they nailed him for his Web usage. “He wanted to see how they did the IP mapping, and how they’d subpoenaed the email records. Some of the Internet providers refused to give their records to the police, and he was very interested in knowing which ones.”