The Barefoot Bandit

by Bob Friel

  The questions that staff have input on are: In the previous ninety days, has the “client” escaped or attempted escape? Assaulted anyone? Not complied with core requirements (gone to school, etc.)? Not shown appropriate response to problems? Had hostile responses to frustration? Used chemicals or alcohol? Victimized peers? At least moderately participated in specialized programming? Been charged with another crime in prison?

  By the CRA scorecard, a “client” could commit multiple assaults, victimize other kids, or get caught using drugs and still score low enough to go home. For Colton, who did none of those things, it was a walk in the park.

  “We couldn’t give Colt points to keep him here,” says a staff member who saw him every shift. “There’s no middle ground on any of the questions, and the worst part about that form is that there’s no place for subjective comments.”

  The staff didn’t want to keep Colton around just because he was such a pleasure to deal with. “We all knew what was going to happen. We knew he was just acting good so he could get to a group home and escape.”

  This wasn’t just a gut feeling. Colton hadn’t kept his escape plan secret, and the information made its way to the guards. “Three or four weeks prior to his release, there were notes in Colt’s tracking saying that he should be considered an escape risk because he’s making escape plans.”

  There’s no question on the CRA form that asks, “Is the ‘client’ planning an escape?” However, the tracking notes would have been part of the overall review before Colton was released to a group home. Even if his scores weren’t high enough to keep Colton in the secure facility, there was one fail-safe built into the form, an “administrative override” that could have denied his release. “There’s no way he should have passed,” says a staffer, “but they went ahead and released him.”

  Unfortunately for Colton, his plan worked. At Green Hill, he’d been attending classes and doing relatively well. He was reading college-level psychology books and studying more about flying. He wasn’t taking full advantage of the therapy offered, but maybe a little more time would have brought about a breakthrough. His buddy Josh, who’d also been a dropout, walked away after spending a full three years at Green Hill with a GED, a clean slate, and a determination not to get into trouble again.

  There’s no telling if more time would have rehabilitated Colt—but it might have. What’s certain is that releasing him when written records showed he was actively planning an escape set the stage for dozens of additional victims and millions of dollars in damages and costs associated with Colt’s next run.

  ON VALENTINE’S DAY 2008, just over a year after he was arrested and about seven months after he’d been sent to Green Hill, Colton was transferred to the Griffin Home Residential Treatment Center. Griffin sits on a nicely wooded six acres just across the railroad tracks from the shore of Lake Washington in Renton, a Seattle suburb. He was placed in a homelike setting with eleven other boys and given a routine similar to that at Green Hill, with schooling, therapy, and behavior classes.

  The residence’s doors are alarmed and kids are supposed to be under twenty-four-hour supervision, but security is low-key by design. Group homes are transitional phases between prison and the community, providing boundaries and structure while easing offenders back into society. For someone like Colton, it could offer a nice, safe place to live, more education, and more counseling to help him overcome his socialization issues. For someone like Colton, though, it was also still a cage.

  Colton began grumbling shortly after he got to Griffin. He called Pam to complain about the drug and alcohol classes they made him attend even though he didn’t have a substance-abuse problem. “He said, ‘Mom, do I have to go?’ And I told him just do what they tell you,” remembers Pam. Colton also told her that the counselors were trying to “brainwash” him via therapy.

  If the brainwashing was to convince Colton that there were more important things in life than money and the trappings of wealth, it didn’t work. While in Griffin, he created a remarkably prescient collage from photos, words, and phrases clipped out of magazines. It even has the words “Buyer’s Guide” pasted in. Topped with “World of Comfort and Style” and an image of a twin-engine business jet captioned “May I Have Another,” the collage has one hopeful self-identifier, “Profession: Pilot.” The rest is: “Money, Money,” “Wealth,” “Dollars,” “Keep It,” “Get More,” “Passion,” “Enjoy the Taste,” “Live Richly.” “Make Money, Not Mistakes.”

  The artwork includes a stack of gold bars, a Jet Ski, three smartphones, two cruise ships, and a yacht. The largest single image is a Rolex. Fashion-wise, Colton added the logos of Gucci, Chanel, Hugo Boss, DKNY, Guess, and Armani (whose products appear twice), all adjacent to the word “Sexy.” For his idea of suitable transportation, there were images of a Porsche, Lexus, Audi, Jaguar, Land Rover, and Lincoln, as well as two Cadillac symbols, and right below a martini (presumably shaken, not stirred), the logo for Aston Martin, James Bond’s favorite getaway car. Dead center is a cruise ship with a line below it saying “See what you’re missing.” There are tourism logos for Mexico and the Caribbean. To pay for it all, Colton included a baker’s dozen of credit cards.

  The collage, laminated on regal purple construction paper, is shockingly crass-spirational, a two-dimensional episode of MTV Cribs.

  The only two things that didn’t quite fit with all the bling were a large image of a piece of strawberry cheesecake and a small photo of a border collie. The artwork screamed of everything Colton felt he’d been denied and was determined to get. On the back it also showed a quiet protest: he signed it “Colton Harris-,” actually leaving the hyphen but dropping his attachment to Gordy Moore.

  Pam says she went to visit Colton “in all the slammers,” though the memories kind of run together for her. At one, she brought him some new clothes. “Of course he told me exactly what to get… and just the shoes were a hundred dollars!” Another time she carefully packed along a robin’s egg that she’d found. “We used to go looking for them in the spring, so I asked the guard if I could give it to him… They said no, so I could only show it to him through the glass.”

  Colton told Pam he was having headaches from the lighting in Griffin. She says they had a doctor see him, but not an optometrist like he wanted. As a solution, she says, they let him wear sunglasses inside. Then on Monday, April 28, he called home and told Pam they wouldn’t let him wear his shades anymore, presumably because it was causing problems with the other kids.

  The following evening, after less than eleven weeks at Griffin Home, Colton pulled on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, laced up his white Adidas, and snuck out a window between bed checks. The windows weren’t alarmed, and staff didn’t realize he was gone until an hour later. Griffin called the local police at 10:40 p.m. to report the escape. They also phoned Pam.

  “A guard called me to say Colt left,” she remembers. “I just said, ‘Son of a bitch.’”

  Part 3

  TAKING FLIGHT

  Chapter 21

  Colton’s escape from Griffin was a local news item the next day, which is how, Ed Wallace says, the Island County Sheriff’s Office first heard about it. As far as anyone knew, he was safely tucked away for another twenty-two months. Sheriff Mark Brown immediately reactivated his E-lert system to tell Camano residents to lock up and keep a lookout. He and other county officials didn’t hide their displeasure.

  “I couldn’t believe it,” says prosecutor Greg Banks. “This is a kid who was very good at running away and eluding police… Didn’t they know how hard it was to catch him the first time? Now we have to do it all over again?” Banks and the sheriff suspected that Colton would head home to Camano. “That’s where he was comfortable and that’s where he was successful,” says Banks. “The woods and all those empty vacation homes were still there.”

  Josh Flickner, whose family owns the Elger Bay Grocery at the top of the South End, and who served as head of the local chamber of commerce, says th
e residents were outraged. “It was ‘You did what with him!?’”

  Pam heard from Colt soon after his escape. “I think as soon as he left he was sorry,” she says. “The way he was talking it sounded like he regretted it.” Pam, for once, found herself in agreement with Sheriff Mark Brown—they even spoke—and they both relayed through the media calls for Colton to turn himself in. If he had, he would have been sent back to Green Hill with another twenty-eight days tacked on to his original sentence. He would also have had a tougher time scoring low enough to be released to another group home before serving his full sentence. But that’s all he had hanging over his head at that point: his original time plus a month.

  Colton had choices. He could go back to juvenile prison for about two years, pay his dues, and then try to move on with his life. Or he could leave the area and attempt to start over—not easy for a seventeen-year-old with no money, no job skills, not even a driver’s license, but kids run off and try it every day. Or he could head back to Camano, where he’d instantly be “most wanted” and be right back playing nonstop hide-and-seek with the cops.

  Getting back into the game had to be attractive in some respects. Colt had been successful for a long time and mainlined lots of juicy adrenaline hits along the way. He’d honed and expanded his criminal repertoire, and by examining the evidence from his last arrest, he’d schooled himself on mistakes to avoid. Going back to Camano would be like repeating a level in a video game: it’s easy up to the point the Zerg, Slicers, Flood zombies, or po-po got you the last time you played. After that, it gets even more fun, more challenging, and more rewarding adrenaline-wise. Sure the cops would be waiting, sure he’d be back in a place with limited room to run and only one way out, but that’s the exact setup for any good video game or action movie—and this was a kid who felt he was equal parts James Bond and Rambo.

  Besides, as Colton had told Dr. Young: he slept better, felt better, and was happier when he was on the run.

  Colt pressed reset and headed for Camano.

  ONE THING COLT WOULDN’T be doing was hooking up with his old riding buddy Harley Davidson Ironwing. Harley had served his time for the Camano spree and made it back out onto the streets. He gave the straight life his best shot. “I worked a steady job for a day,” he says. “I worked all Valentine’s Day in the flower shop where my mom worked in order to get a bouquet of flowers to give to my friend. It was boring… not as much fun as breaking into places… but better.”

  Not long after that, though, “fun” and easier money beat “better.” Harley went back to the flower shop after hours. He busted a window and found about $150. “Then I broke in the salon next door because I knew they had two cash registers.” Harley got only $20 from the salon. That kinda cash didn’t last long. He needed a bigger score, and who has more money than God?

  On Sunday, March 30, Harley went to Stanwood’s Cedarhome Baptist Church, because he “saw they had money.” It was his mom’s church, and it did have cash, thousands tucked away in a big safe in the basement. One of the core beliefs at Cedarhome is “We value giving as an act of trust in God,” and surely there were people there who would’ve reached out to help Harley. There’s no thrill, though, in receiving charity.

  While the faithful were upstairs hearing the Word, Harley crept downstairs to dip into the collection. However, the pastor bore witness and called the cops. When they arrived, Harley took off with police and parishioners in pursuit. And thus the Hobbit was smote.

  Harley went to prison just a month before Colton escaped from the group home. His getting pinched, says Harley, ruined their plans for the big helicopter raid on Costco.

  THE FIRST PLACE YOU’D figure anyone would look for Colton would be the trailer, and that’s just where he went. “It was raining,” says Pam. “Colt came in and ran right into his room. I waited out in the living room while he was looking around for something. When he came back out I said, ‘Did you find whatever it was?’ He said no. I said, ‘If you’re looking down in the heat vent, I took a whole bunch of papers out of there and burned them.’ And he went, ‘Oh!’ He was heading right back out the door again, and I said, ‘Wait a minute.’ I hugged him, and he was soaking wet from the rain.”

  Pam was surprised by how tall Colt had gotten. The green-eyed towhead she’d nicknamed Tubby now towered over her and had to stoop to get inside the door. He’d grown into a slender, brown-haired giant at least six feet four inches tall. “He always seemed to shoot up when he was in the slammers,” she says. Colt’s height was a surprise. Gordy is six foot. Pam stands five-eight. Pam’s mom was five-two, and her father wasn’t tall either. Her grandfather, she says, was so small they called him Shorty. Pam can only attribute Colt’s height to her well water, saying her vegetables always came up oversized, too.

  In the Camano cop shop and over in the Coupeville headquarters, the police expected “the call” any day. “We knew it was coming,” says Ed Wallace. “Sooner or later we’d see a crime that fit Colt’s MO.”

  Pam says she called the sheriff’s office soon after Colt came home. She says she told them where she thought he was staying and said that if they escorted her, she’d take them there. She says, though, that “they never bothered.” The police say that at one point they told her, “Okay, show us,” and she then refused.

  One of the next calls to the police came from Maxine. On May 8, just two days after her husband passed away, her mailbox was stolen for the second time. “I called the sheriff’s office,” she says. “But they didn’t come out.” The grandmother of eighteen says she still wasn’t scared of Colton, and in fact she still felt sorry for him. Nonetheless, she started locking her doors for the first time since she moved to Camano. That didn’t stop the raids, though, and once again pizza, ice cream, and any money she’d left lying around began to disappear. Most bewildering to her was how Colton was able to do it without alerting her little dog, Emma, who greets strangers who approach the house with teeny but effective barks and growls.

  On May 11, Colton played paparazzo. He used an Olympus digital camera to shoot twenty self-portraits, including some sultry poses. He also took a shot of a big pile of crabs he’d caught by hand. The island boy was back in his element, feasting on Dungeness.

  Just a third of a mile up Camano Drive from Maxine’s, homeowners who had experienced a peckish poltergeist during Colton’s previous run found their freezer emptied again, too. Sheriff Mark Brown himself came out and told them that Colt was definitely back on Camano and that they were getting a number of similar complaints. Brown said he didn’t want word to get out, though, in order to avoid media attention that would let Colt know they were on to him.

  Brown approved overtime for his deputies and once again pulled officers off Whidbey for special Colt duty on Camano. He also ordered his cops to use every trick and technology at their disposal. He didn’t want another drawn-out, money-and-morale-sapping chase. In 2006, along with food, the homeowners near Maxine had also lost a bike, which had eventually been recovered. Brown now asked them for permission to install a motion detector that would alert the cop shop if anyone broke in. They said yes… and so were pretty surprised to wake up not long afterward to find that the same bike had been stolen again, this time out of a garage equipped with a police-installed alarm system.

  The same thing happened on the other side of the island, to the neighbor one house south of Jack and Louise Boyle, just past the far end of Haven Place. A bike stolen from their garage had been recovered, and the owners alarmed the building. Someone came along and took the new security as a challenge. He defeated it by stealthily removing a window without breaking the glass, then reaching in and ripping out the alarm system control box. The thief went to all that trouble simply to resteal the same bike.

  Almost every time the Camano deputies recovered a stolen bike and returned it to its owner, it would be retaken. Whoever was doing this seemed to take delight in punking the police. On July 3, Colt re-declared war directly on Island County by breaki
ng into the county annex, stealing a safe and sinking it in a pond.

  Over at the Boyles’, where Jack had previously lost several rounds and lots of his wife’s strawberries, he’d had a full year to add layers of security. It worked. This time not a single Frappuccino or Christmas decoration disappeared out of their basement, even though there was ample evidence that Colton was active all around their neighborhood.

  To the north of the Boyles, Sharon and Dan Stevens owned the hot tub that they believed Colton regularly soaked in, as well as the dog house where they’d found the Boyles’ phone. Sharon is a volunteer court-appointed special advocate who has represented abused and neglected children for more than twenty years. However, she works in King County (Seattle), not Island County, so never had an opportunity to know Colton.

  “I would have loved to have gotten my hands on this kid when he was seven or eight,” she says. “It’s outrageous… between the school, the authorities, CPS investigators… somebody should have intervened.” Sharon believes the entire system, which in some cases can lead to a parent fighting to keep custody of a child simply for the extra government assistance funds, needs improving. She says she was very disappointed when Colton escaped. “It’s sad that instead of taking the help, that Colton came back to the same life and crimes. Some of these kids are lost.”

  Sharon and her husband, Dan, both in their mid-seventies, came up to Camano for a short stay and were woken by their black Lab’s insistent barking. They went out to investigate and found a trail of belongings scattered across their yard. First it looked to them as if someone had approached the house and been scared off by the dog, dropping two very large sneakers and a DVD case as he fled. Then they spotted other droppings that could explain the hurried run: a pile of human excrement squatted near the playhouse. The Lab either scared the crap out of him, or the prowler had been in the middle of relieving himself when the pooch sniffed trouble and started barking. Either way, he left in a hurry when the dog went off and the lights went on. As the shoes were found far apart—one by the playhouse and the other up by the road—it appeared the guy kicked them off as he started running for the woods leading toward Haven Place.