The Barefoot Bandit

by Bob Friel

  The cops ran out of Homegrown and rushed to the plane, which had been sitting on the field for eight hours before airport manager Bea Von Tobel arrived, saw it, and thought, Oh no, not him again. The red-and-white Cirrus was pulled out of the mud and towed into a hangar belonging to Chuck Stewart (not his real name), the wealthy former CEO of a sportswear company.

  Kyle wasn’t really surprised to hear about the plane. It meant that Colt had finally got him. “He was mad that I’d beat him the previous year, that I’d kept him from breaking in by staying here every night for two months while he hit all those other businesses in town.”

  Sleeping on the floor with a .44 Magnum strapped to his leg hadn’t played well with the mild-mannered organic grocer. “The stress caused a huge spike in my blood pressure, so I had to start taking my Chinese herbs. I couldn’t keep staying here forever, though. It was exhausting. I needed to be at home in my own bed. So I basically spent all my year’s profits on this security system.” Kyle upgraded to a top-shelf sixteen-channel, high-resolution night-vision “really bad-ass system” that he could monitor from home on the Internet and communicate with via his iPhone. “It gave me a false sense of security… I mean this is a health food store; how many levels of surveillance do I need?”

  A total of $1,200 was gone from the tills. The key to the upstairs office had been in the cash drawer, but it wasn’t used. Instead, the office door had been busted open. The business’s main computer was destroyed. “He thought the central server was the security backup, so he broke it open and jumped up and down on it, shattering the cards.” The actual surveillance system was in a self-contained unit. Colt had tilted all the cameras down and unhooked them from the system, then realized the monitor also housed the memory. “He cracked it open to reach in and see if there was a hard drive. He would have gotten it if he took out the twenty-four screws, but there wasn’t a Phillips-head around. So instead, he put it in the sink and turned on the water.”

  Downstairs in the store, working by the light from the beer and wine displays fronting the walk-in cooler, Colt raised all the covers over the vegetables bins and slid open all the deli cases. “He left them open and we had to throw out all the food,” says Kyle. He didn’t touch any of the beer or wine, but Kyle was sure he took some organic produce. He also went into the walk-in and took an entire two-by-three-foot baker’s tray loaded with raw meat-and-cheese croissants that were proofing. “No way you could think they were ready to eat,” says Kyle.

  Colt also lifted a big hunk of dessert, an entire organic cheesecake. This one was blueberry, not strawberry like on his shopping list collage, but close enough.

  AS SOON AS I turned on my phone that morning, it rang with news of the stolen plane. Already, though, the Homegrown story had twisted into “the police dusted the floor and found footprints.” I got to Kyle’s expecting evidence of human footprints and instead had to laugh when I saw all the big “goofy foots” drawn on the floor. They even kind of fit in with the hippie vibe.

  The first thing that struck me about the footprints was that there were a lot of them—thirty-nine, so many that they almost created a paisley pattern on the floor. Nothing about Colt said “Hitchcock fan,” so I assumed it wasn’t an homage to The 39 Steps. The drawings weren’t terribly intricate, but each had an arched shape and five toes, so it must have taken fifteen minutes or so to move around the store and chalk them all. Why take the risk of pausing in the middle of committing a felony to do all that? If you wanted to send a message, wouldn’t two feet have done it just as well as thirty-nine? While it could have been manic overkill, it looked to me more like Colt telling us how confident he was in his skills versus the police. He wasn’t afraid of dawdling at a crime scene. The smashed and drowned security system, though, seemed twisted. Why go to all that trouble to make sure no images of you survived at the same time you signed your autograph thirty-nine times? Of course other than his own self-portraits, Colt was severely camera shy.

  The “C-Ya!” he tagged onto the end was in jaunty bold letters. Knowing the extent Kyle had gone to keep Colt out of his store, it was easily seen as a “Na na, you can’t stop me, I’m smarter than you!”—the same kind of tweak as restealing a bike out of a police station, or breaking a dog out of a pound, or returning again and again to take food from a home that kept upping its security measures. For a gamer, it was a great challenge.

  When I went to the airport and saw the spot where the Cirrus ended up in the grass, something else occurred to me. The plane apparently landed at the north end of the runway and stopped quickly. That’s the quiet end of the airport bordered by the Ditch, a field and woods, so it made sense to land there just to make sure no one saw you run off. But it also made perfect sense if your real plan was to land, run to town for a quick snack and to leave your mark à la Zorro, and then take off again. That would be an all-time “You can’t catch me!” Secret-Agent Double-0 Smart-Ass, level 30 game move. It would take two daring night flights and two landings, the ultimate in-your-face to all those who’d been joking online that Colt must not have read the second half of the flight manual.

  He’d told Pam to get ready for the paparazzi…

  Two guests at Smuggler’s Villa reported hearing a plane revving its engine again and again at 4 a.m. that morning—as if the pilot was trying to get it unstuck. The timing fit.

  One last detail that struck me about Homegrown is that the footprints were drawn with chalk from the menu board. Was the tag a spur-of-the moment decision—he saw the chalk and a bell went off? Or did he already know Homegrown so well that he knew the chalk would be there?

  A local Eastsound woman later told me she’d seen someone suspicious in Homegrown the previous fall. “He caught my eye because he was extremely tall, barefoot at a time of year when even the barefoot folks around here are wearing shoes, and because he had this shit-eating grin on his face.” When Colt’s photo ran in the paper, she recognized his face even though there’d been something slightly different in his appearance. “When I saw him, he had on a dreadlock wig.”

  Pam told me that Colt said he’d been going out in public in disguises, telling her, “You wouldn’t even know me, Mom.” He never said, though, whether one of his characters was Rasta Harris-Moore.

  THE ONE UNASSAILABLY DISTURBING fact was that Colt was now embracing the Barefoot Bandit persona. He was actively courting the media. No, he wasn’t its creation, but he was digging the attention. Later, we learned that Colt had already been on the island in January, hiding inside Chuck Stewart’s hangar. To take the chill off a cold winter’s night, Colt squeezed his six-foot-five frame inside a Mini Cooper stored in the hangar and turned on the seat warmers. He stole a notebook and flashlight out of the glove compartment, and in a detail the cops—all amateur psychologists—love, he broke off one of the side mirrors to look at himself and feed what they believed was his narcissistic personality disorder.

  What the visit to Stewart’s hangar meant was that Colt had been able to move on and off Orcas without being noticed, without having to steal a boat or a plane. The Anacortes plane was a prank done solely for the thrill and the headlines. That kind of behavior tacked on to the guns and the cop teasing meant that the danger to both Colt and everyone else had cranked up immeasurably.

  THE FEBRUARY SUN SANK behind the islands at 5:30 p.m. Back home, after an uncomfortable talk with Sandi about being more vigilant, taking the keys out of her car, locking down the house, and using the new safe, the woods around our cabin once again seemed darker.

  Where was he? If he had planned a hit and run, he was probably still looking for a quick way off the island. Flying was out, as the wind picked up wildly after dark. And surely the police now had eyes on the marinas. Or not.

  At eight, I drove to Deer Harbor Marina to look for Colt or for people looking for Colt, and didn’t see either. By nine, I was in Eastsound and went to the airport and the Ditch and drove up and down the streets. Everything looked deserted. I drove down Orcas’s own H
aven Road and parked by the Odd Fellows Hall, about 150 yards away from the huge NO TRESPASSING sign that marked the ancient Indian burial ground at Madrona Point.

  Walking down the road, I expected a cop or FBI agent to jump out at any moment. This spot seemed a no-brainer for a stakeout, so I hunched my six-foot frame even shorter so no one could mistake me for the Bandit. Once I passed the warning sign and lost the glow of Eastsound, though, size didn’t matter. It was a black, moonless night and no one could see a thing. I kept to the path only by altering course whenever I tripped over a rock or bush. Slowly my eyes adjusted to the point where I could see a faint radiance of water and sky through the crowd of black, skeletal silhouettes of madrona trees to the west. About fifteen minutes in, I stopped and sat on a log. I couldn’t see or smell any campfires. The only option seemed to be to sit and listen. However, by this point the wind was gusting over 30 mph, hissing loudly through the trees. A regiment of infantry could have marched by without my hearing them. If Colt was heading in or out, though, he’d have to use this trail. Then I wondered what the hell I’d do if he did.

  The cold wind cleared the skies, and stars came out above the trees, which were being whipped into a frenzy. Every big gust broke more widow makers out of the tall firs, the branches cracking like gunshots and then crashing to the ground. It was not a good night to be camping or hiding in the woods.

  It also wasn’t a good night to be sitting there. I got up and started to trip my way back down the path. Just as I reached the huge gnarly Doug fir that guards the entrance, a long, agonized screech came out of the black woods. A raccoon was decapitating a squirrel or something… I didn’t stop to find out. I drove home thinking that along with dealing with some crappy weather, if Colt was spending a lot of time in the woods he must be having some wild, spooky nights.

  Back at the cabin, I settled in to transcribe notes. Then at midnight, the dog went off. Murphy rushed from door to door inside the tiny cabin. As soon as I opened the front door, he growled and lunged outside. I grabbed him by the scruff but he dragged me off the porch, determined to get at whatever was under the house. I wrestled him back inside. Sandi, who’d been pretty cavalier about things up to this point, was wide-eyed. Murphy had never done anything like that in his three years on Orcas.

  While I was in town earlier that day after hearing Colt had returned, I’d gone by our storage unit. It took me over an hour of digging through boxes but I finally found something I hadn’t seen since packing it away in Orlando. Now I pushed a handful of shells into the twelve-gauge pistol-grip “street sweeper” shotgun. “Probably nothing,” I said, shrugging, then went outside, telling Sandi to lock the door behind me.

  There was nothing under the house. I walked up to the parking pad and no one was there either. I checked the cars, I snuck up on the outhouse and peeked inside. Then I hiked up the long driveway that cuts through the woods. I felt like an idiot, but I called out to Colt several times.

  THERE WAS NO SIGN of Colt that night or the next. Any hope that he might’ve hightailed it off the island again was dashed the following day, though, when word spread that Chuck Stewart’s hangar had been broken into again.

  The Olympics happening just fifty miles north meant an already increased security presence in the region, and Orcas suddenly got the attention of a host of federal agencies along with additional state and local law enforcement. At the same time, a number of islanders decided that they’d had enough and suited up for some Colt wrangling. It was an entertaining mix. One father-and-son team patrolling the Eastsound streets dressed in full camo gear spotted movement in the bushes and rushed in to grab what turned out to be two FBI agents. A baker heading to work at 5 a.m. rounded a corner and saw two guys peering into his restaurant with night-vision goggles—more FBI agents. Anyone male near town in a car or on foot between dusk and dawn was a target. One acquaintance who drove to the gym early each morning in his rattling pickup got stopped again and again.

  The FBI also set up a camera in Bea Von Tobel’s airport office and fed video to their Seattle field office of every plane arriving or departing Orcas. Officially, though, the FBI continued to say they were not interested in the case of what was merely a local miscreant.

  At the north end of the island, U.S. Coast Guard cutters cruised back and forth just offshore with their chase boats lowered, ready to snatch up anything trying to bolt out of the Ditch. Along with the coasties, DHS Customs and Border Protection 900- and 1,200-horsepower Interceptor Class patrol boats circled Orcas, sweeping the island and surrounding waters with their FLIR (forward-looking infrared, aka thermal imaging) and radar. U.S. Navy warships stood by along the border focusing their surveillance equipment on anything that moved. There were so many electromagnetic waves sweeping the area that we figured everyone on the island was now sterile.

  SMUGGLER’S RESORT, SITUATED RIGHT on the Ditch and adjacent to the airport, served as a convenient base for all kinds of agents now sent on stealthy missions to capture Colt. They all came to Orcas undercover and, this being a small island, kept their secrets sometimes as long as fifteen minutes.

  “They had multiple layers of undercover people here,” says Smuggler’s Mike Stolmeier. “I got different groups of from one to four guys staying in the condos and being real vague about their visits. But they’d always request the unit closest to the airport and then they’d casually try to pay with government credit cards. ‘Oh, we’re on leave from Iraq for a month.’ Yeah, right you guys… this is what you would do if you’re on a one-month leave, come to Orcas off-season when there’s nobody here and nothing to do. My favorite was a couple of guys, outdoorsy types, who’d been looking around and then came in acting real nonchalant and started asking questions about the marina and the airport and ‘Gee, does anything unusual ever happen around here?’ So I said, ‘Yeah, occasionally we get guys acting kind of suspicious.’ They didn’t get it, and one asked, ‘So you’ve actually seen people acting suspicious?’ I handed him a slip of paper with their license plate written on it, and said, ‘Yes, the two guys in this car.’

  “The biggest batch were four guys who stayed a full week. Definitely tactical types, go-get-’em thirty-somethings, in and out of the condo all day and all night. They were dressed Eddie Bauer–style—trying to fit in on the island. Only thing was that they weren’t fishing.”

  Some of the sightings were FBI tactical units, but there were other acronyms involved as well. The Department of Defense won’t confirm anything other than to say they “kept in touch with other agencies” about Colton Harris-Moore’s adventures on Orcas, but a couple of sources claim the DOD had their guys out here at least checking out the situation if not actively searching. One thing Colt probably didn’t know was that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has a vacation home on the island. Secretary Gates declined to comment on whether he pulled a few strings to be neighborly and try to end the crime spree, but when things started escalating, some residents were pulling for him to send in Delta Force.

  It was also an election year, and sixty-two-year-old Bill Cumming was widely expected to run for sheriff again. The longer the hunt dragged on, though, the more disgruntled his electorate. With federal help, San Juan County deputies baited a trap for Colt, leaving the keys in a white Chevy pickup rigged with tracking devices and hidden cameras. They even parked it outside a hangar. The day after they secretly set it up, an islander driving members of the high school golf team passed the airport. The kids all pointed to the pickup: “There’s the decoy the cops put out!”

  Five days after the Homegrown break-in, Sheriff Cumming put out a notice telling all San Juan County residents to consider getting alarm systems, and asking us to “wipe down all your surfaces,” like windows and doorknobs to make it easier for the cops to get fingerprints, and smooth our gravel driveways so they’d be able to find footprints and tire tracks when we got hit.

  For the few island residents not already feeling paranoid, that did it. Good night and good luck.

&nb
sp; THE FEDERAL FRENZY ON Orcas died down after about two weeks of the “undercover” agents coming up empty. FBI and DHS assets remained on call, though. Orcas went back to not even having twenty-four-hour police coverage. From 5 to 6 a.m. every morning, the island had no deputies on duty, a fact obvious to anyone who kept watch on the cop shop.

  On Sunday morning, February 28, the sole young deputy manning the graveyard shift left the station and drove his police cruiser home to Deer Harbor. It’s a twenty-five-minute drive, one way; forty minutes during the summer when chances are you’ll be behind an “I brake for trees” tourist; or twenty minutes if you ignore the speed limits and risk offing yourself via a deer through the windshield or a skid off the cliff into Massacre Bay.

  As soon as Colt knew the town was left unguarded, he came out of the shadows and approached Orcas Island Hardware. After the previous summer’s burglary, owner Scott Lancaster had called Colt a “cockroach” during a TV interview. That gave the Barefoot Bandit three possible reasons for coming back: replenishing his tool collection, collecting more cash, and revenge. Or maybe he was just stopping by to do a return: he brought along the bolt cutters he’d stolen in the first burglary.

  Scott had moved the piles of bagged mulch that Colt climbed the last time. He’d pulled the pallets far enough away from the sloping roof that he didn’t think even Spider-Man could jump across to the building.

  Colt once again scaled the tower of bags and then leaped, barefoot, across the void and onto the dew-slicked metal roof. His footprints led to each corner of the building, where they show he squatted like a gargoyle gazing out over the sleeping town. Satisfied the coast was clear, he went to the same warehouse window he’d found open last time. Scott, though, had jammed 2 × 4s into every frame, making them impossible to lift. Colt padded around the roof looking for another way in. He pried up a piece of metal siding, but realized it would take too long to make an opening large enough for him to squeeze through. He went back to the window, busted a small hole in the corner, then used a screwdriver to poke away the 2 × 4. The window slid open and he ducked through.