by Bob Friel
When the Cirrus showed up and Homegrown got hit, Scott had told his wife that he was going to start sleeping in the hardware store. “You idiot,” she said. “We spent four thousand dollars on that fancy new security system just so you wouldn’t have to do anything like that.”
As Colt started to climb down out of the loft, his body heat lit up an infrared sensor, tripping a silent alarm at 5:28 a.m. (In a stroke of luck for Colt, it was only almost silent.) Unaware that the security system was already calling the sheriff’s office, he continued down to the ground floor and went to the door leading to the shop. It had always been left open before the first break-in, but it was now locked. Colt went to work with pry tools.
Meanwhile at his home outside of town, Scott received a 5:30 wake-up call from the alarm company and jumped out of bed. When the alert went to the police dispatcher in Friday Harbor, they contacted the on-call deputy. Even though officers lived just a few minutes away from the hardware store, dispatch called the deputy who’d just gotten off shift and was aboard his boat all the way out in Deer Harbor. It took him forty minutes to get back to town.
Inside the warehouse, Colt wasn’t getting anywhere with the metal-framed commercial door, so finally he busted its window, reached through, and unlocked it. When he pushed it open, though, something was wrong. He could hear a little buzzer going off up at the front counter.
Scott arrived at the store ten minutes after he got the call. He went directly to the back and looked up at the window Colt had used before. “It was still dark so I couldn’t see too well, but it looked wrong.” Then he waited. “I didn’t want to go in until the deputy got there. I had this gut feeling that Colton was in there or else still close by, watching.”
The deputy arrived a half hour later and waited until a second showed up before entering the store. They walked down the display aisles to the back and found the bolt cutters. But Colt was gone.
Just down the street at Homegrown, Kyle had been back manning his tower ever since the break-in. He’d had many more hours to, in his words, “obsess” about Colt, and says he was starting to believe the kid might be a werewolf. That night, Kyle had been very uneasy. “It was the full moon, and I knew he’d be active, running through the woods growling and howling.” Kyle and Cedra had seen what they describe as a white wolf lying in a doorway across the street at 11 p.m. “Our dogs would usually be like ‘Let me at ’em,’ but they were really spooked by this thing.”
Later, the sound of footsteps in the courtyard between Homegrown and the yoga studio woke Kyle. He went down and found a deputy passing through. “He said nothing was going on, but yeah, right… the town was starting to get all ruffled up.”
The ruffling was unlike anything ever seen before on Orcas Island. Within a couple of hours, Whatcom County SWAT, Washington State Patrol, K9 teams with German shepherds, and all available San Juan County deputies were fanning out across Eastsound. Townsfolk hoping for a sleep-in Sunday were rudely awakened by the incessant brain-rattling thwops and sharp turbine whine of an ebony Homeland Security UH 60-A Black Hawk helicopter that showed up to tightly circle the town again and again and again for hours.
Idyllic Orcas Island looked like a war zone. Residents gathered at windows and on the street, craning their necks to watch the helicopter, and then shaking their heads as men in body armor with automatic weapons strode up and down the roads.
From the limited search perimeter both the helicopter and the ground forces were using, it was apparent they felt Colt had gone to ground within a very small area around town. However, he’d had at least a ninety-minute head start before any meaningful search began and was known to just run full out whenever threatened. I’m no manhunter, but a full five hours after Colt slipped out of the hardware store it looked like they were working a perimeter that Stephen Hawking could have run past in less than an hour and a half.
All day long, Scott Lancaster says local guys were driving up, guns in their cars, saying they were going to put a stop to this. “I thought, This is not good.”
Chapter 24
With all the obvious law enforcement activity around the airport, including the Black Hawk using it as an Orcas base, you’d think Colt would head to one of the far corners of the island and hunker down. Instead, he did the exact opposite. The kid who loved planes couldn’t stay away from them.
At former astronaut Bill Anders’s hangar, his assistant noticed powder on the floor. “Later we realized it was from someone lifting and moving the ceiling tiles, as if they were looking for a security system or a place to hide up there,” says Bill. At the time, though, they didn’t think too much of it since nothing was missing and they hadn’t noticed any forced entry. Bill put his Cessna 400 to bed in the hangar as usual, with the keys left hanging from the plane’s baggage compartment door. “I always did that because then I know for sure the mags aren’t left hot,” he says. He left the island for two weeks, and when he came back, he found the plane’s POH sitting out, open, on a small table next to the airplane.
“That never leaves the plane,” says Anders.
The ceiling dust and the POH mysteries were explained when a San Juan County detective found pry marks on Anders’s doors. When they pulled up the records for the hangar’s phone line, they revealed a number of calls to Pam Kohler.
The remaining mystery was why the plane, a sitting duck for two weeks, hadn’t been stolen. Anders always gassed up at his museum, and hadn’t bothered to stop before his last trip, knowing he needed only a small amount of fuel to make the hop back to Bellingham. Colt would have figured out there wasn’t enough fuel to take him far simply by turning on the gauges. Still, Colt studied up on the Cessna 400, aka Columbia—a model he had never flown before. Maybe next time he came back to Anders’s hangar he’d find it with filled tanks… or maybe he’d find another 400 somewhere else when the time was right.
POSSIBLE COLT SIGHTINGS NOW poured in to the police. Bill Cumming laughed when he told me, “Any kid on Orcas who’s at least six feet tall is getting a lot of attention.” A friend who lives on low-bank waterfront just down the road saw a shadowy character she’s sure was Colton kayaking past her home very late on a February night, navigating by headlamp. The San Juans are one of the world’s best places for sea kayaking. There’s endless interest along the miles of serrated coastline, with views through clear water down into kelp forests and rocky reefs covered in purple starfish. Paddlers off the west coast of San Juan Island often get the privilege of seeing killer whales at eye level. However, kayaking in the San Juans is a daylight sport. Boat and ferry traffic, treacherous currents, and unforgiving cold water make midnight paddling in a major channel in the middle of winter almost as foolhardy as flying a plane without taking a class. The headlamp fit Colt’s MO, as did bucking conventional wisdom. Later that night, she heard someone trip over her garden wall.
Still, though, the most reliable sightings came from around the airport area. When sheriff’s deputies took a close look at the hangars, they found four more besides Bill Anders’s and Chuck Stewart’s that had evidence someone had gotten inside to snoop around. And they suspected Colt had broken into even more. Just north of the hangars, a local guy who’d been hired to keep watch over the Ditch twice saw someone lurking among cars in the lot. He says that both times when he went to check it out, a big guy he identified as Colt stood up, got right in his face, and “intimidated the hell” out of him before turning and running off into the woods.
Colt’s Winter Olympics stunt had, as expected, brought a flood of press attention and thousands of new members to his fan clubs who all rooted for him to “Fly, Colton, Fly” and never give up. Around this time I tracked down Colt’s prison buddy Josh, who told me about the guns and Colt’s “They’ll never take me alive” boast. Then Pam told me Colt was sure he’d get twenty years if he got caught. She also said he recently told her he’s “done with people.” Together with Colt’s history of depression, all of this convinced me that the danger had ratcheted
up to the point where somebody was going to die: Colt, a cop, or an innocent bystander. I could easily envision one of the many elderly folks on Orcas or Camano finding him in their home and keeling over from a heart attack.
Since Colt was reading my blog, I decided to cross the line and address him directly. On March 9, I wrote a post titled “What Should Colton Do?” I told him that no way was he going to get twenty years if he gave himself up, but he would if somebody got hurt, even by accident. I told him it was easy for those sitting at home to type “Keep running!” because he was providing entertainment and vicarious thrills. When he died, though, or was sitting in a cell, they’d just go back to playing video games. I wrote that the only smart choice if he wanted to eventually go for his dream of being a real pilot was to turn himself in.
CHUCK STEWART’S BIG HANGAR is the closest one to Smuggler’s and the Ditch. Colt had taken an interest in that building from the beginning: blankets stolen from it in 2008 were found at one of Colt’s campsites. He’d been back inside several times since then to study the POHs for Stewart’s two planes. Deputies responded to each call, but couldn’t figure out how anyone had gotten in. Colt’s first peek into Stewart’s hangar had to be a hallelujah moment. Stewart’s aircraft were dream machines for anyone interested in flying. One, a $4 million Swiss-made Pilatus, is the hottest single-engine turboprop on the planet. Used by everyone from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to air force special forces, the Pilatus carries up to ten people and cruises at more than 300 mph with a range over two thousand miles. It’s also built to use short runways and land on rough dirt or grass strips. At nearly fifty feet long with a fifty-three-foot wingspan, the three-ton Pilatus was a magnitude more plane than Colt had ever attempted. However, a look at the POH revealed something very tempting. Its stall speed was only 5 mph higher than that of the Cirrus, which Colt had successfully landed twice.
Stewart’s other aircraft was an amphibious DeHavilland Beaver, the ultimate bush plane. With its floats bolted on, the Beaver offered a pilot leaving Orcas Island access to the entire Inside Passage, with countless isolated inlets and bays in British Columbia. It would mean another huge leap in skill and luck to safely land on the water, but if the plan was ever to kiss society good-bye and get lost in the wilderness, here was the ideal vehicle.
The sweetener, especially for a teenage boy, was that both of Stewart’s planes had very cool custom paint jobs, with vibrant black-and-blue smoke and waves streaming along the sides of their bright white fuselages. Actually, forget the teenagers: boys of every age on Orcas coveted those planes, as well as Stewart’s hangar, which also had a two-story pilots’ lounge built inside. As a model for a dream life, Stewart’s would be irresistible to Colt. Beyond the hangar filled with fantasy planes and the clubhouse, Stewart lived in a large waterfront compound on the west side of Orcas with a dock and water toys. He was fabulously wealthy, had a jet plane by the time he was forty, and hobnobbed with famous sports stars. The part of Stewart’s life that would have been alien to Colt, considering the take-it philosophy he’d espoused to Harley and Josh, is that Chuck had worked for it all.
Leading citizens in the Orcas community, Chuck Stewart and his wife raised their boys here, worked with local sports teams, provided support for numerous charities, and even built a school on the island. “He was one of the guys that was always there when I needed him,” says Ray Clever, a former Orcas deputy who had a short list of wealthy residents—“my sugar daddies”—who he counted on to support various programs he started to help local youth, especially at-risk kids.
Clever spent twenty-six years as a San Juan County cop after starting his law enforcement career in California. He went through the Los Angeles Police Academy and reminisces fondly about the days when it was permissible to choke people out. “My favorite was the time I choked out two lawyers at the same time. They’d dined and dashed on a $300 tab, and when I stopped them they told me to ‘fuck off’ and started to walk away. I got one in each arm and choked them unconscious. The fact that they were lawyers was just a bonus.”
Clever acknowledges that he was “a little jerk at times” with his newfound police power. “Every cop has to go through that. If they tell you that they haven’t they’re a lying son of a bitch.” One day a veteran who’d seen it all pulled him aside. “He reminded me that I wore a police uniform, not a judge’s robe, and that my badge wasn’t big enough to hide behind but it was big enough that it was going to hurt when someone shoved it up my ass.”
On his very first day on the job in the San Juans, Clever became one of the investigating officers for a five-year-long case, the famous Lopez Island bang-bang, chop-chop, burn-barrel murder featured in the Ann Rule book No Regrets. During his years working on Orcas, Clever was regarded by some as “the only real cop the island ever had.” Others remember him for once shooting and wounding a suspect who attacked him, leading to a lawsuit that the county’s insurance company settled.
Clever remained aggressive—“In my younger days, no one I chased ever got away”—but he was able to adjust to small-island community policing so well that parents of kids flirting with trouble would have him come over to put the fear of God and jail into them, after which, to those who chose the right path, he became Uncle Ray.
At sixty-five, the former all-American swimmer has added some girth around the middle, but it’s like the meat on a summer bear—solid. Clever retired from the force before Colt became an issue, but was pissed that someone was running rampant on Orcas and picking on his friends. And he wasn’t impressed with how well the sheriff’s office had done against Colt so far.
The sheriff, though, was taking the Stewart break-ins seriously. According to Clever, one of the island’s young deputies was detailed to set up a one-man stakeout inside Chuck’s hangar. He spent an entire night there, and later told other officers that he’d been very uneasy inside the dark, echoing hangar. He said he had a creepy feeling that someone was watching him. He kept hearing noises that didn’t make sense and said he was very happy once daybreak came.
Meanwhile, the FBI (still officially not interested in the case) was running a trap and trace on Pam Kohler’s phone line. They saw that calls had been made from a number belonging to Chuck Stewart. According to Clever, when they contacted Stewart and told him about the trace, there was a chilling When a Stranger Calls moment because the phone calling Pam’s number wasn’t the one in the hangar. On March 11 and 15, calls had been made from inside Stewart’s house.
Even more disturbing, says Clever, was that the family had been home on the dates the late-night calls were made. Chuck Stewart was incensed that someone was messing with his family. “If [Chuck] himself could have laid hands on this kid there would have been bloodshed. He would have torn him apart; he was that angry.” Chuck wanted action and his connections went well beyond local government. He had friends in very high places and, according to Clever, an FBI official flew in from Washington, D.C., to kick some asses into gear.
Together, Sheriff Cumming and the FBI came up with an elaborate plan to finally put an end to the Barefoot Bandit’s run. Since Colt had taken such an interest in and was apparently tracking Chuck Stewart, they’d set a trap at his home. Tactically, the place seemed ideal. Stewart’s property lies on two scalloped beaches in an area called Lover’s Cove at the base of Turtleback Mountain, just north of the turtle’s head. The mountain here rises precipitously to over one thousand feet in less than half a mile—so ridiculously rugged and steep that when trying to go uphill you’re forced to scramble on all fours. Two narrow gorges that feed down to the cove would funnel anyone trying to escape into narrow choke points. There are only five homes on that section of coast, with just two private roads leading in and out. To the west lay the 45-degree water and deadly currents of President Channel.
Even though the terrain negated Colt’s sheer speed, the authorities still had to be prepared to chase him on foot, something the Orcas deputies were not up to. The plan called for an
elite FBI tactical team—gung ho, highly trained, and in excellent shape—to form a heavily armed ring around the outside of the house. The other part of the trap would be laid inside the home, where two FBI supervising agents and the San Juan County detective who’d been in charge of the Colton case from the beginning would be waiting to grab him. Local deputies would seal the roads and form the outer perimeter. Cumming also had the nuclear option, with a Homeland Security Black Hawk, a Whatcom County Sheriff’s helicopter, dog teams from Whatcom and Snohomish Counties, tactically trained Homeland Security agents, and two five-man teams of Marysville manhunters all standing by to launch into the operation if needed. In all, there were thirty-five local and federal law enforcement officers and all their high-tech assets arrayed against one barefoot teenager. On paper, it seemed a lock.
The operation was planned for St. Paddy’s Day, March 17. The Stewarts went off island, leaving their home and hangar irresistibly empty. It was cold, a damp 40 degrees at sunset, when a large group of us began to gather east of town. We kept warm with fiddles, bodhrans, brown bread, and Jameson, and for once it seemed like operational security held because there wasn’t a word around the bonfire about the Lover’s Cove stakeout. While we ramped up the craic, a delivery truck made its way down the winding road etched into the steep hillside leading to the Stewarts’ place. No one knew where Colt was and whether he had the area under surveillance, so the commercial van was used to secretly infiltrate the cop and two agents into the house. The inner trap was set.
