by Bob Friel
Meanwhile, the FBI tactical team was still on the mainland, racing down I-5. That’s when the best-laid plans started to go awry.
Living in the San Juans means dealing with the ferries. Each island gets a quota of cars on every boat. In the winter, you can arrive at the terminal a half hour before a sailing and still get on. At the other extreme is the Fourth of July weekend, when a line of cars can back up into downtown Anacortes and you may have to wait eight hours to get on a ferry. Residents know to plan their summer lives so they never have to leave on a Sunday or come back on a Friday unless it’s a dire emergency. The rest of the year, you know to adjust your schedule to allow enough time to get to the ferry landing. The FBI declined a Freedom of Information Act request for the details of their St. Paddy’s Day ferry travel, but, simply put, the highly trained tactical team missed the boat.
If an Orcas resident misses the ferry and it’s just a matter of making him late for dinner, he curses and then heads back into Anacortes to load up on relatively cheap groceries and gas, and maybe gets a fast-food fix at the McDonald’s. If, however, it’s very important that he get out to the island and can’t wait for the next boat, there are a number of options. Two different small airlines fly from Anacortes to Orcas for $69 a person. For $350, a fast charter boat will run small groups and their gear to Orcas in less than a third of the time it takes on the ferry. So, if you positively, absolutely have to get there, no problem. Now, if you’re an FBI tactical team that’s going to be late for the big stakeout, you have those options plus even more. Your federal brethren in Homeland Security have super-speedy 1,200-horsepower interceptor boats, in both Coast Guard and Customs and Border Patrol flavors, based just up the shoreline in Bellingham. Plus you have San Juan County’s own Sheriff’s Office boat available. There’s no reasonable excuse why the FBI team wasn’t able to get to Orcas on time. But they didn’t.
This left the two FBI special agents and the San Juan detective inside the Stewarts’ house with a choice: stay inside or move outside. Colt had already proven he could escape stakeouts set up inside homes just by turning and running. The only time he’d ever been caught was when he was found inside a home and then bottled up from the outside. The story from a San Juan deputy who worked the case is that the three did move outside the home for a while, but then went back inside because they got cold. (When that detail leaked out, Orcas residents began to call it the Cabela’s moment because if the cops had worn their longjohns, they would’ve been comfy enough to wait outside and probably could have caught Colt.)
When the FBI SWAT team finally made it to the island, they were met by an Orcas deputy and led out past Jack Cadden’s Bonny Brook Farm to the private switchback road that heads toward Lover’s Cove. It was decision time again: go all the way to Stewart’s and risk scaring Colt off if he was already lurking nearby, or hold back and wait. They decided to wait and parked on a small patch of ground where several driveways converged about a mile from the target house.
After midnight, a truck approached the crossroads. According to Ray Clever, the FBI agents and Orcas deputy let it pass unchallenged. Any local islander seeing a cop car or a mysterious black SUV parked on the side of his residential road would have stopped to ask what was happening. The person driving this truck, though, kept going. Another suspicious fact about the truck was that it belonged to the Stewarts; it was the one they’d left at their hangar.
And, of course, Colt was driving it.
COLT DROVE TOWARD THE Stewarts’ home, but stopped short and parked the truck sideways across the road, blocking anyone from driving in or out. It appeared he smelled a trap, probably from sighting the vehicle parked at the crossroads. The odd thing is that instead of taking off into the woods, Colt continued on foot up to Chuck Stewart’s house. Game on.
There are two stories told by different San Juan County police officers at this point. One says that as Colt was about to open the front door, he heard motion in the house and turned and ran. The other says that Colt actually opened the front door, walked in, and flipped on all the lights.
Conventional wisdom would be that hitting the lights was a stupid move on Colt’s part. Actually, by Clever’s thinking, it was brilliant.
“If he’d come in and left the lights off, and there were people in there that knew how to play this game, they’d have come out of the dark and taken him down. So instead, he surprises them by turning on the lights. The FBI agents hesitate just for a moment, thinking, Well, maybe this is somebody that belongs here. The kid’s got it preplanned… He doesn’t hesitate. He one-eighties and he’s gone.”
When he heard the agents react, Colt turned and ran off into the darkness. Sheriff Cumming later reported that Colt was positively identified, and from what one of the officers told a local resident, they were close enough to see that he had night-vision equipment.
At 1:15 a.m., Bill Cumming lit the bat signal. Colt was trapped down in Lover’s Cove, but the sheriff didn’t want to take any chances. He called in all the backup and reinforcements at his disposal. Even if Colt was only a property criminal, this kid had embarrassed his department, cost it the confidence of residents, and pissed off VIPs. He’d now get the full shock-and-awe treatment. Deputies sealed off the roads. The FAA even set up a temporary flight restriction (TFR) around the entire west side of Orcas in order to clear the airspace.
The sheriff’s office put out word that a capture was imminent. Mission accomplished.
BACK NEAR THE TOP of the road leading to Lover’s Cove, Henry and Donna McNeil had been asleep for hours. Donna works as postmistress at the Orcas Landing office, and her family has been on the island since pioneer days. Donna grew up with her grandparents’ stories of how during the Depression folks on Orcas who knew how to hunt and fish helped feed their neighbors who didn’t. She was raised as a throwback island gal, crabbing, fishing, and hunting, even earning her high school spending money by selling raccoon pelts. As a young girl, she rode her horse all over Turtleback, and knows every one of its deer trails and skidder roads. She’d seen a lot of things on the mountain, but never expected anything like this.
The dogs went on alert first, which woke Donna up at 1:30 a.m. “Then there was this grumbling that got louder and louder, and suddenly the whole house is filled with light shooting in all the windows and skylights.” Waking up into what looked like a scene from an alien invasion movie, Donna jumped out of bed and ran to the door. Down on Jack Cadden’s field, a Black Hawk was dropping off the manhunters. “We had no idea what was going on. We never expected Colt to come out here; he was an Eastsound problem, so we had no clue.” The helicopter took off and came right at them, stopping only one hundred feet away and hovering at eye level over the road that ran next to their hilltop house. “The pilot turned on a red light in the cockpit so we could see him,” says Donna. “And then he waved.”
The chopper would move down toward the cove and sweep the area, then come back to hover near their house, over and over. Donna turned on her police scanner and could tell they were chasing someone. At 3:30 a.m., they saw a light out in the trees and Donna called the sheriff’s office. “They told me, ‘Just stay in your house,’ but wouldn’t give me any more information.” That didn’t sit well with Henry. “Horseshit, this is my property,” so he strapped on a .45 under his bathrobe and went out in his moccasins to check around. As he walked to the edge of the woods, he saw flashlights swinging, heard voices hollering back and forth and radios going off, and saw dark figures moving through his private skeet-shooting range. One of the lights caught Henry in its beam and immediately men started shouting, “Halt! FBI! FBI! FBI!” Henry held up his hands and shouted back, “Homeowner! Homeowner!”
The FBI tactical guys asked Henry to go back inside, but he told them he was going to look around his property. He went over to an old blue pickup parked on a patch of clay that’d turned mucky from the recent rains. Henry shined his light on the ground to make sure he didn’t step in the mud, and checked inside the truck
.
Donna called the county again, demanding some information. Finally, a deputy pulled into their driveway and said that they were after Colton Harris-Moore. Donna told him about the abandoned farmhouse back in the woods on her parents’ property. “He sluffed it off, saying, ‘We don’t think he’s gotten this far. He was spotted down at the crossroads.’”
HOMELAND SECURITY CALLS THEIR UH-60 Black Hawks “tactical apprehension aircraft,” and outfits them with cutting-edge catch-’em gear. The copters’ Star Safire FLIR is so sensitive that it can zoom in not only on a warm body, but just on the residual heat where someone has touched an object. It makes tracking someone who’s barefoot even easier than if he were wearing shoes because he leaves a trail of warm footprints that show up white against the cold ground. Conditions were ideal, as it’d dropped into the mid-30s, making warm bodies stand out even brighter. One thing Colt had going for him was the tree cover, since Orcas is primarily forested in evergreens. The thick layers of fir and cedar acted as insulation to hide his thermal signature. Unlike the Ace Hardware chase, though, the searchers knew basically where Colt was. He might be able to hide from the Black Hawk by finding a big fleshy cedar and hunkering down underneath, but as soon as he stopped moving, the dogs should have caught up to him.
Since they had information that Colt used police scanners, the searchers even used a special tactical frequency he couldn’t eavesdrop on. That, though, caused communications trouble since not all the cops had the same radios. Turtleback also blocked signals, and an Orcas deputy had to station his vehicle on the road just beside the McNeils’ so he could relay messages among the teams.
Early in the morning of what was now the eighteenth, a request went out to the Orcas Island Fire Department Auxiliaries to set up a big pancake breakfast for the search teams. Everyone assumed it was going to be a celebration.
The Orcas rumor mill also had to put on extra workers once the sun came up. Reliable word varied from “They’ve got him trapped against a cliff” to “cornered in a shed” to “He went in the water.” TV reporters were tipped off and Seattle crews started toward the island. As the hours passed, though, it became apparent—at least to locals—that things weren’t wired as tight as they appeared.
Tactical hunter teams started going from house to house, waking residents for permission to search their properties. One resident asked if there was any danger. “Don’t worry,” he was told. “We have Turtleback Mountain surrounded.”
It’s not wise to laugh at someone holding an automatic weapon, but anyone who knew Orcas could tell you that unless the U.S. Army’s Tenth Mountain Division was also deployed out in the bushes, there was no way Turtleback was surrounded.
AFTER DONNA MCNEIL LEFT for work, Henry went back out to walk the property. He stopped at the chicken coop to make sure the birds were okay and found a surprise—no eggs. They’d been off the island on the seventeenth, and the hens had been laying five a day all month. There should have been ten eggs. It’s hard to imagine someone running from a helicopter stopping to pick up eggs, but they never found an explanation. It also lends some credibility to the idea of searching every “farmhouse, henhouse, outhouse, and dog house.”
Whether or not there was a fly-by egg heist, the next thing Henry found was less equivocal. In what had been a smooth patch of clay mud near his pickup three hours before, he now found a big bare footprint. He called the police and Donna, who came back home to find a yard filled with black cars with no license plates. Seven guys—FBI, Marysville troopers in full camo, Homeland Security agents in all-black tactical gear, and deputies from Snohomish and San Juan Counties—were all puzzling over the print like they were Bigfoot fanatics. They also spotted a number of partials and a second full footprint near the chicken coop. “The head FBI agent said, ‘No, that’s not his print,’” says Henry. “He said it was too small, like a size nine.” (A professional tracker hired by CBS News later estimated that the prints were made by someone who wore a size thirteen shoe.) “Then he asked us if we’d been running around barefoot that night. Yeah, right.”
Whoever made the tracks appeared to have been making a detour around the deputy sitting in his truck relaying radio calls. Henry asked why they weren’t bringing a dog up since the prints were certainly fresh enough to track. “They told us that the dog team had gone back to the mainland at five-thirty a.m.”
Donna asked the searchers if they’d found anything at the old farmhouse. “They all looked at each other. The Orcas deputy hadn’t told anyone about it. They got all excited, so I asked them if they wanted me to take them to it. They said, ‘No, ma’am, these are professional trackers.’” It was full light out, and Donna says she described exactly how to get there. More than thirty minutes later, she says, a call came in from the professional trackers reporting that they’d gotten lost heading to the two-story farmhouse a quarter mile away.
THE SEARCH CONTINUED THROUGHOUT the day. Local squad cars crawled down Crow Valley Road with their trunks open and filled with piles of Marysville manhunters, legs and rifle barrels sticking out. The FBI agents charged past in black vehicles, driving back and forth from one fruitless hot tip to another. Roadblocks were set up, taken down, and then set up again on the same roads. The Black Hawk and sheriff’s copter continued to sweep the terrain with their surveillance pods while patrol boats scanned the shoreline.
At 3 p.m., Sheriff Cumming told the troops to start winding down. At 4:11, he put out a press release: “The extensive, intense search for Colton Harris-Moore on Orcas Island has now been scaled back to an ongoing investigation… This is an ongoing, multi-agency investigation involving both county and mainland-based law enforcement agencies. Therefore, no interviews and no additional, specific details of the search activity or the investigation will be available.”
THERE WAS A STRANGE reaction on the island. On the one hand, many people thought the big paramilitary overkill was ridiculous. However, there were now also a lot more folks officially scared. The story that this was just a nonconfrontational property thief and squatter didn’t jive with black helicopters roaring around all night and day, and heavily armed men going door to door. Local authorities on tourist- and retiree-sensitive Orcas had long given the sense that this kid was just a nuisance. If he’d been a serious threat, like a murderer or a rapist, then they’d have really gone after him and, boom, it’d all be over. But now everyone wondered: If this was someone who’d been leaving behind a trail of bodies instead of just bare footprints, what would they be doing? Sending in helicopters, manhunters, dog teams, and the FBI? Done, done, done, and done. With no results.
Evidence that a lot of residents were thinking about their personal security was the sudden rush of orders with our local gun dealer for “less-lethal” rubber bullets. Designed to stop someone without killing him, these shotgun rounds used to be called nonlethal, but depending on where they hit the target, they weren’t.
One of the last tips on the eighteenth came from Carolyn Ashby, who’d been sitting at her kitchen table in Crow Valley, three-quarters of a mile from Turtleback, watching the helicopters. At 3:30 p.m., she and her daughter spotted a “great big” man dressed in a black hoodie acting very strange in one of their cow pastures. While Carolyn was on the phone with the police dispatcher, she lost sight of the guy. “I carried the phone out onto the porch, and suddenly he walked out from behind a shed. I said, ‘There he is!’ and he took off running. He ran through the tall grass uphill… I’ve chased cows through that field and it’s not easy.” Ashby’s Holsteins and horses lifted their heads and watched the stranger run by. “They must have been thinking, Oh boy, he’s in trouble, because the cows know they get in trouble whenever they break into that field.”
A deputy responded and a helicopter hovered over their property for about an hour, but to no avail. “My son-in-law is six-four and they swooped down on him, but they could never find the guy in the field.”
Carolyn and her husband Eb’s grandsons are the fifth generat
ion of their family on Orcas. In all their time here, she says nothing like this had ever happened. “Things just aren’t the same anymore. My daughter takes a baseball bat when she goes out at night to get wood. When you let the dogs out after dark and they take off after something, you’re scared to open the door and let them back in because you don’t know what’s out there. You feel trapped inside your own house.”
A number of older folks took the threat so seriously that they started planning to move off the island. They could take the added expense, the long trips to get mainland medical treatment, the extra day it took to get anywhere else in the country to see grandchildren, and all the other inconveniences of living in the San Juans because it was such a peaceful and safe setting. But they hadn’t signed up for Black Hawks chasing fugitives through their backyards.
Chapter 25
Down on his 120-acre spread at the base of Turtleback where he raises cattle, eighty-five-year-old Jack Cadden had been rooting for Colt to wise up, quit his shenanigans, and go off and get a life somewhere. “He was a smart bastard, kept the deputies busy. If he’d a put all that smarts to a good use he woulda made something out of himself. To tell you the truth, I kinda hoped they never would catch him.”
When Jack found out that it was because of Colt that the “son-of-a-bitch helicopter” kept waking him up, he did something that he’d never done in his seventy-eight years on Orcas: “First time I’ve ever locked a goddamn door on this island!”
That a guy like Jack was locking his doors says something. As a seventeen-year-old marine, Jack took part in the invasions of Guam and Okinawa, got shot twice, and came home with two Purple Hearts, a Silver Star, and a Japanese sword that, Jack says, “one of their officers didn’t need anymore.”
