by Bob Friel
Jack Cadden ain’t scared of the dark or anything else. Now, though, because of Colt he had to leave lights burning all night.
If Colt came into his house, Jack said, he’d just handle it. “If he made me, I woulda shot him in the leg or foot or something.”
Unlike other guys who’d been puffing up and talking about shooting people during all this, you had to take Jack seriously. And though I know he would’ve given Colt every opportunity to back away before putting an extra hole in him, Jack actually had previous experience shooting at barefoot guys. And that’s worth a quick Farmer Jack story:
“This is back in the days when there was quite a batch of hippies around the island—crazy bastards. Nancy and I were sitting eating breakfast, and here comes this strange-looking guy across the field. I picked up the old twelve-gauge that I kept loaded in the corner and went out on the porch. Well, sure enough he comes up toward the house. I said, ‘I don’t know what the hell you want around here, but you better get gone.’ He picked up a stick and started waving it around, so I let one fly right over his head. Man, he took off down the road, right across that sharp crushed rock, barefooted! I came back in and Nancy’d called the law. About a half hour later, this sheriff’s car comes up the driveway and they had the guy in the backseat. They says, ‘Is this the guy?’ And I said, ‘Sure looks like him. What did you bring him back here for… you want me to shoot him now?’ They said, ‘Oh no no no no!’”
SPECULATION BY THE EVENING of the eighteenth was that Colt lay crumpled on the rocks below the west coast cliffs. Other stories circulated that Turtleback was riddled with caves and that’s where he was hiding. A detective called Donna McNeil to ask where the caves were, and she explained that though there was a mine shaft from an old gold mine, it was now in a homeowner’s front yard and had been filled in. She did tell them about a couple of quarries on the mountain, and says that a search near one of them turned up a campsite tied to Colt.
FBI agents and Marysville manhunters stayed on the island after the big chase and canvassed homes around Turtleback, asking the residents if they knew “any good hiding places,” but turned up nothing. Months later, hikers stumbled upon a campsite on the mountain where it rises to a commanding view above Crow Valley. It was a spot less than a mile and a half from Stewart’s and only a half mile from the Brodys’ home. The camp was littered with water bottles, food wrappers, and three Pilot’s Operating Handbooks taken from airplanes.
There were a couple strange incidents in the days after the big chase, both in an area between Turtleback and Eastsound. In one, a man came home to find his shower running.
Then, remarkably, on March 22, Colt went back to Chuck Stewart’s home. He broke in and stole Mrs. Stewart’s set of keys, bottles of Pellegrino water, and one of her son’s sweatshirts. The Black Hawk launched, but again found nothing. On the twenty-sixth, Chuck climbed into his Pilatus and saw that the plane’s POH had been pulled out and opened up to the “start” checklist. Then on April 1, his caretaker discovered that the hangar’s alarm system had been tampered with.
One night during all this activity—he’s not sure exactly which—Josh got a phone call. “Colt was inside a hangar he’d broken into. He called late and said he could hear the helicopters flying around. We didn’t talk long, though. He said he had to run.” Josh says Colt’s manner was just like always: “Totally relaxed.”
After that, Colt lay very low. There were no credible sightings for several weeks. The police believed—or at least wanted to believe—that their massive show of force had chased him off the island. Residents, though, seemed tuned to something, some energy that Colt brought to the island. It was the same feeling you get when you’re walking through grizzly bear or cougar country—that little background buzz, a tickle on the neck. And that was still around.
In our cabin it’d become an uncomfortable running joke. Every time we heard a strange noise in the night, either Sandi or I would yell out, “Knock it off, Colt, we’re trying to sleep!” Then we’d laugh. And then we’d listen harder.
Murphy felt it, or maybe he was just feeding off everyone around him. He definitely acted more alert as we did our daily two-mile hike through the Deer Harbor woods. There was one spot not far from the cabin where several days in a row he stopped and stared into the trees, refusing to budge until I put all my weight on the leash. Since early March, there’d been a persistent rumor on Orcas that there was a $500,000 reward for capturing Colt. Where before there’d been just a few vigilante types roaming Eastsound, now there were guys all over the island arming themselves and taking to the trees. I emailed Sheriff Cumming, asking him to make some kind of statement saying there was no such huge reward (at this time there was a total of $3,000 offered among rewards posted by Orcas, Camano, and Crime Stoppers). But he never put the rumor to rest. It occurred to me that the cops had no reason to quash it since the supposed big reward put a whole lot of camo-wearing, off-season deer-hunting, shit-kicking mossnecks out in the field shaking the bushes. Plus, with only a $3,000 reward, it was just as likely that one of these guys would shoot Colt and mount him over his fireplace instead of turning him in.
With the rumored bounty on top of all the anger, it wasn’t the safest time to go traipsing through people’s woods. After Murphy stopped at the same spot the third time, I called the neighbor and asked if I could hike in to check it out. I found what looked like the perfect campsite, but no one was around and there was no evidence except for a large pile of scat. I ran down the possible suspects: too big for a raccoon, too far from the water and not fishy enough for an otter, no stray dogs around… The only wild animal in the area big enough would be a deer, but their droppings are usually in Milk Dud form… What the hell was I doing? This kid actually had me kneeling in the woods examining excrement like Kolchak the Crap Stalker.
IF I WAS GOING goofy, at least I wasn’t alone. Most of the people I spoke to admitted they’d been calling out to shadows and noises in the dark woods. Five days after the big Lover’s Cove debacle, I spent an evening manning the Eastsound lookout atop Homegrown with Kyle and his .44 Magnum. He hadn’t been getting much sleep since the break-in.
“This store makes a million noises,” said Kyle. “Refrigerators clicking on and off, the wind flapping the vents, birds landing on the skylight… One night I heard this banging downstairs, grabbed the gun, and ran down, but there’s nothing there. We figured out later it was Pumpkin’s tail wagging. Another time we scared the shit out of one of the deputies who’d climbed up the outside stairs because he thought he saw something up here. The dogs heard him and I come running out of the office in my underwear with the gun, and we’re yelling, ‘Hold it right there!’ at each other. So yeah, we’re nervous, but you’re only paranoid if he’s not out there… and we know he is.”
It was a quiet night in town, but every ten minutes or so, someone would walk by and Kyle would jump up. “See!” It seemed like suddenly every kid on Orcas was at least six-three and wore a hoodie that made him look taller. Kyle had bumped into some of the young guys wandering around. “They were out there packing Tasers, looking for Colt.” Kyle’s theory was that some of the other kids out wandering at night were actually helping Colt: “Maybe they’re acting like decoys.”
The speculation about whether Colt had help on Orcas seemed to end when investigators reportedly found a note written in what looked like a female’s handwriting that he’d left behind in Stewart’s truck. According to a detective familiar with the case, the note was addressed to Colt and warned him about a deputy who lived in a marina, presumably Deer Harbor. It also gave directions to a home and it included tips such as which car to look for in order to tell if the owners were around. The note discussed a plan for stealing a boat and heading for Alaska. “It talked about finding a long-range cruising boat,” says the detective. “And appeared to involve at least two people other than Colt, although we wondered whether Colt had invented all this and planted it as a diversion to throw us off his trail.�
�
There were about a dozen boats moored at Deer Harbor Marina that could make the six-hundred-mile journey to Alaska without having to risk stopping for fuel. Cruising-style boats trade speed for long range, though, so there’d certainly be a lot of opportunities for the authorities to spot a boat during the approximately seventy-five-hour trip. But it had to be an attractive thought. If you ran only at night and laid up in one of the myriad secluded coves during daylight, chances of discovery were much less. And when you got wherever you were going, you’d have a comfortable floating home. Paint over the boat’s name, and it’s not inconceivable that you could anchor someplace almost indefinitely. The issue then would be, as usual, feeding yourself. The other problem was timing. Usually only commercial fishermen make that trip outside the calmer summer season. Winter winds and waves make the exposed stretch between the north end of Vancouver Island and the start of the Inside Passage a rough place for even large ships.
WHEN KYLE PULLED OUT his insurance file the day he got hit, he discovered something disturbing beyond how much the cash loss and $5,000 in damage was going to cost him out-of-pocket. “Not long after I bought Homegrown in 2006, I had a break-in. When I looked at those records, I realized that other than the chalk footprints, it was the exact same burglary. Same method and place of entry, same way of laying out the tills. It was total déjà vu.” In the previous break-in Kyle lost high-tech goodies, a cutting-edge laptop, and an external hard drive loaded with all of his music. The crime was never solved or even really investigated. Kyle, though, was now sure it had been Colt.
“He waits until you think he’s gone and you let your guard down and then he strikes again.” Kyle was convinced Colt was feeding off the island’s energy. “It feels like I’m going to wake up and he’ll be leaning over about to bite my neck.”
COLT’S FASCINATION WITH RETURNING to hit the same places was very unnerving. In April, two events happened that involved previous victims. One seems like just another opportunistic break-in, while the other was much more unsettling.
At 11:15 p.m. on the eleventh, the telltale turbine scream of a Black Hawk tore the air just above our cabin. My first thought was that it was heading to Lover’s Cove again, and I wasn’t looking forward to spending the night making small talk with a deputy manning the roadblock. As I walked outside, though, I could still hear the helicopter. Up the hill where our knoll falls into what we call the Dark Forest, the Black Hawk’s blinking red light showed through the trees. It was close. I jumped in my truck and drove to where Deer Harbor narrows to a fifty-foot bottleneck between the bay and a shallow wetland. The Channel Road Bridge crosses at that spot; it’s the only way those of us living on the west side of Deer Harbor can get to anywhere else on the island. I stopped in the middle of the bridge and watched the helicopter as it hovered almost directly above, its brilliant NightSun spotlight hunting the woods and fields of Cayou Caye.
Earlier in the day, Ryan Carpenter, owner of the Deer Harbor Inn Restaurant whose credit cards were used to order spy cameras and a flight helmet in 2008, had gone to do some work on a house he rents out. The three-bedroom home sits high atop a hill, its windows offering a gorgeous view of the entire harbor. Ryan walked into the living room and noticed that the wooden blinds had been lowered. “They were old and didn’t work too well, and whoever lowered them broke bits and pieces off trying to get them down.” Ryan switched on a light and saw that someone had been playing house.
He had cooked popcorn and eaten it by candlelight—leaving a pool of wax on the floor. Next to the wax sat a water bottle and a couple recent newspapers. One of them, a copy of the Islands’ Sounder, was marked “Lobby” and had been taken from the Inn at Orcas Island, just down the road.
Conveniently for whoever had been inside snacking and reading, Ryan himself had moved a king-size mattress into the living room from a bedroom where he’d been working on the oak floors.
Ryan didn’t call the police. Instead he called his brother. “I told him that the Barefoot Bandit had been there and maybe we could catch him for the reward.”
Ryan worked his shift at the restaurant, and was walking home at nightfall when he noticed a light burning in the rental. He figured he must have left it on. “I stopped home to tell my wife I was going over to turn it off. Then I stepped back outside, looked over, and it was already off. That’s when I got a little scared.” He called 911 and the sheriff’s office told him someone would be right there. He then called his brother, Matt, who grabbed a baseball bat and came over. “The adrenaline was pumping,” says Ryan. “And we’re waiting and waiting.”
After forty minutes, they couldn’t take it anymore and, together with their innkeeper and his dog, they went across the road to the house. The innkeeper went in the front door while Ryan went in the back. No one was in the house, but the Sounder and Seattle Times were gone. “It’s like he just came back for the newspapers.” When they went back outside, they heard something or someone crashing through the woods. “It could have been a deer, but didn’t sound like it.”
Ryan says that fifteen minutes after they went into the house, he saw the first deputy. “They reprimanded us for going in before they got there because it could have been dangerous, but it seemed like it took them a long time to get there.”
The Black Hawk arrived two hours after Ryan called and stayed on station until after midnight, delighting local residents who got to stay up late and make shadow puppets when its spotlight shined in their windows.
With the action so close, neighbors now said they planned on putting a sign at the bottom of our road directing Colt to my cabin.
THE NEXT COLTONESQUE EVENT that month was more serious. Chuck Stewart and his wife were in their bedroom overlooking President Channel. A light suddenly appeared out on the black water. Tug boats pulling log booms and the occasional commercial fisherman traverse the passage between Orcas and Waldron Island at night in April, but few other boats. The light swung back and forth, but it looked too small for a boat’s spotlight. As it came closer, they realized it was a headlamp worn by someone in a kayak paddling toward their property. They knew no sane kayaker—or even a tourist—would be out there at night.
They immediately called 911 and Sheriff Bill Cumming himself jumped into the police boat over on San Juan Island along with two deputies. The sheriff put the lash to Guardian’s turbo diesels and the thirty-five-foot aluminum catamaran (bought with money from a drug seizure) made it on scene even before an Orcas deputy could get there by car from Eastsound. Pulling up off Stewart’s beach, they fired up an infrared scope and spotted a figure approaching the house from the water. The Stewarts have a dock, but like everyone else, they remove the lower, floating portion for the winter. This meant the Guardian was unable to let the deputies off. The Orcas officer in his patrol vehicle then came down the hill with his lights flashing, and the suspect fled into the night. It seemed almost inconceivable that the same guy who’d walked into an ambush that put thirty-five cops on his ass would come back to the same place and try it again.
“After that,” says Ray Clever, “I said enough of this bullshit. Here’s [Chuck’s] wife, petite blonde, just the soul of an angel, generous and kind, and she’s terrified in her own home. She was ready to close down the school, take everything they own, and get the hell off Orcas. She was in tears, asking me to get her a gun and teach her how to shoot. That really got to me. I called [Chuck] and said, ‘I’m yours, won’t cost you a dime, how can I help?’”
Clever went out to their home to check out its security and came up with some self-defense responses in case they had any more unwanted visitors.
Next he and Chuck went to the hangar. By now there was evidence that Colt had been in there at least four times, but the police still had no idea how he was entering. There were no pry marks on the man door or the large hangar door, so the supposition was that he’d been using a key, though no keys had been missing until the seventeenth.
They stepped inside the man door at th
e southwest corner and Ray began a methodical scan. “We started at the floor level—anything out of place? Any panels loose? No.” They surveyed 360 degrees and then looked higher. As they were checking out the north end of the hangar, where the two-story pilots’ lounge with its kitchen and sleeping area stood as a building inside a building, Chuck noticed something. The hangar has translucent fiberglass panels that act as vertical skylights, and there was one small section, a six-inch strip, that looked brighter than normal near the top of the lounge. Chuck said, “That’s not right.” The pilots’ lounge doesn’t reach the top of the hangar, so there’s a gap between its plywood roof and the ceiling. “We walked up and tried to open the attic door,” says Clever. “We can’t budge it. That ain’t right either.”
They went outside. Attached to the north end of the huge hangar is a shed-roofed storage building. There were crush marks on the downspouts coming off the roof. They pulled out a ladder and climbed up onto the roof that starts about ten feet off the ground. “We walk up to where it’s attached to the side of the hangar and there are two piles of human shit up against the wall.”
The light strip they’d noticed was a gap where Colt had cut out the fiberglass panel and then replaced it, creating a hatch. “We pulled that off, lean in, and here’s a mattress, food, gallon jugs of water, clothing, stuff like [Chuck’s] son’s BlackBerry that’d been taken out of their house, an iPhone, a whole box of junk.” Colt had taken stamps, scissors, bed linens, an insulated mug, a DVD, a mirror, even Glass Plus from the Stewart home to outfit his hideaway in their hangar. He also had a sleeping bag and piss jars. “Then we find the .22 handgun that’d been stolen over in Granite Falls after that plane crash. Then, finally, we find the flight manual from the plane he took from Anacortes in February.”
