The Barefoot Bandit

by Bob Friel

  They left everything where it was and replaced the hatch. Clever’s cop juices were flowing and he told Stewart that this would be the place to catch Colt. Chuck Stewart agreed to fund a private stakeout.

  CLEVER DIDN’T THINK APPREHENDING Colt would be easy. “He’s not some scared kid, he’s out there planning, and it has worked well for him for a long time.”

  It would take some time to put together his Orcas A-team and gather some special equipment, but Ray didn’t want to risk missing Colt. He decided to start running the stakeout with just his thirty-five-year-old protégé, Vitaly. They set up in a storage unit near Stewart’s hangar, but ran into a snag the very first night. The storage unit had an alarm system, which had been turned off. However, unbeknownst to them, it was programmed to automatically reset. When Ray opened the door, the alarm went off and an Orcas deputy responded. “If Colt had been watching, he might have seen us,” says Ray. “But it’s next door, so we didn’t worry too much that we were blown.”

  Over the next week, the stakeout evolved into an elaborate trap. Ray met with John Gorton, Orcas Island’s English-born octogenarian electronics wiz who, after twelve years as a radar engineer with the RAF, spent the rest of his career working on top-secret defense systems for Hughes Aircraft. Gorton moved to Orcas twenty-one years ago at the same time as the Stewarts, and has known the family since then. He runs a video production company on the island, and has been asked to set up a few surveillance systems over the years. Before Colt, though, the jobs tended to be Orcas in nature, such as setting up night-vision cameras for someone who wanted to know who was knicking the fruit off his apple trees.

  For Stewart’s hangar, Gorton designed a system using a series of audio and infrared video sensors that fed monitors in the storage unit. They knew they had a challenge because of Colt’s obsession with surveillance equipment. “The problem with infrared cameras,” says Gorton, “is that in a pitch-dark room, you can see the illumination diodes if you know what to look for.” Gorton, though, had a connection in the tech business who sent him a prototype of a new kind of IR camera, one with a totally invisible light source.

  The cameras and microphones would let the stakeout team know when Colt was inside the hangar. Clever and Stewart felt sure that Colt was planning on coming back for the Pilatus. “Once he climbed down from his nest to the hangar floor, we had him,” says Clever. The first thing they’d done was replace the hangar’s locks. There’d been deadbolts with knobs on the inside—one twist and you’re out the door. Now, you needed a key to get in and to get out. All the locks had also been rekeyed so there was no chance Colt had a copy.

  Once Colt entered the hangar, three of the four-member team would rush out of the storage unit and cover the exits while the other kept watch at the monitors. Vitaly, says Clever, is the fastest guy he’s ever seen. “He could run that boy down, no doubt.” Ray also recruited two men he does martial arts training with, Chuck Silva and a local high school teacher, Corey Wiscomb.

  Corey had been at the center of a recent Colt-related controversy. He’d given students in his Math with Business Applications class a challenge: come up with a business and launch it online within four hours. These were all Orcas kids living through the biggest news event to ever hit the island. They understandably thought of Colt, and designed a T-shirt that showed a silhouette of someone running from other figures and a cop car, with text that read: “You Betta’ Run, Colt, Run.”

  There’d been some local students on Colt’s Facebook pages urging him on, but those were underclassmen. These guys and gals doing the T-shirt were seniors, and they said they understood the problems that the Barefoot Bandit was causing in their community. Groups of Orcas High boys were even heading out into the woods on weekends to search for Colt. The words on the T-shirt, they said, meant “We’re coming to get you!” Their plan was to donate all proceeds from sales to Colt’s local victims, and they stated such on the Web page. It seemed like a no-brainer to the kids. With the atmosphere of fear and hate growing on the island, their project even had a sweet touch of doe-eyed idealism to it. “We thought it might help start the community’s healing process,” says student Alison O’Toole.

  The project became a twofer. Along with the practical experience of starting a business, the kids also got a civics lesson. A number of islanders went apeshit on them. One business owner said that if they didn’t immediately pull it all down, he’d refuse to ever let any Orcas High School student into his store again. There was also a referendum coming up on a bond for repairs on school buildings, and some folks threatened that they’d fight against it if the kids didn’t cease and desist. “We were totally shocked by the reaction,” says student Sam Prado.

  The final decision was supposedly left up to the students, but there was a flurry of phone calls that went much higher than the twelfth grade. Ultimately the kids backed down, getting a cold-water baptism in small-town politics.

  One of the reasons Ray Clever says he asked Corey to help with the stakeout was because he knew he’d “taken crap for the T-shirt thing.” The main reason, though, was because he and Chuck Silva are what Clever calls “bloody proficient” fighters. “If Colt put up a struggle, it would not have gone well for the young man.”

  Not that the plan was to let it get to hand-to-hand combat. Chuck Stewart outfitted Clever’s team with bulletproof vests, shotguns loaded with less-lethal baton rounds “to knock him down,” and Tasers “to sizzle him like bacon.” They also carried high-powered strobes designed to disorient him. Clever would be the only one armed with lethal ammo. “I had no intention of shooting him… unless he presented, then all bets were off.”

  Ray asked the sheriff for a police radio so if it all went down, his posse could keep in touch with the deputies to make sure everyone knew where everyone else was and make sure nobody got shot accidentally. Instead of a radio, they sent a police scanner, which Ray took as a slap in the face. Just in case, he outfitted his team in bright red T-shirts and got word to all the Orcas deputies to not shoot the guys in red.

  After Ray told the sheriff about finding the gun in Colt’s nest, Bill Cumming wrote an email to all the Orcas deputies, saying, “This information raises the threat level… You are to use this information as though he is armed and take all appropriate precautions with him. Also, under no circumstances are any of you (us) to discuss this information with anyone other than those who NEED to know.”

  Ray and his team continued to work their day jobs, then every evening at dusk they sneaked into the storage unit, where they took turns watching the monitors and sleeping on a mattress laid on the cement floor.

  While the Clever team lay in wait for Colt, others were actively tracking him through the Orcas woods. Colt not only had manhunters on his trail, but now, most fittingly, a Sasquatch hunter. Seventy-year-old Richard Grover brought his four decades of experience in tracking Bigfoot to the search for the elusive Barefoot. A real hope would be that he’d bag both: find Colt and Bigfoot so Orcas could score some more tourist traffic. Grover hunted around Orcas using a dowsing rod tuned to certain energies. Deputies say he actually scared up a teenager wandering through the woods, but unfortunately it turned out to be neither Colt nor a postpubescent Sasquatch.

  ON MAY 10, I got a call from Pam. The FBI agents had been by again. “They told me a boat was stolen off Orcas about a week ago and they think Colt mighta done it.” They asked Pam if she knew where Colt was headed. She told them no. Then she says they told her it might not matter anyway, because the boat hadn’t turned up anywhere and that could mean it sank.

  “They always try to affect me, get me to cry, but it takes a lot to get me to cry. I told them Colt’s a good swimmer. They said, ‘Yeah, but the water’s so cold now that he’d get hypothermia and drown… ’ So I asked them how long it takes for a body to float up. They said a couple of weeks.”

  I’d never heard Pam shaken up like this. She’d been philosophically fatalistic, but the FBI saying Colt could already be lost
beneath the frigid waters seemed to hit her with a cold splash of reality.

  She hadn’t heard from Colt in months, and asked me if I’d write a post on my blog telling Colt to give her a sign that he was alive. One thing her manner told me—and I presume told the agents—is that she really had no clue where Colt was. I figured the FBI was just trying a particularly heartless tactic to try to shake some information out of her. But… maybe they were telling the truth.

  It made sense. Things had been very quiet on the island; no Colt sightings for a month. With the Orcas ferries and airport under surveillance, if he didn’t have someone to hide him in his or her trunk, then stealing a boat would be the easiest way off. I checked the marinas for reports of stolen boats, and there were none. But the island also has many private docks, and there are plenty of dinghies and kayaks beached in waterfront yards. A very strong kayaker who knew how to read a current chart could island hop to the mainland. He’d have to cross a shipping lane, though, presumably at night when ships don’t see or stop for kayaks because the radar reflections off the low-riding craft are about the same as a floating tree branch.

  Setting sail on these waters at night whether in a kayak or small boat always entails some risk. The Salish Sea’s cold currents claim paddlers and boaters even when they’re not skulking around in the dark. The more I thought about it, the more likely it seemed that Colt could indeed be dead, a blanched body wrapped in kelp on some lonely pebbled shoreline. It was a disturbing image that had a stronger effect on me than I expected. So late that afternoon, I wrote a short blog post telling Colt that his mom was worried and asking that he give her a sign to let her know he was okay.

  The next morning, May 11, as I rounded the curve to drive onto Channel Road Bridge, I suddenly slammed on the brakes. There was a thirteen-foot-long bare foot taking up the entire right-hand lane. I guess you could consider that a sign.

  If Colt did it, I was glad he wasn’t dead. At the same time, though, it was a little chilling. I felt like the planchette just moved itself across the Ouija board. I scanned the woods surrounding the slough, sensing that I was being watched.

  The footprint didn’t look like the thirty-nine left on Homegrown’s floor. Of course the difficulty factor between drawing eighteen-inch-long feet with fat chalk and running up and down a bridge in the middle of the night with a can of black spray paint outlining a foot the size of a Volkswagen Beetle is immense, so artistic allowances must be made. I stood on top of my truck and took a photo, which I emailed to Bev Davis to show Pam. Word came back right away that Pam was positive Colt had painted it for her.

  Pam told me she called up the FBI agents and verbally thumbed her nose at them, saying that Colt was definitely alive and now she did know where he was, so there.

  LATE THAT NIGHT, A rock or something else hard hit the metal roof of our cabin. Once again I found myself standing outside in my boxers staring into the blackness. This time, though, I didn’t bring a gun. The footprint on the bridge was about communicating, not threatening. No one showed himself or answered my calls except for a lonely screech owl. If the big foot on the bridge was an “I’m okay,” it was also a “good-bye,” because that was the last sign of the Barefoot Bandit on Orcas Island.

  It was also the stepping off point for the most famous outlaw road trip since Dillinger’s last run.

  Part 4

  OVER THE LINE

  Chapter 26

  It’s about a four-mile kayak paddle from inside Deer Harbor to the closest spot on San Juan Island. However, that doesn’t count tides, winds, or currents, which, if they’re against you, can make that distance the equivalent of a moon shot. From Orcas to Friday Harbor is a forty-minute ferry ride, available to walk-ons and car passengers five or six times a day depending on the season. You can also run between islands via small motor boat in twenty minutes. If you managed to Doctor Doolittle yourself onto the back of a Steller sea lion, it could carry you there in about an hour. The point is, we had no clue how Colt got from Orcas to San Juan Island. No reports came in of stolen boats, cars, or planes. It was possible someone smuggled Colt onto the ferry in his or her car. But if so, why? Why not simply get on one going the other way, toward the mainland, and drive him wherever he wanted to go? Unless, like before, this was just a way to keep playing the game, making things intentionally more difficult, all ego and craftiness, complicating things just to keep the adrenaline flowing.

  Two days after the footprint on the bridge, Colt broke into a home at the southern tip of San Juan Island where it tails toward Lopez. He snagged the owner’s mountain bike and the keys to his twenty-four-foot SeaSport, a Northwest-built sportfishing boat. Late Thursday night/Friday morning, he drove the boat out into Griffin Bay and then curled around Cape San Juan heading east. He cruised by Goose Island, where the honking comes from seals and sea lions, not geese, and then crossed the fast-moving waters of Cattle Pass—named for a load of cows shipwrecked by the Hudson’s Bay Company. On the Lopez side of the channel, Colt skirted Deadman Island and then grounded on Shark Reef. In an attempt to get as close to shore as possible—and maybe in order to cause the least amount of damage to the boat—he raised the engine’s outdrive. He also switched off the batteries before hopping ashore with his gear and the bike.

  Lopez is the third largest of the San Juans. Folks from Orcas and San Juan Island good-naturedly refer to it as “Slowpez” for its countrified atmosphere. The one-finger wave (index finger, thank you very much) is a universal, year-round ritual on Lopez—not just an off-season nicety among locals as it is on Orcas. Lopez’s most notable resident when he’s not in Seattle or cruising the world aboard his 416-foot super-mega-yacht, Octopus, is Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, who owns a 387-acre peninsular chunk of the island.

  Much of Lopez is farm-flat and great for biking. By Friday evening, Colt had ridden the 8.5 miles up to the northeast corner of the island. Cameras at Spencer’s Landing Marina caught him coming down the ramp to the dock at 11 p.m. wearing a big backpack. He looked around carefully at first, spotted a camera tucked up under an eave, and bolted out of its range. He didn’t leave the marina, though, and was tracked on other cameras as he moseyed up and down the four long docks, stopping here and there among the 110 slips like he was at a boat show. He calmly shopped all night, boarding at least six boats. “He was very relaxed, not gun shy about anything,” says Kim Smith, who, along with his wife, Michelle, manages the marina. “It was like he knew the place.”

  The slips at Spencer’s Landing are all taken by full-timers, not strangers—“transient boats” in marina parlance—so there aren’t many security concerns. Plus this is Lopez Island: five of the boats Colt went aboard had been left unlocked. Inside one, he pulled out a chart to study the waters south of the San Juans that included Camano Island. In others he turned on lights and electronics, kicking the tires, checking fuel levels. Each boat was filled with gear, but he didn’t take anything except, apparently, a nap in one of them. Every boat Colt surveyed was capable of making the trip he had planned, but he kept looking for just the right boat. Shortly after 5 a.m., he found her.

  She was a Coastal Craft 300, a thirty-foot-long, aluminum-hulled flybridge cabin cruiser christened Stella Maris—a $400,000 pocket yacht. “It’s a real looker and had all the electronics you could want on it,” says Kim. With a top speed of thirty-two knots and a range you could stretch out to eight hundred nautical miles, she was definitely an Alaska-capable boat. Colt stepped aboard, but found the cabin locked. He spent half an hour unsuccessfully trying to get inside. At 5:45 Saturday morning, with the sun coming up, he walked back up the dock and left the marina.

  Later Saturday morning, a deputy came by and told Kim about the boat stolen on San Juan Island and found on Lopez. He said they figured it was Colton Harris-Moore and that he might be looking to steal another boat. Kim had a couple of large yachts in the marina he’d been doing engine work on, so he secured those as best he could. Since it was a weekend, people who used their boats
as second homes would be living aboard at the dock. Kim figured that activity plus the security cameras would dissuade anyone from nosing around. The owners of the Coastal Craft, two Seattle women who also have a weekend home on Lopez, took their boat out that day to jig for cod. When they returned from fishing that afternoon, Stella Maris had about 150 gallons of fuel left in her tanks.

  Just before 9 p.m. that evening, May 15, Colt came barreling back to the marina on the mountain bike. He parked it at the head of the main dock and went directly to the Stella Maris. A couple from Seattle were on the deck of their sailboat just one slip away, reading books in the twilight. Colt ignored them, though, and went aboard. Fully exposed to anyone who might look up or walk by, he worked on the Coastal Craft’s front hatch for nearly half an hour. The hatches are designed to stay watertight even if a large wave crashes over the bow and are very difficult to break into without causing extensive damage. But Colt finally got it open and climbed inside.

  He turned on the interior lights and methodically searched for what he knew he’d find: ignition keys. They were in a drawer, hidden beneath silverware. Once he knew he could start the boat, he jumped off and went back to grab the bike. He lifted it aboard, unplugged the shore power cord, cranked the diesel engine, and cast off the lines.

  At 9:30 p.m.—with the Seattle couple still contentedly reading—Colt flicked on Stella Maris’s spotlight and motored out of the marina with the fenders still dangling off the sides of the boat. He cruised up around the tip of Lopez, and then set a course not north to Alaska, but south for home.

  When Kim got to work the next morning, he noticed that Stella Maris was missing. No big deal, he first thought, because the women could have come by early and headed out fishing again. Then he saw that the dock lines and power cord were just thrown onto the dock, not neatly coiled like the owners always left them. “I went to the office and looked at our security footage from Saturday night,” says Kim. “Sure enough, here’s the kid taking the boat.” He called the sheriff. His wife, Michelle, suggested they check the footage for Friday night. There, live on tape for more than six hours, was Colt boat shopping.