The Barefoot Bandit

by Bob Friel

  On Sunday morning, a Coast Guard Safe Boat found Stella Maris adrift off Hat Island, aka Gedney, which lies about three miles below the southern end of Camano. With no one aboard, they figured the operator had fallen into the water and launched a search-and-rescue (SAR) mission.

  Kim got in contact with the owners, then told the coast guard they were okay. He asked one of the Guardies whether the Stella Maris’s dinghy was still aboard. When they said yes, he asked if there was a bicycle. “They said no, and I said, ‘He’s gone.’”

  There was no damage to the Stella Maris; the owners say Colt took good care of their boat. The only visible evidence that someone had been aboard were a couple of used towels and a wrapper from a Snickers bar.

  Kim says he then found himself in the middle of a turf war. The San Juan County sheriff didn’t want him to share his surveillance footage with the Island County Sheriff’s Office, and Island County didn’t want to share any information with the coast guard. Kim finally threw up his hands and turned over the recordings to San Juan County, which later released a couple of still frames to the media. According to Kim, they weren’t even the best shots from the video, which had enough resolution to tell Colt had neatly trimmed his hair since his famous photo, plus had let his sideburns grow.

  The authorities never recovered a GPS track from the boat and didn’t know which route Colt took from Lopez south—but it’s easy to guess. The long way is seventy-five miles; the short route is fifty. The shorter path would take him through Deception Pass at night. When the tide is ripping at Deception, two million cubic feet of water per second flow through the narrow pass, with the current reaching nearly ten knots—faster than the cruising speed of many boats. It’s such a choke point that water levels inside and outside the pass can differ more than three feet, making a trip through at full flow seem like running a swirling, whirlpooling rapid. With any kind of storm surge or wind opposing the rushing water, waves can stack up ten feet high. Boats without enough power to muscle through can be spun around and spit into the rocks. It’s one of the most spectacular and dangerous spots in all the Salish Sea.

  What would Colt do? He wouldn’t hesitate to take Deception. It would explain stealing the boat earlier than his usual post-midnight hours of operation. He would have checked the tide tables and known to get through Deception somewhere close to slack water. Leaving the dock at 9:30 and running at eight knots—a smart nighttime cruising speed—put him on schedule to be through and into protected water behind Whidbey Island by the forecasted midnight slack tide.

  THAT SUNDAY AFTERNOON, PAM was hanging around the trailer as usual. “I heard a whistle from the woods… didn’t sound like any bird I knew.” She didn’t pay much attention, though. “Then I heard what I thought was my idiot friend coming up the drive, babytalking to Mel. I waited for him to come up to the house, but nobody came. Then later, Mel went off into the woods at the back of the property and came back with a fresh rib bone.”

  Pam says Colt never actually came to the house, and doesn’t know if that was him stopping by to see Melanie and give her a treat. When I told her the boat he’d taken was a yacht, she said, “Well, that’s Colt’s style.”

  At 11:30 that night, Pam was in bed watching a Western with the sound cranked up. “I hear a voice calling to me, asking which window or door I was going to meet them at. I yelled, ‘Let me get my bathrobe and slippers on!’ I heard them calling again in a voice like trying to sound like a young person, like they were trying to make me think it was Colt. I yelled out that I was getting my shotgun. I cocked it, had it ready to go, and went to the front door. I had my hand on the handle, then stopped and thought no… Instead, I went to the kitchen window and moved the curtain to look out, and suddenly a bright light was in my eyes. I yelled, ‘Get that goddamn light out of my eyes!’ Gawd that just pissed me off… I hate that.”

  It was the FBI. “They said they knew Colt was here today and started threatening me right and left. ‘We know you’ve been helping him and you’re going away for years!’ I said I haven’t seen him and I don’t know where he is and if you don’t believe me then give me a lie detector test. They said, ‘Oh, we don’t do that.’ I said well then arrest me or I’m going back to bed. They didn’t say anything, so I closed the door and locked it and waited until I thought they were gone. Couldn’t relax, though, so I turned off all the outside lights and went out and sat on the deck, listening and looking for those little flashlights they all carry.”

  BY THE EIGHTEENTH, ISLAND County deputies discovered that the Wagners’ house and beach cabin had been broken into again.

  “We’d secured everything after the last time,” says Bill Wagner. “So he had to break the lock on the main house to get in. And he also broke the door on the cabin. That’s the first time he’d ever done any damage at our place.”

  Inside the beach cabin, the Wagners’ hookah rig—a floating compressor that feeds scuba regulators—had been inflated but not used. An outboard motor and gas can had been carried out to the beach. Both were left on the sand, the outboard with its engine cowling off, as if someone had trouble getting it started. Missing, though, was the Wagners’ eight-foot Livingston dinghy.

  When Colt faced charges the last time, the Wagners told the court they’d pay for school books, “or anything that might help his education while he was in juvie or after he got out,” says Bill. Now, he said, while he wasn’t angry about the boat or the damage to the doors, he was worried that Colt was “way beyond” needing just a nudge onto the right path. “He’s an extremely bright kid who could have done anything. Now, with the planes and the boats and the fame, it’s evolved to the point where he’s become something he never thought he could be… He thinks this is his one chance to really live life.”

  Bill wasn’t under the illusion that it was going to end well for Colt in the short run, but said of the “kind, helpful” kid he came to know during those Camano summers, “He deserves a happy ending.”

  BACK ON ORCAS, THERE was a definite exhale after the Stella Maris was found off Camano. Ray Clever and his team pulled up their stakeout at Chuck Stewart’s hangar and slept at home for the first time in thirty nights. Kyle Ater, the holistic Dirty Harry, did the same, leaving Eastsound in the care of our handful of deputies and a host of new security systems.

  Something about Colt’s exit from the island this time made it feel permanent. The extra energy, the id in the air, was gone. So Sandi, Murphy, and I were especially surprised at dusk on the twenty-first to once again hear a banging under the cabin. We looked at one another for a moment. Then it happened again.

  I dragged Murphy away from the door and went outside into the dim light. I started to bend over and look under the cabin when movement in the salal behind me caught my eye. I spun, and would have been less surprised to see Colton Harris-Moore sitting there eating a pizza. Instead, it was a peacock, a full-blown, shimmering electric-blue-and-green peacock with a five-foot-long, hundred-eyed tail, staring at me. The big bird wasn’t afraid at all. Sandi brought me a piece of seed bread and he ate it out of my hand, then calmly posed for pictures.

  Some folks in Crow Valley were the only ones who kept a small flock of peafowl, but we called and they weren’t missing any. It was a bizarre visitation. Depending on which mythology you follow, the peacock symbolizes compassion, the heavens, or immortality, as in rebirth—like a phoenix.

  The peacock’s cries haunted our woods that night, then he moved about a mile away and adopted friends of ours. A year later, he’s still roosting on their pickup.

  PUSHING OFF FROM THE Wagners’ beach on the west side of Camano during the right tide and sea conditions, it’s not a bad paddle across to Whidbey Island. The currents can even help carry you south to a sandy point near the little town of Langley. From there, it’s about eight miles down to the bottom of Whidbey and the next dot that the police connected to Colt’s run.

  On the night/morning of the twenty-third/twenty-fourth, a boat went missing from Sandy H
ook, a dense development with sixty-some private docks biting into a skinny strip of water so it looks, from the air, like an alligator’s snout. Residents believe someone had been lurking around the neighborhood for at least a night or two, carrying out several break-ins and sleeping aboard a boat. One dock held a twenty-seven-foot Maxum powerboat. During the night, a thief rowed across the hook and exchanged his small dinghy for the sleek Maxum, ripping out the ignition to hotwire it. After a short six-mile trip southwest across the passage to Eglon, near the top of the Kitsap Peninsula, the boat was beached. Bare footprints led away down the sand.

  The boat theft made the news, noting the possible connection to Colt—including the fact that the forensic evidence was turned over to the FBI. The FBI doesn’t waste its time on run-of-the-mill boat thefts, so this was a strong indication that they believed it was Colt and that he was on the move heading south. Despite that, there was already a full head of steam ramping up the Barefoot Bandit chase back on Camano, which was now likely six days and two steps behind Colt.

  The media focus turned back to the South End. Pam called the cops on a TV crew that sauntered up past the YOU WILL BE SHOT sign in order to get the “I’m getting my shotgun” footage—which it did. The responding deputy noticed the nice new wooden stairs that had replaced the cinder block pile leading to the deck. “He asked me if they were booby trapped,” says Pam. “I told him no, but said there were others all around my property.”

  Pam got continuous media offers, but refused to go on camera. One major network sent her a box of fruit, which had no effect, as she said she “wanted the green stuff” and wasn’t talking veggies. She told me I was lucky that I got in early, before she started charging people for interviews.

  THE EVERETT HERALD REPORTED that Bigfoot hunter Richard Grover now pointed his dowsing rod toward Camano. South Enders hoped he would at least help locate a few of their old moonshine stills lost amid the nettles. As the story got bigger, more new characters entered the fray. In early May, an Orcas native attending school on the East Coast started a blog and Web site called Catch the Barefoot Bandit. Using the nom de plume David Peters, he cast his efforts as a direct counter to the fan clubs and T-shirt sellers. On his site, community members could fight back against Colt by donating to a reward fund—with the thought that eventually it would get high enough to tempt someone to turn him in—and by buying T-shirts, mugs, kitchen aprons, and so on with Colt’s picture and mocking messages such as “Turn yourself in and we’ll give you the second part of the flight manual—you know, the part about landing.”

  Peters contacted Mike Rocha, a fugitive recovery specialist, aka bounty hunter, to ask what it would take to get someone like him interested in hunting Colt down. Beyond bounty hunting, Rocha’s various companies offer surveillance, execution of high-risk warrants, “anti/counter terror services,” and Spetnaz-trained teams that can teach you to defend your “important bridges and transportation routes… from enemy combatant attacks.” They basically do anything that involves wearing black tactical gear, kicking down doors, taking lots of target practice, and other things that go well with the soundtrack of “Let the Bodies Hit the Floor” that plays on his Web site.

  The swaggering Rocha, a Vin Diesel double including the shaved head, saw an opportunity to promote his companies and maybe change the public image of bounty hunters from Dog “the” to something at least less hairy. A bail bond company he’s connected to donated $2,500 toward the reward, and Rocha volunteered his team of door kickers. A sticky issue, though, was that Colt wasn’t a bail jumper. When an arrestee bails out, he signs a contract that explicitly gives the bond agency the right, should he skip, to break into his home, kick his ass, cuff him, and drag him to prison. In Colt’s case, however, the bounty hunters had no legal authority beyond any regular citizen to chase or arrest him. And they couldn’t go onto private property without permission.

  Rocha came out to Camano and left Pam a note explaining how he could arrange a “win-win” situation. According to Pam, Rocha wrote that she or Colt’s friends could turn him in and collect the $5,000 reward, then All City Bail Bonds would post Colt’s bail for free and have a lawyer standing by to work the case pro bono.

  Colt was an escapee, though, and he still owed Washington State jail time on his previous sentence. If he was caught or turned himself in, Colt could automatically be sent to prison to start serving out the remainder of his three-year stretch even before new charges were filed. So bail was moot.

  Rocha eventually met in person with Pam. She liked his look, but didn’t like what he had to say. Things got testy to the point where she wound up telling him that if any of his guys shot Colt they’d have to watch their backs for the rest of their lives.

  ON THE TWENTY-SEVENTH, THERE was a sudden burst of activity on police radios. “Usually cops are very laid back on the radio,” says Shauna Snyder, who heard them on her scanner. “But they sounded gleeful.” The excitement was over a teenager captured on an Island County beach. “Residential burglary… one in custody” was the call that caused all the titter. Word spread very, very fast. At the trailer, the phone rang. A reporter called Pam to get her reaction to Colt’s being caught.

  Problem was, it wasn’t Colt.

  “They should double-check this crap before they call a mother and say that her kid is arrested!”

  BY THE THIRTIETH OF May, Colt had made it 127 miles from Eglon down to Raymond, Washington, a little village on the Willapa River. Driving along Highway 101, Ocean Avenue, toward the town of South Bend, Colt stopped at a Vetters Animal Hospital. He took a ragged piece of paper and wrote a note:

  Drove by, had some extra cash.

  Please use this money for the care of animals

  —Colton Harris-Moore

  (aka “The Barefoot Bandit”)

  He attached a $100 bill and put it in the front door of the clinic, which does considerable work with abandoned pets. The receptionist found it and, according to the vet, didn’t recognize the name. She thought it might be from one of their regular clients. The vet herself, though, had heard of Colt. She didn’t know if the note was real or not, but called the local sheriff, who ultimately got in touch with the Island County Sheriff’s Office. They told him it sounded like Colt, but that they’d like to keep it quiet until they could check forensics.

  The vet wrote about her brush with the Barefoot Bandit to a friend, the libertarian author Claire Wolfe, who mentioned it on June 1 in her Living Freedom blog online at Backwoods Home magazine. Wolfe writes often of “outlaws,” though makes a distinction between common thieves and those who run afoul of rules set up by what she considers an intrusive government. “Colton Harris-Moore may not be a true Freedom Outlaw. He may not even be a particularly good guy. But you gotta admit, the boy does what he does with panache. And in this day of omni-surveillance, it’s encouraging to know that some untrained kid can spend years outfoxing ‘authoritah’ and surviving in the cold northwestern forests.”

  Once Wolfe published her blog online, the news that Colt was likely at least as far as Raymond and only thirty miles from the Columbia River—Washington State’s southwestern border with Oregon—was out there. It popped up on my “Colton Harris-Moore” Google alert on June 1, but the story didn’t hit the papers for seventeen days (by which time Colt was already halfway across the country).

  The delay must have been surprising if not disappointing for Colt, because here was another action specifically tailored to get press attention. He did, by all accounts, love animals. The only civic statement anyone I spoke to could remember Colt making was when he told his mom that the penalties for animal abuse should be harsher. Pam took this and tagged it on to any mention of making money off of Colt’s notoriety. After his legal expenses (though she expected a lawyer to take his case pro bono just for the press), and after building a house on her property that she’d eventually leave to Colt, she said any leftover money would go to starting an animal shelter, because that’s what he would want.


  The vet note showed that Colt was further embracing his media construct: he signed this note with his full name, Harris-Moore, the name used by the press, not his usual Colton Harris. Outlaw legend–burnishing and Facebook fan–wise, it was a smooth PR move. Who could hate a poor kid from a rough home who loved animals? Rob from the rich and give to the pups.

  The $100 gift itself, though, was confiscated by the police. To them, the money was evidence. The note was also evidence: another sign that Colt was cocky enough to not worry about covering his tracks… “You can’t catch me.”

  THAT MONDAY, MAY 31, was Memorial Day. Colt continued down 101 until it hit the Columbia River. Then another puzzler. Turn left and he could have simply driven south and crossed the Astoria-Megler Bridge. Drive a little over twelve miles, and he’d have been in Oregon. A few minutes more and he’d be at his next intended stop. No muss, no fuss… no fun. Instead, he went right and headed for Cape Disappointment.

  In 1775, a Spanish explorer sailing up the Pacific Coast figured that the huge volume of brown water flowing into the ocean at 46 degrees 15 minutes north meant there was a river mouth aquí. The waters looked so treacherous, though, he didn’t risk trying to confirm it. Later on, a Brit poked his bowsprit between the two points of land but didn’t believe it was a river, so he renamed the northern headland Cape Disappointment. It was an American merchantman, Captain Robert Gray aboard the Columbia Rediviva, who finally braved the current and waves at the mouth to claim North America’s fourth-largest river for the adolescent United States in 1792, naming it after his ship. As with most New World “discoveries,” Gray was greeted by the Indians who’d been living there forever. These were the Chinook, who lent their name to the king salmon.