The Barefoot Bandit

by Bob Friel

  Graham and other local pilots had heard of Colton Harris-Moore and his affinity for airports and aviation. “We knew he was doing this kind of thing,” he says. “But naw, we figured he was still stuck up there in the San Juans. We didn’t think he’d venture this far.”

  Of course the information that he was most likely in Oregon and shopping the state’s small airports was already there for the disseminating. Here again Colt was serving as a war gamer for law enforcement and Homeland Security. He wasn’t a serial killer or an Al Qaeda sleeper, but he was someone already accused of stealing four planes, more than a million dollars in property, and committing dozens of other felonies. He was very high profile and certainly would be a feather in the cap of whoever caught him. The FBI was actively hunting him and you’d hope they have big ears.

  The Dodge Journey stolen from Warrenton-Astoria was recovered by the Yamhill County Sheriff’s Office in Dayton at 7 p.m. on June 3. That’s less than two miles from McMinnville Airport, which has that State Police Command Center right on the property. Yamhill contacted Warrenton that day and Chief Workman called state authorities and the TITAN Fusion Center. The Fusion Center declined Workman’s request to get the report out, and though a window-licking squirrel could have looked at the info and Colt’s well-known MO and come up with McMinnville Airport as his target, no one in law enforcement even called the airport to give them a heads-up.

  Instead, on June 3, just after Pam says she’d poured herself a beer, the FBI drove up to Haven Place on Camano Island. They were there to ask once again that Pam let them know where Colt was. One of Pam’s standard lines had become “If you don’t believe me, give me a lie detector test!” The FBI agents always declined. This visit, though, the FBI agents told her they were going to set one up for her, but that it would take a couple of weeks. Suddenly Pam wasn’t so sure. “I’m going to have to think about it… I don’t trust these polygraphs.”

  Pam had bought herself a small tape recorder and now recorded the police and FBI whenever they questioned her. During this visit, the tape ran out. The FBI agents stopped the interview and one of them inserted a new tape for her. They all saw the humor in that, and telling the story, Pam went into a fit of throaty laughter that ended in a hacking cough.

  “They were real nice like they used to be,” she said. “And I gave them a big damn lecture about shining that damn flashlight into my face the last time. I said, ‘Don’t you ever do that again!’” The agents, Pam says, told her they didn’t have too much time to look for Colt “because they were after bin Laden and stuff like that. I told them that Colt and his dog could find bin Laden, and one of them laughed and said, ‘Yeah, he probably could.’”

  Friendly as they were, they did, however, leave Pam with a copy of U.S. Code, title 18, chapter 1, section 3, the law regarding actions such as harboring or hindering the apprehension of a criminal that would make someone an accessory after the fact.

  She sighed and said that her life revolved around Colt’s problems. “I get so tired of thinking about it… I go to sleep thinking about it and I wake up thinking about it.” Other than her movies, she said, she has only one escape. “It’s called beer,” she laughed, then added, “I’m serious.”

  As Pam was reading the paper the FBI agents left her, a spider crawled across it and she suddenly yelled, “They bugged me!”

  LATE IN THE EVENING on the eighth, the telephone rang in the trailer. Pam picked it up and recognized a voice she says she hadn’t heard for months. “It was Colt… I was shocked, but it was great to hear from him. He sounded good, relaxed, says he’s fine.” Pam says she asked Colt where he was and got silence for an answer. “He says he got rid of the cell phone he used to use and now he’s on a throwaway.” Pam warned Colt that the heat was on. “I told him to lay low, real low, because of the stupid bounty hunter… but he already knew about him.” As usual, Colt had been following all the news about him. He told Pam, “I read where you said that I wouldn’t be interested in no lousy fifty thousand.”

  “I said, ‘I was right wasn’t I?’ And he said, ‘Yeah.’”

  Pam had just gotten in touch with John Henry Browne, who, depending on who you ask, is either Washington State’s most effective criminal defense attorney or its most hated. Or both. Over a long career, the sixty-four-year-old Browne has been attracted to numerous high-profile cases. Early on, as head trial lawyer for the King County public defender’s office, he represented serial killer Ted Bundy. Since going into private practice, he’s specialized in clients who’ve been similarly popular in the public’s eye, such as a man who set a warehouse fire in which four Seattle firefighters died. Browne, brash, theatrical, and six feet six inches tall, sees himself as a great equalizer for the individual against a too-powerful government. He has a reputation for aggressively attacking the prosecution’s witnesses, which he’s paid to do, and taunting and threatening prosecutors, which just seems to be his favorite hobby.

  Browne confirmed he was interested in Colt’s case. Maybe having a headline-making lawyer to defend him would convince Colt to turn himself in before somebody got killed. I figured it was worth one more shot, and on June 7 wrote a blog post to Colt that included John Henry Browne’s cell phone number.

  WHEN I NEXT SPOKE with Pam, she said she’d told Colt about the lawyer, “but he didn’t act interested.”

  Pam, though, was almost bubbly in this conversation. Colt had finally reached out to her again, and she was feeling like she’d taken control of some things. She had John Henry Browne, and she was setting up a defense fund for Colt.

  “I have people saying hi to me that haven’t said hi in friggin’ years,” she said. “Yesterday down at Elger Bay store, two of the cashiers that have always had their noses in the air to me were suddenly saying, ‘Hi, Pam, how ya doin’?’ What the hell is that? Oh, we better hurry up and make friends with her because she’s gonna be famous. What the hell?”

  Pam said that Colt was studying a foreign language but wouldn’t say which one. In one of their conversations, she said, he also mentioned a girlfriend. “So I told him about birth control ’cause I guess she stayed with him for a while… I said, ‘Now, Colt, you’re not supposed to have any kids until you’re quite a bit older. And he said, ‘Oh, don’t worry, Mom.’”

  Colt had asked her for some other advice, too. “He wants me to write down my words of wisdom for him. And I said, number one: don’t get involved with Orientals or black girls. But then the next time he called me I said I take all that back. I said, ‘Colt, if you love them, then I don’t care what their color is, because real love is not easy to find.’ He said, ‘Well, she’s gotta be able to build a campfire.’ I said, ‘Okay, what else?’ He said, ‘She has to know how to cook and she has to know how to set up a campsite and fish.’ Anyway, he went down his list and what he was describing was me! I felt good about that.”

  BACK IN OREGON… SIX days and nine hot dogs after law enforcement knew the Dodge had been dumped within walking distance of McMinnville Airport, the owner of the FBO called Graham Goad and told him a rental car was missing. One of the services offered by the FBO is to line up cars for incoming pilots. A silver GMC Acadia was stolen while waiting for Enterprise to come pick it up. That same day, the ninth, they noticed that the stock of AA batteries in the supply closet had been raided. Then the owner of a private hangar went to turn on his handheld GPS and it wouldn’t work. When he opened the back to check the batteries, they were gone.

  Graham and the owner of the FBO called the Oregon State Police station seventy-five yards away, but the Staties shrugged and told them to call the city police—they had no interest in a stolen rental car and disappearing hot dogs. The McMinnville PD showed up and took a report, but didn’t do any forensic work. It was Graham who found where the back window to his hangar had been pried open with a screwdriver.

  A week later, Graham’s youngest brother, Matthew, who lives up in Everett, Washington, sent him an email link to a newspaper story about Colton H
arris-Moore being tracked to Oregon. “He says, ‘Hey, this guy is in your area!’ I said, ‘Yeah, we figured that out, thanks for the timely heads-up.’”

  “NO, I NEVER HEARD anything,” says Alan Daniels, manager of Oregon’s Ontario Municipal Airport. He’d received no warning about any airport-surfing plane and/or car thief at loose in the region, certainly not near his airport, which offers a single five-thousand-foot runway right alongside a golf course. Hook your approach to runway 32 at Ontario, and you could land your Cessna in a water hazard.

  Ontario has a population of eleven thousand or so, making it the biggest town in Malheur County. “We’re just a quiet little community out here in the desert,” says Daniels. “It’s not the edge of the world, but if you stand on your tiptoes you might be able to see it.” Ontario grew up on the Union Pacific Railroad and lies on the Snake River where it begins to serve as the squiggly divide between Oregon and Idaho. The area farms out potatoes, onions, and beets, but the town’s main claim to fame is that it’s the home of Oregon’s largest state prison.

  The Ontario airport is close to a major highway, and several other arteries intersect in and around the town. Ne’er-do-wells like the easy on-and-off access. “Our crime rates,” says Captain Mark Alexander of the City of Ontario Police Department, “are up there with bigger cities just because we have such a transient population.” Captain Alexander says they get a lot of people coming through town because they’ve got themselves a Walmart and no sales tax. Plop that combination close to the border of a state with 6 percent sales tax, and sooey, it’s feeding time. “Any given day at Walmart, 75 percent of your license plates are Idaho.”

  Alexander says he hadn’t heard of the Barefoot Bandit. “You gotta understand, we’re just flooded with ‘Be on the lookout of all kinds of people,’ and that’s just from around here.” That doesn’t mean their airport was totally off police radar. “We’ve had some hangars broke into before,” says Alexander. For that reason, officers do drive-bys around the airport every once in a while. One of them cruised through at 10:30 p.m. on June 9, and saw nothing amiss—because you can’t see what’s already missing.

  Local pilot Gary Taylor, fifty-two, flies corporate, a Learjet, out of Ontario Muni. He’d pulled up to the airport that day at 3 p.m. in his white 2008 F250 diesel pickup. He parked the big rig next to the hangar and his copilot cruised up alongside in her Prius.

  Gary, who’s been flying since he was sixteen, went inside to wipe down the jet with an ugly blue bath towel he’d bought just for the plane’s exterior. Once he had the Lear sparkling, he tossed the towel and his keys into the pickup. “I don’t like to fly with car keys and take the chance of losing them on a layover.” The Ford had a keyless entry, so he always stuck his keys up under the driver’s seat and locked the doors. On the front seat, he left a $1,000 Bose noise-canceling pilot headset and a brand-new jacket. Normally, Gary would have tucked his truck into the hangar, but this was scheduled to be a short flight, just a hop to Salt Lake City and back, so he left it outside. They fired up the jet and took off at 4 p.m., expecting to be back by 9 p.m. that evening.

  Instead, it wasn’t until midnight when they taxied back to the hangar. The big truck was gone. “At first,” Gary says, “I thought it was some of my sick friends playing a joke on me.” He didn’t find it funny. “It was late and I just wanted to get home.” He made a couple of calls and realized this was no joke, then called the police.

  The cops told him not to worry—too much. They said that it would probably show up later that night. “They said it was pretty common for… you know, Hispanic people to go out and joyride for a little while. They told me the cars usually show up in town.”

  As they poked around, it became apparent that the pickup might not have been the thief’s first choice. He’d used a screwdriver to try to get in the Prius. Then they discovered that he’d also tried to force open the hangar’s man door. Typically, those are flimsy, but Gary had reinforced it with a steel plate. It turned out to be a lucky break for the burglar: if he’d opened the door, he would have tripped the silent alarm.

  The next day, Gary was driving toward the hangar when he noticed something that caused him to hit the brakes. A jerrican of fuel and a hand truck that had been in the bed of his missing pickup were sitting alongside a silver GMC Acadia parked not far from the Lear’s hangar.

  “I thought that is really way too weird.”

  It got weirder. When Gary walked up to the Acadia and looked inside, he saw his ugly blue towel.

  He called the police out again. The towel, they theorized, had been used to wipe down the prints on the stolen SUV.

  Gary’s truck wasn’t found in town. Two nights later, though, at 2:15 a.m., he got a call from a deputy from over in Ada County, Idaho, who told him they’d found his F250 on a farm road grandly named the Emmet Highway in a little town of less than two thousand called Star. The truck had gone about thirty miles down 84 and then east about ten miles, ending up in the middle of a field where the corn crop was just starting to sprout with stalks about six inches high. “I asked if my headset was in there and the sheriff said yes. The keys were gone, though. They didn’t bother with prints or anything, he just said, ‘Come get it now,’ because the ignition key was missing and they were afraid whoever took it was going to come back.”

  Gary was able to get ahold of a tow company to go put the truck up on a flatbed, but they refused to bring it all the way to his place and he had to go meet them halfway. When he got to the pickup, Gary says he noticed a couple of things right off. First was olfactory, and it wasn’t a new-car smell. “Horrendous body odor. That freaked me out… I wasn’t sure I could take it.” The second thing was that the seat was pulled way up, as if whoever was driving it was real short, or he’d moved the seat up so he could stretch out and sleep in the back. Then, when he turned on the engine, the radio started talking Spanish—not the station he’d left it on.

  Because Ada County didn’t bother to do forensics, there’s no clue who took Gary’s truck—other than the person who did might not have bathed in a few days, and he either spoke Spanish or… was possibly learning the language and wanted to practice. Or the truck may even have been stolen twice, both thieves realizing they weren’t going to get far without having to stop for fuel, which isn’t a smart thing to do considering that almost every gas station in the country has surveillance cameras.

  What is known, though, is that Colton Harris-Moore was in Ada County at that time, where he stole a 2006 Ford F150 and continued his road trip. He did a big 372-mile swing below the Sawtooth National Forest amid the western foothills of the Rocky Mountains and then drove down into the Teton Valley to a town called Driggs, Idaho. There at Driggs Teton Peaks Municipal Airport on June 12, he traded the pickup for a gray Cadillac Escalade, which he stole from a private hangar. The airport had a number of cars around, all with keys in them, but Colt picked the top of the line, the favorite SUV of rap stars.

  He dumped the Escalade in Cody, Wyoming, the following day. Moving between those two points, the most likely route is through Wind River Canyon, past Kirwin, a spot that Amelia Earhart liked so much that she was having a cabin built there while she attempted her ill-fated around-the-world flight. The other choice would be up through Yellowstone National Park and across the Wapiti Valley, a drive that Teddy Roosevelt called “the most scenic 50 miles in America.” It’s the perfect path for a summer road trip, but risky due to having to stop to pay a park entrance fee to a ranger. Regardless of the route, both drives run through such breathtaking vistas that it should be a felony to do either one of them at night.

  Colt was now getting into real bandit country. In 1832, Driggs was the site of a huge fur trapper rendezvous that, beyond the usual alcohol-fueled shenanigans that made those gatherings famous, ended with the deadly two-day battle of Pierre’s Hole, where mountain men along with their Nez Perce and Flathead friends fought a band of Gros Ventre Indians. And Colt certainly wasn’t the first rustler to
make a run through Teton Valley, though historically it served as a hideout for those who filched cattle and horses instead of boats and planes. Crossing into Wyoming, the red hills and frontier towns still faintly ring with the ricochets of Robert LeRoy Parker and Harry Longabaugh, aka Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, along with Wild Bill Hickok, Doc Holliday, Calamity Jane, and Frank and Jesse James.

  The local legend most akin to Colt was probably Ed Harrington, a gentleman bandit whose lasting celebrity came from a July day in 1914 when he held up fifteen stagecoaches. They were sightseeing coaches, each filled with tourists visiting Yellowstone Park, so it was like robbing the faux boats as they make their way through the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. Harrington was very polite, used the magic word “please” when asking folks to deposit their cash in his sack, and didn’t hurt anyone. He got so cocky with how well his plan was working, though, that he allowed his victims to take snapshots of him as souvenirs. Harrington collected more than $1,000 in cash and jewelry, but was later identified and spent five years in Leavenworth.

  The Wild West was once policed by characters like Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson, who were just as wild as the famous outlaws they corralled and sometimes caroused with. Today, it’s men like Detective Ron Parduba and George Menig of the Cody Police Department. Both are former NYPD. New York cops all think they’ve seen everything, but when Parduba and a fellow officer, John Harris, went out to investigate a break-in and stolen truck at High Country Roofing on June 13, they found a distinctive piece of evidence: a giant bare footprint. Harris saw the print in the mud and said it looked “like Bigfoot.” Cody police suspect Colt first went for an Escalade parked at a body shop—’cause that’s how he rolls—then realized it was too damaged and took the roofing truck instead. At some point during his time in Cody, the Barefoot Bandit cut his foot. As he drove the truck east, he bled DNA onto the floorboard.