The Stranger in the Woods

by Michael Finkel

  The man is obeying the officers’ commands but is not answering questions. He avoids eye contact. During their pat-down and search, the officers were unable to locate any identification. He did have a wallet on him, camo-patterned with a velcro closure, but inside is only a sheaf of cash. The money is clearly very old, some of it moldy.

  It’s late, two a.m., but Hughes phones the Pine Tree Camp’s facilities director, Harvey Chesley, who says he’ll be on his way. Hughes has a master key that allows him access to the dining hall—Chesley had given it to him, with his blessing; anything to catch the hermit—and he unlocks a door, flips on the lights, and he and Vance escort the suspect back inside the place he just burglarized.

  The dining room is cavernous and echoey, an expanse of blue linoleum beneath a vaulted ceiling of immense spruce rafters. It’s the off-season, and all the tables and chairs are stacked against the walls. There is a row of windows on the pond side of the hall, but there’s nothing to see in the dark. Hughes and Vance drag a metal-framed chair with a maroon plastic seat into the center of the room, and they sit the suspect down, hands still locked behind his back.

  The officers slide a folding table in front of him, then Vance also sits down, while Hughes remains standing. The man is still not speaking. The expression on his face appears blank and calm. It’s unsettling; a person who has just been arrested after a sudden encounter should not be silent and impassive. Hughes wonders if he’s insane.

  The man is wearing new-looking blue jeans, a hooded gray sweatshirt beneath a nice Columbia jacket, and sturdy work boots. It’s like he has just gone shopping at the mall. His backpack is from L. L. Bean. Only his eyeglasses, with chunky plastic frames, seem outdated. There’s no dirt on him anywhere, and little more than a shading of stubble on his chin. He has no noticeable body odor. His thinning hair, mostly covered by his wool cap, is neatly cropped. His skin is strangely pale, with several scabs on his wrists. He’s a little over six feet tall and broad-shouldered, maybe one hundred and eighty pounds.

  Vance, like many officers who’ve searched for the hermit, always suspected that most of the story was mythical. Now she feels more certain. No way did this guy emerge from the woods. He has a home somewhere, or a hotel room, and was just coming around to burglarize places.

  The camp facilities director, Chesley, soon arrives, as do the camp’s maintenance man and, later, another game warden. Chesley immediately identifies the watch the officers had removed from the suspect’s pocket. It belongs to his son, Alex, who’d left it in his truck, parked in the Pine Tree lot. The timepiece was not valuable but did have sentimental meaning; it had been a gift to Alex from his grandfather. The watch on the suspect’s wrist, meanwhile, is claimed by the maintenance man, Steve Treadwell—it had been given to him by the Sappi Fine Paper Company, marking his twenty-fifth year of working at the Skowhegan plant.

  There’s a lot of commotion in the room, and the suspect’s composure starts to fade. He remains seated and quiet but is soon visibly suffering, his arms shaking. Then Hughes has an idea. His confrontation with the man had been threatening and traumatic, but perhaps Vance can create a calmer atmosphere. Hughes herds all the men through a swinging door into the kitchen, leaving Vance alone with the suspect.

  For a little while, she lets the air in the dining hall settle. She’s followed this case, intrigued and bemused, for the entirety of her eighteen years on the force. She switches the handcuffs so the man’s arms are in front and he can sit more comfortably. Hughes comes out with bottles of water and a plate of cookies, then retreats to the kitchen. Vance removes the handcuffs completely. The man takes a drink. He’s been in custody for more than an hour and a half. Perhaps he’s realized there will be no disappearing this time. Calmly, evenly, Vance reads him his rights. He has the right to remain silent. She asks for his name.

  “My name is Christopher Thomas Knight,” says the hermit.

  4

  “Date of birth?”

  “December 7, 1965.” The sounds passing through his mouth are stuttery and clanky, an old engine struggling to turn over, each syllable a chore. But at least it seems he’s being understood; Vance is jotting things down.

  “Age?”

  The man is quiet again. His name and his birthday are durable relics, lodged in his brain. Much as you’d like, you apparently can’t forget everything. Years, he’s proven, are disposable. So he starts doing the math, uncurling his fingers to keep track. Okay, but what year is it now? They solve the problem together, he and Vance. It’s 2013. Thursday, April 4. Christopher Knight is forty-seven years old.

  “Address?” asks Vance.

  “None,” answers Knight.

  “Where is your mail sent?”

  “No mail.”

  “What address do you put on your tax return?”

  “No tax returns.”

  “Where are your disability checks sent?”

  “No checks.”

  “Where is your vehicle?”

  “No vehicle.”

  “Who do you live with?”

  “No one.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “The woods.”

  This is not the appropriate time, Vance understands, to initiate a debate about the veracity of these claims. Best to let the man continue. “How long,” she asks, “have you been living in the woods?”

  “Decades,” he says.

  Vance would prefer something more specific. “Since what year?” she presses.

  Once more with the years. He has made the decision to talk, and it’s important to him to speak strictly the truth. Anything else would be wasting words. He concentrates for a time, gazing toward the windows, still black. He remembers something.

  “What year,” he asks, “was the Chernobyl nuclear-plant disaster?”

  As soon as he says it, he wishes he hadn’t. The police officer is going to think he’s some lunatic environmental activist. It’s really just a news event he happened to recall. But assembling all the language needed to clarify this seems impossible, so he lets it go. Vance thumbs her phone: Chernobyl was in 1986.

  “That’s when I took to the woods,” says Knight. Twenty-seven years ago. He was not long out of high school, and now he’s a middle-aged man. He says he passed the time living in a tent.

  “Where?” asks Vance.

  “Somewhere in the woods a distance away,” says Knight. He never learned the name of his backyard pond, so naturally he doesn’t know what township he’s in: Rome, Maine; population one thousand and ten. He can, however, recite the name of every species of tree in his patch of forest, and in many cases describe the particular pattern of branches on those trees.

  “Where did you stay during winter?” Vance asks.

  He remained in his small nylon tent, he insists, and did not once in all those winters light a fire. Smoke might give his campsite away. Each autumn, he says, he stockpiled food at his camp, then didn’t leave for five or six months, until the snow had melted enough for him to walk through the forest without leaving prints.

  Vance needs a moment to consider this. Winters in Maine are long and intensely cold—a wet, windy cold, the worst kind of cold. A week of winter camping is impressive. An entire season is practically unheard of. She excuses herself and heads through the swinging door to the kitchen.

  The men are drinking coffee, keeping watch on Knight through the large rectangular window in the door. Vance fills them in on what he said. No one is quite sure how much to believe. It’s important, Hughes notes, before the man stops talking, to learn what he has to say about the break-in.

  Vance returns to Knight, and Hughes, curious, props opens the door a little to hear. Virtually all criminals, he knows, will dispute any wrongdoing—they’ll swear to God they didn’t do it, even if you’ve just watched them do it.

  “Do you want to tell me,” Vance says to Knight, “how you got into this building?”

  “I pried open a door with a screwdriver,” says Knight. To enter the freezer,
he adds, he used a key he’d stolen several seasons before. He points to the three-and-a-half-leaf-clover key chain among the items strewn on the table in front of him.

  “Where did the money come from?” asks Vance, referring to the stack of cash, a total of $395, she’d removed from his wallet.

  “I gathered it over the years,” says Knight. A few bills here and there, mostly singles, from various places he broke into. He thought there might come a point when he’d have to walk into town to purchase something, but that did not happen. He says he spent no money the entire time he lived in the woods.

  Vance asks Knight to estimate how many times he burglarized cabins or houses or camps. There’s a protracted silence while Knight seems to be calculating. “Forty times a year,” he eventually says. Over each of the last twenty-seven years.

  Now it is Vance’s turn to do the math. The total’s more than a thousand—one thousand and eighty, to be exact. Each of them felonies. It’s almost certainly the biggest burglary case in the history of Maine. Possibly, in terms of the number of separate break-ins, the largest in the country. Maybe the world.

  Knight explains that he entered places strictly at night, after carefully trying to ensure that nobody was home. He never stole from anyone’s full-time residence, where it was more likely someone could unexpectedly show up. Instead, he burglarized only summer cabins and the Pine Tree Camp. Sometimes the cabins were unlocked; sometimes he jimmied a window or forced open a door. Pine Tree alone he broke into perhaps a hundred times. He always took all he could carry, but it wasn’t a lot, so he had to keep coming back.

  Vance explains that he will have to forfeit all the stolen material he possesses. She asks Knight to claim what is his. “Everything is stolen,” he says. His backpack, his boots, his break-in tools, the entirety of his campsite, and all the clothes he is wearing, right down to his underwear. “The only thing I can honestly say is mine,” he states, “are my eyeglasses.”

  Vance asks if he has any family in the area. “I would rather not answer that,” he says. He doesn’t know if his parents are alive or dead—he has not been in contact with anyone—but if they are alive, he hopes they never learn that he’s been found. Vance asks why, and Knight says that he wasn’t raised to be a thief. He says that he is ashamed.

  Knight does admit that he grew up in central Maine. He was never in the military. He says that he graduated from Lawrence High School, class of 1984. The Pine Tree Camp facilities director, Chesley, mentions that his wife also went to Lawrence, in the nearby town of Fairfield, graduating two years later. They might still have the 1984 yearbook at their house. Hughes asks Chesley to drive home and try to find it.

  Vance calls dispatch and runs a check on Knight. He has no criminal record; there are no warrants for his arrest. He is not listed as a missing person. His driver’s license expired on his birthday in 1987.

  Chesley comes back with the yearbook, the Lawrence Lyre, its navy blue cover stamped with a big silver “84.” The senior picture for Chris Knight, as he’s called, shows a kid with dark tousled hair and thick-framed eyeglasses, arms crossed, leaning back slightly against a tree, wearing a blue polo shirt with two breast pockets. He looks healthy and strong. There’s less a smile than a wry sort of smirk. He’s not pictured with any sports team or school club or anywhere else.

  It’s hard to tell if the same person is now sitting in the Pine Tree dining hall. Knight says that he hasn’t seen an image of himself in years, except maybe a blurry reflection in the water. There’s no mirror at his campsite, he mentions.

  “How do you shave?” asks Vance.

  “Without a mirror,” he says. He no longer knows what he looks like. He stares at the photo, squinting. His eyeglasses have been pushed up on his forehead, but now he moves them back to his nose.

  And this is the moment, both Hughes and Vance agree, when they suddenly feel certain—they just sense in their guts—that everything they’ve heard tonight is true. The color of the frames may have faded over the decades, but the boy in the photo and the man in the dining hall are wearing similar pairs of glasses.

  It’s not long before dawn now; the darkness has crested. Knight, as Vance knows, will soon be swallowed by the legal system, and perhaps never speak freely again. She’d like an explanation—why leave the rest of the world behind?—but Knight says he can’t give her a definitive reason.

  She points to the scabs on his wrists. “What did you do for medicine?” she asks. “Or doctors?”

  “I took no medications and never went to a doctor,” says Knight. As he grew older, he says, cuts and bruises healed more slowly, but he did not once suffer a serious injury.

  “Have you ever been sick?” asks Vance.

  “No,” says Knight. “You need to have contact with other humans to get sick.”

  “When is the last time you had contact with another human?”

  He never had physical contact, Knight answers, but sometime in the 1990s, he encountered a hiker while walking in the woods.

  “What did you say?” asks Vance.

  “I said, ‘Hi,’ ” Knight replies. Other than that single syllable, he insists, he had not spoken with or touched another human being, until this evening, for twenty-seven years.

  5

  Flashlights, for some families, were the first items to vanish. For others, it was a spare propane tank. Or books on a bedside table, or steaks you’d put in the freezer. In one cabin it was a cast-iron frying pan, a paring knife, and a coffeepot. Batteries, for sure, were missing—often every battery in the house.

  It wasn’t funny enough to be a joke, and it wasn’t serious enough to be a crime. It occupied some unsettling place between. Maybe your kids took the flashlights. You did put those steaks in the freezer, didn’t you? After all, your TV was still there, as was your computer, your camera, your stereo, and your jewelry. No windows or doors were broken. Do you call the police and tell them there’s been a burglary, that all your D batteries and your Stephen King novel are gone? You do not.

  But then you return to your cabin the following spring and the front door is unlocked. Or the dead bolt is undone. Or, in one case, the hot-water knob on the kitchen sink breaks off in your hand—easily, as though it has just been balanced there—and you examine the sink, then the window over the sink, and you see on the sill a few tiny white curls that look like file shavings. Then you notice that the metal lock on the window is open, and that the frame around the lock has been slightly scraped away.

  Holy crap, someone has been inside—and probably stepped on your faucet while wriggling through the window, then made it look like nothing was broken. Again no valuables are missing, but this time you do call the police.

  The police say they already know about the hermit and hope to have the case quickly solved. All summer, at barbecues and campfires, you hear a dozen similar tales. Propane tanks, batteries, and books are the constants, but also lost are an outdoor thermometer, a garden hose, a snow shovel, and a case of Heineken beer.

  One couple opened their place for the season and discovered that there was no mattress on one of the bunk beds. This was baffling. You couldn’t push a mattress out any of the cabin’s windows, not even close. But the front door, the only door, had been bolted and padlocked for winter. The door had been sealed when they’d arrived, the lock untouched; there was no damage anywhere. The kitchen window, however, had been jimmied open. The only idea that made even a sliver of sense was that the thief came in through the window, pried the pins out of the front door’s hinges, forced the door open from the hinge side, slid the mattress out, put the door back together, then exited through the window.

  It was the Pine Tree Camp, everyone learned, that was the primary target, the thief’s own private Costco. In every break-in, the damage was minimal—no broken glass, no ransacking. He was a thief, not a vandal. If he removed a door, he took the time to reattach it. Expensive items didn’t seem to interest him. Or her. Or them. Nobody knew. Because of the type of arti
cles that were stolen, one family called him the Mountain Man, but that frightened their children, so they changed it to the Hungry Man. Most people, including the police, began referring the intruder simply as the hermit, or the North Pond hermit, or, more formally, the hermit of North Pond. Some police reports mentioned “the legend of the hermit,” and on others, where a suspect’s full name was requested, he was recorded as Hermit Hermit.

  Many North Pond residents were convinced that the hermit was actually a neighbor. North and Little North Ponds are in central Maine, away from the summer-congested coast and its moneyed enclaves. The roads that twist along their shorelines are mostly unpaved and bumpy, with about three hundred cabins scattered around the roughly twelve-mile circumference of the two ponds, the majority occupied only in warm weather. A few of the cabins still don’t have electricity. Neighbors tend to know one another; there’s not a lot of turnover. Some families have owned the same plot for a century.

  Maybe, people speculated, the break-ins were carried out by a group of local teens—a gang initiation, a prank. Or, some locals guessed, it could have been the work of an antisocial Vietnam vet. More likely, others thought, it was an inside job at Pine Tree. There were also these suspicious-looking deer hunters who came from out of state. It might’ve been one of those airplane hijackers from the 1970s, still on the run. Possibly a serial killer. And what about that guy who was always fishing by himself—had anybody been inside his cabin? Perhaps you’d find your mattress there.

  One summer, a family had an idea. They taped a pen on a string to their front door along with a handwritten note: “Please don’t break in. Tell me what you need and I’ll leave it out for you.” This sparked a small fad, and soon a half dozen cabins had notes fluttering from their doors. Other residents hung shopping bags of books on their doorknobs, like donations to a school fund-raiser.

  There was no reply to the notes; none of the shopping bags were touched. The break-ins continued: a sleeping bag, an insulated snowmobile suit, a year’s worth of National Geographic magazines. Batteries and more batteries, including the blocky ones from cars and boats and ATVs. The same couple who lost their mattress had a backpack stolen, which triggered a panic—that was where they’d hidden their passports. Then they saw that the burglar had removed the passports and placed them in a closet before departing with the pack.