He’d slid his boots onto sawed-off branches, a wilderness drying rack. One tree had held rakes and snow shovels; another, an olive-green baseball cap and a floppy gray fishing hat. Some items had been in place so long that the trees grew around them. A claw hammer was nearly swallowed by a tree trunk, impossible to remove, and Hughes said that this hammer, more than anything, made him realize how long Knight had lived there.
There was always the chance, Knight had understood, that someone might hike nearby or search for him by air, so he’d tried either to cover any objects that could glint in the sun or to keep them hidden inside the tarp structure. He’d spray-painted a camouflage pattern on plastic coolers and metal garbage cans and on the outside of his spaghetti pot. He kept the blade of his snow shovel, when he wasn’t using it, covered with a dark garbage bag, and he’d wrapped the handle in black duct tape. Propane tanks were also stored in garbage bags. In a couple of spots where one might catch a glimpse of his site after the leaves fell, he’d hung camo-colored tarps. He had even painted his clothespins green.
On a little raised area in his camp, a sort of porch, was a green aluminum lawn chair, the bottom of the legs swaddled in duct tape to stop them from sinking into the soft soil. The chair, like everything in his camp, seemed ideally and harmoniously placed to maximize the site’s sense of tranquillity. Knight scoffed at this notion when we later discussed it: “Do you think I was engaging in feng shui?”
I set up my own tent at the site, then sat in the green aluminum chair as chipmunks raced among the trees, acorns dropping through the branches like pachinko balls. A gust of wind bent the high boughs but scattered only a few leaves around the camp.
Night fell fast. Frogs cleared their throats; cicadas whirred like table saws. A woodpecker hammered for grubs. At last came the call of the loons, the theme song of the North Woods, pealing like a laugh or cry, depending on your mood. A car crunched over a dirt road, a dog barked. For a while people could be heard talking, though their words were too muffled to make out.
Knight lived so close to others that he couldn’t even sneeze aloud. There’s fine cell-phone reception at his site. Civilization was right there, hot showers and creature comforts just steps away.
Soon it grew truly dark—one’s eyes could be open or closed with hardly a difference—and something moved through the forest. An animal, probably no bigger than a rabbit, though it sounded like a hippo. A couple of stars were visible through the scrim of branches overhead, and the crooked smile of a quarter moon. A bird peeped percussively. Then there was nothing.
It was the kind of total quiet that literally made my ears ring; there was not so much as a breeze. Knight, I envisioned, was cowering on his bunk amid the slamming doors of jail, and I felt like an intruder—not on private property but at his home. I retreated to my tent, feet cold, and turned off my phone and burrowed into my sleeping bag.
A volley of birdcalls greeted the morning. I unzipped my tent. There was mist in the treetops; spider webs shone cat’s cradle in the dew. Leaves dropped lazily. Autumn was coming, and the air smelled like sap. I turned on my phone and realized I’d rested for twelve hours, my longest sleep in years.
12
Before Christopher Knight stayed in the woods for a quarter century straight, he never once spent the night in a tent. He grew up less than an hour’s drive east of his campsite, in the village of Albion, two thousand people and four thousand cows. Chris is the fifth child and fifth son of Joyce and Sheldon Knight, following Daniel, Joel, Jonathan, and Timothy; he also has a younger sister, Susanna. His sister, according to Chris, has Down syndrome. Joyce raised the kids, and Sheldon, a navy veteran who served in Korea, worked in a creamery, washing out tanker trucks. They lived in a basic two-story farmhouse with a screened-in front porch, on sixty wooded acres with apple trees and raspberry bushes.
The Knight children had old-school chores. “We were country people,” said Chris. They split logs to feed their home’s wood-burning stove, and picked berries for Joyce’s jellies and jams, and tended the family’s two-acre garden, which they tilled with a tractor.
Under their father’s tutelage, Chris and his brothers learned to fix what was broken, electrical to automotive, and build what they wanted. One family project was a hut, designed by Sheldon and constructed among a stand of cedars on their property. It’s both functional and artistic. The walls are made of stone, every rock gathered by one of the boys and carefully stacked and cemented in place. A stove was fashioned from a fifty-five-gallon oil drum, vented with a homemade pipe; the hut was an ideal shelter during deer hunts.
Evenings at the Knight residence were usually devoted to reading, each parent in a rocking chair, book in hand. A family friend, Kerry Vigue, said that the inside of the house looked like a library. The Knights subscribed to magazines such as Organic Gardening and Mother Earth News, and they owned the entire Foxfire series of books, which detail rural skills like tanning hides and keeping bees. Chris said that as a child he tore through dozens of Time-Life history books, available at his elementary school library.
Joyce and Sheldon expected academic excellence from their sons, and they received it. Former high school teachers and classmates all described the Knight boys as uncommonly bright; “a family of brainiacs,” one recalled. More prized by his parents than good grades, Chris mentioned, was “Yankee ingenuity”—putting your smarts to work. “It’s better to be tough than strong, better to be clever than intelligent,” he said, repeating a family maxim. “I was tough and clever.”
The family frequently experimented with new varieties of seeds, to maximize yield. They grew potatoes, beans, pumpkins, and corn. “Basic stuff to fill the bellies of a bunch of boys,” said Chris.
The Knights also studied thermodynamics, then built a small greenhouse, where they buried hundreds of one-gallon milk jugs, filled with water, just below ground level, creating what’s known as a heat sink. Due to the nature of the electromagnetic bonds in water molecules—chemists refer to such molecules as “sticky”—water can store about four times more thermal energy than soil. During the day, the water buried in the Knight family greenhouse absorbed heat; after sunset, it slowly released energy. Using this system, they grew food all winter and didn’t need to pay a dime to the power company to heat the greenhouse. “In my family,” said Chris, “self-education, self-improvement was preferred.”
Money was tight. Whenever Sheldon came home with coins in his pocket, he dropped them in a coffee can, and Joyce distributed them in the morning before school, for milk money. They never got rid of scrap metal or spare parts.
Chris described his family as “obsessed with privacy.” He begged that they not be contacted or disturbed, at least while he was still in jail. The Knights socialized with a small group of friends and relatives, and virtually no one else. One’s desire to be alone, biologists have found, is partially genetic and to some degree measurable. If you have low levels of the pituitary peptide oxytocin—sometimes called the master chemical of sociability—and high quantities of the hormone vasopressin, which may suppress your need for affection, you tend to require fewer interpersonal relationships.
“Each of us inherits from our parents a certain level of need for social inclusion,” wrote John Cacioppo in his book Loneliness. Cacioppo, the director of the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience at the University of Chicago, said that everyone naturally possesses a “genetic thermostat for connection.” Chris Knight’s must be set near absolute zero.
Sheldon, Chris’s father, died in 2001—Chris didn’t know that until his arrest, more than a dozen years later—but Joyce, in her eighties, still lives in the same house, along with her daughter, for whom she remains the caretaker. The oldest son, Daniel, ten years older than Chris, resides in a double-wide mobile home on an adjoining lot. Their closest neighbor, John Boivin, said he’s lived next door to the Knights for fourteen years and still hasn’t said hello to anyone in the family. Sometimes Boivin spots Joyce collecting the
newspaper. Chris’s sister, Susanna, has hardly been seen in public for decades.
“I know everyone in Albion,” said Amanda Dow, who has worked in the local town office for close to two decades, “but I can’t put a face to them.” People who knew Sheldon invariably described him as introverted. Bob Milliken, an Albion dairy farmer and distant cousin of Sheldon’s, said the Knight family was “smart, honest, hardworking, self-sufficient, well respected, and quiet.” Milliken added that on the rare occasions when he did speak with anyone in the family, he “more or less just stuck to talking about the weather.”
Chris insisted that he’d had a fine youth. “No complaints. I had good parents.” No one else in his family has had any trouble with the law. Two of Knight’s brothers, Joel and Timothy, visited him in jail, the only members of the family to do so. Chris didn’t recognize them, he admitted; only Joel’s laugh sounded familiar. The brothers said they’d often wondered what had happened to Chris. They had supposed he was dead but had never expressed this thought to their mother. They’d always wanted to give her hope that he was still alive. It seemed to comfort her. Maybe he’s in Texas, they’d say. Or he’s in the Rocky Mountains. Or even New York City.
His family apparently never contacted the police about Chris’s disappearance. They did not file a missing person report. “They assumed I was off doing something on my own,” said Chris. “Having an adventure. We Yankees, we see the world differently.” Sergeant Hughes said he wasn’t particularly surprised to learn that the Knights had not involved the authorities. “They’re a rural Maine family,” he said. “Keep-to-themselves people.”
As a young boy, when the lilacs bloomed, Chris would gather a bouquet and give them to his mother. “I like the odor and the color, and it’s one of the first flowers in spring. I remember thinking I’d found something new,” he said. Otherwise there were few overt expressions of love. “We didn’t feel the need to communicate everything all the time,” Chris continued. “We’re not emotionally bleeding all over each other. We’re not touchy-feely. We weren’t in the habit of being physically demonstrative. In my family, the boys could not express feelings. We relied on unspoken understandings. It was the way it was.”
People who knew Chris as a child called him “quiet” and “shy” and “nerdy,” but no one detected any deeper malaise. “I didn’t find him to be all that weird,” said Jeff Young, who went to elementary school, junior high, and high school with Chris and often rode the bus with him. “He was a wicked smart kid, and he had a really good sense of humor.” Knight could also be silly and mischievous in a high school sort of way. Young recalled that when they took driver’s education classes together, one time Chris deliberately drifted too close to the side of the road, rubbing the car against some bushes. It had recently rained, and the instructor, in the passenger seat with the window open, got drenched.
The Knight family never went skiing; they did not eat lobster. “Not our socioeconomics,” said Chris. They owned snowshoes—“the long wooden ones, with the bear-claw bindings”—and they fished the local rivers with live bait. In winter, the family would head up to a relative’s hunting camp in the North Woods and the Knight boys would ride snowmobiles until one or two o’clock in the morning.
Once, Chris went skydiving with his brother Joel. They listened to the instructions, took off in a small airplane, then jumped out. It was the only plane flight of Chris’s life. “So I have taken off in a plane, but I have never landed in one. How amusing.”
As the youngest son, Chris was, of course, ribbed by his older brothers. They bestowed upon him the pet name Fudd, perhaps after the cartoon character Elmer Fudd, rube to Bugs Bunny. Chris detested the name. His parents were strict—early curfews, finish your homework, no junk food. One cousin, Kevin Nelson, told the Kennebec Journal that he used to bicycle over to the Knights’ house carrying treats for the boys. “They would lower a string from a bedroom window, and they’d raise a bag of snacks,” Nelson said. “I don’t believe they ever had soda pop.”
Hunting was Sheldon’s passion. His obituary in the Morning Sentinel contained a total of four words about his leisure time: “He enjoyed deer hunting.” He kept a bearskin rug at the foot of his bed, from a black bear he had shot. Sometimes Chris joined his father on hunts. “A couple of hunting trips, I slept in the back of the pickup,” he said, “but never alone and never in a tent. I slept in my bed in my family home, where my parents knew exactly where I was.”
Chris was once a winner in the Maine moose-license lottery, a lucky chance. He was sixteen years old and went into the woods near the Canadian border with his father, who lent him a .270 Winchester bolt-action rifle. Chris shot a seven-hundred-and-fifty-pound female moose and field-dressed it himself. “I was quite proud. My license, my kill. We ate well that year.”
At Lawrence High School, where his class had two hundred and twenty-four students, Chris felt “invisible.” He attended no social events, played no sports, joined no clubs. He never went to a football game and he skipped the prom, though he did have, he said, “two or three” friends. His classmate Larry Stewart recalled spending a few evenings hanging out with Chris. “I remember one night in particular,” said Stewart. “We were driving around in a guy’s car, and Chris was in the backseat. We just did what kids do up in Maine—we didn’t tip over any cows or anything, but maybe we snuck a few drinks out of someone’s beer, or drove around the old Concourse listening to Foreigner and Aerosmith, and went to McDonald’s or something. Chris was smart and friendly. I never noticed anything odd about him, but who knows what was really going on? Us Mainers, we have our own way of doing things. We like to hold our peacoats and our family really close.”
One day, Chris and Jeff Young decided to skip school and go fishing. “We planned it the day before,” said Young, “and took our fishing rods to school. Just the two of us. I think he didn’t like being around too many people, and I don’t blame him. We walked two or three miles, heading to the old metal bridge over the Sebasticook River. We never made it.” Sheldon must have suspected something, for he drove by in his red Dodge pickup. Chris had respect for his father, Young observed, and perhaps a little fear of him. Without saying a word, Chris just got in the truck and left.
During his senior year, Knight, like most Maine public school students, attended a course called Hunter Safety and Outdoor Skills. He learned things like how to read a compass and how to construct a makeshift shelter. “This is something that keeps replaying in my mind,” said his teacher, Bruce Hillman. “I told every kid that if you are in a survival situation, life or death, and you come upon a camp, it’s okay to break in. This is accepted in Maine. I have a camp, too, and I always leave dry goods behind just in case others need it. You never know what impact you’re going to have on some kid. I was thinking of a survival situation lasting two or three days, not twenty years.”
The early 1980s brought the first generation of personal computers, and Knight was fascinated—one might expect him to be a technophobe, but he was actually an early adopter. His future plan, according to the yearbook, was to be a “computer technician.” (His nickname, unsatisfyingly, was “Knight.”) His favorite subject was history.
“I hated gym,” he said. “I hated gym teachers. What’s that Woody Allen line? ‘Those who can’t do, teach. And those who can’t teach, teach gym.’ I figured out a way of skipping gym class by going to study hall instead, and I weaseled my way out of four years of high school gym. I’m in good shape, I’m above average height. I just didn’t want to play on teams. Being in gym class made me feel like I was trapped in Lord of the Flies. Can you really expect to see me playing volleyball?”
Upon graduation, Knight enrolled in a nine-month electronics course, whose curriculum included computer repair, at Sylvania Technical School in Waltham, Massachusetts, outside Boston. Two of his brothers had taken the same course. After he finished, he stayed in Waltham, where he found a job installing home and vehicle alarm systems, useful knowledge to
have for his later career as a burglar. He rented a room in a house and purchased a new vehicle, a white 1985 Subaru Brat. His brother Joel co-signed the loan. “He did such a nice thing for me, and I screwed him on that,” Knight said. “I still owe him.”
He worked for less than a year, and then suddenly, without giving notice to his boss, quit the alarm-installation job. Knight never even returned his work tools, according to Kerry Vigue, the longtime family friend. His employer, irate, contacted Chris’s family and demanded several hundred dollars in reimbursement for the missing tools, threatening legal action if they refused. Chris’s parents, recalled Vigue, ended up paying.
Chris, meanwhile, cashed his final paycheck and left town. He did not tell anyone where he was going. “I had no one to tell,” he said. “I didn’t have any friends. I had no interest in my co-workers.” He drove the Brat south. He was twenty years old. He ate fast food and stayed in cheap motels—“the cheapest I could find”—and drove for days, alone, until he found himself deep into Florida. He did not mention stopping at any tourist sites, or museums, or beaches. He stuck mostly to the interstate, and apparently didn’t do much except sit in his car and watch the world, sealed off behind metal and glass. Eventually, he turned around and headed north. He listened to the radio. Ronald Reagan was president; the Chernobyl nuclear disaster had just occurred.
The Stranger in the Woods Page 6
