cameras and the DVR they were attached to.
Deer Harbor Marina enjoys a brisk trade with visiting boaters. During July and August there’s rarely an open slip, with half leased to full-timers and the other half filled with boats from all over Washington and British Columbia. That night, the place was packed, the docks alive with people wandering up and down, visiting with fellow boaters, barbecuing, boiling up the day’s Dungeness crab, cocktailing, telling tall tales, and doing all the other stuff yachties do. Things quiet down in Deer Harbor after 11 p.m., but many boaters remain up on deck chatting under the brilliant stars, their voices and the creak of boats carrying far across the still water.
The marina’s showers and bathrooms sit back by the dockmaster’s office, forty yards up the pier from the marina store and the boat slips. There’s always a trickle of folks heading back and forth to the restrooms. That didn’t bother this burglar, though, who strolled from the office to the store and slid open another window. Inside, surrounded by coolers filled with beer, water, and soda, along with racks and racks of snack foods, candy, and wine as well as a complete ice cream shop, the burglar chose to take only the surveillance cameras and DVR.
Word of the break-ins quickly echoed around Deer Harbor. Now
That night as we lay in bed with the big black window behind our heads, the woods outside seemed darker.
The action moved back to Eastsound just before Labor Day weekend, the last big opportunity for local businesses to rake in summer money. Early morning on September 1, a burglar forced his way into the popular Sunflower Cafe on the prime corner of Main Street and North Beach. He took $300 out of the till and $3,280 from the ATM before crossing the street to Vern’s Bayside.
Belinda and Marion had installed surveillance cameras inside and out after the 2008 hit. Now, one by one, the cameras went dark.
“He WHALED on them with his fist,” says Belinda. Then he pried open the side door and went inside the restaurant. A camera in the dining room captured a tall white male wearing a tan T-shirt walking past using a black shirt to cover his face. The burglar went directly to Marion’s office, which sits nooked away in a nonobvious spot up a short flight of stairs from the kitchen. A tiny camera mounted on the office ceiling watched as he came through the door and instantly rounded the divider to shine his flashlight at the empty space where the safe had been the year before. He swung his light around quickly, but couldn’t figure out where they’d moved it.
At that point, the computer attached to the security cameras began to beep. The burglar bolted full speed out of the office and back out the way he came.
Just down the street, Suzanne Lyons was sleeping in her jewelry store, Orcas Arts and Gifts. Lyons has had some experience with at-risk youth.
“When I lived in California,” she says, “I took in five ten-year-old boys as foster kids from really bad families, moms were hookers and everything, but I got them early enough. Four joined the service, and they all turned out okay.”
Suzanne’s family had been taking turns bunking in their little shop ever since her daughter, Erica, had been woken by a noise in the middle of the night shortly after the stolen boat had shown up. Erica went outside to check and found a very tall young man standing in the private yard between the store and their home. He calmly looked at her for a long moment, then vaulted over the six-foot-high fence and disappeared.
They called the deputies, but they couldn’t find the guy. Now, on September 1, it was Suzanne who sensed something was not right. She stepped outside.
“I was in my robe and bunny slippers,” she says, laughing. “I saw this big guy running down Main Street away from Vern’s. I wasn’t really dressed to chase him, though.”
The next morning, as word quickly spread, Eastsound’s worst fears were realized: the summertime burglar was back.
“This time,” says Belinda, “the cops took it seriously.” Sergeant Vierthaler came down to Vern’s right away and watched the security footage. He noticed something very strange about the tall young man who’d broken into the restaurant: he was barefoot.
NEAR THE TOP OF North Beach Road stands Orcas Island Hardware, affiliated with Ace Hardware, “The Helpful Place.” With so much do-it-yourselfing on the island, Orcas has always had two hardware stores. Scott Lancaster worked at one for fifteen years before buying the other in the spring of 2009. Now, five months later, late in the afternoon on September 4, the Friday of the big Labor Day weekend, Lancaster was straightening up the storage yard when he noticed that part of his chain-link fence was laid over. Odd, but nothing else was out of place, so he heaved it back into position and went home.
“That night,” he says, “it started bothering me. I’m wondering if it was pushed over by someone climbing the fence to get onto the roof of the main building. But by that time I’d sat down to a nice dinner with my wife, had a couple glasses of wine… I decided not to go back to check it out just based on a gut feeling.” Besides, he says, there’d always been a hardware store filled with tools at that spot, the building never had an alarm system, and there’d never been a problem. In fact, long ago when the building first went up, a row of its warehouse windows were installed crooked and had never closed far enough to lock. “It’s Orcas,” says Scott. “Most of the time we just left them wide open for ventilation.”
After dark, someone slipped into the yard behind Orcas Island Hardware. He climbed topsoil bags piled next to the lowest part of the warehouse roof, then pulled himself onto a higher stack of bark mulch sacks that rose another level closer to the edge of the twelve-foot-high roof. Balancing precariously atop the tower of bags, he stretched out one long leg and stepped onto the metal roof, barefoot.
The bandit sneaked around to the row of second-floor windows, slid open the one farthest from the sidewalk, and climbed inside the warehouse loft. He used a ladder to drop down into a corridor, then went into the store’s offices. The first thing he saw in the cluttered outer office was the blue glow of a TV monitor. A simple closed circuit, the system transmitted only a live picture of the store—there was no recorder. Still, the burglar switched off its impotent eye. He rummaged through the desks until he found the key to the petty cash drawer, pocketing all the paper money.
Once done with the office, he went downstairs into a B and E man’s dream: a fully stocked hardware store. The first tool he wanted was something big and strong enough to open the safe he’d spotted in the warehouse. Ace, the helpful place, had just the thing: a sixteen-pound, six-foot-long forged steel digging bar. The safe gave way. Inside sat two bank bags—one a ten-year-old KeyBank carrier, a distinctive style that isn’t used anymore. Both bags were filled with cash organized into neat bundles ready for depositing.
Then the thief went on a shopping spree. Using Ace-logoed five-gallon buckets and a clothes basket to carry the booty, he grabbed a Coleman sleeping bag, two air mattresses (one twin and one full-size), an LED headlamp, a hatchet, two axes, a maul/sledgehammer, two hammers, a crowbar, screwdrivers, six assorted padlocks and cable locks, bolt cutters, a power drill and a cordless drill, along with eight drill bits including two augers used for drilling deep, large-diameter holes—like maybe the kind you could insert a camera into. In all, the burglar took more than $5,000 worth of cash and prizes.
He lugged everything to the store’s delivery bay and used his new bolt cutters to snip off the padlock. Up went the big roller door and out he walked. The thief’s appetite was bigger than his ability to carry everything, though. He stopped across the street, ducking behind the hedge at Murphy’s vet’s office to rearrange the load that he must have ferried over in at least two trips. There he left behind the clothes basket with a bunch of the items he’d just taken, and dumped more tools into the landscaping around the real estate office where Sandi works. He kept the necessities, though, and headed off to attempt his most ambitious score. He wanted more cash, and knew the best place to find it.
WHEN ISLAND HARDWARE’S EMPLOYEES arrived the next morning, they found the place had been looted. Scott Lancaster’s first priority after seeing that the deputies were on the job scoping out the big bare footprints clearly visible on the metal roof was to make sure he could keep the store running on its busiest day. He couldn’t do
