before Tom Cruise fictitiously flipped one off in
Anders then topped that by going on the ultimate flight: strapped atop a huge
Now seventy-eight, Bill lives on Orcas Island for much of the year, cruising aboard his big boat,
One thing Bill Anders won’t do anymore, though, is fly at night in the San Juans. “Not that I’m afraid—I’ve got lots of night flying time as an interceptor pilot—but I’m always worried about the goddamn geese on the Orcas runway. You can fly over deer because they don’t jump very high. But the damn geese, they can take off.”
The pilot who took the Cirrus SR22 from San Juan Island wasn’t worried about geese or deer. Something compelled Colt back to Orcas Island that night. Once in the airplane, he could have flown away as far as his fuel would have taken him. Instead, he took off, did a short waggling course across the border into the nearby Canadian Gulf Islands, then turned around and headed straight to Orcas, where the entire island was already on high alert.
Apparently all the lights and info on the dashboard monitors didn’t bother Colt too much either, because he didn’t end up a charred dimple on Turtleback. And he didn’t panic, or he might have used the Cirrus’s most famous standard feature, a rocket-propelled last-resort parachute that erupts out of the airframe and slows its fall to a survivable speed. Instead, he went for it. One thing on his side was that the San Juans are very dark at night so the runway lights are easy to spot. Scattered home lights pierce the black mountainsides, red beacons flash atop Mount Constitution’s cell towers, and a soft yellow glow emanates from Eastsound, but other than that, it’s perfect stargazing dark.
The Bandit flew over town, sighted the runway, and touched down to the north—or tried to touch down.
“It’s a slippery plane and he lost it a bit,” says Bea Von Tobel, herself a longtime pilot. “That’s the hardest part of landing: judging how high above the ground you are, especially at night. You really need some time with an instructor who can teach you how to flare and get down comfortably. Instead, he kind of wandered off onto the grass and almost landed on the taxiway.”
Von Tobel showed up at the airport Saturday morning for the annual meeting of the Ninety-Nines, a group of women pilots, and saw the Cirrus already surrounded by yellow police tape. “He’d gotten in the plane by breaking the lock out of the door. The second thing I noticed was that he’d hit and broken one of my runway lights. All I remember thinking was that he must have really wanted to get back to Orcas to steal a plane and fly back at night. I guess he didn’t want to wait for the ferry.”
While the landing hadn’t been a thing of beauty, the plane suffered only minor damage and was flyable the next day. “He’s very lucky,” says Bill Anders. “But given the choice between skill and luck, I’ll take luck any day.”
Once again, since plane theft is such a rare occurrence, the rumors that quickly spread on the island hinted instead at a partying pilot trying to impress a girl he met at a bar over in “Sin City,” the nickname us provincial islanders have for Friday Harbor because there’s an incredible number of places where you can get a drink in town… like six.
Local police, though, knew the real story.
“AUGUST 2008: BURGLARY, COMMERCIAL burglary, commercial burglary, residential burglary… September ’08: commercial burglary, commercial burglary, commercial burglary, residential burglary… October ’08: more commercial burglaries… November 2008: airplane theft… August 2009: recovered vessel… ” San Juan County sheriff Bill Cumming tut-tutted as he read down a long list his department compiled once they realized who they were dealing with and had confirmed Colton’s MO with Island County detectives.
As tough as it was to believe, Cumming, sixty-one, realized he was up against just one extraordinarily brazen and “pretty darn bright” kid whom he now suspected of at least fifteen burglaries, along with the thefts of two planes and a couple of boats. With half the houses in San Juan County vacant for long stretches during the year, it wasn’t unusual to have teen troublemakers breaking in to raid liquor cabinets. However, in his thirty-eight years in law enforcement—thirty-one years with San Juan County, twenty-four as its sheriff—Cumming had never dealt with a suspect like Colton Harris-Moore.
“We’ve had serial burglars out here before, even people who specialized in unusual things such as entry from the water, but this is unique, this is one person being so prolific. He’s easily doubled the number of commercial burglaries we’d normally see. When you have someone that prolific in such a small area, they usually get caught.”
Another startling aspect of Colt’s spree was, of course, the boats and planes. He was suspected of stealing cars and he’d been convicted years before of taking dinghies on Camano Island, but now he was operating at an entirely different level of sophistication. And it wasn’t just the fact that he was stealing the boats and planes that was extraordinary. “We’ve recovered everything,” said Cumming, noting that Colton hadn’t tried to sell them. “He’s not taking them for joyrides; he’s taking them for transportation.”
Cumming’s job was clear: arrest Colton Harris-Moore. Pressure from the community was growing more intense after every crime. Residents still didn’t know who the suspect was; they just wanted him caught.
The evening after the stolen Cirrus showed up on Orcas, September 12, deputies flooded Eastsound determined to catch the Barefoot Bandit. They got lucky: instead of lying low for a while after the plane theft, Colt went out on the town.
The cops spotted him carrying a large bundle. According to a deputy, two officers went after him on foot while another converged by car. When Colt realized the cops were on his tail, he bolted into the street. The deputy in the car tried to sideswipe him, but missed. Colt danced away from the car and ran north through town toward the airport. Police followed, but he lost them by disappearing into a triangular patch of woods that connects the airport with the Ditch and Smuggler’s.
During the chase, Colt dropped his bundle. A deputy found it and was checking out its contents when he heard a voice sing out from the dark woods.
“You can’t catch me.”
He was right. Even though the stretch of forest was only three hundred yards long, there wasn’t enough manpower to effectively search it, and the county had no canine to try to sniff out the Barefoot Bandit. Besides, Colt already knew these woods as well as any local. Inside his bundle, the police found the sleeping bag stolen from Orcas Island Hardware, along with blankets he’d taken from an airplane stored inside a private hangar that sat at the edge of the trees where he now hid.
Another chunk of woods Colt knew well covered a peninsula called Madrona Point that dangles into East Sound. He had a campsite there complete with a pup tent, a sleeping bag, and a blanket that had gone missing from the Eastsound fire station. Colt used the camp as a base for raiding the town’s shops. Several times, deputies had chased him onto the Point, but he always seemed to vanish into thin air and thick woods.
Lummi Indians used Madrona Point as a burial ground. When the afternoon sun drops low in the sky, the large congregation of orange-barked, red-berried Pacific Madrona trees begins to glow, and it’s easy to imagine the area as a place of spirits. In the mid-eighties, a Seattle businessman who also owned much of Turtleback Mountain planned to build condos here on the island’s most sacred spot. A grassroots antidevelopment movement sprang up and eventually caught the attention of the U.S. Congress. The land was purchased and given to the Lummi Nation. The tribe managed it as an open park until numbnuts littered the area with beer bottles, used condoms, and other trash. Today, the Lummi section of Madrona Point sits behind a huge NO TRESPASSING sign at the dead end of Haven Road.
Back toward Main Street on Madrona Point lies a small group of homes, some of them the original cabins from a long-defunct resort. Island Market, Islanders Bank, and the rest of downtown Eastsound lie just a few yards away though the trees. One day as a retiree named Annette was working on a cottage she’s renovating, a friend
