deprived town of Tsawwassen, British Columbia.
Once Colt reached the Canadian side, he rustled a classy dark gray BMW and drove to see his prison pal.
“He called me on my cell and said, ‘I’m right down the street,’” says twenty-three-year-old Josh. “I was pretty surprised.”
Colt didn’t seem to be nervous about law enforcement chasing him. “No, not at all, totally relaxed. He was enjoying it,” says Josh, who cruised with Colt around Vancouver.
Colt had cash—over a grand that Josh saw—and they went to a bar. Colt didn’t order alcohol, though. “He’s had a drink or two before, but he doesn’t like it,” says Josh. “No booze or drugs for him.”
The two friends who’d bonded in prison when they found out they both lived on Puget Sound had some catching up to do. “He told me about crashing one of the planes in a field and about stealing a boat out in the islands,” Josh remembers. “I think he’s totally nuts for doing the plane stuff, but he said he doesn’t care if he crashes.”
Colt had stayed in touch ever since he’d escaped custody in 2008 while Josh was still locked up. He’d called Josh from inside the Brodys’ home and from several different stolen cell phones. The calls to Green Hill caught the attention of the prison guards, but little came of it other than getting Josh, when he was released, put on a watch list. “They stopped me once at a border crossing and asked me what I knew about Colt, but that was it.”
After a nice, friendly visit, Colt asked Josh to come running with him. Josh said no. He had a good job as a framing carpenter, a beautiful girlfriend, and life was good. He didn’t feel the need to risk it all for a rush. He’d served every day of a three-year sentence and had no desire to go back to jail—or worse. Josh says things looked to be headed someplace serious when Colt gave him a peek at some of the gear he was carrying.
“He had a twelve-gauge shotgun and a nine-millimeter pistol,” says Josh. “He said he’d use them… said something like, ‘They’ll never take me alive.’”
On September 22, 2009, Sheriff Bill Cumming finally announced that the crook he suspected of causing all the trouble on Orcas over the last thirteen months was eighteen-year-old Colton Harris-Moore. “We wanted to give him a false sense of security,” Cumming said as the reason he hadn’t let the county’s residents in on it earlier.
As Cumming talked to reporters, the cops working Colt’s case down in Island County held their breath. “We’d asked Bill not to mention the airplanes.”
Island County Sheriff’s Office deputies had come across campsites in the Camano Island woods where they found newspaper clippings Colt had snipped out about himself. They were concerned that part of his motivation was a need for attention and that giving it to him would just perpetuate or, worse, escalate his actions. “We always tried to downplay him in the press,” says one ICSO officer.
Colt’s Orcas spree made the Local section in the region’s biggest newspaper, the
Our tormenter had a backstory. He also had a mom.
From the
“Harris-Moore’s mother, Pam Koehler (sp) of Camano Island, calls the new allegations against her son ‘crap.’
“‘I know for a fact he is not doing all of these crimes,’ Koehler said Tuesday. ‘Any time the cops can’t catch whoever is doing them, they blame it on Colt.’
“Koehler concedes her son has been interested in flying, but insists he has never taken flight lessons.”
Chapter 10
Creston, B.C., lies snuggled into a scenic mountain valley just north of the Idaho line—a 450-mile drive east of Vancouver. South of town, alongside the squiggling run of the Kootenay River, Creston Valley Regional Airport consists of a handful of hangars and a four-thousand-foot runway where the local flying club offers classes on the hazardous art of mountain flying. Colton spent at least two nights and three days there, but didn’t sign up for a course.
On September 24, he ditched the stolen BMW at the entrance to a landfill less than half a mile away from the airport and walked across a hayfield to the fence line. Hazards to local pilots had long included a herd of elk that enjoyed the warmth of the asphalt runway on cold nights, so Creston erected an eight-foot fence around the entire 225-acre airport to keep planes from getting gored. Colt climbed the fence and set up camp in the thick woods on the west side of the airport.
Creston was a risky place to try to steal an airplane because its manager, Les Staite, lived on-site with his wife and a “yappy little Shih Tzu” that Les calls a tyrant. “Anybody comes around at all, he’s a good alarm system.”
That didn’t faze Colt, though, just made it more challenging. He staked out a spot where he could keep an eye on all six hangars and the Staites’ home. After dark, he slinked across the runway to scope out Creston’s airplane inventory.
At the first hangar, Colt leaned against his pry bar until the door lock popped. Inside, his headlamp illuminated a Wild West scene, with saddles and chaps hanging on the walls. Bush pilot Volker Scherm owned the hangar as a base for BearAir, his backcountry guiding business. He’d built a small office in the corner of the hangar, and up top he stored a collection of grizzly bear and mountain goat skins. Colt tried the office door and found it locked. He was in no hurry, though, and didn’t force it open. He’d learned long ago that people almost always hid keys nearby. Scherm kept his tucked into one of the saddles.
Skins, saddles… made sense there’d be guns close by. Colt left the hangar with Scherm’s laptop, a wad of cash, and three guns, including .32 and .22 caliber pistols. He considered BearAir’s sixties-era Cessna a dinosaur, so he passed on the plane.
Next door, Colt broke into what eighty-year-old Korean War vet Bill Piper calls his “oasis.” Piper’s mancave of a hangar features a bedroom, shower, full kitchen, and an airplane. He’s piloted everything from jets to choppers, but now flies a Piper Super Cub—a classic bush plane equally at home on wheels, skis, or floats. Again, though, the thirty-plus-year-old plane was ancient to Colt; he was interested only in the most modern models. Instead, he helped himself to a cache of Piper’s power bars, bottled water, 7Up, cans of pork and beans, and pudding packets as well as a load of his tools and a portable radio that picked up aviation frequencies.
Colton poked inside all six of Creston’s hangars and saw all the planes, but none of them was just right. He’d already spotted the perfect one—a brand-new Cessna 182 Skylane—but it wasn’t in a hangar where he could spend time prepping it out of sight. The Cessna was tied down on the main ramp just a few hundred feet in front of Les Staite’s kitchen window. Even worse, it sat in a pool of light under a streetlamp.
Despite the risk, Colt stealthed up to the plane and pried open its window to get at the door lock. He climbed inside. As a bonus, the owner had left his satellite phone in the plane. Colt pulled the satphone out of its case and fiddled with it. Everything checked out with the Cessna, so Colt retired to his campsite to wait for the right time.
The next morning, Bill Piper and the other owners discovered they’d been burglarized. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) responded and investigated, after which the hangars were locked back up and Les Staite wired the Cessna 182’s window shut as a temporary fix.
Colt sat in the woods, calmly chowing on pudding and power bars and watching all the police activity. He bided his time until nightfall, when everyone else left and Staite and his yappy dog settled down inside their house.
