assault rifles—along with an armored personnel carrier and ominous black federal government helicopter, all arrayed against a barefoot teenager running through the woods. Now nothing could hold back the story of the boy who stole airplanes. Colton Harris-Moore’s tale went nationwide, and then global.
In order to deny Colt a means of escape, the police told everyone in Granite Falls to lock up their homes and cars. Within the small community, though, some people shrugged it off. One woman not only left her keys in her SUV, but also her purse. Searchers never spotted Colt, and the manhunt was called off after a day and a half. They had no idea how he escaped until the woman’s SUV showed up ditched in the little city of Stanwood. Her purse was still inside, the contents untouched. Stanwood police also found a passport belonging to the burglarized Granite Falls homeowners sticking in the door of their headquarters. Colt might be able to use her husband’s passport, but he had no use for a female identity and wanted to return the wife’s. A truck stolen from a nearby thrift store that same night was found across the causeway on Camano Island, at a spot a half mile from the single-wide trailer where Colt grew up and where his mom still lived.
Eighteen-year-old Colton Harris-Moore, now hunted as an armed-and-dangerous fugitive, had gone home.
Part 2
THE CAMANO KID
Chapter 11
The spark that eventually brought Colton Harris-Moore into the world struck when his mother chose “Crazy.”
She was Pam Harris back then, and had gone to a restaurant/cocktail lounge in Lynnwood, Washington, to wait for her oldest sister. After ordering a beer, she punched up the Patsy Cline classic on the jukebox.
There were few patrons in the lounge, but two guys sitting at the bar were talking and laughing so loudly that Pam could barely hear her song. She got up from her table, fed more money into the jukebox, and played it again. The boys kept up the rough chatter, though. Pam drank her beer, lit a cigarette, and did a slow burn. When the song ended, she got up and went for “Crazy” one more time. On the way back to her table, she screeched, “Be quiet so I can hear it this time!”
That got their attention.
“One of them turned around, got up, and came across the room,” she says. “He was a big guy, muscular, and I thought, Oh God, I’m going to get hit.”
Pam tells the story without any hint that it strikes her as anything but normal that a guy would give a gal a smack in the kisser.
Born Pamela Ann Coaker in the spring of 1951, Pam was the youngest of four—three girls and a boy—spread over nine years. Her father was big in road construction in Kittitas County, Washington, just east of the Cascades, where his family had a sheep farm. According to his oldest grandchild, he was also a big drinker, afflicted with what she calls “the Coaker curse.” Pam’s mother grew up in the Dakotas as the oldest of fifteen kids in a family with a dash of Sioux blood in their veins—something the entire clan cites to explain their fondness for running around barefoot.
Pam’s mom suffered through a couple of bad marriages, lost her voicebox to cancer, and, according to family, used alcohol to help deal with the pain. Both of Pam’s parents died in their early sixties.
Pam grew up loving the outdoors, and some of her favorite early memories involve listening to her father play guitar around campfires. She also enjoyed clamming, crabbing, and fishing, even though she’s never gotten over a fear of the water. As a teen in the sixties, Pam got into the Beatles and organic gardening, dressed hippie, and wore headbands over long hair that she straightened on an ironing board.
At seventeen, she married an air force mechanic named Harry and moved to San Bernardino, California, where she gave birth to her first son, Paul. Pam loved life in California, but moved back to Washington State and then east to Missouri as Harry followed work. When Chrysler laid him off, the family returned to Washington and settled in for a few happy years. The marriage ended, according to Paul, when Harry left Pam because of her drinking.
Paul, who plans to write a book about his difficult childhood, grew up a latchkey kid, often left alone while Pam worked during the day or was out at night. From the age of six, he’d come home from school to an empty apartment, call one of his cousins, and stay on the phone until his aunt could get there to pick him up. During those years, Pam worked at a dry cleaner and then in Seattle at a series of government jobs in the accounts payable sections of the Department of the Interior, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the U.S. Navy.
The oldest of her batch of nieces and nephews remembers Pam as more of a sibling than as an adult figure. She was the “cool aunt,” with a great record collection and even a blurry picture she’d taken of the Beatles running onstage.
“We’d listen to music and go to concerts,” her niece says. “We were holding tickets to go see Lynyrd Skynyrd when they died in the plane crash.” The niece also remembers Pam telling her who her real father was and helping her get in touch with him—something that pissed off her mother, Pam’s oldest sister, to no end. “Pam always did her own thing,” she says. “She didn’t care what anybody thought about her, what they thought about the men in her life, about her drinking, or smoking ‘her weed.’ Her attitude was ‘I do what I want, when I want, how I want.’”
Another of Pam’s notable qualities was her thriftiness. “Tightwad,” says her niece. “Her apartment was always freezing in the winter because she refused to turn on the heat and pay for the electric bill.” Pam’s alcohol budget back then went to a generic econo-brew in a stark white can plainly and boldly labeled BEER.
In June 1985, Pam remarried, this time to Jerry Harris, a guy who’d dated her older sister Sandy for a couple of years. That union didn’t last long, though, and soon after it spoiled, Pam found herself in that cocktail lounge faced with the imposing six-foot figure of Gordon “Gordy” Moore bearing down on her while Patsy Cline wondered why she let herself worry.
“He walked over to my table and just said, ‘What?’ So I said, ‘I’ve been trying to listen to this song three times! Will you shut up?’ He laughed, thank God. And then he invited me up to the bar to sit with him and his friend. We had a few drinks—whiskey for him, beer on my side—and then he said, ‘Hey, you want to go to the beach tomorrow?’ I gave him my phone number and said, ‘Call me—at noon.’”
Though she doubted he would, Gordy called—at 11:59. He picked her up and, after a nice day at the beach, said he wanted to introduce her to his folks. “I thought, Well, that’s a little quick,” says Pam. “My hair was all windblown and I didn’t bring a brush, so on the way to his parents’ place he stopped and bought me one. I thought that was pretty cool.”
Gordy worked as a concrete finisher with full journeyman status and made a good hourly wage. He filled Pam’s kitchen with food every time he came over, putting so many cans on her shelves that she couldn’t shut the cupboard doors. “He met my son, Paul, and everything was cool there, too,” she says.
Gordy liked to smoke turkeys and shared Pam’s love of the outdoors, taking her, Paul, and one of Paul’s cousins camping several times.
Pam yearned to live someplace more rural than Lynnwood, a Seattle satellite primarily known for its shopping centers and convenient highway access. She was also tired of the long commute to her government job, though she made the best of it. Once during a heavy snowstorm, her bus got stuck in a drift coming home. “I told the driver she should get off and get us all pizza and beer,” says Pam. The driver refused, so Pam led a mutiny among the passengers, piloting them to a local Black Angus, where they spent the next few hours warm and toasting.
According to Pam, Gordy worked hard and when the whistle blew he enjoyed the bars. His concept of the ideal home had a pub within walking distance. Pam’s woodsy dreams, though, finally persuaded him to pool his
