to get married—he liked messing around too much. Gordy does what Gordy wants to do.”
Pam, at thirty-nine, became pregnant just as her twenty-year-old first son and his wife, Jacquie, had their own baby girl, Christina. Around the same time, Pam’s oldest sister—who’d also moved out to Camano and lived at the end of Road 25’55—was in the terminal stages of emphysema. In January 1991, Pam’s granddaughter died of SIDS, which, the family says, had a big effect on her. That March, Pam’s oldest sister died.
Pam skipped her sister’s funeral because, as she told her niece, she felt she was too close to term. Three weeks later, at 8:38 a.m. on March 22, 1991, at Affiliated Health Services in Mount Vernon, Skagit County, Washington, Pam gave birth to her second son.
“Paul called me and said, ‘Oh God, my mother wants to name the baby Colt, after the beer and the gun,’” says Pam’s niece. “It was Paul and Jacquie who convinced her to officially make it Colton, since at least that was a real name.”
Pam had kept Jerry Harris’s surname, and she and Gordy decided to hyphenate. The baby boy became Colton Harris-Moore.
PAM WANTED TO CELEBRATE Colt’s birth as an extra special event. “I was working for the navy back then and had a good paycheck,” she says. “And Gordy was working steady and everything was cool, so I said, ‘We’ve waited for this baby for five years, how about let’s bring him home from the hospital in a white limo?’”
Pam says she’ll never forget the limousine driver’s name: Dexter. “We had him stop at a little store on the way home. I laid the baby in the backseat and both Gordy and I went inside. When we came back, Dexter was standing outside that limo like a guard. It was cool.”
They’d rented the limo for a couple of hours, so little Colt’s next stop was the feed store. “We were raising pigs and we had to get our feed,” says Pam. “When the owner saw the limo he went in and washed his hands and put on an apron because he wanted to see the baby. He met Colt and then we loaded a couple of bags of pig feed into the trunk of the limo.”
After that, they stopped at the market on Camano to show Colt off to some of the cashiers they knew. “God, we had a lineup! People I didn’t even know lined up to see that baby,” remembers Pam. Pam and Gordy then took Colt home to the little trailer tucked out of sight among the cedar trees.
A Camano resident who was at the market that day when the limo showed up remembers turning to a friend and saying, “That kid doesn’t have a chance.”
COLT, PAM SAYS, WAS a fat, happy baby. She nicknamed him Tubby and says that from the beginning he always loved to be outside and was fascinated with anything “up.” She remembers Colt staring into the night sky as she rocked him, and says that one of his first words was “moon.”
Pam went back to work after Colt was born, dropping him off at either her sister Sandy’s or her daughter-in- law Jacquie’s before heading off for the ninety-minute commute to her job with the navy. (The women in her office had thrown her a baby shower and had given her a novelty frame that said “
According to Pam, Gordy was “an excellent father for about the first two years. We’d even argue over who got to change the diaper.” Then Gordy started to get itchy. “He wanted a bar out his front door,” says Pam. “So I said, ‘Okay, let’s make one. We’ll open up all the windows and put a couple of kegs in here.’” That didn’t work. Gordy started stepping out on her, which led to increasingly hostile confrontations at home.
“Once he started drinking? Whoa!” says Pam’s niece. “Sloppy and mean. He turned evil… Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”
According to court records, the first report to Child Protective Services regarding Colton Harris-Moore’s welfare occurred before he turned one.
When he was about eighteen months old, Pam says she began to find Colt sitting on the floor of the trailer banging his head against the wall. Relatives remember him, as an infant, acting out of control, scrambling atop the kitchen counters in the trailer. A former neighbor reported that more than once he saw toddler-aged, diapered Colton wandering down 25’55 alone, “like a wild child.”
Before Colt turned three, Gordy was “in and out” of the home. In April 1994, Pam filed a protection order against him.
Colt was enrolled in special education preschool classes at the age of three because testing indicated he’d failed to reach normal developmental milestones. Colt’s IEP (Individualized Education Plan) concentrated on helping him with speech and articulation.
Pam also headed to school. She’d been the first in her family to attend college when she took courses in Seattle and St. Louis, and now she enrolled in Skagit Valley College. “I was planning on getting my criminal justice degree,” she says. From there she wanted to work toward her law degree and ultimately become a practicing attorney. “I know that at least I’d be an honest one.”
When Pam took a psychology class, she suddenly had an insight into what she calls Colt’s mental problems. She says that from an early age he never thought through the consequences of his actions. “We learned about brain synapses, and I said, ‘That’s it! Colt has a broken synapse.’”
With Pam out of work, though, money got tight and she quit school. “Crap just started happening, trucks breaking down, nobody to help me… so bag it.” Pam and Colt went on welfare. Gordy was supposed to pay child support, and when he didn’t, the state’s Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS) went after him. Gordy, though, had a way to get around them.
“He knew to work less than a full quarter, which is what it takes for them to find you and take your money,” says Pam. “So he just kept moving to another job.”
Gordy didn’t totally disappear, though, stopping back at the trailer every once in a while over the ensuing years. If he was flush, he’d hand Pam some cash.
Around this time Pam had a falling out with her remaining sister, Sandy, in a continuing round of family feuds. Colton would later remember that event (“when Mom alienated them”) as being painful because he was close to Aunt Sandy and loved visiting the animals. According to family members, the feuds were usually about money.
On December 4, 1994, with her sons Paul and Colt in attendance, Pam got married again, this time to forty- one-year-old Seattle native William Kohler. Bill loved fishing, heroin, and raising homing pigeons. He’d served in the army, based overseas in Germany during the sixties, and then, according to Pam, worked as a milker at dairy farms when he came back to Washington. While Colt had already begun to detest Gordy, his biological father, he warmed to Bill. The two, Pam says, did everything together, and especially bonded over taking care of the animals they kept. Colt would later say that one of his best memories of Bill was how he’d walk like a chicken when they went out in the mornings to collect eggs.
Once again, though, his mother’s choice of men left Colt with little stability at home. Pam told a counselor that Bill “was not really here much… He was a heroin addict, so he was out a lot… Colton couldn’t count on [him].”
PAM SAYS YOUNG COLT was always more than a handful. “I don’t recall ever being able to control him, ever.” She found it impossible to discipline him. “I was spanked and I’m okay,” she says, though even corporal punishment had little effect on Colt. “He was always so big and strong, even when he was little, that it took more out of me to spank him than what the spanking did to him… He just always did what he wanted.”
When Colton was four, a witness filed a complaint with Child Protective Services after seeing “a woman” grab Colt “by the hair and beat his head severely.” By this time, concerns about Colton Harris-Moore’s mental health, education, nutrition, and physical safety had been entered into every part of “the system” possible, with reports to county, state, and federal agencies tasked with child welfare.
Colton continued special ed classes until age six, when he was reassessed and determined eligible for regular grade school. He was an inquisitive kid who could laser focus on things he was interested in—like nature and airplanes—but he never clicked with school. Pam remembers only one teacher who seemed to get through to him, and she moved to another school district after Colton finished second grade. His marks were never good, and they deteriorated as he advanced until at one point he failed every class. Pam says she insisted that the school hold
