to grab her shotgun, fire it into the air, and chase them off her property a la Granny from
When running through the woods pretending to be Navy SEALs lost its edge, Colt and Joel began concocting real secret missions. The first mischief they got into was stealing cigarettes from their mothers. “Then we’d go hide out and smoke them,” says Joel. They then progressed to what they called “ninjing,” as in ninja-ing, stealthing through the woods and creeping up to neighborhood homes. “We’d go out at night and sneak around trying to find open garages,” he says. “We’d take soda pop and stupid stuff like that.”
Joel says Colt never worried about getting caught. “He was the same way in school when we’d disrupt the class, or on the bus when we’d start fighting or something. He didn’t care if he got into trouble.”
By the time Colt, Joel, Anne, and Kory were ready for the fourth grade, Camano’s brand-new Elger Bay Elementary was ready, too. They no longer had to bus out to Stanwood, but according to Anne, the kids continued to pick on both her and Colt. At times, she says, the teasing was so relentless that Colt escaped the only way he knew how—“He ran and hid.”
From Anne’s point of view, Colt had been fine up to this stage in his life. “He’d been a really good kid until the fourth grade. He’d do his homework and was a good student, especially for things he liked. If he took an interest in something he was all over it.” But then, she says, things changed. “Suddenly Colt became a troublemaker, a rebel. He’d stand up and start talking in the middle of class and the teacher would be like, ‘You need to sit down and pay attention,’ and he’d be like, ‘Uh, no.’ So he’d get sent out into the hall. It weirded me out, the way he just suddenly changed.”
PATTY MORGAN TAUGHT COLT in fifth grade at Elger Bay Elementary, though she says that for any discussion about his actual education, you have to look to lower grades because “he’d already checked out by fifth.” Morgan says Colt didn’t want to contribute and didn’t want to do the work in her social studies class (they were studying government that year). “Mostly he would just kinda slouch in the back and not participate. He was a hard one to read.” Morgan says she attempted to engage him because she felt he could do the work if he tried. That led to her most vivid and disturbing memory of Colton. “One time I was trying to encourage him to write his assignment, and I laid my hand on his shoulder. He suddenly jerked really violently and said, ‘Don’t touch me! Don’t ever touch me!’”
“I think there were some teachers that felt bad for him,” says Kory, though he sensed that some seemed to care less about the kids they’d identified as troublemakers, including him and Colt. What he and Anne and other students from their class agree on is that Colt seemed to follow the classic arc of the bullied becoming the bully. “He went from being picked on to being the one picking on anyone he could get away with it against,” says Kory.
“He wanted to be accepted and he wanted to be just like everyone else,” says Anne. Unfortunately for her, being like everyone else at Elger Bay Elementary meant turning on the fat girl with buck teeth. “He’d make fun of me, pull my hair, throw things at me, so the whole class would laugh. No one else liked me, so he thought that if he made fun of me, then people would like him. He turned my life into a living hell… I didn’t live all of that down until high school.”
Colt wasn’t able to raise himself too far up the pecking order, though. The kids may have laughed at some of his antics, but very few wanted to hang out with him. Whenever he did reach out and make a connection, it didn’t last long.
“He was the black sheep of the school,” remembers Mike Bulmer, who was one of Colt’s few friends for a while. Also from a broken home and a veteran of mother-son battles, Mike stole his mom’s van when he was only nine years old in an attempt to flee to his dad’s place on Camano. His father got custody in time for Mike to enter fifth grade at Elger Bay Elementary. As the new kid on the island, he didn’t have any friends, so he and Colt gravitated toward each other.
Mike’s father’s property on Camano was a Shangri-la for little dudes, with BMX bikes and rugged riding trails etched throughout the acreage. Mike and his older brother even had a go-cart and paintball guns. Colt, says Mike, always wanted to be there. “My dad wouldn’t let him stay over on weekdays, but every Friday he’d come over and we’d order pizza and hang out for the weekend.” Mike says Colt didn’t have a bike of his own at the time, so he used to walk the three miles back and forth from his trailer.
Colt never invited Mike to his home. “He said his mom was always yelling at him,” remembers Mike. “One time I was at a buddy’s house on Haven and you could frikkin’ hear her screaming at Colt all the way down the road.”
Mike is another one who says his close friendship with Colt began to break down because of the tall tales. One day when Colt was over at their house, Mike’s older brother called him out on his stories and drew a circle in the dirt. “He made us fight, full-on fist contact,” says Mike. “I was the bigger kid back then and I got Colt on the ground. He looked up at me and I socked him right in the face. That made him really, really angry. I don’t know how the hell he did it because I was so much bigger, but he lifted me off and then took a fat tree branch and broke it over my head. Then he went home.”
FOR ALL THE REJECTION, Colt continued to seek companionship.
South End sculptor Shannon Kirby first met Colt when he came down her road walking his bike. She looked up from her gardening and saw a cute kid with a flat tire. “He was a little pumpkin.”
Shannon called him over and reinflated his tire. “I showed him where I kept my pump and told him it was there if he ever had another flat.” It took only five minutes to fix the bike, but then they started talking. “He was very chatty. It was like he was just starving. He just wanted someone to pay attention to him.”
Colt stayed for an entire hour. As he was leaving, Shannon told him to come back if he wanted to. A few days later, he did. “I yakked with him for a while, but for less time than before because I was busy. Finally I said, ‘Sorry, I’ve got things to do.’ I could just see his face immediately change, with this look of ‘Ugh, they always do that to me, they shut me down.’” Colt left. A short while later, Kirby’s bike pump was stolen.
The next time Shannon saw Colt was when a bunch of kids came cascading out of the woods onto her property. “They’re roughhousing and I’m watching. It was obvious Colt didn’t understand boundaries, like nobody had taught him. He was playing way too rough with this one girl. He tripped her and she fell and hurt her ankle, so I went out, helped her up, and gave her a Band-Aid. Colt was like this gangly goonball that didn’t know how to behave.”
Kirby saw Colton again years later, this time in the Stanwood Library. She said hello, but says he looked away, uncomfortable. By then she’d had another break-in that the police later tied to Colton.
Chapter 13
In 2000, Pam took up with a man we’ll call Jimmy, a journeyman mechanic, chain-smoking Caterpillar cowboy, and hard drinker who “could put a hurtin’ on a bottle of whiskey before noon by a long shot.” Jimmy’s the kind of guy who seems to know every road and dirt logging track in the state, and when telling a story will make damn sure you know exactly what byways got you there and where every crossroad leads to. Same thing with machinery details and model numbers. Folks who know him describe Jimmy as “a lost soul,” and though in some ways he fit Pam’s predilection for bad boys, the then-forty-five-year-old had never been in any real trouble with the law beyond what he calls “some DUI bullshit.”
Jimmy hooked up with Pam while doing a land-clearing job down on Haven Place. “It was all happy-go-lucky bullshit for the first while, a good time when you were drunk,” he says. So he moved into the trailer, “shacked up, whole shit and caboodle.” He says it looked like Pam and Colton had been barely scratching by. “She wasn’t working. Nothing in the cupboard and nothing in the fridge but beer,” so he filled the trailer with food. Jimmy says he’d cook and Colton would help. He quickly learned the kid’s favorite meal. “Crab wouldn’t last a day with him in the house.”
To add to the Dickens-on-draft scene, Jimmy says that Colt’s clothes were rags. “His ass was hanging out of his underwear, so I took him and bought him a couple hundred dollars of new stuff—shoes, jeans, underwear, everything.”
