Jimmy says he and Pam rarely went out. “She’s not a bar-hopper, not her scene, wouldn’t socialize with other people. She just wanted to stay home and lay on the couch drinking her beer.” He says he and Colton spent a lot of time outside, playing with Colton’s Great Pyrenees named Cody and bonding over heavy equipment. Jimmy taught Colton how to mow the lawn on a tractor, then graduated him to bigger boy’s toys. “I put him on my D7 Cat, my 440 articulated skidder, my D2 bulldozer… Hell, he could run that within a few minutes. He was a good student, real quick learner.”
Some other lessons Colton picked up on real quick were how to hotwire tractors, cars, and boats—skills Jimmy thought might come in handy someday out in the field. “I feel lower than dogshit about that,” he says now. “Never thought he’d go and do this stuff.”
Colton’s fascination with airplanes offered another connection between the two. Jimmy actually had a pilot’s license. He’d learned as a kid, hanging around a small airfield, helping out by pumping gas into planes until a friend of the family took him up and taught him to fly. Finally, Colton had met a real pilot.
“Colt was just obsessed with airplanes,” says Jimmy. “He had books about them all scattered around and he was always drawing them with crayons and colored pencils. So I started taking him to the hobby shops in Mount Vernon and Burlington and I’d buy him all kinds of plane models—some real fancy with lights that would work off batteries—and then we’d build them together.”
Soon Colt had squadrons of model planes in his room, some hanging from the ceiling posed in perpetual dives, others awaiting clearance for takeoff amid the clutter.
Jimmy also had a laptop. “We’d get on the Internet and fart around looking at airplanes. I was thinking about getting a chopper, a small experimental helicopter, two-man job. Pam would be passed out on the couch, and me and the kid would go online to look at the chopper and dream about it.”
One of Jimmy’s computer programs in particular captured young Colt’s attention: Microsoft Flight Simulator. Sitting beside Jimmy, Colt familiarized himself with the sim’s aircraft—a Learjet Model 45, a Bell 206 JetRanger helicopter, and a Cessna 182 Skylane featuring an ultrarealistic instrument panel.
Unlike a fantasy video game designed solely to inject adrenaline thrills, Flight Simulator offers an educational experience for those with the flying bug. The screen accurately renders the cockpit gauges, and to successfully get airborne a virtual pilot must learn to operate all of the plane’s controls within correct parameters. Forget to release the brakes and the plane won’t go anywhere; not enough throttle and it won’t lift off; fly too slow or pull the nose too high and the plane will stall and crash unless quickly corrected. With the sim, would-be pilots can learn to navigate between points using instruments or visual landmarks, they can fly day or night or in any kind of virtual weather, and they can practice landing at real, accurately rendered airports around the world (three hundred airports back then; three thousand in the latest version of the program).
Jimmy was impressed by how quickly Colt mastered the highly technical Flight Simulator. “I even had a joystick hooked up so it felt more realistic, and he took to it right away.”
While the models and Microsoft had Colt’s imagination reaching for the skies, life on the ground, in the trailer, began to more closely approximate hell.
“As time went along… man, she was a mean fucking drunk,” says Jimmy. “Very moody, just go into raging drunks. Looking into her eyes… she had the hate in her. She’d drink and beat up on the kid. I mean she hammered on him—we’re talking black and blue. I wouldn’t beat my dog that way. Every other day it’d happen. Maybe the kid wouldn’t clean up his room or take out the garbage, which was a joke anyway because the whole goddamn place was a hog pen, a total firetrap. She’d be half drunk and start picking on him for one thing or another, nitpick bullshit, then it would escalate and she’d start beating on him.”
Jimmy says Colt had his own anger issues, throwing fits when asked to do something he didn’t want to do. And together, mother and son brought out the worst in each other. “The poor kid would have enough of his mother nagging and nagging, and then he’d just fucking come unglued. When she got mad she’d break his toys and stuff, so it got to the point where he’d break up his own shit before she could. He’d trash out his room, kick and stomp, bitch and scream and go outside. I’d go out and calm him down and we’d sit out on the picnic table and bullshit. He’d tell me he hated her. I shouldn’t have done it, but once in a while he’d be out there crying and I’d have a beer in my hand and give him a sip.”
Jimmy never saw Colton fight back. “He was scared of her back then.”
Jimmy says the bad scenes inside the little trailer weren’t limited to mother and son. “It started to wear down real quick. Then her and I got into it one day and I ended up in Coupeville for a night.” He says he and Pam were having a shouting match in the trailer’s little living room when Pam went ass over tit behind the woodstove. “She fell over the kindling box,” says Jimmy. “But Colt thought I hit her. She yelled for Colt to go call the cops, so he went across the road to the house where a bunch of dopers lived and called the 911.”
The Island County deputies and Stanwood police came out. Pam had a shiner coming up, and they arrested Jimmy, who spent the night locked up in the Coupeville county jail. “I took a taxi back the next day and told the driver—a damn good-looking gal, charged me $100 for the ride, though—I told her to turn the cab around and have it facing the main road with the engine running and wait for me just in case. I didn’t know what [Pam] might do. I sat in the taxi for a good long time, not knowing whether to shit or go blind… then finally grew some hair on my ass, got out, and walked down the driveway. The door was open and she was sitting on the couch, fuckered up. She turned around, big old black eye. I only stayed a few days after that and then decided no way, it’s not working out.”
Island County records show that the assault charges against Jimmy were dropped.
After Jimmy, Van again became a fixture around the trailer. He and Colt mainly got along. During a later interview with counselors, Colt said that Van was only violent to him twice, while Pam was violent to him “100s of times.”
Chapter 14
With nearly constant trouble and stress at home and at school, Colt increasingly turned inward—maintaining his fantasy life as the secret agent son of a rich pilot—and outdoors, spending as much time as possible in the woods.
Both Pam and Jimmy say they taught him survival skills: how to build fires and set up campsites, which plants were safe to eat and which ones were poisonous. Once inside the evergreens, Colton was home, kicking off his shoes to climb trees or to run full speed through the undergrowth.
“He loved being in there,” says Kory. “If you ever chased him, he’d always go for the woods. And once you were in the trees, forget it, because you’d never be able to find him but he’d know exactly where you were. You’d follow him in, but he’d disappear, then suddenly he’s behind you throwing rocks, but you still can’t see him, so you’d have to back off.”
Kory says Colt was equally at home in the woods all over Camano Island. “He knew the woods up by where we lived better than we did, and we were in there all the time.”
COLT ALSO KNEW AND loved the waterfront, wandering Camano’s coastline from top to bottom, often alone, from a very young age.
“I was out in the water, boogie boarding, just paddling around,” says Megan Wagner, “when all of a sudden I see this snorkeler coming toward me. We hardly ever saw strangers down on the beach, and this kid is coming straight at me, closer and closer. I’m thinking, Whoa, that’s really, really weird, and I start to swim away. I look back and he’s still following me! So finally I stop and turn around. He pops up and says, ‘Wow, from underwater, your legs look like Jell-O!’”
It was summer, the ideal time to be a nature-loving boy or girl on a Pacific Northwest island. Megan Wagner, at twelve, was old enough to be offended by someone commenting on her legs. And she was, at first. But looking at this ten-year-old boy[1] with the buzz cut and the big smile spreading beneath his dive mask without a trace of malice, she couldn’t help but start laughing.
He introduced himself as Colton and said, “Want to see something cool?” Megan said yes and followed as he scouted ahead in the shallow water. “Then he bends his knees and suddenly kicks his bare feet up,” says Megan. “And this huge crab comes flying off the bottom and Colton just grabs him! I thought that was the coolest thing
