ever.”
Colton thrust the big spidery Dungeness at Megan’s face. When she didn’t freak, it sealed their friendship. “I was pretty tomboyish, and we definitely hit it off right away,” she says. The two played together in the sea until lunchtime, when Megan’s mom, Doreen, called her back to the beach to eat. Megan asked if Colton could join them. From that point on, he became part of the Wagners’ summertime family.
The beach they picnicked on lay about 150 feet directly below the Wagners’ high-bank waterfront property on South Camano Drive, 3.3 miles south of Pam’s trailer as the raven flies. Doreen and her husband, Bill, first rented the house for a year when he worked for an aircraft company on the mainland. They loved the spot so much that later, after they moved to California and Bill started his own aeronautical engineering company, they decided to buy it as a vacation home. Along with the main house up on the treed bluff, the property came with a small beach cabin that served as a boat house for kayaks, dinghies, and other water toys.
“You didn’t want to have to go up and down that path between houses more than once,” said Doreen. “So we’d pack up in the morning and spend the whole day down there.” That “we” included Megan and her three younger sisters, along with a revolving guest list of friends and family. And Colton Harris-Moore.
“After that first day, I’d just always make an extra sandwich for him because he was always there,” said Doreen. Their Colton was a real island boy, a pint-size Tarzan. “He never had shoes and I don’t even remember him even having a shirt, just always showing up in his swim trunks with his mask in his hand.”
Every morning when the Wagners hiked down the path to the beach they found Colton waiting for them. “Then after a while,” says Doreen, “he started meeting us up at the main house so he could help cart all the stuff down to the beach.”
Once down the steep switchback trail that ran through fir, maple, and thickets of blackberries, Megan and Colton would head straight for the water. “We’d splash around, swim, walk along the beach lifting up rocks to see what kinds of animals were under there, like little crabs. At low tide we’d wade around this big rock and see who could find the biggest starfish.”
Megan says Colton amazed her with how much he knew about nature, both in and out of the water. “I remember there were these berries growing on the property and I’d always wanted to eat one, but my mom told me not to because they were poisonous. One day I look over and Colton is eating them and I’m like, ‘What are you doing?’ And he’s just, ‘Oh, they’re good, try one.’ He said they were salmonberries.”
When Bill Wagner took his summer vacation, he’d fly up to Washington in his twin-engine Westwind business jet with his private pilot, Dan, who’d stay with the Wagners on Camano. The kids had a couple of men around to run the boats, and Colton got to meet more real pilots. Bill would anchor their little cuddy cabin runabout off the beach and every day he or Dan would be out either dragging the kids behind it on inflatable tubes or pulling up pots filled with Dungeness crab. “I really enjoyed having Colt around,” says Bill. “And boy was he a spring—he never stopped moving. But he was also just the kindest, most polite little kid… and always helpful.”
“My youngest sister was six at the time,” remembers Megan, “and she freaked every time seaweed touched her leg. She’d scream because she thought a crab was going to get her. So when we waded in or out to the boat, Colton would carry her. He’d even give her piggyback rides, barefoot, up the steep dirt path when we had to go back to the house.”
Everyone knew it was time to head up when Doreen let loose one of her ear-piercing whistles. Playtime, though, didn’t stop just because they had to leave the beach.
“Colton taught us all how to climb trees,” says Megan. “We had a little fort up in a tree that was near a fence and he showed us how to climb the fence first then get into the tree.” Colton, the girls, and whatever friends they had visiting would also play tag in the woods along the driveway and the main road. Inside, Doreen set up the home’s solarium as what she called the “kids’ dormitory” for the summer, with inflatable mattresses on the floor. “It was a place where they could watch TV and play video and board games.”
Megan says her and Colton’s favorite board game was Life. Doreen remembers that the kids decided that whoever won would have the most babies when he or she grew up.
They also watched movies. The film Megan says they had playing continuously that first summer was
At dinnertime, Colton always had a place at the table. “We’d have spaghetti or macaroni and cheese,” says Megan. “And when Dad or Dan were up and we’d been out on the boat, we’d have a whole bunch of fresh crab and Colton would help clean them.” Doreen says he also always offered to help her with the dishes.
Every day, Doreen would tell Colton to call his mom and see if it was okay that he stayed for dinner. She says he’d pick up the phone, talk for a few moments, hang up, and tell her, “Yeah, it’s fine.” It didn’t take her long, though, to realize he was only pretending to call.
After dinner, in the lingering Northwest summer evenings when the sun doesn’t hit the horizon until 9 p.m., the kids would head back out to play until bedtime. “It’d get to be eight o’clock, and I’d be, ‘Okay, Colton, it’s time for you to go home.’ He’d say, ‘Okay. I’ll call my mom.’ Well, he was faking that, too, and walking back home.” No one saw the friend of his mom’s who, Colt said, dropped him off every morning, so they began to suspect that that, too, was a fib.
One evening, time slipped away so smoothly that when Doreen looked up it was 10:30, and Colton was still there. “I said, ‘Well, Colton, the girls need to go to bed, where’s your mom?’ He says, ‘Oh… she can’t pick me up, I’ll just walk.’ I said, ‘No, you’re not. Come on, we’ll give you a ride home.’” Doreen, Dan the pilot, Megan, and Colton piled into the van. “When we got over to the east side of the island, to the bottom of Haven Place,” remembers Doreen, “Colton said, ‘This is my road, this is good, just drop me off here!’ And I said, ‘No, no. I want to make sure you get home okay.’”
Megan says Colton started freaking out. “He tried to open the door and jump out while the car was moving.” So
They pulled into the dark driveway and drove up under the cedars to the clearing. “There’s his mom and a couple guys sitting around the campfire, a case of beer on the picnic table,” says Doreen. “Colton got out and they all started hollering at him, so he just took off running for the mobile home.” Doreen told Megan to stay in the van and she got out and walked up to Pam. “I just said, ‘You know your son’s been spending a lot of time with us. I thought maybe you would want to meet me.’”
Doreen said she didn’t get much of a response from Pam. “She pretty much blew us off.” After that, Colt didn’t show up for a couple of days.
Doreen, who’d investigated child abuse as a social worker back in the Black Hills of South Dakota, had just always assumed that Colton was a latchkey kid. “Whenever I’d ask why we hadn’t seen or met his mom, he’d just say, ‘She works,’ or ‘She’s not home.’” Doreen says she hadn’t observed any classic warning signs that he came from a troubled home. “He was always clean, his hair was always buzzed neat, there were no obvious signs of physical abuse. He just seemed like a lonely little kid.”
“We never saw him with anyone else, no other friends, no other kids,” says Megan.
The Wagners were all relieved when, on the third day, they walked outside and there was Colton, waiting for them. “He looked embarrassed,” says Megan.
Doreen took him aside and sat him down. “I said, ‘Look, I’ve seen it all, don’t be ashamed about anything. I just want to make sure you’re safe and that you know you can come to me if there’s anything I can do. He said, ‘Okay,’ and that was it.”
After seeing his home, Doreen went out and bought Colt sport sandals and some T-shirts. “I thought it was weird that he was always barefoot,” says Megan, laughing, “but I guess that’s what he liked because he wasn’t too excited to get the sandals. He was just like, ‘Oh, thanks,’ and I think he only wore them to make my mom happy.”
Megan says Colton rarely talked about his home life, “other than one time when I was complaining that I didn’t like my mom’s smoking, and he said he ‘hated!’ when his mom smoked. He was all excited one day because he said he’d just bought a remote control tank off eBay and that it shot BBs. He said he hid in the woods and when his mom came out to smoke he’d fire BBs at her. He thought that was great. I was impressed just because I didn’t even know what eBay was back then and he was two years younger than me and had it figured out. He seemed really smart and actually really mature for his age.”
Colt also never told Megan his dreams for the future, but she says meeting the family’s private pilot
