obviously had an impact on him. “Colt told me that he thought Dan’s job was really, really cool,” she says. After getting to know Dan, Colt began telling other kids that his father was not only a pilot, but one who flew rich people all around the world. He also began to tell Pam that when he grew up he was going to become a private pilot for people like Bill Gates and Paul Allen, and work for them until he had enough money to start his own aerospace company.
At the end of that first summer, when the Wagners told him they were leaving for California, Colt was visibly disappointed. They wrote his number next to the phone and Megan promised she’d call as soon as they came back the following year. And she did. Colton again became part of the family, spending practically every glorious Pacific Northwest summer’s day with them, beaching under the ever-blue skies; swimming, boating, and crabbing in the calm waters of Saratoga Passage; playing games well into the evenings; and eating anything and everything that Doreen put in front of him. By then, Colt had already outgrown the sandals Doreen had bought him and he spent the whole time happily barefoot.
The third summer, the Wagners did more traveling and spent less time at the beach. They lost touch with their island boy. Later, Doreen ran into Colton and Pam at the Elger Bay Store, but she says he acted very uncomfortable, like he didn’t want her to talk to Pam. Doreen gave him a hug, and says that was the last time she saw him. That wasn’t the end of the Wagners’ connection to Colton, though. He’d spend quite a bit more time at their house—not that they’d know about it until they got a call from the police.
Chapter 15
Colton’s summer days with the Wagners were moments of idealized normalcy for him. Back on Haven Place, though, things were growing uglier between him and his mother. In later interviews with counselors, Colton said it was at this age that it became clear to him the extent and damage of his mother’s alcoholism. He said that at one point he tried to give her a Bible, and another time an Alcoholics Anonymous pamphlet, but “she burned it.” Her drinking, Colton said, led to violence. One day when both Pam and her boyfriend beat him, Colton decided to take off.
AFTER JIMMY MOVED OUT of Pam’s trailer, he never expected to see or hear from Colton again. Then one day in 2001, when he was living across the bridge in Stanwood, he got a call.
“It was Colt and he was real upset. He said his mom had been beating on him. I told him, ‘If you need to get out of there, get the hell out and walk to the main road.’ I called Island Transit [the free bus that loops the island every hour] and told them what was going on. They had a driver go out for him, actually picked the kid up and delivered him right to my door. When he showed up he had bruises all over his arms and legs and a couple on his back.”
Jimmy says Colton stayed with him for ten days. Colton spent his time sketching airplanes and rocket ships in a lined notebook. He also practiced with Microsoft Flight Simulator.
“So one day,” says Jimmy, “nice day, warmish, good outdoor working weather, I’m watching this kid fly around on the computer… man, he just loved airplanes. He was a good kid, you know? He just had issues. So I say, ‘Hey, you want to do something different? You want to go
Jimmy drove them to a private strip owned by a friend whom he “talked out of a plane.” He walked a wide- eyed Colton up to an old Cessna 170, a 145-horsepower tail-dragger that’d been built in the 1950s. Jimmy showed him how to do the walkaround safety check, then buckled Colton into the right seat. “I got in, yelled, ‘Clear!’ and fired that bitch up. Well, Colt didn’t know what to do! He’s just going, ‘Wow.’ I said, ‘You ready?’ He gave me this funny look, like for a second he didn’t quite know… and I just said, ‘Here we go!’”
After taxiing to the end of the smoothed-dirt strip, Jimmy spun the plane around and opened up the throttle. “I wound her out and yelled, ‘Hang on, buddy!’ When I got it up to speed and started to pull back, I tell you his guts all but fell out of him!”
Jimmy leaned the little plane into a gentle bank and flew south down the spine of Camano then out over the water, turning east over the top of Hat Island and crossing Possession Sound to the mainland. He says Colt’s nervousness drained away as they gained altitude. Jimmy pointed the nose of the Cessna north toward Canada, and set her on a straight and level course at three thousand feet over the town of Marysville. Then he turned to Colton: “Put your hands on the wheel.”
Colton stared at the yoke in front of him. “He wasn’t expecting that!” says Jimmy. “I said, ‘C’mon, this ain’t no different than what you been doing on the computer.’ So he put his little hands up there and death-gripped that son of a bitch.”
Jimmy let go of the wheel on his side of the cockpit and suddenly ten-year-old Colton Harris-Moore was flying an airplane.
“Once he settled down a little, I told him to push the wheel in just a bit… The nose dipped and he goes, ‘Whoa!’ Then I had him pull back… ‘Whoa!’” Jimmy showed Colton how the trim and the flaps worked and had him reach down and put his feet on the pedals to waggle the tail back and forth. “By this time we’re almost the fuck up to Mount Vernon, so I had him put us into a turn and we came back south.” Jimmy took back the controls for the approach and landing on the narrow strip.
“He was just amazed,” says Jimmy. Over the following week, he took Colton up twice more, letting him fly the plane longer each time and further familiarizing him with the controls and instruments. Colt was in heaven.
Back on the ground, though…
“His mother finally caught up with him. She found out where he was and she’d leave messages, threatening to get me for kidnapping,” says Jimmy. “We’d come in and listen to the machine and the kid says, ‘Don’t send me home.’ He was fucking petrified. That’s when we did the recording.”
Jimmy got out a microcassette and Colton put his story on tape, which, Jimmy says, he gave to the authorities. “We ended up calling the Island County cops and we got a hold of CPS.” First to show up was a county deputy. “The kid was terrified when the cop got there, shaking like a leaf, crying and everything—he was scared of the cop,” says Jimmy. “I was trying to tell him it was going to be okay. CPS ended up carting him off, but then Pam got him back three or four days later.”
Jimmy tells this story teary-eyed. Court documents corroborate the events, referring to a CPS investigation for “negligent treatment or maltreatment” and reports “Colt being afraid to go home after being thrashed by his mother and her boyfriend.” It also quotes the police officer saying, “Colton does not want to go home to his mother Pamela… and if mother comes to get child tonight I will place him in protective custody.”
The CPS risk tag rating for this episode was listed as “high,” meaning CPS needed to have a social worker see Colton within twenty-four hours. In Washington State, CPS does not have the authority to actually take a child away from a parent, even temporarily. Only the police—through protective custody—or a judge via a court order can remove a child. In this instance, Colton was placed in protective custody and taken to a foster home. Once a child is under protective custody, DSHS, of which CPS is part, has only seventy-two hours to file a dependency petition or it must return the child to the parent.
In Colton’s case, he was returned to Pam, who said that later, when Colt would get mad at her, she’d tease him about his time in the foster home, asking if “he wanted to go back to his other mother.”
FOR HER PART, PAM denies that she was an abusive mother and blames her anger back then on her inability to control Colton. “I talked to his pediatrician about referring us to a hospital to get a brain scan because I knew something was wrong. I couldn’t just take him up there because his insurance couldn’t of covered it. I wanted to take him because he’d thrown something at me or hit me, my eye and forehead were bruised. She wouldn’t do it, and said, ‘I don’t think we have to go that far.’ I said, ‘I think we do!’”
Instead, Pam took Colton for an evaluation at Compass Health. Originally a Lutheran orphanage, Compass evolved over the past 110 years into a community-based nonprofit that provides mental health and chemical dependency services to thirteen thousand low-income children and adults—as well as the homeless and incarcerated—in Island, San Juan, Skagit, and Snohomish Counties.
In August 2001, a Compass Health clinician noted instability and sleep disturbances in ten-year-old Colton.
