crook.”
Harley was in eighth grade when Colton, then in sixth, approached him. “He reminded me a little bit of myself. He was smart, he had a problem with authority. I figured he could be another person I could do crimes with.”
As for Colton’s motivations, Harley says, “I think he was just looking for somebody that wouldn’t put him down. He didn’t have any friends, and his mom didn’t give a rat’s ass about him. He wouldn’t have gone for a criminal lifestyle if his mom had been giving him the attention I was giving him.”
Harley says there wasn’t much to teach Colton about crime. “I gave him some tips on how not to draw attention to himself. Colt used to always want to turn lights on. Bad thing for burglars! That’s how you get caught real quick.”
Thieving, according to Harley, is not so much about the skill as the will. “It’s easy to learn how to break into a house… it’s whether you can actually do it or not.” The big leap, he says, is from thinking about it and wanting to do it, to actually breaking a window and going inside someone’s house to steal their stuff.
Harley calls himself “a drug addict” and counts booze among his addictions along with weed and cocaine. However, he says the rush that comes from breaking the law goes way beyond the drug high. “It’s not the stealing,” he says. “It’s the adrenaline you get from stealing. Knowing that any moment the cops can show up!”
Colton had been feeding his adrenaline habit since he was a child, when Pam says he’d climb to the precarious tops of the hundred-foot-tall trees around the trailer. Then he found he could score big hits from “ninjing” around the neighborhood, stealing whatever caught his eye. Just like a drug, he needed more risk each time in order to achieve the same level of thrill.
Harley says they got that burglar’s buzz even knowing that if they played it smart there was little chance of getting arrested. “We knew that the odds of getting caught burglarizing a house are very low,” he says. “It’s way better than you can do in a casino.” (He’s absolutely right: the closure rate for solving burglaries in the United States is 12 percent.)
And even if they happened to get spotted in the act, there was one simple solution: “Run.” According to Harley that was an especially effective strategy in rural neighborhoods. “No cop in his right mind is going to chase you through the woods.”
As to any moral quandary, Harley says: “It ain’t hurtin’ nobody else. Everything I’ve ever stole is insured, so they’ll reimburse them and they can get something better. These are victimless crimes.”
Harley says he and Colton wandered the streets of Stanwood plotting their future. “Our ultimate plan was to steal a helicopter, land it on the roof of Costco, and steal a bunch of shit,” he says. “Colt always wanted to fly and he always said how it’d be great to steal an airplane.”
Chapter 16
In August 2002, on his birthday, Bill Kohler died in Oklahoma. When she got the word, Pam says, “I freaked, I started breaking everything that would break, screaming and yelling.”
She says she sat eleven-year-old Colton down out at the picnic table and told him that the man he’d been closest to, the man he’d even tried to convince her was really his father, was dead. “He was very upset, and I was crying. I hugged him.”
There was no funeral. “They cremated him without even asking me… and that’s not what Bill wanted.” Pam got his ashes but says she doesn’t even know how he died. “I never did get the coroner’s report because they wanted me to pay for it and that just don’t jive with me. Paying to find out how someone died? I mean he’s dead, so why pay for it? Not cool.”
Even though Bill hadn’t been around much, Pam says that his death sent her into a steep downward spiral. “I drank a lot. I listened to Bill’s music, this beautiful American Indian music. I went into a deep depression… I’m sure it had some kind of an impact on Colt.”
Not long after Bill, their Great Pyrenees, Cody, also died. Pam got another Great Pyrenees, but gave it away when it started to suffer from seizures. After that, she took Colt to the pound and picked out Melanie, an energetic beagle, who became Colt’s constant companion.
In Pam’s narrative of Colton’s trouble with the law, she says the two deaths were the turning point when he began having problems. Five months before Bill died, though, Island County deputies responded to a silent alarm at Elger Bay Elementary School. “Myself and another deputy found Colton hiding in a closet,” says Chris Ellis, who commanded the Camano Island precinct. Colt had gathered up a pair of binoculars, a disposable camera, candy, and some change from various school desks and drawers.
“I called his mom, Pam, and said ‘This is Lieutenant Ellis from the sheriff’s office. I have your son Colton here and… ’ And she jumps in and goes, ‘What the fuck did that little asshole do now?’”
Ellis explained they’d caught Colt at the school. “She refused to come pick him up. I had a deputy take him home… he was ten years old.”
THE NEXT TIME COLTON’S name comes up in police records is January 2003, when he and another boy were caught shoplifting at the Camano Plaza Market. That April, Harley once again went outlaw to feed one of his hungry friends: he got nabbed stealing peanut butter and Snapple from Port Susan Middle School.
According to Pam, she and Colton were going hungry, too. “We starved,” she says, because money was so tight. She also says that she and Colton now fought constantly.
Colt told friends he was mad because Pam would spend all the money from their assistance check within two weeks, leaving them flat broke for the rest of the month. It was then, he says, that he first began to look at his neighbors’ houses as sources of food and money to buy food. He remembers being happy after breaking into one of his first homes, not because of the loot he found, but because he could make pancakes.
Colton continued to receive treatment at Compass Health, but later admitted to a psychologist that he didn’t tell the counselors the extent of the physical conflict between him and his mom because he was afraid they would take him away from her. However, he did tell them that Pam had been on two-week drinking binges during which she’d break things. The twelve-year-old told them, “She is in denial about her drinking.”
The Compass staff were also aware of the men Pam had coming through the trailer: “Many inappropriate father figures in the home over the time, exposing Colton to domestic violence and drug and alcohol addiction/selling.”
The most plaintive words from young Colton come from this period: “I am not happy. I am depressed. I could stay in bed all day. I need help. I am tired of this stuff.”
Clinicians reported that “Colton wants mom to stop drinking and smoking, get a job, and have food in the house. Mom refuses.”
Colt’s pleas, all the interviews, the mounting CPS complaints, the counselors’ notes… result in two more mental health diagnoses for him: intermittent explosive disorder and depressive disorder. He’s prescribed Strattera, an ADHD medication.
IN THE SPRING OF 2003, the original nuclear family had an explosive reunion. Gordy Moore showed up at the trailer on a nice May day. He and Pam started partying out in the yard and decided to fire up the grill and cook burgers.
“Gordy’s getting the barbecue-er ready and we told Colt to go inside and get the ketchup and mustard and all that,” remembers Pam. “So he does and he brings them out to the picnic table. But then all of a sudden he started taking them back in. He said, ‘I don’t want to barbecue.’ I said, ‘I don’t care if you want to or not.’ So his dad and I brought all the stuff back out and then Colt stood off a ways and threw rocks at us, mainly at his dad, rocks about the size of baseballs. And so they got in a big fight toward the backyard and they’re rolling around on the ground toward the sticker bushes.”
Colton says he got mad because his parents wouldn’t let him fix his food the way he wanted, and in his version he told police that Gordy threw him into stinging nettles, held him down by the throat, and said, “Don’t you know I have killed three men because of my anger?” The twelve-year-old took that as a threat. Colton also said he hadn’t thrown the rocks until after Gordy throttled him.
