saying, ‘Some sailboaters found your dinghy drifting offshore and asked me to take the engine off and switch it over to their Zodiac.’”
The kid’s obvious gift of gab momentarily stunned Kramer. “He could really think on his feet, but his story made no sense. I asked him where the boaters were and he said they’d gone off sailing for a while. I look around, and here he’d dragged my boat up the beach and hidden it amid the trees. I told him I didn’t believe him, and he just walked off.”
Not only impressed with the kid’s golden tongue but also his strength, Glen had to call his wife to help him muscle their boat back to the water. He reattached his outboard and then looked at the Zodiac and the gas cans lying beside it. “I knew the boat didn’t belong there, so I decided to tow it over to my beach and try to find the owner.”
Glen’s wife suggested they call the Island County sheriff. Glen simply told them he’d caught a young boy stealing his boat. The deputies knew exactly who to look for. “It wasn’t ten minutes later that they came rolling up the driveway with the same kid in the back of the police car. I identified him and they said they’d arrest him, but that he’d be right out again because he was only thirteen.”
Not too long after the police left, another vehicle came up to the Kramers’ home, this time a battered little pickup. Glen looked out and saw the same kid, now in the passenger seat, with a woman he presumed was his mother or grandmother driving. He figured she’d brought him back to apologize for taking the boat, and went out to meet them.
According to Glen, Pam Kohler got out of the truck and started right in on him, saying: “You stoled our gas cans!”
“What are you talking about?” asked Glen, stunned for the second time that day.
“You stoled our gas cans and we want them back,” Pam kept insisting.
Sensing this was not an argument worth having, Glen told Pam, “Well, you tell your son they’re back wherever he stole that Zodiac from because I put the gas cans inside it and the owner’s already come and taken his boat.” Then he walked back into his house.
As the Utsalady neighbors began comparing notes, they found that a number of their boats had been moved around. Several that had older two-cycle outboards had their engines ruined. Glen says they believed that Pam had been bringing Colton up to their neighborhood all summer long. “She was dumping him off at the boat ramp with gas cans.” Even though Colton was sophisticated enough to mix and match engines and boats to create just the little cruising package he wanted, he apparently didn’t know that the two-cycle outboards needed oil mixed in with the fuel. “He was using plain gas and just running each boat until the engine seized up, and then he’d take another one.”
When he got hauled before the judge, Colton was found guilty of theft in the second and third degrees and sentenced to fifty days in juvie plus forty-eight hours community service and six months probation.
“COLTON AND I ‘DATED’ in eighth grade, as eighth graders do,” says Brandi. “Holding hands as we walked to class, going to movies… ” After they’d been dating for a few weeks, though, Colton stopped showing up for school. He’d been sent to juvie, but hadn’t told anyone he was going away. “I couldn’t get ahold of him and had no idea where he was.” Brandi says that when Colton finally returned to school, he was very tan. “He told everyone he’d been in the Bahamas.”
Brandi says everything to do with Colton turned even worse in the eighth grade. “Things really got out of control,” she says. “The kids got even meaner to Colton.” One day, he and Brandi were hanging out at the Stanwood playground when two boys Colton had trouble with walked up. “I said, ‘Colton, let’s just go,’ but he said, ‘No, we’re fine.’ They yelled, ‘Hey, fag, you need to leave.’ When Colton refused, they grabbed him and pushed him up against the jungle gym. I was begging them to please just leave him alone and they kept asking me why I was hanging out with this ‘piece of shit.’ Colton tried to get away and one of them pulled out a knife and said he was going to stab him. I was crying and grabbed my phone and told them I was calling the cops. They pushed Colton down, kicked him in the stomach, and walked away.”
Brandi called her mom, who rushed across the bridge to pick them up. “She took us back to our house and asked Colton if he wanted to call his mother. He came up with some story that she was out of town. You could see by the look in his eyes that he was on his own. His mom wasn’t out of town, but she wasn’t going to do anything to help him anyways, so why bother? He didn’t act scared, but I know he was.”
BACK AT THE TRAILER, the horror show escalated to the point where, in November 2004, it actually appeared that Haven Place was haunted. The tires on Pam’s pickup kept inexplicably going flat. Then one night as she sat in her lawn chair having a smoke and a beer, she started hearing things hit the ground all around her. She called the cops, but they couldn’t find anyone.
Night after night it happened: batteries, tent stakes, a croquet ball, screwdrivers, all mysteriously fell out of the sky, often hitting the trailer. Pam says that every time she left home, someone went in and took things—a bag of potatoes, socket wrenches, circular saw blades—and then later threw them back at her and the trailer. She says whoever it was threw flour around inside and put human excrement in her freezer. A can of corn came crashing through one of the trailer’s few remaining glass windows. The other windows, which Colton had broken and were covered in plastic sheeting, were soon after slashed with a box cutter.
One evening as she and Colton were walking in the door of the trailer, Pam says she heard a bang. When she looked, there was a circular saw blade stuck in the door jamb.
Pam says she called the police every night for a month, but they never found anyone. She fired salvos of buckshot and profanities into the woods, but it kept happening. Then disturbing messages began to show up. The same plywood door where Colton had earlier written “Pam is a drunk” was now covered with spray-painted threats: “I’m sick of you,” “Bitch,” “Die,” and “You Will Die—5 hours.” On the floor was written: “Fuck’n Bitch I’ll Kill U” and “Die Bitch.”
The police kept showing up, but weren’t happy about the shotgun. “The cops told me that they would never come here again if I kept the shotgun loaded, and that if I did, I better never come to the door with it or they’d shoot
Pam thought her neighbors to the east were responsible. They’d accused Colton of stealing a $3,000 car stereo. Pam insisted Colton wouldn’t do that because “we already have a radio in every room of the house.” The neighbors reported the theft, but said Island County deputies declined to take fingerprints and told them that it was probably Colton who’d taken it.
Pam saw the cops talking to the neighbors a couple of times, but the attacks continued. Desperate, she called Bev and Geof Davis.
RARE ARE THE HARD-LUCK childhood stories with happy endings that do not include a teacher, a coach, a mentor, a local cop, an uncle, a grandmother… someone who grabs the kid at the right time—often by the scruff of the neck—and gives him whatever it is he needs to set him on the right path.
For Colton Harris-Moore, Bev and Geof Davis could have been those people.
Bev and Geof moved to Camano in 1977 and live on a seventeen-acre South End family compound that’s sort of a down-to-earth mossneck Nirvana, a whimsical backwoods Disneyland, with creeks and woods and quirky yard art and bridges and trolls and fanciful inventions and old gas pumps and summer-camp signs and Wild West memorabilia and guns and trucks and tractors and cool old cars.
They share the acreage with Bev’s mom and her sister, and usually at least one person who’s in need of a place to stay or a leg up. South Enders know Geof and Bev to be generous, some say to a fault. “Geof, especially,” says Chris Ellis, “is a sweeper of lost souls. He sweeps them up and gives them a hand.” The Davises have helped people most others consider untouchables, like a guy known locally as Stinky Steve (“You’d understand the name if you ever picked him up hitchhiking”). Bev and Geof, though, understand troubles, having seen more than their share, and those experiences have made them remarkably nonjudgmental.
They both grew up with alcoholic, verbally abusive fathers. Bev herself became an alcoholic, and when she finally saw the damage it was doing to her family, she sucked it up and quit. When she did, Geof stopped drinking, too, out of solidarity, even though he didn’t have a problem.
Geof Davis is the kind of guy who makes you feel that if you could just better yourself to a point halfway between what you are and where he’s at, then you’d be a good man. Unassuming to an absolute, he also gives you
