The Barefoot Bandit

hope by admitting he wasn’t always this way.

A genuine Northwest cowboy, Geof grew up on a five-thousand-acre spread along the Yakima River—though he wasn’t left a blade of grass when his stepmother died. He competed in rodeos, worked as a Forest Service horseman, and then became a fire watcher when his bronc-busted legs couldn’t take riding anymore. He worked a full life doing guy stuff: construction, and driving dump trucks, tractors, and eighteen-wheelers. Geof says that for a long time he had no use for other people—“Hated them, that’s how I was raised”—but he got over that in a big way. Common in those kinds of sea-change stories, there’s a woman to thank. In Geof’s case, it’s Bev, who, when she smiles over her reading glasses, looks an awful lot like Mrs. Santa Claus. Which fits…

One year as Christmas neared, Geof told Bev he wanted a Santa suit. She did up his eyebrows and rosy cheeks, and Geof went driving around Camano in his 1940 Ford pickup handing out candy canes. That began an entire decade of Geof as the island’s Saint Nick. Santa’s tour eventually grew to a traffic-stopping parade of Christmas light–covered classic cars that escorted Geof to nursing homes and then to the poorest parts of town to deliver thousands of dollars’ worth of donated toys to needy kids.

Geof is as gregarious as Bev is reclusive. He’s always out and about and there are very few people on Camano he doesn’t know. He first met Pam Kohler when Colton was just a small child, and says she already had a reputation on the island.

“There’s some people around here, my God, they’d a shot her if they had the chance,” says Geof. “She was drinking a lot more heavily back then… she was bad. And crimey sakes, when she drinks she can use more cuss words than Carter has pills.” Geof, though, saw her simply as a troubled woman with a young boy, struggling to get by. As he does with many folks he meets in the community, he told Pam to give him a call if she ever needed help. Still, he and Bev were surprised when she did call some time later, asking for a $50 loan. Even more so when she said she’d leave them her shotgun for collateral. “After that we always called her Shotgun Pam,” Bev says, laughing.

Whenever Pam called, needing a loan for a new old truck or whatever, “for some stupid reason, I’d always go over and help,” says Geof. The reason, though, was Colt.

For anyone who didn’t have a dad around, but especially for a rough-and-tumble young boy, Geof would be the guy you’d want to take you under his wing. He’s a big man, rugged yet gentle, and plainspoken with a lot of hard-won wisdom. Best, there’s still an awful lot of playful boy left in him, even though his seventy-year-old body now has more titanium in it than the Terminator.

Geof has tried to help at least eight at-risk kids on the island. “All the misfits,” he says kindly. Some haven’t responded. “I’ve had to kick some of them off, but others are doing okay. They come up to me and now they’re married and making it, and they say, ‘Thanks for getting me on the right track.’”

Geof remembers coming across eleven-year-old Colton hitchhiking along the main road because he’d been booted off the Island Transit bus for cursing at the driver. Geof pulled over and they got to talking. “I knew Pam’s story, and I’d heard about what was going on with Colt in school. It sounded to me like they’d all just sort of shut their eyes to him when there were times they could’ve helped. And CPS… they suck, they didn’t do what they should have done. I understand they’re understaffed, but that still doesn’t give them the right to not help a kid, especially when they knew he was troubled. So I’m looking at Colton and thinking here’s a kid that just doesn’t have a chance in life.”

When Pam told Bev about the mysterious attacks happening at the trailer, Bev said she and Geof would come out next time. Things started mysteriously flying around again the very next night, so the Davises put on dark clothes and drove to Haven. Bev took photos of the damage and graffiti while Geof hunted around the black woods for any sign of intruders. As Bev went to put her camera away, “BAM! something hit our car, hard. I turned and saw Colton standing on the lawn with his arms folded.”

The next time Bev and Pam were on the phone, Colt yelled out that he heard something and saw a shadow. He went outside and came back with a note. Pam couldn’t make out the words, so Colt read it: “You have until Dec 9th.” Bev heard Colton tell his mother, “See! That isn’t my handwriting, is it?”

Later than night, Pam found another note hanging on a nail: “Death doesn’t hurt, but your dying will.” A third note said: “This is the kind of note that will be sent to your relatives when you die on Dec. 9th.”

Bev says Pam was terrified, and understandably so. She was living alone with just her young teenage son in the middle of thick dark woods and under attack every night. Even though Pam told Bev she trusted “no one!” Bev hoped that helping her through these night terrors might break through what she saw as Pam’s denial about her drinking and lifestyle. She also hoped it would give her and Geof a shot at helping Colton. They went as far as setting up security cameras, alarms, and motion-detecting lights around the trailer. Within minutes of Colton putting in a tape, the camera captured a figure running back and forth in front of it. The police, though, told Bev and Geof that they believed it was Colt on the video and that he was responsible for all of it. They told them he was “a bad seed.”

By early December, someone was setting fires on the trailer’s front porch. The police showed up and this time questioned Colton and Pam separately. They told Pam that they’d had the notes analyzed and that it was Colton’s handwriting. They also said they’d been hiding in her woods with night vision and had seen him running around throwing things. Pam said, “Bullshit!” and told them that even if Colton did write the notes, there was no way he could have thrown saw blades and other things she believed came at her when Colton was standing close by. One cop told her, “Say the word, Pam, and we’ll arrest him right now.”

“The hell you will,” she said, and grabbed Colton, telling him not to say anything more to the deputies.

One positive thing that came from all the drama was that Geof spent time with Colton. After finding Colt walking alone along the main road again, they got to talking about boats. “He really perked up with that,” says Geof. “So I said, ‘Well, I know some people down there on the water, maybe we can find someone with a cool boat.’” Guys Geof knew had rebuilt a tiny steamboat, and he introduced them to Colton. “Colt went right up and got to talking to these two old-timers, asking them all kinds of questions about the boat. Next thing, he’s asking me if he can go for a ride with them. I said, ‘Sure, you can.’ So I sat and waited for him. Crimey sakes, they had him out there for two hours—he loved it!”

After that, every time Geof found Colton out along the road—which was often—he picked him up and took him along wherever he was going. Geof says he felt Colton wasn’t quite normal, “but I disagree with a lot of those initials they saddle kids with, ADD and that… I think if they had the right parenting, if the kid got the right response from their family, I don’t think you’d have all those initials. Every child has trouble paying attention and acting proper if they haven’t been brought up right.”

Colton impressed Geof in a lot of ways. “He was a nice kid, polite and smart. Man, he knew the name of every airplane out there. He’d rattle off names right and left, then start describing each one of them for me. I’m thinking, This kid knows more than Boeing!”

DURING ONE OF THE fruitless searches for the invisible tormenters at the trailer, Bev took Colton aside and asked what she could do to help him. “He said that if I could get his mom to quit drinking that would be the best thing,” she says. He told her, “She thinks that I’m the problem, but she doesn’t realize that she has the problem… When I’m grown and gone she’ll see that.” Bev told Colton that no matter what his mom did, he was old enough to start making some of his own choices. She said he could start making some new friends, and promised that she and Geof would help him get involved with some constructive activities that would get him out of the house and wouldn’t end up with him thrown in juvie. She offered to take him to Alateen and said, “Don’t count on your mom to make changes: you do it!

“I talked for quite a while and Colt was silent,” says Bev, who wrote everything that transpired during this time in long, detailed letters to her sister. “Then he started, and it was like he couldn’t stop, it was like one big sentence. He told me he never has friends over because of the dump he lives in and how his mom is mean to him and everyone else, and anybody new that comes over gets met with a shotgun, and that he can tell if she’s drunk or not by how she says hello on the phone and how he doesn’t feel like going home if he hears her drunk hello, and how she tells him to give her gas money or she won’t pick him up, and how he’s glad when she runs out of money each month because then she can’t buy beer, and that she spends several hundred dollars a month on cigarettes and beer and that money could be used to fix the place up! He said, ‘I don’t even know what she does all day,’ because he does all the cleaning and the laundry. He told me about a friend of his whose mother was so nice, ‘if Scott even gets a mosquito bite, his mom is right there looking at it and medicating it!’ He said, ‘Scott’s mom is pretty, and they live in a nice house, and I just wish my mom could be like that. I told my mom how