nice Scott’s mom was and she said, “Well, goody for her! She’s probably in debt up to her eyeballs!” My mom just doesn’t understand that they aren’t in debt, they work, and I asked her, “Why don’t you get a job like a normal person?” and she said, “Why, Colton? So you can have all the pretty little toys you want and be a spoiled rotten brat? You want all that shit, get out and get yourself a job!” ’”
Bev assured Colton that they’d help him if he started to take some responsibility for his life.
The following day, Bev stopped by after delivering Santa Geof to Stanwood for the yearly parade. “Pam was sitting outside in her truck drinking and smoking, but Colton had obviously been working his butt off cleaning the yard and driveway, creating a huge pile of junk. He’d even trimmed a lilac bush and strung Christmas lights on it.” Bev praised him effusively, and says he was very proud of his work.
Later, a local deputy Bev knew called her. “He told me I was ‘maybe too nice’ getting involved with Colton and Pam.” The deputy said he thought that out of all the teens he’d ever dealt with in his many years on the island, Colton was “the worst of the worst.” He also said he thought it was “way too late for Colton, that he’s already gone.” Bev’s own mother also warned her away because of stories she’d heard from a friend working at the school.
Bev promised everyone that she’d be careful, but told them she still wanted to help Colt and, if possible, even Pam. She said she’d put her trust in God and repeatedly asked her friends and family to pray for all of them.
The next time Bev went over to Pam’s, a knife whizzed past her shoulder from Colton’s direction and almost hit Melanie. Bev confronted Colt, but he denied everything and told her, “I never want to see you again as long as I live!”
Bev asked Pam to send Colton away for a couple of days to see if the incidents stopped. Pam said she couldn’t because last time he went to the one place that would take him he stole the homeowner’s bank card. She added that “Colton’s dad was a credit card thief.” Bev also found that Colton had been rifling through her purse, taking cash.
Bev wrote to her sister that all the notes about the entire episode should eventually go to an author, “for their book about Colton, when he’s in prison and when Pam gets drunk and shoots herself or someone else, or when Colton kills her. The only hope for these people is some sort of institution—for both of them!”
BEV AND GEOF DIDN’T give up, though. When Pam called to say Colton brought home his first A in math, Geof picked him up from school, took him go-cart racing, and bought him a remote control Hummer as a reward. Bev and Geof also hauled away mountains of junk—old toilets, car parts, and so on—that Colton had gathered when he cleaned up the property. “We really felt he hated living in a pig sty,” so one day while Colton was at school, Bev says she and Geof went to the trailer to “swamp” his room. It’d been so crapped up that Colton was sleeping in with Pam. They spent four hours picking up and sweeping out. They laid down wall-to-wall carpet, installed a new bed, and put up shelves. The final touch was a throw rug with big glow-in-the-dark bare feet on it.
Pam warned them that Colton would freak if anyone touched his stuff, and made Bev and Geof promise to be there when he came home from school because she said she was “tired of the bruises.” When they told Colton they’d fixed up his room, he yelled at Pam and ran into the trailer. After a few tense minutes, he came out and walked up to Bev. He handed her a Snickers bar, saying, “For all you’ve done.”
After each promising moment, Bev thought that things would settle down in the trailer. The poltergeist, though, continued to terrorize Haven Place. “Colt called me, laughing,” says Bev. “He held up the phone and I can hear the shotgun going off in the background and a drunken Pam screaming, ‘That’s right, you motherfucker son of a bitch, goddammit you come out, you lily-livered chickenshit!’ And Colt’s just cracking up.”
Pam decided her next strategy to catch the perpetrators would be to lie under the trailer and shoot them with a BB gun. Geof told Colton that he’d come by and do some target practice with him. Colton was excited and repeatedly called Bev, saying, “Mom wants to know when Geof is coming by to shoot BBs with me.” When the day came, though, Geof was busy and stopped by to tell Colton he had to postpone. Before Geof could get home, Colton called Bev and told her. Geof was met by an angry Mrs. Claus, or rather Mrs. Claws, who told him in no uncertain terms that this was a kid who’d been disappointed by adults all his life and Geof better get his ass back there. Geof turned right around, and he and Colton shot the BB gun for hours. Colt turned out to be a crack shot, excellent at picking off his mortal enemy: Pam’s beer cans.
It felt to Bev and Geof that they were on the verge of a major breakthrough. Then it all came crashing down.
THE OLD-TIMERS WHO’D taken Colton out on their steamboat told Geof they’d be happy to show him the shop where they’d rebuilt the boat and made the parts. Geof asked Colton if he wanted to go, and got an enthusiastic “Yes!” They planned for Geof to pick Colton up that Saturday.
“A couple of days later,” remembers Bev, “I answer the phone. It’s Pam and she is mad. I ask her what’s up and she says, ‘Just put Geof on the phone!’” Geof gets on and has his ears fried.
“She demands to know why I’m taking her son away from her,” says Geof. “I told her that’s not what I was doing, but she says, ‘Well, that’s all he talks about, he wants to go everywhere with you and you keep taking him places! I don’t know who you think you are. He is my son, not yours! So just back off!’ She got vicious, told me off, and threatened to get a restraining order on me. So I said, ‘Fine, if you don’t want me to see him I won’t.’ And so I just backed off because… wow… that’s Pam. I didn’t want any trouble.”
“We just then felt it was all hopeless and we weren’t equipped to deal with it,” says Bev. “It was very hard on us to realize we couldn’t help that poor boy except to be there if he ever called.”
The night raids on the trailer eventually stopped. Pam maintains it was neighbors, while the police believe it was Colt. They may both be right. There was a lot of anger toward Pam and Colt in that neighborhood. One of Colt’s former friends says he knew a father and son who lived there at the time who “hated” Pam and Colt and wouldn’t have hesitated to make their life hell as revenge for thefts they blamed on Colt. The graffiti and many of the coincidences in Bev’s exhaustive catalog of events, though, suggest Colt was responsible for much of it. No charges were ever filed against anyone.
Chapter 17
On March 1, 2005, the employees at the Stanwood Library arrived to find three windows broken. Beneath one of the windows were footprints made by someone hoisting himself up to the eight-foot-high sill. There was also blood splatter from the burglar apparently cutting himself on the glass. Once inside, he took the $61 in the cash box.
The Washington State Police crime lab tested the blood and found there was only a 1-in- 150,000,000,000,000,000 chance that it hadn’t dripped from Colton Harris-Moore. “I think that one’s bullshit,” says Pam. “Why would he go in the library? I don’t think they even collect fines for overdue books anymore.”
On March 7, Colton was sent to Echo Glen Children’s Center, a medium/maximum-security juvenile facility in Snoqualmie, Washington, sentenced to six weeks for theft 2 and theft 3. From this point on, there wasn’t a single moment in Colton Harris-Moore’s life when he wasn’t under investigation, wanted on warrant, or actually serving time.
Colt left Echo Glen at the end of April, and in May was again expelled from Stanwood Middle, this time for “continual disruption to the educational process and danger to self and others.” The expulsion led to another week in juvie because getting into trouble in school was a violation of his parole. Pam told the court that Colton wasn’t following “reasonable household rules,” which also violated his parole.
On November 22, another alarm went off at Elger Bay Elementary School. When the deputies arrived, they found Pam’s black Mazda pickup in the parking lot, filled with stolen computer equipment. Inside the school, they discovered shoe prints and Colton’s fingerprints. They impounded Pam’s truck and arrested Colton for the theft of an Apple computer and accessories.
By December 2005, at least twelve referrals to Child Protective Services had been recorded regarding Colton. Whenever there was a big fight at home now, though, Colton ended up going to jail. On Pearl Harbor Day, another domestic disturbance call led to Colton’s being arrested again for assault on Pam.
