Despite failing grades and multiple suspensions and expulsions, the schools continued to socially promote Colton. He was enrolled in high school and then, in a last-ditch effort to keep him in the educational system, he was transferred to a high school with alternative programs. However, the school reported to the court that Colton didn’t attend classes, another parole violation. He also didn’t show up for his community service, and then he got hit with another PSP in the first degree.
Colton served another fifteen days, and by the time he got out, the police already had another piping hot arrest warrant ready to serve, this one for the Stanwood Library job. Deputies went to the trailer to collect him, but Colton ran off into his woods. He was now beyond catch-22: he had to go to school or violate his probation, but if he showed up at class the police would nab him on the outstanding warrant. So Colton went on the lam for the first time.
Though the Haven Place trailer was still more like the Thunderdome (Colton told a psychologist that it was during this time in 2006 when “she told me that she wished I would die”), he sometimes stayed with Pam. Other nights, the fugitive camped in the woods. The rest of the time, police believe, he either squatted inside unoccupied homes or crashed with friends, successfully eluding capture for two months. Island County deputies swung by the trailer every so often and noticed a leaning tower of pizza boxes in the bushes. Playing a hunch, they asked the pizza place to let them know the next time they had a delivery to Pam’s address. According to the Island County Sheriff’s Office, one officer donned the pizza guy’s jacket and cap and carried the pie to the door. He saw the silhouette of someone peeking out the window at him, but the disguise worked, because the door opened and there stood Colton expecting some tasty ’za. Instead, the cop gave him a big smile and said, “Hello, Colt.”
It was revenge of the Noid. Colton turned to Pam, deflated. She looked up, realized what had happened, and told the officers preparing to cuff her son, “That was a good idea!”
IN JUNE 2006, COLTON began serving a thirty-day sentence at the Denney Juvenile Detention Center for the Stanwood Library burglary. At his hearing, his probation officer offered the court this assessment: “Colton is a fifteen-year-old young man with extensive criminal history with juvenile court. Colton and his mother live alone on Camano Island. She continues to minimize his criminal behavior and make excuses for him. The one positive thing that Colton has going is that he doesn’t use drugs or alcohol.”
ACCORDING TO KORY BRYAND who was also doing short stints in juvenile detention, Colton had as much trouble getting along with the kids in juvie as he did on the outside. “All the guys in there had problems with him. Colt would just talk crap all the time. The only reason guys weren’t beating him up is that nobody wanted to go on lockdown.” The threat of being confined to his room without privileges didn’t worry Colt, though. “He got put on lockdown for backtalking the COs [corrections officers].”
While Colt was inside, Island County deputies were busy investigating a stolen credit card that was used in May to make ATM withdrawals and to buy a laptop and wireless router—cash and goodies worth $3,708.57. They traced it to Colton.
“Colt always had money from credit cards,” says Harley. “That’s how you could tell he was smart… you have to be pretty smart to get the pin off a credit card.”
Mike Bulmer remembers that even back in middle school Colton had a debit card hidden in the woods. “He’d say, ‘Don’t follow me,’ and he’d go off and get the card and then we’d go get the money out of an ATM. He’d give me some and some other guys some, like he was doing it to kinda get friends.”
Colton walked out of the detention center on July 7… now
During Colton’s legal limbo, he and Pam headed off island for a family reunion. They arrived at Sandy’s spread in Arlington with Pam’s little pickup loaded down with bales of hay they’d picked up for a relative’s horses.
“I hadn’t seen him for a long time,” says Colt’s oldest cousin. “He gets out of the truck, tall, thin, and barefoot.” Colt, she says, visited with Sandy’s horses and played croquet with his second cousins while the adults hung out and talked. “When Colt came over to the picnic table where the adults were, he was very polite and quiet.” Once he felt comfortable, she says, his sense of humor started to come out. “We’re all smart-asses in our family, and he fit in. He also had that typical teenage sarcasm.” Colt spoke a lot about Melanie: “He kept saying how much he loved that dog.” His other big topic was airplanes.
“It’s wide open out there, with a lot of planes flying overhead, and every one that flew by, Colt was ‘Oh that’s a blah blah blah blah’; he knew every detail about every plane. I was amazed.” Someone at the table asked him what he wanted to be. “He said, ‘I’m going to be a pilot.’ We all knew that he’d been getting into trouble, and Sandy said, ‘If you keep out of jail.’”
Colt, says his cousin, was calm and cool “until Pam started needling at him. She told us about his violent rages when he starts running around screaming and tearing things up. She said that one night she was on the computer and Colt wanted to use it. She wouldn’t get off, so he picked it up and threw it out the window.”
That image, says his cousin, didn’t fit the Colt they saw in front of them, who was “quiet and respectful to all the other adults.” It was obvious, though, that there were issues between him and Pam. “They just sat there sparring, she’d push his buttons and they’d fight over anything and everything… really weird.”
She says Pam complained that Colton had stopped taking his meds. Colt said that he stopped because he didn’t like them. “She also told us that Colt wouldn’t go to therapy anymore ‘because he thinks he knows more than they do.’”
His cousin says Colt got madder and madder until he finally ran off to the horse barn. “Pam yelled after him, ‘Yeah, run away, that’s what you always do, Colt, run away!’”
ON JULY 14, 2006, THE Island County prosecutor filed two counts for the credit card crime: theft in the first degree and a PSP. Colt was ordered to appear before the court. Knowing there could be only one outcome from the hearing—more jail time—he skipped it. On July 28, a warrant was issued for his arrest and Colton Harris-Moore was once again a kid on the lam.
The fact that he was on a small island with limited room to run didn’t faze Colton. He took one of Pam’s tents and set up a campsite in the thick brush at the front southwest corner of her Haven Place property. He set up fallback camps at other spots and, according to Harley, he also spent time sheltering with people willing to help him. Colt didn’t just lie low and hide out, though; he actually stepped up his criminal activities.
For one thing, he had to feed himself and he’d learned the hard way that it wasn’t as simple as waiting for the pizza guy to show up. Fortunately, all of his childhood ramblings around the island came in very handy. He knew every forest path and every backyard in the South End. He also knew the trusting nature of the community, where few people bothered to lock their doors or worried about security.
Chapter 18
It was a battle of wits, and I guess I lost,” laughs Jack Boyle (not his real name).
Jack certainly didn’t come to the battle unarmed. He has a graduate degree in nuclear engineering from MIT and a forty-year career at a prestigious university—nine as dean of the graduate school.
Jack and his wife, Louise, bought a piece of South End Camano back in 1978. Their two acres straddled South Camano Drive, with the building site atop a 140-foot bluff overlooking the waters of Saratoga Passage. The other acre was across the road, a thickly wooded buffer that backed up to an undeveloped patch at the top of Haven Place. The Boyles and their kids camped on the property until 1991, when they built a summer home.
“We’d been told to only use local people when we built or we’d run into all kinds of trouble with permits and things,” says Louise. “There’s a lot of insider stuff that goes on. The people in the interior of the island are all full- time residents and they kind of own the island, while a lot of people on the coast are just vacation homeowners and are looked on as interlopers.” She says the split goes beyond who spends the most time on the island. “Waterfront property is very expensive, interior property very cheap, and that tends to cause a social divide. It’s really two cultures.”
Still, the Boyles loved the island and their terrific view. In 2002, the now-retired couple decided to give
