Camano a full-time try. When designing their vacation home, they hadn’t bothered planning for all the storage space necessary in a permanent home. Island folks usually even go beyond that and keep a large larder so they don’t have to hit the grocery store as often. To rectify the situation, the Boyles enclosed the crawlspace beneath the house, creating a basement. Part was walled off as a little workshop for Jack’s tools, and another room served as a wine cellar, which they kept fully stocked with about a hundred bottles. The rest was space for household stuff and, because the kitchen didn’t have enough cabinet room, food. The big freezer and shelves were filled with everything from frozen fruit to Frappuccinos.
The Boyles found themselves going down to the basement several times a day and never thought of locking the door. In late 2004, Louise began having little inklings that something was off. “I’d always be saying to myself, ‘I could’ve sworn I bought a case of Coke,’ or ‘I knew I had this or that in the food reserves.’ I’d go down and the shelves were looking empty.” This went on for more than a year. “I kept thinking, I’m losing it,” she says, laughing.
Then, one evening in the summer of 2006, Louise asked Jack to take a gallon of milk down to the basement fridge. The next morning when he went to get it for breakfast, it was gone. Now they definitely knew they weren’t imagining things. Jack went out and bought a lock for the door. “Half the time we’d forget the key and have to come back up,” says Jack. So they hid the key on a hook underneath the trellis near the door. “It probably took him three seconds to find that.”
Not long after they’d put the lock on, the Boyles were woken at midnight by an alarm going off next door. Someone had stolen Jack’s bolt cutters out of the basement and used them to cut a padlock off the neighbor’s storage shed. The next morning, they found the bolt cutters on the path that led through their woods to Haven Place.
Jack and Louise began to talk to neighbors and discovered that there were a lot of similar things going on. Then an Island County detective came to their door. He showed them a picture of Colton, saying the department had good reason to believe he was the one breaking into area homes. The cop asked if they’d noticed their front door. “There were pry marks where someone had stuck a crowbar and tried to force the door open,” says Jack. In their front garden, Louise’s cat statue had been tipped over, “obviously someone looking for a hidden key.” Someone had also tried to pry open their locked mailbox.
The Boyles had installed a security system when their home was built, but never used it unless they were going out of town. Now they began to turn it on every night. Knowing that the basement key “hidden” under the trellis was still the weak link, Jack bought an expensive combination lock that didn’t use a key but opened with a punch code.
So… the Boyles were more than surprised when a neighbor who’d come up for the weekend went into the woods across the road to clear some brush and surprised a burglar in Frappuccino delicto. The perp took off through the trees toward Haven Place before the neighbor got a look at him, but he left behind his partially consumed, highly caffeinated picnic. He’d polished off a can of Diet Coke, four Nature Valley Sweet & Salty bars, a jar of gourmet jelly, and at least two Starbucks Frappuccinos, leaving behind all the empty wrappers and jars, along with nine Fraps out of a twelve-pack and a Ziploc of frozen strawberries.
The neighbor called Jack, who went up the trail and couldn’t believe his eyes. “That’s our stuff!” He went to his basement and found the door closed and locked. Inside, though, the cupboard was most definitely bare.
They called the sheriff but say they just got a shrug. This kind of thing and worse was happening all over the South End and the deputies didn’t have the time or inclination to investigate a minor pantry raid. It was up to Jack to put on his figurative tweed thinking cap, go Sherlock, and try to solve a classic “locked room” mystery.
“I finally remembered that when I first bought the fancy lock I’d spread out the parts and instructions in the basement, but didn’t get it installed that first day.” On a hunch, Jack went to his filing cabinet and pulled out the paperwork for the lock. “One page was missing,” he laughs. “The page with the combination. He’d gotten in, figured it all out, and only taken that one page.”
Jack reset the combination, but their stuff continued to walk away: two-thirds of a case of Diet Coke, half a case of classic Coke, more specialty jellies, an eight-pack of tuna, a carton of protein bars…
The basement door lies beneath their bedroom window and Louise’s superpower is her hearing. A number of times she awoke in the middle of the night to the sound of their neighbor’s hot tub going when they weren’t on the island, and she’s sure Colton was sneaking in for soaks. But she never heard anyone rummaging in the basement. Again and again they’d set their security system—which showed all doors alarmed—then go to bed. No alarms would go off, but they’d get up to find that more stuff was missing—more snack bars, two cans of whipped cream, Dijon mustard, flaxseed meal…
It drove Jack crazy. One day he opened the door and it finally struck him. The basement alarm worked via a sensor in the door jamb and a magnet on the door itself. When the door closed, the magnet armed the switch. If the door opened, pulling the magnet away, the alarm went off. Now, staring at the door, something didn’t look quite right. Jack suddenly realized what it was. “He’d unscrewed the magnet from the door and glued it to the sensor so it would never go off!”
Jack was impressed. Despite the fact they were always home during the burglaries, they say they never felt threatened. Unlike a “typical” invasion by teens, they also say there was never any malicious damage, nothing else was ever disturbed in the basement, and the wine and hard liquor were never even touched.
To Jack, it was more like trying to outsmart a Mensa-level raccoon. He bought motion detectors and positioned them around the house. Each one went off with a separate custom recording that would alert them: “Someone at basement door,” “Someone at front door,” and so on. They were very high-tech.
Next to go missing were a box of Kleenex, Ziploc bags, more fancy jam, one of Jack’s backpacks, a bunch of drill bits, and two boxes of Christmas lights. “The most poignant,” says Louise, who kept a running tally, “were the Christmas lights.”
“I couldn’t figure out for a long time how he got around the motion detectors,” says Jack. “Then I finally pulled down one of the sensors. Here he’d taken the batteries out and then put it back up so I wouldn’t know it was disabled.”
It got to the absurd state that after each raid Jack would automatically walk up into the woods knowing that he’d find a trail of wrappers, cans, and other litter scattered along the path that lead directly to Haven Place. This raccoon had no compunction about crapping up the forest. After calling the police, Jack would go out to clean up.
It wasn’t until months later that the Boyles noticed that the cordless phone they kept in the basement was missing. They found it in their neighbor’s dog house, which sat within range of the transmitter. The black Lab never used its dog house and was quickly ruled out as a suspect.
Other homes along Camano Drive were also getting hit multiple times for things like food and bikes, and the police told residents that they suspected Colton in all of it. Across the island from the Boyles’ and a mile south of Pam’s cabin, Maxine K., a grandmother of eighteen, discovered that someone was foraging in her garage freezer, scarfing up ice cream and frozen pizzas along with whatever canned food was on the shelves. She and her husband would find the empty boxes and containers in the nearby woods, and even found evidence of a fire where she believes the burglar was cooking the food. Knowing that it was Colton—whom she referred to as “Island Boy” and says she felt sorry for—at first she didn’t even bother calling the police.
Not everyone was taking the thefts in stride, though. One of the Boyles’ neighbors, “summer people,” says Louise, made it clear that if he had the opportunity inside his house, he wouldn’t hesitate to shoot Colt. “There was a lot of that around the island,” she says.
Still, many of the South Enders empathized with a rebellious kid who’d grown up in miserable circumstances and was now forced to hide out in the woods and Yogi Bear his meals. Colton lost some sympathy, though, when people learned he wasn’t just taking Frappuccinos and frozen pizzas.
As easily as he could get into the Boyles’ basement no matter what the security measures, Colt could get inside almost anyone’s house. And while he’d refused to study for school, he did plenty of homework when it came to burglaries.
“Colt would call and say, ‘Hey, come on out to Camano, I found some houses,” says Harley, who was living in Everett when Colt went on the lam. “I was still on probation and I didn’t want to go out there, but he said he’d pay me plus split whatever we got.”
Harley says he’d take the bus out to the island and Colt would pick him up at the stop. “He’d already have a stolen car.” Harley says he and Colt took cars only for transportation—borrowing them to get from burglary job to
