job—and never tried to sell them. “One house, we took the car and drove it around and then took it back exactly where we got it. We even cleaned it up and all.”
Harley says “you’d be amazed” how many houses they could hit in one night. Usually, he says, Colt had already done the prep work, identifying the houses and sometimes even greasing their way inside. “He had keys to some of them… ” Harley hints that someone was providing the keys to Colt, but police believe that Colt more likely just sniffed around until he found the emergency keys that people squirrel away under welcome mats, flowerpots, conspicuous rocks, garden gnomes, or on top of door frames—all the obvious places that we homeowners think are so clever. Harley says that if Colt didn’t have the key it was still no problem: “We’d just break in.”
Harley’s criteria for a good target: “Any home where nobody’s at.”
Once inside, they were primarily looking for jewelry and cash, but didn’t limit themselves if something struck their fancy. “I took a couple of pool sticks, two piece, alligator skin case,” says Harley. But taking things like that had particular risks. “My mom could tell that I’d stolen them and she confiscated them.”
No amount of cash was too little for Harley to pick up, and he was incredulous that Colton passed up change. “He just left that alone, wasn’t interested! I was like, ‘Cool, I’ll take it, I need it for bus fare anyway.’ I had about $120 worth of change just from houses out there.”
Harley also searched homes for drugs and booze but says Colt never did. “I did enough of that for both of us.” And though he says he was never afraid during a job, Harley carried a gun. “I carried it because I could… and because I’m not allowed to have ’em, so it was doing what I do best: being rebellious.” He says he knew about the serious penalties for carrying a firearm during a crime. “I knew I would never get caught with it. All you gotta do is hit the woods, and I knew plenty of places I could dump it.”
At the end of their night shift, Harley would head back to Everett with his share of the loot. He says they fenced what they could, and he’d wait for the next call from Colt to come out and work the island again.
THE BURGLARIES WITH HARLEY were old-school B and Es: get in and loot the place. Residents came home to find that everything of any value that could be easily carried had been taken. Colt twisted the standard a little because he’d also take things any professional burglar would ignore but that he wanted—not to fence but to play with. Things like remote control toys. At the same time, though, he began to hone sophisticated skills and to develop his own brand of more delicate crime that mixed ballsy blue-collar burglaries with white-collar computer capers. For these jobs, Colt preferred to work alone.
Colt had always been fascinated with technology, and tech gear was one of his top targets. Friends say that before they knew he was burglarizing local homes, they always wondered how dirt-poor Colt always had the latest iPod and other gadgets. Like every other kid of his generation, Colt was more than proficient at computers. Early on he also discovered the power and possibilities of the Internet, both for benign uses—his Myspace profile under the user name Harris90210 listed his occupation as “pilot”—and as a tool for learning about and committing crimes. The Web, even more than his frontier island, was the real contemporary Wild West. To a budding outlaw, it offered everything from untraceable ways to stay connected with friends and family, to aerial surveillance photos of targets, and complete research on potential victims. It also provided step-by-step instructions on criminal techniques.
Say a wrong-crowd kid lets you in on a secret: you can open almost any door lock using something called a bump key. Google it up, then go to YouTube and find a helpful selection of how-tos on using bump keys to open locks in two or three seconds without leaving any sign of forced entry. As a bonus, they offer easy instructions on how to make them. Why bother, though, when the sponsored links that pop up along with the search results include several “ask no questions” online shops where for about $30 you can order a full set that will get you into practically any house in the country? Ah, but you need a credit card to order the keys and you don’t have one. That calls for identity theft.
There are lots of ways crooks go about ID theft. Colton dabbled in the simplest form: stealing credit card offers out of mailboxes, filling them out, and then intercepting the cards. However, he also realized that if you can ninja yourself in and out of someone’s house without them knowing you’ve been there, forget about it, you’ve got the keys to the kingdom.
Colt’s combination of twenty-first-century tech savviness and nineteenth-century outlaw cojones came together to create a remarkably effective criminal. He wasn’t some Cheetos-stained hacker trying to break past software firewalls. This was a guy who would physically break into your home and make himself comfortable while using your computer, Internet connection, and good credit against you.
Boot up the ubiquitous home computer… If you’re one of the few who actually bother to password protect your system, it takes a few extra minutes to reboot it with an easily available password-breaking program the thief brought on a USB stick. Once he’s logged on, chances are you’ve saved your Amazon, eBay, PayPal, and other account passwords in the Web browser and they’ll fill in automatically. If not, they’re probably all listed on a document saved on the hard drive, or else sticky noted somewhere close to the computer. The credit card info for payment is either saved as a default for the retailer accounts, or the cards themselves are in the house ready to be entered into the online form.
Traditional thieves are stuck with whatever’s lying around the house, hoping for jewelry, electronics, and guns that are easily converted into cash. However, a burglar on the lam determined to remain in the same small area has got to be careful about trusting local fences. He’s also not too comfortable walking into retail stores to buy new clothes, the latest music and tech toys, self-defense equipment, and other necessities. What does he do, though, if, when he breaks into your home, you don’t have the kind of laptop he wants, or the latest-generation iPod, or your clothes don’t fit him? No worries: he just uses your credit cards and computer to order whatever he wants. It’s custom burglary with convenient overnight shipping. The challenge is making sure you don’t have a clue that he’s been in your house—that way you probably won’t know what happened until the credit card bill arrives a month later.
Delivery is another tricky part. Colt obviously couldn’t have illegal purchases delivered to any address connected to him, his mom, or any known associates because that would give the authorities a paper trail. So that basically left three options: have it delivered to the credit card owner’s legitimate address, use an unsuspecting third party, or create a fake address. Colt ultimately used all these methods. Another aspect of the rural, trusting nature that helped him get away with things for so long on Camano and later on Orcas was the unofficial “island rules” used by delivery companies. With homes typically so far apart from one another and from the roads, drivers have little compunction about leaving packages on porches, ripe for the picking.
The innovative crimes, the “subtle” thefts where he sneaked in and out without the homeowner realizing anything was amiss, became one of Colton’s identifying MOs. Together with the numerous joint operations with Harley during this period, the Island County Sheriff’s Office suspected Colt was involved in dozens of burglaries and car prowls on Camano during a period of just a few months. The
To add to the pressure, it was an election year. One of the new candidates for sheriff, Mark C. Brown, was an ex-navy officer who served thirty-plus years in the Washington State Patrol. Colton’s crime spree had become such an issue that one of Brown’s campaign pledges was that, if elected, catching Colton Harris-Moore would be one of his department’s top priorities.
Not that the deputies weren’t already trying. “We had many other things going on in the county that we’d be better off spending our department’s time and money on,” says Detective Ed Wallace. “But we started setting up special operations to try to catch Colton.”
Each time the sheriff’s office sent a team out after Colt it meant pulling manpower off much busier Whidbey Island to reinforce the few Camano deputies. Still, they began moving officers and burning up overtime out of an already tight budget. The first place they targeted, naturally, was Haven Place.
“THE POLICE ASKED TO use my property to keep watch for Colt,” says Carol Star. “I gave them permission, but they were so obvious! They came in black SUVs and parked in the street. They came up my driveway wearing camouflage makeup and carrying machine guns, and were so loud I could hear them inside my house. They weren’t sneaking up on anyone. I told them, ‘You guys need to come in an old beat-up van or something, and you’re making too much noise.’ So one of them says, ‘Well, we want him to know that the police are around.’ Yeah, then why would you be wearing camouflage uniforms and makeup!?”
