The Barefoot Bandit

Chapter 19

If Colton left the island after the tent raid, he didn’t leave for long. In early October, he escalated his war against law enforcement by stealing a digital camera from a Washington State Patrol car. Shortly after, he showed up at the trailer to play paparazzi, taking several pictures of Van. On the twentieth of that month, an Island County deputy taking another swing through the woods around Pam’s reported that he heard someone “crashing through the brush” and suspected it was Colton. He gave chase and stumbled onto another campsite. Melanie was there again, tied to a tree. A search recovered two cell phones and a copy of Flight Training magazine addressed to Eric Moore at Pam’s address. Records show that Colton had been receiving the magazine designed for student pilots for at least six months.

The deputy also found a camera, the Canon Powershot stolen from the WSP police car. A quick scroll through the photos showed a smiling face that the deputies instantly recognized as Van Jacobsen. One of the photos showed Van mugging for the photographer with his finger up his nose. The cops asked Van to come down for a chat and he admitted that Colt had come by and taken pictures.

In the November election, Mark Brown won the Island County sheriff’s job and prepared to take over the following January. He would inherit a force with budget issues and the inability to catch a teenage serial burglar running wild on the skinny south end of Camano Island.

With the heat increasing, Colt began to concentrate on the less-invasive custom credit card thefts. Maxine K., the spritely eighty-something grandma who’d been losing ice cream and pizza, received a call from the Kitsap County Sheriff’s Office. Lying just south of Island County, Kitsap is a fragmented peninsula that branches into Puget Sound between the Seattle-Tacoma metro area and the Olympic Peninsula. A Kitsap deputy told Maxine that one of their residents who’d been visiting Camano had an unauthorized online charge on his credit card and that the package was scheduled to be delivered to her house.

When the package arrived, Maxine called the Island County Sheriff’s Office. A deputy came out and, according to Maxine, said, “Hmmm,” and went back to the office to figure out what to do, leaving the package with her. In the meantime, a power company service truck showed up to deal with an outage next door. Maxine’s phone rang.

“It was some fella who said, ‘I’m so-and-so and I live at the end of your street… ’” Maxine, who’d been living there full-time for fifteen years and had island connections going back much longer, replied, “No, you don’t. Nobody by that name lives here.

“He asked me why the power company truck was out front… I was very suspicious of him.” After Maxine hung up with the mystery caller, the Island County deputy phoned back and told Maxine that they couldn’t take the package, saying that “it was Kitsap County’s problem.” Maxine told the deputy about the strange caller. The deputy ran the name and told Maxine that it was the name of a resident, but not anyone living where the caller said he did. And it definitely wasn’t someone who lived where he could see the power company truck near Maxine’s. It was, said the deputy, the name of one of Pam Kohler’s neighbors on Haven Place.

At this moment, Island County had a clear bead on Colton; he’d even baited his own trap. Maxine couldn’t believe it when the deputy told her they weren’t going to do anything about it.

Maxine had brought the package inside, but when the Island County Sheriff’s Office told her and her elderly husband they were on their own, her husband said, “Forget this,” and set the box outside. Their house sits a good thirty yards from the main road and isn’t visible from the street—no casual passerby could see the package.

“Of course,” says Maxine, “the next morning it was gone.”

The police still didn’t come out, but Maxine and her husband found tracks and figured out where Colt had been hiding. At the top of their driveway, above a sign that reads CAMP RUNAMUCK, is a forest-green plywood treehouse they’d built for their grandkids. It was a pretty luxe structure in its day, accessed by a ladder and featuring a Plexiglas window that provides a nice view of the front of the house—ideal to see deliveries.

LOCAL KIDS LIKE KORY occasionally ran across Colton as he roamed the island. “He always had that dog with him… I don’t know how he fed it.” Kory says that at first, none of the South End kids had any thought of turning Colton in. Most of them were having their own troubles with the deputies. That didn’t mean Colton was safe, though. He had a close shave after leaving a house Kory says he’d just burgled. “We saw him head into the woods and one of the guys who lived at the house came out, drunk, with a bottle of booze in one hand and a shotgun in the other. He was pissed because he said Colton had stolen some of his electronics, and he shot at him, trying to hit him. He missed, though, and then Colton was gone into the trees.”

Colton himself was seldom without a weapon of some sort, often a knife, but according to Harley and the police, there were also handguns. “Colt had done a burglary in which we knew guns were taken,” says Chris Ellis. “He’d escalated to being armed and then graduated to guns. My deputies and I knew from that point on that any interactions with him might be deadly.” Colton said he packed a gun because he was associating with some tough guys around this time and he was nervous about them possibly coming after him. Harley—all five feet six inches and 135 pounds—was actually the duo’s muscle instead of Colton, who now stood six-foot-two.

“Colt had a couple of kids trying to jack him for money,” says Harley. “I stopped them. I may be short, but I grow a couple of inches when I’m mad… Colt always said I was like a blowfish that way.”

Colton’s childhood friend, Anne, had started dating Harley a few months before his and Colt’s crime spree became the talk of the town. “He smoked pot and had friends who could get alcohol, so he was cool… It was kinda a bad-boy thing,” says Anne. “And here Harley turns out to be this perfectly polite, immaculate gentleman. Never said a bad thing about anyone. Even my dad, who hates everyone, was impressed and thought he was a great guy.”

Harley, though, didn’t tell Anne what he and her old friend Colton were up to, and she only found out when she got into a bit of trouble herself. “I got caught shoplifting, and me and my best friend are in the back of the Stanwood police car talking about how we were going to tell Harley about it. Suddenly the cop slams on the brakes, turns around, and says, ‘You don’t mean Harley Ironwing, do you?’ And I’m like, ‘Umm, yes, why?’ When we got to the cop shop, he started questioning me about Harley and Colt breaking into places and do I know anything about it. I’m like, ‘No, but I’m gonna beat his ass when I see him.’”

In January, Sheriff Mark Brown was sworn in and immediately ordered more resources sent to Camano to catch Colton, saying that the fifteen-year-old was “causing havoc over there.” Brown attended a community meeting held on the island to address the increasing anger and frustration. Residents came with questions, including, says Chris Ellis, “Why can’t you do your f’n job?” According to the Boyles and others who attended, the sheriff didn’t have many answers. “He didn’t share any information,” says Louise. Instead, he spent most of the time seemingly blaming the victims. “He asked, ‘Well, how many of you have a locking mailbox? How many of you have security lights outside?’ He just kept slamming us, and when at one point I mentioned that we had been out of town when something happened, he said, ‘See, you go out of town all the time.’ I was so mad.”

Brown said he was giving the community some much-needed straight talk about what was making them such easy targets.

The meeting illustrated growing fractures in the community regarding Colton. “Colt had been driving us crazy for a long time, and we really wanted him caught,” says Louise. “But we didn’t want him harmed and we didn’t think he ought to be put in prison for the rest of his life.” However, she says that a lot of those who came out were very hostile. “There was a lot of talk of guns, questions for the sheriff on where to buy them and where to go for shooting practice. I think a lot of people were more scared than they needed to be. And not just the old people. There was a young woman, around nineteen, and she was so terrified that when her husband drove in to work at four-thirty in the morning, she’d drag herself out of bed so he could drop her off in Stanwood at a fast-food place until the sun came up and she’d feel safe enough to take a bus back home. She was just shaking, petrified, when she told her story.”

Louise says the sheriff and other deputies did nothing to allay those fears. The word that went out was to form neighborhood watches and to be careful if you saw Colton because he could be dangerous. “We got the sense that the deputies were embarrassed because they couldn’t catch him and so they wanted to kill him, that’s why they were talking so much about him having guns.”

Kory says that there was a certain subgroup of “bad-ass cops” on Camano at that time. He’d had some experiences similar to Colton’s, including being on the run under an Island County warrant for a year. “Those guys kept showing up at my mom’s house basically telling her that they were going to beat me up when they caught