leading toward Haven Place.
Sharon and Dan began to find a number of other things on their property now that Colton was back on the loose. Most interesting was a note. They discovered the yellow Post-it on the switchback trail that leads from their home down to the beach. It’s Colton writing to Colton, thinking things through on paper. He was back to collecting safe houses, potential targets, and credit cards. Part of the note appears to be about a certain name, noting “lost $ moved.” Below that are reminders: “#1 of 2,” with “2” circled, and “Use $ 4 orig pkg.” A guess would be that he used the dollar sign as a symbol for credit cards, and he kept track by numbering them.
The real insight, though, came after his $ figuring.
“Peroll [
Colton was considering the kind of deal he’d accept to turn himself in. He didn’t know that an escaped felon, even a juvenile, doesn’t hold any cards when it comes to making a deal. The last word he wrote was the big question: Where would he go to live whenever he did get out of prison? “Home?”
Colton’s decision on the first question about whether to turn himself in was clear by his actions: he never approached anyone looking for a deal. He chose freedom, regardless of the risk.
With the note, a bottle of aftershave, shoes, and other souvenirs of Colton’s continual presence on her property, Sharon says she still never became one of those afraid of him. “I don’t think he’s a scary kid or ever wants to hurt anybody… I think he’s always been looking for survival.”
THE LOSS OF HIS Post-it appeared to be another lesson for Colt. He needed a better place to entrust his important notes and thoughts, and switched to a journal. In it he kept his important digits—some of which happened to be other people’s credit card numbers and security codes.
Colton also had to solve a logistical problem. How can someone who’s essentially homeless receive all the stuff he ordered online with stolen credit cards? He solved this with a brilliantly simple ploy. In many rural areas, mail carriers don’t deliver house to house, especially on a dead-end road like Haven Place. At Haven, residents put all their mailboxes at the bottom of the road where it hits Camano Drive. So Colton added a mailbox near his mom’s and made up his own address: 550 Haven Place.
Legitimate addresses on Haven start in the 700s and go up to 1100, so the not-so-bright move was failing to pick a number within that range. An obviously nonexistent address might work with some of the shadier online retailers, but surely big-bank credit card companies would check a little more closely to see if such an address actually existed on the planet.
On June 5, a Seattle couple, Jackie and Paul, arrived at their vacation home on Shady Lane—just behind the Wagners’ summer home. They stayed for three and a half days, never leaving the house. They don’t store financial records on Camano and don’t keep computers there. Still, two days later, Paul’s social security number was used to apply for credit cards from seven companies. The address used on all applications was 550 Haven Place. At least one of the cards was approved, delivered to the fake address, collected, and activated.
Mail carriers continued to service the phony mailbox for some time. Chase delivered a credit card to 550 Haven in the name of a Camano resident who’d been burglarized while he was out on a fishing trip. The card was used to pay for $39.95 worth of research on PeopleFinders.com (creepy slogan: “Find anyone, anywhere”) and $29.95 on another stalker-friendly identity collection site. Colt also used it to shop for necessities such as police scanners on Amazon.com. Chase Bank records show the same card used at 3:34 a.m. on the sixteenth of June to withdraw $300 from an ATM on Camano. The following morning, four more attempts were made for $200, $300, $300, and $500. When police pulled the bank’s security footage, it showed Colton Harris-Moore standing at the ATM punching numbers.
WITH EXTRA POLICE PATROLS detailed specifically to track him down and residents back up in arms, if Colton was worried about anything it didn’t show on his face. On July 8, he spread a Hilly brand jacket onto a bed of ferns and lay back to pose for another private photo shoot. Dressed in a black polo sporting the Mercedes-Benz logo, with his iPod earbuds inserted, and a diet green tea bottle and a portable power supply by his side, Colton stretched out his long arm and took a series of eleven photos of himself with a Nikon Coolpix camera that he’d stolen from a Camano resident three days earlier. A number of shots featured different come-hither looks. Another was an eyes-closed fail. And then there was one frame in which he wore an enigmatic, barely perceptible Mona Lisa smile, a look that would come to be both fawned over and ridiculed for the next two years as it was reproduced again and again ad nauseam.
You could speculate that by taking so many pictures of himself Colt was making up for a childhood deprived of snapshots. Or, as the police believed, that he enjoyed a narcissistic personality disorder. Another explanation is that Colt’s self-portraiture simply fit his generation’s penchant for self-broadcasting and self-dramatizing. His peers were continually taking photos of themselves and posting them on social media. For the millennials, few things happen without a visual record, and sites like Facebook encourage them to broadcast mini reality shows about themselves. Throughout his run, Colt kept in contact with people both by phone and the Internet. It’s easy to assume he took photos of himself in various locations to send to friends.
Colton deleted all the photos from the Nikon’s capture card. But he didn’t format it, which would have permanently gotten rid of them. Instead, the images remained lurking as little digital ones and zeros that would come back to haunt him.
ONE OF THE PEOPLE Colt kept in touch with while he was on the lam was Josh, who remained behind the fence at Green Hill. “He started calling here, asking to talk to his buddy,” says a staff member at the prison. “We reported it to the administration, but they wouldn’t let us call the cops. We wanted to get a trace, but they wouldn’t let us do anything. They just told us to monitor the calls, which we did.”
Josh says he wasn’t too surprised when Colton called. “He told me that his plan worked, that he’d escaped, and that he was back having fun doing what he likes: running around staying one step ahead of everyone.” Josh describes Colton’s manner as unnaturally calm despite knowing that he was again being hunted. “He was happy, totally relaxed… It was kinda weird… nuts. But that’s what he lives for.”
Colton called often just to bullshit, says Josh. “He was just seeing how everything was going. He never said where he was and I didn’t want to know details, but sometimes he’d call from places he’d broken into, other times from a cell phone, usually late at night.”
Police later recovered stolen cell phones with dozens of calls to Green Hill School, which Colton had programmed into the phones’ memories as “Ghs.” Each call to the school was monitored by staff who could only sit back and listen while Colton boasted of his escape and his future impact.
“We knew he was doing stuff, and there was nothing we could do about it,” says a staff member. “Colton told [Josh]: ‘Watch the news because I’m going to be all over it.’”
COLTON’S MAILBOX RUSE CONTINUED to work until one of his victims got word from multiple credit card companies that someone had applied for cards using his name and the 550 Haven Place address. He notified the sheriff, and a deputy found the mailbox. The police left it in place, though, and told the postmaster to contact them if anything came through addressed to 550. It wasn’t long before they got a call.
The next package for 550 Haven Place was too large to fit in the box. Working with the police, the mail carrier left a note asking how the addressee would like it delivered. Colton answered and even helpfully provided a plastic bag, telling the mailman to just wrap the package in the bag and leave it.
Before the carrier’s next round, Island County deputies and detectives secreted themselves into the woods all around the bottom of Haven Place. The package was delivered and placed on top of the 550 mailbox. Haven residents came and went, picking up their mail, not knowing that an entire squad of cops was watching from behind trees. Then a familiar vehicle approached. Pam Kohler got out of her truck and checked her mailbox. She then looked over at the package on top of 550 and began speaking to someone on a cell phone. Deputies strained to hear what she was saying, but couldn’t make it out. Pam left the package alone, got back into her pickup, and drove off.
The cops were totally keyed, suspecting Pam had just let Colton know his package had arrived. They waited… and waited… “We had that stakeout manned for about forty-eight hours,” says Detective Ed Wallace, who took shifts in the woods. Finally, though, they gave up and pulled out, taking the package and the mailbox. The lab
