successfully pulled Colton’s fingerprint off the note to the mail carrier.
Born and bred in west Texas with the tarrying twang to prove it, Jimmy Pettyjohn drove through Snoqualamie Pass back in 1989. At its western end, the pass opens up on a stunning view. “I’ve been a waterman all my life even though I had to drive five hundred miles in any direction to hit wet back in Texas,” said seventy- year-old Pettyjohn, who passed away December 2010. “Well, I got that first look at Puget Sound and said, ‘Wow, I’m not going back!’”
The Pettyjohns settled on the east side of Camano’s South End, in a modern log home kept humming by visiting grandkids. “Doors and windows always open, never take the keys out of cars… and we’re retired, so we’re here all the time. Never worried about crime.”
The first hint of trouble was a charge on Jimmy’s American Express for $107.90 worth of Pepper Power Bear Spray from UDAP out of Bozeman, Montana. It’s a product specially formulated by the survivor of a grizzly attack to blast a fog of pain so nasty it’d force Smokey the Bear to leave a campfire unattended.
Jimmy had never ordered any such thing, so he called AmEx and they absolved the charge. Simple mistake somewhere… He hadn’t noticed anything amiss in his house, no clue that anyone had broken in, and Jimmy saw no reason to quit the old habit of leaving his billfold in its customary place on a shelf above his computer. Pettyjohn’s PC sat in a room off the garage that he used as a workshop/man cave/heavy smoking den—with the smoke provided by both a steady stream of cigarettes and a big stainless-steel barbecue (yes, the barbecue is indoors… he was Texan). On the edge of the shelf above his monitor there’s a peg. That’s where Jimmy always hung his wedding ring and his gold Rolex when he had some puttering to do. Something else he’d come to realize was a bad habit.
On the morning of July 9, Camano’s indoor barbecue king ambled into his cave and reached for his Rolex. The watch was gone. Surprisingly, though, his wedding ring still hung on the peg. “I really cherish that ring, been wearing it for fifty years, and if he took that my feelings woulda goddamn sure been hurt… But he didn’t.”
Pettyjohn was so relieved, figuring he’d gotten off easy, that he never even reported the theft. He didn’t notice anything else out of place. His wallet sat on its shelf, all the credit cards accounted for and all in exactly the right order he kept them.
Two days after the burglary, a package arrived addressed to Pettyjohn. He’d ordered a book from Amazon, and signed for the FedEx figuring this was it. “Open it up and it was a couple little electronic devices and a tiny CD,” he says. “I think, Oh shit, they sent me one of those new electronic books.” Jimmy put the gadgets in a Ziploc and wrote the date on it in case he had to return them. He put that on a table in his sanctuary. “I’m thinking the gran’kids would be over on the weekend and show me how to install it.” He used the FedEx box to store the nuts and bolts from a swing set he was dismantling out in the yard.
When his clan came over a couple days later, he went to show them the devices. They looked everywhere, but the gadgets were gone. Pettyjohn realized that a thief must have been watching for the delivery and then broken into his home again to steal the package. “He’d paid for overnight… I think thieves spare no expense on the shipping.” Jimmy couldn’t ignore it this time. “I got to callin’ the sheriff and told him about it, but they didn’t do anything.”
He didn’t let it drop, though. “I called around on my own and got the outfit in Austin that shipped the package [Scancity] and found out that the electronic things were a couple of credit card–swiping devices. Called the sheriff back and told them that, and that’s when they finally got interested.”
Jimmy did the legwork and provided the sheriff with a printout of the card reader specs. They were “Mini 123s,” tiny 1.2-ounce battery-powered gizmos that fit in your palm and record the numbers off credit cards’ magnetic strips. Two of the $230 devices had been ordered, and each could store 2,500 swiped credit cards. The deputy took prints off a window where Pettyjohn’s wife noticed the screen had been removed, and asked Jimmy to dump out the nuts and bolts so he could take the FedEx box.
“This is Camano Island… I never bothered to think too much about locks, and didn’t have any lights outside,” said Pettyjohn, who grew up in the oil field construction business and served in the army, taking “a government-paid vacation to Southeast Asia for a year.” The idea that someone had been brazen enough to come into his house at least three times, including the 2006 credit card theft, made him start to think about security. A freaky thing about the burglaries was that the Pettyjohns have two dogs, “a yappin’ poodle” and a long-haired dachshund, which both make noise at a pin drop. “He had to be pretty damn stealthy.”
After Jimmy got back from Vietnam, he’d decided to never pick up another gun. And he didn’t—until these break-ins convinced him otherwise. “I didn’t want to see him get hurt… He wasn’t doing near as bad a things as some kids his age… But we’re retired and here all the time. We were home, just behind that door when he came in here. That concerned us.” One of the Pettyjohns’ three daughters was worried enough to buy them two guns; another friend gave him a Glock. “And now I’ve got the place lit up like an all-night liquor store. It is a shame.”
Colton Harris-Moore stole some of Camano’s charm from Jimmy Pettyjohn, which is tough to forgive, but if things had been just a little bit different, the transplanted Texan and the Barefoot Bandit could have been buds. The two are simpatico on at least one passion.
“When I was growing up in Amarillo, I always used to hang at the local airport… even did my homework there. Back then the CAA (precursor to the FAA) would give you your pilot’s license at fourteen, same age you could get your driver’s license.” Jimmy’s dad had been an “airplane driver” in World War II, and always owned a plane because he had business all over Texas. “I turned fourteen on a Sunday, but took my check ride on Saturday when I was still thirteen,” said Pettyjohn, “which makes me the youngest pilot ever licensed in the United States.”
Pettyjohn kept a plane on Camano, “a souped-up Piper Cub.” He loved to take off from the island and fly around Mount Baker, giving air tours to his kids, grandkids, friends, and even the deputy who came out to investigate the stolen credit card swipers.
Two weeks after his Rolex disappeared, Pettyjohn’s credit card statements started arriving. “The Discover card bill came in and had $485.44 worth of iTunes purchases.” The Pettyjohns had about as much use for iTunes as they had for anti–grizzly bear spray. “Then Visa comes in with all these other electronics ordered on it and over $300 on PayPal. That’s when I realized he’d gotten every goddamn credit card out of my billfold and copied down the number and the little three-digit code on the back and then put them back just exactly where they were so I never noticed. Pretty clever… nitwit kid.”
ON JULY 18, 2008, Colton pulled one of his least clever moves. It was a nice evening for a drive, and he tooled around the South End in a shiny black Mercedes. Always mindful of the people who’d teased him about his raggedy clothes and crappy trailer, Colton stopped by at least one home to shout out, “Who’s poor now?!”
The Mercedes hadn’t been reported stolen, so Colton could have driven forever with little chance of getting spotted—if he’d driven well. Instead, he flew around the island, speeding and swerving along the tree-lined roads. At around 11:30 p.m., he was doing 69 mph in a 50 when he blew by another black car, an ICSO deputy’s Charger. The cop watched as the Mercedes crossed both the center and the fog lines. He popped his blue light, but rather than pull over, the Mercedes took off.
The short car chase ended as the Mercedes turned into the parking lot of the Elger Bay Cafe with the cop car right on its tail. The driver wasn’t giving up, though, just trying to put the odds in his favor by switching from a car chase to a foot pursuit. As the officer and a reserve-deputy intern watched in disbelief, Camano’s “most wanted” leaped out of the Mercedes while it was still moving and then ran down an embankment toward the woods. The Mercedes continued to roll, heading toward a big propane tank that feeds the restaurant.
The cop slammed his car into park and jumped out, but he was too late to stop the Mercedes. Fortunately, it barely missed the propane tank, though now looked like it was about to drive over the twenty-foot-high drop-off behind the cafe. Before it reached the edge, however, the car hit a large plastic trash Dumpster and finally came to a stop. With Colton beating feet into the darkness, the deputy began to give chase. Then, however, he realized that the car or the trash can had clipped the gas line where it entered the building. The deputy ran to his patrol car, backed it away from the propane tank, and called in the fire department to handle that potentially explosive situation. Next he radioed for backup to try to corner Colt.
All available Island County officers responded to the call and set a perimeter. A Snohomish County dog team and the Marysville “manhunters” arrived to try to track Colt down. Just a half mile west of the parking lot, though, private woods led directly into the large expanse of Camano Island State Park. Once again, as soon as he hit the
