courthouse, learning about his childhood and finding out that he wasn’t a typical drug-addled, violent punk, I was hooked.
Chapter 22
The beginning of the truth about Colton Harris-Moore lay south, on Camano Island. After the hour-long ferry ride from Orcas to the mainland, the drive between Anacortes and Camano runs through Skagit Valley. It’s a great back-road drive at the right times of year. In spring, the valley erupts in an acid trip of colors as millions of tulips bloom. Wintertime brings thousands of snow geese and trumpeter swans that form drifts along the farmland furrows and occasionally lift off in huge honking blizzards of white. Driving through on the day before Halloween, though, there wasn’t much to slow down for.
In normal times, talk on Camano tends toward fishing and crabbing. In the fall of 2009, though, it was all about Colt. The wanted posters were back up, rewards were offered by the local chamber of commerce and Crime Stoppers, and Sheriff Mark Brown was trying to keep his cool. After the plane thefts brought the case a higher profile, more law enforcement started pitching in to help catch Colt. Snohomish County’s manhunter teams worked the island, and other agencies lent Brown helicopter support whenever there was a solid sighting. Island County deputies began camping out in garages and backyards where Colt was known to forage.
Now “the cops meant business,” says Maxine, who had canine teams sniffing around her property trying to pick up Colt’s trail. She told police that even after being hit eight times, she still wasn’t afraid of Island Boy. “A female deputy said, ‘Well, you should be.’”
Local kids ventured into the woods looking for Colt and a piece of the reward money. They found two more of his campsites behind the mailboxes at the east end of Haven Place. The police also found several camps tied to Colt, some with stolen property, others with keepsakes surprising for someone who professed to have such disdain for the press. “Colton was collecting all the news clippings about himself,” says Ed Wallace.
Islanders say the cops were embarrassed and getting more pissed every time Colt made news. More off-duty deputies began stalking the woods. Even rangers at the local parks beat the bushes on their lunch hours.
The media repeatedly shorthanded Colt as a
One crew finally got what it wanted. When Canadian CBC TV asked about the fan clubs and Colt’s hero status, Brown’s round and ruddy face turned a new, threatening hue.
“He’s certainly not my hero,” he said, then added ominously, “I hope that you and I and everybody else, when he does make that fatal mistake, are not responsible for something other than an arrest being made without an incident.”
The tenor of Brown’s response heartened those villagers already carrying flaming torches. And it horrified others.
“The mentality here on Camano when all this started was ridiculous,” says Maria (not her real name), a local woman who, a few years before, supervised Colt while he did community service at the park where she works. “Not a lot goes on out here, so when something does happen it gets blown out of proportion.”
Maria previously worked for years as a crisis worker in Bellingham, counseling at-risk youth who included those she calls “the worst of the worst, extreme cases, kids that were too psychologically wounded to stay in juvie.” She saw hundreds run through the system. “I had experience with children that came from some of the most horrific environments you can imagine, and we [society] still had these expectations that they were going to behave and fit in like any other child. I loved my job, but it just became too much for me.” That experience, though, gave her the confidence to volunteer to take on Colt even though he already had a reputation as trouble.
Maria says Pam dropped him off the first two days but then stopped. She didn’t know how he made the twenty-mile round-trip the rest of the week. “He showed up every day without any food or anything to drink, and he was expected to work all day outdoors. So I fed him, gave him water, and he was just so very grateful.”
Despite his reputation, Colt struck her as “a good-hearted kid who’d always been looked at with negative expectations and didn’t have a lot of motivation to feel good about his life. Yet give a kid like Colton a chance, some stability, look at them with some possibility, and they tend to shine. Colton took this opportunity and he just worked his butt off, sawing and hauling wood, pulling weeds and cutting brush to create a picnic area.”
She said Colton was quiet, a bit shy, that he didn’t talk much except about the work at hand. “He had just a ridiculous amount of knowledge about the plants and what would grow here. He struck me as being really smart, so I started to ask his opinion and advice and he instantly perked up and became really engaged. I told him he might have a job here when he graduates and he said, ‘You think so? All right, right on.’”
Colton gave her plenty of great ideas for plantings, but Maria explained that she had a very tight budget and couldn’t afford to buy new plants.
“When he left, he said, ‘Thank you so much,’ and he wanted to know if he had any more community service to work out, would I be willing to have him here, and I said, ‘Absolutely, in a heartbeat!’ It was an absolute pleasure working with him.”
Two weeks later, Colton rode his bike ten miles back to the park. “He was kinda shy, handed me three small bags and just said, ‘Here.’ He’d remembered about the budget and went out and hand-harvested seeds from local flowers that he thought would grow well in the park. I said, ‘Oh my God, thank you so much!’ And he’s like, ‘Yeah, all right. Well, I guess I’ll go, bye.’ He started to walk away but then turned around and said, ‘Thank you for being so nice to me.’ I was literally teary-eyed.”
AS I CONTINUED SOUTH on Camano, Maria’s take had me thinking of Huck Finn. Huck, whose life’s theme was freedom and escape—from rules, schoolin’, and his drunk dad who’d locked him in that backwoods cabin. Huck, who did what he had to do to survive, including “borrowing” what he needed, like food, clothing, and canoes. Was Colton just a kid who’d struck out on his own to escape a bad home and then got swept along in a big current of circumstance? Were our yachts and planes just fancy rafts transporting him from one test of his relative morality to the next?
On the way to my first visit to Pam and Colt’s home, I stopped at the little back-country commercial oasis a half mile south of Elger Bay Elementary School. There’s a general store and a nice little cafe that both carry the Elger Bay name. Together they serve as the dining, grocery-shopping, gas- and propane-filling, mailing, DVD- renting, fishing, hunting, and banking center (via an ATM) for the South End. An antique Coca-Cola sign and a big community bulletin board decorate the outside of the grocery. There’s an elaborate jerky display near the entrance, and the fine wines and crab bait are just a few steps apart. It is truly a convenience store.
It’s also the South End’s social and gossip center.
“Local people come in here and when you say, ‘How are you today?’ you
Over the past three years, Colton and his mom had kept the phone busy at Elger Bay, with both talk about them and between them. “She thinks her phone is tapped, so she comes down here and uses the pay phone to talk to him.”
Chances were decent, said Kara, that the next person walking in would be a crime victim. “A guy who comes in the store got hit and had just gotten his insurance in place when that little bugger hit him again! Another local woman had her credit cards stolen and we caught Colt in here on video using them to take money out of the ATM. I’ve heard the term ‘Robin Hood’… well, this guy isn’t stealing from the rich and giving to the poor. There used to be a feeling around here that if they need it that bad, then there, take it. But after it just kept happening and happening, then people got really pissed off. It’s certainly hurt the confidence we had in our sheriff’s department. When this all started I got a dog, and Joe is the kind to eat first and ask questions later.”
Despite her consistent denials that she ever helped Colt while he was on the lam, Pam Kohler’s involvement is a constant subject of speculation in the area. Kara said there were rumors of a trap door in the trailer, even a tunnel so Colton could come and go without the police seeing. Kara was at the counter one day back in 2008, after Colton had escaped from the prison home and was back committing burglaries on the island. “Pam comes in and
