pulls out a Ziploc full of money like I’ve never seen. What really threw me is we’re talking about a woman that’s on assistance.”
Kara can soften a bit talking about Colton. “He didn’t stand a chance. He truly went through hell and I think this all boils down to what he went through as a kid.” But then she turns angry again when she considers what he did to her community. “He knows right from wrong—if not, why would he run from the cops? He’s smart, too; the problem is that he’s just using it for the wrong things. He figured out the electricity timing, just like Josh thought he would.”
Josh is Josh Flickner, whose family has owned and operated Elger Bay Grocery for eighteen years. The electrical event was when the Washington DOT announced that they were cutting power to Camano overnight as part of the new bridge construction. The warning provided a save the date for would-be thieves who knew exactly when the entire island would go lights out.
With Colton back on the island, Flickner—who was also head of the local chamber of commerce—called Sheriff Brown and suggested that he station deputies at his grocery and other likely targets. Flickner says his idea went nowhere, so his sister and another employee camped out in the store. In the middle of the night, they awoke to someone tearing the deadbolt out of the back door. They saw the silhouette of a man, “about six-five, same build as Colton, carrying a big empty trash bag,” says Flickner. “They said, ‘Hello?’ and he just calmly turned around and left.”
Josh had become the voice of local anti-Colt sentiment. “All he’s doing is hurting people—financially, psychologically, he’s hurting people, yet here we are putting him on a pedestal, glorifying him, idolizing him. He’s got a Facebook site… I want to vomit, okay?”
Josh disagreed with Sheriff Brown on tactics. “I think we could have caught him two years ago. I know about sixty guys that would’ve volunteered to comb the woods in the south end of the island—it’s not that wide. A sheriff has the power to deputize citizens, but he said no, he’d never do that. People are getting really frustrated when the sheriff says don’t take it into your own hands while every day more people are victimized.”
Josh said Pam still came into the store regularly. “She buys $2 of gas, cigarettes, and six-packs of Busch Ice. We talk to her and half the time she’s in denial and the other half she’s talking about how proud she is of Colt. Now she’s being quoted in
Josh remembers Colton coming into the store as a young boy. “There was always something shady about him. I remember looking into his eyes and something did not look right… just a look of malicious intent… I lean toward saying evil.”
I left Elger Bay Grocery wondering whether I was looking for Huckleberry Finn or Michael Myers from
The one issue everyone seemed to agree on was Colton’s mother, Pam. Kara told me that all the neighbors are scared of her “because of the shotgun… They don’t know how far she’ll go.”
From what local reporters and police told me, I was the first writer invited to the trailer. I’d written Pam a letter, telling her a little about my background. I said I felt I could empathize with all sides of the story. I knew a number of the victims, lived in one of the affected communities, and had cops in my close family. By Colton’s age, I’d also had a few scrapes with the law, and a few years after that I wound up halfway around the world in the Republic of Maldives working at an island resort with David Friedland, a former New Jersey state senator who’d faked his death in the Bahamas to escape racketeering charges. Friedland ascended to number- one most-wanted fugitive status, hunted ceaselessly by the feds and Interpol. I saw that pressure firsthand. I also belatedly understood what my escapades did to my parents. All they knew was that I was somewhere overseas where my day-to-day life involved charging tourists to watch me stick dead fish in my mouth and feed them to wild sharks—I’d thoughtfully sent them video footage. For nearly two years, my parents spent their nights not knowing whether I’d end up lost at sea, decapitated by a shark, or locked away in some fetid fourth-world prison.
I was also an adrenaline junkie, and had even soloed an amphibious ultralight airplane after the sketchiest of instruction. I told Pam that my experiences might give me some insight into what both she and Colton were going through.
ON HAVEN PLACE, I slowed to a crawl at a low point in the swaybacked road where damper soil encouraged a thick stand of cedars. I first passed by what looked like just a narrow gap between trees but turned out to be a driveway. When I backed up I saw the two big WARNING NO TRESPASSING signs. I turned into the cavelike entrance, branches reaching out to hiss and scratch the length of my truck. I stopped under a large tree beside three other pickups in varying states of decay. Two of them, including a cool 1966 Chevy, were far down entropy road; the other was a typical island clunker rig that still looked drivable. An orange bowling ball lay in tall grass next to the broken tin skeleton of a kiddie pool filled with many summers’ worth of browned cedar branchlets.
I ducked under a final, dripping bough and entered a small clearing. A moldering, moss-stained single-wide trailer home slumped across the space. About a hundred feet of flat lawn stretched in front, with a picnic table and rock fire pit. A smaller clearing behind the trailer led to a garden, an animal pen, and a chicken house.
An extra room and a deck had been cobbled onto the narrow trailer at some point over the years. I climbed a wobbly stack of cinder blocks that stood in for steps up to the deck. Looking out from atop the rain-slicked planks, it was a beautiful, tranquil piece of property completely screened by billowing drapes of cedar and Douglas fir, everything a deep evergreen in the misty overcast. The trailer, the junk, the aluminum shed frozen in mid-collapse, the camper decaying under the trees—nothing was really so far out of a certain ordinary for around here.
At the far side of the clearing, in a natural grotto amid the soaring cathedral of hundred-foot trees, stood some kind of statue. It was about four feet high, indistinct, but I could make out a head and outstretched arms. It might be a Virgin Mary.
“That’s an armadilla that used to stand outside a liquor store,” said Pam Kohler. “The chickens got to it, though, and pecked off some of the Styrofoam.” The statue, she said, was on the property when she bought it twenty-four years ago.
Dressed in a sagging gray sweater over white pants and house slippers, fifty-eight-year-old Pam was hunched over and moving slow, as if life had her weighed down. Beneath brown hair her eyes were milky blue and tired. Nicotined fingernails and ashtrays filled with Pall Mall butts floating in a black ooze of ash and rainwater explained the load of gravel in her voice.
She invited me in and the door opened directly into a small living room with a brown couch facing a wood stove and TV. She said her antenna pulls in a few broadcast channels, but mainly she listens to the radio or watches movies—Westerns are her favorites—on the TV in her bedroom. She used to have a DVD player, she said, but had to sell it, so she watches VHS tapes.
Even accounting for the overcast day, it was dim inside. The windows that weren’t broken and covered with plywood were obscured by newspapers “to keep the reporters and the cops from looking in.” A sallow light filtered through, matching the cloying scent of cigarettes.
Pam calls the trailer “dumpy” and she’s not wrong. She said she’d been cleaning for a week in anticipation of a visitor, a childhood friend of her late husband who’d been writing to her every week from prison. Now he was getting out after serving a thirty-seven-year sentence and was going to live at the trailer “to protect me and Colt. Nobody’s going to mess with me once he gets here.”
Melanie, Colton’s dog, greeted me with her tail wagging at 100 rpm. “I think she’s some kind of hunting dog,” said Pam. “This summer she got one of the biggest snakes I’ve ever seen, and then some kind of rodent.” Melanie also snagged a neighborhood chicken that day, whose fresh carcass I almost stepped in out on the lawn.
According to Pam, Mel also has a nose for money. She told me the story of a couple who moved their travel trailer onto her property for a while. “They stayed one night and never came back, so Colt and I went in. We found hypodermic needles in there… Melanie kept scratching at one of the seats, so I said to Colt, ‘Let’s break in there and see what it is.’ There was a hundred and seventy-some dollars in there. Colt grabbed it and the chase was on!” She laughed.
Just last month, Mel found something else unusual on the property. “She was barking out in the yard, so I walk over and it’s a SWAT guy hiding in the trees in his full G.I. Joe outfit.” Melanie, Mel, or Meeshee, as Colt sometimes calls her, has plenty of experience sniffing the police. “You can always tell when they’re around because they all wear foo foo,” says Pam, meaning cologne.
