All the jurisdictions except the Mounties had been there, including the FBI and officers from an auto theft task force who, Pam said, told her they thought Colt had stolen between forty and sixty cars. “Those guys brought me a plate of chocolate chip cookies,” Pam said. “It’s all weird.” Other cops brought cans of dog food for Melanie. The FBI agents, she said, had been professional so far, but she had a big, long-standing problem with the Island County deputies, who she described as “bumbling idiots.”
“Everything that happens on this island they blame on Colt. I’m sure he’s done some of these things… but he’d have to be sixty or seventy years old to have done all the things Mark Brown says he’s done.”
We sat at a small kitchen table, Pam drinking coffee. The fridge went bad, so she has only a dorm-size. Plus, she said, “Vacuum broke down, wash machine broke down, my truck broke down, all within forty-eight hours.” The ceiling’s falling down in patches, too, but there’s a new wood laminate floor that Pam told me Colt had installed for her before he last went to “the slammer.”
A friend gave her a dishwasher, and she also has plenty of music. While on the lam, Colt had sent her a couple of iPods preloaded with Michael Jackson and Patsy Cline—“Colt thinks she’s got a beautiful voice.” Colt has wide-ranging taste in music, from the latest rap to Ol’ Blue Eyes, and one of Pam’s favorite memories is dancing with him out on the deck to Sinatra’s “Summer Wind.”
She was adamant that Colt wasn’t living out in the woods. He’d told her he was staying in a house protected by high-tech surveillance equipment. He had his own room, TV, and computer. The people who own the house were a recently married couple and there were also two men a bit older than Colt living there, one of whom was ex- military. Pam called those guys “Colt’s goons.” Colt, she said, had free access to the family’s big SUV and did computer work for them, getting paid $600 a week. The wife was a chef into organic food, though Colt asked her to stop cooking it for him because he was trying to put on weight. Once, the chef even cooked Pam a gourmet meal that someone delivered to her mailbox at the end of Haven. Pam says the family also gave her a Bose Wave radio. “I had to pawn it once for money, and they ran the serial number to make sure it wasn’t stolen—and it wasn’t.”
Pam said the police knew all these details. “I started thinking maybe they didn’t want to find Colt,” she said. “That way they could go to the public and say, ‘We can’t catch this kid because we don’t have enough manpower. We need more money.’”
The mystery family had now moved off Camano, but Pam said she didn’t know where. Colt still stayed with them, though, proof that he had no reason to be breaking into people’s houses or businesses. When I mention that police had found his fingerprints at crime scenes, she said, “I know for a fact that Colt doesn’t leave fingerprints. In fact, I have a pair of my gloves that he used to wear… those little ones that stretch to any size, real soft.”
Pam said the deputies had been following her. “They think I’m hiding him, but I’m not, and I don’t know where he is… and wouldn’t tell them if I did.”
Her mail had recently stopped for a week, so she called an FBI agent who’d left his card. “He said, ‘We don’t do that, but maybe Island County cops were taking it.’ The next day all of my mail showed up. There’s just too many weird things going on.”
Pam was sure they had her phone bugged, and maybe the trailer and her truck. Her prison pen pal, she said, was going to sweep the place for listening devices when he got there. She said she was suspicious and leery of everything. “One of these sheriffs that was here yesterday, he told me he knows a colonel in the army, that he can get Colt in touch with him and go into special forces… And I don’t believe it. I don’t believe anything anybody ever tells me. I never have.”
After Granite Falls, a Snohomish County police officer called her. “He said, ‘I’m at a crash site and Colt’s name has been mentioned.’ And I thought he meant a car crash! I said, ‘Where are the people?’ He said there was nobody there. He wasn’t giving me any information… I asked if an aid car had taken Colt to the hospital, and he just said nobody’s here. So I asked, ‘Well, are there like body parts or what?’”
The officer finally told her it was a plane crash.
“I was pretty shocked. I really don’t believe Colt flew any planes… but if he did, I am very, very proud of him because he woulda had to teach himself. And if he is flying them, then I hope he wears a parachute and works on his landings.”
I find that Pam has a sense of humor, albeit a rough one, though it doesn’t sound like she gets to exercise it much. And she admitted to being prickly. “Fucking-A right I’m hard to get along with! I don’t have any friends, I don’t associate with anybody. I only leave the property to go to the store if I have to. I don’t like people, I don’t like relatives… ”
Pam wasn’t working and said she was now disabled. Social Security denied her benefits, but she was fighting them and hoped the money would kick in before she lost the property for failure to pay taxes (it did after, she says, she was diagnosed with a broken back). She said her widow’s benefits stopped when Colt turned eighteen, and she once had to consider selling the Camano land. “Colt just freaked out: ‘But Mom, I wanted to show my kids all the trees I’ve climbed!’”
No friends, no money, no family around… Pam was leading an insular life even for an islander. Her older son, Colt’s half brother, Paul, fell off a three-story roof twelve years ago and is disabled, living on the mainland. Now the one family member she said she was close to had been on the lam for eighteen months.
Pam asked the FBI to find Colt’s father, Gordon Moore. “I think he oughta be out here worrying just as much as me!” She tried to get ahold of Moore herself by calling the last place she knew he was staying. “He was living with this old lady and she told me, ‘He’s not here and he better never come back!’ She had this little tiny rat dog, yippin’, and it musta drove him nuts, and I guess he took it outside and killed it… That sounds like Gordy.”
She said Colt doesn’t take after his father. “Colt decided by himself that he didn’t like Gordy. I would say that was a good call.” Colton, she said, loves animals. He even had a pet spider out by a patch of holly trees. “He fed it for years,” Pam said. “He’d get bugs and throw them into its web and it would run over and wrap them up. One time when he called [from out on the run] I said, ‘You want me to keep feeding that spider for you?’ And he goes, ‘Oh, Mom, you don’t have ta.’ I said ‘I will if you want me to.’”
During another of their recent calls, Pam told Colton she was doing some cleaning. He was, she said, very concerned about his stuffed animal collection. “I told him they were fine, that I put them in a Rubbermaid for him.” Nonchalant about getting chased through dark woods by SWAT teams and Black Hawk helicopters, the famous Barefoot Bandit was worried about whether his plush puppies were well cared for.
There were no photos and few personal touches on display in the trailer besides a couple of fish and animal knickknacks that Pam said were Colt’s. “We didn’t take many pictures,” she said. Pam thought the self-portrait of Colt run with all the news stories was terrible, but said she liked the one from the Island Market security camera on Orcas that was now featured on wanted posters. “Colt said that’s not him, but it looks like him to me… and I think that’s a good picture of him… if it’s him.”
Pam said she and Colt kept up on everything by telephone, that he called her frequently on an untraceable phone “like the president has.” Whenever they heard clicks or static on the line, Colt said it was the FBI listening in and he “says derogatory things to them.” She said they talked for hours each time he called.
“We always laugh on the phone. I mean laugh hard, really hard. And some people may not see the humor in things that him and I see. Some of it is probably not very… definitely not politically correct. I am pretty prejudiced because of Vietnam, never really got over it, and Colt knows that. He always brings up something that makes me laugh about Orientals.”
Colt was following the press about himself and Pam said he’d been getting angry at her lately for talking to the media. “I told him it’s the only way to get his side of the story out there.”
What her calls to radio shows, interviews in the local papers, and even call-ins to cable TV shows seemed to be doing, mostly, was to inadvertently deflect heat off Colt and onto her. She’d made herself an easy target, the one clear villain in the story, and had become a two-dimensional quote machine. Her gruff phone manner and gravelly “hisselfs” evoked Granny Clampett or, as some of the local cops referred to her around the station, Momma from the movie
Though her interviews didn’t get beyond the “I’m proud he can fly planes” soundbites, the narrative Pam was trying to tell was that she could never control Colt, and “no one in the school system ever tried to help him,” the social service people were “well-meaning but useless,” and the deputies never tried to help the local kids. According to her, Colt was a good-hearted kid who loved the outdoors and airplanes, and who didn’t steal because he needed
