to, “but because he can.”
I asked Pam if she had any regrets about her part in Colt’s upbringing. She said her biggest mistake was not moving Colton out of Island County once she realized everyone had it in for him.
I ASKED IF COLTON had a plan. “Kids always have plans… whether they’re good or bad.” At one point, she said, Colt had given her the tail number of an airplane and said she should be ready to meet him. “He wants to come get me and me be with him. Go live the good life.”
Colt’s idea of the good life, she said, was “having a yacht and living on a tropical island.” The only way he’d ever talked of earning that good life was being a pilot. “I told him, ‘You graduate and we’ll send you to flight school.’ Evidently he don’t need flight school.”
He did, however, recently tell Pam: “Don’t be surprised if you get a strange phone call one day from either the government or a private company that wants to hire me to do secret work.” She said Colt assured her that he wouldn’t do anything for the federal government unless he had a twenty-year contract.
She stressed a number of times that she was proud of Colt for his abilities, including being able to evade helicopters and SWAT teams. “He’s doing it because he likes to see if he can. He thinks it’s easy—he’s said that. And he’s sure making them look like fools.”
When a radio interviewer once prodded Pam, saying it sounded like she was rooting for him, she said, “Of course! I’m his mother!”
I ASKED IF PAM thought Colt might be doing some of these things for the press attention. “No, he’s his own person, very much. He’s not going to do anything because of what’s in the media.”
She said he was, however, following the news and his fan club online. “He laughs, reads me a few things over the phone, and we crack up. I told him the other day that when this is over, you have your pick of any woman, they’re in love with you.” I asked about his reaction to that. “He don’t care, he’s not into a girlfriend. He’s got other things on his mind.”
It didn’t seem contradictory to Pam that Colt thought the media coverage was absurd and yet he’d told her to be ready to drag the old gate across the driveway because he was planning “something big” that would have “the paparazzi” crawling all over the place.
With that warning and the recent story from Granite Falls, Pam seemed fatalistic about Colt’s chances, saying she didn’t think he’d make it out alive, “not if he took a shot at those cops.” She said that “everyone makes their life plan before they come to this earth,” so “whatever Colt’s going to go through, whatever’s gonna happen is gonna happen, he planned it that way… It’s predetermined.”
Pam said she was trying to get Colt a bulletproof vest. I asked if he told her he wanted one. “I don’t care if he does or not. I’m getting him one and he’s going to wear it. Sometimes a mother has to put her foot down.”
WHEN I STOPPED BY the next day to take photos of Melanie, it appeared that it soon wouldn’t be safe for anyone to put his foot down around Pam’s property. Her friend had arrived the previous evening. There was a big contractor bag filled with empty Busch Ice cans on the deck. Inside, Pam was doing her version of coquettish. She’d apparently been able to leave behind the weirdness for at least a few hours. For me, it was a whole new level. While Pam happily chatted on the phone, I sat at the kitchen table with Tim. Both physically and in his calmly menacing manner, he reminded me of David Carradine in
Tim also told me that if he wanted to, he could find anyone—anyone—in two days. I wanted to tell him that things have changed a little in the last thirty-seven years, and now a ten-year-old with a Web connection can find anyone in two minutes… but I didn’t. It didn’t seem like the time for jokes. Instead, it was booby-trap time.
Tim picked up a shotgun shell and hunting knife, and patiently showed me how he was carving away the ends of the shell casings to empty the pellets while leaving the wad and gunpowder in place. Then, he explained, you simply add a cap that impacts the primer when stepped on, and bury it out in the yard. Voila, a homemade “toe-popper.” It wouldn’t kill anybody, he said… unless of course he went into shock. It was just designed to blow off part of a foot. To complement the poppers, he planned on adding camouflaged nail boards, poor-man pungi sticks, most effective when dipped in shit.
Pam said these would keep the media and the police away. I questioned the wisdom of setting booby traps for the police. “If I put a sign down at the end of my driveway saying ‘Property Is Booby Trapped, Enter at Your Own Risk,’ I think that covers me… And I don’t care if it does or not. I’m not gonna have cops running around my property at all hours of the day and night… It’s just unnerving.”
They never made the “Booby Trapped” notice, but Tim did paint IF YOU GO PAST THIS SIGN YOU WILL BE SHOT on a big piece of plywood and posted it at the front of the drive.
Chapter 23
My
Friends joked with Sandi that because of the story, Colt was sure to come back to the island now and pay me a visit.
According to Pam, though, Colton already knew who I was. “He checks out everyone I talk to,” she said. “And he’s been reading your Web thing.” Since there was no conclusion to the story by my deadline, I’d begun posting updates on a blog called Outlaws & Outcasts. Colt followed the posts as well as the Web sites that carried my travel-adventure stories.
Three weeks later, on February 10 at around 11 p.m., aviation authorities keeping guard over the antiterrorist no-fly zone wrapped around the Vancouver Olympics noted a small plane taking off from Anacortes Airport. The exclusion zone dipped to just north of Orcas Island, and any aircraft entering it had to utilize a special transponder code. This one wasn’t transmitting the correct signal. ATC tracked the plane as it flew an erratic course, teasing along the no-go line, but they kept from pulling the trigger on any of their contingency plans, such as launching fighters armed with Sidewinder suppositories. They monitored the plane until it disappeared from radar over Orcas, and then forgot all about it.
The plane, a $650,000 Cirrus SR22—the same model Colt had stolen for his first night flight—touched down at the north end of the Orcas runway and was found bogged down in the muddy grass alongside the airstrip. It was a decent landing in that at least the plane was still flyable, with only minor damage to a gear cowling.
At 8:15 the following morning, Kyle Ater opened the door to his Homegrown Grocery and saw cartoonish bare feet drawn on the floor. He figured it was an employee prank. “I thought, Oh, these won’t be hard to clean up because it’s just chalk. Then I took a couple more steps into the store and saw the tills laid out on the floor and water pouring out of the sink.”
The footprints trailed all around the store, up and down the aisles, ending at the side door with a “C-Ya!” The cash drawer was smashed open. “I went over to the sink to turn it off, and the security system was in there, underwater, along with my pliers, knife sharpeners, and a screwdriver.” He called the police. “I’d been getting a whole new level of service from them since all the Colt stuff started because of the media attention.” Kyle put on rubber gloves to keep from contaminating the scene and the officers arrived quickly. “But Steve Vierthaler told me, ‘Don’t worry, we won’t be sending anything to the crime lab because they won’t be able to look at it for a year.’”
Kyle says he and the deputies were thinking the break-in was a copycat because Colt had never done anything like draw footprints. “While they’re shooting pictures, though, a radio call comes in saying, ‘We’ve got a plane in the grass at the airport.’ We all hear this and instantly everyone says, ‘It is him!’”
The cops ran out of Homegrown and rushed to the plane, which had been sitting on the field for eight hours before airport manager Bea Von Tobel arrived, saw it, and thought, Oh no, not him again. The red-and-white Cirrus
