through.
When the Cirrus showed up and Homegrown got hit, Scott had told his wife that he was going to start sleeping in the hardware store. “You idiot,” she said. “We spent four thousand dollars on that fancy new security system just so you wouldn’t have to do anything like that.”
As Colt started to climb down out of the loft, his body heat lit up an infrared sensor, tripping a silent alarm at 5:28 a.m. (In a stroke of luck for Colt, it was only
Meanwhile at his home outside of town, Scott received a 5:30 wake-up call from the alarm company and jumped out of bed. When the alert went to the police dispatcher in Friday Harbor, they contacted the on-call deputy. Even though officers lived just a few minutes away from the hardware store, dispatch called the deputy who’d just gotten off shift and was aboard his boat all the way out in Deer Harbor. It took him forty minutes to get back to town.
Inside the warehouse, Colt wasn’t getting anywhere with the metal-framed commercial door, so finally he busted its window, reached through, and unlocked it. When he pushed it open, though, something was wrong. He could hear a little buzzer going off up at the front counter.
Scott arrived at the store ten minutes after he got the call. He went directly to the back and looked up at the window Colt had used before. “It was still dark so I couldn’t see too well, but it looked wrong.” Then he waited. “I didn’t want to go in until the deputy got there. I had this gut feeling that Colton was in there or else still close by, watching.”
The deputy arrived a half hour later and waited until a second showed up before entering the store. They walked down the display aisles to the back and found the bolt cutters. But Colt was gone.
Just down the street at Homegrown, Kyle had been back manning his tower ever since the break-in. He’d had many more hours to, in his words, “obsess” about Colt, and says he was starting to believe the kid might be a werewolf. That night, Kyle had been very uneasy. “It was the full moon, and I knew he’d be active, running through the woods growling and howling.” Kyle and Cedra had seen what they describe as a white wolf lying in a doorway across the street at 11 p.m. “Our dogs would usually be like ‘Let me at ’em,’ but they were really spooked by this thing.”
Later, the sound of footsteps in the courtyard between Homegrown and the yoga studio woke Kyle. He went down and found a deputy passing through. “He said nothing was going on, but yeah, right… the town was starting to get all ruffled up.”
The ruffling was unlike anything ever seen before on Orcas Island. Within a couple of hours, Whatcom County SWAT, Washington State Patrol, K9 teams with German shepherds, and all available San Juan County deputies were fanning out across Eastsound. Townsfolk hoping for a sleep-in Sunday were rudely awakened by the incessant brain-rattling thwops and sharp turbine whine of an ebony Homeland Security UH 60-A Black Hawk helicopter that showed up to tightly circle the town again and again and again for hours.
Idyllic Orcas Island looked like a war zone. Residents gathered at windows and on the street, craning their necks to watch the helicopter, and then shaking their heads as men in body armor with automatic weapons strode up and down the roads.
From the limited search perimeter both the helicopter and the ground forces were using, it was apparent they felt Colt had gone to ground within a very small area around town. However, he’d had at least a ninety-minute head start before any meaningful search began and was known to just run full out whenever threatened. I’m no manhunter, but a full five hours after Colt slipped out of the hardware store it looked like they were working a perimeter that Stephen Hawking could have run past in less than an hour and a half.
All day long, Scott Lancaster says local guys were driving up, guns in their cars, saying they were going to put a stop to this. “I thought, This is not good.”
Chapter 24
With all the obvious law enforcement activity around the airport, including the Black Hawk using it as an Orcas base, you’d think Colt would head to one of the far corners of the island and hunker down. Instead, he did the exact opposite. The kid who loved planes couldn’t stay away from them.
At former astronaut Bill Anders’s hangar, his assistant noticed powder on the floor. “Later we realized it was from someone lifting and moving the ceiling tiles, as if they were looking for a security system or a place to hide up there,” says Bill. At the time, though, they didn’t think too much of it since nothing was missing and they hadn’t noticed any forced entry. Bill put his Cessna 400 to bed in the hangar as usual, with the keys left hanging from the plane’s baggage compartment door. “I always did that because then I know for sure the mags aren’t left hot,” he says. He left the island for two weeks, and when he came back, he found the plane’s POH sitting out, open, on a small table next to the airplane.
“That never leaves the plane,” says Anders.
The ceiling dust and the POH mysteries were explained when a San Juan County detective found pry marks on Anders’s doors. When they pulled up the records for the hangar’s phone line, they revealed a number of calls to Pam Kohler.
The remaining mystery was why the plane, a sitting duck for two weeks, hadn’t been stolen. Anders always gassed up at his museum, and hadn’t bothered to stop before his last trip, knowing he needed only a small amount of fuel to make the hop back to Bellingham. Colt would have figured out there wasn’t enough fuel to take him far simply by turning on the gauges. Still, Colt studied up on the Cessna 400, aka Columbia—a model he had never flown before. Maybe next time he came back to Anders’s hangar he’d find it with filled tanks… or maybe he’d find another 400 somewhere else when the time was right.
POSSIBLE COLT SIGHTINGS NOW poured in to the police. Bill Cumming laughed when he told me, “Any kid on Orcas who’s at least six feet tall is getting a lot of attention.” A friend who lives on low-bank waterfront just down the road saw a shadowy character she’s sure was Colton kayaking past her home very late on a February night, navigating by headlamp. The San Juans are one of the world’s best places for sea kayaking. There’s endless interest along the miles of serrated coastline, with views through clear water down into kelp forests and rocky reefs covered in purple starfish. Paddlers off the west coast of San Juan Island often get the privilege of seeing killer whales at eye level. However, kayaking in the San Juans is a daylight sport. Boat and ferry traffic, treacherous currents, and unforgiving cold water make midnight paddling in a major channel in the middle of winter almost as foolhardy as flying a plane without taking a class. The headlamp fit Colt’s MO, as did bucking conventional wisdom. Later that night, she heard someone trip over her garden wall.
Still, though, the most reliable sightings came from around the airport area. When sheriff’s deputies took a close look at the hangars, they found four more besides Bill Anders’s and Chuck Stewart’s that had evidence someone had gotten inside to snoop around. And they suspected Colt had broken into even more. Just north of the hangars, a local guy who’d been hired to keep watch over the Ditch twice saw someone lurking among cars in the lot. He says that both times when he went to check it out, a big guy he identified as Colt stood up, got right in his face, and “intimidated the hell” out of him before turning and running off into the woods.
Colt’s Winter Olympics stunt had, as expected, brought a flood of press attention and thousands of new members to his fan clubs who all rooted for him to “Fly, Colton, Fly” and never give up. Around this time I tracked down Colt’s prison buddy Josh, who told me about the guns and Colt’s “They’ll never take me alive” boast. Then Pam told me Colt was sure he’d get twenty years if he got caught. She also said he recently told her he’s “done with people.” Together with Colt’s history of depression, all of this convinced me that the danger had ratcheted up to the point where somebody was going to die: Colt, a cop, or an innocent bystander. I could easily envision one of the many elderly folks on Orcas or Camano finding him in their home and keeling over from a heart attack.
Since Colt was reading my blog, I decided to cross the line and address him directly. On March 9, I wrote a post titled “What Should Colton Do?” I told him that no way was he going to get twenty years if he gave himself up, but he would if somebody got hurt, even by accident. I told him it was easy for those sitting at home to type “Keep
