running!” because he was providing entertainment and vicarious thrills. When he died, though, or was sitting in a cell, they’d just go back to playing video games. I wrote that the only smart choice if he wanted to eventually go for his dream of being a real pilot was to turn himself in.
CHUCK STEWART’S BIG HANGAR is the closest one to Smuggler’s and the Ditch. Colt had taken an interest in that building from the beginning: blankets stolen from it in 2008 were found at one of Colt’s campsites. He’d been back inside several times since then to study the POHs for Stewart’s two planes. Deputies responded to each call, but couldn’t figure out how anyone had gotten in. Colt’s first peek into Stewart’s hangar had to be a hallelujah moment. Stewart’s aircraft were dream machines for anyone interested in flying. One, a $4 million Swiss-made Pilatus, is the hottest single-engine turboprop on the planet. Used by everyone from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to air force special forces, the Pilatus carries up to ten people and cruises at more than 300 mph with a range over two thousand miles. It’s also built to use short runways and land on rough dirt or grass strips. At nearly fifty feet long with a fifty-three-foot wingspan, the three-ton Pilatus was a magnitude more plane than Colt had ever attempted. However, a look at the POH revealed something very tempting. Its stall speed was only 5 mph higher than that of the Cirrus, which Colt had successfully landed twice.
Stewart’s other aircraft was an amphibious DeHavilland Beaver, the ultimate bush plane. With its floats bolted on, the Beaver offered a pilot leaving Orcas Island access to the entire Inside Passage, with countless isolated inlets and bays in British Columbia. It would mean another huge leap in skill and luck to safely land on the water, but if the plan was ever to kiss society good-bye and get lost in the wilderness, here was the ideal vehicle.
The sweetener, especially for a teenage boy, was that both of Stewart’s planes had very cool custom paint jobs, with vibrant black-and-blue smoke and waves streaming along the sides of their bright white fuselages. Actually, forget the teenagers: boys of every age on Orcas coveted those planes, as well as Stewart’s hangar, which also had a two-story pilots’ lounge built inside. As a model for a dream life, Stewart’s would be irresistible to Colt. Beyond the hangar filled with fantasy planes and the clubhouse, Stewart lived in a large waterfront compound on the west side of Orcas with a dock and water toys. He was fabulously wealthy, had a jet plane by the time he was forty, and hobnobbed with famous sports stars. The part of Stewart’s life that would have been alien to Colt, considering the take-it philosophy he’d espoused to Harley and Josh, is that Chuck had worked for it all.
Leading citizens in the Orcas community, Chuck Stewart and his wife raised their boys here, worked with local sports teams, provided support for numerous charities, and even built a school on the island. “He was one of the guys that was always there when I needed him,” says Ray Clever, a former Orcas deputy who had a short list of wealthy residents—“my sugar daddies”—who he counted on to support various programs he started to help local youth, especially at-risk kids.
Clever spent twenty-six years as a San Juan County cop after starting his law enforcement career in California. He went through the Los Angeles Police Academy and reminisces fondly about the days when it was permissible to choke people out. “My favorite was the time I choked out two lawyers at the same time. They’d dined and dashed on a $300 tab, and when I stopped them they told me to ‘fuck off’ and started to walk away. I got one in each arm and choked them unconscious. The fact that they were lawyers was just a bonus.”
Clever acknowledges that he was “a little jerk at times” with his newfound police power. “Every cop has to go through that. If they tell you that they haven’t they’re a lying son of a bitch.” One day a veteran who’d seen it all pulled him aside. “He reminded me that I wore a police uniform, not a judge’s robe, and that my badge wasn’t big enough to hide behind but it was big enough that it was going to hurt when someone shoved it up my ass.”
On his very first day on the job in the San Juans, Clever became one of the investigating officers for a five- year-long case, the famous Lopez Island bang-bang, chop-chop, burn-barrel murder featured in the Ann Rule book
Clever remained aggressive—“In my younger days, no one I chased ever got away”—but he was able to adjust to small-island community policing so well that parents of kids flirting with trouble would have him come over to put the fear of God and jail into them, after which, to those who chose the right path, he became Uncle Ray.
At sixty-five, the former all-American swimmer has added some girth around the middle, but it’s like the meat on a summer bear—solid. Clever retired from the force before Colt became an issue, but was pissed that someone was running rampant on Orcas and picking on his friends. And he wasn’t impressed with how well the sheriff’s office had done against Colt so far.
The sheriff, though, was taking the Stewart break-ins seriously. According to Clever, one of the island’s young deputies was detailed to set up a one-man stakeout inside Chuck’s hangar. He spent an entire night there, and later told other officers that he’d been very uneasy inside the dark, echoing hangar. He said he had a creepy feeling that someone was watching him. He kept hearing noises that didn’t make sense and said he was very happy once daybreak came.
Meanwhile, the FBI (still officially not interested in the case) was running a trap and trace on Pam Kohler’s phone line. They saw that calls had been made from a number belonging to Chuck Stewart. According to Clever, when they contacted Stewart and told him about the trace, there was a chilling
Even more disturbing, says Clever, was that the family had been home on the dates the late-night calls were made. Chuck Stewart was incensed that someone was messing with his family. “If [Chuck] himself could have laid hands on this kid there would have been bloodshed. He would have torn him apart; he was that angry.” Chuck wanted action and his connections went well beyond local government. He had friends in very high places and, according to Clever, an FBI official flew in from Washington, D.C., to kick some asses into gear.
Together, Sheriff Cumming and the FBI came up with an elaborate plan to finally put an end to the Barefoot Bandit’s run. Since Colt had taken such an interest in and was apparently tracking Chuck Stewart, they’d set a trap at his home. Tactically, the place seemed ideal. Stewart’s property lies on two scalloped beaches in an area called Lover’s Cove at the base of Turtleback Mountain, just north of the turtle’s head. The mountain here rises precipitously to over one thousand feet in less than half a mile—so ridiculously rugged and steep that when trying to go uphill you’re forced to scramble on all fours. Two narrow gorges that feed down to the cove would funnel anyone trying to escape into narrow choke points. There are only five homes on that section of coast, with just two private roads leading in and out. To the west lay the 45-degree water and deadly currents of President Channel.
Even though the terrain negated Colt’s sheer speed, the authorities still had to be prepared to chase him on foot, something the Orcas deputies were not up to. The plan called for an elite FBI tactical team—gung ho, highly trained, and in excellent shape—to form a heavily armed ring around the outside of the house. The other part of the trap would be laid inside the home, where two FBI supervising agents and the San Juan County detective who’d been in charge of the Colton case from the beginning would be waiting to grab him. Local deputies would seal the roads and form the outer perimeter. Cumming also had the nuclear option, with a Homeland Security Black Hawk, a Whatcom County Sheriff’s helicopter, dog teams from Whatcom and Snohomish Counties, tactically trained Homeland Security agents, and two five-man teams of Marysville manhunters all standing by to launch into the operation if needed. In all, there were thirty-five local and federal law enforcement officers and all their high-tech assets arrayed against one barefoot teenager. On paper, it seemed a lock.
The operation was planned for St. Paddy’s Day, March 17. The Stewarts went off island, leaving their home and hangar irresistibly empty. It was cold, a damp 40 degrees at sunset, when a large group of us began to gather east of town. We kept warm with fiddles, bodhrans, brown bread, and Jameson, and for once it seemed like operational security held because there wasn’t a word around the bonfire about the Lover’s Cove stakeout. While we ramped up the
Meanwhile, the FBI tactical team was still on the mainland, racing down I-5. That’s when the best-laid plans started to go awry.
Living in the San Juans means dealing with the ferries. Each island gets a quota of cars on every boat. In the
