him.
Since they had information that Colt used police scanners, the searchers even used a special tactical frequency he couldn’t eavesdrop on. That, though, caused communications trouble since not all the cops had the same radios. Turtleback also blocked signals, and an Orcas deputy had to station his vehicle on the road just beside the McNeils’ so he could relay messages among the teams.
Early in the morning of what was now the eighteenth, a request went out to the Orcas Island Fire Department Auxiliaries to set up a big pancake breakfast for the search teams. Everyone assumed it was going to be a celebration.
The Orcas rumor mill also had to put on extra workers once the sun came up. Reliable word varied from “They’ve got him trapped against a cliff” to “cornered in a shed” to “He went in the water.” TV reporters were tipped off and Seattle crews started toward the island. As the hours passed, though, it became apparent—at least to locals—that things weren’t wired as tight as they appeared.
Tactical hunter teams started going from house to house, waking residents for permission to search their properties. One resident asked if there was any danger. “Don’t worry,” he was told. “We have Turtleback Mountain surrounded.”
It’s not wise to laugh at someone holding an automatic weapon, but anyone who knew Orcas could tell you that unless the U.S. Army’s Tenth Mountain Division was also deployed out in the bushes, there was no way Turtleback was surrounded.
AFTER DONNA MCNEIL LEFT for work, Henry went back out to walk the property. He stopped at the chicken coop to make sure the birds were okay and found a surprise—no eggs. They’d been off the island on the seventeenth, and the hens had been laying five a day all month. There should have been ten eggs. It’s hard to imagine someone running from a helicopter stopping to pick up eggs, but they never found an explanation. It also lends some credibility to the idea of searching every “farmhouse, henhouse, outhouse, and dog house.”
Whether or not there was a fly-by egg heist, the next thing Henry found was less equivocal. In what had been a smooth patch of clay mud near his pickup three hours before, he now found a big bare footprint. He called the police and Donna, who came back home to find a yard filled with black cars with no license plates. Seven guys —FBI, Marysville troopers in full camo, Homeland Security agents in all-black tactical gear, and deputies from Snohomish and San Juan Counties—were all puzzling over the print like they were Bigfoot fanatics. They also spotted a number of partials and a second full footprint near the chicken coop. “The head FBI agent said, ‘No, that’s not his print,’” says Henry. “He said it was too small, like a size nine.” (A professional tracker hired by CBS News later estimated that the prints were made by someone who wore a size thirteen shoe.) “Then he asked us if we’d been running around barefoot that night. Yeah, right.”
Whoever made the tracks appeared to have been making a detour around the deputy sitting in his truck relaying radio calls. Henry asked why they weren’t bringing a dog up since the prints were certainly fresh enough to track. “They told us that the dog team had gone back to the mainland at five-thirty a.m.”
Donna asked the searchers if they’d found anything at the old farmhouse. “They all looked at each other. The Orcas deputy hadn’t told anyone about it. They got all excited, so I asked them if they wanted me to take them to it. They said, ‘No, ma’am, these are professional trackers.’” It was full light out, and Donna says she described exactly how to get there. More than thirty minutes later, she says, a call came in from the professional trackers reporting that they’d gotten lost heading to the two-story farmhouse a quarter mile away.
THE SEARCH CONTINUED THROUGHOUT the day. Local squad cars crawled down Crow Valley Road with their trunks open and filled with piles of Marysville manhunters, legs and rifle barrels sticking out. The FBI agents charged past in black vehicles, driving back and forth from one fruitless hot tip to another. Roadblocks were set up, taken down, and then set up again on the same roads. The Black Hawk and sheriff’s copter continued to sweep the terrain with their surveillance pods while patrol boats scanned the shoreline.
At 3 p.m., Sheriff Cumming told the troops to start winding down. At 4:11, he put out a press release: “The extensive, intense search for Colton Harris-Moore on Orcas Island has now been scaled back to an ongoing investigation… This is an ongoing, multi-agency investigation involving both county and mainland-based law enforcement agencies. Therefore, no interviews and no additional, specific details of the search activity or the investigation will be available.”
THERE WAS A STRANGE reaction on the island. On the one hand, many people thought the big paramilitary overkill was ridiculous. However, there were now also a lot more folks officially scared. The story that this was just a nonconfrontational property thief and squatter didn’t jive with black helicopters roaring around all night and day, and heavily armed men going door to door. Local authorities on tourist- and retiree-sensitive Orcas had long given the sense that this kid was just a nuisance. If he’d been a serious threat, like a murderer or a rapist, then they’d have really gone after him and, boom, it’d all be over. But now everyone wondered: If this
Evidence that a lot of residents were thinking about their personal security was the sudden rush of orders with our local gun dealer for “less-lethal” rubber bullets. Designed to stop someone without killing him, these shotgun rounds used to be called nonlethal, but depending on where they hit the target, they weren’t.
One of the last tips on the eighteenth came from Carolyn Ashby, who’d been sitting at her kitchen table in Crow Valley, three-quarters of a mile from Turtleback, watching the helicopters. At 3:30 p.m., she and her daughter spotted a “great big” man dressed in a black hoodie acting very strange in one of their cow pastures. While Carolyn was on the phone with the police dispatcher, she lost sight of the guy. “I carried the phone out onto the porch, and suddenly he walked out from behind a shed. I said, ‘There he is!’ and he took off running. He ran through the tall grass uphill… I’ve chased cows through that field and it’s not easy.” Ashby’s Holsteins and horses lifted their heads and watched the stranger run by. “They must have been thinking, Oh boy, he’s in trouble, because the cows know they get in trouble whenever they break into that field.”
A deputy responded and a helicopter hovered over their property for about an hour, but to no avail. “My son- in-law is six-four and they swooped down on him, but they could never find the guy in the field.”
Carolyn and her husband Eb’s grandsons are the fifth generation of their family on Orcas. In all their time here, she says nothing like this had ever happened. “Things just aren’t the same anymore. My daughter takes a baseball bat when she goes out at night to get wood. When you let the dogs out after dark and they take off after something, you’re scared to open the door and let them back in because you don’t know what’s out there. You feel trapped inside your own house.”
A number of older folks took the threat so seriously that they started planning to move off the island. They could take the added expense, the long trips to get mainland medical treatment, the extra day it took to get anywhere else in the country to see grandchildren, and all the other inconveniences of living in the San Juans because it was such a peaceful and safe setting. But they hadn’t signed up for Black Hawks chasing fugitives through their backyards.
Chapter 25
Down on his 120-acre spread at the base of Turtleback where he raises cattle, eighty-five-year-old Jack Cadden had been rooting for Colt to wise up, quit his shenanigans, and go off and get a life somewhere. “He was a smart bastard, kept the deputies busy. If he’d a put all that smarts to a good use he woulda made something out of himself. To tell you the truth, I kinda hoped they never would catch him.”
When Jack found out that it was because of Colt that the “son-of-a-bitch helicopter” kept waking him up, he did something that he’d never done in his seventy-eight years on Orcas: “First time I’ve ever locked a goddamn door on this island!”
That a guy like Jack was locking his doors says something. As a seventeen-year-old marine, Jack took part in the invasions of Guam and Okinawa, got shot twice, and came home with two Purple Hearts, a Silver Star, and a
