WHEN KYLE PULLED OUT his insurance file the day he got hit, he discovered something disturbing beyond how much the cash loss and $5,000 in damage was going to cost him out-of-pocket. “Not long after I bought Homegrown in 2006, I had a break-in. When I looked at those records, I realized that other than the chalk footprints, it was the exact same burglary. Same method and place of entry, same way of laying out the tills. It was total deja vu.” In the previous break-in Kyle lost high-tech goodies, a cutting-edge laptop, and an external hard drive loaded with all of his music. The crime was never solved or even really investigated. Kyle, though, was now sure it had been Colt.
“He waits until you think he’s gone and you let your guard down and then he strikes again.” Kyle was convinced Colt was feeding off the island’s energy. “It feels like I’m going to wake up and he’ll be leaning over about to bite my neck.”
COLT’S FASCINATION WITH RETURNING to hit the same places was very unnerving. In April, two events happened that involved previous victims. One seems like just another opportunistic break-in, while the other was much more unsettling.
At 11:15 p.m. on the eleventh, the telltale turbine scream of a Black Hawk tore the air just above our cabin. My first thought was that it was heading to Lover’s Cove again, and I wasn’t looking forward to spending the night making small talk with a deputy manning the roadblock. As I walked outside, though, I could still hear the helicopter. Up the hill where our knoll falls into what we call the Dark Forest, the Black Hawk’s blinking red light showed through the trees. It was close. I jumped in my truck and drove to where Deer Harbor narrows to a fifty- foot bottleneck between the bay and a shallow wetland. The Channel Road Bridge crosses at that spot; it’s the only way those of us living on the west side of Deer Harbor can get to anywhere else on the island. I stopped in the middle of the bridge and watched the helicopter as it hovered almost directly above, its brilliant NightSun spotlight hunting the woods and fields of Cayou Caye.
Earlier in the day, Ryan Carpenter, owner of the Deer Harbor Inn Restaurant whose credit cards were used to order spy cameras and a flight helmet in 2008, had gone to do some work on a house he rents out. The three- bedroom home sits high atop a hill, its windows offering a gorgeous view of the entire harbor. Ryan walked into the living room and noticed that the wooden blinds had been lowered. “They were old and didn’t work too well, and whoever lowered them broke bits and pieces off trying to get them down.” Ryan switched on a light and saw that someone had been playing house.
He had cooked popcorn and eaten it by candlelight—leaving a pool of wax on the floor. Next to the wax sat a water bottle and a couple recent newspapers. One of them, a copy of the
Conveniently for whoever had been inside snacking and reading, Ryan himself had moved a king-size mattress into the living room from a bedroom where he’d been working on the oak floors.
Ryan didn’t call the police. Instead he called his brother. “I told him that the Barefoot Bandit had been there and maybe we could catch him for the reward.”
Ryan worked his shift at the restaurant, and was walking home at nightfall when he noticed a light burning in the rental. He figured he must have left it on. “I stopped home to tell my wife I was going over to turn it off. Then I stepped back outside, looked over, and it was already off. That’s when I got a little scared.” He called 911 and the sheriff’s office told him someone would be right there. He then called his brother, Matt, who grabbed a baseball bat and came over. “The adrenaline was pumping,” says Ryan. “And we’re waiting and waiting.”
After forty minutes, they couldn’t take it anymore and, together with their innkeeper and his dog, they went across the road to the house. The innkeeper went in the front door while Ryan went in the back. No one was in the house, but the
Ryan says that fifteen minutes after they went into the house, he saw the first deputy. “They reprimanded us for going in before they got there because it could have been dangerous, but it seemed like it took them a long time to get there.”
The Black Hawk arrived two hours after Ryan called and stayed on station until after midnight, delighting local residents who got to stay up late and make shadow puppets when its spotlight shined in their windows.
With the action so close, neighbors now said they planned on putting a sign at the bottom of our road directing Colt to my cabin.
THE NEXT COLTONESQUE EVENT that month was more serious. Chuck Stewart and his wife were in their bedroom overlooking President Channel. A light suddenly appeared out on the black water. Tug boats pulling log booms and the occasional commercial fisherman traverse the passage between Orcas and Waldron Island at night in April, but few other boats. The light swung back and forth, but it looked too small for a boat’s spotlight. As it came closer, they realized it was a headlamp worn by someone in a kayak paddling toward their property. They knew no sane kayaker—or even a tourist—would be out there at night.
They immediately called 911 and Sheriff Bill Cumming himself jumped into the police boat over on San Juan Island along with two deputies. The sheriff put the lash to
“After that,” says Ray Clever, “I said enough of this bullshit. Here’s [Chuck’s] wife, petite blonde, just the soul of an angel, generous and kind, and she’s terrified in her own home. She was ready to close down the school, take everything they own, and get the hell off Orcas. She was in tears, asking me to get her a gun and teach her how to shoot. That really got to me. I called [Chuck] and said, ‘I’m yours, won’t cost you a dime, how can I help?’”
Clever went out to their home to check out its security and came up with some self-defense responses in case they had any more unwanted visitors.
Next he and Chuck went to the hangar. By now there was evidence that Colt had been in there at least four times, but the police still had no idea how he was entering. There were no pry marks on the man door or the large hangar door, so the supposition was that he’d been using a key, though no keys had been missing until the seventeenth.
They stepped inside the man door at the southwest corner and Ray began a methodical scan. “We started at the floor level—anything out of place? Any panels loose? No.” They surveyed 360 degrees and then looked higher. As they were checking out the north end of the hangar, where the two-story pilots’ lounge with its kitchen and sleeping area stood as a building inside a building, Chuck noticed something. The hangar has translucent fiberglass panels that act as vertical skylights, and there was one small section, a six-inch strip, that looked brighter than normal near the top of the lounge. Chuck said, “That’s not right.” The pilots’ lounge doesn’t reach the top of the hangar, so there’s a gap between its plywood roof and the ceiling. “We walked up and tried to open the attic door,” says Clever. “We can’t budge it. That ain’t right either.”
They went outside. Attached to the north end of the huge hangar is a shed-roofed storage building. There were crush marks on the downspouts coming off the roof. They pulled out a ladder and climbed up onto the roof that starts about ten feet off the ground. “We walk up to where it’s attached to the side of the hangar and there are two piles of human shit up against the wall.”
The light strip they’d noticed was a gap where Colt had cut out the fiberglass panel and then replaced it, creating a hatch. “We pulled that off, lean in, and here’s a mattress, food, gallon jugs of water, clothing, stuff like [Chuck’s] son’s BlackBerry that’d been taken out of their house, an iPhone, a whole box of junk.” Colt had taken stamps, scissors, bed linens, an insulated mug, a DVD, a mirror, even Glass Plus from the Stewart home to outfit his hideaway in their hangar. He also had a sleeping bag and piss jars. “Then we find the .22 handgun that’d been stolen over in Granite Falls after that plane crash. Then, finally, we find the flight manual from the plane he took
