from Anacortes in February.”
They left everything where it was and replaced the hatch. Clever’s cop juices were flowing and he told Stewart that this would be the place to catch Colt. Chuck Stewart agreed to fund a private stakeout.
CLEVER DIDN’T THINK APPREHENDING Colt would be easy. “He’s not some scared kid, he’s out there planning, and it has worked well for him for a long time.”
It would take some time to put together his Orcas A-team and gather some special equipment, but Ray didn’t want to risk missing Colt. He decided to start running the stakeout with just his thirty-five-year-old protege, Vitaly. They set up in a storage unit near Stewart’s hangar, but ran into a snag the very first night. The storage unit had an alarm system, which had been turned off. However, unbeknownst to them, it was programmed to automatically reset. When Ray opened the door, the alarm went off and an Orcas deputy responded. “If Colt had been watching, he might have seen us,” says Ray. “But it’s next door, so we didn’t worry too much that we were blown.”
Over the next week, the stakeout evolved into an elaborate trap. Ray met with John Gorton, Orcas Island’s English-born octogenarian electronics wiz who, after twelve years as a radar engineer with the RAF, spent the rest of his career working on top-secret defense systems for Hughes Aircraft. Gorton moved to Orcas twenty-one years ago at the same time as the Stewarts, and has known the family since then. He runs a video production company on the island, and has been asked to set up a few surveillance systems over the years. Before Colt, though, the jobs tended to be Orcas in nature, such as setting up night-vision cameras for someone who wanted to know who was knicking the fruit off his apple trees.
For Stewart’s hangar, Gorton designed a system using a series of audio and infrared video sensors that fed monitors in the storage unit. They knew they had a challenge because of Colt’s obsession with surveillance equipment. “The problem with infrared cameras,” says Gorton, “is that in a pitch-dark room, you can see the illumination diodes if you know what to look for.” Gorton, though, had a connection in the tech business who sent him a prototype of a new kind of IR camera, one with a totally invisible light source.
The cameras and microphones would let the stakeout team know when Colt was inside the hangar. Clever and Stewart felt sure that Colt was planning on coming back for the Pilatus. “Once he climbed down from his nest to the hangar floor, we had him,” says Clever. The first thing they’d done was replace the hangar’s locks. There’d been deadbolts with knobs on the inside—one twist and you’re out the door. Now, you needed a key to get in and to get out. All the locks had also been rekeyed so there was no chance Colt had a copy.
Once Colt entered the hangar, three of the four-member team would rush out of the storage unit and cover the exits while the other kept watch at the monitors. Vitaly, says Clever, is the fastest guy he’s ever seen. “He could run that boy down, no doubt.” Ray also recruited two men he does martial arts training with, Chuck Silva and a local high school teacher, Corey Wiscomb.
Corey had been at the center of a recent Colt-related controversy. He’d given students in his Math with Business Applications class a challenge: come up with a business and launch it online within four hours. These were all Orcas kids living through the biggest news event to ever hit the island. They understandably thought of Colt, and designed a T-shirt that showed a silhouette of someone running from other figures and a cop car, with text that read: “You Betta’ Run, Colt, Run.”
There’d been some local students on Colt’s Facebook pages urging him on, but those were underclassmen. These guys and gals doing the T-shirt were seniors, and they said they understood the problems that the Barefoot Bandit was causing in their community. Groups of Orcas High boys were even heading out into the woods on weekends to search for Colt. The words on the T-shirt, they said, meant “We’re coming to get you!” Their plan was to donate all proceeds from sales to Colt’s local victims, and they stated such on the Web page. It seemed like a no-brainer to the kids. With the atmosphere of fear and hate growing on the island, their project even had a sweet touch of doe-eyed idealism to it. “We thought it might help start the community’s healing process,” says student Alison O’Toole.
The project became a twofer. Along with the practical experience of starting a business, the kids also got a civics lesson. A number of islanders went apeshit on them. One business owner said that if they didn’t immediately pull it all down, he’d refuse to ever let any Orcas High School student into his store again. There was also a referendum coming up on a bond for repairs on school buildings, and some folks threatened that they’d fight against it if the kids didn’t cease and desist. “We were totally shocked by the reaction,” says student Sam Prado.
The final decision was supposedly left up to the students, but there was a flurry of phone calls that went much higher than the twelfth grade. Ultimately the kids backed down, getting a cold-water baptism in small-town politics.
One of the reasons Ray Clever says he asked Corey to help with the stakeout was because he knew he’d “taken crap for the T-shirt thing.” The main reason, though, was because he and Chuck Silva are what Clever calls “bloody proficient” fighters. “If Colt put up a struggle, it would not have gone well for the young man.”
Not that the plan was to let it get to hand-to-hand combat. Chuck Stewart outfitted Clever’s team with bulletproof vests, shotguns loaded with less-lethal baton rounds “to knock him down,” and Tasers “to sizzle him like bacon.” They also carried high-powered strobes designed to disorient him. Clever would be the only one armed with lethal ammo. “I had no intention of shooting him… unless he presented, then all bets were off.”
Ray asked the sheriff for a police radio so if it all went down, his posse could keep in touch with the deputies to make sure everyone knew where everyone else was and make sure nobody got shot accidentally. Instead of a radio, they sent a police scanner, which Ray took as a slap in the face. Just in case, he outfitted his team in bright red T-shirts and got word to all the Orcas deputies to not shoot the guys in red.
After Ray told the sheriff about finding the gun in Colt’s nest, Bill Cumming wrote an email to all the Orcas deputies, saying, “This information raises the threat level… You are to use this information as though he is armed and take all appropriate precautions with him. Also, under no circumstances are any of you (us) to discuss this information with anyone other than those who NEED to know.”
Ray and his team continued to work their day jobs, then every evening at dusk they sneaked into the storage unit, where they took turns watching the monitors and sleeping on a mattress laid on the cement floor.
While the Clever team lay in wait for Colt, others were actively tracking him through the Orcas woods. Colt not only had manhunters on his trail, but now, most fittingly, a Sasquatch hunter. Seventy-year-old Richard Grover brought his four decades of experience in tracking Bigfoot to the search for the elusive Barefoot. A real hope would be that he’d bag both: find Colt
ON MAY 10, I got a call from Pam. The FBI agents had been by again. “They told me a boat was stolen off Orcas about a week ago and they think Colt mighta done it.” They asked Pam if she knew where Colt was headed. She told them no. Then she says they told her it might not matter anyway, because the boat hadn’t turned up anywhere and that could mean it sank.
“They always try to affect me, get me to cry, but it takes a lot to get me to cry. I told them Colt’s a good swimmer. They said, ‘Yeah, but the water’s so cold now that he’d get hypothermia and drown… ’ So I asked them how long it takes for a body to float up. They said a couple of weeks.”
I’d never heard Pam shaken up like this. She’d been philosophically fatalistic, but the FBI saying Colt could already be lost beneath the frigid waters seemed to hit her with a cold splash of reality.
She hadn’t heard from Colt in months, and asked me if I’d write a post on my blog telling Colt to give her a sign that he was alive. One thing her manner told me—and I presume told the agents—is that she really had no clue where Colt was. I figured the FBI was just trying a particularly heartless tactic to try to shake some information out of her. But… maybe they were telling the truth.
It made sense. Things had been very quiet on the island; no Colt sightings for a month. With the Orcas ferries and airport under surveillance, if he didn’t have someone to hide him in his or her trunk, then stealing a boat would be the easiest way off. I checked the marinas for reports of stolen boats, and there were none. But the island also has many private docks, and there are plenty of dinghies and kayaks beached in waterfront yards. A very strong kayaker who knew how to read a current chart could island hop to the mainland. He’d have to cross a shipping lane, though, presumably at night when ships don’t see or stop for kayaks because the radar reflections off
