The Barefoot Bandit

He turned on the interior lights and methodically searched for what he knew he’d find: ignition keys. They were in a drawer, hidden beneath silverware. Once he knew he could start the boat, he jumped off and went back to grab the bike. He lifted it aboard, unplugged the shore power cord, cranked the diesel engine, and cast off the lines.

At 9:30 p.m.—with the Seattle couple still contentedly reading—Colt flicked on Stella Maris’s spotlight and motored out of the marina with the fenders still dangling off the sides of the boat. He cruised up around the tip of Lopez, and then set a course not north to Alaska, but south for home.

When Kim got to work the next morning, he noticed that Stella Maris was missing. No big deal, he first thought, because the women could have come by early and headed out fishing again. Then he saw that the dock lines and power cord were just thrown onto the dock, not neatly coiled like the owners always left them. “I went to the office and looked at our security footage from Saturday night,” says Kim. “Sure enough, here’s the kid taking the boat.” He called the sheriff. His wife, Michelle, suggested they check the footage for Friday night. There, live on tape for more than six hours, was Colt boat shopping.

On Sunday morning, a Coast Guard Safe Boat found Stella Maris adrift off Hat Island, aka Gedney, which lies about three miles below the southern end of Camano. With no one aboard, they figured the operator had fallen into the water and launched a search-and-rescue (SAR) mission.

Kim got in contact with the owners, then told the coast guard they were okay. He asked one of the Guardies whether the Stella Maris’s dinghy was still aboard. When they said yes, he asked if there was a bicycle. “They said no, and I said, ‘He’s gone.’”

There was no damage to the Stella Maris; the owners say Colt took good care of their boat. The only visible evidence that someone had been aboard were a couple of used towels and a wrapper from a Snickers bar.

Kim says he then found himself in the middle of a turf war. The San Juan County sheriff didn’t want him to share his surveillance footage with the Island County Sheriff’s Office, and Island County didn’t want to share any information with the coast guard. Kim finally threw up his hands and turned over the recordings to San Juan County, which later released a couple of still frames to the media. According to Kim, they weren’t even the best shots from the video, which had enough resolution to tell Colt had neatly trimmed his hair since his famous photo, plus had let his sideburns grow.

The authorities never recovered a GPS track from the boat and didn’t know which route Colt took from Lopez south—but it’s easy to guess. The long way is seventy-five miles; the short route is fifty. The shorter path would take him through Deception Pass at night. When the tide is ripping at Deception, two million cubic feet of water per second flow through the narrow pass, with the current reaching nearly ten knots—faster than the cruising speed of many boats. It’s such a choke point that water levels inside and outside the pass can differ more than three feet, making a trip through at full flow seem like running a swirling, whirlpooling rapid. With any kind of storm surge or wind opposing the rushing water, waves can stack up ten feet high. Boats without enough power to muscle through can be spun around and spit into the rocks. It’s one of the most spectacular and dangerous spots in all the Salish Sea.

What would Colt do? He wouldn’t hesitate to take Deception. It would explain stealing the boat earlier than his usual post-midnight hours of operation. He would have checked the tide tables and known to get through Deception somewhere close to slack water. Leaving the dock at 9:30 and running at eight knots—a smart nighttime cruising speed—put him on schedule to be through and into protected water behind Whidbey Island by the forecasted midnight slack tide.

THAT SUNDAY AFTERNOON, PAM was hanging around the trailer as usual. “I heard a whistle from the woods… didn’t sound like any bird I knew.” She didn’t pay much attention, though. “Then I heard what I thought was my idiot friend coming up the drive, babytalking to Mel. I waited for him to come up to the house, but nobody came. Then later, Mel went off into the woods at the back of the property and came back with a fresh rib bone.”

Pam says Colt never actually came to the house, and doesn’t know if that was him stopping by to see Melanie and give her a treat. When I told her the boat he’d taken was a yacht, she said, “Well, that’s Colt’s style.”

At 11:30 that night, Pam was in bed watching a Western with the sound cranked up. “I hear a voice calling to me, asking which window or door I was going to meet them at. I yelled, ‘Let me get my bathrobe and slippers on!’ I heard them calling again in a voice like trying to sound like a young person, like they were trying to make me think it was Colt. I yelled out that I was getting my shotgun. I cocked it, had it ready to go, and went to the front door. I had my hand on the handle, then stopped and thought no… Instead, I went to the kitchen window and moved the curtain to look out, and suddenly a bright light was in my eyes. I yelled, ‘Get that goddamn light out of my eyes!’ Gawd that just pissed me off… I hate that.”

It was the FBI. “They said they knew Colt was here today and started threatening me right and left. ‘We know you’ve been helping him and you’re going away for years!’ I said I haven’t seen him and I don’t know where he is and if you don’t believe me then give me a lie detector test. They said, ‘Oh, we don’t do that.’ I said well then arrest me or I’m going back to bed. They didn’t say anything, so I closed the door and locked it and waited until I thought they were gone. Couldn’t relax, though, so I turned off all the outside lights and went out and sat on the deck, listening and looking for those little flashlights they all carry.”

BY THE EIGHTEENTH, ISLAND County deputies discovered that the Wagners’ house and beach cabin had been broken into again.

“We’d secured everything after the last time,” says Bill Wagner. “So he had to break the lock on the main house to get in. And he also broke the door on the cabin. That’s the first time he’d ever done any damage at our place.”

Inside the beach cabin, the Wagners’ hookah rig—a floating compressor that feeds scuba regulators—had been inflated but not used. An outboard motor and gas can had been carried out to the beach. Both were left on the sand, the outboard with its engine cowling off, as if someone had trouble getting it started. Missing, though, was the Wagners’ eight-foot Livingston dinghy.

When Colt faced charges the last time, the Wagners told the court they’d pay for school books, “or anything that might help his education while he was in juvie or after he got out,” says Bill. Now, he said, while he wasn’t angry about the boat or the damage to the doors, he was worried that Colt was “way beyond” needing just a nudge onto the right path. “He’s an extremely bright kid who could have done anything. Now, with the planes and the boats and the fame, it’s evolved to the point where he’s become something he never thought he could be… He thinks this is his one chance to really live life.”

Bill wasn’t under the illusion that it was going to end well for Colt in the short run, but said of the “kind, helpful” kid he came to know during those Camano summers, “He deserves a happy ending.”

BACK ON ORCAS, THERE was a definite exhale after the Stella Maris was found off Camano. Ray Clever and his team pulled up their stakeout at Chuck Stewart’s hangar and slept at home for the first time in thirty nights. Kyle Ater, the holistic Dirty Harry, did the same, leaving Eastsound in the care of our handful of deputies and a host of new security systems.

Something about Colt’s exit from the island this time made it feel permanent. The extra energy, the id in the air, was gone. So Sandi, Murphy, and I were especially surprised at dusk on the twenty-first to once again hear a banging under the cabin. We looked at one another for a moment. Then it happened again.

I dragged Murphy away from the door and went outside into the dim light. I started to bend over and look under the cabin when movement in the salal behind me caught my eye. I spun, and would have been less surprised to see Colton Harris-Moore sitting there eating a pizza. Instead, it was a peacock, a full-blown, shimmering electric-blue-and-green peacock with a five-foot-long, hundred-eyed tail, staring at me. The big bird wasn’t afraid at all. Sandi brought me a piece of seed bread and he ate it out of my hand, then calmly posed for pictures.

Some folks in Crow Valley were the only ones who kept a small flock of peafowl, but we called and they weren’t missing any. It was a bizarre visitation. Depending on which mythology you follow, the peacock symbolizes compassion, the heavens, or immortality, as in rebirth—like a phoenix.

The peacock’s cries haunted our woods that night, then he moved about a mile away and adopted friends of