ours. A year later, he’s still roosting on their pickup.
PUSHING OFF FROM THE Wagners’ beach on the west side of Camano during the right tide and sea conditions, it’s not a bad paddle across to Whidbey Island. The currents can even help carry you south to a sandy point near the little town of Langley. From there, it’s about eight miles down to the bottom of Whidbey and the next dot that the police connected to Colt’s run.
On the night/morning of the twenty-third/twenty-fourth, a boat went missing from Sandy Hook, a dense development with sixty-some private docks biting into a skinny strip of water so it looks, from the air, like an alligator’s snout. Residents believe someone had been lurking around the neighborhood for at least a night or two, carrying out several break-ins and sleeping aboard a boat. One dock held a twenty-seven-foot Maxum powerboat. During the night, a thief rowed across the hook and exchanged his small dinghy for the sleek Maxum, ripping out the ignition to hotwire it. After a short six-mile trip southwest across the passage to Eglon, near the top of the Kitsap Peninsula, the boat was beached. Bare footprints led away down the sand.
The boat theft made the news, noting the possible connection to Colt—including the fact that the forensic evidence was turned over to the FBI. The FBI doesn’t waste its time on run-of-the-mill boat thefts, so this was a strong indication that they believed it was Colt and that he was on the move heading south. Despite that, there was already a full head of steam ramping up the Barefoot Bandit chase back on Camano, which was now likely six days and two steps behind Colt.
The media focus turned back to the South End. Pam called the cops on a TV crew that sauntered up past the YOU WILL BE SHOT sign in order to get the “I’m getting my shotgun” footage—which it did. The responding deputy noticed the nice new wooden stairs that had replaced the cinder block pile leading to the deck. “He asked me if they were booby trapped,” says Pam. “I told him no, but said there were others all around my property.”
Pam got continuous media offers, but refused to go on camera. One major network sent her a box of fruit, which had no effect, as she said she “wanted the green stuff” and wasn’t talking veggies. She told me I was lucky that I got in early, before she started charging people for interviews.
THE EVERETT HERALD REPORTED that Bigfoot hunter Richard Grover now pointed his dowsing rod toward Camano. South Enders hoped he would at least help locate a few of their old moonshine stills lost amid the nettles. As the story got bigger, more new characters entered the fray. In early May, an Orcas native attending school on the East Coast started a blog and Web site called Catch the Barefoot Bandit. Using the nom de plume David Peters, he cast his efforts as a direct counter to the fan clubs and T-shirt sellers. On his site, community members could fight back against Colt by donating to a reward fund—with the thought that eventually it would get high enough to tempt someone to turn him in—and by buying T-shirts, mugs, kitchen aprons, and so on with Colt’s picture and mocking messages such as “Turn yourself in and we’ll give you the second part of the flight manual—you know, the part about landing.”
Peters contacted Mike Rocha, a fugitive recovery specialist, aka bounty hunter, to ask what it would take to get someone like him interested in hunting Colt down. Beyond bounty hunting, Rocha’s various companies offer surveillance, execution of high-risk warrants, “anti/counter terror services,” and Spetnaz-trained teams that can teach you to defend your “important bridges and transportation routes… from enemy combatant attacks.” They basically do anything that involves wearing black tactical gear, kicking down doors, taking lots of target practice, and other things that go well with the soundtrack of “Let the Bodies Hit the Floor” that plays on his Web site.
The swaggering Rocha, a Vin Diesel double including the shaved head, saw an opportunity to promote his companies and maybe change the public image of bounty hunters from Dog “the” to something at least less hairy. A bail bond company he’s connected to donated $2,500 toward the reward, and Rocha volunteered his team of door kickers. A sticky issue, though, was that Colt wasn’t a bail jumper. When an arrestee bails out, he signs a contract that explicitly gives the bond agency the right, should he skip, to break into his home, kick his ass, cuff him, and drag him to prison. In Colt’s case, however, the bounty hunters had no legal authority beyond any regular citizen to chase or arrest him. And they couldn’t go onto private property without permission.
Rocha came out to Camano and left Pam a note explaining how he could arrange a “win-win” situation. According to Pam, Rocha wrote that she or Colt’s friends could turn him in and collect the $5,000 reward, then All City Bail Bonds would post Colt’s bail for free and have a lawyer standing by to work the case pro bono.
Colt was an escapee, though, and he still owed Washington State jail time on his previous sentence. If he was caught or turned himself in, Colt could automatically be sent to prison to start serving out the remainder of his three-year stretch even before new charges were filed. So bail was moot.
Rocha eventually met in person with Pam. She liked his look, but didn’t like what he had to say. Things got testy to the point where she wound up telling him that if any of his guys shot Colt they’d have to watch their backs for the rest of their lives.
ON THE TWENTY-SEVENTH, THERE was a sudden burst of activity on police radios. “Usually cops are very laid back on the radio,” says Shauna Snyder, who heard them on her scanner. “But they sounded gleeful.” The excitement was over a teenager captured on an Island County beach. “Residential burglary… one in custody” was the call that caused all the titter. Word spread very, very fast. At the trailer, the phone rang. A reporter called Pam to get her reaction to Colt’s being caught.
Problem was, it wasn’t Colt.
“They should double-check this crap before they call a mother and say that her kid is arrested!”
BY THE THIRTIETH OF May, Colt had made it 127 miles from Eglon down to Raymond, Washington, a little village on the Willapa River. Driving along Highway 101, Ocean Avenue, toward the town of South Bend, Colt stopped at a Vetters Animal Hospital. He took a ragged piece of paper and wrote a note:
Drove by, had some extra cash.
Please use this money for the care of animals
He attached a $100 bill and put it in the front door of the clinic, which does considerable work with abandoned pets. The receptionist found it and, according to the vet, didn’t recognize the name. She thought it might be from one of their regular clients. The vet herself, though, had heard of Colt. She didn’t know if the note was real or not, but called the local sheriff, who ultimately got in touch with the Island County Sheriff’s Office. They told him it sounded like Colt, but that they’d like to keep it quiet until they could check forensics.
The vet wrote about her brush with the Barefoot Bandit to a friend, the libertarian author Claire Wolfe, who mentioned it on June 1 in her Living Freedom blog online at
Once Wolfe published her blog online, the news that Colt was likely at least as far as Raymond and only thirty miles from the Columbia River—Washington State’s southwestern border with Oregon—was out there. It popped up on my “Colton Harris-Moore” Google alert on June 1, but the story didn’t hit the papers for seventeen days (by which time Colt was already halfway across the country).
The delay must have been surprising if not disappointing for Colt, because here was another action specifically tailored to get press attention. He did, by all accounts, love animals. The only civic statement anyone I spoke to could remember Colt making was when he told his mom that the penalties for animal abuse should be harsher. Pam took this and tagged it on to any mention of making money off of Colt’s notoriety. After his legal expenses (though she expected a lawyer to take his case pro bono just for the press), and after building a house on her property that she’d eventually leave to Colt, she said any leftover money would go to starting an animal shelter, because that’s what he would want.
The vet note showed that Colt was further embracing his media construct: he signed this note with his full
