I couldn’t find a law enforcement officer anywhere who’d ever heard of such a thing as allowing a fugitive to basically collect a bounty on himself. If it worked, it could start a whole new trend. Go directly to jail and
“He’s not gonna turn himself in,” said Pam. “Give up your freedom for a lousy fifty thousand dollars! What the hell can you do with that small amount of money? Maybe get a really nice car.”
The deadline came and went without a peep from Colt. The prospective donors have remained anonymous.
ON WEDNESDAY MORNING, JUNE 9, Graham Goad arrived at his McMinnville shop and noticed that the back door was unlocked. Inside his office, Graham’s computer screen wasn’t how he’d left it and his wireless booster was again unplugged. He called Adam in and demanded to know if he’d been messing with his stuff. Again, Adam pleaded innocent. Then it was his turn. He pulled his head out of his brother’s fridge and asked, “Graham, how many hot dogs did you eat yesterday?”
Oh no, Graham thought, not now, not when he’d just stocked up on the special smoked sausage dogs. Graham did some quick hot dog calculus that put Captain Queeg’s geometric strawberry logic to shame. He ran the figures again and double-checked the net number of wieners left in the wrapper. The result was inescapable: six dogs had fled the pack.
“That’s when I realized, ‘Hey, somebody’s been in here!’”
Graham walked over to the FBO for a cup of joe and mentioned the theft. “One of the people there said, ‘Ho ho ho, maybe it’s the Barefoot Bandit!’”
Graham and other local pilots had heard of Colton Harris-Moore and his affinity for airports and aviation. “We knew he was doing this kind of thing,” he says. “But naw, we figured he was still stuck up there in the San Juans. We didn’t think he’d venture this far.”
Of course the information that he was most likely in Oregon and shopping the state’s small airports was already there for the disseminating. Here again Colt was serving as a war gamer for law enforcement and Homeland Security. He wasn’t a serial killer or an Al Qaeda sleeper, but he was someone already accused of stealing four planes, more than a million dollars in property, and committing dozens of other felonies. He was very high profile and certainly would be a feather in the cap of whoever caught him. The FBI was actively hunting him and you’d hope they have big ears.
The Dodge Journey stolen from Warrenton-Astoria was recovered by the Yamhill County Sheriff’s Office in Dayton at 7 p.m. on June 3. That’s less than two miles from McMinnville Airport, which has that State Police Command Center right on the property. Yamhill contacted Warrenton that day and Chief Workman called state authorities and the TITAN Fusion Center. The Fusion Center declined Workman’s request to get the report out, and though a window-licking squirrel could have looked at the info and Colt’s well-known MO and come up with McMinnville Airport as his target, no one in law enforcement even called the airport to give them a heads-up.
Instead, on June 3, just after Pam says she’d poured herself a beer, the FBI drove up to Haven Place on Camano Island. They were there to ask once again that Pam let them know where Colt was. One of Pam’s standard lines had become “If you don’t believe me, give me a lie detector test!” The FBI agents always declined. This visit, though, the FBI agents told her they were going to set one up for her, but that it would take a couple of weeks. Suddenly Pam wasn’t so sure. “I’m going to have to think about it… I don’t trust these polygraphs.”
Pam had bought herself a small tape recorder and now recorded the police and FBI whenever they questioned her. During this visit, the tape ran out. The FBI agents stopped the interview and one of them inserted a new tape for her. They all saw the humor in that, and telling the story, Pam went into a fit of throaty laughter that ended in a hacking cough.
“They were real nice like they used to be,” she said. “And I gave them a big damn lecture about shining that damn flashlight into my face the last time. I said, ‘Don’t you ever do that again!’” The agents, Pam says, told her they didn’t have too much time to look for Colt “because they were after bin Laden and stuff like that. I told them that Colt and his dog could find bin Laden, and one of them laughed and said, ‘Yeah, he probably could.’”
Friendly as they were, they did, however, leave Pam with a copy of U.S. Code, title 18, chapter 1, section 3, the law regarding actions such as harboring or hindering the apprehension of a criminal that would make someone an accessory after the fact.
She sighed and said that her life revolved around Colt’s problems. “I get so tired of thinking about it… I go to sleep thinking about it and I wake up thinking about it.” Other than her movies, she said, she has only one escape. “It’s called beer,” she laughed, then added, “I’m serious.”
As Pam was reading the paper the FBI agents left her, a spider crawled across it and she suddenly yelled, “They bugged me!”
LATE IN THE EVENING on the eighth, the telephone rang in the trailer. Pam picked it up and recognized a voice she says she hadn’t heard for months. “It was Colt… I was shocked, but it was great to hear from him. He sounded good, relaxed, says he’s fine.” Pam says she asked Colt where he was and got silence for an answer. “He says he got rid of the cell phone he used to use and now he’s on a throwaway.” Pam warned Colt that the heat was on. “I told him to lay low, real low, because of the stupid bounty hunter… but he already knew about him.” As usual, Colt had been following all the news about him. He told Pam, “I read where you said that I wouldn’t be interested in no lousy fifty thousand.”
“I said, ‘I was right wasn’t I?’ And he said, ‘Yeah.’”
Pam had just gotten in touch with John Henry Browne, who, depending on who you ask, is either Washington State’s most effective criminal defense attorney or its most hated. Or both. Over a long career, the sixty-four-year- old Browne has been attracted to numerous high-profile cases. Early on, as head trial lawyer for the King County public defender’s office, he represented serial killer Ted Bundy. Since going into private practice, he’s specialized in clients who’ve been similarly popular in the public’s eye, such as a man who set a warehouse fire in which four Seattle firefighters died. Browne, brash, theatrical, and six feet six inches tall, sees himself as a great equalizer for the individual against a too-powerful government. He has a reputation for aggressively attacking the prosecution’s witnesses, which he’s paid to do, and taunting and threatening prosecutors, which just seems to be his favorite hobby.
Browne confirmed he was interested in Colt’s case. Maybe having a headline-making lawyer to defend him would convince Colt to turn himself in before somebody got killed. I figured it was worth one more shot, and on June 7 wrote a blog post to Colt that included John Henry Browne’s cell phone number.
WHEN I NEXT SPOKE with Pam, she said she’d told Colt about the lawyer, “but he didn’t act interested.”
Pam, though, was almost bubbly in this conversation. Colt had finally reached out to her again, and she was feeling like she’d taken control of some things. She had John Henry Browne, and she was setting up a defense fund for Colt.
“I have people saying hi to me that haven’t said hi in friggin’ years,” she said. “Yesterday down at Elger Bay store, two of the cashiers that have always had their noses in the air to me were suddenly saying, ‘Hi, Pam, how ya doin’?’ What the hell is that? Oh, we better hurry up and make friends with her because she’s gonna be famous. What the hell?”
Pam said that Colt was studying a foreign language but wouldn’t say which one. In one of their conversations, she said, he also mentioned a girlfriend. “So I told him about birth control ’cause I guess she stayed with him for a while… I said, ‘Now, Colt, you’re not supposed to have any kids until you’re quite a bit older. And he said, ‘Oh, don’t worry, Mom.’”
Colt had asked her for some other advice, too. “He wants me to write down my words of wisdom for him. And I said, number one: don’t get involved with Orientals or black girls. But then the next time he called me I said I take all that back. I said, ‘Colt, if you love them, then I don’t care what their color is, because real love is not easy to find.’ He said, ‘Well, she’s gotta be able to build a campfire.’ I said, ‘Okay, what else?’ He said, ‘She has to know how to cook and she has to know how to set up a campsite and fish.’ Anyway, he went down his list and what he was describing was me! I felt good about that.”
BACK IN OREGON… SIX days and nine hot dogs after law enforcement knew the Dodge had been dumped
