If you like reading those true crime feature stories you often find in Vanity Fair and Esquire and Rolling Stone (theirs are my favorite), check out the Seattle Weekly (I know, right?).
But the Weekly published a page-turner this week about Colton Harris-Moore, an elusive teenage bandit who’s suspected of terrorizing Washington state’s northwest counties—Island, Kitsap, San Juan, Whatcom—breaking out of juvey, breaking into homes, stealing planes (!?), and living on the lam as the police fumble.
When his mother returned home to find the deputies’ note attached to her door, she provided them with a message her son had left for the cops before he fled. “Mom, cops were here…everything’s on lockdown. I’m leaving 4-Wennachi…won’t be back est. 2 month. I’ll contact you they took Melanie. I’m going to have my affiliates take care of that. P.S. –Cops wanna play huh!? Well its no lil game…..It’s war! & tell them that.” [Ellipses his.]
They heard, and turned to a relatively new weapon in the law enforcer’s arsenal: tracking his movements via the Internet. Each time they suspected Harris-Moore had broken into a residence, investigators checked the past day’s Internet activity. Eventually they turned up his e-mail address, mellenie010@hotmail.com, named for his dog. They also found his MySpace page, where under “occupation” Harris-Moore had entered the word “pilot.”
By then, Island County Sheriff Mark Brown had created a detail whose sole purpose was to track down Harris-Moore. Police began pulling overtime shifts trying to facilitate his capture—made all the more imperative, said police, after he allegedly stole a pistol from a police cruiser. “Wanted” posters with the teen’s mug shot were posted around the island.
Upon his election to office in January 2007, Brown announced that capturing Harris-Moore would be one of his top priorities, later telling the Herald that not only would Harris-Moore be caught and prosecuted, but so would anyone giving him shelter.
On Friday, February 9, 2007, Island County undersheriff Kelly Mauck sent out a press release containing a message for Colton Harris-Moore. “You will be caught,” he said. “You are hurting the citizens of our community, and you are unnecessarily putting yourself and others in harm’s way.”
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Now he was on the run again—only this time it wouldn’t be just one law-enforcement agency chasing him, but several.
Before dawn on November 12, 2008, the Eastsound Airport on Orcas Island was empty. Beatrice von Tobel and the rest of the airport’s employees would not arrive for a few hours. But the small runway, as always, was lit.
It’s unclear how well-laid-out Harris-Moore’s plan was, or if he’d chosen his targeted plane before or after he arrived. A notorious quirk in the design of the Cessna 182 allows for keyless start-up, making it an obvious target. And so the suspect walked up to the single-plane hangar, entered the airplane, and then quite literally took off.
Hours later, the plane’s owner, Bob Rivers, the morning-zoo DJ at Seattle’s KZOK, received a phone call from the Yakima County Sheriff’s Department saying that the plane had been found crashed some 300 miles east of its previous parking spot. The suspect had made a “hard landing” on the Yakama Indian reservation, damaging the plane, and police found vomit in the cockpit.
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Shortly after his reappearance on Camano in 2008, folks on the island began to wonder if Harris-Moore had decided to take the summer off. Reported burglaries went down. Many wondered if he’d moved on. That’s when authorities in San Juan County, northwest of Island County, began noticing an uptick in reported thefts. Harris-Moore was later officially named a suspect in more than 30 burglaries there, and another dozen in Whatcom and Kitsap Counties.
