Lots of people go through a rebellious phase at some point in their teenage years.
I had several friends who took up smoking, for example, and a guy in my class at school
got heavily into death metal to get back at his parents for forcing him to take flute lessons.
I wasn’t immune to this particular teenage rite of passage, either - you wouldn‘t think it to
look at me now, but for 6 months when I was about 14 I drank my tea without even using a coaster.
As shocking a crime as that may be, it pales in comparison to the capers a certain young American
by the name of Colton Harris Moore got up to during what was quite simply
the most spectacular rebellious phase of all time.
In fact, calling it a rebellious phase doesn‘t really do it justice - ‘International crime
spree‘ would probably be a better way of putting it.
When the police finally caught up with Colton in 2010, he had a $10,000 bounty on his head
and the charges brought against him read more like the plot for Grand Theft
Auto 6 than something a single human child could ever actually have done in real life.
This is the frankly ridiculous story of Colton Harris Moore, better known as The Barefoot Bandit.
All the best criminal masterminds have an origin story,
and Colton Harris Moore‘s is a particularly sad one that goes a long way towards explaining how
he came to be one of the most prolific - and daring - teenage criminals in history.
Before he acquired his intriguing nickname - more on that in a minute by the way - Colton
Harris Moore was just a kid like any other growing up on Camano Island in the Puget Sound
off the coast of Washington. According to most accounts, Colton‘s childhood was pretty bleak.
He grew up in a trailer nestled deep within one of the many forests that can be found in the centre
of Camano island, and just to give you a taste of the kind of vibe that was going on at home, at the
bottom of the drive was a sign reading ‘if you go past this point, you will be shot.‘ Yeeeeah.
Colton’s family was, shall we say… dysfunctional. His father was allegedly a heroin addict who was
sent to prison for attacking Colton when he was just 12 years old, and his mother was an alcoholic
with a fuse so short she made Joe Pesci’s character in Goodfellas look like a Mormon.
Social services were called out to the trailer as many as a dozen times during Colton’s childhood,
but for one reason or another, nothing ever came of it.
Quite understandably, Colton wasn’t all that big a fan of chilling out maxing and relaxing at home,
and so from as young as seven he started to sneak off into the woods,
often staying there for days on end.
The stealing that would come to characterise pretty much the whole of his young life started
simply as a way to stay alive. There was never much food in the fridge at home,
and Colton learned early on that other people‘s fridges were usually more generously stocked.
He also stole blankets, clothes, and other supplies to help him survive
during those long nights he spent under the stars when life at home got to be a bit too much.
In those early days, Colton wasn‘t exactly the master thief he would become in later life. He
was caught stealing on multiple occasions, with each misdemeanour earning him a week or two in
juvenile detention. But as is the case with most things in life, if you want to get really good
at stealing stuff, a little practice goes a long way. And boy did Colton practice.
It’s hard to say exactly when he crossed the line from ‘I’m stealing this because I need
it’ into ‘I’m stealing this because I can,’ but soon enough Colton was pilfering pretty much
everything that wasn’t nailed to the floor. He was suspended from school numerous times for stealing,
and his classmates soon dubbed him Klepto Colt.
By the time he turned 16, the scope, scale, and frequency of Colton’s burglaries had increased
significantly, and he was routinely breaking into the expensive holiday homes that can be found
along Camano Island’s various beachfronts. But it was while breaking into one of these in 2007 that
he was caught red-handed after neighbours spotted lights on in a house that was supposed to be empty
and called the police. Colton found himself facing no fewer than 23 different charges of theft,
for which he was ultimately sentenced to 4 years in juvenile detention.
Much to everyone’s surprise, Klepto Colt seemed to change his ways during his time inside - or at
least, he managed to convince those in charge that he had. Because after about 12 months he
was transferred to a minimum security facility to serve out the remaining 3 years of his sentence.
With the benefit of hindsight, I can confidently say that ‘minimum’ probably
wasn’t quite the right kind of security for a boy like Colton, and soon enough he’d escaped.
Still only seventeen at the time, he would spend the next 2 years living as a fugitive.
During that time Colton was almost constantly on the move. Only he knows exactly where he went and
when, but he’s thought to have travelled through Washington, Idaho, South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa,
Illinois, Indiana, and parts of western Canada, sometimes moving on foot and sometimes stealing
cars. He was rarely sighted, but police were able to piece together at least some of his movements
by the inevitable rash of break-ins that would be reported wherever he went.
Despite these tantalising clues, Colton’s exact whereabouts
remained frustratingly difficult to pin down. In fact, he might as well have been a ghost.
What the police didn’t know is that Colton had essentially become nocturnal and was spending
most of his time living off the grid, only venturing into built-up areas to steal what
he needed to survive. Well, sort. of. He probably didn’t *need* that $6,500
set of night vision goggles that he bought using a stolen credit card. But hey - you never know
when something like that might come in handy, especially when you’re a nocturnal fugitive.
If Colton had been content to lay low, who knows how long he might have been able to evade capture.
But his natural caution was counterbalanced by an almost alarming willingness to take risks
in order to get what he wanted.
He’d break into homes for the most trivial of reasons - to take a long soak in the bath or watch
TV. And if he found any given house to be empty, he sometimes stayed for days or weeks on end,
ordering survival gear to his borrowed front door using stolen credit cards.
But of all the many crimes Colton committed during his time on the run,
there’s one that epitomises his utter fearlessness more than any other - stealing aeroplanes. Colton
was a self-confessed flight nut, and he stole his first plane - a Cessna 182S - at the age of 17.
The idea of a teenager strolling into an airport and nicking an aeroplane
might sound pretty crazy, but it’s positively insane when you factor in the minor detail that,
the first time he stole a plane, Klepto Colt had no idea how to actually fly one.
In fact, rumour has it he’d never even *been* in a plane - not even as a passenger.
How the hell he managed to get that Cessna into the air - and perhaps more importantly
back onto the ground again afterwards - is a genuine mystery to this day.
Media reports from the time claim he taught himself to fly through a combination of
reading manuals he bought on eBay and practising on flight simulators,
but Colton himself has claimed he simply figured it out as he went along.
Whatever the truth, each flight was meticulously planned and executed.
Colton would stake out an airport for days on end before making his move, absorbing as much
information as he could about airport security, shift patterns, planes types, and points of entry.
When he’d figured out which plane he wanted to steal and how, he’d spend weeks figuring
out a flight plan. If he was expecting to land during the night he’d simply find a quiet airport
and do exactly that. But if he planned to land during the day, he’d use Google Earth
to scan for likely landing spots. Once he’d figured out where he wanted to touch down,
Colton would digitally scout the surrounding terrain so that when he was safely on the ground,
he‘d know exactly where to go next - something that was especially important since
a downed aeroplane in the middle of a field was bound to attract police attention fast.
Using these methods, Colton successfully stole and flew
no fewer than 5 different aircraft during his time as a teenage fugitive.
As word of these outrageous antics began to hit the news, Colton achieved genuine antihero status,
particularly among young people, with Facebook pages dedicated to
the Barefoot Bandit attracting tens of thousands of followers.
By the way, if you’re wondering what the whole ‘Barefoot Bandit’ thing was all about,
the name came from reports that Colton liked to commit his various crimes
sans shoes and socks. In truth that was more of an occasional thing than a genuine Modus Operandi,
but as his fame grew, Colton started to play up to the moniker. After breaking into a grocery
store in early 2010, he took the time to draw dozens of feet on the floor in chalk
before making his escape, and he’s known to have left at least one
enigmatic crime-scene note that was signed ‘Colton Harris Moore, AKA the Barefoot Bandit’.
Despite apparently enjoying his growing notoriety, it was starting to become a bit
of a problem. The authorities weren’t overly impressed with the number of rings that were
being run around them by this upstart teenager, and the longer Colton remained at large, the more
embarrassing the situation became. In an effort to end the farce, the police sent sniffer dogs,
SWAT teams, and helicopters armed with infrared cameras after him. None of these methods proved
effective, but Colton must have realised the noose was tightening around his neck.
Which is probably why he decided it was time to make one last, bold play.
The first signs of what that play involved came with reports that a plane stolen from an
airport in Bloomington, Indiana, had been located apparently abandoned by the person who’d taken it.
Most of Colton’s flights to this point had been fairly short, usually no further than
the neighbouring state. But this time was different. Because the people who found
the abandoned aeroplane weren’t from Ohio or Illinois - in fact, they weren’t even American.
Colton Harris Moore, the Barefoot Bandit - a self-taught pilot with
no formal navigation training - had flown a tiny single-engine aeroplane more than
1200 miles to the Bahamas, specifically to the island of Great Abaco.
As was usually the case when Colton showed up somewhere,
soon enough the locals started noticing things going missing,
with dozens of houses and businesses reporting break-ins in quick succession.
Colton had become so famous at this point that it wasn't long before pretty much everyone on
the island knew the Barefoot Bandit was in town. Plenty of people were upset,
but plenty of others were flat out excited. One local girl even attempted
to secure a date with Colton through his ever-expanding Facebook fanpage.
And considering the fact that one of the few times he was sighted on the island was
while buying a drink for a girl in a bar, it’s possible he actually took her up on the offer.
But if the authorities in America had been embarrassed by Colton’s general refusal to get
himself caught like a normal person, it’s safe to say they were positively shitting bricks at
the thought of him flaunting their inability to apprehend him on an international scale.
The FBI promptly stuck a $10,000 bounty on his head,
to be paid out to anyone who provided information that led to his arrest.
Flying to the Bahamas had been a bold, some might say brilliant move. But
Great Abaco isn’t a particularly big place, nor is its population all that large. Realistically, the
situation was only ever going to end one of two ways - either with Colton’s capture, or his death.
During the epic, James Bond-style speed boat chase that brings this story to an end,
both of those possibilities seemed equally likely. Colton stole 2 different speed boats
as he sped from island to island with the police in hot pursuit. He’d somehow gotten his hands
on a gun at this point, a fact that doesn’t seem to have been lost on the police - they
rained bullets down on Colton from behind, eventually shooting out the engine on his boat
and leaving him stranded. For the first time in 2 years, Colton found himself with nowhere to hide.
According to some reports, when he realised it was over Colton put a handgun to his head and
threatened to end things on his own terms, though Colton himself denies that part ever happened.
Either way, he was brought in safe, sound, and - brilliantly - barefoot (one of the
first things the arresting officers did was place a pair of trainers on his feet,
almost as though they thought by covering them up there were robbing Colton of whatever voodoo
it was he’d been using to evade America’s finest for the previous two years straight).
For his antics in the Bahamas, Colton was sentenced to either 3 months in jail or a $300
fine. Unsurprisingly he opted for the latter,
but far weightier punishment awaited him on his return to America, where he was accused
of committing approximately 100 different thefts alongside a slew of other charges.
Like all trials of this magnitude, there was a lot of legal to-ing and fro-ing going on,
but when the dust had settled Colton was sentenced to 7 years in prison.
That might sound like a fairly lenient sentence considering all the fuss he’d caused,
but Colton’s extremely difficult childhood was seen as a mitigating factor
in his subsequent crime spree, as was his age when many of the crimes were committed.
In the end, he served fewer than 5 of those years,
and on his release in 2016 the attorney who’d defended him during his trial
hired Colton to work at his law firm, a solid indicator of just how much goodwill
Colton had accumulated by this point, in spite of his remarkable career as a teenage criminal.
These days, by all accounts he’s an upstanding member of society
who’s put his rebellious teenage years firmly behind him,
though in 2016 his parole officer did force Colton to end a crowd-funding campaign
aimed at raising enough money for him to get his pilot’s license. Too soon Colton. Too soon.
To this day the story of the Barefoot Bandit remains a polarising one, and for obvious reasons.
On the one hand Colton was an apparently heartless criminal
who practically turned stealing from others into a game. On the other hand, it’s pretty
hard to blame someone with Colton’s upbringing for going off the rails a bit - OK a lot, but still.
Colton genuinely does seem to want to right the wrongs of his criminal past, too. He’s even gone
a long way to paying off the $1.4 million dollars in restitution he owes to his many victims,
thanks in no small part to selling his story to 20th Century Fox for a seven figure sum.
I guess sometimes crime does pay.
Thanks for watching.