Bob Friel - The Barefoot Bandit

On October 2, 2008, the Orcas Island Chamber of Commerce held a meeting to address what the Islands’ Sounder headlined as a “plague” of sophisticated burglaries. The reporting quotes Orcas deputy sergeant Steve Vierthaler telling the business owners that some of the crimes appeared to be connected and were “very subtle thefts” that included thieves using WiFi scanners to hack into people’s home networks and steal their identities.

Vierthaler was asked about the possibility of getting DNA from break-ins. “The reality is not like CSI on television,” he said. “It is hugely expensive to do lab work and the labs are hugely backlogged.” He said that DNA might be used for violent crimes, but not for thefts.

According to the Washington State Patrol, which does all the law enforcement laboratory work for San Juan County, it doesn’t cost the county a dime to send DNA samples or other forensics to their lab. The only cost is the time it takes a local deputy to collect the evidence. There are indeed backlogs, and testing is done on a priority basis with murders, rapes, and assaults taking precedence over property crimes, but a WSP lab spokesman says they work with local law enforcement on any kind of crime, especially when it’s high profile, highly publicized, or perceived to be an immediate threat to the community. With today’s computerized databases of fingerprints and DNA from known criminals (Colt’s prints and DNA had been in the system for years by this point), law enforcement experts say that not attempting to collect forensics at crime scenes is the result of poor training, bad policy, or just plain laziness.

Vierthaler told the Chamber members that all the businesses should consider alarm systems. “I would prefer a silent alarm,” he said. “But because we are so understaffed, the response time is at least ten minutes, so an audible alarm would be better.” He had some simple suggestions, too: “Leave the lights on inside and use motion detector lights outside. These people are like cockroaches: you turn on the lights and they run.”

He also suggested that everyone, at their businesses and residences, put wooden dowels in their windows. He didn’t report, however, how the sheriff’s office had recently learned firsthand the importance of that do-it-yourself tip.

RUMORS FLEW AROUND THE island—as usual—but other than a few unofficial “If you knew the shit that I did” warnings, Orcas residents were never alerted that a burglar brazen enough to break into the cop shop and even pepper spray a deputy had been stalking the island.

There were a couple more break-ins that fall, but both happened at construction operations, typical targets for local kids. Maybe, as the sergeant told the Chamber, “these things happen in cycles and end when [opportunistic burglars] get caught or leave the island.”

Then came that surreal November 12, when Bob Rivers’s airplane flew away. Burglaries dropped back to their usual low level once the Cessna took off, but the police never connected the plane theft to any of the other crimes that had happened on the island that summer because they had no forensics.

As soon as she heard about the stolen plane, Marion Rathbone went directly to the police and reminded them about the Sporty’s Flight Training Course taken from Vern’s. She’d been waiting to hear about a crime involving a plane and here it was—she felt it couldn’t be a coincidence. She says the sergeant’s response was an authoritative “You can’t learn to fly from DVDs.”

The other person on Orcas who had a clue was Ryan Carpenter, who wondered if the $900 flight helmet ordered with his credit card had just taken off.

Airline pilots call the area around the San Juan Islands “the blue hole” because the Olympic Mountains and the Vancouver Island Range hold back the roiling Pacific clouds, often leaving a pocket of clear blue air over the islands when it’s raining everywhere else in the region. It’s the same rainshadow effect that happens on the east side of the Cascades. Forks, the legendary home of the Twilight characters, lies only seventy miles west of the San Juans yet averages over a hundred inches more rain per year than falls on the islands—and nothing smells worse than wet werewolf.

The mountain defenses and location in the middle of the inland Salish Sea keep San Juan Islands winters remarkably benign considering how far north they lie. Just to the west, the Pacific coasts of the Olympic Penninsula and Vancouver Island promote “storm watching” vacations where shawl-swaddled folks sip cocoa and watch sixty-foot waves explode against the shore. The Salish Sea, though, is walled off from the open Pacific and its huge swells. In the other direction, rising dramatically in the east and visible from Orcas, Mount Baker holds the world record for highest single-season snowfall: 1999 saw it smothered with ninety-five feet of snow. However, down in the islands the sea moderates temperatures so snow and ice rarely stick around.

If there’s one month not to be in the San Juans it’s November, when the islands often take hits from major tree-toppling windstorms and the year’s hardest rains. The rest of late fall and winter are usually mild, what the Irish call “soft” days of mist and occasional drizzle with cool temperatures. Still, daylight can be in depressingly short supply this far north, and the low-slung sun seldom rises with enough strength to feel it on your face. Island residents pile Douglas fir into their wood stoves and pull together community potlucks so they can laugh away the darkness with other hardy full-timers. On Orcas, the Giving Tree goes up at Island Market and people buy presents for those local kids who’d otherwise go without at Christmas.

Then winter gives way. The buffleheads and goldeneyes fly off, replaced by spring swarms of rufous hummingbirds returning from their epic Mexican vacations. Spring is also when the San Juans’ 125 pairs of bald eagles weave the finishing touches into their massive nests atop waterfront trees, and the three resident pods of killer whales begin spending more of their time around the islands. The real start of summer doesn’t depend on the calendar but on whenever the hallowed North Pacific High chases the drizzly Aleutian Low back north. Once this semipermanent air mass takes over around the Fourth of July, the San Juans can see two months of wondrously monotonous blue skies and 72-degree days that seem to go on forever (at this latitude it’s dark for only about five hours in midsummer).

Long before any vacationing white man arrived on Orcas, its peaceful, easy summers were enjoyed by the Lummi, one of the Northern Straits Salish-speaking tribes. Lummi Indian clans moved out to the island each June and set up camps where they feasted on the plentiful salmon, crabs, and clams. The only downside to summering in the San Juans back in the day were the occasional murderous raids by Haida and Bella Bella, warlike tribes from up in the Queen Charlotte Islands and the Alaskan coast. The first white settlers in the San Juans married Salish women because they knew the skills to survive in the Pacific Northwest wilderness. However, the native women remained so afraid of the Haida that even in the last decades of the nineteenth century they’d hide themselves under blankets when sailing between islands during the summer raiding season.

From where I live in Deer Harbor, the only road to Eastsound sweeps around Massacre Bay, named for an 1857 raid that wiped out more than one hundred summering Lummi, with the surviving women and children hauled away as slaves in forty-foot-long war canoes. A beautiful little knoll just offshore also takes its name from the slaughter: Skull Island.