Bob Friel - The Barefoot Bandit

The safe wasn’t empty, though.

“At the bottom was a single dollar bill and the credit card that had been used to make the online order,” says Marion. “It was folded in half, creased as if to say, ‘Here ya go, I don’t need this anymore.’”

They called the sheriff’s department. Vern’s had suffered small thefts over its sixteen years, mostly summer employees dipping into the till, but never anything major like this. “We felt violated, raped,” says Belinda. “And then, worse, our police told us we were asking for it… just because we didn’t have a security system.”

In the disorder of deputies coming in and out and still trying to get the restaurant up and running because they couldn’t afford to lose a summer day’s business—especially now—Marion forgot about the Sporty’s package. Then FedEx showed up with another box. This one contained a pair of spy cameras, two tiny, battery-powered, motion-activated cameras designed to be hidden anywhere and record several days’ worth of surveillance video. Like the flying course, the cameras had been ordered a few days earlier using Belinda’s credit card.

“All kinds of alarm bells started going off,” says Marion, who suddenly realized that the Sporty’s package had been taken along with everything in the safe. “Learn-to-fly DVDs, surveillance cameras from a company that also sells untraceable cell phones… and now whoever ordered all this also had a shitload of cash… Hello? Certainly seemed to me like it could have something to do with terrorism.”

Beyond general post-9/11 awareness, the Pacific Northwest remains extra sensitive to the potential of terrorism due to Ahmed Rassem, the Millennium Bomber. In December 1999, the Al Qaeda–trained and –funded Rassem filled a car with explosives intending to blow up passengers at an LAX terminal. He successfully drove through U.S. Immigration checks and onto a car ferry in Victoria, B.C.—a city on Vancouver Island less than ten miles from the San Juans across Haro Strait. The bomber’s plan failed only because a U.S. Customs agent named Diana Dean at the ferry’s destination in Port Angeles, Washington, sensed something wasn’t quite right and searched his car.

Marion took the cameras and her hunch to the Orcas cop shop. The deputy shrugged her off.

“I couldn’t believe it,” she says. “But there was definitely something going on, and I wasn’t going to shut up until someone listened.” So Marion called the FBI. They did listen and took a report, and an agent phoned a detective at the San Juan County Sheriff’s Office headquarters over in Friday Harbor. They decided, though, that there wasn’t much to go on.

Marion kept wondering if she was soon going to hear about a crime or terrorist attack involving a small plane. She and Belinda also had another concern: staying in business. “That money was our winter,” she says, her soft face taking on a hard glower. “We’re not rich. My mom wouldn’t have been waiting friggin’ tables if she didn’t have to.” Marion eventually did make that trip to the bank, but instead of a deposit, it was to borrow enough money to keep Vern’s open and staffed for what looked to be a lean winter.

“And then we had to borrow another fifteen grand to put in a security system.”

Mount Constitution rules over the entire east side of Orcas Island as the centerpiece of Moran State Park, a 5,200-acre Northwest wonderland of gigantic old-growth trees where mountain streams and waterfalls feed five blue lakes filled with rainbow trout and landlocked kokanee salmon. The view from the tower atop the 2,407-foot-high mountain (named for USS Constitution , aka Old Ironsides) takes in much of the San Juans as well as the Cascades running up into Canada, and, looking south, the Olympic Mountains. It’s the highest point in the San Juans, but it’s not Orcas’s most notable. That honor goes to a smaller but more distinctive geological feature on the west side of the island called Turtleback Mountain. The formation’s bulbous head and sloping shell are instantly recognizable from many miles away, and first sight of the friendly turtle is always a comforting welcome home when returning to the island.

In 2006, developers drew up plans to slice Turtleback into housing tracts. Full- and part-time San Juan County residents—including cartoonist Gary Larson, who came out of retirement to draw and donate a Far Side –ish frame showing doctors surgically removing the developers from the mountain—worked together with the San Juan Preservation Trust to raise $17 million to buy 1,576 acres and turn it into a preserve. Today Turtleback, along with approximately 20 percent of all the land in the San Juans, is protected in perpetuity.

The day after someone made off with the Sporty’s flight manuals and all of Vern’s cash, Martin and Ellen Brody (not their real names) returned to their home at the foot of Turtleback Mountain. Wooden stairs, decks, and walkways climb the slope to reach their comfortable single-story that’s partially hidden from the road behind a garden. With their back sheltered by the turtle’s shell, the Brodys face across Crow Valley, the island’s best bottomland. They can even see the small farm they bought when they first moved to Orcas from Seattle back in 1981.

“We’d been to Orcas on vacation and thought it would be the most wonderful place to live and raise a family,” says Martin. “And we were right.”

He hung out a shingle in financial services and became a gentleman farmer. “The rule was we could have any animals the kids wanted as long as they were small enough for me to chase down and tackle. Cows and horses were out, but we had sheep, goats, pigs, and chickens.”

Ellen became a beloved local teacher and spent her free time mastering woodwork. The Brodys kept the farm until their two kids graduated college, then downsized into the home on Turtleback.

“When we sold the farmhouse, the new owners asked for the keys,” remembers Ellen. “We said, ‘What keys?’ We’d never locked the doors in the sixteen years we lived there.”

Retired now, Martin and Ellen are big into taking cruises. They had one coming up, but this recent trip was a visit to see their daughter, now a Harvard professor. When they walked into their immaculately kept home, Ellen went through the galley kitchen and nearly stepped into a large puddle of water on the floor outside a bathroom.

“It was right below the skylight and I thought, Uh-oh, we’ve got a leak,” says Martin. They cleaned up the water and he added “fix leak” to his list of things to do before they left in three weeks for a monthlong Pacific cruise. Jet-lagged, they then went to bed.

“The next morning I get up and reach for my box of cereal,” says Martin. “But it was gone.” He knew he’d opened a fresh box of Honey Bunches of Oats just before they left for Boston. Ellen said she hadn’t touched it, so Martin chalked it up to a senior moment. Same thing with the missing carton of milk he was sure he’d left in the fridge.

Ellen took their suitcases into the laundry room to start the wash. When she opened the louvered doors in front of her sparkling white stackables, she instantly knew something wasn’t right. “There were two dirty fingerprints, one on the washer and one on the dryer,” she says.

Martin had no doubt—“She keeps this place spotless”—but it was Ellen who put words to the unthinkable.

“Someone’s been in our house.”

Now they went through their home, looking carefully. Ellen called out from her office that her brand-new computer netbook, bought to keep up with emails during their upcoming cruise, was gone. In the kitchen, Martin realized that the leather wallet he’d left on top of their cruise documents was also missing. True to his profession, he knew exactly how much had been in there: “Three twenties.”