BAREFOOT BANDIT Movie Update

This has been in the works for awhile now, but Robert Zemeckis and 20th Century Fox have officially come to an agreement for Zemeckis to get involved in the film adaptation of The Barefoot Bandit.

This still doesn't mean there's definitely going to be a movie, but involving an A-list director like Zemeckis -- Forrest Gump, Cast Away, Polar Express, and even a few movies without Tom Hanks, such as Romancing the Stone, Back to the Future(s), Contact, Who Framed Roger Rabbit and so on including the next Denzel Washington film, Flight, which is in post production -- is a good thing.

It's unfortunate that all the Hollywood press that picks up any stories on the movie keeps referring to the original title of my book: Taking Flight. Not that I didn't like the title, but the title of both the book and the screenplay changed to The Barefoot Bandit. (It'd also be cool for them to acknowledge once in awhile that there IS a book.)

So, the film is in development, which can mean a lot of things. In this case, it means screenwriter Lance Black (Milk, J. Edgar, Virginia) is completing his third draft of the script in consultation with Zemeckis. Fox secured the rights to my book and to Colton's life rights (with all of the life rights money going to repay Colton's victims).

I know that a favorite game has been speculating on which actor would be best to play the Barefoot Bandit. There's still no word on that, though don't be surprised if it turns out to be none of the usual suspects...
      

More Highway of Tears on the Radio

Here's the interview I did with Canandian Broadcast Co North's morning show: CBC Daybreak North Show. It airs in all of the communities along the Yellowhead, aka, Highway 16, the Highway of Tears.
(BTW: The story appears in this month's Outside magazine, not Outdoor Magazine.)
    

HIGHWAY OF TEARS on the Air

Mention the phrase "serial killer" and you naturally get some attention.

I did a couple of media appearances in the last two days about "The Vanishing," my feature in the latest issue of Outside magazine that's about Canada's infamous Highway of Tears.

Yesterday, NPR's Ross Reynolds had me on his show, The Conversation. (Look for the Listen to the Show links to the right and pick one of the options to hear the archived segment). It's surprising that even here in Washington few people have heard about this tragic story that's been going on for a long time just north of us in British Columbia.

This morning I did an interview with CBC radio, on Daybreak, a show that's based in Prince George, BC, a city that's seen more than its share of Highway of Tears murders and mystery. The host seemed a little miffed that the story appeared in an outdoors magazine, especially in an issue where the cover lines aside from my story (which was given the "eyebrow" above the logo) were all about How to get in shape, and How to buy running shoes.

I understand their sensitivity about the issue (and, frankly, I'm not a fan of this issue's beefcake cover). This is, after all, their collective tragedy, with way too many of their Northern BC daughters and sisters and friends dead or disappeared along this wild stretch of the province. They're also very frustrated that not one of the Highway of Tears cases going back 43 years has been solved.

Outside, though, has a long tradition of covering stories like this: serious journalism about serious subjects like Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild and Into Thin Air, Sebastian Junger's The Storm and others. Byliner has a list here of Outside's "greatest must-reads." Not a fluffy story about running shoes or ab workouts among them.

I'll post the CBC interview as soon as they get it up there.

TRAVELING THE HIGHWAY OF TEARS

In a remote and eerily beautiful region of British Columbia, dozens of women and girls have gone missing or been found murdered. The only connection between most of these unsolved cases is that they happened along a desolate road the locals now call the Highway of Tears.

For my latest feature in OutsideMagazine, I traveled up and down this road, which is also known as Highway 16, visiting crime scenes and interviewing victims’ families, private investigators, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and members of the First Nations tribes and other locals that live in the tiny villages and small mill towns scattered along the way.

I was drawn into the story for Outside when I heard of a young woman, Madison Scott, who’d gone missing from her campsite last spring. A large-scale search was underway, and media attention often helps solve these kinds of cases, ideally with the missing person safely returned to their family. (Tragically, though, Maddy, has now been missing for more than a full year. Please visit www.madisonscott.ca for information on search efforts, and contact the RCMP if you have any information. There is a C$100,000 reward for information that leads to solving the case).

Investigating Maddy’s story put me on Highway 16, which you soon discover has a long and terrible history with as many as 43 women and girls from this stretch of BC either found murdered or gone missing and never been found. There’s even a special unit of the RCMP dedicated to figuring out whether a serial killer is on the loose along this lonely, misty road. They’ve concluded that 18 of the cases (Madison Scott is not one of them) share enough similarities to possibly be linked.

The deeper I got into the story, the more complicated it became, and the more I found people who were frightened of what was happening in their isolated, rural communities. The fact that none of the cases on the RCMP’s official list has been solved only feeds the fear and the conspiracy theories that run rampant in some of these small towns.

After three trips into BC to investigate, I turned in my story. I’d found that another young woman from the same town where Maddy grew up had recently been killed, but unlike the other cases, there’d actually been an arrest. It seemed tangential to the main story because the suspect, Cody Legebokoff, knew his victim. 

Still, I mentioned it as supporting a theory that maybe there wasn’t a serial killer involved in many of these cases after all, that maybe the murders were more horribly mundane, and it was just that the vast wilds of British Columbia made it easy to hide evidence of the crimes – that Highway 16 simply offers a convenient artery for creeps, date rapists, domestic abusers and other assholes who wind up killing women and ditching their bodies far along the countless lonely logging roads that branch off the highway. A passage I wrote about this, which was cut from the final story, reads like this:

“So if something snaps inside, if bad mommy drank and didn’t hug you enough, if the devil personally tells you he needs help, if somebody touched you wrong and crossed the wires in your dirty little mind so now you really need to hurt somebody… then Highway 16 can be your friend.”

The day I turned in my story, the RCMP announced that they were charging 20-year-old Cody Legebokoff with three more murders. I yanked the story back from the editors for the first of what would be two rewrites – the second because of another horrific murder that happened while I was doing my research.

If the charges against Legebokoff are proved in court this summer, then there was indeed a serial killer preying on women in that part of British Columbia. However, as you’ll read in the story, which is on newsstands now, what’s even more frightening is that his arrest does nothing to solve all the other cases.

A Well Read Colton Harris-Moore

I was fortunate to get an invite to tape an episode of "Well Read" with Terry Tazioli. Taz (as I heard someone call him) is the host of this new PBS show that focuses, as you could guess, on books.

Well Read has an interesting format. Taz interviews an author for about 25 minutes, then spends the last five talking with Mary Ann Gwinn, the book editor for the Seattle Times, who offers a few "Well if you like that genre, then you'll love the following books..."

It's a good format and Terry keeps it lively with his enthusiasm for reading and good books.

You can watch the show at the link, which will take you to the Media Appearances page of my website.

Colton Harris-Moore, Barefoot Bandit New Footage

As I mention in The Barefoot Bandit, on my trip to the Bahamas during Colton Harris-Moore's run, I discovered that he had been carrying around a Contour HD camera. Skiers, bikers, hang-gliders and others strap this tiny videocam onto their helmets to get exciting “You are there!” footage. You can also mount them on dashboards, whether on a car or a plane.

Colton used the camera both with a dashboard mount and as a hand-held to film his point of view as he stole airplanes and cars, as well as just playing around in the woods.

I’ve known this footage existed for quite awhile, but repeated Freedom of Information Act requests to review it have been refused and, currently, delayed by the FBI. I’m not certain how this local Seattle television station, KOMO, obtained the video.

As you check out the clips, what they call nighttime footage is actually daybreak in Bloomington, Indiana as Colton steals and taxis Spider Miller’s Cessna Corvalis in preparation for his flight to the Bahamas. The written commentary from the television station says that Colton waits for the airport to open, as evidenced by the runway lights. But that’s not accurate. Most small airports have a lighting system that pilots can turn on and off by using their radios. Colton knew how to turn on the lights himself.

There are a number of clips here that you can play at KOMO's site. Nothing very exciting unless you keep in mind that this was a young man who’d never had a formal flight lesson…

Colton Harris-Moore, The Barefoot Bandit's Maximum Issues

There's been a lot of news action recently, with John Henry Browne talking to an AP reporter about Colton being locked down in maximum security. It's worth me doing another post to update the one I wrote on March 30th about Colt and the chances he'll spend a considerable amount of time in max.

The facts are that Colton Harris-Moore is now in the Washington State Penitentiary  at Walla Walla and is being held in their IMU – Intensive Mangagement Unit. IMU is high-level maximum security, which includes the worst and most-dangerous adult offenders as well as inmates on death row.

In IMU, Colton gets five hours outside of his solitary confinement cell, and three showers per week. He doesn’t mix with other inmates, and his only human contact so far has been with prison guards and officials.

Prior to this, Colton was held at the Washington State prison in Shelton, which serves as a sort-of induction center where inmates are given medical and mental tests to determine where they’ll be sent. Apparently they don’t learn enough there, because officials at Walla Walla are saying they need another seven weeks, which Colton will spend in solitary at their IMU, to evaluate where they’re going to put him next. It’s not an uncommon practice for prisons to segregate new prisoners before assigning them a permanent unit, but this double evaluation within the Washington State DOC seems redundant.

After his capture in the Bahamas, Colton was held in solitary at SeaTac Federal Detention Center for at least six months. Interestingly, he requested he stay segregated even after he was deemed eligible to move into the general population. As I detail in The Barefoot Bandit: The True Tale ofColton Harris-Moore, Colton did not do too well juvenile prison. As once source who served time with Colt in County told me, “There were a lot of guys who had trouble with him, but didn’t go after him only because they didn’t want to go on lockdown.” However, a prison buddy from his time at the Greenhill juvenile state facility told me about a number of times where Colton was chased into his room and beaten after getting into arguments with other boys.

Colton eventually did move into general population at SeaTac and by all accounts did fine. There’s often a big difference between the kinds of inmates you find in a federal facility and a state prison, especially maximum security. Feds house a lot of swindlers, fraudsters and other white-collar crooks. Murderers, rapists, gang-bangers and other violent and dangerous felons: you’ll find them in state prisons.

One class of people you’ll find in all prisons, but especially at the local level, are the mentally ill. It’s estimated there are at least 350,000 mentally ill people in US prisons, a number that skyrocketed after the wholesale closings of state hospitals in the 80s and 90s. Huge numbers of the mentally ill were pushed onto the streets, and many now simply revolve through the prison system time and again.    

Two issues that come up with solitary confinement are physical safety and mental well-being. Colton is, of course, a big guy at 6’5”, but by all accounts he’s not a fighter and nothing in all of my research says he’s confrontational or violent. He will be physically safe in solitary unless he got into a confrontation with guards, which seems extremely unlikely given his history.

The mental issue, though, is critical. Special advisors to the United Nations have testified that solitary confinement “can amount to torture.” Those prisoners with mental issues are particularly prone to damage since often part of the segregation means that along with little human contact and extremely limited opportunities for fresh air and exercise, the inmates in IMU are not given the same access to education and counseling opportunities, or even the distractions of TV and radio, as the general population.

We all know the argument that these are prisoners and they deserve to be locked away and not given a cushy existence. And yes, Colt is a criminal who committed dozens of felonies and deserves to spend years behind bars. However, the short-sightedness that I see in our justice system is that it leans way too much toward retribution than rehabilitation, and often seems to forget that these people are coming back to our communities one day. Do we want them to come back simply as better crooks, having gotten their masters degrees in Criminal U? Do we want them to come back with their mental problems worse? Do we want non-violent offenders turned violent because of what they’ve had to do to survive inside or simply because they’ve lost all hope in a “justice” system?

Colton will be out of prison and back in society at age 25, with a long life ahead of him. People that I’m talking to in our communities in the islands – the ones most affected by Colton Harris-Moore’s crimes – are very concerned about what Colt will be like when he gets out. They’re hoping for second-chance Colt, a man who takes  advantage of the educational opportunities and specialized counseling (being paid for by friends who’ve  known him for years and who see him as eminently salvageable) to help him move beyond the challenges he still faces due to the lingering effects of Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder, the traumas of his childhood, and his own poor record of decision-making.

What they fear is a Colt who’s been further beaten down by yet another “system.” A Colt who has whatever optimism for a functional life further beaten out of him or driven out of him by too much time alone in a box, and who winds up simply learning to become a better, and perhaps more dangerous, criminal.              

A number of letters have been written to the governor – including some by victims who had their homes on Camano Island burglarized multiple times by Colton. The letters have asked for her to intervene, to get Colton Harris-Moore out of maximum security and into a facility where he can start the serious work on his rehabilitation. Colton’s defense team has been working behind the scenes for the same thing. By John Henry Browne taking this issue public, it’s safe to say that those efforts have failed – so far.