![]() Perkins-Vance called dispatch and learned that Knight had no criminal record. Knight admitted that everything he possessed in the world, he’d stolen, including the clothes he was wearing, right down to his underwear. He said he stole only food and kitchenware and propane tanks and reading material and a few other items. He confessed that he’d committed approximately forty robberies a year while in the woods-a total of more than a thousand break-ins. He had never in his life sent an e-mail or even seen the Internet. He’d not made one phone call or driven in a car or spent any money. He said he didn’t know if his parents were alive or dead. He never lit a fire, for fear that smoke would give his camp away. Knight stated that over all those years he slept only in a tent. He was 20 years old at the time, not long out of high school. The nuclear meltdown took place in 1986, the same year, Knight said, he went to live in the woods. He had long ago lost the habit of marking time in months or years this was just a news event he happened to remember. Knight thought for a bit, then asked when the Chernobyl nuclear-plant disaster occurred. He said he had no address, no vehicle, did not file a tax return, and did not receive mail. His name, he revealed, was Christopher Thomas Knight. He raced to the camp in his pickup truck and sprinted to the rear of the dining hall. The device remained silent in the kitchen but sounded an alarm in the home of Sergeant Terry Hughes, a game warden who’d become obsessed with catching the thief. Newly installed in the Pine Tree kitchen, hidden behind the ice machine, was a military-grade motion detector. The key was attached to a plastic four-leaf-clover key chain, with one of the leaves partially broken off. On a previous raid at Pine Tree, he’d stolen a key to the walk-in, and now he used it to open the stainless-steel door. Burgers and bacon were in the locked freezer. Then, into his backpack, a bag of marshmallows, two tubs of ground coffee, some Humpty Dumpty potato chips. Ten rolls of Smarties, stuffed in a pocket. With an expert twist of a screwdriver, he popped open a door of the dining hall and slipped inside, scanning the pantry shelves with his penlight.Ĭandy! Always good. It was cold and nearly moonless, a fine night for a raid, so he hiked about an hour to the Pine Tree summer camp, a few dozen cabins spread along the shoreline of North Pond in central Maine. The hermit set out of camp at midnight, carrying his backpack and his bag of break-in tools, and threaded through the forest, rock to root to rock, every step memorized.
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