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Riddles of a Dead Manhunt - 10 Years Later

One dead cop, three dead fugitives and ten years to understand why. So, why?

By Ron Dungan

There is snow on the Ute, the Blue Mountains are white and creeks run high. I stop my truck at the crossing, grab my boots and pack. Cold and muddy, knee-deep and fast, this water will fall away to sand and rock when the snow melts and summer heat burns these hills of sage and juniper. Long ago, Pueblo clans built towers of stone in nearby canyons, and before long I spot a small ruin. But I have not come to look for ruins. I have come to see this canyon, to walk this ground where two men came to die.

This story begins with a storm of gunfire and ends in a bone pile. The facts fall into place slowly at first and tumble forward until they gather and take shape as one of the biggest manhunts in Western history. On May 28, 1998, three men stole a water truck near Ignacio, Colorado. The following day, Cortez Police Officer Dale Claxton spotted the Mack truck and pulled up behind it. As he waited for backup, a man dressed in camouflage got out of the stolen ride and sprayed Claxton's patrol car with at least 18 rounds. Claxton didn't even unfasten his seat belt. He was dead.

The three men drove the water truck for a few miles, hijacked a yellow Ford flatbed pickup and tore down McElmo Canyon. One man rode in back, firing at officers and deputies, wounding two. Officers lost sight of the truck but thought it might be headed toward Hovenweep National Monument.

"It was a fairly quiet day," said Art Hutchinson, superintendent of Hovenweep at the time. Hutchinson once received a letter that said: "Dear Park Manager, you have no authority over us, signed, Patriots of America." When he got a phone call warning that armed men in camouflage might be coming his way, he took it seriously. Hutchinson hung up and went to find some visitors who had just left. He told them to go back to the visitor's center and was trying to close the park gate when the yellow flatbed came, moving fast.

"I saw a puff of dirt go up in the sagebrush by my car," Hutchinson said. Several rounds followed, but he was unharmed. The truck headed into Cross Canyon, a few miles up the road.

"You could hide lifetimes there," said Vaughn Hadenfeldt, a Utah guide. The canyon is a long, broad ditch that starts in Colorado and cuts west. Many side canyons finger through it.

Alan Freestone and William Pierce, of the San Juan County Sheriff's Department, came across the stolen flatbed, abandoned in a wash and covered in sagebrush. But the fugitives were gone. They had left weapons in the hills overlooking the truck, in a perfect position to fire down on the deputies. Freestone still shakes his head over that.

Help poured in from many agencies. A couple of command posts took shape, one on top of Cross Canyon and another in Colorado. The National Guard sent men and helicopters, the FBI brought in SWAT teams and the Navajo Nation put trackers on the ground. Men and equipment converged on the high desert while summer heat seared the hillsides. Tracking dogs struggled in this heat. They didn't find a thing.

As the hunt continued, investigators learned the names of the three men they were looking for: Robert Matthew Mason, Jason Wayne McVean and Alan "Monte" Pilon. Mason and McVean lived in Durango. Pilon grew up in Dove Creek, Colo. Details emerged. Lists of weapons and supplies turned up. Some were not the kinds of supplies you take on a typical camping trip. They would need chicken wire, a metal detector, body armor, 55-gallon drums, cut in half. Officers found a requisition for night vision goggles. McVean had stored dynamite, 50 pound bags of fertilizer, potassium nitrate, potassium chlorate and other chemicals, an estimated $8,000 to $10,000 worth of supplies and ammunition. They were armed with AKS and AK assault rifles, Glocks. There were manifestos and organizational charts. There were maps and diagrams. Some were hard to make out.

The search continued without result. The fugitives had vanished.

On June 4, a Utah social worker named Steve Wilcox decided to have lunch by the swinging bridge just outside of Bluff, Utah. The swinging bridge no longer exists, but you can see the cables that once held it in place on the tamarisk-choked banks of the San Juan River. When Wilcox got there, he saw a man in the brush wearing fatigues and pointing a rifle at him. As Wilcox drove away he heard a gunshot, but he escaped without injury.

Nobody knows how Robert Mason wound up on the riverbank that afternoon. It is possible he floated down Montezuma Creek. Kelly Bradford, a deputy sent to look around, approached from a bluff overlooking the river, not knowing that Mason had moved to the other side. Mason fired and struck him twice.

As a Blanding police officer got Bradford to safety, a woman running the Bluff grocery store picked up the radio chatter on a scanner, Hadenfeldt said. She shut down the store and word of the shooting spread. Hadenfeldt went to get a group of students in town for an archaeological field school.

"By the time we got to where the students were, we had a Black Hawk helicopter over us,"' he said.

Jim Hook, owner of the Recapture Lodge in Bluff and chief of the volunteer fire department, started to get in the fire truck, but thought better of it because that's what the fugitives were shooting at - vehicles with lights and sirens. He got in an unmarked truck and warned people to stay inside. SWAT teams dropped out of helicopters. They secured the north bank, called for a dog tracking team and spotted Mason across the river.

Sheriff's reports say Mason died of a self-inflicted gunshot. The 26-year-old sat in a bunker dug into the riverbank, wearing a helmet, dressed in camo and a bulletproof vest, surrounded by pipe bombs. He had a shovel and a couple empty canteens, a rifle leaning on his shoulder and a Glock in his lap. Investigators believe he fell out of the flatbed in Cross Canyon because he was scraped up badly.

The search moved to Bluff. The entire town was evacuated and the elementary school became a command post for 500 people. The media - local, regional, national - hovered outside of town and set up about 30 satellite dishes on top of Cow Canyon. Roadblocks stopped vehicles outside of town.

"I've been in law enforcement for 35 years and I've never seen anything like it," said San Juan County Sheriff Mike Lacy.

I walk away from the ruin and wander the hills, passing deer tracks and cattle tracks, moving over broken ground. After two or three miles, the tent goes up on a spot overlooking a side canyon. Coyotes howl. Soon a fire burns and a stove roars. Bundles of twigs knock the fire down to ash and I dive into my bag, toss and turn, the coyotes howling, the night cold. I rise in the gray dawn, bleary and tired, slam the coffee and walk as sunlight warms the hills. Much of Cross Canyon is what the Bureau of Land Management calls a multiple use area. There are signs of its many uses all around. I follow deer tracks down a hill and walk among a few black cattle. There are markers that look like mining claims, corrals, oil and gas wells, discarded Budweiser cartons on the roadside. I walk along the road for a while, then work my way up a rocky hillside to the top of Tin Cup Mesa.

Officers swarmed the elementary school in Bluff. There were federal agents, state troopers, Navajo trackers, park rangers - reports said more than 50 agencies had a presence.

Hadenfeldt spent the night in Blanding, along with most Bluff residents. The next day he needed to get some of his clients back on the road. They went back to the Recapture, which officers checked, guns drawn. His clients grabbed their luggage and drove away. He saw no reason to return to Blanding. He went home.

"So now I'm in Bluff, and basically there's nobody in town but law enforcement," he said. Hadenfeldt said that as he walked around, he got the feeling that the fugitives would not come to his house, but he could die in a helicopter crash.

"It was just insane," he said.

"So I'm sweeping the porch. I'm just cleaning up around the guest house, and it was the only time that they allowed one news pool into Bluff." A media storm closed in around him, the broom moving, the cameras running.

"They wouldn't let me stop sweeping. I guess they needed action. I was getting a little perturbed . . . So I blabbed for a while." Friends from far away called later to say they had seen him on national TV, though he never saw the clip himself.

After the news pool left, Hadenfeldt wandered over to the school to see if he could help cook for the troops. He found a woman in the kitchen wondering what to with enough hamburger meat to feed 400 people and nothing but ovens. Hadenfeldt's work as an outfitter requires him to keep plenty of grills on hand. He rounded up a few from his house, broke a window to get a few more from a local rafting company and had hamburgers turning over coals when someone approached him and said, "We're from the FBI, and we want to talk to you." An agent took him to the school, which reminded him of a scene from a movie.

"Every agency had its own war room, and nobody was talking to one another," Hadenfeldt said. The FBI showed him a map that belonged to one of the suspects. Where is this? they asked. It was Grand Gulch, with various routes and springs marked. Grand Gulch, a deep canyon with lots of fingers, is narrower than Cross Canyon, has no roads and offers plenty of places to hide. It is not the sort of place you would want to look for well-armed men. The Southwest is full of such places. Hadenfeldt went up with agents in a helicopter to take a look.

"They were freaked out," he said. He saw lawmen from the east going into the desert without water. He saw well-trained men shaking their heads, wondering how to search such country.

"Most of these people, I'm sure were very well trained, but they're trained to go into buildings," Hadenfeldt said.

Rumors drifted through the Four Corners. The fugitives were on the river. The fugitives had outside help. People wondered if others would join them. In other words, nobody knew if there were three outlaws or 300. Nobody knew what their original plan was, the plan that Claxton probably disrupted when he pulled up behind the stolen water truck. Nobody knew if they would strike again.

"At the time it was very frightening. I think we were still recoiling from the Oklahoma City bombing," Hook said. One rumor had it that local sympathizers were leaving their trucks open, keys in ignition, in case the fugitives needed a getaway vehicle.

"There was always rumors of that, that people was helping them and feeding them food, but most of that was far fetched when we got into it," Lacy said. The sheriff was confident they were looking for three men at the start and now two. But where were they? Helicopters with heat sensors flew over many canyons. They spotted a few cows, but no suspects.

At one point, an FBI agent assembled members of the volunteer fire department and said the likelihood of an aviation crash was high. The volunteers, who had just begun to organize their department and never sprayed anything but water out of a hose, began to practice with a new foam machine, though they didn't have to use it. Time passed. There was no trace of Pilon or McVean. After a few days, the FBI left Bluff. Then everyone else left. The search continued into the summer on a smaller scale.

Rumors persisted. Navajos reported men in rafts on the river. A psychic wrote in to offer his help. A man sitting in a prison cell said he could help find the fugitives, for a price. Each rumor was noted, some tracked down, but nothing came of them. A rancher near Tin Cup Mesa reported hearing a shot fired. San Juan County deputies checked it out and found nothing, Freestone said. Summer passed, the heat burning. More than a year went by.

Pilon's body was found October 31, 1999, by 11 Navajo deer hunters on Tin Cup Mesa, not far from where the flatbed was abandoned. Pilon had an old leg injury, a break that had not healed well. A news report has the 30-year old, heavy-set man limping into the wilderness with a backpack, eluding trackers. The consensus seems to be that after all the planning to escape into the hills, Pilon could not cover ground. He would wait things out under a juniper tree. One way the sheriffs identified the body was through that broken leg. The deer hunters split a $150,000 reward for their find.

Now only McVean remained. Some wondered if the 26-year-old had slipped out of the canyon.

"I thought he was dead. There was no doubt in my mind about that," Sheriff Lacy said. But there was no proof. The matter trailed off without resolution, seared into local memory, embedded into the frontal lobes, even as people picked up with their lives and wounds healed. Claxton's son, 11 years old when his father was slain, grew up and joined the Cortez Police force, where he still serves. A deputy keeps photos of Pilon and McVean on his wall. Local people talk readily about the fugitives. Tony Hillerman dashed off a best-selling novel, Hunting Badger, based loosely on the case.

About this time last year, a cowboy named Eric Bayles was moving cattle down a dry creek in Cross Canyon. He figures he has ridden in that creek hundreds of times over the years. He saw something sticking out of a hole, high on the bank. He tugged on a corner of a backpack frame and started poking around.

"When I found the pipe bombs I quit," Bayles said. He called the sheriff's department, which announced a short time later that Bayles had found McVean's body. This is where the story ends, in dirt and rust and bone. But it does not end. It festers. Bayles said the FBI told him he had $150,000 coming, and asked what he would do with the money. He did not announce any grand plans to go to Disneyland.

"I said I'd probably buy a pair of boots and not have to make payments on them," Bayles said.

Bayles and his wife, Sharon, are people living on modest means, reaching retirement age. For reasons that are not clear, the FBI chose to pay Bayles $75,000. County Commissioner Lynn Stevens has worked on behalf of Bayles to get the rest of the money, or at least find out the reason why only half was paid.

"They've got a couple of reasons but I don't think they meet the test of legality or public trust," Stevens said.

The FBI knows that paying half the reward money has not gone over well in the Four Corners and responds to questions about the reward with a standard press release. The FBI believes that $75,000 is "fair compensation," it says. Cortez Police Chief Roy Lane, whose officer lost his life 10 years ago, said even he gets this press release when he asks about the reward.

When I show up at the Bayles home, his wife shows me pictures. The rusted assault rifle. A piece of body armor. A soda bottle. Bone. The hole where the body was found is much bigger now, she explains. People keep going there to look around, convinced they will find weapons or some other treasure.

I turn away from Tin Cup Mesa and walk, spotting pottery chips on the ground - gray corrugated, red on white, black on gray. There are dirt mounds where buildings once stood. I leave the pottery and pick up a deer trail that leads back to camp, pack my gear and go. A few trucks have moved on the roads in the morning. The canyon is big and lonely, but not entirely abandoned or forgotten. It is a place of commerce and recreation. Cowboys, miners, pot hunters and deer hunters, they all come here in trucks and on horseback. The work of the fugitives, before the days of mayhem and bloodshed, did not go unnoticed. Cowboys had seen men playing war games in Cross Canyon for at least a year or two. You could hide lifetimes there, but it would be work.

There is still the question of why.

"There are a lot of different theories," Chief Lane said. If you talk to people around the area, two of them emerge, that the fugitives wanted to rob the Ute casino or blow it up. But they are just theories. The question remains. "We have no idea." Lane said.

"I wish we could have found one of them alive because there's always going to be some question as to why Dale had to lose his life."

We will never know the answer. Why? The word gets swept up in wind, carried downstream in spring runoff, buried in dust like pottery or bone, lost in the land, like our questions about the Pueblo clans who once lived here. Maybe it doesn't matter. Knowing why would not give us comfort or bring back the dead. Knowing why would not change a thing.