Today I bring to you a weird mystery from the Four Corners area…a mystery of 3 fugitives on a murdering and robbing rampage, or rather, the mystery of what happened to them and what they had planned. This is the bizarre and entirely true story of the Four Corners Fugitives.
First off, who are the fugitives? They are Robert Matthew Mason, Alan Lamont “Monte” Pilon, and Jason Wayne McVean. Mason and McVean were 26-year-old friends who had grown up together in Durango, CO. Mason took after his namesake and worked as a stonemason after dropping out of high school. McVean was a metalworker with a fascination with weapons. Pilon was a 30-year-old mechanic from Dove Creek, CO, who bonded with the men over their mutual love of guns and wilderness survivalism.
The three are described as “irrational.” No one knows exactly what they were thinking or planning, as they embarked on a crime spree in 1998. But what is certain is that they hated the government, especially the IRS, and they had plenty of guns and pipe bombs in their possession. Guns, hand-drawn maps indicating supply caches, lists of Four Corner police radio frequencies, and copies of the Anarchist Cookbook were found in their homes after this incident. Pilon was known to be part of the Four Corners Patriots, an anti-Semitic and separatist Christian group known to be viciously militant. He had even attended a paramilitary camp that the Four Corners Patriots hosted shortly before the crime spree he partook in with his co-conspirators.
On May 29, 1998, the three men decided to steal a water tanker from an oil company operating in Farmington. It is unknown why they chose to steal the water tank. They may have wanted it to take out to the desert and live off the water it contained as they prepared for the Armageddon they deeply feared. Or they may have wanted to transform it into a bomb, a la the Oklahoma City bombings, and take out a dam or other critical infrastructure. McVean had been a true fan of the book The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey, where a group of eco-terrorists blow up the Glen Canyon Dam in Arizona. Or maybe the men wanted to use it as a sort of battering ram as they robbed places, such as the Ute Casino nearby. Some think they were after the armored truck carrying cash from the Ute Casino to Cortez that afternoon and planned to use the water tanker in the robbery. We will never know the truth; it is one of the mysteries shrouding this case.
As the men fled the area in the massive tanker that carried over 3000 gallons of water, Dale Claxton came into hot pursuit. Claxton was with the Cortez Police Department, but he was off-duty that day. He had just dropped his little boy off at school when he spotted the tanker drive by, which had just been reported stolen by the oil company. He radioed that he was behind the vehicle.
But those were his last words. The tanker pulled over by a bridge and Claxton did likewise. As he moved to unclick his seatbelt, a figure wearing a camouflage bulletproof vest and a Kelvar helmet exited the tanker and fired several rounds into Claxton from a fully automatic AK47. First he fired through the windshield, then he moved to the passenger window. Claxton was shot 29 times. He died instantly and a memorial marks the spot where he was murdered.
The men then fled in the 2.5-ton tanker. Over 75 law enforcement agents from all over the Southwest united in pursuit of these men almost immediately.
The tanker clearly wasn’t a very inconspicuous or fast getaway vehicle. So the men abandoned it and stole a 1-ton flatbed Ford owned by Nielsen’s Inc. in Farmington. A construction worker for Neilsen’s Inc was loading the truck when a man wearing camouflage, a mask, and goggles held him at gunpoint and demanded the key. Fortunately they did not shoot him.
The chase then recommenced. The fugitives decided to double back the way they had come, a bold move. One man in camo clambered onto the flatbed and fired at law enforcement from atop a pile of lumber; another leaned out the passenger side with a gun.
They came up behind Montezuma Sheriff’s Deputy Jason Bishop and fired at him, grazing his head. Then they pulled up beside his unit and the man straddling the lumber in the flatbed opened fire on him. Todd Martin, also a Montezuma County deputy, converged on the scene when his vehicle was caught in a volley of bullets. Martin was shot in the left arm and right knee with the AK47. Thankfully, both officers survived their wounds. A Cortez police officer and a Colorado State Trooper also came upon the scene and their vehicles were totaled by the barrage of bullets, but neither officer was killed.
The fugitives swerved around roadblocks and outran police and deputies all the way across Highway 666 (now 491) and into Utah. They didn’t kill anyone else on this leg of the chase, but it was now apparent that these men did not care how many lives they claimed in their efforts to get away. Finally, they crashed through the south gate of the Hovenweep National Monument, where they shot at a park ranger. They then abandoned the truck, in a creekbed near the entrances to Monument Valley and Mesa Verde National Park, 15 miles from Hovenweep. Two sets of footprints led away from the truck, suggesting Pilon had jumped or fallen from the flatbed in back. All three men thus vanished into the Cross Canyon desert wilderness.
The desert appeared to swallow them whole.
Over 160 officers from ten agencies swarmed the Four Corners area in search of the fugitives. A National Guard helicopter searched for them from above. Private citizens feared these men and kept an eye for them, even calling in sightings of Jason McVean for years. But the men evaded capture.
The manhunt was highly publicized and rife with territorial disputes between the Navajo Nation (a sovereign nation), Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and three counties. It was totally contaminated by infighting and a lack of clear leadership. Perhaps that was why these men were never found – alive, anyway. It was thought they had escaped by boat or were surviving in the Utah desert wilderness on caches of supplies they had carefully hidden all over the area. In retrospect, it is weird that the men were never found, when they were right under law enforcement’s noses.
The first fugitive to be found was Robert Mason. He was found on June 4, about a week after the manhunt started. Steve Wilcox was a government-employed social worker who needed to do a little self-care. He stopped at the Singing Bridge on the San Juan River, near Bluff, Utah, and prepared to get out of his truck, hoping to enjoy a little picnic. That’s when he noticed a sniper in the hills, aiming at him. He floored it and his car was struck twice but he got away. He promptly called police once his cell phone could get service, which is still spotty in that area today.
San Juan Deputy Kelly Bradford then traveled to the area and didn’t see the sniper. What he didn’t know was the sniper had moved locations. Suddenly, he felt a bullet sear through his shoulder. He fled to his unit and another bullet struck him in the back. He still managed to clamber to his vehicle and radio for help, while in agony and also in awe at the expert marksmanship of this sniper.
The canyon was soon flooded with officers and SWAT from Pueblo, CO. Even a helicopter joined the search. Mike Bradford, Deputy Kelly Bradford’s cousin, helped him into an ambulance and he eventually made a full recovery from his wounds. Officers trekked up the San Juan River in search of this sniper. It was not long before officers noticed a rifle barrel peeking over a sand berm. They swarmed the area, and discovered a makeshift bunker wherein they found Mason.
Or, rather, the body of Mason.
Mason’s rifle was lying several yards away, carelessly flung away from his body onto the sand berm. Pipe bombs littered the bunker. And Mason was very, very dead. Police claimed he had shot himself in the mouth with a 9mm Glock. But the autopsy report by Maureen Frikke, state assistant medical examiner, revealed that the angle was not likely for a self-inflicted gunshot wound and there was no gunpowder on his mouth or hand. Plus, Mason had terrible bruising, indicating that he had been kicked twice in the crotch and then punched in the mouth. There were bullet fragments in his tongue, suggesting that the bullet had expanded in an unusual way for being fired so close to the head. There was also no shell casing at the scene. The officers searching for him claimed that they had not heard the gunshot, yet his 9 mm Glock didn’t have a silencer on it.
Theories abounded. People thought that either the police had killed Mason, or he had been shot by McVean. San Juan County Sheriffs stuck by their verdict of suicide. They tried to explain away the troubling autopsy by saying that the bullet had expanded in such a way due to plant fiber or dirt in the Glock barrel. They said his bruising may have come from crossing the Singing Bridge while carrying an armful of stuff. Finally, they claimed that he couldn’t have been shot by another person, such as McVean, because there were no other footprints found in the area. Ann Mason, Robert Mason’s mother, admits her son was up to something, but she does not believe that he committed suicide. Neither does Dan Schulz, the author of Dead Run, a well-researched book on this case.
The story only gets stranger when some Native American deer hunters found the well-decomposed skeleton of Alan Pilon next on October 30, 1999. He had been sitting near the crash site of the truck the entire time, and his advanced state of decomposition suggested he had been there since May 29, 1998 or thereabouts. He still had on his camo and his Kelvar helmet, and sitting next to him was a backpack with seven pipe bombs and some Coke bottles. He didn’t have any water or any ammunition in his gun, which seems strange for a hardcore survivalist, about to eke out a meager existence in the desert. His skeleton was posed under a tree, sitting cross-legged. Police reported he had shot himself in the head.
Only, again, the scene didn’t align with suicide. A reconstruction of Pilon’s skull reveals that the bullet had entered at an angle improbable for suicide. Someone apparently had shot Pilon in the head from above and then staged the scene to look like suicide.
Pilon was found near Tin Cup Mesa, just a few miles west from Cross Canyon where the fugitives had wrecked the flatbed. One of his ankles was broken, suggesting that he was the one sitting on the back of the flatbed, shooting at law enforcement in pursuit. When the men wrecked the truck, he probably jumped from the back and broke his ankle, which made him useless to the survivalist cause. He may have been shot by the other two as a result. But his death remains a mystery. The deer hunters collected the $150,000 reward for finding Pilon. A similar reward for McVean remained uncollected for many more years.
In 2000, a woman was hiking along Tin Cup Mesa in Utah (very close to where Pilon had been found dead) when she found what appeared to be an arm bone. She brought it to her husband, who was working at the oil well at the base of the mesa, and he said it was human while she maintained it was from a deer. They brought the arm to the coroner in San Juan County, Rick Randolph, who agreed it was human based on evidence of a thumb still attached. Randolph turned the armbone over to San Juan County sheriffs, who then sent it to the Salt Lake City crime lab for analysis. The lab sought DNA samples from McVean’s parents to make an ID. However, OME — determined the bone was not even human. McVean still had not been found…yet.
Finally, on June 5, 2007, cowboy Eric Bayles was riding near Cross Canyon when he found what he thought was a saddle blanket. Then he realized it was a bulletproof vest, decayed in the sun, and he began to dig in the sand nearby, where he uncovered some pipe bombs and ammunition. He realized he had found evidence of the final fugitive. He called in the sheriff and they uncovered the rest of McVean’s remains 9 years and one day after Robert Mason was found beaten and shot near Bluff.
McVean was found in a sandy wash surrounded by tamarisk trees, 50 yards from a gravel road and about 2.5 miles from where Pilon’s skeleton had been found. Law enforcement agents from the area noted they had often crossed the wash, so they were shocked his corpse had been there the entire time.
McVean’s cause of death is not clear due to the fact his bones were so scattered apart by wildlife and his skull was in fragments. Only some of his remains were recovered from the wash. His sun-bleached bones were surrounded by supplies, such as hundreds of rounds of ammo, a first aid kit, a backpack, a camo bullet-proof vest, an AK-47 (likely the one used to kill Dale Claxton), and one of Pilon’s business cards for his mechanic business. McVean’s watch had stopped on May 30. This makes authorities believe he had died just one day after the trio arrived in the Cross Canyon area.
Theories and legends had abounded for years that he had murdered his companions and then traveled as far as Wyoming or Kansas or Oregon. Some thought he had managed to survive in the harsh desert by himself that entire time, maybe with the help and protection of other anti-government separatists living in the area who revered McVean as a hero. Yet others believe that McVean had gotten away on a boat on the San Juan River, and a fourth man may have been involved with the escape. Sightings of him cropped up for years as far as Kansas, Wyoming, and Oregon. Fueling the rumors were the signatures of the three fugitives that occasionally appeared in the Hovenweep National Monument guest logbook, along with the message “You haven’t caught us yet.” Obviously, this was a prank by the rangers or some guests or even a friend of the fugitives.
Mike Lacy, the San Juan County deputy involved in the manhunt who was later convicted of stealing money from the city government in 2011, never believed that McVean survived in the desert by himself for all those years. He felt that McVean had either died in Cross Canyon or had escaped from the region. How right he was.
The disappointing reality is that he was the first or second of the three fugitives to die. He had been in Utah, overlooked by the hundreds of people combing the area for the fugitives, the entire time. While it is not clear how he died, I feel confident that he was probably shot.
Now at first this seems like a huge mystery. Who was stalking these men and murdering them? But I think there is a far simpler explanation.
First, Mason survived the longest, so I think he took out his companions before meeting his own end at the San Juan River. I think Pilon broke his ankle and was shot (probably by Mason) since he couldn’t keep up in the canyon wilderness and that made him a potential liability in the manhunt. I’m not sure why McVean was also killed, but I think it was because he had been badly injured as well. Mason and McVean had been childhood best friends, so it is hard to believe that Mason shot McVean in cold blood. But authorities did find evidence that the three men had previously told people that they would rather die than be caught by authorities, so maybe Mason acted on his end of the pact and shot them both when it became evident they could not run.
Then Mason decided to carry on his murderous rampage against the government employee Steve Wilcox and later against law enforcement, so he started sniping from the hills above the hanging bridge. That’s when law enforcement caught up to him and beat him to death. They panicked, realizing they could get in serious trouble for this, so they staged it to look like Mason shot himself in the mouth. There have been numerous police shootings in New Mexico and the police usually get away with it – but this was Utah and the police beat a white man to death, so they were afraid.
Of course, it is also possible that Mason did shoot himself. He knew that law enforcement was closing in and he was determined to go out on his own terms. There are some explanations for why his death looked like homicide when it was suicide. But I lean more in favor of a cop cover-up after they killed him in retribution for killing one of their own.
This is just my theory. There are definitely other theories. Some people speculate that both Mason and Pilon committed suicide and there are explanations for why the autopsies found “unusual features” inconsistent with suicide. People think the men committed suicide as a last stand against law enforcement. McVean’s death is still unexplained but may have been suicide too.
Another theory is that Mason and McVean were using Pilon and disposed of him when they were done with him. Remember that Mason and McVean were lifelong friends and Pilon was only added to the trio later on. Pilon was shot by Mason and McVean, probably due to being a liability with his broken ankle. Then the two men decided to split up and go to separate caches of supplies, agreeing to rendezvous later at the San Juan River, where they planned to flee the area by boat. Only McVean died a day later for some reason and never made it to the hideout that Mason created near the river.
Yet another theory is that McVean was stalking both Mason and Pilon and shot them for some unknown reason. He then survived in the canyons for some time and even traveled to Oregon, before returning to Cross Canyon to die. I don’t think that theory makes much sense at all. Why would he return to Cross Canyon to die, and why was his watch stuck on May 30? Why would he kill his childhood best friend Robert Mason?
Another question is what the men were planning. They clearly had a plan in place that they had been formulating for some time. They even had supplies stashed in the desert, indicating they planned to hide out there for some time. Only one thing is clear – they hated the government. It is important to note that they targeted government employees, including Steve Wilcox, yet they did not shoot the construction worker from whom they stole the flatbed Ford.
These men were celebrated as heroes by many anti-government people. But the reality is that they caused a lot of harm to a lot of innocent people. Todd Martin and Kelly Bradford both had brutal rehabilitations from their gunshot wounds. Jason Bishop quit law enforcement shortly after recovering from his head wound. Dale Claxton’s partner quit law enforcement and attempted suicide. The tribal police already faced budgetary constraints but shelled out $700k they didn’t really have to capture these men. And, finally, Dale Claxton lost his life, his four children lost their father, and Sue Claxton lost her husband. His grandchildren don’t get to grow up with him. His son, Corbin, joined the Cortez Police Department to uphold his late father’s legacy in the early 2000s. Somehow, he managed to get Sue Claxton’s blessing.
All of these people had their lives destroyed by the fugitives, while nothing truly revolutionary was accomplished. Rather, the whole endeavor ended up being a waste of life and money. Nevertheless, it is a great story, reminiscent of the Wild West days of yore. And it is one of those great mysteries that will never be solved. McVean, Pilon, and Mason have taken their secrets to the grave.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-nov-24-mn-36887-story.html
https://extras.denverpost.com/news/news1027f.htm
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-nov-02-mn-28964-story.html
https://www.durangoherald.com/articles/1998-manhunt-remains-a-thriller/
https://archive.sltrib.com/story.php?ref=/news/ci_6074564
https://www.deseret.com/2007/6/7/20023184/manhunt-a-9-year-mystery-may-be-solved
https://www.odmp.org/officer/15098-patrolman-dale-dewain-claxton