FINALLY OVER
Mystery that gripped Four Corners, nation may be solved

The Shiprock SWAT team begin their search in Jun 1998 with Lt. Clarence Hawthorne, second from left, taking point along the San Juan River. [Independent File Photo]

By Bill Donovan
Staff Writer

GALLUP — The photos that Donovan Quintero took for the Gallup Independent back in 1998 showed a side of the Navajo police that few people had seen before.

"I have never seen them this serious," Quintero, who is a free-lance photographer today, said Thursday.

The photos showed Navajo police with their guns drawn as they searched the cars of both Navajos and non-Navajos on reservation roads in northern Arizona and southern Utah, searching for three men who had holed up on the reservation.

The roadblocks, which went up on and off throughout that summer, was part of the biggest manhunt in Navajo police history, and one of the longest and most expensive manhunts in U.S. history. Hundreds of police officers from 51 agencies participated in the manhunt.

Stolen truck
It began when McVean, 26 at the time, and two other men, Alan "Monte"Pilon, 30, and Robert Mason, 26, were in a stolen water truck when they were pulled over by Cortez, Colo., Officer Dale Claxton, authorities said.

Claxton was shot 29 times, and the trio fled over the border into Utah in the Four Corners area of Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico.

There were thousands of square miles of hidden canyons in the area, and at least one of the three men was reported to have experience in living off the land.

Dempsey Harvey, a lieutenant in the Shiprock tribal police district, was a member of the tribe's tactical reaction team. He and eight other members of that squad would spend the next four months searching.

"We were searching areas based on reports from sightings from people in the area," he said.

Dozens of tips
There were dozens of tips reported, and each was investigated. Eventually, two of the three suspects were found, months and miles apart. Both were dead.

But the whereabouts of the third man, Jason McVean, has remained a mystery for years.

"I thought he had escaped down to Mexico," Samson Cowboy, another manhunt participant and now director of the tribe's Division of Public Safety, said.

That was the opinion of many in law enforcement a year after the manhunt was over.

Although there was a theory in the early months of the manhunt that the three were hiding somewhere in the southern Utah portion of the Navajo Nation because of the sightings, by late 1999 almost everyone thought McVean had to be hiding out somewhere else and would eventually mess up and get arrested.

But that theory was turned on its head Tuesday when a cowboy riding in the Cross Canyon area some five miles from the original search area stumbled upon a bulletproof vest and a camouflage backpack.

He began digging, found a pipe bomb and then called the San Juan County, Utah, Sheriff's Department. Sheriff deputies found a leg bone 30 yards from the initial site, and the theory now is that bone belonged to McVean.

San Juan County Sheriff Mike Lacy said DNA tests are now being done on the bone, and the results may solve some of the mysteries.

But not all.

Police still don't know much about the plans of McVean of Durango, Colo., and his partners Pilonof Dove Creek, Colo., Mason, also of Durango. The water truck was stolen from Ignacio, Colo., but why the trio wanted it and why they were armed for battle with automatic weapons, handguns and explosives remains unknown.

The Hunt
In summer, the Four Corners desert is unforgiving. Temperatures soar above 100 degrees and the rough, rocky terrain is pitted with canyons and cliffs as high as 200 feet. Hunting for someone is like looking for a needle in a haystack.

Tensions rose June 4 after a San Juan County deputy, Kelly Bradford, was injured by a sniper near the banks of the San Juan River, just east of Bluff, Utah.

Bradford was sent to the river after a local social worker said someone fired at him while he was eating lunch. Mason's body, strapped with explosives, was found that same day in a dirt bunker on the south side of the river, dead from a gunshot wound to the head.

Bradford's shooting forced the evacuation of about 300 residents of Bluff. Police posted road blocks to the north and south, checking every vehicle in case McVean and Pilon tried to sneak away in someone's trunk.

Police even tried to smoke out the fugitives, setting fire to tamarisk trees and sagebrush in the river bottoms, while helicopters carrying snipers scanned the area from above. The search waned after a few weeks, hampered by jurisdictional squabbles and the sheer difficulty of the task.

Ongoing search
Navajo police renewed the search around July 1 when a young girl said she saw two men in camouflage trying to steal a truck in a nearby Utah town called Montezuma Creek. By summer's end, however, McVean and Pilon remained at large and were slipping into the pages of folklore.

Police conceded they might never be found but kept the case open and vowed to continue to follow any lead.

In October 1999, 11 Navajo deer hunters discovered a 9mm handgun and a cache of survival gear next to a pile of human bones in Squaw Canyon about 25 miles northeast of the bunker where Mason was found. An autopsy determined it was Pilon, who had a broken ankle and died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.

After that, leads trickled in but led nowhere, Lane said.

Eight months ago, his officers went to Flagstaff, Ariz., to investigate a reported sighting of McVean.

"He was like an identical twin to (McVean) and I was sure we had him," the chief said. A fingerprint check, however, proved the man wasn't McVean.

Lane said he's 99 and 9/10ths sure that the bones found in Cross Canyon, also near Hovenweep will be McVean's.

The Associated Press contributed to this article