Dead Run: The Murder of a Lawman and the Greatest Manhunt of the Modern American West by Schultz Dan

Author:Schultz, Dan [Schultz, Dan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2013-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 13

UNCERTAIN DEATH

According to police records, Navajo police assumed authority for the crime scene overnight, but final authority for processing the scene and for the manhunt on both sides of the river seemingly remained in the hands of Sheriff Lacy. The refocused effort along the northern edge of the Navajo Reservation once again forced Lacy and Butler together but if anything had changed since their engagement in Cross Canyon, it was that the relationship had deteriorated further. What Lacy didn’t know was that a few days before Butler had traveled to Salt Lake City where he met with the US Attorney’s Office to discuss jurisdictional issues and a hypothetical action plan that circumvented the sheriff in the event Navajo Nation police captured the suspects on their own.

* * *

At midmorning, June 5, bomb specialists from El Paso County and the Colorado Springs Police Department arrived at the scene. The pipe bombs were removed first. If detonated, the devices would have spread lethal shrapnel several yards in every direction. Behind protective rocks a few yards away, a remote-controlled disrupter rendered them harmless.

With the bombs removed, police still worried that the body and gear in the bunker could be booby-trapped to explode when moved. Using the cable winch on the front of the medical examiner’s SUV, the bomb techs remotely lifted the rifle and backpack from the bunker. An X-ray revealed the backpack was safe to search. Mason’s body was last. With a piece of rope, they tied a sling between the utility belt Mason wore over one shoulder and his right thigh. The winch cable was hooked on the sling. As the officers watched from behind the vehicle, the winch slowly dragged the body over the lip of the berm into the clearing.

Minutes later it was strapped to a gurney in the back of the medical examiner’s vehicle as the car bounced along a dirt road angling through twenty miles of reservation before turning north to Salt Lake City.

* * *

Even to the casual observer, there was something that didn’t seem right about the police’s hasty explanation of how Robert Mason died. It was clear that hours before his death, he wasn’t planning suicide. He washed out socks and hung them to dry, filled canteens—activities that suggested he wasn’t planning to end it there and if circumstances suddenly changed his mind, his police profile had him going out in a blazing shootout, not quietly killing himself.

Dr. Maureen Frikke of the Utah State Medical Examiner’s Office bent close to the naked corpse on the table in front of her, dictating her observations into the microphone that hung above the body. Methodically, she examined the man’s feet, legs, hands and arms, torso, and last, the bullet wound in his mouth. The meticulous external examination was the first step in each of the seven or eight autopsies she would perform that week, indeed for each of the nearly three thousand she had performed already in her career.

By that point, as she examined Bobby Mason’s body, Dr.

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