Monday marks two years since Cortez Police Officer Dale Claxton was gunned down on a bridge overlooking McElmo Creek. Since that time, the clues leading to his killers have been as unpredictable as the shooting itself.

Less than two hours after Claxton’s shooting on May 29, 1998, his alleged killers — Alan "Monte" Pilon, 31, of Dove Creek; Jason Wayne McVean, 26, and Robert Mason, 26, both of Durango — vanished into the sand and rocks of Cross Canyon.

Despite more than 500 officers who converged on the area with some of the most high-tech military hardware available to them, there was not a trace of the three men for nearly a week. The first break for searchers came on June 4, when Mason was found dead near Bluff, Utah. Special Weapons and Tactics teams converged on Bluff, determined to find Mason’s two friends, but found no trace of either McVean or Pilon. After another week of fruitless searching, the searchers went home empty-handed.

But their rest was not to be a lasting one, as they were again called to the San Juan River near Bluff after a 9-year-old girl reported seeing men matching the descriptions of McVean and Pilon. This time officers resorted to lighting the banks of the river on fire — reportedly as an attempt to clear the underbrush and reveal the fugitives — but again they left the area without making a single arrest.

When the SWAT teams disappeared, they were replaced by bounty hunters and survivalists, all of whom scoured the desert between Cross Canyon and Bluff hoping to find a trace of the two fugitives and to claim the $150,000 reward being offered for each of them.

Ironically, it was none of the highly-trained trackers that found the next fugitive, but rather a group of deer hunters who were desperately searching through the dusk for a four-legged trophy on the last day of the hunting season. More than a year after the manhunt began, the hunters discovered Pilon’s bleached remains reclining underneath a cedar tree on a rocky outcropping on Tin Cup Mesa only a few miles from where the stolen vehicle had been abandoned. Pilon’s bones had been scattered by animals, but an empty handgun lay near his side and a tripod-equipped rifle sat propped in front of him.

A coroner’s report failed to reach a conclusion about how Pilon died, although it said that the trajectory of the bullet that killed him — a trajectory that indicated the gun was fired into Pilon’s temple at a downward angle — suggested the possibility that he had not died by suicide.

The hunters split the $150,000 reward for finding Pilon and also received a personal thank-you from Claxton’s widow, Sue. The bounty for the Four Corners fugitives, once nearly half a million dollars, had shrunk by two-thirds.