CORTEZ (AP) – "I’m the mother of one of the bad guys," Ann Mason says with palpable sorrow and weariness.

"It’s part of my legacy," she says of the May 29, 1998, killing of Cortez policeman Dale Claxton by a trio of camouflage-clad men. The slaying made her 26-year-old son a target of one of the largest manhunts the West has ever seen.

"You get tied to the bumper and dragged along when it’s your child," she says.

On June 4, 1998, when law enforcement found Four Corners fugitive Robert Matthew Mason, dead from a bullet to the head, they thought "good riddance to a cop killer," Ann Mason says.

She believes no agency has thoroughly probed the strange circumstances surrounding his death.

Lead investigators with the San Juan County, Utah, Sheriff’s Department concluded it was a suicide, but the facts just don’t add up for her or for some others.

Utah’s chief deputy medical examiner, who conducted Bob Mason’s autopsy, wouldn’t label his death a suicide, instead calling the manner of death undetermined.

For Jim McVean, the father of fugitive Jason Wayne McVean, what little he has been told by law enforcement about the murder of Claxton and the ongoing search for his son, the last suspect presumably alive, doesn’t ring true.

"I’m still not sure it’s our boys who did this thing," Jim McVean says. "There are too many unanswered questions. The cops refuse to answer them."

Ending two years of silence by talking to The Denver Post, the Mason and McVean families, both of Durango, have very different stories to tell about their sons.

"We just hope somebody with a conscience will come forward and say what really happened," says Jason’s stepmother, Debbie Kay McVean.

Few men of this region, in this century, have attained the infamy of the young gunmen who came out of nowhere to kill Claxton as he sat in his squad car.

He had been following a water truck reported stolen from the Ignacio area, but he hadn’t even flashed his lights when the truck stopped on a county road just outside Cortez about 9:20 a.m. Claxton stopped behind it. One of its passengers, outfitted in camouflage and combat gear, leapt out and fired almost 20 rounds into the helpless officer.

The gunman spared two stunned eyewitnesses who sat in separate vehicles nearby. Their accounts led Cortez Police Chief Roy Lane and other law officers to believe that Jason McVean probably was the triggerman. Mason was probably the truck’s driver, Assistant Police Chief Russ Johnson says.

In the minutes after Claxton’s killing, three men hijacked a flatbed truck at gunpoint, wounding two sheriff’s deputies and disabling eight law enforcement vehicles as they sped down county roads. The gunmen vanished into the dust-filled air of labyrinthine desert canyons to the west. They were last seen near Hovenweep National Monument, where they rained bullets on a park ranger in his car as they bounced down a gravel road at 70 mph. The ranger wasn’t injured.

The stolen Ford was found hours later on County Road 220. Either the truck had flown off the road, had become stuck in a wash or had been intentionally ditched.

Two assault rifles, ammunition and a police radio were also left behind. Lawmen said they found two sets of footprints leading from the truck.

The last time Ann Mason saw her son alive was the evening of May 27, 1998. Bob Mason didn’t live with his parents and was somewhat secretive about where he stayed, but he stopped by his parents’ home often for meals or to drop off his German shepherd puppy for Ann to tend.

However, Bob, a skilled mason, also had worked hard at his parents’ home, constructing beautiful flagstone walkways, walls, steps and patio, a backyard pond and waterfall. "He was a sweet kid," his mother says.

Bob Mason told his parents he was going camping with Jason McVean and another fellow around McElmo and Cross canyons or at Bug Point.

He said he would be back Sunday evening. As he filled seven canteens and made other preparations, his father asked: "Why don’t you take the two five-gallon water jugs instead of all those canteens? Why don’t you take your dog?" "I just can’t," Bob Mason answered.

Two days later, the Masons watched the news of Claxton’s killing and the massive manhunt near their son’s campsite. Saturday morning, Ann Mason called Cortez police and told them she was worried her son might get caught in the crossfire. Police later told her they could not find either his or McVean’s truck in the area.

Mason’s father (a retired schoolteacher who asked that his full name not be used in this story) soon found his son’s truck, loaded with several backpacks and other camping gear, parked at Jason McVean’s trailer at Animas Air Park. "We knew then something was terribly wrong," he says.

Police later located McVean’s truck parked about 15 miles west of Durango.

The Masons went to the La Plata County’s Sheriff’s Office on Saturday with their fears and coalescing suspicion. They told authorities Bob Mason was an avid gun collector and no fan of law enforcement.

Jim and Debbie Kay McVean spent that weekend at Navajo Reservoir southeast of Durango. They were camped near friends, including a policeman with a scanner, and they all listened to the drama unfolding in the desert.

"We had no idea until Sunday night" that Jason might be in harm’s way, Jim McVean says. "It wasn’t until Tuesday we called Beverly (Pilon). She said: ‘It’s our boys they’re after.’ "

On June 2, 1998, police publicly named their suspects: Mason and McVean, both 26 and from Durango, and 30-year-old Alan "Monte" Pilon of Dove Creek. Speculation on the motive centered on Claxton’s inadvertently interrupting a big plan, perhaps a robbery of the Ute Mountain Casino at Towaoc, 10 miles south of Cortez. The men had been stockpiling weapons, guns and other supplies for years, investigators learned.

Two days later came reports a man in camouflage had fired at close range on a picnicking social worker, and several hundred lawmen from 64 agencies descended on the area of the Swinging Bridge in the San Juan River Canyon just east of Bluff, Utah.

Steve Wilcox told authorities he had been looking for a lunch spot, driving on the dirt road that leads to a rickety foot bridge, when he noticed a pair of empty boots. He saw a pair of eyes under a military helmet, a gun barrel and finally, as he sped away, a bullet ricocheting off the canyon’s north wall.

A short time later, as San Juan County Sheriff’s Deputy Kelly Bradford stood on the canyon rim peering down, a sniper shot ripped through his shoulder. As he tried to crawl back to his squad car, Bradford wrote in his report, he was struck by a second shot to the back.

Members of the Pueblo County Special Tactics and Rescue Team and two Navajo police officers found Bob Mason’s body at roughly 5:30 p.m. It was still warm to the touch, according to the report. A Glock 9mm handgun, three pipe bombs and a .308-caliber rifle were nearby.

San Juan County Sheriff Mike Lacy said it appeared the sniper had killed himself.

The Masons heard the next day on CNN it was their son who was dead.

When the Masons called the San Juan County Sheriff’s Department, they were told someone would call them back. When the call came, the caller asked for Bob Mason, a peculiarly painful and disorienting jolt for his mother. It is one of Ann Mason’s most searing memories in a blur of nightmarish days, and she would never regain confidence in San Juan County’s investigation, she says.

That summer, law enforcement, particularly the Navajo police, launched dozens of forays into the desert. Officers and residents alike reported sightings of the fugitives and even the mysterious limping figure of Alan Pilon himself, but it wasn’t until Oct. 31 that a band of Navajo hunters happened upon Pilon’s remains on Tin Cup Mesa.

Pilon had died of a bullet to the head. The pile of bleached bones poking through tattered camouflage had been hidden under a tree for a long time, Lacy says. The spot was a few miles northwest of where the Ford flatbed had been ditched, and Lacy figures this is as far as Pilon ever got.

The Utah medical examiner concluded the trajectory of the bullet that struck Pilon had been right to left, front to back and downward. The downward angle is atypical of a self-inflicted wound, according to a medical examiner, but suicide is still a possibility, Lacy says.

Lacy and his investigator have stuck with their early determination that Bob Mason also committed suicide, despite the findings in the July 29, 1998, autopsy report of Utah’s deputy chief medical examiner, Dr. Maureen Frikke. She wrote that "the gunshot wound to the head had many unusual features, which suggested it was not a self-inflicted injury."

The point of entry was far forward in the mouth, Frikke said. The lips and jaws were not injured, suggesting he had not closed his mouth around the barrel. The way the bullet jacket expanded and fragmented suggested to her that something else had been in Mason’s mouth. The trajectory of the bullet into the skull required that Mason’s head had been tipped far back, hyperextending his neck, an odd position unless he had been leaning back against a dirt berm. However, the berm was to his right side and bushes were behind him, according to investigators’ diagrams and photos.

San Juan County investigators believe they can explain most of these peculiarities, and Frikke, in correspondence with the Masons, seemed to have become less suspicious of the suicide theory. However, she continued to report that there was "no reasonable explanation" for a skull fracture Mason sustained just before or during the time of his death.

In more than a year of steady prodding, Ann Mason has a tall stack of documents from law enforcement agencies. She has pored over piles of gruesome death-scene photos, autopsy diagrams and crudely rendered illustrations of her son’s demise.

It has given her few answers and no peace. But she persists.

"My son has no voice. He never had his day in court," she says. "I’m not supposed to make him out to be a saint. (My husband) told me not to try, but I can’t believe he meant for this to happen – the killing and the maiming."

Ann Mason has asked the FBI take over as the lead investigative agency. Her son is an enrolled member of the Choctaw Tribe in Oklahoma, she says, and the case should be under federal jurisdiction.

"The FBI didn’t want the case," Lacy says.

"She is not going to convince me that her son was some innocent bystander in all this," Chief Lane says heatedly.

Mason knows her son, found wearing body armor and loaded with firepower, somehow contributed to Claxton’s death. She and her husband have struggled with confusion and doubts, but they finally found the words for letters of apologies, mailed last week, to Claxton’s widow and the three injured lawmen.

"They ruined a lot of lives," Ann Mason says of her son and his friends. "I’m so sad and sorry about it all. It doesn’t get any easier with time. I know my story doesn’t have a happy ending. I just want it to have an ending."

The McVeans, however, suspect that their son might have been framed for the murder, or, at the very least, that police have covered up the actual events surrounding Claxton’s death. Officials say they can’t reveal information that would compromise their ongoing investigation.

"The cops have no fingerprint evidence," Jim McVean says. "They say the guns belonged to our boys, but I’ve seen no proof of that. ... My honest-to-God wish is that Jason will call me and tell me what happened."

The authorities continue to look for just such a break, the McVeans say.

"It’s a creepy feeling knowing that your phones are bugged, your house is watched, your mail is gone through," Debbie Kay McVean says.

Jim McVean knows a worse feeling. He knows that his son’s corpse could be stumbled upon any day somewhere in the vast desert that swallowed him up two years ago.