Dead Run
The Murder of a Lawman and the Greatest Manhunt of the Modern American West
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4.0 • 37 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Evoking Krakauer's Into the Wild, Dan Schultz tells the extraordinary true story of desperado survivalists, a brutal murder, and vigilante justice set against the harsh backdrop of the Colorado wilderness
On a sunny May morning in 1998 in Cortez, Colorado, three desperados in a stolen truck opened fire on the town cop, shooting him twenty times; then they blasted their way past dozens of police cars and disappeared into 10,000 square miles of the harshest wilderness terrain on the North American continent. Self-trained survivalists, the outlaws eluded the most sophisticated law enforcement technology on the planet and a pursuit force that represented more than seventy-five local, state, and federal police agencies with dozens of swat teams, U.S. Army Special Forces, and more than five hundred officers from across the country.
Dead Run is the first in-depth account of this sensational case, replete with overbearing local sheriffs, Native American trackers, posses on horseback, suspicion of vigilante justice and police cover-ups, and the blunders of the nation's most exalted crime-fighters pursuing outlaws into territory in which only they could survive.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Florid prose and speculative dramatizations take away from the story of a brutal 1998 murder in Cortez, Colo. Journalist Schultz gets off to a rocky start with a discussion of the role of the Wild West in American culture, whose reach exceeds his grasp: "Like the land and legends that created it, the spirit of the American West is too expansive to capture in cohesive thought, yet we know it by its landmarks: individualism, excess, self-reliance, resourcefulness, impatience and, above all, freedom." That approach looking to invest with broader significance the gunning down of policeman Dale Claxton by three survivalist antigovernment conspirators won't work for every reader, and many will wish Schultz had stuck to known facts. Instead, an author's note explains the rationale for filling in gaps "by suggesting events that seem most consistent with the physical evidence and expert opinion," and concludes with the caveat that as "far as anybody knows, the following pages are the brutal truth." Sections identifying the flawed and uncoordinated strategy law enforcement used in catching the killers work much better. 8-page b&w photo insert.
