On a sunny May morning in 1998, three friends in a stolen truck passed through Cortez, Colorado. Where they were going and what they planned to do is unknown, but among official speculation and most consistent with the evidence was a plot to blow up Glen Canyon Dam – an act of sabotage that, if successful, would result rank as the most  severe catastrophic event in  nation's history.

     Instead, the truck was pulled over by an unsuspecting small-town cop and the outlaws opened fire. After shooting him twenty times, they blasted their way past a dozen responding police cars and vanished into ten-thousand square miles of the harshest wilderness terrain on the North America continent. The pursuit that ensued pitted the most sophisticated law-enforcement technology on the planet against three self-trained survivalists. Seventy-five local, state, and federal police agencies; dozens of SWAT teams; U.S. Army Special Forces; and more than 500 officers from across the country gathered on the Colorado-Utah state line, then followed the fugitives into a landscape only the bad guys could survive.

     Nine years later, the last of the fugitives was finally accounted for, but what really happened to them remained shrouded in mystery. The first in-depth account of this sensational crime, Dead Run is replete with overbearing local sheriffs, Native American trackers, posses on horseback, suspicion of police cover-ups, rumors of vigilante justice, and the blunders of the nation's most exalted crime fighters pursuing outlaws against the unforgiving backdrop of the Utah desert canyon lands.

     More than a thrilling crime story, Dead Run is also an examination of the seductive allure of outlaw culture in the West and how it continues to inform national attitudes toward guns, authority, and unfettered freedom. Exhaustively researched, Dead Run offers a stunning portrayal of an enduring Wild West landscape, where the American spirit is most boldly and confusingly, even tragically, lived.

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