The Whole True Story of the Dougherty Gang

They shot at cops! The sister's a stripper! It's like Bonnie and Clyde! These were the irresistible beats of the media's giddy coverage of one of the most bizarre crime sprees in recent memory. Kathy Dobie retraces the eight-day, fifteen-state, AK-47-inclusive journey of Ryan, Dylan, and Lee-Grace Dougherty—and discovers that the siblings' saga is even weirder than you thought

Inside the bank lobby, there was a mausoleum-like coolness and, until that moment, a stillness composed of marble floors, potted plants with waxy leaves, and mahogany tables. It was half past noon, and there were only two customers at the teller windows of the CertusBank in Valdosta, Georgia. Two of the robbers were armed, one with a machine pistol and the other with an assault rifle. The one with the pistol had long hair and, surveillance photos would later show, sculpted fingernails. The robber with the assault rifle raised it and fired a few quick bursts toward the ceiling. A male voice barked: "Everybody get down! On the floor!"

As the two customers obeyed, the unarmed member of the trio leapt over the counter and began scooping bills out of the teller’s cash drawer and into a red-and-black gym bag. After emptying the teller’s drawer of $5,200, he jumped back over the counter, and as he strode out of the bank, his accomplices backed their way out behind him. Witnesses would report seeing a dirty white four-door sedan leaving the parking lot. The license plate stuck out in their minds—it was gold or orange or yellow. At any rate, not from around here.

Two days later, on August 4, the FBI announced that three siblings were wanted in connection with the robbery: 21-year-old Ryan Dougherty (pronounced dock-erty), his 26-year-old brother, Dylan, and their 29-year-old sister, Lee-Grace. The suspects—the brothers were carpenters, their sister a stripper—were also wanted for allegedly shooting at a Florida police officer hours before the bank heist, when the officer attempted to pull them over for speeding. The feds issued a nationwide alert for the trio, whom they described as dangerous, heavily armed, and because of their family bond, unusually "committed to each other."

It was past midnight in Lacoochee, Florida, and the cicadas and tree frogs were in full chorus, making the shadowy old oaks pop and click like fizzy water. Occasionally a dog cut at the night with a series of sharp barks, and then the air erupted with the howls of dozens of answering dogs until they tired and the velvety calm of a sticky summer night returned. There was no moon, and the humidity was so thick it was as if the Withlacoochee River had gotten up from its bed and gone walking. The lush vegetation, the hidden houses, and ramshackle trailers gave Lacoochee a wary, secretive air.

Much of the neighborhood was asleep that Monday night, the working and the unemployed, the sober, the drunk, but a light burned inside a yellow house at the end of a short dirt drive. Dylan, Ryan, and Lee-Grace Dougherty were gathered in the living room. They were in a state of emergency; this was a war council, hastily convened.

Earlier that day, August 1, Ryan had driven over to criminal court in Daytona Beach to plead no contest to two felony charges: "sending a minor harmful information" and "lewd and lascivious conduct." He’d entered the courtroom with some vague idea that he was facing five years’ probation. He hadn’t wanted to think too much about his case; the charges were from two years earlier, and they were embarrassing as fuck.

In the spring of 2009, when he was 19, he had exchanged a series of sexually explicit text messages with a girl who he thought was 13; she was actually 11. In the space of one week, the two texted and called each other 376 times. On the eighth day, he wrote her: "im done with middle and hs I have a grown mans cock and I don’t think ud kno what 2 do with it"; the next day, he told her to stop contacting him. The police believe the girl warned him of their investigation, even though she denied it. Ryan says he simply "woke up," said _Shit, this is crazy, what am I doing? _As he waited to be sentenced that day, Ryan felt like he wasn’t the same person who had sent those messages, and he was anxious to put the whole thing behind him.

Whenever Ryan talked about his childhood, he’d tell people he was a "bad little shit"—sleeping around, doing drugs, breaking into cars, committing those crimes in the same spirit that moved him to go bodyboarding in a hurricane. He’d never had a father, he’d say, only his mother’s boyfriend, who was "a worthless drunk." But at 17 his brother Dylan took him under his wing "and taught me how to do everything right I’ve ever done." To Ryan, that included holding down a job for almost five years now and "treating women with respect."

There had been some backsliding, to be sure, but Ryan felt he was well on his way to becoming a "decent, trustworthy person." Now his girlfriend, Amber Suriano, was eight and a half months pregnant with a baby boy, and he believed he’d found his calling: to be a family man. Coming home after a day of setting trusses and pounding nails in the swampy heat and finding big-bellied Amber there filled him with immense satisfaction.

Ryan’s lawyer told the judge that his client was extremely immature, more like "14 or 15 than a 21-year-old," and the judge expressed regret that Ryan had to be lumped in with grown men who raped kids. Then the judge handed down his sentence: two years of house arrest (Ryan could leave only to go to work), ten years’ probation, and up to fifteen years in prison if he violated that probation at any time over the next twelve years. Worst of all, Ryan had to register as a sex offender, which meant he could no longer have contact with anyone under the age of 18.

After sentencing, Ryan had to report immediately to a probation officer, who told him he wouldn’t be able to attend his son’s birth or live in the same house with him. He made a frantic call to his lawyer, who reassured him an emergency motion would be filed that would allow him to live with his son. Then the probation officer said he had to fit Ryan with an ankle monitor, and Ryan felt he’d been sucker punched—the judge hadn’t mentioned anything about that, either. Ryan would have to pay $240 a month to wear the monitor, the officer told him. He made less than a thousand a month. How were he and Amber and the baby going to survive?

At eight o’clock that night, another probation officer met with Ryan and Amber at the house in Lacoochee. The meeting started out badly, with the P.O. telling Ryan, "Eighty percent of the people on your type of probation fail and go to prison." He went on to say that if Ryan didn’t get permission from the judge, either he or Amber and the baby would have to find somewhere else to live. And even if the judge let them all live together, Ryan still wouldn’t be able to take his son anyplace where other kids would be—no trips to the playground, no picking him up at school when the time came, no Chuck E. Cheese’s, no Little League games.

But Ryan had a more immediate problem, one that was going to get him thrown into prison. He didn’t have mail service—the house in Lacoochee didn’t even have a mailbox—and he needed two pieces of mail in order to obtain an ID that reflected his status as a sex offender. The P.O. told him that, by law, he had forty-eight hours to fix this, to get mail delivered to a house without a mailbox in an area that had no mail service. All of Ryan’s pleading for more time left the P.O. unmoved. "That’s your all’s problem," he told them. As he left the house that night, he said, "I’ll be back in forty-eight hours to arrest you." He said it without heat, almost casually. Just like that, Ryan was going to be locked away for fifteen years. Just like that, his life was over. Really over, because Ryan was sure he wouldn’t survive his sentence: "People like me get stabbed in prison, we get beat to death." The way he figured it, he had forty-eight hours left to live.

Surveillance photos showed that one of the bank robbers

had long hair and sculpted nails.

It was eerily quiet inside the Lacoochee house that night, except for the long-legged pacing of six-foot-one Dylan, who was moving so hard and so fast that he looked like he might just punch a hole in the wall and stride right through. Lee-Grace, her dark hair pulled back in a ponytail, her prominent eyes bare of makeup, sat next to baby brother Ryan on one of the two couches in the living room, hunched over a piece of paper. No one spoke, because Ryan feared the GPS monitor clamped around his leg might have an audio device. There’s some fiber optic shit inside it, he scribbled. Lee-Grace jotted something while Ryan leaned in close to read it. As the minutes ticked by, the three siblings continued to write to each other, mapping out a plan, raising potential problems, solving them.

Ryan rented this house with Amber, and Dylan had moved in a few weeks prior, hoping to get his old job back at the same construction company where Ryan worked. Lee-Grace had just arrived from Merritt Island on Florida’s east coast, where she lived with her boyfriend’s parents. Ryan liked to think of his family in larger-than-life terms, describing them in a letter this way: "The trouble we cause when us Doughertys unite. We are capable of moving mountains, healing hearts, splitting skulls..." Lee-Grace had also taken a turn at family mythologizing, posting on her Flickr page: "I have a huge, crazy family. I’m 28 but act like I’m 17 most of the time. I love to farm and shoot guys_ [sic]_ and wreck cars. I’m a redneck and proud of it. I like milk and German engineering and causing mayhem with my siblings." But no one was feeling grandiose or boastful that night. The whole atmosphere was edgy, both fearful and pissed off; they were curled around one another like snakes.

One, two, three, four, eight sheets of paper later, they were ready to call it a night. Dylan and Lee-Grace each took a couch and lay there fully clothed. Ryan climbed into bed next to pale, red-haired Amber, whom he calls his wife. He was feeling bad, really bad. This was all his fault; he loved her helplessly. In her belly, underneath the butterfly tattoo, drifted his son, the only dream he’d ever had that was worth something. "God, I think I’m the worst thing that ever happened to you," he said.

"Don’t say that," she told him. "There’s worse things that have happened in my life." And that was all he was gonna get. Still, as the heat piled silently into the small bedroom on the side of the house, and Amber sat upright in bed quietly crying, Ryan fell into a deep sleep, mouth agape, face long and blank. He twitched, he gasped; he was running through a tunnel of dreams, already far away from her.


At 6 A.M. the next morning, Ryan’s cell-phone alarm began beeping, just as it would on any workday. According to Amber, he dressed in his work clothes, leaned over the bed to kiss her on the head, saying "I love you," and left the room, shutting the door behind him. The GPS tracker on his ankle monitor would show him leaving the house shortly afterward.

Out in the yard, Ryan took his hard hat, hammer, and tool pouch out of Amber’s Subaru and left them on the front lawn. He and Dylan packed the car with ten guns, 2,000 rounds of ammunition, some clothes, a plastic jug of water, and some food from the refrigerator. The guns belonged to Dylan, an avid collector and expert marksman. Sometime the night before, Dylan had called a close friend, saying he wanted him to have all his tools and his Honda CBR1000RR, a bike capable of going nearly 200 miles an hour. But he was not leaving any of his guns behind, if for no other reason than they were worth good money and he could always sell or trade them for services like getting him and his siblings across the border. All three Doughertys were good shots, but Dylan was the best. As he would later tell the FBI, "I can shoot a running rabbit with a $3 pistol." That wasn’t a metaphor.

There were no $3 pistols in the Subaru that day. Among the firearms were two MasterPiece Arms machine pistols and three other handguns—a Beretta, a Glock, and a Mauser—as well as a Mossberg shotgun and Dylan’s favorite, an AK-47 assault rifle.

Ryan’s stomach was tightly knotted. He was never a "morning person"; most days he liked to smoke a joint and be very quiet. He had told Amber many times: No arguments in the morning, no negativity. But today the tension was ratchetted so high, his blood surged like electricity. A sense of disbelief—Are we really going to do this?—jockeyed with a fatalistic feeling that they had no choice.

Lee-Grace was still feeling numb and drowsy from the handful of Xanax she’d taken the night before, and after reluctantly giving up her phone so her brothers could destroy it, she climbed into the backseat, thinking the boys were going all Pineapple Express on her. It was a soft, watercolor morning, and she wanted to go back to sleep. Only Dylan seemed both awake and calm.

The Dougherty kids: (from left) Erin, Ryan, Lee-Grace,

Dylan, and Devon; right, Dylan (behind his mom and

Lee-Grace) clowns with Ryan.

As they bounced out the dirt drive and onto the main road, Ryan was driving and Dylan rode shotgun. Two miles down the road, they stopped for gas at the Cumberland Farms mart, where a surveillance camera caught a sober-looking Ryan dressed in dark pants and a long-sleeve black shirt walking into the store. (Later, when the guys from his construction crew saw the video on the evening news, they knew Ryan hadn’t planned on going to work that day. Housebuilders in Florida work outside in hundred-plus heat, and while the Mexicans might wear long pants and shirts, the white guys wear as little as possible. Ryan always wore shorts and work boots and went shirtless.)

In Dade City, they pulled off the road, cut off Ryan’s ankle monitor, and tossed it out the window, where it landed, blinking, in a patch of grass. At that moment, the brothers knew they had jumped from the train; there was no reboarding, no going back now. (At 7:21 A.M., Pro Tech Monitoring service sent out an alert that the monitor strap had been cut.)

As they drove south on 301, Dylan had to keep reminding Ryan to slow down. Each time, Ryan obeyed, but then he sped up again. As they went zipping by a police cruiser in Zephyrhills, Dylan barked, "Hey, there’s a cop. Maybe we should slow the fuck down?" Ryan did, but his racing blood couldn’t abide the crawling car, and soon he was pushing ahead, a little faster, a little faster still...just in time to be caught by another Zephyrhills cop, who clocked them going forty-five in a thirty-mile-an-hour zone. The officer pulled out after them, flashing his lights and siren.

Later, Dylan would have time to think about that moment, and he would think of it in an interesting way: "Normally, who would be driving to work fast that early in the morning? A guy who was late for work. So you give him a ticket, and he works the next three days for free." It was just one of those things that had gnawed at Dylan and caused him lately to think he would be happier living in some other, freer place, where the law didn’t hound a man and try to pick his pocket. That dream had now become their plan. They were heading out of the country, over the border, into Mexico and then south into...Costa Rica? Brazil? Argentina? The siblings hadn’t decided yet, but when they got there, Ryan was going to send for Amber and his son.

As the cop car swung into the road behind them, the brothers threw a quick look at each other: Ryan’s ankle monitor gone, automatic weapons in plain sight. What happened next was what Dylan describes as a "rattlesnake reaction." Ryan hit the gas hard. Sixty-five, seventy-five, eighty, ninety... Dylan already knew that the Subaru couldn’t go faster than 130; they weren’t going to lose the cruiser. They had just swerved off the main road and careened through a CVS parking lot when the police officer reported shots fired at him from the Subaru. Pop, pop, pop. A dozen or so rounds, and then one hit his front right tire, flattening it. Later, the people who knew Dylan said if he was the one doing the shooting, he must’ve been aiming for the tire. If he had wanted to hurt the officer, he would’ve hit him, or at least shattered the windshield. The police car wobbled to a stop at the side of the road.

Then Dylan guided Ryan through streets he knew like the back of his hand. As they drove west on Route 54, they watched a convoy of police cars racing east, both Zephyrhills police and deputies from the Pasco County sheriff’s office. They were trapped on a peninsula, 200 miles south of the state line, which was like being caught on a dead-end street. And yet, before four hours had passed, they were crossing undetected into Georgia.

Eight days later, when an FBI agent asked Dylan, "How the fuck did you guys get out of Florida?" Dylan would grin and reply, "A lot of lefts and rights."


PASCO SIBLINGS SOUGHT IN SHOOTING ALSO WANTED IN GEORGIA BANK HEIST. By the evening of August 4, the FBI had issued a press release stating that the three Georgia bank robbers and the three Zephyrhills shooters were one and the same. The image of a gun-toting, bank-robbing trio of siblings hit reporters like a shot of Jack Daniel’s; it was exhilarating; it was old-school. DOUGHERTY GANG ON THE LAM! Lee-Grace made the biggest splash. "A gun-toting stripper—what’s not to like?" asked one commenter. A series of X-rated photographs she had taken for some guys who ran an illegitimate poker club where she gave lap dances later found their way into the public domain, most likely with a price tag.

Chris Nocco, the Pasco County sheriff, appeared on Good Morning America, Inside Edition, CNN, and Fox News, addressing some of his comments to law enforcement: "Remember, if you engage them you’ll be going into a battle. But I promise you, we will win."

As news of the siblings’ escapades reached the carpenters who worked with both brothers at Carpenter Contractors of America, most of them fingered Dylan as the mastermind. Mike Young, who knew Dylan first, and then Ryan when Ryan was "just a little jitterbug" learning the trade, says, "Dylan was always the go-getter. He’s got that I’m-the-leader, this-is-how-we’re-gonna-do-it attitude, and Ryan, because of brotherly love, he always just followed along."

Dylan had a reputation for being hot-tempered and crazy strong. He liked collecting and shooting guns, riding his motorcycle, drinking whiskey, smoking weed. On construction sites, you could hear his voice clear across the street; he was always bantering, pontificating, philosophizing. The foreman would say, "Don’t you ever shut up?" But Dylan could motivate the guys on the meanest, hottest day.

Ryan often told friends how glad he was to have a brother like Dylan, "someone I can look up to, someone who’s got my back." Both boys loved to drive fast, and Dylan would take his Honda out on weekends, pushing the speedometer as far as he could, more than once tapping out at 196 miles an hour. He didn’t stop for cops; that was the rule, almost the game. They couldn’t catch him, so why pull over? At CCA, the foreman would often joke: "The only people who can kill Ryan and Dylan are Ryan and Dylan."

A couple of days after the bank robbery, the siblings’ mother, Barbara Bell, made a brief televised appeal to her children to turn themselves in: "Lee-Grace, Dylan, and Ryan, only Mom knows what good people you are inside. Please prove me right and everybody wrong by doing the right thing now and turning yourselves in."

Barbara’s last contact with the kids had been on the Monday of Ryan’s court appearance. On the way home from court, he had texted her a number of times:

"You can give up or stand up and fight what do you think your son will do I’m gonna go out with my boots tied and stand up for what’s right."

When his mother texted him not to do anything stupid or crazy and get himself hurt, he wrote her back: "There’s a time for all of us to die"

And then: "You’ve always been a wonderful mother never forget that"

Only this last text worried Barbara Bell. It sounded like good-bye.


From Georgia, the siblings drove south first, back into Florida. And then north again, cutting through Alabama and into Mississippi. They cut through the top of Mississippi into Arkansas and then doubled back into Mississippi, then Louisiana, into Texas...

Like scared rabbits, Dylan thought. They never took a freeway; back roads all the way. Ryan did almost all the driving while Dylan or Lee-Grace navigated by map. "You got to love Walmart. They have everything," Dylan says. "We stripped all our electronics. We didn’t use a GPS. We went in and got an atlas—a good old-fashioned paper atlas, as my granddad would say, never fails ya. And I pretty much knew where we were going and had an idea as to the next immediate left and right that we were gonna need to take to get us out of wherever the next sticky spot was."

They bounced around like a pinball, so there was no logic to their trajectory, nothing for law enforcement to work with. Ryan kept to the local speed limits. They all wore sunglasses and hats whenever they left the car. They believed that most people were too busy with their lives to be keeping an eye out for the three fugitives.

Ryan was taken aback by how poor people were in the South. He never thought he’d had it all that great, scraping by on $8.50 an hour, but now he saw that it could’ve been a lot worse. In Mississippi or Arkansas—he was never really sure what state they were in, since Dylan had the map, and his exhaustion and paranoia had made the whole journey hallucinatory—he saw houses patched with plywood and plastic sheeting, people sitting on buckets in their yards, entire Main Streets abandoned, their buildings blindfolded and gagged with bricks and boards. He and Dylan began to talk about all the money the government sends overseas when people were drowning right here. They loved America, but it seemed like a place where things could go bad really quickly, and when they did, nobody cared.

Lee-Grace dozed through the first three days. With Dylan there, she felt safe. Nothing really bad could happen to her. On the third day, her brothers jolted her awake, "Gracie! There was just something on the radio about two brothers and a sister robbing a bank." Lee-Grace yawned and stretched. A worried frown puckered her forehead. "Well, couldn’t it be another two brothers and sister?" They wanted to shake her.

In Texas, corn and bean fields lay shriveled in the sun. All the rivers were dead. Bridges arched over rippled funnels of earth. When they passed a sign that said SAND RIVER, Ryan read it aloud. "Look, Sand River! That’s pretty funny." But it wasn’t, really. It made him think of things coming to an end, a world out of control, people helpless and going hungry. All through the South and into Texas, they slept in the car, and night after night mosquitoes flew into their ears, whined, went silent, and the slap always came too late. The heat lay on their bodies, pressing down heavier and hotter at each passing minute; their skin grew slick and oily.

The Dougherty gang in captivity: Lee-Grace, 29; Ryan, 21;

and Dylan, 26.

One day they bathed in a river, and Lee-Grace sat down and wrote a letter to their youngest sister, Devon: "We all love you so much. Don’t feel sad if anything happens to us." It was a long good-bye letter just in case, but her brothers wouldn’t take her to a post office to mail it; too dangerous, they said. So she tucked it into the seat pocket of the car. If they were successful getting across the border, the car would be ditched, found, and Devon would get her letter. If they were killed by the police, well, she would get it then, too.

All three felt this journey could end in death. They didn’t think the police would care whether they were caught dead or alive. Ryan had stopped smoking pot—it made him too paranoid—but he remained hyperalert, and Dylan and Lee-Grace relied on his premonitions. He had always had a good sense for when things were going to go wrong.


In the news media and on the Internet, there was a great deal of speculation about the rhyme and reason behind the crime spree, with observers often reaching the conclusion that there wasn’t any. They must be meth heads or crack addicts, people thought. (Look at their bugged-out eyes!) Maybe they were just pure hell-raisers, or inbred white trash without a lick of sense. Of the three, Ryan’s motives were the clearest: the fear that in two days’ time he’d be thrown in prison for fifteen years and never be able to raise his son. As for drug-addled Lee-Grace, well, she loved her brothers, and there wasn’t much else to serve as a compass in her life. Dylan’s motives were more inscrutable.

He had the most to lose, the least to gain, and yet he was the guiding spirit behind the whole misadventure. Maybe the why can only be found by going back to their childhood home, a three-bedroom trailer on five acres in central Florida. They called it "the Farm," and for a short time all five Dougherty kids lived there together with their mom and dad. Their father, whom everyone called Doc, was a straight-­talking, high-spirited Irishman from Philly; loose-limbed and strong, he could fix or build anything. He called his eldest son, the towheaded southpaw Dylan, his "left-hand man," because Dylan followed him everywhere. Their mother, Barbara, was intelligent and high-strung, a good nurse, the primary breadwinner, in fact, but not a patient mother. She had five kids in seven years, too many too fast, but it was Dylan who got knocked about, hit with a hairbrush, dragged across the floor. So when Dylan was 8 years old, Doc sent him off to live with his uncle Glenn and aunt Suzanne on their Kentucky horse farm.

There, Dylan learned how to work hard, mucking out stables, fixing fence posts, hauling hay. His uncle Glenn taught him how to drive a tractor and shoot guns; he was steady and patient. Like Doc, Glenn often talked about the right and the wrong way to live, about loyalty and honesty and leading by example. "You have to be where the metal meets the meat," he would say.

Dylan was 11 when the news arrived that Doc was dying. On a job site, Doc had lifted a 300-pound air compressor and developed an aneurysm that later burst. Dylan was flown to Florida and taken to the hospital to say good-bye. "Take care of your brother," Doc told him. "And keep your chin up."

"When you’re 11 years old," Dylan remembers, "and your dying father tells you to do two things, both of them pretty damn specific, you’re not going to forget." Watching out for his brother became that much easier after Uncle Glenn moved the family to another horse farm in Zephyrhills when Dylan was 12.

"Dylan’s the most loyal person in the entire family," Lee-Grace says. But loyalty, if it’s too blind and too fierce, can disarm a man. In 2007, when Dylan was 22, his sister Erin collapsed and went into a coma, a victim of the same genetic defect that weakened her father’s heart. It was on Lee-Grace’s birthday, May 28, when Barbara told the hospital staff to take her daughter off life support. After Erin’s death, Lee-Grace and Ryan dove a little deeper, a little more recklessly, into drugs, but Dylan pulled Ryan to shore, first giving him brotherly advice, then finding him an apartment nearby in Zephyrhills and eventually getting him a job framing houses.

Dylan wasn’t loyal just to his family. His first romantic relationship—he was 15, she was 18—lasted for eight years. After they broke up, he met the woman who became the love of his life. If he were a horse, Dylan says, his first girlfriend had him in a bit and reins, while the second girlfriend loved his wildness. When she got pregnant, she wanted an abortion. He refused to pay for it. He wanted her, he wanted the kid. She left him and had the abortion. "That took me someplace I’ve never been before," he says, his voice quiet, almost shaky. He came close to killing himself.

After Uncle Glenn passed away in May of 2009, Aunt Suzanne left the horse farm almost immediately, heading to Michigan to be with her biological children. Shortly thereafter, she seemed to lose all interest in Dylan. Still, he had the farm, his "birthright," and Ryan moved in with him. (Every few months, Dylan would drag Lee-Grace out of some druggy hellhole and bring her to the farm, where she could detox.) For a year and a half the brothers lived there, target practicing, racing cars, egging each other on, arguing, laughing, just being brothers, and making up for lost time...until Suzanne, hearing rumors that they were growing pot there, sold the land out from under them. And Dylan was cast adrift yet again.

Erin, Glenn, Suzanne, his girlfriend, their unborn child, the farm. Dylan felt the losses keenly, but he kept his hurt inside, where it continually changed shape; a hot knife one day, a cold, open hole the next. Loss plagued him, as it did the whole Dougherty clan. If fate had had its way, they would’ve been dispersed long ago, the family extinguished. But the Dougherty kids clung to one another, and their bond was like many a secret—urgent, sustaining, held tight and close against a hostile world.


Lee-Grace thought if they all turned themselves in, they might get, like, two years. The boys had trouble convincing her it wouldn’t go that way. "Lee-Grace, you can’t walk away from this," Ryan told her. "There’s no going home. The only thing you’re gonna get is a bullet in your head if you try."

Ryan ached for Amber, and once, when he was driving through the desert, he broke down and cried. The brothers discussed the possibility of sneaking back into Florida just so Ryan could see her one more time, but Dylan thought that would be suicide. "You know, I really didn’t have anybody that was 100 percent worth turning back for," Dylan says. "My sister Devon, obviously she would’ve got a postcard from some random address later on down the road, but as for turning back for anybody, I didn’t feel a real strong connection to anybody other than the other two people that were in the car."

When they stopped for gas or food, they took turns going in, though Dylan did most of the shopping. With his long curly hair, he didn’t look much like the photo released by the FBI. And he was cool as a cucumber, unfailingly polite with the cashiers. He paid for things with $100 bills, and no one blinked an eye. When Lee-Grace went inside the gas-station marts, she would always stay too long, because she’d start cruising the shelves of souvenir shot glasses and refrigerator magnets and the postcard racks. "Without all the guns and shooting at things, it would’ve been an ordinary family vacation," Lee-Grace says.

They ate Slim Jims and protein bars and drank a lot of Gatorade. At a Subway in Colorado, the kid at the counter flirted with Lee-Grace. He was so full of sparkle, asking her how a little thing like her could eat all this food she had ordered, that Lee-Grace wished she could just say good-bye to her brothers (waiting outside in the Subaru for their sandwiches) and find a place to live nearby and maybe make something pretty of her life.

As soon as they had hit Colorado, the heat slipped away and the first mountains rose on the horizon, shaggy-backed and serene, like solitary grazers. Soon there were herds of them, and rivers that raced and tumbled. They heard bears growling one night in Colorado. Saw a mountain lion in Montana. Slept with the windows open, and the sky was so still, the stars seemed to be fluttering. "I saw beautiful, amazing things," Ryan says. "We would stop and look at the sights! I mean, I would pull over to the side of the road—fuck it, you know? It might be the last time we ever see things this beautiful."

They kept coming back to Colorado. It felt like a good place to hide, and Dylan needed time to figure out how to get them over the border. On August 9, they came into Colorado Springs to buy a tent at an REI. That night they camped in a wash right off the side of the road. Ryan parked the car so the back plate faced the tent, but he couldn’t hide the fact that it was a white Subaru. Occasionally they heard a small truck passing by, and after a while it sounded like the same truck over and over again, and it seemed to slow down each time it passed, but they were too exhausted to check it out.

The next morning, Ryan woke in a state of agitation. "Guys, I have a bad feeling today’s the day we’re gonna get caught." He and Lee-Grace packed the car in a frenzy. As they drove down the mountain, a silvery mist hung from the trees, and the roads were slick.

When they stopped at a gas station, Dylan went into the shop to buy some pastries, sunflower seeds, and Gatorade. When he got back in the car, Ryan said tensely, "I think that’s an undercover guy in that white SUV." Ryan noticed that he had a laptop and that the backseat was caged. Lee-Grace felt her body go numb. Dylan lay down on the floor in the backseat and told Ryan to drive and see if they were followed. "Just be calm, guys. Just be calm," he said. They pulled out of the gas station and onto I-25 going south. The road stretched behind them, empty until it dissolved into the gray mist. Lee-Grace had just started to breathe when Ryan shouted, "We’ve been made! We’ve been made!" There, fifty yards behind them, the white SUV had emerged, big headlights first.

Ryan hit the gas. And as they began racing down 25, state troopers filled the road behind them. They saw an exit ramp, but it was blocked by cop cars. So was the next one.

"This is gonna end really badly," Dylan said.

"Does it hurt to get shot in the head?" Ryan wanted to know.

"I don’t think it will hurt," Dylan said. Whether he was holding one of his guns right then, whether he was getting ready to shoot at the cars that kept appearing and disappearing in the mist behind them and seemed to multiply with every reappearance, is not something Dylan chooses to talk about. "They’ll take me out first," he said to his brother and sister. "Then Ryan. They might not shoot you, Lee-Grace, because you’re a girl. They might wait to see if you’re gonna surrender."

"If they kill both of you, I don’t want to be left alive," she said.

They were quiet after that. Ryan pushed the car up to 120 miles an hour, and Lee-Grace gripped the shoulder strap of her seat belt with one hand. Dylan was thinking he should tell Ryan to slow down, take the car over the median, onto the other side of the highway, and off an entrance ramp—the cops hadn’t barricaded those. If he had said it, "we would’ve been three amigos gone like a fart in the wind," but he hesitated, and then they saw the cops with their automatic rifles lined up on the overpass up ahead. "This is it, this is it!" Ryan said, not excited at all, just sounding grim. "Lee-Grace, get down, duck down."

"I love you, guys!" she cried, her hand reaching for Ryan’s arm.

"I love you!"

"I love you!" her brothers called back. With their eyes glued to the armed men above, they didn’t see the spike strips laid out in the shadow of the overpass. When they hit them, they heard a pop, and then they were rolling over, around and around, the car filling with darkness, then light, dark, then light, Dylan thinking it felt like being a lotto ball, Lee-Grace feeling his body pressed hard against the back of her seat.

When the car smashed nose first into a guardrail, they finally came to a stop. Dylan found himself on the road, shoeless; he must’ve been thrown there, though he didn’t remember flying. He watched as Ryan ran in one direction and Lee-Grace in another. He heard a shot, tried to get up, but three officers were pointing guns at him. He could see Lee-Grace holding her leg and cursing out a cop. So she was alive. He lay back down on the pavement, listening for any sign of his brother Ryan.

Ryan ran and ran. He couldn’t think straight. His head was fuzzy. He saw a restaurant and headed toward the back of it. He stopped; he whirled around—which direction, which direction? When he saw three men approaching him at a crouch, he shouted, "Stay away from me! They’re gonna shoot me!" He loped off unsteadily. One of the men came at him from behind and tackled him to the ground.

It was all over. They lay separate from one another, each guarded by men with guns. Red lights swooped round and round, ambulances rushed in, but all of that bustle faded to a low roar; nobody had ever really existed for them but one another, and that morning they reached out through the chaos and felt one another’s presence, as they always had.


When the siblings were moved from the local hospital to the Pueblo County jail, they were put in solitary cells. As Dylan lay down on the bunk bed, he saw the initials E.D. carved into the metal frame above him, the same initials as his sister Erin. He felt strangely at peace. He had done his best.

Ryan had sprained an ankle in the crash, and while he was being led into the jail, handcuffed and shackled, an officer walking behind him stamped down on the leg chains just as Ryan had lifted his foot—the pain was so severe, Ryan shat in his pants. At night another officer kept coming to his cell, waking him with taunts: "You’re going away forever—you ain’t never seeing sunlight again."

Once they were transferred to Huerfano County jail, the harassment stopped. The staff at Huerfano was professional. Lee-Grace was kept on one side of the jail with the women, unable to see her brothers, but that didn’t stop her from occasionally making birdcalls to them, "Caw-caw! Caw-caw!" Ryan and Dylan were put in separate pods, each with a handful of other inmates; the brothers couldn’t talk, but they could see each other through the Plexiglas. They both began to work out on the gym equipment, play cards, mostly spades, with their cellies, and write letters.

Ryan wrote Amber incessantly and included notes to his baby boy: "Hey Buddy. What you been up 2 suckin your thumb Well it took 22yrs but I quit. haha...I can’t wait 2 Be Free So we can be 2gether. Dress in matchin outfits." He told his son stories of his childhood: "I remember as a kid flying this kite it soared above the trees so high how time drags on son when you’re young. All you want to do is grow up than you get older and you wish the clock would slow down...Every time I’d kiss your mom my heart would beat faster time would slow down and my palms would get sweaty._ Everytime. _That’s how you know your in love It hurts when there not next to you. I hurt real bad. But I’ll live 4 the hope I can be with you and your mom again."

Since he’s been locked up, Ryan’s had nightmares, and during one he punched the wall of his cell so hard he thinks he may have broken some bones. He wants to get his hand fid, because he knows he’s gonna need it in prison.

"I feel awful every day that my brother and sister, they’re in here with me and possibly facing even more time than me," he says. "They tell me not to feel bad, they’re okay. They tell me not to have any regrets, but I can’t help it."

Dylan faces twenty-three charges in Colorado, including attempted murder of a law-enforcement officer. "Dear Mother, Well, I don’t know what to say other than I love you a lot, always have and always will.... I guess I should tell you that as the charges stand now I am facing around 134 years, 64 in CO 35 in GA and 35 in FL..." Lee-Grace also faces a charge of attempted murder of a law-enforcement officer in Colorado for shots allegedly fired during the car chase, and first-degree assault for allegedly aiming a machine pistol at an officer as she tried to flee the car wreck. He shot her in the leg, though later told reporters he had aimed for her stomach.

On November 1, she pled not guilty to the twenty-nine charges filed against her, and she will go to trial in February. After Colorado is done with her, she faces federal charges for armed bank robbery in Georgia and fleeing-to-elude charges in Florida. Ryan faces twenty-four charges in Colorado and who knows how many in Georgia and Florida. But after all that gets settled, there will be one more to face: violation of his probation. Punishable by up to fifteen years in prison.

Dylan laughs ruefully when asked if he would’ve done things differently, seeing how they turned out. "Well, this right here wasn’t part of the plan," he says. "To be honest, I don’t know what the fuck we were thinking. I mean, with the smartphones and the snitches on every corner and the media, I don’t know how the hell we thought we were gonna make it. To start with, it really wasn’t something I planned out. If I had planned it out better, we probably would’ve gotten away with this, because—I can say it right now—we definitely have the mustard to do it. You know the reason we did it—it was my brother. I wouldn’t have done it for anybody else. It was all because I truly loved my brother, and I was willing to do anything to keep him away from the end result of what was ultimately coming on the horizon for him."

Dylan’s working out a deal with his lawyers to be sent to the same prison as Ryan. This deal will most likely involve Dylan pleading guilty to certain charges or taking a stiffer sentence. "I can’t watch over Lee-Grace no matter what, because she’ll be going to a women’s prison," Dylan says. "But if I can get sent to the same facility as Ryan, even if we don’t get to share a cell, I can look after him. My job didn’t end at the car wreck on 25. I feel the responsibility continuously. At the end of the day, he’s my little brother, and I’ll always have his back. And that’s just the way it is. I don’t know why I’m like that, but I am."

Kathy Dobie’s last feature for GQ_, "The Girl from Trails End," appeared in the September issue._