PHOENIX, Ariz.—They left Amanda Crow to die under an ironwood tree. Paralyzed, the 19-year-old lay on her back in a remote wash, studying its thorny branches and teardrop leaves. Blood from her slashed throat and stab wounds pooled around her body in a scarlet aura. A night passed, then a day, then another night. Twice, she watched the Day-Glo bloom of a desert sunrise while flies and ants feasted on her blood.

Delirious, Crow imagined at times that she was home in bed, with a heavy blanket wrapped tight around her, forcing her to lay still. It was mid-morning, almost 40 hours after she'd been beaten, knifed and abandoned, when she heard the crunch of tires. "Help!" she gasped, in the strongest voice she could muster. To the man who found her, it sounded like the cooing of a dove.

Crow was airlifted to a hospital, where doctors put her on a respirator after tweezing the insects from her throat and perforated torso. Her left lung was collapsed. Her spinal cord was pierced at neck-level.

The ensuing police investigation culminated in the arrest of four neo-Nazi skinheads on charges of attempted murder and kidnapping, and two of them face trial next spring. But already, voluminous police reports, crime scene photos, interrogation transcripts and court documents related to the attack on Crow, along with interviews with investigators, ex-skinheads, and those close to Crow and her accused attackers shed light on the secretive, criminal subculture of racist skinheads in America's fourth-largest metropolis. The inhabitants of this chaotic and violent underworld boast of virtues like "Aryan pride" and "racial unity." But in reality, they are just as dangerous to their own kind as they are to non-whites and Jews, the declared targets of their hate and rage.

Crow was a victim of skinhead violence. But she was also a skinhead, a fact which did nothing to dissuade her "racial brothers and sisters" from literally stabbing her in the back.

Amanda Crow discovered the skinhead movement in a pool hall where she found a flier for an "Aryan barbecue." Three years later, police say, four of her former comrades nearly killed her.

At the same time, the skinhead scene in Phoenix was making a very public comeback, as a local group of skins who would eventually call themselves the North American Skinheads (the crew went through a series of name changes) was surging in numbers, violence and public attention.

In October 2002, soon after Crow began her junior year of high school, four racist skinheads stomped a young white man to death outside a pool hall. As news of the murder coursed through the Phoenix media, the brash and brutal leaders of this new crop of Phoenix skins, rather than shying away from scrutiny, courted publicity by granting television and newspaper interviews as they continued to organize skinhead events and actively recruit young people into the movement.

Crow became a skinhead in early March 2003, after she wandered into a Phoenix pool hall and wandered out holding a flier advertising an upcoming "Aryan Barbecue" in a mostly minority neighborhood.

With long dark hair, and at a shapely 5 feet 10 inches, Crow looked quite a bit older than 16. One of the Aryan barbecue's principal organizers, former Phoenix skinhead leader Sean Gaines, describes Crow back then as sweet, needy and hopelessly unaware of what she was getting herself into.

"She brought this girl who was part Jewish to the barbecue. That shows how naïve and how young they were," Gaines told the Intelligence Report from his Phoenix jail cell, where he's awaiting trial for capital murder in a separate case. "I tried to tell her to stay out of trouble."