Death in the Desert

There wasn't much good that anyone could say about Gary Tison except that he inspired a remarkable loyalty from his family. Imprisoned at the age of 25 for holding up a grocery store, he used a meeting with his wife Dorothy as an opportunity to escape from a visiting room in Arizona's Final County Jail.

Recaptured and later paroled, Tison was accused of a parole violation in 1967 when he passed a bad check. Instead of appearing at the court hearing, he overpowered the prison guard escorting him and shot him dead with his own pistol. That put Tison into the Arizona State Prison in Florence with a life sentence for murder.

But Tison's family rallied round. On July 30, he was visited by his son Ricky, 18, and the two chatted in a fenced picnic area at the prison. At the same time, two of Tison's other sons, Raymond, 19, and Donald, 20, decided to visit their father. They carried a box of food into the prison. Checking in at the lobby, one of them pulled a sawed-off shotgun out of the box and aimed it at a guard. Soon the three sons were escorting their father out of prison. With them went Convicted Murderer Randy Greenawalt, 29, who had helped out by cutting off telephones and alarm systems.

The five men strolled so casually toward their getaway car that the tower guard assumed they were departing visitors. But on the next day the fugitives' car had a flat tire. Marine Sergeant John F. Lyons, 24, heading from his home in Yuma, Ariz., to visit relatives in Nebraska, stopped to help. Lyons, his wife Donnelda, 24, and their 22-month-old son Christopher were all shot to death. A niece of the Lyons, Teresa Tyson, 16 (no kin to the Tisons), was wounded in the hip and was later found in the desert, having bled to death.

One of the biggest man hunts in Arizona's history pursued the murderous Tison family, and police set up a roadblock near Tison's home town of Casa Grande, Ariz. Soon, a silver van slowed at the signal from police, then sped on with a blast of gunfire from its windows. Five miles down the road, alerted deputies at another roadblock fired at the passing vehicle, killing Donald Tison. After a half-hour gun battle his two brothers and Greenawalt surrendered. The father, Gary, fled into the desert.

Police discovered that the van was registered to James Judge Jr., 24, of Amarillo, Texas. He and his new bride Margene had been honeymooning in Colorado and had called home to say they would be seated 20 rows above the 5-yd. line at a televised football game between the Denver Broncos and Dallas Cowboys in Denver. The seats were vacant during the game--and the Judges are presumed to have been killed by the Tisons.

As the search for Tison continued, more than 300 police officers and hundreds of civilian volunteers probed the desert, in heat up to 120DEG F., near the small town of Chuichu, Ariz. They found nothing. But last week Ray Thomas, 27, a chemical company worker, smelled a foul odor when he went out to dispose of some trash about 1 1/2 miles from the point where the fugitives' van had been ambushed. Searching around, he soon found the decomposed and bloated body of Gary Tison lying face up under a mesquite tree. Unwounded, he had apparently died of exposure to the heat of the desert.

Greenawalt and the two surviving Tison brothers were promptly charged with multiple murder. But Jose de la Vara, deputy county attorney of Yuma County, said the father had been "released to a higher authority."

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