Gary Tison’s fateful final escape
Four decades later, murderous tale of three sons who helped father flee prison has lost none of its drama
Gary Tison had just been sentenced to prison for passing a bad check. When the hearing ended, one version of the story goes, he wanted to kiss his wife goodbye before returning to his cell.
The guard wouldn’t let him. During the five-minute drive from the courthouse in Florence back to prison, Tison somehow managed to overpower the guard and grab his gun. He shot and killed the man. He left the body at the end of a dirt road and drove off in the prison truck.
A manhunt began, lasting into the next day. Someone called police from Casa Grande saying Tison was in the backyard. Police responded. There was a brief shootout. Finally, officers arrested Tison.
At the court hearing, Tison had received a sentence of about seven months for passing the bad check. Now he would face charges as a murderer.
In 1968, he would be sentenced to life in prison.
He would make every effort not to stay there.
A life of escapes
The so-called Tison Gang saga is a story of escapes. Three attempted by Tison, and one by another inmate who jumped the perimeter fence with one goal in mind: to let officials know what Tison was planning.
Gary Tison infamously succeeded in busting out of prison in 1978. He left with a fellow murderer and with the aid of Tison’s three sons.
They killed a family, including a baby, in southwestern Arizona. They killed a honeymooning couple in Colorado. They spread fear across state lines, leaving no clue about where or when they would strike next.
Law enforcement tracked them but was never really on their tail.
The gang would be caught purely by happenstance. Officers at a roadblock were anticipating a sports car coming at them from the west. Instead, a van came from the east. More online: To see our exclusive documentary video “Pure Evil: The True Story of the Tison Gang,” go to bestreads.azcentral.com
Nearly 40 years later, the saga of the Tison Gang’s prison break has lost none of its cinematic sweep. There is a guntoting escape, unrelenting violence committed by a desperate gang on the run and a bullet-filled ending that has the main protagonist making a futile crawl for cover.
There is also an intriguing cast of characters, revolving around the domineering and sociopathic father and the sons who were raised to see him as an ideal man.
That the violent saga has been made into a movie — twice. The first retelling, “A Killer in the Family,” was made for TV in 1983 and starred Robert Mitchum as Tison, with a screenplay by best-selling novelist Sue Grafton.
Now, the story is unfolding again on the big screen in “The Last Rampage,” borrowing the title and material from the 1988 book by James C. Clarke about the escape. Robert Patrick plays Tison in this version, which opened Friday in a limited release.
It undoubtedly takes some dramatic license, as films based on true events do. There are still many unanswered questions — about the run-up to the escape and the relationships of those involved. Not to mention what happened during the nearly two weeks the gang spent on the road, killing six people along the way.
Caught hiding in the laundry room
Gary Tison’s second escape attempt was ill-planned. The prison walls would prove insurmountable.
Tison’s life revolved around the prison. He had met his future wife, Dorothy, there in the mid-1950s while she came for a visit with Gary’s sister. The two wrote letters while he finished his sentence for robbing a grocery store.
When he was released, he stayed out of trouble long enough to marry Dorothy in 1957 and have their sons.
But Gary would be out of his family’s life again in 1961. He was imprisoned for five years for stealing weapons from an armory.
The time after that release was recalled fondly by Dorothy Tison to a court-appointed psychologist in 1980. She said the time the family was together on a ranch was the “happiest time of their lives.”
But a year later came Tison’s arrest for passing a bad check. And the sentencing hearing where the guard wouldn’t let him kiss his wife goodbye. And the murder of the guard, James Stiner.
Tison was recaptured in Casa Grande 19 hours after driving off in the prison truck.
“I killed the guard,” Tison told officers who found him. He led them to Stiner’s body.
Tison was placed in maximum custody at the Florence prison.
Dorothy Tison, despite the evidence and her husband’s reported confession, never believed her husband killed the guard, she told the court-appointed psychologist. That doctor wrote in his report that he believed an idealized version of Gary Tison was passed on to the couple’s three sons.
The boys routinely visited their father while he was in Florence. One deputy warden, in an oral history interview, recalled watching the Tison boys grow up from being in diapers.
Tison was seen as a model inmate. Frank Terry, a major in the department, said in a 1990 oral history interview, that Tison was “very mild-mannered” and that “most of the time in there, the man was a model prisoner.”
But, Terry added a caveat.
“If he’d see a chance to escape, though, he’d take it,” Terry said, “and if you stood in his way and he had to kill you, he would.”
In 1972, Tison tried to escape.
He and two other inmates held guards at gunpoint and took their uniforms. The disguises fooled a guard in a tower into opening a gate and letting them walk through the yard.
But the attempt was foiled before Tison could leave. Guards found a long pipe placed up against the wall and reasoned the group had tried and failed to climb it and escape. Tison and the others were found hiding in a laundry room.
Newspaper clippings from the time quoted prison officials saying they were not sure how Tison managed to have a weapon.
A prisoner with privileges
Despite the killing of one guard and his foiled escape attempt, Tison retained favored status as an inmate.
He was given the job of directing the inmate activities, a post that came with a desk in an office and a telephone that gave him access to the outside world.
Tison had convinced officials he was a changed man, looking to make the best of himself within the prison walls.
The Republic, in December 1975, went to the prison to check out conditions and spoke with its warden, Harold Cardwell.
Cardwell suggested to the reporter it would be good to speak to an inmate who had been locked up for a while to get perspective. Cardwell suggested Gary Tison. “He’s articulate and won’t try to snow you,” Cardwell was quoted as saying.
Tison was interviewed at his desk in the small activities office. Tison told the reporter that he used to run the dope and other deals inside the prison, but changed. “I’ve got a wife and three kids,” he said. “I want to get out someday and I know that the only privileges you get from The Man come from working for others and accepting responsibility.”
Robert Tuzon: Reluctant cohort
Robert Tuzon never thought about escaping prison. He thought he was innocent of the murder charge that put him behind bars and it would be only a matter of time before he convinced the right people.
In his first day in prison in 1976, Tuzon figured out who was in charge: Gary Tison, the inmate who somehow kept a derringer in his boot.
“He was the chairman, CEO,” Tuzon said during an interview in August. While other inmates ran various factions of the populations, mainly drawn on ethnic lines, it was Tison who ran them all, Tuzon said.
“When you keep things tranquil, everything is better off,” Tuzon said, “and he could keep things tranquil.”
Tison was the editor of the prison newspaper, “La Roca,” and also ran the audio-visual department where he had access to a phone.
“If you want anything, just go see Gary,” Tuzon said.
Tuzon wanted to call his wife. “So I got to his office and he calls my wife, puts me through, and I get to talk to my wife, which wasn’t allowed at the time.”
Soon, both men would gain an extraordinary measure of privileges.
In September 1977, a federal judge ruled that the state’s prisons were over-
crowded and decreed the state come up with a plan either to build more prisons or to reduce its inmate population.
Cardwell came up with a plan to convert the women’s prison across the street into a facility for inmates that didn’t need as much security, mostly barbedwire fence. Contracts were out to fortify it. But inmates would be moved in the meantime.
Cardwell had to determine which ones could be safely placed there.
Tison had shown himself, in the warden’s eyes, to avoid trouble. There had been a prison strike the previous year. Tison refused to take part. Tison also wrote pro-warden editorials in the prison newspaper.
Cardwell later would insist such gestures had no bearing on him. “I don’t say he ingratiated himself to me,” he said in his 1990 oral history interview, “because I didn’t know him that well.” Cardwell did call Tison a “smart guy. He was intelligent.”
Officials knew that Tison was a dangerous man. But they had to weigh those actions with his years of solid behavior inside the institution.
Tison made the cut.
Joining him was a serial killer named Randy Greenawalt. Although he only had been convicted of killing one trucker — marking his window with X as the man slept and then firing at it from a distance — Greenawalt had an apparent disdain for drivers of big rigs and there was talk he was responsible for similar slayings.
Greenawalt had also refused to take part in the prison strike, along with Tison. He also moved to cushier quarters.
Tuzon also made the cut. He had been convicted of the murder of his brotherin-law, but claimed it was in self-defense. He expected to win an appeal. In the meantime, he was assigned to work in the kitchen.
Tuzon said he found Tison waiting for him there. Given Tison’s record, Tuzon told him he was surprised to see him there.
“I got connections,” Tison told him. The move to the annex meant Tison could have longer visits with his family, outside and lasting most of the day. The family was able to bring in home-cooked or outside food. The Tison boys often carried in boxes filled with books for their father.
On the day Tuzon learned a court had denied his appeal, Gary Tison approached him with a question.
“Don’t you want to leave here?” he asked.
Tison said he knew Tuzon could fly a plane. He suggested they escape and Tuzon fly them to freedom.
Tuzon said he refused to take part. The next week, Tison showed him photographs of Tuzon’s wife and children, along with a newly adopted dog. Tison said he would have them all killed if Tuzon didn’t take part in the escape.
“Before you can do anything they’ll be gone,” Tison said, according to Tuzon.
“So, I decided, well, OK, I’ll fly your plane,” Tuzon said.
Next came a test.
It was a weekend visitation day in the outside courtyard.
Tuzon’s wife, Irma, met Tison’s sons, Ricky and Raymond. Tison ordered Tuzon’s wife to deliver a rifle that Tuzon owned to his sons. Irma initially balked but her husband told her, “It’s deeper than you think.”
The delivery was made, building Tison’s trust in Tuzon.
Next, Tison wanted Tuzon to teach him how to fly a plane.
Under the guise of taking a class, he had a cardboard replica of a King Air cockpit delivered to the prison, the type used in training. He set it up and had Tuzon show him how to work the controls.
Tison said the plan was to steal weapons from the Casa Grande armory and then fly them to Costa Rica and sell them on the black market. Tuzon said Tison estimated the haul would be worth a couple of million dollars.
Tuzon had his own plan. “When I had him in the air, I was just going to crash the plane,” Tuzon said in the interview this year. He figured his life would have been over with after an escape charge, and he didn’t want Tison to hurt any more people.
Tuzon wrote his attorney and told him about Tison’s escape plan. His attorney, in turn, notified prison officials, and word got to Warden Cardwell. Tuzon was summoned into Cardwell’s office to tell him what he knew.
Cardwell, in his oral history interview, recalled getting a tip about Tison. He said he had a committee meet and look at the evidence to see if Tison needed to be moved back to maximum.
That March, Tison was given four polygraph exams asking him if he planned to escape, the director of corrections at the time, Ellis MacDougall, later would tell The Republic.
Tison passed all four.
He remained in the lightly guarded prison annex.
In May 1978, Tison said the plane was in place and the plan was a go for the next week. Tison also told Tuzon he planned to kill six guards on his way out.
Tuzon questioned why the guards needed to die when it would be so easy to escape the annex. Tison told him that he needed to do it his way.
Tuzon went to the maintenance shack and snagged a pair of wire cutters. During a baseball game in the recreation yard, he snipped the chain link. Then he ran across the sand to a fence ringed with barbed-wire. Tuzon knew sometimes there was a guard in the tower; sometimes not. This time, there was. As he hit the top of the fence, a guard popped his head out.
Tuzon rolled over the wire, jumped down and started running. The officer started firing.
Tuzon’s plan was to head six blocks to the Department of Public Safety office and tell them about Tison’s escape plot. He thought maybe they would believe him.
That plan changed when the bullets started flying.
He zigged and zagged across the desert, dodging bullets. A prison vehicle pulled up and dogs were sicced on him.
Tuzon said he was taken to Cardwell’s office, where the warden yelled at him for trying to make the prison look bad.
Tuzon was charged with escape and moved out of the annex and back into the maximum security wing. His plan to alert officials failed. But he succeeded in getting himself away from Tison.
Weeks later, from his basement cell, Tuzon heard sirens go off in the prison. “I don’t know why,” he said, “but I just had a feeling that was Gary just escaped.”
Sons help Tison’s third escape
Gary Tison’s last escape began in what to guards must have seemed like a routine event. His son, Raymond, 18, came to visit him.
But Gary Tison did not have the typical reaction upon seeing his son that July 31, 1978.
“Dammit, you guys aren’t supposed to be here,” Gary Tison reportedly said.
The two sat outside in the yard. Raymond had brought two ham sandwiches and a six-pack of soda. They spoke, presumably Raymond filling him in on what seemed a new plan.
Twenty minutes later, the two came back inside the visitors’ lobby.
The other two sons, Donald, 20, and Ricky, 19, entered moments later. They had a cardboard box advertising Salem cigarettes.
Ricky grabbed a sawed-off shotgun that was concealed in the box and shoved it into the window at the corrections officer in the booth.
Greenawalt held a clerk’s job that put him in that control booth. Donald Tison passed a pistol to him.
Brandishing the gun, Greenawalt ordered the two officers to the floor.
Gary Tison brought in a third guard from outside and ordered him into a supply closet. The other two guards were corralled in next.
Raymond Tison went outside and ordered the visitors and prisoners inside and into the closet. They locked it.
The gang walked out, got into a green Ford LTD and drove away.
They switched cars at the parking lot of a nearby hospital, getting into a black Lincoln Continental.
Ten minutes later, the officers were able to break out of the closet and call in the escape.
Inmates told officials what they had heard of the plan through the rumor mill: The Tisons wanted to drive to Mexico and hide at a ranch in Sasabe. After a time, maybe they would join a drugsmuggling ring there with which Tison had connections.
Police established roadblocks along the highways to Mexico. Helicopters joined in the search. They were looking for a green LTD.
On the run: flat tires and 6 killed
On the road to Yuma, according to a 1981 Republic story that reconstructed the incident, the gang’s black Lincoln caught a flat. They mounted the spare and kept driving.
Upon reaching Yuma, the car turned north. One officer speculated in the 1981 article that the gang wanted to rob a bank to get some quick cash. Another speculated that Greenawalt wanted to see a woman he had befriended who lived in Flagstaff.
Either way, the gang was now headed north on a remote stretch of Arizona 95, going from Yuma to Quartzsite.
About 25 miles south of Quartzsite, the car caught a second flat. With no spare, the group was stranded by the side of the road.
The sun dropped. Crime scene photos later would show a campfire.
In the middle of the night, a U.S. Marine assigned to the Yuma station was driving that same state highway. With him were his wife, his 22-month-old son Christopher and his niece.
The Marine stopped to help.
The Tison gang would steal the car. But they would leave no witnesses.
The family was forced into the Continental with the flat tire and were driven out into the desert.
It is not clear whether the family was shot in one flurry of bullets or systematically. It is also not clear if they were shot by only Gary Tison and Randy Greenawalt, or if the sons joined in.
John Lyons was blown from the passenger seat and ended up outside of the car on his back. Christopher was blown into the body of his mother, Donnelda. Teresa-Jo Tyson, the niece, was hit in the hip and buttocks but did not die. She tried crawling for help after the gang left but
bled to death near a bush.
The gang got in their new vehicle, an orange Mazda, and headed north.
They stopped in the town of Wenden and bought silver spray paint to change the color of the Mazda, then headed for Flagstaff.
Greenawalt had started a pen-pal relationship of sorts with a woman, Kathy Ehrementrout, who lived there. Greenawalt and Donald Tison went to visit her, leaving the rest of the gang at a campsite in the woods outside the city.
Ehrementrout bought the men a truck and ammunition.
Their path after Flagstaff is not clear. In the 1981 article, authorities said Gary Tison had arranged for a plane to pick them up in Clovis, New Mexico. Arizona authorities hoped to quietly wait at the airport for the Tisons and Greenawalt. But word leaked out. State police swarmed the airport.
Authorities later determined, according to the 1981 article, that the Tison gang drove up to the airport, saw the officers and left.
The gang drove northeast into Colorado. Along the way, they confronted a pair of newlyweds from Texas, James and Margene Judge, who were on their way to Denver to see the Dallas Cowboys play the Denver Broncos.
The gang killed the couple and drove away in their van back toward Casa Grande, the town Gary Tison had called home when he wasn’t in prison.
End of the road: volleys of shots
The gang stopped in Casa Grande for at least one day, according to the 1981 article, and visited one relative.
From there, they headed toward Mexico, driving back roads to avoid authorities.
They did not know police agencies had set up roadblocks on every intersection of those roads.
Someone reported an attempted break-in at a Border Patrol station in Gila Bend. They also spotted a silver sports car near the scene. If someone was trying to get weapons, it sounded like something Gary Tison would do. And the gang was last known to be in a silver Mazda.
Along Chuichu Road, four officers sat in two patrol cars parked in the road, nearly blocking it. About 2:45 a.m. on Aug. 11, a van approached. An officer flashed his red lights and then walked up to the vehicle as it slowed.
Two shots were fired, narrowly missing the officer.
The van barreled between the two patrol cars at an estimated 90 mph.
There was another roadblock six miles away. Four deputies there stood on the side of the road with weapons drawn.
The van came into sight, chased by two patrol cars. Officers could hear gunfire.
As the van sped past, the officers fired at it, 51 shots.
Donald Tison was driving. One bullet struck him in the head, blowing his brains throughout the van.
The vehicle slid off the road. After it came to rest, Gary Tison was
heard yelling, according to the 1981 article: “It’s everyone for himself.”
Gary Tison was the only one who managed to run off.
A helicopter flew over and illuminated the area. Officers found Ricky and Raymond Tison, along with Greenawalt, hiding in a ditch. All three had weapons. None used them.
That started the hunt for Gary Tison. He would not be found for 11 days. But Tison did not last that long.
His body was found by an employee of a nearby chemical plant who smelled a foul odor. Authorities said it appeared Tison died violently, kicking gouges into the wash where he laid, inadvertently burying his gun underneath him.
A reporter on the scene as lawmen moved his body wrote that they cursed his remains. “I hope to hell he suffered,” one said.
Secrets, sons locked up in prison
Within weeks, then-Arizona Gov. Bruce Babbitt would remove Cardwell from his position as the warden of the prison.
“That was obviously necessary,” Babbitt said in an interview this summer. “The idea that you had in minimum security a person who was there for the murder of a prison guard was just incomprehensible.”
Greenawalt would be sentenced to death. He was executed in 1997.
Ehrementrout was among a handful of friends and relatives who would be convicted of helping the gang.
Tuzon, for his efforts at trying to warn officials about the escape, had his sentence reduced. He lives in the Tucson area and works as a minister.
Ricky and Raymond Tison initially were sentenced to death. But their sentences were set aside by the Arizona Supreme Court in 1989. They both were sentenced to life in 1992.
As he received his reprieve from death row, Ricky Tison told the court that he had been manipulated by his father.
“I wish I had the insight back then,” he said in court. “It wouldn’t have happened if I did.”
Raymond Tison expressed a similar sentiment at his sentencing a week later. “I’m not Gary Tison,” he told the court. “I don’t think I’m going to be Gary Tison.” Neither would agree to an interview. The secrets about what happened during the rampage remain secret, locked up tight at the Arizona State Prison in Florence.