Ex-deputy who killed 2 Yuma lawmen dies in prison
Former Yuma lawman Jack R. Hudson, who was serving a life sentence for the 1995 murders of a Yuma police officer and state trooper, died of cancer Tuesday morning at the Arizona State Prison Hospital, prison officials confirmed.
Hudson, 59, had been assigned to the Arizona State Prison Complex-Lewis and his death, like all deaths at the prison, is being investigated in consultation with the county medical examiner’s office. No time of death was provided.
Hudson, a former Yuma County Sheriff’s deputy and undercover narcotics officer, was sentenced out of Yuma County to life in prison for four convictions of first-degree murder, plus attempted first-degree murder, burglary, aggravated assault, and theft convictions for killing Yuma police officer Lt. Daniel Elkins and Arizona Department of Public Safety Sgt. Michael Crowe in the line of duty.
According to stories published in the Yuma Sun, Elkins, the commanding officer of Southwest Border Alliance, had arranged to have Crowe and evidence technician Jim Ehrhart
meet him at the office at about 10 p.m. on July 4 of that year.
The officers were aware that drugs and weapons had been disappearing from the evidence room.
Elkins, Crowe and Ehrhart walked in to find that two safes had been opened and the offices had been ransacked by Hudson that night. They were unarmed but had guns in their vehicles, Robinson said.
Hudson opened fire with a fully-automatic 9 mm Cobray pistol. He shot Crowe, chased Elkins down in the parking lot to shoot him and would have killed Ehrhart except that the weapon jammed.
When officers arrived, Hudson was arrested without incident. Elkins was pronounced dead on arrival at Yuma Regional Medical Center. Crowe died the next morning.