In retrospect, considering the time he spent in jail, it seemed incredible that Gary Tison could command such loyalty from his family. Imprisoned at the age of 25 for robbery, he took advantage of a meeting with his wife to flee the county jail in Florence, Arizona. Recaptured and later paroled, Tison was charged with parole violation after passing a bad check in 1967. That April, en route to a court hearing, he overpowered a prison guard, handcuffed the officer, and shot him to death with his own service revolver.

Conviction of first-degree murder earned Tison a life sentence, but he wasted no time on self-pity. In prison, he quickly made friends with serial slayer Randy Greenawalt, serving life on conviction for one of his four random murders. (The victims were truckers, picked out, Randy said, because one of their kind "roughed him up" years before.) Proud of his "special" status as a multiple killer, Greenawalt fell into line with Tison's new plan of escape.

On July 30, 1978, Tison's son Ricky, 18, came to visit his father at the state prison in Florence. They were chatting in the fenced picnic area when two more of the Tison boys -- Raymond, 19, and Donald, 20 -- arrived with a basket of food for their father. Inside the lobby, one of the boys pulled a shotgun and covered the guards, demanding his father's release. Randy Greenawalt, meanwhile, had done his part by temporarily disabling the prison telephones and alarm system. Together, the five strolled so casually toward their getaway car that tower guards mistook them for departing visitors and let them go.

Next day, the fugitives were stranded with a blow-out when 24-year-old Marine Sgt. John Lyons stopped to help. Traveling from Yuma to Nebraska with his wife, their infant son and teenage niece, Lyons hated to see anyone stuck in the desert, but his act of charity resulted in disaster. Lyons, wife Donelda, and son Christopher were killed in the first blast of gunfire from Tison and Greenawalt. The sergeant's niece, Teresa Tyson, age 16, was wounded in the hip and left to die, discovered by a group of searchers after she had bled to death.

Scouring the countryside for Tison and company, authorities established a roadblock near Gary's home town of Casa Grande, Arizona. When the silver van approached, some hours later, it began to slow, the driver braking, but a blast of gunfire from the windows scattered officers as Tison and his gang swept past. A second roadblock waited five miles down the road, and this time deputies were ready, killing Donald Tison with their first barrage of fire. The battle raged for half an hour, Greenawalt and the surviving Tison boys surrendering as they ran out of ammunition, Gary taking off on foot across the desert.

Officers discovered that the van belonged to James and Margene Judge, a pair of newlyweds from Colorado. Never found, they were included in the list of murder victims charged to Greenawalt and the incarcerated Tison brothers. Gary Tison, meanwhile, managed to elude pursuit until the final week of August, when his bloated, decomposing corpse was found outside the tiny town of Chuichu, Arizona. Unwounded in the final shootout with police, he had apparently succumbed to thirst and desert heat.