Do you know who murdered Thomas Lawson? Thomas Lawson, a 45-year-old male from Anchorage, died after midnight on January 14, 1984. He had come north years earlier after a stint in the U.S. Air Force and worked iron on the city's rising skyline, picking up shifts behind the wheel of a Yellow Cab when winter slowed construction. On that cold Saturday, residents in the Muldoon neighborhood noticed a taxi idling in the middle of their street.
Officers who answered the calls found Lawson in the driver's seat with a gunshot wound to the head; he was rushed to Humana Hospital, where he was pronounced dead. He had recently turned forty-five. The obituary index for the local papers records his death notice two days later.
Detectives quickly read the scene as a robbery. Lawson's last pickup was traced to Muldoon Road, a stretch with a rough reputation, and witnesses and dispatch records helped narrow the window. Within days, an anonymous caller broke the case open, naming three teenagers and pointing police to the murder weapon. Investigators learned the teens had tried sizing up several cab drivers that night. They eventually lured Lawson to a cul-de-sac on a pretext, pressed a. 22 to his head, and fled on foot after the shooting, tossing the handgun onto the roof of a nearby mobile home. The take was just twenty-six dollars—money that, according to later accounts, they spent on pizza.
Four days after the killing, all three suspects were in custody and charged with first-degree murder and first-degree robbery. Two—identified in contemporaneous coverage as Timothy Burris, 15, and Brett Blanchard, 17—were waived into adult court. A judge concluded both displayed sufficient intent and culpability for adult prosecution, citing, among other details, a signal Burris gave to shoot and Blanchard's attempt to minimize the act as a “mistake.” In 1986, a jury found Burris guilty of first- and second-degree murder; he received a 30-year sentence. Blanchard entered a plea to first-degree murder and was sentenced to 35 years. The third accomplice remained in juvenile court and was adjudicated accordingly.
The stark facts of the night—an idling cab, a small haul, a driver who had built the city now dying inside one of its arteries—echoed through Anchorage's mid-eighties crime pages. Lawson's name appears in the Anchorage Times obituary roll for January 16, 1984, even as police files and later retrospectives fixed the timing of the attack to the earliest minutes of January 14. What began as a winter shift to make ends meet ended as a senseless, solved killing, its arrests and prosecutions traced in courtrooms and columns that followed.
