Betty Tyson has died, according to her sister. Betty Tyson spent 25-years in prison before being exonerated based on new evidence.
Delorise Tomls said that Tyson, 75 died in a Rochester Hospital on Aug. 17, following a cardiac arrest. She will be laid to sleep Friday. Thomas noted that her sister, who spent nearly as much time free as she had in prison after her release, had just recently celebrated a milestone.
“It felt good. She was free,” Thomas, 72, said by phone from her Rochester home, where Tyson also lived. “She enjoyed herself, going out driving, playing cards, going out to different parties … She enjoyed her life.”
Tyson received a 25-year sentence to life in jail in February 1974 in connection with the death of Timothy Haworth. The Philadelphia business consultant left his Rochester, New York hotel at midnight on May 24, 1974, to search for a prostitute. He was found strangled in an alley with his necktie the following day.
In May 1998, a judge overturned Tyson’s murder conviction, ruling that the police had withheld exculpatory evidence.
Tyson, who entered prison in New York at 25 years of age, was released just a few days shy of her 50th anniversary. She had been the longest-serving woman inmate there.
Tyson told The Associated Press that she found comfort in the Bible while in prison. This was about 18 months after Tyson left Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, north of New York City. As a model inmate, she counseled women with AIDS, earned a printer’s apprenticeship, led aerobics classes and became known as “Mom” to younger inmates.
“All that bitterness and anger left me in the late ’70s,” Tyson told AP. “I wasn’t a goody two-shoes, but the fact of the matter is, I didn’t kill anybody.”
Tyson was raised fatherless by eight siblings, had dropped out of college at the age of 14, and then turned to prostitution in order to feed her heroin habit. She and another prostitute, John Duval, were convicted of Haworth’s murder on the basis of confessions they said were beaten out of them by police, and on the testimony of two teenage runaways, one of whom revealed long afterward that the same officer had terrorized him into lying.
Tyson’s conviction was overturned after a previously unknown police report was discovered which documented that the other teenage witness said he had not seen either Tyson or Duval with the victim. Duval’s conviction was overturned in 1999.
Tyson was compensated with $1.25m by the City of Rochester. However, she struggled financially after being released from prison. When she spoke to AP, she had been unable to find work as a printing technician. She was earning $143 a weekly cleaning a daycare center.
“She was a very kind person. She helped anyone that needed help,” Thomas said Wednesday. “I tried to tell her, ‘You know you can’t help everybody, now.’ She did. She did as much as she could.”
Thomas stated that Tyson spent the months leading up to her heart attack with her ailing older sister who passed away in April and a younger sibling who died less than one month earlier. She loved her big “crazy family,” Thomas said.
“We all get together and laugh and talk about the old times and eat good food,” Thomas said, “talk about our mother.”
Their mother, Mattie Lawson Buchanan, died of emphysema just five months after Tyson’s release.
