Entranced

Investment Banker Willard H. York, 36, hustled his wife, mother, son & daughter into the family sedan and began the usual Sunday drive from his ranch to church in San Antonio. He had a particularly gritty rag to chew over with his conscience. On March 19, the SEC had filed suit against him. It charged that York had done business while insolvent, and had used customers' securities without their consent. The same day, Dr. Lloyd Irving Ross, one of San Antonio's top surgeons, had filed suit for $80,279. Dr. Ross was an old friend, a fellow Methodist, a trusting customer and the family doctor.

As Banker York swung into a rocky lane leading to the highway, he saw a man standing beneath a roadside live oak tree. Then he saw the gun in the man's hand.

As he stopped, the man squinted carefully down his heavy automatic rifle and put six shots into York and his wife. Two bullets dropped nine-year-old John York as he scrambled from the car and five more hit his 67-year-old grandmother in the back as she got out and started to escape. In blind terror, 13-year-old Ann, the only York in the car still alive, pelted up the lane with lead cracking around her. Hit in the thigh, she managed to keep going until she reached a farmhouse where she sobbed out her story, and named the rifleman.

A few hours later, while police searched the roads for the man who had deliberately snuffed out four lives, a man walked up to the complaint desk in San Antonio's police headquarters. He was immaculately dressed, and he had a problem. "It seems that I am in a sort of a trance," he confided, stolidly. "I have a gun in my car. I think it has been fired. I don't remember."

The police brought the York family's old friend, Dr. Lloyd Irving Ross, up to date, jailed him on a charge of murder.

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