California Executes Stephen Wayne Anderson, the Utah Prison Escapee Who Killed Elizabeth Lyman
Anderson, 48, shot the 81-year-old retired piano teacher in her home in 1980. After 20 years on death row he refused all visitors and died at San Quentin almost alone.
Published
Stephen Wayne Anderson spent 20 years on California's death row for killing an 81-year-old woman in her bed. In his last days he turned away every visitor, and early on January 29, 2002, he was executed.
The lethal injection began at 12:18 a.m. at San Quentin State Prison, and Anderson, 48, was pronounced dead at 12:30 a.m. He was the 10th person executed in California since voters reinstated the death penalty in 1978. He chose only three of the seven witnesses he was allowed, all believed to be from his defense team, and he made no final statement, saying that his poetry and essays would speak for him. Elizabeth Lyman's relatives had made clear that they did not want him put to death, and they declined to attend.
On May 26, 1980, Anderson broke into Lyman's home in Bloomington, in San Bernardino County. Lyman, a retired piano teacher, was in bed when he shot her. He covered her body with a blanket, searched the house for money and then sat down in her kitchen to eat, and sheriff's deputies, called by a neighbor who had seen him through a window, arrested him there. He was 26 and had escaped from Utah State Prison on November 24, 1979. According to the California corrections department, he had murdered an inmate while held there and later admitted to six contract killings in Las Vegas.
A San Bernardino County jury convicted him of first-degree murder with special circumstances and residential burglary and sentenced him to death on July 24, 1981. On death row he wrote poetry and essays, and his lawyers called him "the poet laureate of the condemned." As his execution approached he lost interest in their campaign to have his sentence commuted. "Twenty years in here, I think it caught up with him," said Capt. K.J. Williams, who oversaw death row. "This was a part of his destiny. He accepted it."
The California corrections department's summary describes the Utah inmate's murder and the six Las Vegas contract killings, but lists Anderson's only earlier convictions as aggravated burglary.
Sources
- Executed Inmate Summary – Stephen Wayne Anderson, California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation
- Death Row Inmate Was Calm, Alone to End, Los Angeles Times
- Inmates Executed 1978 to Present, California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation