The neighbor was woken by barking dogs. It was a little after one in the morning on Monday, May 26, 1980, in Bloomington, in San Bernardino County, and through a window of the house next door the neighbor could see a man inside. The house belonged to Elizabeth Lyman, eighty-one, a retired piano teacher who lived alone. By the time sheriff's deputies arrived, she was dead in her bed, and the man was sitting in her kitchen eating a meal of noodles and eggs he had cooked for himself.
According to the state's account, Stephen Wayne Anderson, twenty-six, had cut her telephone line with a knife before breaking in, believing the house was empty. When she woke in her bed he shot her in the face with a .45-caliber handgun from a distance of eight to twenty inches, with a hollow-point bullet. He covered her body with a blanket, picked up the spent casing, and ransacked the house for money. He found less than $100.
He was an escapee from the Utah State Prison, which he had broken out of on November 24, 1979. He had been locked up there for aggravated burglary, one count in 1971 and three in 1973, and according to California corrections records he killed a fellow inmate there and assaulted another inmate and a correctional officer. After his arrest he admitted six contract killings in Las Vegas in the months before the Lyman murder. None of those led to charges in Nevada, and later investigators concluded that several of the killings he described had never happened. A reinvestigation in 2015 was reported to have tied him to the 1980 killing of a man named Timothy Glashien. Accounts of his early life disagree even on where he was born; most give St. Louis, Missouri, on July 8, 1953, and some reports at his execution called him a native of New Mexico.
A San Bernardino County jury convicted him of first-degree murder with special circumstances and residential burglary, and on July 24, 1981, it sentenced him to death. The California Supreme Court affirmed the judgment in December 1990. On death row he taught himself to write and became known for poetry that won awards, and his supporters argued to Governor Gray Davis that the work was evidence of rehabilitation. His prison record also showed rule violations for assault and fighting in 1984, 1985 and 1987.
Davis refused clemency, and on January 28, 2002, the United States Supreme Court turned down his final appeal. For his last meal he asked for two grilled cheese sandwiches, radishes and cottage cheese, peach pie and chocolate chip ice cream. The execution by lethal injection began at 12:18 on the morning of January 29, 2002, in San Quentin's death chamber, nearly twenty-two years after Elizabeth Lyman's death. He was forty-eight.