2 Portraits of Grandmother’s Killer Emerge

He is an instinctual killer, the government believes, a Vegas hit man, a “poster child for the death penalty” who learned how effortless murder can be when he caught a bird as a young man and crushed it in his palm without a second thought.

Years later, after he shot a grandmother in the face, prosecutors say, he cooked himself noodles in her kitchen and poured himself a glass of milk while she died. He would say later that he made just two mistakes: not getting out of the house sooner, and not trying to shoot his way past the cops once he was caught.

That’s half the story.

Stephen Wayne Anderson, 48, scheduled to die by lethal injection Tuesday morning at San Quentin State Prison, also has an IQ of 136. Beaten as a boy, disowned at 17 and forced to live outdoors and alone in the hills of New Mexico, he has become an accomplished poet, writing behind bars about the smell of honeysuckle and the wind tickling the trees in the fall.

His supporters say he made up the hit man stuff, and many law enforcement officials are starting to agree. Friends say he never meant to kill, that he is the hapless target of cowboy prosecutors determined to see San Bernardino County’s first death penalty case in 40 years to its ultimate conclusion. For the first time in California, his victims’ survivors unanimously support his bid for clemency.

His trial attorney was so incompetent that two other killers represented by the same man have had their death sentences thrown out. He is the linchpin of allegations that Gov. Gray Davis should no longer address clemency pleas because he has never agreed to one--and has suggested that he never will in a murder case. Indeed, Davis denied Anderson’s clemency bid Saturday, saying there is “no question of his guilt.”

All told, Anderson’s is one of the most convoluted cases to emerge from San Quentin, and is emblematic of the passion--and ambivalence--surrounding the debate over government-sponsored execution.

“This one,” said Robert S. Horwitz, one of the lawyers fighting for an unlikely eleventh-hour reprieve, “has a lot of baggage.”

With the governor’s decision this weekend, it is now virtually certain that Anderson will be put to death early Tuesday.

Prison workers will open the tap of an intravenous line, delivering three drugs into Anderson’s bloodstream. Each is lethal on its own. When served as a cocktail, they are more than sufficient.

Anderson, bearded and portly with an easy smile, would be the 10th man executed in California since voters reinstated capital punishment in 1978.

Meantime, in the days leading to the execution, two strikingly different portraits of Anderson have emerged.

There is the yin--the premeditated murderer who may have killed as many as nine people, who once befriended a prison guard, then told his new pal he’d kill him in a jiffy if it meant escaping from custody.

And there is the yang--the troubled, railroad-hopping hobo who blossomed into a poet and an intellectual, the fumbling burglar who fired his gun in the dark only when he panicked.

The surprising footprint of Anderson’s case on those who have come in contact with him began the very night he was arrested. It was Memorial Day 1980. A San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputy drove him away from a small home in Bloomington, an unincorporated community near Fontana, where he’d just shot and killed 81-year-old Elizabeth Lyman, a retired piano teacher.

Anderson asked whether California enforced the death penalty. “I hope so,” he said. “I want out of this mess.”

A homeless drifter who was riding the rails after escaping prison in Utah, where he was being held on several burglary charges, Anderson landed in Bloomington in spring 1980.

After casing the house of his victim for two days, he was sure no one was home--mostly because he saw no car in the driveway, his legal team has argued. But Lyman did not have a car, and she was inside.

On May 26, Anderson drank a pint of vodka, according to his lawyers, and then, shortly after midnight, spent an hour prying the hinges off the door.

When he walked into the bedroom, looking for cash, Lyman rose from her sleep. Anderson turned and shot her under the left eye with a .45-caliber handgun.

Authorities say he had taped down the gun’s safety to ensure that it would fire quickly.

Then, law enforcement officers say--though it’s one of many disputed facts in the case--he fixed himself a bowl of noodles.

“He simply made himself at home,” David Whitney, San Bernardino County’s lead deputy district attorney, wrote to the governor earlier this month.

Said Wes Daw, one of the original investigators in the case: “His hunger outweighed his conscience.”

Anderson does not dispute charges that he pulled the trigger, though his supporters argue that instead of carrying out a premeditated killing, he panicked and shot wildly in the dark when Lyman rose from her bed.

When deputies arrived, Anderson chuckled about how he’d been caught in someone else’s home in the middle of the night wearing dark clothes and gloves. Not exactly a tough case to crack. Authorities suspect Anderson stabbed a fellow inmate to death in 1977 in Utah, escaped custody and in 1980 shot a man to death in a murder-for-hire and killed six others while operating as a “hit man” in Las Vegas.

Defense lawyers argue that none of it ever happened. They say Anderson was probably involved only in the death of the inmate, Robert Blundell, and even that, they argue, was self-defense.

Anderson now denies the crimes, and his defense team believes he delivered “false confessions” to the murders-for-hire because he was suicidal after being arrested in the Lyman murder. Authorities concede that they’ve never been able to prove that the “hit man” murders even occurred. Still, Whitney cited all of it in his letter asking that the execution proceed as planned.

“As some of the officers have put it, he’s a poster child for the death penalty,” Whitney said in an interview. “It’s not about what’s best for the defendant.”

That may be the only thing the two sides agree on.

Relatives of Lyman and Blundell wrote letters supporting Anderson’s bid for clemency--asking that his sentence be commuted to life in prison without possibility of parole.

“While we deeply miss our son and brother ... executing Stephen Anderson will not replace our loss nor bring us any relief,” Blundell’s mother, Lois Smith, wrote to court officials last year. “We do not want or need Stephen Anderson to die for the death of our loved one.”

So who wants Anderson to die, besides the prosecution?

The answer, his attorneys claim, is no one.

“That should be something that would weigh in this,” said Marie Stratton, the Los Angeles-based federal public defender.

‘We Let Juries

and Courts Decide’

Whitney scoffed at the argument, asserting that his “client” is the public.

“We let juries and courts decide,” he said. “Murders are cases against the state, against society in general.”

Anderson also has been the focus of an unusual appeal in which his attorneys argued that Davis should recuse himself from clemency requests.

The governor has rejected recommendations that dozens of killers be released from prison, and he has now thrown out all four clemency petitions he has received in the last three years. In interviews, Davis has said that “if you take someone else’s life, forget it.”

“No mercy,” Margo Rocconi, another Anderson lawyer, told corrections officials earlier this month.

Ward Campbell, a supervising deputy attorney general in Sacramento, said in an interview that courts have ruled that even if Davis had a blanket policy against clemency, that would not violate the Constitution. No one has proven that the governor has such a policy, he said, and a federal appeals court agreed Friday.

Anderson’s defense team also laments his representation--or lack thereof--by S. Donald Ames, a flamboyant San Bernardino County attorney who died two years ago. The court appointed Ames to represent Anderson because the defendant had no money.

Federal judges have commuted two other death sentences to life prison terms because of Ames’ work. In those cases, federal judges found that being represented by Ames was “the equivalent of no counsel at all.” Ames once said his own client “deserves to fry.”

Preparation, Anderson’s attorneys have wrote, “was something of which Mr. Ames was congenitally incapable.”

Ames also said Anderson refused to give him names of witnesses to call when the jury was weighing the death penalty. According to federal judges who investigated, Ames’ own notes indicate that Anderson gave the attorney the names of many witnesses.

Most importantly, Ames did not delve into Anderson’s past, which, his supporters say, explains quite a bit.

Born to a coal miner’s daughter and an alcoholic oil worker, Anderson and his younger brother, Ken, were beaten as children, according to Anderson’s clemency appeal. The family was unable to afford food at times.

“I dreaded the days that you boys were born,” their mother, Goldie, told her sons. She told neighbors that she preferred her dogs to her children.

Anderson learned to protect his brother from their parents. Because their mother would get upset when young Ken soiled his diaper, Anderson learned to change diapers.

That pattern would continue. In 1971, Stephen, afraid for his brother’s safety, took the blame when Ken threw a party at their Farmington, N.M., home.

“If Stevie had tried to hit back I think Dad would have killed him,” Ken wrote in court documents. “Finally ... he screamed at him to pack his bags and get out of the house.”

Anderson camped in the hills surrounding town.

“I just don’t think he ever had a chance,” Rocconi said.

Jurors weighing whether the state should execute Anderson learned little about his past, his new attorneys say. Three jurors have written the state, saying they would have voted for life in prison if they had learned more about Anderson’s background. One said she remains haunted by the case.

Wrote Award-Winning

Poems and Essays

Deputy Dist. Atty. Whitney defended Ames, saying he was a friend and “one of the better defense attorneys in our county.”

In December, 19 U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals judges ruled that Ames did not violate Anderson’s right to a fair trial. Six judges disagreed.

“If the courts appoint incompetent counsel ... we should not then compound that judicial error by permitting the state to execute the ill-represented defendant,” they wrote. “The system has now failed doubly in Stephen Anderson’s case.”

Anderson will leave behind hundreds of award-winning poems and essays--and a powerful connection with people who helped him through an intellectual resurrection. Many of his works delved into his extensive time spent behind bars, including a 1993 piece called “Stone”:

Barely remaining sane, he wept demanding release; yet somehow he knew those shouts were in vain. Sinners such as him were granted no peace. So, trapped between agony and pride ... he wept upon a concrete bed, remembering all the mistakes he’d made.

“He was totally different from what I expected, in his intelligence, his talent and his sensitivity to other people,” Horwitz said.

None of these issues, his supporters concede, make Anderson a saint. But they are enough, they argue, to have spared him from execution and condemn him instead to life in prison.

Bell Chevigny, a volunteer with a prison-writing program in New York who edited an anthology that included an Anderson piece, began corresponding with him through letters regularly in the late 1990s.

“He is the most peaceful and compassionate person,” she said through tears. “I think the state’s humanity falls short of his at this point.”

Davis disagreed Saturday in a 34-page document denying clemency, saying Anderson is indeed smart--smart enough to know better.

Anderson, the governor wrote, “is an extremely intelligent man. But his intelligence, ironically, also makes the brutality and indifference of his crimes all the more reprehensible.”