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SAN QUENTIN— Stephen Wayne Anderson, described by his defenders as the poet laureate of the condemned and by prosecutors as a stone-cold killer, was executed early Tuesday. 

Anderson, 48, was pronounced dead from lethal injection at 12:30 a.m. PST after his request for a last-minute reprieve was turned down by the U.S. Supreme Court. 

Anderson was sentenced to die for killing 81-year-old Elizabeth Lyman after breaking into her house on Memorial Day 1980. Members of Lyman’s family, who had asked that Anderson’s sentence be commuted to life in prison without parole, chose not to attend the execution. 

Anderson’s attorneys had asked Gov. Gray Davis to spare Anderson’s life. They portrayed the Lyman killing as a mundane burglary gone wrong and argued that Anderson was the victim of a harsh childhood and incompetent trial lawyer. 

Prosecutors countered that Anderson was an escaped convict with a long criminal record when he broke into Lyman’s home. They pointed out that after shooting her in the face he ransacked the house, watched television in her living room and made himself a meal in her kitchen. 

Anderson would later confess to killing Lyman and two men in Utah, including a fellow prison inmate. He also confessed to six contract killings in Nevada, although there was no corroborating evidence of those murders. 

Predicting, correctly, that Davis would not grant clemency, Anderson’s attorneys fought an unsuccessful legal battle to get the clemency decision turned over to the lieutenant governor, claiming Davis was biased. 

The defense team also lost its legal challenges to the sentence, which included claims that Anderson got bad legal representation – two other clients of the same lawyer did get their death sentences overturned for that reason — and that he was jailed too long before being charged after his 1980 arrest. 

Anderson was the 10th inmate executed in California since voters reinstated capital punishment in 1978. 

In 1981, Anderson joined a death row that numbered fewer than 50 inmates. As of Tuesday, the count was over 600. 

Anderson left no official last words. But he did leave behind scores of poems that his supporters said showed a soul reformed. 

His lawyers quoted one, “Unchained Visions,” in a statement they released after the execution: 

“If no other misses you, I will:/I will sense the emptiness/where once you breathed.” 

“It has been a privilege to represent him. We will miss him greatly,” his public defender, Margo Rocconi, wrote. 

Rocconi was the last person to communicate with Anderson. 

As he lay on the gurney in the death chamber, she mouthed the words, “I love you,” three times to the condemned man. Witnesses said he responded: “Thank you.”