A 34-year-old vagrant with a long record of felony arrests, Anderson was living at a Seattle half-way house in 1976, when he stole the director's car and credit cards, embarking on a spree of robbery and murder spanning twenty states. Scores of victims were robbed, and at least eight murdered, before Anderson was run to earth in Minnesota. Pleading guilty to homicide there, he received the state's maximum sentence of forty years imprisonment. In a subsequent trial, Anderson also pled guilty to the murder of a fruit vendor in Broward County, Florida, receiving a sentence of death. On September 2, 1982, the state supreme court voided the sentence, ordering a new trial on constitutional grounds that no attorney was present when Anderson made his self-incriminating statement.