BREAKING: A man convicted in the 1978 murder and sexual assault of an ASU student as well as another sex assault case is scheduled to be executed in May, the first Arizona execution since 2014: abc15
On January 7, 1978, 21-year-old Deana Bowdoin, an ASU student, was sexually assaulted and stabbed to death in her Tempe apartment.
The case went cold at the time, until about 20 years later when DNA connected Dixon to the murder. Dixon was already serving prison time for a separate 1986 sexual assault conviction. Dixon was sentenced to death after a jury found him guilty. He was indicted for Bowdoin’s murder in 2002 and he has exhausted all appeal options, according to the Attorney General’s Office.
All executions were halted by a State Supreme Court Judge in 2014, after what some lawyers call the"botched" execution of death row prisoner Joseph Wood.