Clarence Wayne Dixon was born on August 26, 1955, in Fort Defiance, Arizona. He grew up in a location near the Navajo Nation, which had an impact on his background. In 1974, he graduated from Chinle High School. Following high school, he went to Arizona State University in 1977 to study engineering.

However, 1977 was also the year when his life took a serious turn. He was arrested for an assault with a deadly weapon after attacking a 15-year-old girl. Dixon claimed that the girl reminded him of his ex-wife. During the attack, he struck her on the head with a metal pipe. After this incident, he was evaluated by two psychiatrists. They concluded that he was not competent to stand trial. As a result, he was found not guilty by reason of insanity. The judge who made this ruling was Sandra Day O'Connor, who would later become a U.S. Supreme Court justice.

On January 6, 1978, 21-year-old Deana Lynne Bowdoin had dinner with her parents and then went to a bar with a friend. They spent time there until midnight. Deana decided to go home after that. She returned to her apartment in Tempe, Arizona, in the early hours of January 7.

Around 2:00 a.m., Deana's boyfriend arrived at her apartment and found her dead on her bed. She had been strangled with a belt and stabbed several times. There was also evidence of sexual assault, as semen was found, but it could not be matched to any suspect at the time.

Deana's murder remained unsolved for over twenty years, becoming a cold case. In 2001, a cold case detective matched DNA from the crime scene to Clarence Dixon. At the time, Dixon was serving a life sentence in an Arizona prison for a sexual assault he committed in 1986. Investigators learned that he had lived across the street from Deana when she was murdered. However, her family and friends did not know of any connection between her and Dixon.

Dixon was charged with Deana's murder. The rape charge was dropped after reaching the statute of limitations. On January 24, 2008, he was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to death. His lawyers argued that he was mentally incompetent and had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. He had experienced hallucinations throughout his life and was declared legally blind in 2015.

Dixon had previously been found not guilty by reason of insanity in a 1977 assault case, which had taken place just two days before Deana's murder.

After a lengthy process of finding new lethal injection drugs following a botched execution in 2014, Arizona announced it would resume executions. On April 5, 2022, the Arizona Supreme Court issued an execution warrant for Dixon, scheduling his execution for May 11, 2022.

Dixon was given the choice between lethal injection and lethal gas. He did not select a method, so he was executed by lethal injection. On April 28, the Arizona Board of Executive Clemency denied his request for clemency.

Dixon was executed on May 11, 2022, becoming the first person to be executed in Arizona since 2014. The execution began at 10:19 a.m., and he was pronounced dead at 10:30 a.m. He maintained his innocence in his final statement.