WALLA WALLA, Washington — Westley Allan Dodd got exactly what he wanted just after midnight Tuesday, becoming the first person in the United States in nearly three decades to die by hanging, and doing so not as a victim of the system but as its most willing participant.
Dodd, 31, was pronounced dead at 12:09 a. m. at the Washington State Penitentiary, the state’s first execution since 1963 and the nation’s first hanging since 1965.
He dropped through the trap door with a heavy crack, and witnesses said there was no struggle, no movement—nothing but quiet, controlled finality.
What made this execution extraordinary was not the method alone, but the man who chose it. Dodd was Washington’s first and only volunteer for execution, waving all appeals and demanding that the state carry out his sentence. “I have to be.
I will 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 again,” he said in a jailhouse interview, staring directly into the camera.
The state had to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 him, Dodd argued, because he could not be trusted to stay alive. He had told authorities for years that his urges were escalating, predatory and uncontrollable. The courts let him walk anyway, time after time.
This time, there would be no walking free.
His crimes were so grim that courtroom veterans sought counseling and jurors required psychiatric help. Reporters who covered the proceedings found themselves haunted by what they heard. The details were so horrifying that even his own therapist concluded that Dodd ought to die.
Authorities described his record as a road map of failure, a decades-long spiral of escalating violence that began in his early teens. By his own count, he victimized dozens of children, and his targets were always the most defenseless—far too young to stand a chance against even a physically unremarkable predator.
The worst part, by any measure, was that the system kept releasing him. Arrested, treated, released; arrested again, treated again, released again. He never served more than four months for any offense, often just days.
The man who confessed he liked what he did would enter treatment and continue his compulsions, and the courts would send him back into the community.
Dodd’s case would change Washington law, but too late for William and Cole Neer, and too late for Lee Iseli. The three boys never made it home in 1989, and their murders became the anchor of a case that 𝓮𝔁𝓹𝓸𝓼𝓮𝓭 systemic failures at every level.
On November 13, 1989, Dodd wrote in his diary: “5:25 p. m. Now going to CAS, we’ll check out local parks before movie.”
It was his final diary entry. He went to the Liberty Theater, where “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids” was playing, and slipped into the restroom with a child he had already picked as his prey.
That plan failed. The boy escaped, screaming, shaken but unharmed. Dodd fled but was caught a few blocks away.
This time, the system did not let him walk. This time, the diary and the confessions and the escalating pattern finally caught up with him. Two years and change later, he was in Walla Walla, counting the hours to his own death.
Dodd was not merely willing to die; he craved it. He waved all appeals, baffling his attorneys and frustrating those who sought to spare him. When the American Civil Liberties Union filed a last-minute appeal on behalf of 26 Washington taxpayers, it was not to question his guilt or his sentence, but to challenge the method.
The ACLU called hanging a cruel, mutilating and uncertain punishment, and argued that tax dollars should not fund such an outdated practice. Ten hours before the scheduled execution, the Washington Supreme Court denied the appeal in a 7-1 ruling, with only Justice Robert Utter dissenting in a 13-page rebuke that called hanging gruesome and inhumane.
There was a bitter irony at the heart of the ACLU’s argument. Dodd had been offered a choice between lethal injection and hanging. He chose the noose.
“Hanging,” he said. “That’s the way I’m going to go. I don’t think I deserve a neat, clean, painless little death.”
His attorney, Daryl Lee, defended the choice, arguing that lethal injection was not the humane alternative its proponents claimed. “What could be more painful than a lethal injection where they miss the vein and say, ‘Oh, gee, we have to try again. You have to live one more minute’?”
Lee said. Dodd did not want that, Lee insisted, and did not believe it was humane.
The legal fight did not end with the state court. A rare request hit federal court in San Francisco, not to stop the execution but to film it. The request came from Charles Campbell, the next inmate in line for the same rope.
Campbell believed footage of the hanging might buy him time. The judges ruled 2-1 against him.
Back in Washington, a citizen group made a similar request for a videotape of the execution, arguing that it should be preserved for the record. That request was also denied. Dodd’s final check recorded him at 5-foot-9 and 139 pounds, not much mass to strap down, yet every inch mattered in the precise mathematics of a hanging.
It had been nearly 30 years since the nation’s last hanging, and just as long since Washington had used its execution chamber. The forgotten space was back in play, with fresh paint and a crew following the execution manual to the letter. Every detail was checked twice: weight, drop, the length of the rope, every inch in between.
As early as December 7, officials had bought the rope: Manila hemp, 1¼ inches thick. They boiled it, stretched it, waxed it and oiled it—a process designed to remove the recoil and allow the knot to glide cleanly. Washington was ready for its first execution in three decades.
At 4 p. m. on the day of his death, Dodd was offered dinner.
He asked for whatever the rest of the inmates were having. No special request. The records show he ate, though no word on how much.
What was on the tray—broiled salmon, scalloped potatoes, mixed vegetables and coleslaw—was documented. His appetite was not.
As night fell, the state penitentiary glowed under floodlights. Outside, it felt less like a prison and more like a spectacle, with a stadium chant twisting for the rope. “What the heck?
Stretch his neck,” some in the crowd called out. A fence split the crowd, with police holding the line.
On one side, candle-lit protesters sang and prayed, Amnesty International among them. On the other, cheering supporters waved signs and lit fireworks. The numbers told the story: supporters of the execution outnumbered protesters 4 to 1.
The media lot was packed, satellite trucks lining the pavement with dishes tilted to the sky.
Most reporters arrived hours early, flown in from across the country. Right on the hour, the gates opened and reporters were let in 10 at a time. IDs were taken, swapped for badges, hands stamped with WSP.
Meanwhile, Dodd sat with his attorney, Daryl Lee, for hours, talking, organizing, preparing.
Together they wrote the will Dodd had once drafted in anger. The original version, sending his ashes to a pen pal, was scrapped. The new version left them to his sister with a request for a private memorial.
It was part of making peace with his father, who never gave him love. His sister Kathy agreed the family was missing that warmth.
Outside, the tension finally snapped. Five hardcore protesters broke from the main crowd and climbed a snowy embankment near a guard tower, likely aiming to disrupt the execution or force a response. They got one, arrested on the spot and spending the rest of the night in Walla Walla County Jail.
After winding through a maze of dim tiers and reinforced doors, the witnesses reached the final stop. Only 12 made the cut. That was the rule.
Witnesses were picked by lottery from the crowd that entered earlier that night. Numbers were drawn, names were called, and dozens were turned away.
After a final pat-down, the witnesses were placed behind glass. Just seconds after midnight on January 5, 1993, Dodd was led into the upper level of the half-century-old chamber. As the witness screen rose, he stepped onto the trap door and approached the microphone.
The sound system failed. He was barely audible.
Media reconstruction later pieced together his final words. “I was once asked by somebody, I don’t remember who, if there was any way offenders could be stopped,” he began. “I said, ‘No.’
I was wrong. I was wrong when I said there was no hope, no peace. There is hope.
There is peace. I found both in the Lord Jesus Christ. Look to the Lord and you will find peace.”
The near boy’s father—the father of the child Dodd had not killed—shook his head, visibly angered by Dodd’s religious parting words. The rope, 7 feet 1 inch long, was calculated to his build. It was set behind his left ear.
The hood was placed. His wrists and ankles were strapped.
The executioner pulled the lever. With a heavy crack, Dodd fell through the wooden floor. Witnesses saw no struggle, no movement—none of the horrors opponents had warned of.
It was quiet, controlled and final. He remained in view for a minute, then the screen closed.
At 12:09 a. m. , Wesley Allen Dodd was pronounced dead.
By all accounts, it went as planned.
Dodd’s final hours mirrored his life: isolated, with no family present. But not all ties were cut. Just days earlier, his mother and sister had written letters that were later shared in interviews, holding love without erasing the truth.
“I still love you. I always will. I’ll remember the good times,” his mother wrote.
His sister Cathy added, “You’ll always be my brother.” She once wondered if more affection might have changed him—more hugs, more love—but she had let it go. “I think Wes had some kind of brain problem.
He’s just not all there.” That sense of something missing showed in his final interview, granted to a local reporter just hours before the execution.
Dodd spoke calmly about religion, confession and forgiveness. “A lot of people won’t believe me when I say I’m sorry, but I need to say it. If I’ve confessed all my sins, I believe what the Bible teaches.
I’ll go to heaven.” Then his words turned darker. “I’d like to believe I could go up to the three little boys and hug them, tell them I’m sorry, love them with real true love.
No desire to hurt them.”
For those who had followed the case, the execution brought no easy closure. The families of William and Cole Neer and Lee Iseli carried a grief that no state action could ease. Doyle Near, the father who had confronted the system’s failures, sat among the witnesses and watched the man who murdered his son die by the state’s hand.
What Dodd left behind was a case study in failure—a system that kept releasing a confessed predator despite his own warnings. He told authorities his urges were escalating, predatory and uncontrollable, and the courts let him walk. The diary he kept was his outlet.
“Just writing it down was exciting,” he said. “By the time I started, I became completely obsessed.”
He called his crimes “incidents,” numbered his victims and logged his methods in chilling detail. The 5:25 p. m.
entry on the day of his final arrest was his last. The state of Washington changed its laws because of Dodd, closing the loopholes that allowed him to slip through. But the change came years too late for the three boys who never made it home.
The execution, by all accounts, went exactly as planned. The rope was properly prepared, the drop was precise, and death was declared at 12:09 a. m.
Washington had carried out its first execution in three decades, and the man who demanded it got his wish.
But the case of Westley Allan Dodd did not end with his death. It stands as a haunting question about a system that failed its most vulnerable citizens, a narcissist who sought and received the ultimate attention, and a state that finally, after years of missed opportunities, carried out the sentence its courts had imposed.
Dodd got what he wanted. Those who knew the case best understood that was part of the tragedy all along.
