On the evening of November 13, 1989, William Ray Graves, an out-of-work construction worker, was at the New Liberty Theater in Camas, Washington, watching Honey, I Shrunk the Kids with his girlfriend and her 6-year-old son. The boy went to the restroom. A man picked him up and carried him out of the building, and the boy began to scream for help. "The boy started screaming, 'Help me! help me!'" the theater's co-owner, Cathy Asher, told reporters. He fought his way free and ran back inside, crying. A truck driver told Graves that a yellow Ford Pinto had just driven off fast. Graves found it about four blocks away, barely running. When the driver got out to raise the hood, Graves grabbed him, walked him back to the theater and, with the help of bystanders, tied his hands with a belt until police arrived. "I was not 100 percent sure he was the man," he said later.
The driver was Westley Allan Dodd, 28, a shipping clerk at a paper company in Vancouver. Before dawn he had confessed to the murders of three boys. A Camas police lieutenant, Mike Slyter, said of the child who had screamed and kicked his way loose: "The boy is a hero, I would say." A week later the boy received a share of a $10,000 reward, and a new cap from the police chief.
Dodd grew up mostly in eastern Washington, in Richland. His father, Westley James Dodd, known as Jim, and his mother, Carol, had three children: Westley, his brother Greg, 11 months younger, and a younger sister, Katherine. Jim Dodd remembered his eldest as a "very cute," happy small child, and Greg recalled the two of them playing army and sliding down mounds of snow. At school Westley was small, pigeon-toed and bookish, and other children picked on him. Jim said the boy was uncoordinated and could not throw or run like the others; Greg, though younger, often stepped into fights on his behalf.
The marriage was unhappy. Westley later called it "lousy" and told a court investigator in 1989 that his parents fought constantly, that his father had once blackened his mother's eye and that the children were often spanked with a belt. Jim Dodd admitted to The Seattle Times that he had met household problems with anger and had felt overwhelmed. Greg and Katherine remembered a normal, loving family. On July 3, 1976, Westley's 15th birthday, his mother told his father to leave, and Jim Dodd attempted suicide. The divorce followed in 1977. Greg and Westley would later describe it as a relief, but at the time Westley withdrew further into himself.
He had real gifts. At Chief Joseph Junior High he played clarinet in the marching band and helped his band teacher, Larry Bunch, with chores. Bunch called him "very responsible" and once considered him as a babysitter for his own children. Dodd had a talent for conducting, won a school directing award and was vice president of the drama club. At Columbia High School he faded from view. In 1979 he left abruptly; he had no class picture in the yearbook, and few classmates remembered him.
By Dodd's own later account, his offending began at about 13, when he exposed himself to children from an upstairs window of his parents' house. Police came, and little was done. In the fall of 1975 he was caught again and referred to juvenile authorities and counseling; he said at the time he did not think he had a problem. Through the rest of the decade he stalked and exposed himself to younger children and then began to molest them. A charge of communicating with a minor for immoral purposes, brought after he exposed himself to a group of schoolchildren, was dismissed. After he molested the daughter of his father's girlfriend, his father sent him to four months of counseling. At 18 he was arrested for soliciting a minor, and the charges were dropped because he said he was joining the Navy.
He enlisted in 1981, at 19, and volunteered for submarine duty, serving at Bangor and Bremerton. In May 1982 he offered four boys $50 each to come to a motel for strip poker. The charges were dropped, and the Navy took him off submarine duty but did nothing more. That summer he went absent without leave and received an administrative discharge, which he said he had asked for.
Back in Richland he worked at the Red Lion Motor Inn and lost the job after he molested a 6-year-old boy and pleaded guilty, in 1983, to communicating with a minor for immoral purposes, his first conviction. In February 1983 he moved to Lewiston, Idaho, to live with his father. Working a temporary job for a cable company at a promotion at the Nez Perce County Fairgrounds, he met a 9-year-old boy whose parents were divorced. He befriended the child and molested him in March and April 1983. "He was seeking male companionship and I did that to him," Dodd later told the Lewiston Tribune. Two counselors tried to treat him. Stephen Lindsley, a psychologist with the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare, described him as a "fixated offender" focused on boys of 10 to 12, stopped seeing him in June 1983 after he missed six of 12 appointments, and wrote that he remained "within a high-risk category." A second therapist, at the Asotin County Mental Health Center, also gave up after missed appointments. Lindsley later said he had warned Dodd he would hurt someone but could do nothing legally on "a gut feeling."
The boy told a counselor in 1984, his parents went to the police, and in June 1984 Lewiston police arrested Dodd. He also confessed to Clarkston police, but that case was never prosecuted. On August 1, 1984, Judge John H. Maynard sentenced him to 10 years in prison, then commuted the term to one year in the Nez Perce County Jail on condition that he undergo counseling. Court clerks thought the clean-cut young man looked like someone they would bring home to their parents. "The shorter the hair, the shorter the sentence," Dodd told the Tribune. He served about four months, part of it on work release, and said he began molesting again about a month after his release. Maynard later said he would not have shown leniency had he known Dodd's full record. Because the sentence had been commuted rather than suspended, a later judge ruled that the court's authority over him had lapsed, and in November 1987 he was released from Idaho's jurisdiction altogether.
In Lewiston he befriended George and Alice Olson, who ran a vacuum-cleaner store where he worked as a door-to-door salesman. He camped and fished with them, and Alice Olson later lived with him in Kennewick for about six months. She knew his history and tried, without success, to have him committed.
In June 1987, working as a security guard at a construction site in the Seattle area, Dodd tried to lure an 8-year-old boy away with a story about helping to find a lost child. The boy ran and told adults, who called police. Dodd admitted what he had meant to do, and said that if this child had not been available he would have found another. Prosecutor Rebecca Roe charged him with first-degree attempted kidnapping, a felony; he was convicted of attempted unlawful imprisonment, a gross misdemeanor. A court worker, Lan Remme, concluded in a presentence report that Dodd met the legal criteria for a "sexual psychopath" and recommended four years in the sexual psychopath program at Western State Hospital. The court did not follow the recommendation. A psychologist, Dr. Kenneth Von Cleve, wrote that Dodd's history of assaults on children was "the most extensive I have ever encountered in an offender of his age." In the same King County file Dodd described himself as "predatory and uncontrollable." He served 118 days, and the rest of a one-year sentence was suspended on condition of a year of counseling. "I've been getting incredible breaks from everyone," he later told the Lewiston Tribune.
By the late summer of 1989 he had moved to Vancouver, in Clark County across the Columbia River from Portland. He took a job as a shipping clerk at a paper company near Vancouver Lake and rented an apartment less than a mile from David Douglas Park.
Cole Neer was 11 and his brother William, called Billy, was 10. They lived in Vancouver, a few blocks from the park, and on Labor Day, September 4, 1989, they were riding their bicycles there. Their father was Clair Neer. The public record says little more about who they were as children, and the family largely kept its grief out of the newspapers.
According to the Washington Supreme Court's later summary of his diary, Dodd had spent the long weekend, September 2 through 4, walking the park for hours at a time, choosing secluded spots, judging the best times and bringing weapons. He carried a fillet knife in his sock. When he saw the two brothers, he ordered them to come with him and to bring their bikes, so that no one would see abandoned bicycles and start looking. When Cole asked why they had to follow him, Dodd answered that he had been told to bring them. He led them into a wooded area, tied them, and sexually assaulted Cole. Then he stabbed both boys. The court record notes that Billy, wounded, tried to run, saying "I'm sorry, I'm sorry" as Dodd caught him. Cole was dead when he was found later that day; Billy died on the way to the hospital. The next day Dodd put the knife in a manila envelope and threw it in a dumpster.
For weeks investigators had no suspect. At the time they said publicly that they had no evidence the boys had been molested.
Lee Joseph Iseli was 4 and lived in Portland. His parents, Bob Iseli and Jewell Cornell, had divorced about two years earlier. His mother worked as a deli clerk at a Portland grocery store; his father, a lifelong Portland-area resident, was a computer operator at a company that sold feed and supplies for horses. Lee had a big brother, Justin, then 9, who would later fill his own room with Little League trophies, baseball bats and Nintendo games. For years afterward Bob Iseli said he could still sense Lee playing on the back porch of the rented house where the family had lived.
On Sunday, October 29, 1989, around noon, Lee was at a school playground near his home with his brother Justin, where a group of older boys was playing football. Lee was off by himself. Dodd, who had looked over the playground the day before, walked up and asked whether he wanted to "have some fun and make some money." When the boy hesitated, Dodd took him by the hand while Justin's back was turned and led him to his car. Lee cried on the drive; Dodd held his hand and promised not to hurt him. At the Vancouver apartment, with his neighbor and landlord out, Dodd held the child through that day and night, abused him, photographed him and killed him by hanging on the morning of October 30. That afternoon, after work, he burned the boy's clothes and left his body in a trash bag near Vancouver Lake, keeping a single item of clothing.
Lee's body was found near Vancouver Lake on November 1. The Clark County Sheriff's Office, the Vancouver police and the Portland police formed a task force. Because the case crossed the state line, Portland homicide detective C.W. Jensen and Clark County sheriff's detective Dave Trimble worked it as partners. They compiled a file of 160 names. "Every time the phone rang I prayed it was not going to be another case like this," Jensen said. At Lee's funeral his small casket was topped with his photograph.
Two weeks later, Dodd went to the theater in Camas. When Camas police identified the man held by William Graves, they found that he had a record of sexual offenses against young boys, that he lived near David Douglas Park and worked near Vancouver Lake, and that the boy he had tried to take looked like Lee Iseli and was close to him in age. A Camas officer called Trimble at home.
The detectives questioned Dodd in the Camas police chief's office from 10:45 p.m. to 2:45 a.m., in two sessions. Trimble read him his Miranda rights; Dodd said he understood them, did not want a lawyer and was willing to talk. He admitted taking the child from the theater but denied the murders. "I like kids. I love little children. I would never hurt a child," he said. When the detectives raised a search of his home and car, he said he would probably talk to a lawyer first. Jensen asked whether he felt better talking about "the whole thing," and Dodd said he did. He looked upset, nearly cried and asked for water. Then he told them there was a briefcase under his bed with information about "Lee and the other boys." Jensen told him to go back to the beginning. Over about three hours he confessed to all three killings, and in a second, recorded interview, after fresh Miranda warnings, he went through it again. "It was like he was going over a shopping list," Trimble said.
Two judges signed warrants for his apartment and car. In the briefcase officers found an item of Lee Iseli's clothing, a photo album with pictures of the boy that Dodd had captioned, and his diary. Searchers also listed cameras, undeveloped film, knives and a bed rigged with white ropes. The diary began with a section Dodd titled "1968 to 1989," a record of his sexual history, followed by "Incident 1," the Neer killings, and "Incident 2," the abduction and murder of Lee. Its pages recorded more than 50 acts of molestation, plans for further killings and his view that killing gave him more of a "high" than molesting. Jensen said officers who later heard passages read at training seminars fainted, became ill or walked out. "We got lucky," he said. He called Dodd "the ultimate all-star homicidal maniac."
Clark County prosecutors charged Dodd with three counts of aggravated first-degree murder, one for each boy, and with attempted first-degree murder and first-degree kidnapping of the boy from the theater. He pleaded not guilty. In May 1990 his lawyers moved to suppress the confession and the evidence from the apartment. The court ruled the confession voluntary and the searches lawful, noting that even without the confession the police had probable cause: his recent move to Vancouver, the closeness of his home and workplace to the crime scenes, and a neighbor who had seen a boy resembling Lee Iseli in Dodd's apartment at the time of the murder, wearing only an undershirt.
In June 1990, after those rulings, Dodd changed his plea to guilty. A doctor, Dr. Maletzky, found him competent, and the judge questioned him closely before accepting the pleas to all three aggravated murders and the attempted murder of the Camas boy.
The penalty phase went to a jury. The judge went through the diary line by line, keeping out the "1968 to 1989" section and the part dealing with the theater abduction, and excluding some of the material about Lee's death. Dodd's lawyers and investigators gathered evidence that might have argued for mercy, but Dodd told them not to present it and would not let them call witnesses. The judge told him to sleep on the decision; the next morning he confirmed it. On July 14, 1990, the jury unanimously sentenced him to death for the murders of Cole Neer, Billy Neer and Lee Iseli. At the sentencing Jewell Cornell's sister read a statement on the family's behalf, calling him "scum of the earth" and saying she hoped he would rot in hell.
At the sentencing hearing Dodd objected to any appeal. He wrote to the Washington Supreme Court on January 5 and February 11, 1991. The trial court, he wrote, had gone out of its way to give him a fair trial, and the jury had looked for a reason for leniency and found none. "There is no reason to waste . . . time and money on what I firmly believe would be useless appeals," he wrote, asking to waive every right he could and to have only the review the law required. He told the justices they would share responsibility for any murder he committed if the state let him live, and he said that if he were imprisoned he would try to escape, kill guards if he had to, and go back to hurting children.
His request raised a question Washington's courts had never settled: whether a condemned prisoner could give up all review and simply be executed. The Supreme Court made his trial lawyers friends of the court, appointed a new attorney, Darrell Lee, a Clark County lawyer and businessman, to represent him, and ordered a fact-finding hearing in Clark County Superior Court on his competence. Bob Iseli went to the hearings in Vancouver in June 1991, though he found them painful. He suspected Dodd's wish to die was a tactic and feared he would change his mind. He blamed the state, which had arrested Dodd several times before, and had confronted Dodd by satellite on a national television talk show the month before. "As much as I would like him to go away, I know he would like me to go away, too," he said. He called his own presence "being a thorn in his side." Jewell Cornell stayed away from the hearings but said she would be at the execution. "He may have taken Lee away, but Lee will always be my son," she said. "He can't take that away."
Two psychiatrists and a social worker testified that Dodd was intelligent, free of psychosis and fully aware that waiving his appeals meant death. One diagnosed severe pedophilia, another pedophilia and sadism, and both said the disorder did not impair his judgment. Dodd testified that he would rather die than live his life in a cell, that he would not change his mind and that he would waive his appeals even if the death penalty were struck down and he could go free. Lee told the court his client had rationally weighed death against life without parole and preferred death. On June 12, 1991, the court found him competent and his decision "a considered decision," which he had "unwaveringly" kept.
On October 8, 1992, the Washington Supreme Court decided State v. Dodd. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Fred Dore held that a capital defendant could waive general appellate review but could not waive the review of his sentence that state law made mandatory. The court then conducted that review, compared Dodd's case with six other Washington cases involving three or more killings, found that the aggravating factors overwhelmed any possible mitigation, and affirmed the death sentence. Justice Robert Utter, joined by Justice Charles Smith, dissented. A condemned prisoner might change his mind, Utter wrote, and society's interest in applying the death penalty fairly was too great to let one man's wish control; to defer to Dodd would in effect make the state a participant in his suicide. Reconsideration was denied on November 19, 1992.
On November 30, 1992, Clark County Superior Court Judge Robert Harris reaffirmed Dodd's competence, named Darrell Lee as the only lawyer authorized to act for him in state court and signed the death warrant, setting the execution for January 5, 1993, a week before Governor Booth Gardner was to leave office. "It is my intention to let the death sentence be carried out," Gardner said. Dodd told Lee to ignore anyone who asked for clemency on his behalf and to sue anyone who tried to stop the hanging. "I do not want to die," he wrote to The Seattle Times late that year. "But I have been completely honest in saying that I must die."
Under Washington's 1981 death penalty law Dodd could choose between lethal injection and hanging. He chose the rope, saying he deserved to die the way his third victim had. No one had been hanged legally in the United States since 1965, and Washington had not executed anyone since Joseph Chester Self was hanged on January 20, 1963. Between 1909 and 1982 it had been a misdemeanor in Washington to publish the details of an execution, and the state had never performed an autopsy on a hanged prisoner.
The American Civil Liberties Union went to court, arguing that hanging was cruel and unusual and predicting a botched death. The state Supreme Court upheld the law. In Thurston County Superior Court, Judge Richard Strophy refused to let the execution be videotaped but granted the challengers some ground: the hanging had to take place in full view of the witnesses, with the curtain open until all movement stopped; the time from the opening of the trap to the pronouncement of death had to be recorded; an independent citizen witness could attend; and the autopsy would be photographed. In federal court another condemned man, Charles Rodman Campbell, convicted in 1982 of murdering two women and an 8-year-old girl in Snohomish County, asked to film Dodd's hanging as evidence for his own challenge to the method. U.S. District Judge John Coughenour refused, and on the eve of the execution a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit agreed, 2 to 1.
On January 4, 1993, the state Clemency and Pardons Board unanimously declined to recommend that the governor intervene, despite a petition from two church groups. Hours later the Washington Supreme Court, by a vote of 7 to 1, refused to halt the execution. "We think he has a right to make a choice," Chief Justice Dore wrote. Utter dissented again, in 13 pages. Seattle attorney Timothy Ford had argued that hangings did not always bring a quick, painless death; Assistant Attorney General Kathleen Mix answered that experts expected unconsciousness to be almost immediate.
At 4:40 p.m. on January 4, Dodd was moved to a holding cell in the execution building at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla. Prison staff had rehearsed every phase of the procedure, timing the walk from cell to gallows with a stand-in and testing the drop with a sandbag. That evening Dodd signed a new will. An earlier document would have sent his remains to a Nashville woman he had met through prison correspondence; the new one left them to his sister, with a private memorial to be arranged by the prison chaplain. For his last meal he asked for what the rest of the prison was eating: salmon, scalloped potatoes, mixed vegetables and coleslaw. Darrell Lee spent three hours with him and said afterward that Dodd had asked for forgiveness, showed remorse and had forgiven his father.
He was hanged at 12:05 a.m. and pronounced dead at 12:09. He was 31. It was Washington's first execution since 1963 and its 74th overall, and the first legal hanging in the United States since 1965. Twelve journalists watched as the state's media pool, along with Clair Neer and Jewell Cornell. Supporters and opponents of the death penalty stood outside in the snow.
A faulty microphone made his last words hard to hear, and the witnesses pieced them together afterward. He said he had once believed there was no hope and no peace and had been wrong: "There is hope; there is peace. I found both in the Lord Jesus Christ." He offered no apology to the families in the room. Clair Neer was seen to hiss and shake his head. Jewell Cornell appeared relieved, witnesses said.
The reporters disagreed about what they had seen. Joe Hart of KNDU-TV said the death was quick and far less terrible than people had been led to expect. Michael Rollins of The Oregonian saw slight movement after the drop, found it grotesque and called the execution a legal homicide. Attorney General Ken Eikenberry described the process as clinical. Mary Dodd, the wife of Dodd's brother Greg, said: "This is what we need to close the book." The family, she said, had been hurt to learn of the death from television rather than from the state. Alice Olson said she had prayed and would miss him. Dodd's body was taken to the King County medical examiner, Dr. Donald Reay, for autopsy.
Dodd's arrest came while Washington was already rewriting its approach to sex offenders. In May 1987 the state had been forced to release Earl Shriner at the end of a 10-year sentence, though officials knew he planned to harm children; two years later he raped and mutilated a 7-year-old boy in Tacoma. That case, coming a year after a Seattle businesswoman was murdered by a man on work release, led Governor Gardner in May 1989 to appoint a Task Force on Community Protection. According to a 1996 history by the Washington State Institute for Public Policy, Dodd was caught in Camas while that task force was meeting, and his confession became part of the public outcry around its work. Its recommendations became the Community Protection Act, passed unanimously by both houses of the Legislature in February 1990. The act lengthened penalties for sex offenses, created a sex offender registry and community notification, set up programs for victims and, most controversially, allowed the state to civilly commit "sexually violent predators" after their prison terms ended. Washington was the first state to pass such a post-prison commitment law, and the state Supreme Court upheld it in 1993. The 1996 history credits Shriner's case as the direct trigger and lists Dodd's arrest as part of the context rather than as the cause.
Dodd's own record was the strongest argument the reformers had. A year before the hanging, the Lewiston Tribune reviewed it under the headline "the system failed." Dodd told the paper he "got away with a lot of things." In a letter to the state Supreme Court in late 1991 he wrote that he had never taken treatment seriously and had gone along only to stay out of jail so he could keep molesting children.
The hanging itself became evidence in the national argument over the method. Charles Campbell's challenge went to an 11-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit, and the trial court heard days of testimony about Dodd's execution. Dr. William Brady, who pronounced death for the state, testified that when the trap opened there was no twisting or swinging, only one or two small efforts at breathing. Dr. Reay testified that Dodd lost consciousness within seconds. Another state expert said he could not be certain of that. On February 8, 1994, in Campbell v. Wood, a divided court held that hanging under Washington's protocol was not cruel and unusual. Judge Stephen Reinhardt, dissenting with three colleagues, noted that Dodd was the only person hanged in the country since 1963 and that he had refused to assert his rights. Reinhardt argued that a single hanging proved little, that the state had controlled every source of evidence about it, and that the state's executioner had no experience beyond Dodd. Judge Robert Poole wrote separately that hanging was as unacceptable today as "the rack and screw."
Four more men were executed in Washington under the 1981 law, the last in 2010. On October 11, 2018, in State v. Gregory, the Washington Supreme Court unanimously struck down the death penalty as imposed in an arbitrary and racially biased manner, and the eight remaining death sentences were converted to life without parole.
Dodd's account of his own life came largely from himself, in diaries, court testimony, letters and interviews, and some of it cannot be checked. The diary's count of more than 50 molestations is his own record; most of those acts were never charged. His statements of remorse varied: he told the Lewiston Tribune he cried about his crimes every night, told a Tacoma officer who had gone to high school with him that he cried at night and then caught himself planning the next attack, and told the PBS program Frontline in 1992 that he did not know whether he had feelings at all. His lawyer said he showed remorse in his last hours; the families in the witness room heard no apology. Bob Iseli doubted to the end that Dodd's wish to die was sincere.
Reports also differ on smaller facts. Some 1989 wire copy gave the Camas boy's age as 5 and transposed the Neer brothers' ages; court records give 6, and 11 for Cole and 10 for Billy. One Seattle Times profile placed Lee Iseli's abduction at a Vancouver playfield, while the court record and other reports put it at a Portland school playground. HistoryLink states that a jury convicted Dodd; the court record shows he pleaded guilty and the jury decided only the sentence.
July 3, 1961: Westley Allan Dodd is born (date inferred from his 15th birthday, July 3, 1976).
July 3, 1976: His mother asks his father to leave; his parents divorce in 1977.
1979: Leaves Columbia High School in Richland.
1981-1982: Serves in the Navy; removed from submarine duty after offering boys money to come to a motel; discharged.
1983: First conviction, in Richland; moves to Lewiston, Idaho, in February and abuses a 9-year-old boy that spring.
August 1, 1984: Sentenced in Idaho to 10 years, commuted to one year in jail; serves about four months.
June 1987: Tries to lure an 8-year-old boy in the Seattle area; convicted of attempted unlawful imprisonment and serves 118 days.
May 1989: Governor Booth Gardner appoints the Task Force on Community Protection.
September 4, 1989: Cole Neer, 11, and Billy Neer, 10, are killed in David Douglas Park, Vancouver.
October 29-30, 1989: Lee Iseli, 4, is abducted from a Portland school playground and killed in Dodd's Vancouver apartment.
November 1, 1989: Lee's body is found near Vancouver Lake.
November 13-14, 1989: Dodd is caught at the New Liberty Theater in Camas and confesses to the three murders.
February 1990: The Legislature passes the Community Protection Act.
June 1990: Dodd pleads guilty.
July 14, 1990: A Clark County jury sentences him to death.
June 1991: Competency hearing in Clark County Superior Court; on June 12 the court finds his waiver of appeals knowing and voluntary.
October 8, 1992: The Washington Supreme Court affirms the death sentence in State v. Dodd.
November 30, 1992: Judge Robert Harris signs the death warrant.
January 4, 1993: The Clemency and Pardons Board declines to intervene; the state Supreme Court refuses a stay, 7 to 1.
January 5, 1993: Dodd is hanged at Walla Walla at 12:05 a.m.
February 8, 1994: The Ninth Circuit, relying in part on evidence from Dodd's hanging, upholds Washington's hanging protocol in Campbell v. Wood.
October 11, 2018: State v. Gregory ends the death penalty in Washington.