Westley Allan Dodd

What the record shows

Westley Allan Dodd was an American serial killer who murdered three young boys in and around Vancouver, Washington, in the autumn of 1989. Arrested in November 1989 after a failed abduction at a movie theater in Camas, he confessed to all three killings, pleaded guilty in June 1990 and was sentenced to death by a Clark County jury on July 14, 1990. He refused to appeal, chose hanging over lethal injection, and was hanged at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla on January 5, 1993, at the age of 31.

Dodd was born on July 3, 1961, in Toppenish, Washington, and grew up mostly in Eastern Washington, attending schools in Richland. The Seattle Times, in a profile published two days before his execution, traced a long record of offenses against children that began in his teens and continued through a Navy enlistment that ended in discharge. In 1983 he pleaded guilty in Idaho to an offense against a minor and served a reduced jail term, and in 1987 he was charged in Seattle with attempted kidnapping after trying to lure a young boy into a building; he was convicted of a lesser gross misdemeanor and served 118 days. UPI reported at the time of his arrest that he had completed a sexual deviancy treatment program in Washington.

On September 4, 1989, the bodies of two brothers, Cole Neer, 11, and William, known as Billy, 10, were found in David Douglas Park in Vancouver, where they had been riding their bicycles. Both had been stabbed. On October 29, 1989, four-year-old Lee Iseli was taken from a school playground in Portland, Oregon, around midday. He was killed the next morning in Vancouver, and his body was found near Vancouver Lake; the Washington Supreme Court opinion gives the date of discovery as November 1, while UPI reported it as October 31. A two-state police task force that included the FBI worked the killings, and a $10,000 reward was offered, but UPI reported that Dodd had not been among the roughly 50 people investigators were examining.

The case was solved on November 13, 1989. Dodd tried to take a six-year-old boy from the restroom of the New Liberty Theatre in Camas. The boy broke free, theater staff raised the alarm, and William Graves of Washougal, the boyfriend of the boy's mother, followed Dodd's car. When the car broke down nearby, Graves held Dodd until police arrived. According to the Washington Supreme Court, detectives interviewed him from late that night into the early hours of November 14; he first denied any knowledge of the murders, then admitted the attempted abduction and the three killings, and repeated the account in a taped interview. A search of his Vancouver home turned up a diary and other evidence, according to the Wikipedia article.

Prosecutors charged Dodd with three counts of aggravated first-degree murder, attempted first-degree murder and first-degree kidnapping. He initially pleaded not guilty, but changed his pleas to guilty in June 1990 after adverse rulings on evidence. At the penalty phase in Clark County Superior Court he testified and asked for death, according to the Wikipedia article, and on July 14, 1990, the jury returned death sentences for the murders of the Neer brothers and Lee Iseli. He also received a 50-year sentence for the attempted murder. Washington law at the time allowed a condemned prisoner to choose between lethal injection and hanging, and Dodd chose hanging.

Dodd declined to appeal. After a June 1991 hearing, the trial court found him competent and his waiver knowing and voluntary. On October 8, 1992, the Washington Supreme Court held in State v. Dodd that a defendant may waive general appeal but not the mandatory statutory review of a death sentence; conducting that review, it found the sentence supported by the evidence and not disproportionate, and affirmed. Civil liberties groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, argued that hanging was cruel, but their challenges did not stop the execution. On November 30, 1992, Judge Robert Harris reaffirmed Dodd's competence and signed a death warrant setting the date for January 5, 1993.

Dodd was hanged shortly after midnight on January 5, 1993, and pronounced dead at 12:09 a.m. Clair Neer, the father of Cole and Billy, and Jewell Cornell, Lee Iseli's mother, were among the witnesses. The Seattle Times reported that it was the first execution in Washington since 1963 and the first legal hanging anywhere in the United States since 1965. According to the Wikipedia article, his case was later cited in the debate that led Washington to authorize civil commitment of people found to be sexually violent predators.