Douglas Franklin Wright was executed by lethal injection at the Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem in the first minutes of September 6, 1996. It was the first execution in Oregon in 34 years and the first in the state by lethal injection. He had been convicted of two murders in 1970 and, in 1993, of aggravated murder in the October 1991 shootings of three homeless men whom he had recruited on the streets of Portland with the promise of a job and driven to remote forest roads on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation. A fourth man killed in the same series, a member of the Makah Tribe, fell under federal jurisdiction; Wright was indicted for that killing but never tried. In the last week of his life he confessed to kidnapping and killing a 10-year-old Portland boy who had disappeared in 1984.
The Oregon Supreme Court described the 1991 killings as separate incidents carried out apparently according to a common plan. The case was broken because one of the men he took to the forest ran away.
Little about Wright's childhood appears in court records or the wire reports used here. What the record shows is a long criminal history. In 1970 he was convicted of two murders committed in Portland in 1969; the Oregon Supreme Court later said those killings had no factual connection to the 1991 case. He pleaded guilty. An Associated Press account written at the time of his execution described the victims as an Oregon woman and her mother and said he served 12 years for the killings. A federal appeals court, reviewing his criminal history in 1994, also counted a 1969 assault conviction.
Wright's lawyer in the 1970 murder cases was disbarred in 1979 for failing to file federal income tax returns and later died, according to a footnote in the 1996 Oregon Supreme Court opinion. Wright would later argue that this lawyer had represented him inadequately and that his guilty pleas had not been knowing and voluntary.
He was released from the Oregon State Penitentiary in 1982. In 1984 he was imprisoned again, this time for first-degree robbery and second-degree kidnapping, the Warm Springs tribal newspaper Spilyay Tymoo reported in 1991. He was released again in July 1991. By October of that year he was 51 years old and living in Tigard, a suburb southwest of Portland.
Luke Tredway was 10 years old and lived in southeast Portland. On May 23, 1984, he left a friend's house to walk home, a distance of less than a mile, and never arrived. Nearly a year later, around his 11th birthday, his mother, Kathleen Tredway, spoke to United Press International. "Happy birthday, Luke, wherever you are," she said. "We love you and we miss you." She told the reporter that there were still no solid leads, and she was careful to say that the police were not to blame; the problem, she said, was that there was simply no information. "He just disappeared," she said.
His photograph had been printed on posters and milk cartons and shown twice on national television, including a CNN program about missing children. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children had passed on reported sightings from around the country, but Portland police detective David Schmitt said they had all turned out to be children who looked like him. "We are still looking for him," Schmitt said. The case remained open for 12 years. His disappearance is still listed in the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs), with May 23, 1984, as the date of last contact.
No one was charged. Wright's confession in 1996, described below, is the only account that connects him to Luke's death, and it was never tested in court.
The Oregon Supreme Court summarized the method in a few sentences. Wright recruited homeless men in downtown Portland, telling them he was hiring laborers to build a camp for young people in the Cascades near Mount Hood. He fed them, drove them to an area on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation in Wasco County, and shot each man in the head with a powerful handgun.
U.S. Highway 26 crosses the reservation on its way from the Mount Hood area. The bodies were found off the W-300 forest road, about 22 miles northwest of the town of Warm Springs.
The first body was found on October 7, 1991, by local woodcutters, about 1.75 miles off Highway 26 on the W-300 road. He was Anthony Barker, known as Tony, 27. Spilyay Tymoo reported that he had left a detention facility in San Diego without authorization earlier that month and was being sought by California authorities. In Portland he had become one of the men Wright approached with the offer of work. His father attended Wright's trial; the trial judge noted that Mr. Barker stared at Wright as he walked back from the witness chair after testifying.
The next trip went differently. According to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, two homeless men in downtown Portland, Randy Henry, who also used the name Marty McDaniel, and Tony Nelson, accepted a man's offer of work outside the city. They left with him in a Toyota with Oregon plates. The driver stopped at his apartment, then drove toward Mount Hood and into a forested area that turned out to be inside the reservation.
The driver and Nelson walked away from the vehicle. Henry heard a gunshot and saw the driver holding a long-barreled revolver. He ran. Barefoot, his feet bleeding, he made it to Highway 26, where a motorist, Ervie Dominguez, picked him up; the tribal paper reported that the driver was an off-duty police officer. Dominguez took him to a rest area in the Government Camp area and police were called, but Henry left.
Tony Nelson was 31 and an enrolled member of the Makah Tribe of western Washington. Hunters found his body on October 22, about 2.5 miles off Highway 26 on a spur of the W-300 road. Ballistics tests later showed that the gun that killed him had also killed Tony Barker, whose body lay within a mile of his. Nelson's tribal membership meant that his death, an offense by a non-Indian against an Indian on reservation land, was a federal matter. The three other dead men, like Wright, were not Native American, and their deaths fell to the state.
Investigators from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the tribal police and the Wasco County Sheriff's Office worked the scene together, and the FBI joined the investigation. On October 26 and 27, searchers with dog teams and mounted search-and-rescue volunteers from Warm Springs and from Jefferson and Clackamas counties combed the area and found two more bodies, more than a mile off the highway on another spur road. They had not been identified when the tribal newspaper went to press. Besides Tony Barker, the men whose deaths Wright was convicted of in state court were William Clement Marks and William Ray Davis, named in Amnesty International's 1996 appeal. The sources available for this account do not say which body was which, and give no further details about either man's life.
All four men had died of gunshot wounds to the head. "There are strong similarities in these cases," Sergeant Bill Lennox of the Wasco County Sheriff's Office told reporters at the search base camp. The bodies were fully clothed and lying on the ground, he said. Investigators believed the men had been lured to the area with the promise of work. For people on the reservation, the paper wrote, the discovery left the community stunned, and many residents were reconsidering driving alone and unarmed into the woods.
The day after Nelson's body was found, agents found Henry in downtown Portland. He identified the apartment building where the driver had stopped, although he could not pick Wright out of a photo lineup. Henry also put investigators in touch with a third person whose information pointed them to Wright. During an FBI interview, a former fellow inmate identified Wright, and vehicle registration records confirmed the link.
Agents obtained search warrants for Wright's apartment and car. They seized two guns, one of them a .357 Sturm Ruger Blackhawk revolver found in his pickup. Ballistics tests tied the .357 to the deaths of both Nelson and Barker. Henry later identified Wright, his truck and his home.
By November 1, 1991, Wright was in the Justice Center jail in Portland, held on an attempted aggravated murder charge and a federal armed career criminal charge, with bail set at $1 million, and facing a Wasco County charge of attempted aggravated murder over the attempt on Henry. Under the division agreed between agencies, Wasco County kept jurisdiction over three of the deaths and the FBI over Nelson's.
The federal government tried Wright on two counts of being a felon in possession of firearms. A jury convicted him, and the judge sentenced him above the normal guideline range because of earlier convictions that did not count in the standard criminal history score. In scoring that history, the court counted back from August 30, 1991. On appeal Wright argued that pretrial publicity about the murders had tainted the jury, that the FBI agent's affidavit for the search warrant had left out important facts, and that the warrant's partly inaccurate description of his pickup should have led to the gun being suppressed. The Ninth Circuit rejected each argument in an unpublished memorandum on March 18, 1994. The trial judge, it noted, had asked prospective jurors whether they recognized Wright's face, and adding the omitted facts would not have defeated probable cause.
The state case, numbered CR92-073, was tried before a jury in Wasco County Circuit Court. The prosecution relied on two theories to raise the killings to aggravated murder under Oregon law: that Wright had a previous murder conviction, and that more than one person had been killed in the same criminal episode. The jury found him guilty of eight counts of aggravated murder, one count of first-degree kidnapping and one count of attempted aggravated murder.
Several moments from the trial survive in the Oregon Supreme Court's opinion. While in jail awaiting trial, Wright had talked with a friend who remarked that everything seemed to be going "okay." Wright agreed, "except for the guns." The state used the remark as evidence that he had possessed the murder weapon, and the trial court allowed it. When Barker's father glared at Wright, the defense asked for a mistrial; the judge, who had seen the moment, found it was not serious enough to warrant one.
In the penalty phase, Wright's lawyers argued that he should not be executed. Two mental health professionals had tested him and, according to Justice Fadeley's later opinion, found that he did not have a normally functioning brain; one reported clear evidence of organic impairment of the right frontal area. That was the main mitigating evidence the jury heard. On cross-examination the prosecutor asked the defense psychologist about a pending, unresolved professional complaint against him. The defense moved for a mistrial; the judge refused and instructed the jury instead. The defense also tried to call acquaintances of Wright to say they did not want him executed, and the judge excluded that testimony.
The jury's answers led to a sentence of death. After the verdict, a juror told defense counsel in a chance meeting that she had asked the bailiff whether prison inmates would be called as witnesses and had been frightened at the prospect. The defense raised the matter two months after trial and asked to interview the jurors; the court refused.
Under Oregon law a death sentence goes automatically to the Oregon Supreme Court. Wright did not try to stop that review. His public defenders argued that the 1970 convictions should not have been used against him, that the jail remark and the psychologist's cross-examination had been handled wrongly, and that the jury issue required an inquiry.
On March 21, 1996, the court affirmed the convictions and the death sentence. On the 1970 convictions it held that the trial court had been entitled to find that Wright failed to prove his claims about his old lawyer and his guilty pleas. Justice Fadeley agreed with the convictions but would have ordered a new penalty phase. In that opinion the prosecutor's questioning of the psychologist was intentional misconduct that had damaged the only substantial mitigation evidence the jury heard.
Two weeks before that ruling, on March 7, 1996, the Ninth Circuit had decided a separate appeal over the federal murder charge. Wright had asked to dismiss the indictment for Nelson's death, arguing that after his firearms conviction a second federal prosecution for conduct arising from the same events violated the ban on double jeopardy. The court disagreed: the two offenses had different elements, and under the Supreme Court's decision in United States v. Dixon that was the only test. The Nelson case remained headed for a bench trial, which never took place.
After the Oregon Supreme Court ruled, Wright said he wanted "to get on with it." At a hearing on his death warrant in Wasco County Circuit Court on June 6, 1996, he said he did not intend to seek post-conviction relief, the next stage of review in Oregon. His execution was set for 12:01 a.m. on September 6, 1996.
Amnesty International issued an urgent appeal on August 8. It reported that Wright had said he no longer wished to live under the conditions of Oregon's death row, where contact visits and smoking were banned and prisoners had one hour a day for exercise and showers. Governor John Kitzhaber was described as personally opposed to the death penalty but had said he would not intervene. Opponents planned a four-day march from September 5 to 8, stopping at the penitentiary on the night of the execution.
Lawyers working with the Oregon Criminal Defense Lawyers Association tried to act for him anyway. On August 26 they filed a petition for post-conviction relief in his name in Marion County Circuit Court, along with medical and psychological reports and sealed prison treatment records. The ACLU also brought a motion, heard on August 28. Their argument was that Wright's choice was effectively suicidal and that his competence to make it had never been examined. He had not sought death at his arrest or after the verdict, they pointed out; he had allowed his lawyers to present mitigation and had not tried to block his automatic appeal.
Wright never joined the case. On September 3 Judge Rodney Miller ruled that no one else had standing to file for him, and said that Wright was legally competent to proceed. The Oregon Supreme Court heard the appeal on September 4 and affirmed on September 5, the day before the execution. Assuming that a "next friend" could ever file for a prisoner, it held, the lawyers had produced no meaningful evidence that a mental disease or defect had substantially affected Wright's ability to decide, so no competency hearing was required. Because no valid petition had been filed, the automatic 60-day stay that Oregon law gives after post-conviction proceedings never took effect. The court decided a parallel case, Bryant v. Thompson, the same day.
About a week before he died, Wright confessed to kidnapping and killing Luke Tredway. After reviewing the confession, Portland police closed the 12-year-old case. In a written statement given to the penitentiary superintendent on the eve of his execution, he apologized to the families of all his victims and said he hoped his death would bring them peace. "I can no longer live with my guilt, my personal shame nor my unbearable grief for the death of Luke Tredway," he wrote. The confession was never examined in a courtroom, and the Associated Press accounts used here do not say whether Luke's remains were found.
Wright went to the execution chamber at the Oregon State Penitentiary cooperatively, prison officials said. Ten invited witnesses watched through a window, among them Wasco County Sheriff Art Labrousse, whose office had investigated the 1991 killings. Four reporters also watched. They said that by the time they were brought in Wright was already strapped down with the intravenous lines in place, and that what they saw felt sterile. Bill Cooper of KEX radio in Portland said it was hard to report on an event when they had seen only the final minutes.
Wright made no final statement. Before the drugs took effect he looked at Janice Downing, the mother of one of the men he had killed, and mouthed "I'm sorry." She nodded. He was pronounced dead at 12:16 a.m., about ten minutes after the injection began. A prison log showed that in his last days he had listened repeatedly to Bob Dylan's "Knockin' on Heaven's Door."
Outside, opponents of the death penalty held candles, while others in the crowd cheered when the hour arrived. Corrections director Dave Cook said the execution had gone without major problems; spokesman Jim Lockwood said it had gone as planned and that inmates showed little reaction during the day. Labrousse called the death calm and humane, in contrast to the way Wright's victims had died.
His body was taken to Portland for an autopsy by the state medical examiner and returned to a Salem funeral home for cremation. His family declined to accept the remains, leaving the state to decide what to do with the ashes.
Oregon voters had abolished the death penalty in 1914 and again in 1964, and restored it in 1920 and 1978. The state's modern death penalty law dates from 1984, according to the Oregon Department of Corrections. The last execution before Wright's was that of LeeRoy Sanford McGahuey, in the gas chamber on August 20, 1962. Wright was the first person executed in Oregon by lethal injection.
Only one more execution followed. Harry Charles Moore, who also gave up his appeals, was executed in 1997. Willamette Week noted in 2008 that the two men executed in Oregon since executions resumed nationally were both convicted of multiple murders and had both volunteered for death by waiving their appeals.
Governor Kitzhaber, who had declined to stop Wright's execution, declared a moratorium on executions in November 2011. His successor, Kate Brown, kept it in place and on December 13, 2022, commuted the sentences of all 17 people then on Oregon's death row to life without parole. The state had closed its death row in 2020.
The federal murder charge in Tony Nelson's death ended with Wright's execution, without a trial.
Proven by final conviction: two murders in 1969 (convicted 1970), and the aggravated murders of Anthony Barker, William Marks and William Davis, the kidnapping, and the attempted murder of the man who escaped (Wasco County, 1993, affirmed 1996). Also proven: the federal firearms counts.
Charged, never tried: the killing of Tony Nelson. The federal indictment was pending, with a bench trial planned, when Wright was executed. The Ninth Circuit's description of the evidence, including the ballistics match, has never been tested in a trial.
Confessed only: the 1984 kidnapping and killing of Luke Tredway. Portland police closed the case on the strength of the confession; no court ever examined it.
Details that vary between sources: the number of victims the state convictions cover (the federal court and the AP say three; one sentence of the Oregon Supreme Court opinion says he was convicted of killing four men); the date of the death sentence (one human rights report gives May 3, 1993, while other accounts give October 1993); how the 1969 victims were related (the AP says a woman and her mother); and the gap since Oregon's previous execution, given as 34 years by the AP and the Department of Corrections, and as 37 years in one national newspaper report.
1969: Wright kills two women in Portland; he is also convicted of an assault that year.
1970: convicted of the two murders after pleading guilty.
1979: his 1970 defense lawyer is disbarred.
1982: released from the Oregon State Penitentiary.
May 23, 1984: Luke Tredway, 10, disappears while walking home from a friend's house in southeast Portland.
1984: Wright is imprisoned again for first-degree robbery and second-degree kidnapping.
April 1985: Luke's mother, Kathleen Tredway, appeals for information around his 11th birthday.
July 1991: Wright is released from prison.
October 7, 1991: woodcutters find the body of Tony Barker, 27, on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation.
October 1991: Randy Henry escapes on foot when Tony Nelson is shot; a motorist takes him to a rest area near Government Camp.
October 22, 1991: hunters find Tony Nelson, 31.
October 26 to 27, 1991: a search finds the bodies of William Marks and William Davis.
By November 1, 1991: Wright, 51, of Tigard, is in custody; a .357 Ruger Blackhawk from his pickup is matched to the deaths of Barker and Nelson.
1993: Wasco County jury convicts him of eight counts of aggravated murder, kidnapping and attempted aggravated murder; death sentence.
March 18, 1994: Ninth Circuit affirms his federal conviction on two felon-in-possession counts.
March 7, 1996: Ninth Circuit rejects his double jeopardy challenge to the federal Nelson indictment.
March 21, 1996: Oregon Supreme Court affirms the convictions and death sentence.
June 6, 1996: at the death warrant hearing he says he will not seek post-conviction relief.
August 8, 1996: Amnesty International urgent appeal.
August 26, 1996: lawyers file a post-conviction petition in his name in Marion County.
The week before his execution: Wright confesses to the kidnapping and killing of Luke Tredway.
September 3, 1996: Judge Rodney Miller dismisses the petition.
September 5, 1996: Oregon Supreme Court affirms the dismissal in Wright v. Thompson.
September 6, 1996: Wright is executed by lethal injection, pronounced dead at 12:16 a.m.
1997: Harry Charles Moore becomes the second and last person executed in Oregon to date.
November 22, 2011: Governor Kitzhaber declares a moratorium on executions.
December 13, 2022: Governor Brown commutes all 17 Oregon death sentences.