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Washington Executes James Elledge, Who Killed Twice and Asked to Die for It

On parole for a 1974 Seattle motel murder, Elledge killed Eloise Fitzner in a Lynnwood church in 1998, pleaded guilty and urged the jury to sentence him to death.

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Illustration of a penitentiary in eastern Washington under floodlights at night. Not an actual scene from the case.

James Elledge told the jury that a wicked part of him needed to die, and he never stopped asking. Early on August 28, 2001, Washington put him to death for the murder of Eloise Fitzner.

Elledge, 58, was pronounced dead at 12:52 a.m. at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla, the second person executed by lethal injection in the state and the fourth since Washington restored the death penalty. He made no last statement. No members of either family watched; the witnesses were reporters, lawyers, a deputy prosecutor and two Lynnwood police officers. There had been no last-minute appeals, and earlier that month Gov. Gary Locke had declined to grant clemency.

On April 18, 1998, Elledge lured Fitzner, 47, and another woman to the Lynnwood church where he worked part time as a janitor, promising them dinner and gifts. He tied them up and killed Fitzner. He held the other woman until the next day before letting her go, and on April 21 he called the police from a Tacoma motel room and surrendered. In May he pleaded guilty to aggravated first-degree murder in Snohomish County Superior Court. At the penalty trial that October he urged the jurors to sentence him to death, telling them, "There is a very wicked part of me, and this wicked part of me needs to die." They deliberated for about 90 minutes before agreeing.

It was the second time he had killed. In May 1974, in an argument over rent at the El Dorado Motel in Seattle, Elledge killed the night manager, Bertha M. Lush, 63. He was convicted of first-degree murder in 1975 and sentenced to life with the possibility of parole. Paroled in 1989, he went back to prison twice for parole violations and was last released in August 1995. He was still on parole for Lush's murder when he killed Fitzner.

Elledge refused every appeal. On July 5, 2001, the Washington Supreme Court, in its mandatory review, found that he had given up his appeals knowingly, voluntarily and intelligently, and upheld the death sentence. "It's good that there'll be an end to this," Fitzner's brother said the day before the execution.

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