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 and came back crying. A man had hit him in the stomach and tried to take him. 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 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. Within hours he had confessed to the murders of three boys.
Dodd grew up mostly in eastern Washington, in Richland. His 15th birthday was July 3, 1976, the day his mother asked his father to leave; his parents divorced the next year. He had a younger brother, Greg, and a younger sister, Katherine. The Seattle Times described him as a small, bookish boy who was picked on at school. At Chief Joseph Junior High he played clarinet and was vice president of the drama club. He left Columbia High School in 1979.
His offending began at about 13, when he exposed himself to children from a window. Over the next decade it continued, and it was repeatedly met with dropped charges, short jail terms and counseling he did not finish. Charges for trying to get two girls into his car were dropped when he said he would join the Navy. In the Navy he was removed from submarine duty after trying to lure boys to a motel, and he was later discharged. In 1983 he pleaded guilty in Richland to communicating with a minor for immoral purposes, his first conviction.
He then moved to Lewiston, Idaho. In 1983 he abused a 9-year-old boy there, and in June 1984 he was arrested. On August 1, 1984, Judge John H. Maynard sentenced him to 10 years in prison, then commuted it to one year in the Nez Perce County Jail on condition of counseling. Dodd served four months. Two therapists had already stopped seeing him after missed appointments. One of them wrote that he remained "within a high-risk category."
In June 1987, in Seattle, he was arrested for trying to lure an 8-year-old boy from a construction site where he worked as a security guard. The boy ran and told adults. Charged with first-degree attempted kidnapping, a felony, Dodd was convicted of attempted unlawful imprisonment, a gross misdemeanor. He served 118 days. A psychiatrist who evaluated him that year, Dr. Kenneth Von Cleve, wrote that his history of assaults on children was "the most extensive I have ever encountered in an offender of his age." A King County court report that year quoted Dodd calling himself "predatory and uncontrollable." "I've been getting incredible breaks from everyone," Dodd later told the Lewiston Tribune.
By 1989 he was living in Vancouver, less than a mile from David Douglas Park.
Cole Neer, 11, and his brother William, known as Billy, 10, lived in Vancouver. Over Labor Day weekend in early September 1989 they were in David Douglas Park when Dodd attacked them. He stabbed both boys. They were found dead in the park, and for weeks police had no suspect. Their father, Clair Neer, would be one of the two parents who witnessed their killer's execution.
Lee Iseli was 4 and lived in Portland with his mother, Jewell Cornell, a deli clerk; his parents had divorced about two years earlier. His father, Bob Iseli, a computer operator at a feed and tack company, also had an older son, Justin. On October 29, 1989, Dodd abducted Lee and took him to his apartment in Vancouver, where he killed him. Lee's body was found near Vancouver Lake. At his funeral his casket was topped with his photograph.
Portland homicide detective C.W. Jensen and Clark County Sheriff's detective Dave Trimble worked the case together because it crossed the state line. They compiled a list of 160 names. "Every time the phone rang I prayed it was not going to be another case like this," Jensen said.
When Camas police called Trimble about the man from the theater, Dodd at first admitted taking a child but said he would never harm one. Then he told the detective that there was a briefcase under his bed with information about "Lee and the other boys." In about three hours he confessed to all three killings. "It was like he was going over a shopping list," Trimble said. Detectives found his diaries, which recorded the killings and more than 50 acts of molesting children. "We got lucky," Jensen said.
Dodd pleaded guilty. He would not let his trial lawyer call witnesses on his behalf, and in 1990 a Clark County jury unanimously sentenced him to death. At the sentencing, Jewell Cornell's sister read a statement to him on the family's behalf.
Dodd refused to appeal. He wrote to judges urging a quick execution and told the justices of the state Supreme Court they would share responsibility for any murder he committed if the state let him live. He chose hanging over lethal injection, saying he deserved to die the way he had killed his third victim. "I do not want to die," he wrote to The Seattle Times. "But I have been completely honest in saying that I must die."
His request raised a question Washington's courts had not settled: whether a condemned prisoner could waive all review and be executed. The state Supreme Court ordered a hearing in Clark County Superior Court, held in June 1991, to question him about his wish to waive his appeals. His attorney, Darrell Lee, supported his choice. Bob Iseli attended the Vancouver hearings, though he found them painful. He doubted Dodd was sincere and blamed the state, which had arrested Dodd several times before. He called his own presence "being a thorn in his side."
The American Civil Liberties Union sued to stop the hanging as cruel and unusual. In the final hours before the execution, the state Supreme Court refused, 7 to 1, to block it. "We think he has a right to make a choice," Chief Justice Fred Dore wrote. Justice Robert Utter dissented. The state Clemency and Pardons Board unanimously declined to recommend commutation.
Dodd was hanged at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla at 12:05 a.m. on January 5, 1993, and pronounced dead at 12:09. He was 31. It was Washington's first execution since 1963 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. Protesters for and against the death penalty stood outside in the snow.
Witnesses had trouble hearing his last words and 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." Clair Neer was seen to hiss and shake his head. Jewell Cornell appeared relieved, witnesses said. Dodd offered no apology. Mary Dodd, his sister-in-law, said: "This is what we need to close the book."
A year before the hanging, the Lewiston Tribune reviewed his record under the headline "the system failed." Dodd told the paper he "got away with a lot of things." Four more men were executed in Washington under the same 1981 law, the last in 2010. On October 11, 2018, in State v. Gregory, the Washington Supreme Court struck down the state's death penalty as arbitrary and racially biased in its application, and the remaining death sentences were converted to life without parole.