The state of Washington carried out its first execution in nearly three decades just after midnight Tuesday, sending convicted child killer Westley Allan Dodd to the gallows for the brutal murders of three young boys. Dodd, 31, became the first American inmate executed by hanging in the United States since 1965, ending a case that 𝓮𝔁𝓹𝓸𝓼𝓮𝓭 catastrophic failures within the judicial system.
The execution at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla came after a jury determined Dodd should die for the murders of 11-year-old Cole Neer, his 10-year-old brother William Neer, and 4-year-old Lee Iseli. Witnesses reported the condemned man showed no emotion as the trap door opened beneath him at 12:05 a. m.
, bringing to a close one of the most disturbing criminal cases in Pacific Northwest history.
Dodd’s final statement offered a chilling glimpse into his psyche. “I confessed to all my crimes,” he told a reporter in the days before his death. “I believe in heaven as the Bible says.
I have my reservations, but I’d like to think I could go up to the three small boys, embrace them, apologize and love them with a genuine wish not to hurt them in any way.”
The crimes that brought Dodd to the gallows began on Labor Day, September 4, 1989, when he approached brothers Cole and William Neer in Vancouver’s David Douglas Park. Armed with a six-inch knife and driven by fantasies he had meticulously documented in personal journals, Dodd forced the boys off the beaten path and deeper into the woods, where he bound them with shoelaces, sexually assaulted them, and stabbed them to death.
Less than 15 minutes after Dodd fled the scene, a teenage hiker discovered the mutilated bodies and ran to alert authorities. The gruesome discovery triggered a massive manhunt across the Vancouver area, with investigators scrambling for any clue that might identify the killer who had so brutally ended two young lives.
Dodd watched the manhunt from a distance, filling a scrapbook with press clippings about his own crimes. He reportedly spent the intervening weeks masturbating to the memories and writing in his diary, waiting for the bloodlust to drive him out hunting again. The wait would not be long.
On October 29, 1989, Dodd crossed the river into Portland, Oregon, and abducted 4-year-old Lee Iseli from the playground of Richmond Elementary School. The child was molested and photographed in the 𝓷𝓾𝓭𝓮 at Dodd’s apartment, his ordeal briefly interrupted by trips to McDonald’s and Kmart, where Dodd purchased the boy a toy before resuming the sexual 𝓪𝓫𝓾𝓼𝓮.
The murder was completed at 5:30 the next morning when Dodd choked his young victim unconscious and finished the job with a rope, suspending Lee’s body from a rod in the closet. After work that night, Dodd dumped the body near Vancouver Lake at the Washington State Game Preserve, where a hunter discovered it on November 1.
Police still had no solid leads beyond a rough sketch compiled from eyewitness descriptions in Portland, but Dodd had reached a point of no return. His homicidal urges had pushed him beyond all rational control, and he was acting with increasing recklessness and desperation.
On November 11, 1989, Dodd attempted to abduct a young boy from a Vancouver theater but quickly abandoned the effort when the child resisted and drew attention. Just two days later, after scribbling another plea to Satan for assistance in his journal, Dodd drove to Camas, Washington, to try his luck at another theater showing the family film “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.”
Dodd scoured the audience with methodical precision, keeping his eye on a little boy who was alone as he moved toward the foyer. When a 6-year-old boy entered the lobby to use the restroom, Dodd smiled and told the child to go in first. Moments later, desperate screaming shattered the silence of the theater corridor.
The child, identified as James, had been grabbed by Dodd in the restroom. Theater employees watched in confusion as a young man with black hair and a prominent mustache carried the screaming, writhing boy out of the bathroom, patting his back and telling him to calm down. But the child’s repeated pleas for help raised immediate alarm.
Staff chased Dodd through the dark streets as he tightened his grip on the terrified youngster. He reached his car and fumbled for his keys, glancing back just long enough for James to break free and run. The boy grabbed the leg of the theater owner who was following them and shouted, “That man wanted to hurt me.”
William Ray Graves, the mother’s boyfriend, had heard the commotion and was enraged when he learned what had almost occurred. “Fire in my eyes,” he later stated. When Dodd was spotted in a mustard yellow Pinto wagon, Graves raced out into the dark streets, intending to pursue the vehicle on foot.
In a stroke of luck, the Pinto broke down in the middle of the road.
Graves approached carefully, asking Dodd if he needed help so as not to spook him. When Graves had his opportunity, he grabbed hold of Dodd and took him back to the theater, restraining himself from attacking the assailant even though he wanted to beat the life out of him. Graves sat with the murderer in the movie foyer until police arrived.
Dodd, then 28, initially denied any participation in the recent deaths of Cole and William Neer and Lee Iseli. But authorities questioned him about his employment at a paper mill approximately a mile from where Lee’s body had been found. In less than an hour of detention on November 13, 1989, Dodd confessed to everything.
The confession proved to be only the beginning of the horror. The more Dodd talked about injuring children, the more he appeared to relish it, as if his admissions were a chance to relive his crimes. He described atrocities in graphic detail and spoke of a torture rack he had planned to build, complete with illustrations in his journals.
During a police search of his apartment, investigators uncovered a suitcase beneath the bed containing the most unsettling evidence yet: photographs of children, including one of his victim Lee Iseli. His personal journals shocked and saddened the community, containing detailed discussions of planned rapes and murders, sketches of his torture device, and references to a private pact with Satan.
In one journal entry, Dodd wrote: “I’ve now asked Satan to provide me a six to ten year old boy to make love to, suck and play with, photograph, 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 and do my exploratory surgery on.” Another page detailed his search for compliant children who could be taught Lucifer’s ways and serve as an assistant to the devil “through me.”
Dodd was charged with the murders of William and Cole Neer and Lee Iseli. He first pleaded not guilty, but in January 1990 he changed his pleas to guilty on all charges. Later that year, he read a statement to a Clark County judge admitting to all counts, including his plans to commit murder.
No trial would be held to determine his guilt, but a jury would decide whether he should be executed.
The jury of six men and six women sat stunned, disgusted, and saddened as they read from Dodd’s journal and viewed photographs of his brutality toward Lee Iseli. The defense called no witnesses and offered no evidence. Dodd sat still during the proceedings, reportedly telling The Oregonian that he had heard the testimony so many times it had become old to him.
The prosecution sought the death penalty, and on July 15, 1990, the jury agreed. Dodd’s execution date was set, and he would ultimately choose death by hanging over lethal injection, a decision that made him the first inmate in nearly three decades to die on the gallows in the United States.
The path to the gallows was a long one marked by years of missed opportunities to stop a predator who had been offending since childhood. Dodd was born on July 3, 1961, in Richland, Washington, into a loveless environment where he was frequently overlooked by his parents in favor of his two younger siblings. He reported being bullied in school and denied emotional growth.
Dodd was aware of his sexual attraction to neighborhood boys as early as age 9. By 13, he was exposing himself to children from his bedroom window. When one child reported him and police were called, Dodd got off easy because the witness had not seen his face.
The ordeal taught him to seek pleasure elsewhere.
He progressed from exposing himself to more violent activities, riding his bike around the neighborhood seeking children aged 10 and under. “Boys didn’t report me as often as girls,” he stated, so he went looking for them. His father, Jim Dodd, later admitted to The Oregonian that he recognized his son’s sexual deviancy through their conversations but mainly avoided talking about it.
Dodd’s first victims were his own family members. At age 14, he abused his 8-year-old cousin in a closet, assaulting her 6-year-old brother the next day and another male relative a few weeks later. When his cousins were not accessible, Dodd put himself in settings where he would be among children, befriending local boys and offering to babysit.
At 16, Dodd was invited to stand in for a neighbor’s regular babysitter and assaulted the children while they slept. He pursued employment that required interaction with children, working as a camp counselor and using games like spin the bottle, strip poker, and skinny dipping to entice youngsters into improper contact while disguising the 𝓪𝓫𝓾𝓼𝓮 as harmless fun.
“I’ve done this to other kids before and they enjoyed it,” he would remark, playing on children’s fear, guilt, and naive curiosity. He attempted to normalize the situation for little children who did not know any different, persuading befuddled youngsters that he was teaching them activities that adults perform and that it was totally normal.
Dodd’s fantasies became increasingly violent over the years. He wrote about wanting to eat the genitals of his victims. His arrests had no effect on him.
At 15, he had been detained for exposing himself but was not prosecuted. Instead, authorities suggested he seek therapy. Throughout the years, Dodd attended court-ordered therapy sessions on an irregular basis, if at all.
Now 18 and anxious for fresh victims after the youngsters he had been abusing regularly moved away, Dodd went after children he did not know. He found he could be more aggressive with them than he had first thought. In one incident, he came upon a little child fishing alone in a forested location and asked whether the child wanted to see something “very nice.”
He forced the youngster to strip, but they were interrupted by another group of children.
Dodd joined the U. S. Navy two years later, in part to avoid pending charges of child molestation.
“If I hadn’t joined the Navy then I may have been killing within a year,” Dodd said weeks before enlisting in September 1981. While stationed at a submarine base in Bangor, Washington, he continued to prey on children living on the base and made excursions to Seattle to approach kids in movie theater bathrooms.
Dodd used money as a lure, tricking children into going into secluded areas to help him retrieve something. He learned that arcades were perfect places to find kids who needed money for games and prizes, giving them quarters for each of his demands. At one point, he was arrested for offering to pay boys $50 each to go to a motel and play strip poker, but after he admitted to police that he planned on molesting them, the charges were mysteriously dropped.
Eventually, Dodd received a general discharge from the Navy. He was apprehended after approaching a young boy and found guilty of attempted indecent liberties, serving 19 days in jail with another order to seek counseling. On December 29, 1982, he was back in jail in Benton City, Washington, caught undressing a child after luring him away from a playground.
He pled guilty in January 1983 and served 30 days before being released to seek court-ordered counseling once again.
In May 1984, Dodd was arrested for molesting a 10-year-old boy. Although his initial sentence would have kept him off the streets, the judge, for reasons unknown, allowed Dodd to remain free by giving him a suspended one-year sentence on the condition that he attend counseling and conduct himself as a good citizen. During this period, Dodd was arrested twice for driving with a suspended license but was not returned to jail.
While on the streets, Dodd was free to pursue more targets. He chose an apartment building with lots of kids and took jobs at fast food restaurants, convenience stores, and charity truck routes. On his routes, he noted which houses had children, recording addresses with plans to return.
He marked isolated areas on maps and offered to babysit for free as a “birthday present,” buying a co-worker’s kid fishing gear before sexually assaulting him.
Dodd relocated to Seattle in 1986 at age 25 after sexually assaulting at least 30 children and getting away with it almost scot-free. “When I arrived in Seattle I realized that a molestation was less likely to be reported than an attempt. I decided to be a little more assertive in the future.
I wouldn’t take no for an answer to my wishes any longer,” he wrote. He targeted the most vulnerable children, including a roommate’s 2-year-old son who was partially deaf and could not yet speak, tying the boy’s hands with a bathrobe strap so he would not struggle.
The concept of force thrilled him. Dodd continued to daydream about murdering his victims. “The more I thought about it, the more exciting the idea of murder sounded.
I planned many ways to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 a boy. Then I started thinking of torture, castration, and even cannibalism.” While he claimed he decided to murder in order to keep himself from going to jail, this is difficult to believe given that he was hardly prosecuted for any of his prior crimes.
Dodd chose his first murder victim in 1987, an 8-year-old boy he met while working as a security guard at a construction site. But the child sensed his new friend was dangerous after Dodd asked him to help find a lost little boy. The 8-year-old said he needed to go home to get toys for the lost boy, promised he would be right back, and instead stayed inside.
His mother called police, and Dodd was convicted on a misdemeanor count of attempted unlawful imprisonment.
He was released in October with yet another order for psychiatric treatment. Dodd went through the motions until his probation expired in the fall of 1988, at which time he promptly abandoned therapy and went back on the hunt. By then, he had begun to collect his morbid daydreams in a diary complete with discussions of planned rapes and murders, sketches of the torture rack, and details of his pact with Satan.
Dodd would later tell authorities he was not serious about his bargain with the devil, but his writings suggested otherwise. By late summer 1989, he clearly had murder on his mind. On the night before the Labor Day attack on the Neer brothers, he wrote: “If I can get home I’ll have more time for various types of rather than just one quickie before murder.”
The execution of Westley Allan Dodd brought a measure of closure to the families of his victims, but questions remain about how the system failed so spectacularly for nearly three decades. Over and over, judges released Dodd with suspended sentences and court-ordered counseling that he never took seriously. Over and over, he returned to the streets to victimize children.
Dodd’s case has become a grim case study in the dangers of an overcrowded judicial system and the tragic consequences of lenient sentencing for violent predators. His own boasts about how simple it was to fool the judicial system and avoid going to jail stand as a damning indictment of the failures that allowed him to continue his reign of terror.
As the state of Washington closed the book on Dodd’s life, the families of Cole and William Neer and Lee Iseli were left to mourn sons who should have had decades ahead of them. The three boys were victims not only of a vicious predator but of a system that had numerous opportunities to stop him and failed at every turn.
Dodd’s final days were marked by expressions of regret, but for those who sat through his trial and read the pages of his journal, the remorse rang hollow. His writings detailed not just the crimes he committed but the ones he still planned to commit, describing in graphic detail the torture and murder of children he had not yet met.
The hanging of Westley Allan Dodd at 12:05 a. m. on January 5, 1993, was the first execution in Washington state in nearly 30 years and the first hanging in the United States since 1965.
It was carried out after the U. S. Supreme Court declined to intervene, rejecting appeals from Dodd’s attorneys who argued that hanging constituted cruel and unusual punishment.
Dodd chose hanging over lethal injection, a decision that prosecutors noted was consistent with his lifelong pattern of seeking attention and control. Even in death, he dictated the terms, ensuring that his execution would make history and cement his place in the annals of American crime.
The legacy of Westley Allan Dodd is one of profound tragedy and systemic failure. A child predator who admitted to molesting more than 30 children before committing his first murder slipped through the cracks of the justice system repeatedly, despite arrests, confessions, and court orders. Each lenient sentence emboldened him further, teaching him that he was effectively untouchable.
In his own words, Dodd acknowledged the inevitability of his trajectory. “If I hadn’t joined the Navy then I may have been killing within a year,” he said in 1981. He was right.
And the justice system, with its revolving door of therapy orders and suspended sentences, did nothing to stop him.
The boys he murdered are remembered not just as victims but as warnings. Cole Neer, 11, and William Neer, 10, were brothers who went to a park on a holiday afternoon and never came home. Lee Iseli, 4, was snatched from a school playground where he should have been safe.
Their families have spent decades living with the knowledge that their sons might still be alive if the system had done its job.
Westley Allan Dodd is dead, hanged by the state he terrorized. But the questions his case raised about how society handles predators, how courts weigh leniency against public safety, and how a confessed child molester could walk free time and again remain as urgent today as they were on the night of his execution.
