He made them carry him. For twelve years, Charles Rodman Campbell insisted he would never be executed. On the night of May 27, 1994, his arguments were exhausted.
The trapdoor dropped at 12:08 a. m. within Washington State Penitentiary, Walla Walla.
He was pronounced dead six minutes later, becoming the last person hanged in Washington history.
Campbell, 39, had been sentenced to death for the brutal murders of Renee Wicklund, her eight-year-old daughter Shanna, and neighbor Barbara Hendrickson. The killings took place on April 14, 1982, in Clearview, Washington.
But the story leading to that chamber began years earlier, with an assault, a broken parole system, and a string of ignored warnings.
Prison officials said Campbell refused to walk to the gallows. When guards opened his cell just after midnight, they found him curled rigidly on the floor.
He appeared unwilling or unable to stand. Guards used pepper spray to extract him, then strapped him to a board. Four guards carried the 223-pound condemned man down the corridor to the execution chamber.
In the chamber, Campbell was lifted to his feet, the noose was placed around his neck, and a black hood was pulled over his head. Even then, witnesses reported, he kept moving and twisting, delaying the inevitable for as long as possible. He offered no clear final statement.
His last hours had been spent with his former girlfriend Judith Dirks and their son Jacob, but any words exchanged were private.
Campbell’s last meal, provided in the holding area, consisted of fish sticks, tossed green salad, scalloped potatoes, and a cherry tart. He barely touched it.
The execution was witnessed by relatives of his victims, including Renee’s sister Lorraine Ehlers-Iverson, who had flown from North Dakota. Afterward she said, “A long tortuous ordeal has come to a close. We can go to sleep at night knowing Charles Campbell can never come out of prison to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 again.”
Don Hendrickson, Barbara’s husband, also sat in the witness room. It was Don who had found the bodies on the evening of the murders. He walked across the street when Barbara did not come home, found the sliding glass door slightly open, and moved through the house until he saw his wife on the hallway floor.
He stared straight ahead through the execution, and later returned to the grave he would share with Barbara in 1999.
The crimes that put Campbell on death row began decades earlier. Renee Wicklund was a 23-year-old mother living in Clearview in December 1974.
On an unseasonably warm afternoon, Campbell sprinted up her driveway, forced his way inside, and sexually assaulted her while her baby daughter sat in the room. Afterward, he thanked her and walked away. Police matched a mug shot almost immediately, but Campbell fled before arrest.
He was captured in early 1976 and convicted. Renee testified against him. Barbara Hendrickson also testified.
Campbell received three concurrent sentences totaling 40 years. He served just five years. In June 1981, the parole board classified him as eligible for lower custody based on incomplete records.
Hundreds of violation reports, including assaults and threats, had never been forwarded by the reformatory.
Campbell was moved to a work-release facility in Everett, just ten miles from Renee’s home. No one told her.
No one notified the county sheriff. Campbell obtained court transcripts that included her address. Neighbors noticed footprints in the snow beneath Renee’s windows.
Her mother, visiting from North Dakota, saw Renee staring into the darkness with a look of dread.
On the afternoon of April 14, 1982, Campbell drove to Clearview and parked in the tree line. He carried a butcher knife taken from Judith Dirks’s kitchen.
Renee was home sick with strep throat. Shanna arrived home from school at about 4:20. Barbara came over to check on Renee and was in the kitchen making Jell-O with the little girl.
The attack lasted nearly two hours. All three were killed.
An eleven-year-old neighbor, Josette Frays, saw a tall man with dark curly hair moving through the bushes with a large knife.
Police later found jewelry from the victims in Campbell’s car and in his pockets. He was arrested and charged with three counts of aggravated murder. In 1982, a jury convicted him on all counts.
He was sentenced to death in December of that year.
Washington law gave condemned inmates a choice between lethal injection and hanging. Campbell refused to choose, arguing that selecting a method would be a form of suicide and therefore violated his religious beliefs.
The state chose hanging. For twelve years, Campbell’s appeals moved through state and federal courts. He argued cruel and unusual punishment, due process violations, and constitutional overreach.
Every challenge was rejected.
During his years on death row, Campbell’s mother, Betty Lou, spoke publicly. She said she still loved her son but believed the sentence was right.
She had written to the state years earlier, warning that moving him to lower custody would lead to disaster. A prison psychologist had described Campbell as “conscienceless,” “imminently dangerous,” and at war with society. Those warnings were buried or ignored.
One of the most haunting developments came nearly three decades after the execution. In 2023, Seattle detectives reopened a cold case from 1975 involving Hallie Ann Seaman, a 25-year-old architecture graduate student found sexually assaulted and stabbed near East Lake Avenue. Her car was found burned.
No one had ever been arrested. DNA evidence from the scene was run through modern databases and matched Charles Rodman Campbell.
Seaman was killed in April 1975, four months after Campbell attacked Renee Wicklund and while he was a fugitive.
She is believed to have been his first murder victim. The match was made from DNA that had been stored for decades. For 48 years, her family lived without answers.
For 29 years, the killer’s name was already on a death certificate. The state’s system had failed her long before science caught up.
The Campbell case remains a devastating example of what happens when criminal justice systems share incomplete information.
The parole board never received the records of Campbell’s violent behavior in prison. Victim notification laws were not followed. A man who had declared war on society was placed ten miles from the woman who testified against him.
Three women died because no one connected the dots in time.
Renee Wicklund and her daughter Shanna are buried side by side in North Dakota. Barbara Hendrickson is buried beside Don, who died in 1999.
Judith Dirks and Jacob, the son Campbell conceived while in prison, survived him. Jacob later became a social worker, carrying the weight of a father he knew only through a pane of glass. He had petitioned the governor for clemency, but the execution was carried out.
Charles Rodman Campbell died at 12:14 a. m. on May 27, 1994.
He dropped five feet seven inches through the gallows trapdoor. It was the only execution by hanging in Washington state since 1965, and it remains the state’s last. The gallows at Walla Walla have been dismantled.
The case endures as a lesson in accountability, and in the limits of the state’s ability to atone for what might have been stopped.
The families who waited through the execution hope the DNA match in the Seaman case brings at least one more chapter of closure. For Renee’s sister, the relief was finished.
For Don, the justice he watched was the end of an unthinkable journey. For everyone else, the story of Charles Campbell asks a question that has never been answered: whether broken systems can ever fully be fixed, or whether some men simply cannot be changed.
There is no comfort in the details, only the weight of what was lost.
Renee was a musician, a mother, a woman who built a life from scratch. Shanna was eight years old. Barbara was the neighbor who brought food and stayed to help.
Their names deserve to be remembered. Campbell took their lives, but he could not erase their legacy from the record, or from the hearts of those who loved them.
