Westley Allan Dodd was a serial murderer and sexual predator from Seattle, Washington. His execution on January 5, 1993 was the first legal hanging in the United States since 1965.
Dodd began sexually abusing children when he was 13 years old; his first victims were his own cousins. All his victims (over 50 in all) were children below the age of 10, some of them but 2 or 3 years old. Dodd became more deranged the older he became (he wrote about wanting to castrate his victims and eat their genitals). When he was arrested, the police found with him a homemade torture rack, thankfully unused.
Dodd was sentenced to death for molesting and then stabbing brothers Cole (11) and William (10) Neer in a Vancouver, Washington park in 1989 as well as for the separate rape and murder of Lee Islei (4).
Less than four years elapsed between the murders and Dodd's execution because he felt he deserved the punishment. He said that he "should be punished to the full extent of the law, as should all sex offenders and murderers," refused to appeal his case or the capital sentence ("I must be executed before I have an opportunity to escape or kill someone within the prison. If I do escape, I promise you I will kill and rape and enjoy every minute of it"), and chose hanging as the method of his execution "because that’s the way Lee Iseli died."
