The Return of the Gallows
When the public imagines an execution by hanging, minds inevitably drift to black-and-white photographs, the Old West, or medieval castle courtyards. Yet, an unsettling legal reality lingered in the United States deep into the late 20th century. While lethal injection and the electric chair became the symbols of modern capital punishment, the gallows remained active. In the 1990s, the creak of the wooden trapdoor echoed once again inside American penitentiaries, sealing the fates of three notorious criminals. These modern executions by hanging were not archaic remnants of a distant past; they were deliberate choices made by the justice system and, in some cases, demanded by the condemned themselves.
The Monster Who Smiled at the Rope
The modern revival of the gallows began with Wesley Allan Dodd. Born in 1961 into a stable, upper-middle-class family in Richland, Washington, Dodd’s life bore no outward signs of the severe trauma or economic hardship typically associated with violent offenders. Yet, beneath the surface of a seemingly normal childhood lay deeply disturbing psychological deviance. By his teenage years, Dodd harbored dangerous, predatory impulses directed entirely toward children. Despite multiple arrests for minor offenses and attempted abductions throughout his youth, systemic legal failures repeatedly allowed him to walk free.
By 1989, Dodd’s dark fantasies shifted from exploitation to calculated murder. In September of that year, he intercepted two young brothers, Cole and William Near, in a Vancouver park. Leading them into an isolated wooded area, he committed an unspeakable act of violence, stabbing both children to death. Far from fleeing in shame, Dodd became obsessed with his own media coverage, compiling newspaper clippings into a macabre scrapbook. Weeks later, he struck again, abducting four-year-old Lee Iseli from an Oregon playground, taking him to his apartment, and ultimately hanging the child inside a closet.
When Dodd was finally captured following a botched abduction attempt at a movie theater, his behavior in court stunned the nation. He openly smiled during his trial. When asked what the state should do with him, he defiantly stated that if he were given life in prison, he would kill guards to escape and return to murdering children. Sentenced to death in 1990, Dodd refused all appeals and chose hanging as his method of execution, callously stating it was appropriate because it mirrored how he killed his final victim. On January 5, 1993, at the Washington State Penitentiary, Dodd was led to the scaffold. His final words claimed he had found religious peace, before the trapdoor opened, making him the first man legally hanged in America in decades.
A Terrified Killer Forced to Face the Scaffold
The second modern hanging took place just over a year later, driven not by the inmate’s preference, but by his absolute refusal to cooperate with the state. Charles Rodman Campbell was a towering, red-haired man whose violent streak tore apart a quiet community in Clear View, Washington. In 1974, Campbell brutally assaulted a young mother, Renee Wickland, inside her home. Cooperating bravely with the authorities, Wickland and her neighbor, Barbara Hendrickson, testified against Campbell, securing his conviction and a subsequent prison sentence.
While serving his time, Campbell cultivated an obsessive, vengeful hatred toward the women who put him behind bars. In an incomprehensible failure of administrative oversight, Campbell was placed into a work-release program in 1982. Driven by raw malice, he immediately returned to the Wickland residence. In a frenzied act of revenge, Campbell murdered Renee Wickland, her eight-year-old daughter Shana, and Barbara Hendrickson, who had simply dropped by to assist the family.
Following his conviction for the triple murder in 1984, Campbell spent twelve years filing desperate appeals to prolong his life. He steadfastly refused to choose a method of execution, hoping to stall the system indefinitely. Under Washington law at the time, the default execution method for inmates who refused to choose was hanging. On May 27, 1994, Campbell’s time ran out. Overcome with terror, he refused to leave his cell, forcing guards to use pepper spray to extract him. Unable to stand or walk due to fear, Campbell was strapped to a rigid backboard to keep his body upright. He was carried onto the gallows platform, a black hood was pulled over his face despite his frantic movements, and the lever was pulled. The drop fractured his spine, causing near-instantaneous death.
“Don’t Put Me to Sleep Like a Dog”
The final legal hanging in United States history took place far from the Pacific Northwest, in the state of Delaware. Billy Bailey, born into extreme poverty in 1946, lived a life defined by severe physical abuse, foster homes, and chronic alcoholism. In June 1979, after escaping from a prison work program, Bailey entered a state of profound psychosis. After robbing a local liquor store at gunpoint, he fled to a farm owned by Gilbert and Clara Lambertson, an elderly couple who had occasionally employed him during his youth. Without provocation or mercy, Bailey shot both of them to death, arranged their bodies in chairs, and fled on foot before being captured after a shootout with police.
During his 1980 trial, Bailey displayed immense hostility, openly daring the judge to hang him. Although Delaware amended its capital punishment laws in 1986 to establish lethal injection as the primary method, inmates sentenced prior to the change retained the option of the gallows. Bailey stubbornly refused lethal injection, famously declaring that he would not permit the state to “put him to sleep like a dog.” He demanded the rope.
Because Delaware had not performed a hanging in fifty years, state officials had to travel to Washington to study gallows construction and weight-drop dynamics. A custom scaffold was built specifically for Bailey. On January 25, 1996, after eating a heavy final meal of steak and baked potatoes, the 49-year-old Bailey was walked to the structure. He offered no final words. The trapdoor opened, and Bailey entered the history books as the last man to die by the gallows in America.
The End of an Era
The historical lineage of these modern executions traces back to the deeply controversial case of Rainey Bethea in 1936. Bethea, convicted of a brutal assault in Owensboro, Kentucky, was executed before a raucous, carnival-like crowd of twenty thousand spectators. The public outrage over the circus atmosphere surrounding Bethea’s death forced states to abandon public executions entirely, moving the gallows behind closed prison walls.
The executions of Dodd, Campbell, and Bailey marked the absolute final gasp of a punishment method older than the nation itself. In the years following Bailey’s death, states systematically dismantled their wooden scaffolds, replacing them permanently with execution chambers designed for lethal injection. Today, the gallows are gone, surviving only as a grim reminder of a transitional era when modern forensics and ancient punishments briefly collided.
