Reporters Peer Into The Darkness And Find It Invades The Spirit

WALLA WALLA - It was nearly one in the morning, and the 12 reporters who saw Westley Allan Dodd hanged to death were being debriefed by the rest of us.

The questions were mostly about re-creating those four minutes, with a lot of discussion as to whether Dodd had or hadn't twitched a couple of times before dying.

So I waited until after the news conference to ask the reporters about the nightmares. I had started having them when I thought I'd be a witness.

When a lottery was held two hours before the hanging to determine which reporters would view the execution, my number wasn't picked. I was sorry to miss out on the story, but almost instantaneously I felt relieved. I could sleep again through the night.

The closer you get to the Dodd story, the more its evil and darkness creep into your thoughts. It was the case with the cops involved, with the jury that gave him the death penalty.

You look at a little boy and, if you're among those who've read Dodd's diary, you remember what he did to one of the three boys he murdered, Lee Iseli, age 4.

"He started to gasp again and opened his eyes. I grabbed a rope and put (it) around his neck as he lay breathing slowly . . .," Dodd remembered in his very concise madman's writing.

If you're among those who might witness his execution, you can expect your subconscious to wake you in the middle of the night.

You can rationalize all you want about Dodd's murder of those three boys being so despicable that he deserves execution.

That's for the radio talk shows. Being a witness, taking part, changes everything.

I asked Mary Clayton, with KNSN radio in Walla Walla, one of the witnesses, about her nightmare. I knew she had had them. Her husband, Richard, a reporter with The Walla Walla Union-Bulletin, had told me about them.

In the middle of the night he heard Mary say in her sleep, "No, no, don't, no, no."

Mary was dreaming an execution was taking place in a huge stadium. She could see that children were being taken to the stadium to see someone die:

"No, no, don't, no, no."

Julie Havel, a reporter with a cable-TV station in Vancouver, Wash., told me about two weeks of sleepless nights, as sometimes she felt compassion, sometimes hatred, for Dodd.

Kerry Brock, the KOMO-TV anchor from Seattle, told about four or five such nights, in which the thoughts of the hanging would not go away.

Perhaps the nightmares are how we prepare ourselves for seeing something terrible.

Among the material I read before coming to Walla Walla was a research paper written by Dr. Cornelius Rosse, of the University of Washington School of Medicine, on just how hanging causes death.

He quoted from Gray's Anatomy about how the first cervical vertebra dislocates, "with rupture of the transverse ligament. . . ."

I remembered my dream the next morning. I had heard a very loud crack. It was Dodd's neck. He was dangling in front of me.

Another one of the witnesses was Terry McConn, 40, of The Union-Bulletin. He has two sons, ages 7 and 10. Because he covers the penitentiary, McConn was automatically one of the witnesses.

He had this dream, McConn said, in which he was walking into a room and seeing strangers. They were there for a hanging. That's where the dream ended.

The last two nights, he said, he had been waking up every hour and a half. McConn kept thinking he hoped he wouldn't embarrass himself, like passing out.

When Westley Dodd was actually hanged, most of the witnesses told about how quickly it all happened. They sounded relieved.

Carl Dombek, a KING-AM radio reporter in Seattle, said that looking at the hanging through the glass windows separating witnesses from Dodd was like looking at a department-store display.

It seemed sterile, he said, and certainly not the gruesome scene that the American Civil Liberties Union said could take place.

I asked Dombek if he had had any nightmares before the hanging. "None," he said, "but ask me in the morning."

I would learn later that another reporter who was a witness, and appeared very composed at the briefing, went back to his motel and vomited.

It was nearing 1:30 this morning and the prison officials were asking the reporters to start packing up their gear. The first execution in this state in three decades, the first hanging in the country since 1965, was over.

Not quite over, I'd guess, will be those thoughts that will keep creeping in.

Witness Mary Clayton talked about seeing a taped interview on TV in which Dodd is said to have talked about going to heaven and giving a hug to the three little boys he killed.

Mary Clayton started crying.

Sometimes that's all you can do, when you get too close to the darkness.