WALLA WALLA — Behind a heavy metal door in a corner of the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla, up the stairs, lies what is known as a death chamber. For decades, it was the state’s designated place for executions.

The state has carried out 78 executions in Washington since 1904, most by hanging but the last three by lethal injection. On Wednesday, the chamber will officially close with a ceremony featuring Gov. Jay Inslee, who ushered in its disuse with a 2014 moratorium on the death penalty. Not until last year, however, did the Legislature — faced with a state Supreme Court ruling negating Washington’s capital punishment law — quietly take the statute off the books.

The chamber will be preserved for history as it was when active. Two rows of seats for witnesses, such as journalists and victims’ family members, face a window. Beyond that lies a table to which men were strapped before receiving a lethal injection. A microphone hangs from the ceiling for last words.

In a room above is the gallows, where you can still see bolts, hovering over trap doors, through which ropes were strung. Up yet more steps are two cells where condemned men were brought shortly before their execution. (No woman has ever been executed in Washington).

Stopped clocks in the chamber are set to 12:56, the early morning time when on Sept. 10, 2010, the last executed man in Washington, Cal Coburn Brown, was pronounced dead.

Ending Washington’s death penalty was “a long journey,” said Reuven Carlyle, a former state senator and Seattle Democrat who was a leading opponent of capital punishment.

The ceremony this week will put a cap not only on that journey but the state’s tumultuous history with executions — marked by legal tussles that have stopped and started the practice, a secret training, resignations by high-ranking officials, a controversial deal with a serial killer, concern about racial and geographic disproportionality, and raw feelings among victims’ families that continue to linger.

Only state with hanging on the books

Penitentiary Capt. Dick Morgan was called into Superintendent Tana Wood’s office. She had just gotten off the phone with the Department of Corrections secretary. It was the early 1990s, and an execution seemed close.

You know who’s responsible for getting this stuff done, don’t you? Wood asked Morgan, as he recalled. You, she told the man who later became superintendent of the penitentiary and two other prisons, as well as DOC secretary for a year.

The last execution had been in 1963.

In the meantime, the U.S. Supreme Court had stopped capital punishment nationwide with a 1972 ruling that held its application was as arbitrary as being “struck by lightning.”

Washington has never been as enthusiastic a user of the death penalty as some other states. Texas, for instance, has executed close to 600 people. But Washingtonians didn’t want to give capital punishment up entirely after the justices’ ruling. Three years later, voters passed an initiative aimed at consistency by requiring mandatory death sentences for certain offenses.

But the U.S. Supreme Court soon struck such mandatory sentences down, while upholding a Georgia law that gave juries discretion over whether to recommend a death sentence in a separate proceeding looking at aggravating or mitigating circumstances. More legal wrangling in Washington occurred before the state, in 1981, adopted a law similar to Georgia’s.

Yet, there was a challenge in applying Washington’s law, Morgan discovered. It gave condemned individuals a choice of whether to be hanged or receive a lethal injection. That meant he had to prepare for both eventualities.

“Only one state had hanging on the books, and that was Washington,” Morgan said. Why? “God knows,” Morgan said, though he speculated the state’s continued use of a practice widely considered outdated and possibly gruesome had to do with anticrime sentiments of the time.

He spent days on the phone looking for someone who still knew how to carry out a hanging. Finally, he found in Florida a retired executioner who had practiced his profession in a country Morgan still declines to name to protect the man’s privacy.

“I flew him secretly to the Tri-Cities, went and picked him up, got him a motel room,” Morgan said. The next day, Morgan took him to Walla Walla to impart what he knew.

Morgan faced another task: choosing staff to participate. An execution is a massive undertaking, with more than 100 people assigned duties like escorting different groups of witnesses, bringing the condemned to the cells above the gallows and talking to him while he’s there.

Morgan adopted the principle of a Texas warden: “no volunteers,” or as he also put it, “keep the ghouls far away.” He didn’t want anybody excited to be there.

So he assigned tasks while giving staff the right to refuse. Only one ever did during the two executions Morgan ended up supervising, though others had conditions: Their pastor, or wife, could never know.

Morgan’s own feelings were complex. His dad, who had also been a corrections officer, once viewed an execution and told Morgan he was disgusted by the circus atmosphere. Morgan took that to heart. But he felt loyalty to his superintendent and a duty to do what she asked of him.

As Morgan walked through the death chamber one day this month, he considered how it felt to take such an active role in putting men to death. Both executions he supervised were hangings.

Westley Allan Dodd, who had confessed to killing three boys, asked to be hanged because that’s how he killed one of his victims. He was calm, according to observers of the 1993 execution, which as the country’s first hanging since 1965 attracted national media and demonstrations on both sides of the issue.

In contrast, Charles Rodman Campbell, who killed a mother and her 8-year-old daughter, as well as their neighbor, appeared too weak with fear to walk to the gallows a year later. He was brought in strapped to a board.

“I had no remorse,” Morgan said. While he felt they deserved to be killed, he said: “I really, fervently, believe a government shouldn’t kill its own citizens.”

Years after those executions, and largely retiring from DOC in 2011, he came out publicly against the death penalty.

A deal with the Green River killer

When Washingtonians weigh capital punishment, one name invariably comes up: Gary Ridgway.

In the early 1990s, prosecutors and law enforcement officers had evidence to bring Ridgway to trial for seven murders of young women, most of whom he dumped along the banks of the Green River in South King County, recalled Dave Reichert, the current Republican gubernatorial candidate who was then the county sheriff. But Ridgway was believed to have killed far more.

Ridgway’s lawyers came to then King County Prosecutor Norm Maleng’s office with a proposal: take the death penalty off the table and Ridgway will confess to more murders and show where he put the bodies.

Maleng’s first reaction was “hell no,” said Dan Satterberg, then the office’s chief of staff and later Maleng’s successor, since retired.

But Reichert said he told Maleng: “We need to really look at this.” Like detectives, he thought it was the best chance of providing answers to dozens of families about what happened to their daughters and getting their remains returned.

Maleng relented and struck a deal. The Green River killer then spent six months in an empty building near Boeing Field, his whereabouts kept from the press, while he was questioned by detectives. Periodically, they put him in a van and took him to the river banks so he could show them where to find bodies. Reichert trailed in a car.

Ridgway ultimately confessed to 49 murders and is thought to have killed still more.

The case became a Rorshach test of sorts. A common question: If one of the worst serial killers in American history didn’t get the death penalty, how could anyone?

Reichert, on the other hand, views the case as an argument for capital punishment. “The death penalty threat to Ridgway is the thing that got him to confess,” said the former sheriff.

Satterberg, in contrast, sees Ridgway as “an example of somebody you can put away and not think about anymore” (although people are again thinking about him now because of the serial killer’s recent unexplained transfer to the county jail).

Satterberg’s point was that a sentence of life without the possibility of parole, as Ridgway received many times over, can offer more certainty than one of death that is inevitably tied up with years of appeals.

That was made clear to him, he said, while working on the case of Washington’s last executed man. In 2009, 18 years after Cal Coburn Brown killed Washa, Satterberg sat in the penitentiary parking lot with her family members when the state Supreme Court issued a last-minute stay. The family had driven there from Nebraska.

The court lifted its stay, related to a challenge to the state’s lethal injection method, subsequently changed, and the family returned the following year. After he died by lethal injection, Satterberg said, Washa’s sister turned to him and said, “Now we don’t have to think about him anymore.”

Satterberg said he realized the family had been dealing with the uncertainty of Washa’s killer’s fate for nearly 20 years, whereas prosecutors could likely have wrapped up a life sentence in three.

A new governor’s decision

Nick Brown found a binder sitting on his desk when he became Inslee’s general counsel in 2013. It contained information his predecessor thought he needed to know. Death row cases appeared on the first few pages.

The issue had simmered in Washington for years. State Supreme Court Justice Bob Utter resigned in 1995, saying he could “no longer participate in a legal system that intentionally takes human life.” The prison system’s top physician, Dr. Marc Stern, quit his job in 2008 because he was unwilling to play a part in executions.

But the matter hadn’t come up in Inslee’s gubernatorial campaign and wasn’t top of mind, said Nick Brown, now a Democratic candidate for state attorney general. He talked with the new governor.

Inslee, too, hadn’t thought about it much, despite voting for a 1994 bill continuing the federal death penalty when he was in Congress. The possibility of signing a death warrant sharpened his attention, he said. Months of research followed.

Nick Brown talked with penitentiary staffers and was struck by the weight of asking public servants to kill. “I remember people talking about just how hard it was,” he said.

He, as well as Inslee, also talked to victims’ families. Grief, anger and frustration at the slow pace of prosecutions were common themes, but they varied in their views on the death penalty. That made an impression.

Ultimately, Inslee said he was swayed by what he calls “an overwhelming patina of unfairness” in the death penalty’s application. Two people could commit the same crime and yet one would live and the other die. Racial discrimination was a factor, Inslee believed. And so was the enormous cost of pursuing capital cases; only a few Washington counties could afford it.

The governor declared a moratorium in February 2014.

Four months later, Falana Young’s 23-year-old son, Dwone Anderson-Young, was killed in a double homicide near his Leschi home by a man on a self-proclaimed jihad against U.S. policy in the Middle East. Ali Muhammad Brown was convicted of those murders and two others.

Young said she believed for a time the death penalty was on the table for her son’s killer. Then, prosecutors came to her house and explained Inslee’s moratorium.

“I was angry,” Young said.

Being a Christian, she said, she was ambivalent about the death penalty. She still is. But she believes prosecutors, the judge and victims’ families should have a chance to weigh in. “I don’t think one person should be allowed to take that away,” she said, referring to Inslee.

Alicia Dassa, co-founder with Young of a local chapter of Parents of Murdered Children, said a death penalty prosecution tells victims’ families their slain loved one was important and the crime so heinous that it deserves the maximum punishment available.

But she and her husband James Dassa, whose 18-year-old son Conner Dassa-Holland was shot dead in front of their Rainier Beach home in 2020, also have mixed feelings. While they don’t know who killed their son, Dassa said: “Your initial response is ‘yeah, I want that person dead.’ Depending on where you’re at that day, or that week, the feeling can change.”

A court ruling and a strategic change

Washington’s death penalty law was not, in the end, killed by one person. In 2018, the state Supreme Court weighed in.

The court looked at a study by two University of Washington scholars, Katherine Beckett and Heather Evans, finding Black defendants in this state were roughly four times more likely to be sentenced to death. The state’s attorneys attacked their analysis and a prolonged fact-finding process ensued.

The process made the analysis more accurate and reliable, the justices concluded, citing not just the UW research but also their own observations of “implicit and overt racial bias.”

Still, years ticked by before the Legislature acted. A fix to the law, theoretically, was possible, though how wasn’t exactly clear. And a bill aimed at getting rid of the law was a minefield. For one thing, said state Sen. Jamie Pedersen, D-Seattle, some lawmakers were bound to propose amendments that would make exceptions for certain egregious crimes, like the murder of a child. Who would want to go on record opposing that?

A lightbulb went off, Pedersen said, after a conversation with a state Supreme Court justice about laws the court had deemed problematic. Pedersen and colleagues realized they could tuck a clause ending the death penalty into a “defects and omissions” bill getting rid of a host of those problematic laws.

They wouldn’t make it into “a big progressive thing,” Pedersen said, but something “very vanilla.” They were just cleaning up the books.

Rep. Jenny Graham, a Spokane Republican opposed to ending capital punishment, was incensed by Pedersen’s approach. “This was the sneaky, backdoor way,” said Graham, whose 15-year-old sister, Debra Estes, was murdered by Ridgway.

But Senate Bill 5087 easily passed.

After Wednesday, a plaque will hang in the death chamber relaying these events in a few paragraphs. It will also offer a different kind of finality to the chamber’s storied past.