For nearly a century, Washington State’s Walla Walla State Penitentiary operated a hanging room whose clock stopped at 12:56. In September 2024, the state held a ceremony to officially close that room for good. Five days earlier, a man serving 49 consecutive life sentences had been returned through the same prison gates after a four-day absence, with no official explanation given at the time. The prison on the hill has held some of the most notorious offenders in the state’s history, including Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer.
Its story spans escapes, riots, a federal court ruling that found conditions unconstitutional, and an experiment in prisoner self-government that collapsed within a few years. The territory that would become Washington did not want to spend public money on a prison in its early years. In 1874, the legislature sent convicted criminals to a privately run jail in the small town of Seatco in Thurston County. Local investors were paid one dollar per day for each prisoner and were also allowed to lease those men out as laborers for 70 cents a day.
The prisoners themselves earned nothing, worked 12-hour days, wore leg irons long enough to cause sores, and had no visitors or chaplains. The facility earned a grim reputation that still appears in museum research: hell on earth. In 1884, the Puget Sound Herald published an investigation that helped shut the jail down. It closed in 1888, and the last prisoners were sent east.
One of them, George France, later wrote a book about his experiences. The town was so identified with the prison’s bad reputation that it changed its name to Bucoda. The state needed a proper prison to demonstrate its readiness for statehood. After city officials lobbied without success, local banker Levi Ankeny, who later served as a U.
S. senator, donated 160 acres on a hill outside Walla Walla. In 1886, the legislature appropriated $96,000 for land and buildings. Construction began in September of that year.
The first prisoners arrived on May 11, 1887, under guard. Sources disagree on the exact number—some say 10, others 97 or 98—but they agree that the first inmate was William Murphy, serving 18 years for manslaughter. The prison’s walls were tested almost immediately. In July 1887, two prisoners escaped and were recaptured a few miles away.
In 1891, inmates seized a supply train, and a knife was held to the warden’s throat. He refused to order the gate opened and shouted for a guard to shoot. Both leaders fell. In 1933, a prisoner cut through a vegetable cellar wall and was shot while climbing the outer wall.
In February 1934, two inmates entered an office where two officers were standing. One pulled a knife and said they had been in prison too long. A guard was stabbed multiple times, and wire was wrapped around another officer’s neck. When the warden called the office, the prisoners forced one officer to answer and warned him to sound normal.
He did not, and armed men were placed on the wall. Six inmates, their wrists bound with wire, were pushed into the yard as human shields toward the southwest gate. Along the way, one prisoner stabbed and killed an officer. Guards on the wall ordered the men to stop, then fired.
Seven prisoners died in the yard. One inmate survived because he placed an officer’s gold-trimmed hat on his head, and the men above mistook him for a guard. Five men were convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison with hard labor. In 1955, ten prisoners escaped through a tunnel dug under the wall.
The pattern had been set: the territory built a wall on donated land to prove it could hold its prisoners like a civilized state, but what happened inside remained a separate matter. In the 1970s, the prison became the site of a bold experiment. Doctor William Conte, the state director of institutions, and Governor Daniel J. Evans introduced a series of reforms.
Conte wanted to move Washington away from pure confinement and toward a European model: shorter sentences, smaller prisons, more contact with the outside world, and more activities inside. Life magazine described it as a new way to run a big prison. Mail censorship ended, prisoners could wear their own clothes, and a man accused of breaking a rule was entitled to a fair hearing before punishment. At the heart of the reform was a new body: the Inmate Government Council.
Eleven men elected by the prison community met with administrators on a regular agenda. In 1970, a strike began over discipline related to prisoners growing their hair long. All 1,345 men stayed in their cells for ten days. A group of Black and white prisoners then formed a race relations committee, which led directly to the Inmate Government Council.
Its first election was held in April 1971. For a time, the experiment worked in ways no other prison had seen. One study found that from 1971 to 1973, power at Walla Walla was shared among several centers of authority, a situation that did not exist anywhere else. Prisoners published their own newspaper.
Professors from Whitman College began a social therapy program inside the walls. Clubs formed. Life-sentenced men lived in the eighth wing beside a plot called the Lifers’ Garden, where they held meals attended by several hundred outside guests. Bike clubs and tribal groups held feasts in the main yard.
But privileges accumulated. An inmate could choose his cell, wear what he liked, keep as much property as his cell could hold, and join clubs whose banquet halls were locked to keep out correctional officers. One writer described these as dysfunctional accumulated privileges. Officers could no longer enter parts of their own prison.
Records from the period contain no outcome numbers—no release rates, nothing showing whether the council changed a single life after a man left the gate. In 1973, the first warning appeared. A council member accused the superintendent of using divide-and-rule tactics to plant distrust between elected men and the inmates who voted for them. It seemed like a political complaint at the time.
It was not. The prison had long been overcrowded. Around 1950, a staff psychologist recalled roughly 1,900 inmates with fewer than 500 employees, about one employee for every four prisoners. By the late 1970s, the state estimated capacity at 872 prisoners.
A federal court found that the lowest recent population was between 1,000 and 1,100. By 2007, the American Correctional Association listed capacity at 1,825, while the prison generally held between 2,200 and 2,500 men. A federal judge later described the reality of living in those conditions. In a 1980 ruling, Judge Jack Tanner found that the buildings were old and deteriorated, lighting was so poor it caused eyestrain and fatigue, plumbing threatened to contaminate drinking water with sewage, fire prevention was below standard, insects and rodents were everywhere, and ventilation was inadequate.
He found that a lack of jobs, programs, classes, and space led to frustration, anger, and violence. Judge Tanner also found what he called overclassification—placing men in maximum security who did not need it because of a lack of trained staff. He found that holding a man in maximum security when less security would suffice increased the likelihood he would reoffend or try to escape. The court found that much of the prison’s violence was racially motivated.
In the isolation cells, a solid metal door closed over the bars, with a small window the guard decided whether to cover. Guards controlled the light switches, and the court found they sometimes left men in darkness for days. If sent to isolation, a man served his punishment in ten-day periods. Once a day, he came out for a ten-minute shower.
No reading, no radio, no cigarettes. After ten days, he got 72 hours with the door open, an hour of exercise, and something to read. Some men stayed for months or years, with no clear standards for getting out. A historian adds that Washington’s prisons remained informally segregated until the 1990s, and Walla Walla did not integrate its cafeteria until the 21st century.
The same pattern extended to the death chamber. In 2018, the Washington Supreme Court relied on a study by two University of Washington researchers that found Black defendants in the state were about four times more likely to be sentenced to death. The court cited both implicit and explicit racial bias. Washington had not executed anyone since 1963.
In 1972, the U. S. Supreme Court halted the death penalty nationwide. Three years later, Washington voters passed an initiative imposing mandatory death sentences for certain crimes, which the state supreme court soon struck down.
In 1981, the state adopted a new law with separate proceedings in which a jury weighed the death penalty. The law included a detail almost no one noticed: it allowed a condemned man to choose his method of execution—lethal injection or hanging. Washington was the only state that still had hanging on its books. One man used that provision.
Wesley Alan Dodd confessed to killing three boys and asked to be hanged because that was how he had killed one of them. On January 5, 1993, he became the first person executed by hanging in the United States since 1965. National media and protesters from both sides came. The state had to find someone who still knew how to carry out a hanging.
A captain spent days on the phone and finally found a retired executioner in Florida who had practiced in a foreign country the captain still refused to name. The man was flown in, lodged at a motel, and taken to Walla Walla the next day to share his knowledge. Charles Rodman Campbell, convicted of killing a mother, her eight-year-old daughter, and a neighbor, was too weak from fear to walk to the gallows on May 27, 1994. He was brought bound to a wooden board.
The last three men executed in Washington died by lethal injection on the table beneath the old trap doors: Jeremy Sagastegui on October 13, 1998; James Elledge on August 28, 2001; and Cal Coburn Brown on September 10, 2010. In 2008, the prison system’s chief doctor resigned rather than participate in executions. The room above the table was never dismantled. It simply stopped being used.
Gary Ridgway had lived in effective isolation at Walla Walla since his conviction. Prison documents obtained by the Seattle Times explained why: he was easily recognizable, and other inmates targeted him. In May 2015, without public notice, the Department of Corrections moved him and another inmate by private plane to the federal prison in Florence, Colorado, at a cost of nearly $20,000. The state wanted him placed in the adjacent supermax facility that held the Unabomber, but the Federal Bureau of Prisons put him in a high-security prison among the general population, where he could get a job.
The governor was not informed until after the fact. The victims’ families were never informed. After protests from families and elected officials, Ridgway was flown back and returned inside Walla Walla on October 24, 2015. Nine years later, it happened again.
On the morning of September 9, 2024, he was booked into the King County Jail in what officials called an institutional hold—bureaucratic language for a transfer. The reason was not announced at the time. A woman whose DNA had helped identify one of the victims just nine months earlier learned about it from a reporter. Court documents released months later showed he had offered to lead investigators to more remains.
The sheriff’s office said only that cases remained open. In December 2025, a Seattle radio host, citing five sources, reported that Ridgway was receiving end-of-life care. The Department of Corrections called the reports inaccurate rumors and said his condition had not changed. Neither claim had been independently confirmed when the article was prepared.
The prison has held other notable inmates. Little Willie John, an R&B singer, entered the prison on July 6, 1966, to serve eight to twenty years for a fatal stabbing after a Seattle party. He died in prison in May 1968 at age 30, and the cause of death remains disputed in the record. Robert Lee Yates, convicted in 2000 of thirteen murders, is serving two life sentences plus 408 years.
Billy Gohl, who killed sailors in Aberdeen, died there in 1927. The death chamber’s clock had stopped at 12:56. The hanging room itself was built into the original 1886 structure. The trap doors are still in the ceiling, and the bolts from which the ropes hung remain in place.
The condemned man spent his final hours in cells directly above the room where he would die. In September 2024, the room was formally retired with a plaque bearing Governor Jay Inslee’s words that when the decision is death, a fallible system is a hard thing to accept. Washington abolished the death penalty in stages. Inslee declared a moratorium in February 2014.
The state supreme court struck down the death penalty law in October 2018. In 2023, the legislature removed capital punishment from the legal code. State Senator Jamie Pedersen and colleagues included the repeal in a defect and omission bill, a routine measure to clean up laws the court had already invalidated. Representative Jenny Graham, a Republican from Spokane whose 15-year-old sister Deborah Estes was killed by Gary Ridgway, called it a sneaky pass.
Pedersen noted the court had already emptied the law of its effect; Graham argued that something this significant should not have been passed as routine administrative action. The prison remains in operation today. Located at 1313 North 13th Street, it is the oldest continuously operating prison in the state. It is not a ruin.
Programs include auto body repair, welding, diesel mechanics, and dog training. The department divides it into east, west, and south complexes of varying security levels, plus a maximum-security intensive management unit. Two superintendents now run it: Rob Jackson, who started there in 1991 as a mental health trainee, and Brad Bowman, who started in 2007 as a correctional officer. The prison’s history of violence continued into the 1970s, when the reform era collapsed.
In 1974, Superintendent B. J. Ray dissolved the Inmate Government Council. To maintain order, he turned instead to the Washington State Prison Bike Club, an association of incarcerated outlaw motorcycle riders.
On Easter Sunday 1977, five days after an officer’s hand was blown apart by a booby-trapped cigarette lighter, inmates set fire to the church and looted the inmate store. The officer spent eleven days in the hospital. A lockdown followed that lasted 46 days, the longest in the prison’s history. The summer of 1979 began with the killing of Sergeant William Cross.
On June 15, after an inmate and a guard were killed, the prison was placed on full lockdown. For three weeks in the hottest part of summer, the men were not allowed out of their overcrowded cells. No showers, no laundry, no cleaning supplies, no recreation, no reading, no lawyers, no store, no phones. On one day, inmates in the eighth wing dismantled the plumbing in their cells.
They were moved to the yard with what the court later called unnecessary force and held there in conditions it described as intolerable. The next day, six men were shackled to their cell bars in the isolation unit. A riot squad removed them. Every one was injured, and medical examinations confirmed it.
One man was taken to the hospital after an officer inserted a baton into his rectum. The court found the team knew it had used unnecessary force and tried to cover it up. Every member was suspended, and five were fired. On October 12, 1979, inmates filed a class action lawsuit in federal court.
On June 23, 1980, Judge Jack Tanner issued a 60-page ruling concluding that conditions at the Washington State Penitentiary constituted cruel and unusual punishment. He made 230 findings of fact. In the two previous years, eight inmates and two guards had been killed, and the prison had been locked down three times. The court concluded that guard brutality was the norm.
In February 1982, the Ninth Circuit agreed that violence and medical care violated the Constitution but reversed or vacated many other provisions. It said there was no constitutional right to rehabilitation, and it found the order to end racism too broad. One former inmate, Alvin Gilchrist, published an account in 2006. At 16, he began serving an adult sentence for armed robbery.
In 1974, he escaped from a prison truck and led officers on a two-week chase that ended on an island. No one was hurt, and no weapon was used, but the escape brought him a life sentence. In 1975, he became the youngest person in state history labeled a habitual criminal. A Seattle columnist called him Fierce Al.
He wrote that he became an animal to be treated as a human. In the late 1970s, he was transferred to the federal prison in Marion, Illinois, and at 22 was the youngest man there. He received a second sentence of two life terms. He was released in 1991 after about 19 years, returned within 15 months on drug and weapons violations, and was released again in 2005.
In his account, he credited civil rights lawyers he met while challenging prison conditions with showing him another way to live. Walla Walla was built for profit from the start. Prisoners worked in brick plants, ran a jute mill that produced grain sacks and carpet, later made license plates and road signs, and operated a cannery and a dairy that supplied other state institutions. The 1891 law that organized the prison set terms at the top: a warden appointed by three directors, a bond to the state of $10,000, a state-provided house, and office expenses capped at $150 a year.
Farmers needed cheap grain sacks, and the prison sold them. In October 1906, the Oregonian reported that the state board had forced Warden A. F. Kees to resign after discovering he had allowed state grain sacks to be purchased for speculation despite a warning.
The board said it believed he had made no personal profit. In 1923, inmate workers began manufacturing Washington license plates, and the department still lists license plates as an occupation at Walla Walla. Around 1950, the prison farms raised cattle, poultry, and hogs, and inmate crews demolished houses in town for their lumber. In the early years of the mill, a farmer could buy a prison-made sack for six and a quarter cents.
Today, the state gives eligible families up to $100 a month for travel costs to visit. In March 2002, an outbreak of Campylobacter bacteria began inside the walls. Over the course of a year, more than 100 inmates and staff became ill across five genetically identical outbreaks. Official explanations offered possibilities including pigeon droppings on a leaking kitchen pipe and poor food handling.
The precise source was never identified. In 1980, Judge Tanner found some evidence that officials may have retaliated against inmates and witnesses through harassment, threats, and possibly transfers. The Ninth Circuit reversed that finding because the evidence was not sufficient and the issue was not in the complaint. The matter remained unresolved.
In a cemetery outside town, there is an unmarked common grave for prisoners who died. How many lie there and who they were is not recorded in any available record. The question of how many people Gary Ridgway actually killed remains unresolved. Beyond his convictions, he is listed as a suspect in 22 other murders.
A sheriff said in 2013 he believed the real number could be between 65 and 70. Ridgway told a radio interviewer he killed between 75 and 80 people, and claimed he had killed before 1982. The sources disagree, and the only man who knows has every reason to be unreliable. The prison never closed, so it never went through years of empty corridors that produce most ghost stories.
No documented ghost tradition exists there. What it has produced is a word. Across Washington, and to some extent in neighboring states, the name of an entire city became shorthand for prison. In 1998, the punk band The Offspring released a song called Walla Walla on their album Americana about a friend finally sentenced to three to five years.
But the friend in the lyrics is actually imprisoned at Folsom. The city’s name had become slang for prison itself. In 1978, two young journalists spent four months inside, and their photo essay The Concrete Mother was published in 1981. The prison also touched a larger story most people do not connect with it.
In 1995, Kevin Bacon starred in the film Murder in the First, playing Henri Young, an orphan who steals five dollars to feed his little sister, is sent to Alcatraz, spends years in a dark cell, kills a man, and then dies. The real record is different. Young was a bank robber who at least once beat a hostage severely. He was convicted of a murder usually dated to 1933, though one account places it after his 1934 release.
He served time in Montana and Washington state prisons before entering the federal system. In 1939, he took part in an escape attempt from Alcatraz in which Arthur Doc Barker was shot and killed. Young then killed a fellow escapee, Rufus McCain, and a jury convicted him of manslaughter. He did not die on the island.
In 1948, he was transferred to the federal medical center in Springfield, Missouri. In 1954, after his federal sentence ended, he was handed over to Walla Walla to begin a life sentence for that earlier murder. He served it there until 1972, when he was released at age 61, then violated his release conditions and disappeared. Washington authorities list his whereabouts as unknown.
Even his birth year is disputed. The real story is not more merciful than the film. It is longer. The prison’s deepest cultural impact passes through a smaller door.
Little Willie John recorded Fever in 1956. In 1958, Peggy Lee stripped it down and made it the signature song of her career. James Brown, who opened shows for him, recorded a tribute album. In 1996, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted him, 28 years after his death in this prison.
A comeback album he recorded while out on appeal remained unreleased until 2008. Today, the prison has two superintendents and a current listed capacity of 2,439. In late June 2021, a heat dome settled over the Pacific Northwest. Temperatures reached 116 degrees, and the sweet Walla Walla onions in nearby fields began to cook.
Inside the maximum-security intensive management unit, which inmates call the Hole, the air conditioning stopped working. Dozens of men spent 23 hours a day in small concrete and metal cells. The department told reporters that every unit in its prisons east of the Cascades was air conditioned, which sounds like protection until you notice it describes equipment rather than whether it works. The hanging room itself was closed with a ceremony in September 2024.
But the hooks still hang from the ceiling, and the marks the ropes left on them remain. The state closed the room. It did not remove the hooks. The iron has outlasted the men.
It has outlasted the wardens. It has outlasted the law. When a state closes one room and keeps every cell in the corridor full, the question of what exactly it has finished with remains open. The iron gives no answer.
It simply remains.