JUST IN: Charles Campbell Execution | Triple Murder, Last Meal + Final Words | Washington Death Row.

He is one of our state’s most notorious killers, a triple murderer driven by revenge.  It’s past midnight when the guards come for him. May 27th, 1994, Washington State Penitentiary, Walla Walla. The corridor to the gallows is quiet, the kind of quiet that has a weight to it. The kind you only find in places built for things that can’t be undone.

 Charles Rodman Campbell has spent 12 years on death row telling anyone who would listen that this moment was never going to come. 12 years of legal motions. 12 years of appeals. 12 years of arguing that the state had no right to his life, that the method was cruel, that the process was unjust, that the Constitution protected him.

Tonight, his arguments have run out. But when the guards open his cell door, Charles is on the floor. Not sick, not just refusing. He’s curled on his side, rigid, like if he doesn’t move, time will stop. Like if he makes himself small enough, the moment will pass him by. It won’t. They pepper spray him, restrain him, and when it’s time to walk him to the gallows, Charles Campbell’s legs stop working.

 Whether he can’t stand or won’t stand, nobody can say for certain. But 223 lb of man who once walked into a house carrying a knife and looked three women in the eyes while he used it. That same man cannot find the strength to take 30 steps on his own. They strap him to a board. Four guards carry him down the corridor. In the chamber, they lift the noose.

They pull the black hood over his head. And even then, even with the rope already placed, Charles is moving, twisting, shifting, delaying by seconds what he has been delaying for 12 years. The trapdoor drops at exactly 12:08 a.m. Six minutes later, he is gone. His name was Charles Rodman Campbell. After spending more than 12 years on death row, Charles was hanged at the Washington State Penitentiary on May 27th, 1994.

In this video, we are going to talk about his crimes, his last meal, and his last words. But before we get there, we need to go back because to understand the full weight of what happened in that chamber, you need to know who was in the room watching. You need to know why a woman flew across the country to be there, why a man who had lost the most important person in his life sat in that room with his hands folded and stared straight ahead until it was done.

And for that, you need to know her name first. Her name was Renee. She grew up on a farm in rural North Dakota, which tells you a lot about her right away. Farm kids learn early that the world doesn’t bend around you. You bend around it. You work before you complain. You get up when you don’t feel like it. You take care of what’s yours.

Renee had all of that. She was bright and sharp and the kind of person other people naturally gravitate toward. In high school, she played the flute and threw a baton in parades and racked up achievement awards through the 4-H club. She was good at things. Most things, actually.

 And she graduated in 1970 with a music program at Valley City State College already coming after her. She had other plans. She made her way to Washington state to visit her sister and something about the Pacific Northwest just got into her. The trees, the water, that sense of open air and possibility. She decided almost immediately that this was where she was going to plant herself and grow.

 She got a job at a beauty salon in Seattle. That’s where she met Jack Wickland, 14 years older, once married, a little world worn in the way that some men are. They fell in love and they made it work. In 1973, Renee and Jack settled in Clearview, a small quiet community in Snohomish County, where the houses sit back from quiet roads and the trees come right up to your property line and you actually know the people across the street.

Their home was on just over an acre. It reminded Renee of growing up. That same year, she gave birth to a daughter, Shawna. And across the street, which in a neighborhood like Clearview meant maybe 40 ft of pavement and years of shared history, lived Barbara and Don Hendrickson. Barbara was older than Renee, steadier, one of those women who seems to have quietly decided that she was going to hold everyone around her together and never made a fuss about it.

When Jack was away for work, which was often, Barbara was the one who came over with food, with conversation, with herself. No fuss, no conditions. She had been in this neighborhood for over a decade and she took Renee in the way some people just take you in, naturally, completely. By late 1974, Renee had it, the life she had come here to build, a home she loved, a daughter who completed everything.

A friendship across the street that had become something closer to family. She was 23 years old and she had no idea that on the other side of Snohomish County, a man had already decided she was going to pay for something she hadn’t done yet. His name was Charles Rodman Campbell. He was born in Hawaii in October 1954.

His father was a Marine who eventually moved the family to Snohomish County when Charles was young. Same county, same roads, same general orbit as Clearview. And the house Charles grew up in was not a stable one. His parents drank, both of them, heavily. The home was loud and unpredictable. The kind of environment where a child either learns to go invisible or learns to come out swinging.

 Charles came out swinging. He’d later describe what happened in that house as abuse. Whatever the full truth of that was, the outcome was the same. He arrived in the world angry and he stayed that way. He was drinking himself by age 10, speed and methamphetamine by 12, heroin by 13. He stopped attending school consistently at 15.

By 16, he was stealing cars. At 17 17 years old, he called a friend from a jail cell and told him to go kill his father for turning him in after he stole the Cade family car. Not because his father had done something terrible, because his father had reported him. That is the logic Charles Campbell lived by. Other people did things to him.

Other people caused his problems. Other people paid. He got married young somehow, had a daughter, and immediately turned that house into a terror. He threw knives near his infant daughter’s crib when she cried. Threatened his wife’s mother. Threatened to kill the dog. Created an environment of such constant fear that his wife couldn’t report him because reporting him meant something she loved would be destroyed.

 A judge eventually took his visitation rights. The marriage ended. By December 1974, Charles Campbell was 20 years old, unemployed, out of a marriage, out of places to put his rage. A lifetime of anger that had been looking for somewhere to land. It landed in Clearview. December 11th, 1974, an unseasonably warm afternoon.

 Renee is outside cleaning the windows of her house. Shanna is on the grass nearby, just over a year old, propped up in the way babies are, taking in the world. Jack is at work. The street is completely still. Renee notices a man walking up her driveway. Tall, dark, curly hair, thick and reddish-brown. He gets about halfway up toward the house and then turns around and walks back toward the road.

She watches him go. Probably the wrong house. She goes back to her windows. He comes back. This time he isn’t walking. He sprints at her. Renee doesn’t think. She grabs Shanna, runs for the door, gets inside, but not fast enough. The door is already pushing back against her. She puts her full weight into it.

 One arm holding her daughter, one arm holding the door, and this man is on the other side pushing harder. She can’t hold it. He’s inside. He has a knife. What Charles Campbell says to Renee in the next few minutes, what he demands, how he makes clear what will happen to Shanna if she doesn’t comply, doesn’t need to be spelled out here.

You understand what happened. When it is over, Charles thanks her. Actually thanks her, as if something consensual just took place, and walks out the front door. Renee runs across the street to Barbara. She can barely speak. Barbara takes one look at her face and grabs a gun. Locks every window. Locks every door.

The two women sit together and wait for police. When officers arrive, Renee gives them everything. His height, his hair, his clothes, the faint smell of alcohol on his breath. Police had a mug shot on file that matched almost immediately. They had a name, Charles Rodman Campbell. But he was already gone. Days after the assault, he quit his job at a pizza restaurant, stole over a thousand dollars from the register and disappeared.

For over a year, Renee Wicklund didn’t know where he was. Think about what that means. Every morning she woke up not knowing if today was the day he came back. Every night before she could sleep, the paranoia isn’t something you can reason your way out of because the fear isn’t irrational. It’s based on something that already happened in her own home while her daughter sat in the room.

Her marriage to Jack didn’t survive it. Some things a relationship can hold and some things it can’t. Jack moved out. Renee stayed in the Clearview house with Shanna because why should she be the one to leave? But the peace of that home was gone. She checked the locks. She watched the road. She stayed.

 In early 1976, the call came. Charles had been picked up on a burglary charge, broke into a home with a sawed-off shotgun, got found drinking at a bar nearby. Police connected it to the assault. Renee went to the lineup. She pointed at him without a word of hesitation. That face didn’t need any prompting. At trial, Renee took the stand and looked at Charles Campbell across that courtroom and told 12 strangers exactly what he had done to her.

Barbara Hendrickson took the stand, too. Two women, both refusing to be silent, both pointing at the same man and saying his name out loud. He was convicted. Three concurrent sentences totaling 40 years. He began serving May 11th, 1976. Renee Wicklund breathed for the first time in years.

 She didn’t know that by testifying against him, she had also given him a reason to come back. She didn’t know that in his mind he was already keeping score. Inside Washington State Reformatory at Monroe, Charles Campbell was not becoming a different man. He brewed his own alcohol using yeast stolen from the prison kitchen. He assaulted inmates.

At least one badly enough to require medical treatment. He ran a system of threats and coercion that kept other prisoners from reporting him. Guards knew about the drug trafficking. Some were reportedly afraid of him. Other inmates had a nickname for Charles, One Punch. In 1979, a prison psychologist reviewed his file and produced one of the most damning documents you’ll ever read from a state institution.

He wrote that Charles Campbell had declared war on society. That he viewed the people around him as mindless obstacles. That he was conscienceless, incapable of genuine care for anyone but himself, and imminently dangerous to everyone who crossed his path. That report went into the file, and then someone stopped checking the file.

Here is what actually happened. And pay attention, because this is the part that should haunt you. In June 1981, after Charles had served only 5 years of a 40-year sentence, the parole board classified him as eligible for lower custody. Their reason? The paperwork they received only showed three minor infractions from his first year.

Hundreds of documented violations, assaults, threats, brewing, coercion, a consistent and escalating pattern of violence. None of it had been forwarded. The reformatory had simply stopped sending records to the parole board. Not just for Charles, for hundreds of prisoners. An entire broken system running on incomplete information, releasing men into communities that had no idea they were coming.

That fall, Charles was transferred to a work-release facility in Monroe. A few months later, moved to a program in Everett, 10 miles from Renee Wicklund’s house. Nice. They told her the county sheriff’s office wasn’t notified. The state didn’t call. Renee believed Charles Campbell was still serving 40 years.

 What she didn’t know was that he was a 10-minute drive from her front door. And he had already found her address. During sentencing, Charles had requested a copy of the court transcripts, a legal right. His transcripts contained Renee’s home address. And in the months he spent at the work-release facility, he used it. He drove to Clearview.

 He parked in the tree line. He stood in the dark outside her house and watched the windows. In January 1982, Renee’s mother Hilda came to visit from North Dakota. Renee had never told her mother about the assault. Fiercely protective, didn’t want to put that weight on her family. So, Hilda arrived knowing nothing. But Hilda could feel something.

The dogs started barking at nothing, pacing near the windows at night, growling with that specific animal certainty that something outside the glass had no business being there. More than once, Hilda noticed Renee standing completely still at a window, staring out at the dark yard with an expression that looked less like looking and more like listening.

Then one morning, the footprints. Deep, fresh tracks in the snow running directly beneath the windows of the house. Nobody had any reason to be on that side of the property. Renee mentioned it to Don Hendrickson. He said he’d seen similar tracks near his house. What none of them knew was what those footprints meant.

 Charles Campbell was 10 miles away. He had her address memorized. He had been standing outside her home in the dark, watching, for months. Eight years had passed since she testified against him. He had spent every one of those years circling back to the same conclusion. He was going to make her pay for it. Wednesday, April 14th, 1982. Charles wakes up restless.

He drives to the home of Judith Dirks, a woman who had been a substance abuse counselor at his prison facility, who lost her job because of their relationship, who is now carrying his child. He sits in her living room and works through a six-pack of beer as if he has somewhere to be and he’s just killing time until he gets there.

 He barely speaks. He barely listens. His mind is already in Clearview. He leaves that afternoon. On the way out, he takes a butcher knife from Judith’s kitchen. He makes one more stop, a woman named Debbie. Something in him needs to establish control before he does what he’s already decided he’s going to do. He makes a move on her.

 She pushes him off. He backs down and walks out. The rage walks out with him. He gets in his car and drives south toward Clearview. By 3:00 in the afternoon, Charles has parked his car in the tree line. He cuts the engine. The street is quiet. There are children’s toys in the yard and inside that house is the woman who stood in the courtroom and told the truth about him.

He has been waiting 8 years for this. At 3:30, he steps out of the car. He moves through the bushes with the knife in his hand, low, slow, patient. Inside that same house, Renee has been in bed most of the day. Strep throat, the grinding wearing kind. She worked from home, ran her accounting practice out of the house, but not today. Today, she is resting.

 She doesn’t know there is a car in the tree line. She doesn’t know who is moving toward her house. Around 4:20, Shanna gets home from school. The house feels the way it does when a child comes through a door. And a few minutes later, Barbara knocks because that is Barbara. She had come to check on her neighbor to see if she needed anything.

To be present the way she had been present for years. She takes Shana into the kitchen with her to make Jell-O, keeping the little girl busy while Renee rests. It’s an ordinary Tuesday afternoon in a quiet neighborhood. Renee believes she is alone in her bedroom. She isn’t. What happened inside that house in the next 2 hours was not random.

It was not a robbery that escalated. It was not someone who panicked. Every movement Charles made was deliberate, specific, and personal. And what was done in that house to Renee, to Shana, who was 8 years old, to Barbara, who had only come over to help, does not need to be detailed frame by frame to be understood.

Renee was found in the bedroom, beaten, assaulted. Her throat had been cut. She had bled out on the floor. Shana was killed in that same room close to her mother. Barbara had tried to run. She had made it to the hallway. She was feet from the back door. He caught her there. When it was done, Charles took the jewelry from all three women, ripped the earrings from their ears, walked through that house, stepped over the bodies, and left through the sliding glass door.

 He drove to the Snohomish River. He was drinking again before anyone found them. By 6:30 that evening, Don Hendrickson hadn’t heard from Barbara. He knew his wife and Renee could talk for hours. He wasn’t usually worried, but Renee was sick, and something was pulling at him. A husband’s instinct, maybe. He walked across the street. The sliding glass door at the back of of house was open, just slightly.

 Renee was meticulous about her locks, had been since 1974. She would not leave a door open. Don stepped inside. The house was wrong in a way he felt before he could explain. Not the wrong of something visible, the wrong of an absence. The specific quiet of a place where something has stopped. A tap was running somewhere, water going nowhere. He turned it off.

 He saw a chair on its side. Things out of place that had no reason to be out of place. He moved down the hallway. He found Barbara first. Don Hendrickson had been married to that woman for 34 years. 34 years. She had walked across the street that afternoon to make Jell-O with a neighbor’s child. Because that was who she was.

She showed up. She always showed up. She was on the floor of the hallway. He knew she was gone. He knew it immediately and completely. And he knew that Renee and Shanna were still somewhere in that house. And some part of him kept moving because he had to know, because there was still some version of this where they were hiding, where they were okay, where something other than what he was already understanding was possible.

That version didn’t exist. Don walked back out to the street. He could barely stand. Police arrived within minutes. It took investigators no time at all to see what this was. This was not a break-in, not a robbery that went wrong. The level of violence, the nature of what had been done, the specific targets. This was personal.

 This was a man who came to a house with a purpose and fulfilled it. The crime scene told them a great deal without anyone saying a word. A bloody fingerprint on a drinking glass in the kitchen. Jewelry found in Charles’s pants pocket when he was arrested days later. More of Renee’s pieces in his car. 11-year-old Josette Frays, who lived next door, had been in her yard at 3:30 that afternoon.

 She saw a tall man with dark curly hair moving through the bushes with a large kitchen knife. Blue jacket, yellow stripe down the sleeve. She had watched him move toward the house. Later in a lineup, she pointed at Charles without a moment of hesitation. Police had already found a matching jacket in Charles’s room the morning after the murders.

 Judith Dirks took the stand and told the court what she knew. For years, she said, Charles had talked about Renee and Barbara. He blamed them for every day he spent behind bars. He couldn’t move past it, couldn’t let a single conversation go by without circling back to the fact that those two women had stood in a courtroom and told the truth about him.

 He had gotten his hands on the court transcripts. He knew the address and Judith had known. In the way you know things you wish you didn’t, that this was coming. A fellow inmate from the work-release program told police he had spent part of that evening with Charles at the Snohomish River. Charles was agitated, he said, wound up, excitable in a way that felt completely wrong.

 At one point, Charles drove down to the riverbank and did something with what he was carrying. Police sent divers. They pulled up Renee’s jewelry from the bottom of that river. Bracelets, necklaces, small decorative pieces she had carried from her childhood home in North Dakota. Things her mother had given her.

 Sitting in the river mud, Charles Rodman Campbell was arrested and charged with three counts of aggravated first-degree murder. Now, before we get to the trial, you need to sit with something. Everything that happened on April 14th, 1982, was preventable. Not theoretically preventable, specifically, concretely, step-by-step preventable.

 Charles Campbell’s own mother wrote a letter to the state warning them that moving her son to lower custody would end in exactly this kind of disaster. She knew what he was. A psychologist put it in a formal report, dangerous, conscienceless, incapable of caring for anyone but himself. Hundreds of violation reports sat in a filing system that stopped forwarding them.

 Charles’ ex-wife reported that he had left work release and assaulted her. And the state decided the case was too weak to pursue. A man with a violent conviction for assaulting the same woman was placed 10 miles from her home and not a single person picked up the phone. Every warning ignored. Every flag missed. And three women paid for it.

 The trial began in November 1982. Charles sat at the defense table and contributed almost nothing to his own defense. When crime scene photographs were shown to the jury, images that reportedly caused even experienced investigators to look away, Charles sat still. When testimony described in detail what he had done to Renee, to Shana, to Barbara, he sat still.

When witnesses placed him in those bushes, in that yard, waiting in the trees at 3:00 in the afternoon, he sat there unmoved, like the proceedings were happening to someone else entirely. His attorneys argued tunnel vision. Police had locked onto Charles too early, they said, and ignored other suspects.

 It was a long reach, and the jury saw it for what it was. The physical evidence didn’t need any help. The fingerprint, the jewelry, the jacket, the timeline of his movements, the eyewitness, the river. On November 26th, 1982, the jury found Charles Rodman Campbell guilty on all three counts. On December 17th, he was sentenced to death. Washington state gave condemned inmates a choice between lethal injection and hanging. Charles refused to choose.

He said selecting the method would constitute a form of suicide, which he claimed violated his religious beliefs. The same man who walked into a house and killed three women in one afternoon was now explaining to the state that he had religious objections to participating in his own execution.

 The state chose for him, hanging, and then the appeals began. 12 years of them. Cruel and unusual punishment, denial of due process, violations of constitutional rights. Court after court, year after year, all of it rejected. All of it dragging the families of Renee, Shanna, and Barbara through another decade of waiting, of reopened wounds, of watching a man try to survive his consequences using the same system he had spent his life exploiting.

 His mother spoke publicly during those years. Betty Lou said she still loved her son, and she also said the sentence was right, that this had always been where he was heading. That she had never believed anything different. She shared memories from his childhood that were dark and specific. A woman who had watched her son become this from the closest possible distance, who had tried to warn people when the warning still might have mattered, and had been ignored like every other warning in this case. During those years

on death row, Charles met his son. Judith Dirks had given birth to a boy named Jacob in October 1982, the same fall Charles went on trial. Jacob grew up visiting his father through a pane of glass. He later petitioned the governor not to carry out the execution because that man on the other side of the glass was the only father he had.

Jacob would go on to speak publicly about the weight of that, about what it cost him, about the work it took to build a different kind of life for himself. He became a social worker. He did good things with the life he was given. The story of Charles Campbell has damage in every direction. On April 15th, 1994, 12 years after the murders, the state of Washington lifted the stay of execution.

 Charles was given a date, May 27th, 1994. The night before, Charles refused to leave his cell. Guards used pepper spray to extract him. He was moved to the holding area near the execution chamber. His last meal was brought to him, fish sticks, tossed green salad, scalloped potatoes, and a cherry tart. He barely touched it.

 He spent his remaining hours with a small number of people. Judith was there. Jacob was there. Whatever was said in those hours belonged to them. By midnight, the guards came again. And we already know what happened. What we haven’t told you yet is who was watching. Lorraine Ehlers-Iverson was in that execution chamber, Renee’s sister.

 She had flown in from North Dakota to be there for this. When she stepped outside afterwards, she said, “A long tortuous ordeal has come to a close. We can go to sleep at night knowing Charles Campbell can never come out of prison to kill again.” Not the relief of something good happening, the other kind, the heavy kind that comes after something that needed to end has finally ended.

Don Hendrickson was in the room, too. The man who had walked across the street on a quiet Tuesday evening and found his whole world changed, who had moved through that hallway and kept going because he had to know. Don sat in that chamber and watched until it was done. He passed away in 1999. He was buried beside Barbara.

 Renee and Shana Wicklund are buried side by side in North Dakota, back in the state Renee had come from. Far from the Pacific Northwest she had loved enough to call home. The trapdoor dropped at 12:08 a.m. Charles Campbell dropped 5 ft and 7 in. He was pronounced dead at 12:14. He was the last person executed by hanging in Washington state.

 Nearly 30 years passed and then the story cracked open one more time. In 2023, detectives in Seattle quietly reopened a case that had been sitting untouched for nearly 50 years. Her name was Hallie Ann Seaman. She was 25 years old in April 1975. A graduate student at the University of Washington, two semesters from finishing her master’s degree in architecture.

Last seen alive at her drafting table. The following afternoon, her body was found in the bushes near East Lake Avenue. She had been sexually assaulted and stabbed. Her station wagon was found miles away, burned down to the frame. No suspect, [clears throat] no arrest. For 48 years, no answers.

 Then investigators ran old DNA evidence through modern forensic databases. The match came back to a man who had been dead for 29 years, Charles Rodman Campbell. He had killed Hallie Ann Seaman in April 1975, 4 months after he attacked Renee Wicklund, while he was a fugitive, while the state of Washington had no idea where he was or what he was doing.

He was never questioned, never suspected. His DNA had always been at that crime scene. The world just wasn’t capable of reading it for another 50 years. Hallie Ann Seaman was likely his first. Nobody knew. Here is what this case leaves behind. Three women are dead because a reformatory stopped sending records to a parole board.

 Three women are dead because a county sheriff’s office was never told a violent predator had been placed 10 miles from his first victim. Three women are dead because Renee Wicklund, who had a name, who had testified, who had a daughter, was never given a single phone call that could have let her decide what to do next. The system failed.

 That part is not a debate, but here is the harder question, the one I want you to think about after you close this video. Charles Campbell was not a surprise. Everyone who knew him, his mother, the psychologist, his ex-wife, the inmates who were afraid of him, they all said the same thing in different words. This man cannot be reached.

 He is not going to change. He is going to hurt someone if you let him go. So, what do we do with that? Is the lesson of Charles Campbell about broken systems, better monitoring, better records, better notification for victims, better oversight of who gets released and when? Or is the lesson that there are some people for whom rehabilitation was never a real possibility, and that the only real question is how completely we separate them from everyone else? Because both of those lessons point to very different solutions.

And I don’t think you can believe both at the same time. Drop your answer in the comments. I want to know where you stand, and if this is the kind of story you come here for, the ones where the crime is only half of what went wrong. Subscribe to True Crime Matter and hit the notification bell. There’s a lot more where this came from.