Washington State Penitentiary

Three stopped clocks in the execution chamber mark 12:56 AM, the moment of the last execution in 2010, and the gallows hooks are still embedded in the ceiling. Washington's oldest prison in Walla Walla has seen 78 executions, a 1934 escape that killed nine people, and houses the Green River Killer, a Hillside Strangler, and a serial killer who once worked there as a guard.

When the execution chamber at Washington State Penitentiary was officially retired on September 18, 2024, three stopped clocks on the wall marked 12:56 AM. That was the exact moment Cal Coburn Brown was pronounced dead on September 10, 2010, the last person executed in the state. The gallows hooks were still embedded in the second-floor ceiling with visible rope marks. The trap door was still functional above the lethal injection gurney below. Former captain Dick Morgan said the sound of the trap door was "hard to forget," so "loud and startling" it would disturb inmates in nearby wings for days.

The prison was built in 1886 on 160 acres donated by Walla Walla businessman Levi Ankeny, using machine-made bricks from nearby Dixie that weighed a pound heavier than anything manufactured in the country at the time. The first 97 convicts arrived on May 11, 1887, transferred under armed guard from Seatco Prison in Thurston County, a privately-run facility so brutal it earned the names "The Seatco Dungeon" and "Hell on Earth." When Washington achieved statehood in 1889, the territorial prison became the Washington State Penitentiary. Inmates gave it their own names over the decades: The Hill, The Joint, The Walls, The Pen. The one that stuck was Concrete Mama.

The violence here has been extraordinary. On February 12, 1934, inmate James R. DeLong pulled a knife on an officer and said, "Sorry to do this, but we're doing too much time." The spontaneous escape attempt left nine dead: seven inmates cut down by wall guards' gunfire, turnkey Tom S. Hubbard stabbed multiple times, and Officer H.L. Briggs fatally knifed as inmates used bound hostages as human shields. One inmate, Phillip Wallace, briefly evaded gunfire by putting on a guard's gold-braided cap, causing wall guards to mistake him for staff.

The 1970s brought a radical experiment in prisoner self-governance through the Resident Government Council, but reforms collapsed into chaos. The administration enlisted the Washington State Prison Motorcycle Association, a group of imprisoned outlaw bikers, to enforce discipline. Bikers roared prison-built choppers around the Big Yard, marijuana was everywhere, and hundreds shot heroin. On June 15, 1979, Sergeant William Cross was stabbed five times (one cutting his aorta) while intervening in a confrontation between Mexican American and Native American gang members near the dining hall. Cross became the first Washington corrections officer killed by inmates in living memory. His death triggered a 130-day lockdown.

Seventy-eight people were executed in that chamber between 1904 and 2010. The first was Zenon "James" Champoux, a twenty-six-year-old French Canadian hanged on May 6, 1904, for stabbing eighteen-year-old entertainer Lottie Brace at Seattle's Arcade variety theater after she rejected his advances. Though described as dying instantly, his heart beat for seventeen more minutes. The most notorious execution came on January 5, 1993, when child killer Westley Allan Dodd was hanged just after midnight, the first legal hanging in the United States since 1965.

Death row occupied the last six cells on A-Tier in the administrative segregation unit known as Big Red. Concrete slabs replaced metal bunks. The tier received no direct sunlight despite fluorescent overhead lighting. Notable inmates who passed through or remain behind the walls include Gary Ridgway (the Green River Killer, forty-eight murder convictions), Kenneth Bianchi (one of the two Hillside Stranglers, five life terms), and Robert Lee Yates (the Spokane Serial Killer, at least sixteen victims). Yates had been hired as a corrections officer at this same penitentiary in 1975, years before his killing spree.

Correctional officers report unexplained sounds echoing through empty tiers, figures glimpsed along corridors where decades of violence occurred, and an atmosphere in the oldest cell blocks that goes beyond what brick and concrete should produce. The execution chamber, preserved intact with its gallows hooks and stopped clocks, carries a weight that staff describe as physical. In a place where seventy-eight men were hanged or injected, where nine died in a single afternoon of gunfire, where a sergeant was stabbed to death at dinnertime, and where serial killers serve their sentences within earshot of each other, the question isn't whether something lingers. It's what it would take for it not to.