Den stora tråden om seriemördare [Sammanfogad]

Campbell was charged with the April 1982 killing of Renae Wicklund, her eight-year old daughter Shannah, and her neighbor Barbara Hendrickson, in Clearview, Snohomish County, Washington. He was convicted and sentenced to death.

However, that was not the first time Campbell had harmed the Wicklund household: he had been previously convicted and sentenced for raping Wicklund in 1974. In that trial, she had testified that Campbell had attacked and sodomized her and held a knife to her baby's throat while forcing sex upon her. Campbell served six years of a 30-year sentence in a Washington prison, and upon his release (which Wicklund did not know about), tracked down Mrs. Wicklund and committed the three murders.

In 1982 he was convicted on charges of capital murder. Campbell had been given a choice between hanging and lethal injection, but refused to make a choice, so under state law, hanging was used. Later in 1996, Washington state law was amended to make lethal injection the default method. Campbell refused to cooperate with the execution, so he had to be removed from his cell using pepper spray and hanged strapped to a board. It took prison officials 90 seconds to place a hood on his head and to fix the noose before the trap was opened. He died instantly.

According to Broom, Campbell refused to state a preference, and at that time, hanging was still the primary method in the state of Washington.

"I haven't seen a lethal injection," Broom said, "but from the reports I've read, it would appear that a hanging is a much more dramatic thing to see. Everything about it is different, but you still walk away with a very detached feeling."

After being thoroughly searched a number of times, Broom and the other media witnesses were relieved of their belts, pens, keys, anything that could be used as a weapon. They were all furnished with identical note pads and short, eraserless pencils for making notes during the execution. They were then led to the facility where the hangings took place.

"This facility is not new," Broom said, "so there's not that sanitary atmosphere of the lethal injection chamber. And, of course, you need more room to do a hanging than a lethal injection, so this is essentially a two-story building with a trap door for the inmate to fall through."

Witnesses sit in folding chairs facing a pair of large windows, one on each floor of the facility. The upper window is covered with a gauzy curtain that can be parted for the inmate to speak his final words. Otherwise, it remains closed and the window is backlit, creating a silhouette, so witnesses can see the actions-sliding the hood and the noose over the inmate's head, etc.-but cannot see the executioners' faces.

"Charles Campbell either could not or would not make a last statement," Broom said. "He was sedated and had to be strapped to a board to hold him upright. Then we heard the trap door open and his body, still strapped to the board, was hanging in front of us in the lower window, which did not have any gauze curtain.

"The body hit the end of the rope, and there was a slight bounce, and then there wasn't any movement after that except that the body turned slightly back and forth."

Broom said the moment after the execution his dominant emotion was one of relief.

"Some hangings in past years hadn't gone quite right," Broom said. "I had read an old Times article about a hanging that had ended in a partial decapitation. So I felt a sense of relief that this one didn't end that way, and that we didn't have to see anything too physically grueling."