Triple Killer Who Asked for Death Is Hanged : Punishment: Execution comes this morning after Washington state justices reject plea from death penalty opponents.

Three-time child killer Westley Allan Dodd, who asked that he be afforded the same treatment he gave one of his victims, was executed early today in the nation’s first hanging in 28 years.

The 31-year-old shipping clerk died just after midnight after a prison official pushed a button that opened a trapdoor and sent Dodd falling the 7-feet, 1-inch length of his gallows rope.

The state Supreme Court cleared the way for the execution when it issued a one-sentence ruling late Monday rejecting a bid by 26 Washington residents to halt the hanging as cruel and unusual punishment. The vote was 7-1.

It was Washington state’s first execution since 1963.

The last hangings in the United States were in 1965 in Kansas, when four murderers were put to death. Among them were Richard Eugene Hickock and Perry Edward Smith, the subjects of Truman Capote’s book, “In Cold Blood.”

Dodd, who killed three children, had decided to drop all appeals. He had said he must die because “I will kill and rape again and enjoy every minute of it.”

He chose hanging over lethal injection because, he said, he had hanged his youngest victim’s body in a closet after killing him.

Death penalty opponents staged prayer meetings, vigils and demonstrations across the state in the hours before the execution.

Dodd was sentenced to death in 1990 for the 1989 sex murders of three boys in Washington’s Vancouver area. The crimes were so grisly that some of the jurors who sentenced him sought psychiatric help afterward.