YAKIMA — In November 1938, the disappearance of a Yakima businessman was the big story in town.
News accounts through the month chronicled the search for John Dee Moore and, after his body was found south of Toppenish, the search for his killer that culminated in the arrest of an 18-year-old California man.
Roy Wright, Moore’s killer, would become the last person tried in Yakima County to be executed by the state of Washington.
Moore owned a Packard car dealership in Yakima at the corner of South Fourth Street and East Chestnut Avenue, near where the Yakima Transit Center now stands. The 61-year-old Moore was described as a “genial” man by his employees.
Moore’s employees said the last time he was seen was on Nov. 7, 1938, when he was showing a 1937 Packard to a man and drove off with the man on a test drive.
The dealership’s employees became concerned when Moore did not show up for work the next day, and they alerted police. Investigators put out a description of the car and the man who was seen with Moore.
The Packard was found in Vancouver the next day. While there was no sign that the car had crashed, authorities said there were bloodstains inside it.
Moore’s body was found Nov. 9, two days after he left the car dealership, in a gulch about 26 miles south of Toppenish. An autopsy determined that he had died from a single gunshot to the head, and that he had been killed somewhere else and his body was dumped there. At the time of his death, Moore was carrying only $5, which was not found on him, authorities said.
Portland police and the FBI joined Yakima detectives in the investigation, as Moore’s employees looked through mug shots in an attempt to identify the man they saw driving off with their boss.
On Nov. 19, Yakima police got a break in the case when officers in San Jose, Calif., said they had arrested Wright after he was accused of stealing a car from a dealership there under the pretense of a test drive, and admitted to car thefts in Yakima County.
When Yakima detectives told Wright he was being arrested for Moore’s killing, he confessed and detailed how the crime happened and his flight to California.
Wright had told Moore he wanted to take the car on a test drive and, after driving around the city, directed Moore to head to Wapato, where Wright claimed his mother lived and would make a payment on the car.
Once in the Wapato area, Wright pulled a gun on Moore and ordered him to get out of the car and hand over his wallet, he told investigators. Instead, as Moore pulled the keys from the ignition, he grabbed for the gun, at which point Wright shot Moore once in the head. In addition to Moore’s wallet, Wright also took Moore’s watch, pocketknife and tie clasp before throwing him out of the car.
When he was booked in Yakima, Wright showed little emotion as he signed his fingerprint card, according to news accounts.
With Wright’s confession in hand, prosecutors charged him with first-degree murder. The trial centered mainly on the question of whether Wright should be sentenced to death or life in prison.
In his closing arguments, prosecuting attorney Lloyd Wiehl argued that a death sentence would be the only guarantee that Wright would not offend again. Wright, he warned, could be released either on good behavior or through a pardon from a “sentimental governor” as a Christmas holiday gesture.
“You know if this boy goes to (the state prison at) Walla Walla, he will probably be out in perhaps 10 years, and not more than 20 years. He will get out of there to prey again upon society. Do you think with his background that being placed in the penitentiary … will reform him? Do you think being among those hardened criminals, murderers, robbers, those mad dogs that have been penned up there, is going to reform this boy?”
Jurors unanimously voted to condemn Wright to death, with his sentenced being passed in Yakima County Superior Court in January 1939.
‘A warning to all young boys and girls’
But while awaiting sentencing, Wright was among five inmates who broke out of the jail. After two days, a tired Wright turned himself in to Toppenish police.
Authorities said the escapees used saw blades smuggled into the county jail in bananas to cut through the window bars.
Wright appealed the sentence, arguing that Wiehl’s closing argument unnecessarily inflamed jurors against him, but the state Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the argument did not amount to misconduct.
Wright, 19 at the time, was hanged in the early-morning hours of Oct. 6, 1939, at Walla Walla. His last words were reported to be, “My life is not worth half of the man I killed … (and) the judgment of my sinful life will be a warning to all young boys and girls to not transgress the law.”
Yakima County’s most recent death-penalty case was in 1989 for Herbert “Chief” Rice, who was tried for the 1988 killing of an elderly Parker couple. Jurors in that case deadlocked 11-1 in favor of a death sentence, which meant Rice, who was 17 at the time of the killings, received a sentence of life without parole.
That sentence was overturned after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2012 that such sentences for juveniles were unconstitutional. Rice and his accomplice, Russell Duane McNeil, were resentenced in 2023 to a minimum mandatory 40-year prison sentence, giving them the possibility of being released as soon as 2028.
Gov. Jay Inslee implemented a moratorium on executions in 2014, and in 2017 the Washington State Supreme Court ruled the state’s death penalty was unconstitutional.
In 2023, the Washington Legislature struck the death penalty from state law. In 2024, Inslee presided over a ceremony to close the death chamber at Walla Walla.
