On January 23, 1948, 27-year-old Wardell Heath Henderson was executed in the Oregon State Penitentiary gas chamber for the 1945 Vanport murder of Walter Poole, a white butcher. The conviction, handed down by an all-white jury, was widely criticized as racially biased and unsupported by physical evidence. Despite local and national petitions to commute the sentence and new evidence suggesting injustice, Governor John Hall denied clemency. The case became a catalyst for racial justice efforts in Portland into the Civil Rights era.
Born November 26, 1920, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Henderson was the son of a laborer and a domestic worker. He attended school through the 11th grade before working at the R.J. Reynolds tobacco plant. In 1941, he enlisted in the US Army, serving with distinction in the Aleutian Islands campaign with the 93rd Engineer Battalion and participating in the Invasion of Kiska as a Caterpillar operator with the 87th Mountain Infantry. Leaving the Army in 1944, he moved to Portland to work in the shipyards.
On Christmas Eve 1945, Henderson shot a former friend in the leg during a dispute at Vanport speakeasy, fleeing the scene. That same night, Walter Poole attended a holiday gathering nearby. Poole’s body was discovered the next day, badly beaten, shot in the back, and robbed of his car, $90, a ring, and a watch.
Witnesses later reported seeing Poole’s 1940 Chevrolet driven by a Black man and a white soldier on Christmas Day at multiple Portland gas stations. On December 29, the car was found abandoned in Iowa; a Black man and two white soldiers had been seen leaving it. Three days later, at his mother’s urging, Henderson surrendered to the authorities in Philadelphia to answer charges he had deserted the military. A ring and watch matching Poole’s were found in his possession.
Henderson was interrogated for five days by FBI agents before signing four confessions, all written by the agents. He was extradited to Portland and charged with first-degree murder. Prosecutors argued that Henderson had killed Poole for the car after the speakeasy altercation. The defense emphasized the lack of physical evidence and highlighted blatant inconsistencies in the confessions that contradicted the Prosecution’s own case. Despite this, Henderson was convicted and lost on appeal.
Before his execution, Henderson wrote an article for the Oregon State Penitentiary inmate journal, Shadows, revealing that two white soldiers had offered him money, a watch, and a ring to drive them in Poole’s Chevrolet to the Midwest. Multiple witnesses confirmed the presence of white soldiers, but these leads were dismissed in court. Henderson also described coercive interrogation tactics, including solitary confinement, starvation, beatings, and threats of death, leading him to sign the confessions.
Despite growing public outcry, clemency was denied. George L. Thomas, Portland chapter president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) personally advocated for Henderson, expressing serious doubts about his guilt. Other civil rights leaders, including Edwin C. “Bill” Berry of the Portland Urban League, condemned the execution as “tantamount to a lynching.” Henderson’s case fostered the growth of the Portland chapters of the NAACP and the Urban League, and energized the effort to abolish capital punishment in Oregon.
