William Ray Davis, a white male age 37, was killed on October 1, 1991, after being lured from Portland to a remote stretch of the Warm Springs Indian Reservation in Wasco County by a man promising day labor at ten dollars an hour. Davis, who was experiencing homelessness, was one of several men targeted with the same pitch. Once isolated in the high desert, he was shot in the head and left where the wind scours the sage and basalt.
His death occurred the same day as that of another victim, 23-year-old William Clement Marks, and within the same month as the killing of 27-year-old Anthony Arthur Barker.
Detectives later learned the recruiter was Douglas Franklin Wright, a recently paroled offender who had embarked on a new series of murders by trolling for vulnerable men near Portland shelters. Wright’s method was chillingly consistent: food and drink on the drive, talk of brush-clearing work at a “youth camp,” and then a pistol shot once the road turned to dust. Evidence tied Davis’s murder to this pattern in Wasco County, where prosecutors would ultimately center their case.
The break came on October 20, 1991, when Wright attempted the same routine with two more men. He shot one, Anthony “Tony” Nelson, in the head, but the second man, Randy Scott Henry, leapt from the vehicle and escaped. Henry flagged help and led police back to Wright, whose arrest opened a trail of forensic and testimonial links to the earlier killings of Davis, Marks, and Barker. With those connections established, Wright was charged in Wasco County and the case against him accelerated.
In court, prosecutors set out the sequence of October killings and the ruse that brought each victim to the reservation. A Wasco County jury convicted Wright of the aggravated murders of Davis, Marks, and Barker; on October 11, 1993, he was sentenced to death. The sentence was carried out by lethal injection on September 6, 1996, making Wright the first person executed in Oregon since 1962 and the first by that method in the state. The official record of victims from that October includes Davis by name, age, and county; memorial listings likewise preserve his date and place of death.
No other suspects were credibly identified in Davis’s killing. From arrest through execution, authorities and the courts treated Wright as the sole offender responsible for luring and murdering the three men in Wasco County during October 1991, including William Ray Davis.
