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Westley Dodd was a predator who fell through the cracks of an inefficient, overburdened legal system, graduating from relatively harmless acts of exhibitionism to the depths of sadistic child molestation and murder before he was finally caged and condemned. Apparently repentant in captivity, he granted countless interviews and published articles on self-defense for children in the months before he kept his final date with Washingtons hangman. His legacy, for all of the belated efforts to do right, consists of ugly memories and pain. A native of Washington State, born July 3, 1961, Dodd was conscious of his sexual attraction to neighborhood boys by age nine, a full six years before his parents divorced and cast the family into disarray. By age fourteen, he had begun to dabble in exhibitionism, flashing other children from his bedroom window until one reported him and the police were called. Dodd got off easy that time, since the witness had not seen his face, and the experience taught him to seek his pleasure further afield. In short order, he graduated from exposing himself to more aggressive actions, fondling and fellating any children who were willing to submit. Dodd graduated from high school in 1979 and joined the U.S. Navy two years later, in part to avoid pending charges of child molestation. Boot camp failed to mend his ways, however, and Dodd was AWOL at the time of his June 6, 1982 arrest for asking a nine- year-old boy to disrobe in Richland, Washington. That charge earned him a general discharge from the service on disciplinary ground, but the case was apparently never pursued. On December 29, 1982, Dodd was jailed again, this time in Benton City, Washington, for undressing a youngster he lured away from a playground. He pled guilty on that charge in January 1983, and served a total of thirty days before he was released to seek court-ordered counseling. By all accounts, the treatment was a failure. With the courts permission, Dodd went to live with his father in Lewiston, Idaho, where he signed up for another out-patient program and was said to be making some progress. His June 1984 arrest for molesting a nine-year-old boy would suggest that counselors were mistaken in their assessment of Dodd. Sentenced to ten years in prison for lewd conduct with a minor, he served less than four months before his term was commuted to one year in county jail, that sentence suspended on condition that he seek further treatment. By 1986, Dodd was back in the Vancouver area, pursuing his interest in children full-time. On June 13, 1987, he was arrested after trying to lure a young boy into a vacant building. Convicted on a misdemeanor count of attempted unlawful imprisonment, he was released in October with yet another order for psychiatric treatment. Dodd went through the motions until his probation expired, in the fall of 1988, at which time he promptly abandoned his therapy and went back on the hunt. By that time, he had started to collect his morbid daydreams in a diary, complete with discussion of planned rapes and murders, sketches of a torture rack he planned to build, and details of a private pact with Satan to assist him in obtaining victims . Dodd would later tell authorities he wasnt serious about his bargain with the Devil, but his writings suggest otherwise. In one entry, Dodd wrote: Ive now asked Satan to provide me a 6-10 year old boy to make love to, suck and fuck, play with, photograph, kill, and do my exploratory surgery on. Yet another page detailed his search for compliant children who could be taught Lucifers ways and be an assistant to Lucifer, through me. Whatever his religious bent, by the late summer of 1989, Dodd clearly had murder on his mind. He was armed with a six-inch knife on Labor Day, September 4, when he went prowling in Vancouvers David Douglas Park. The night before that hunting trip, he wrote: If I can get it home, Ill have more time for various types of rape, rather than just one quickie before murder. As luck would have it, though, he set his sights on brothers, 11-year-old Cole Neer and 10-year-old William. Taking the two of them home was clearly out of the question, but Dodd bullied them into following him off the beaten track, deeper into some woods, where both boys were bound with shoelaces, sexually abused, and then stabbed to death. Escaping in the nick of time, Dodd fled the scene less than fifteen minutes before a teenage hiker found the mutilated bodies and ran off to call police. Dodd spent the next few weeks watching Vancouvers manhunt from a distance, filling a scrapbook with press clippings, killing time with masturbation and his diary until the blood lust drove him out to hunt again. On October 29, he drove across the river into nearby Portland, Oregon, and there abducted four-year-old Lee Isely from the playground of the Richmond Elementary School. Back a Dodds apartment, the child was molested and photographed in the nude, his ordeal interrupted briefly by a trip to McDonalds and K-Mart, where Dodd shelled out the money for a toy. The sexual abuse resumed once they were back at Westleys flat, climaxed at 5:30 the next morning, when Dodd choked his young victim unconscious and finished the job with a rope, suspending Lees body from a rod in the closet. After work that night, he dumped the body near Vancouver Lake, at the Washington State Game Preserve, where a hunter discovered it early on November 1. Police still had no clues to the elusive killers identity, beyond a rough sketch compiled from eyewitness descriptions in Portland, but Dodd had reached the point of no return by now, his homicidal urges pushing him beyond all rational control. On November 11, he tried to abduct a young boy from a Vancouver theater, giving up when the child resisted his advances. Two days later, after scribbling another plea to Satan for assistance, he drove to Camas, Washington, to try his luck at another theater. He got the screaming child outside, this time, but bolted for his car when witnesses collected in the lobby. Less than two blocks from the theater, his car broke down, and Dodd was captured by the boyfriend of his latest victims mother, held until police arrived and took him into custody. Five minutes with the FBIs computer network told authorities they had a live one on their hands. Immediately suspect in the recent murders, Dodd at first denied involvement, objecting that he loved children, but his mood changed as the night wore on, and confessed the crimes in detail, directing police to his stash of manuscripts and photographs. The rest was easy, with Dodds guilty plea to all charges in January 1990 clearing the way for a death sentence six months later. Dodd resisted all appeals and mounted the gallows at Walla Walla state prison shortly after midnight on January 5, 1993. He was the first American inmate hanged in nearly three decades. |
