Quote: Westley Allan Dodd (July 3, 1961 – January 5, 1993) was an American convicted serial killer and sex offender. In 1989, he sexually assaulted and murdered three young boys in Vancouver, Washington. He was arrested later that year after a failed attempt to abduct a six-year-old boy at a movie theatre.

Dodd wrote detailed accounts of his murders in a diary that was found by police. After pleading guilty to the charges of murder, he received the death penalty. After refusing an automatic appeal, he was executed by hanging on January 5, 1993, the first legal hanging in the United States since 1965. 

By the age of 9, Dodd had discovered that he was sexually attracted to other boys.

Sex offenses

At the age of 13, Dodd began exposing himself to children in his neighborhood. His father eventually told an Oregon newspaper that he was aware of the behavior but largely ignored it, since he felt his son was otherwise a "well-behaved child who never had problems with drugs, drinking, or smoking." By the time he entered high school, Dodd had progressed to child molestation, beginning with his younger cousins, and then neighborhood children he offered to babysit, as well as the children of a woman his father was dating. At the age of 15, Dodd was arrested for indecent exposure, but police released him with a recommendation of juvenile counseling.

In August 1981, at the age of 20, Dodd tried to abduct two girls, who reported him to the police. No action was taken. The following month, he enlisted in the US Navy, and was assigned to the submarine base in Bangor, Washington, where he began abusing children who lived on the base.

Once, Dodd offered a group of boys $50 to accompany him to a motel room for a game of strip poker. This time, he was arrested. Despite confessing to police that he planned to molest the boys, he was released, with no charges filed.[10] Shortly afterwards, he was arrested again for exposing himself to a boy and was dishonorably discharged from the Navy. Dodd spent 19 days in jail and underwent court-ordered counselling. In May 1984, he was arrested for molesting a 10-year-old boy but received only a suspended sentence.

Dodd planned his entire life around easy access to "targets", as he referred to children. He moved into an apartment block that housed families with children, and worked at fast food restaurants, as a charity truck driver, and other such jobs. He repeatedly molested the pre-school-aged children of a neighbor, but the woman declined to press charges, fearing the experience would be too traumatic for her children.

In 1987, Dodd tried to lure a young boy into a vacant building, but the boy refused to go with him and instead told the police. Prosecutors were aware of Dodd's history of sexual offenses and recommended five years in prison. However, once again, Dodd received minimal punishment because he had not actually touched the boy or exposed himself. He was placed on probation and ordered to seek psychiatric treatment. After finishing probation, he stopped going to treatment and moved to Vancouver, Washington,[6] where he was hired as a shipping clerk.

In the early autumn of 1989, Dodd decided that David Douglas Park in Vancouver, a large, heavily wooded park with several secluded trails, would be a good place to find potential victims. He was arrested several times over the next few years for child molestation, each time serving short jail sentences and being given court-mandated therapy. All his victims (around 50 in all) were below the age of 12, some of them as young as 2, and most of them were boys.

Dodd's sexual fantasies became increasingly violent over the years; he would later say, "The more I thought about it, the more exciting the idea of murder sounded. I planned many ways to kill a boy." A psychiatrist who evaluated Dodd following one of his convictions said that he fit the legal criteria for a "sexual psychopath".

Murders

On September 4, 1989, Dodd went to Vancouver's David Douglas Park, with a fish fillet knife and shoelaces, and sought out young boys to kill. He lured two brothers, 11- and 10-year-old Cole and William Neer, to a secluded area, where he forced them to undress, tied them to a tree and performed sex acts on them both. When he was done, he stabbed them repeatedly with a knife and fled the scene. The boys were soon discovered in the park. Cole was dead at the scene, while William died en route to a nearby hospital.

After the murders of the two brothers, Dodd started a scrapbook with newspaper clippings and other facts about the murders. On October 29, Dodd drove to Portland, Oregon, where he encountered four-year-old Lee Iseli and his nine-year-old brother Justin at a local park. The younger boy was playing alone on a slide, and Dodd succeeded in convincing the boy to come with him. Justin had gone home, so Dodd told Lee that he would drive him back to his house. He managed to take Lee to his apartment in Vancouver apparently unnoticed, and he ordered the boy to undress. Dodd then tied Lee to his bed and molested him, taking photographs of the abuse. Dodd kept Lee overnight while he continued to sexually abuse him, all the while jotting down every detail in his diary. The next morning, he strangled Lee to death with a rope and hung his body in the closet, photographing it as a macabre "trophy".

He would later confess to police that he had originally planned not to kill the boy, but eventually decided that it was necessary to keep him from telling anyone. Dodd stuffed Lee's nude body in trash bags and threw him in some bushes near Vancouver Lake. He burned Lee's clothing in a trash barrel except for the boy's underwear, which he kept as a souvenir of the crime. One day later, Lee's body was discovered, which sparked a manhunt for the killer.[6] Dodd kept a low profile and mostly stayed in his apartment, writing down future plans for child abduction and also constructing a homemade torture rack for the next victim.
Arrest

On November 13, 1989, Dodd drove to Camas, Washington, around 12 miles (19 km) east of Vancouver, where he attempted to abduct 6-year-old James Kirk II from the restroom of the New Liberty Theatre. The child began fighting and crying as Dodd was leaving the theatre through the lobby, carrying the boy in his arms. Despite Dodd's attempts to calm the boy, theatre employees became suspicious and followed Dodd out to the street. Due to their pursuit, Dodd released his victim, got into his car, and drove away.

The boyfriend of the boy's mother, William "Ray" Graves, came to the theatre lobby and was told that the boy had nearly been abducted. Graves went outside the theatre in the direction where Dodd was last seen. Dodd's car had broken down a short distance away from the theatre and he was attempting to start the motor. In order not to raise Dodd's suspicion and to stall for time, Graves pretended to be a passerby and offered to help him. He then put Dodd into a headlock and returned him to the theatre, where employees called the police.

The local police contacted the Portland Police task force investigating the kidnapping and murder of Lee Iseli. Dodd was taken to the Camas Police station, where Portland task force lead detectives C.W. Jensen and Dave Trimble interviewed him. He was then taken to the Clark County jail in Vancouver, where Jensen and Trimble continued their interrogation over the course of three days. Eventually, Dodd confessed to all three murders. Jensen and Trimble then served a search warrant at Dodd's home in Vancouver.

During the search of Dodd's home, police discovered a homemade torture rack, along with newspaper clippings about his crimes, a briefcase containing Lee Iseli's underwear, a photo album containing pictures of Lee Iseli, and assorted photographs of children in newspaper and store catalogue underwear advertisements. They also discovered Dodd's diary, in which he wrote in detail about the murders.

Dodd was charged with aggravated first-degree murder in the deaths of the Neer brothers and Lee Iseli, plus attempted kidnapping of another child. He initially pleaded not guilty to all charges, but later changed his plea to guilty.

   

Quote: Why have I yearned, even ached, so much to write about 1983 lately? On a purely nostalgia-based level, I find myself wanting to swim around in a time from my life when there was a bit more idle space in the world: a time when I went to a lovely school, had a fertile imagination, a great social life and spent a lot of time outdoors. But there’s much more to it than that. I turned eight midway through 1983, and in a way it seems like the first year of my life for which my memories are solid and fully coloured in, an energetic midpoint of childhood when, fully recovered from the illness that had almost killed me a couple of years earlier, I started to properly become the me I am now. 1983 — a general election year, and the eve of the Miners’ Strike — also seems, in retrospect, to be when the big lights of the 1980s, Thatcher’s 1980s, fully came on, when things started to get a little glossier and, in many ways, more problematic. Nottinghamshire — a very unglossy place, halfway up the country, with its strong reliance on the coal industry — seems to me an interesting prism to examine this through. A pit village in north Nottinghamshire, quite a lot like the one I grew up in, especially.

You can’t avoid politics when you write about a place like this at a time like that, but I also would not describe 1983 as a political novel. It is also definitely not a ‘Hey, remember ZX81s and C5s — what was all that about?’ pop-cultural cheeseboard. It’s a story about an ordinary family, in an ordinary village sandwiched between two ordinary collieries, an ordinary childhood, an ordinary (yet unusual and magical) inner-city primary school, an ordinary(-ish) robot maker, and some extraordinary goings-on. It’s very autobiographical and very unautobiographical, mundane and sci-fi, silly and serious. But it is also marinated, unavoidably, in the cultural atmosphere of the time. If you want a flavour of what D. H. Lawrence country had become by the time ‘Blue Monday’ was first on the playlist at the local leisure centre roller disco, you’ll inevitably find out here.