In 1989, Westley Allan Dodd kidnapped, molested and fatally stabbed 11-year- old boy and his brother, 10, whom he encountered in a Vancouver, Wash., public park. A short time later, Dodd abducted and took pleasure in prolonged torture and murdered 4-year-old boy. In 1992, the state of Washington hanged Dodd for those murders. His execution in 1993, was the first legal hanging (at his own request) in the United States since 1965.
A native of Washington State, born in 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. Dodd grew up in what has been described as a loveless home and was often neglected by his parents in favor of his two younger brothers. He has stated that he was also ostracized in his school environment and deprived of or denied any emotional growth. 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. Dodd took his “show on the road,” as he called it, and pedaled his bike around the neighborhood, looking for children, 10 or younger.
He would ride by, yell at them, and expose himself when he got their attention. He looked for boys, he said, because “boys didn’t report me as often as girls.
At the age of 15 Dodd had already been arrested for exposing himself, but he was not prosecuted. Instead, the authorities recommended counseling. Exhibitionism is the act of exposing in a public or semi-public context one’s intimate parts.
Dodd began molesting children when he was 13 years old; his first victims were his own cousins. All his victims were children below the age of 12, some of them as young as two. At 16, Dodd was asked to fill in for a neighbor’s usual babysitter, and molested the children as they slept. Later, Dodd sought jobs where he’d encounter kids, including being a camp counselor.
It wasn’t until later that he used force with his victims. Usually, Dodd tricked children into inappropriate contact through “fun and games.” He molested as many as 175 children of both sexes, mostly boys, over a 15- year period. He knew how to gain child’s trust. He befriended children with gifts and games, and knew how to coax them into dangerous situations without using force. He was described as being good with kids. He moved from exposing himself, to fondling any victim who was willing to submit. Then, sexually assaulting them and, finally, he became sexually sadistic murder.
Dodd graduated from high school in 1979 and joined the U.S. Navy two years later, in 1981, in part to avoid pending charges the same year.
He had attempted to abduct a couple of little girls. Although they had reported him to the police, Dodd wasn’t incarcerated. At one point he was arrested offering to pay some boys $50 each to go to a motel and play strip poker with him. But after he admitted to the police that he planned on molesting the boys, the charges were mysteriously dropped. Eventually, Dodd received a general discharge from the Navy. He was apprehended after approaching a young boy, and found guilty of “attempted indecent liberties.” For this he served 19 days in jail, and was ordered (again) to get counseling.
The same year, Dodd was jailed, this time for undressing a youngster he lured away from a playground. He pled guilty on that charge in 1983, and served a total of thirty days before he was released to seek court-ordered counseling. With the courts permission, Dodd went to live with his father, where he signed up for another out-patient program and was said to be making some progress.
He chose an apartment building with lots of kids, and took jobs at fast food restaurants, convenience stores, and charity truck routes, where he would pick up donations from houses.
Dodd volunteered to baby-sit. He took a co-worker’s son on a fishing trip, as a birthday present, where he sexually abused him. He repeatedly molested a neighbor’s 2 and 4-year-old kids, but the mother didn’t want to traumatize the boys by pressing charges.
In 1986, at the age of 25, Dodd moved to Seattle. He felt “invincible,” having sexually assaulted at least 30 kids at this point. “Now, when I got to Seattle, I had learned I was less likely to be reported for a molestation than for an attempt. I decided that from now on I would be a little more forceful. I would no longer accept no as an answer to my requests,” he later wrote. He chose the most vulnerable children, including a roommate’s 2-year-old son who was partially deaf and could not yet talk. The boy resisted, and Dodd tied his hands with a bathrobe strap. “The idea of force was exciting,” he said.
In 1987, Dodd chose the first child he would murder — it would be an 8-year-old boy he met while working as a security guard for a construction site. On his day off he drove to where the boy lived, hoping to lure him into one of the vacant buildings nearby. Then he planned to take the child into an isolated wooded area where he would kill him. But the kid sensed that he was dangerous. After Dodd asked him to help find a “lost little boy,” the 8-year-old said that he was going home to get some toys for the lost boy, and promised that he would be right back. Instead, he stayed inside, and his mother called the police.
Dodd received another light sentence. “We prosecuted the case to the full extent that we were able,” said one district attorney. “Essentially, he tried to get the boy to go with him, but he refused. Nothing more serious happened that we could use.” Prosecutors tried to invoke Dodd’s history as a sexual predator to convict him of a longer sentence, 5 to 6 years in jail. But the judge reduced the charge to a “gross misdemeanor,” and Dodd spent only 118 days in jail (with one-year probation.). A disturbingly light sentence, especially in consideration of Dodd’s intentions for the boy.
Judges always saw him as very polite, articulate, tidy and neat young man and somehow his sentences were too lenient if there was any sentence, although they could have read about his previous behavior and one assessment which describes him as a very dangerous. One judge said that it hadn’t been written anything, but documents show otherwise. Some declined to comment.
His crimes were progressing tremendously.
By the late summer of 1989, Dodd was armed with a six-inch knife on Labor Day, when he went prowling in Vancouver David Douglas Park. He set his sights on brothers, 11-year-old and 10-year-old. Taking the two of them home was clearly out of the question, but Dodd bullied them into following him deeper into a wood, where both boys were bound with shoelaces, sexually abused, and then stabbed to death. Dodd had fled the scene less than fifteen minutes before a teenage hiker found the mutilated bodies and ran off to call police.
In 1989, he drove across the river into nearby Portland, Oregon, and there abducted four-year-old boy from the playground of the Richmond Elementary School. Back a Dodd’s apartment, the child was molested, sexually abused. It was prolonged torture. He went once to buy something and continued to torture a boy.
At 5:30 the next morning, Dodd choked his young victim unconscious and finished the job with a rope, suspending boy’s 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.
In November, he tried to abduct a young boy from a Vancouver theater, giving up when the child resisted his advances. Two days later, he tried at another theater. He got the screaming 6 year-old child outside, but Dodd was captured by the boyfriend of his latest victims mother, held until police arrived and took him into custody.
Dr. Ronald Turco prepared a psychological profile of the killer — he would be 25 to 35 years old, and “kicked out of the military if he served.” He would be a loner, and probably kept photos of his victims, a diary of his offenses, including clipped articles, and child pornography. The killer probably chose boys because he saw girls as “defective.”
Many parents and children were lucky. He tried many times.
In custody, 28-year-old Dodd denied any involvement in the murders. Dodd was visibly nervous as detectives from both Washington and Oregon interrogated him. When Dodd told the police he worked at a paper plant, only a mile away from where the body of 4 year-old boy was found, authorities pressed him further. That night in November of 1989, in less than an hour of custody, Dodd confessed the crimes in detail, directing police to the most disturbing evidence. Dodd seemed to enjoy reliving the events. As investigators searched Dodd’s small but orderly apartment, they found ropes and belts (for restraining his victims); knives (Dodd planned to use these for his “experimental surgeries”); and ropes around the single bed’s headboard and footboard. They found four volumes of Parent/Child books, and a copy of the New Testament, with the words “Satan Lives” scrawled inside.
They also found Dodd’s homemade torture rack, which had not yet been used. He told them about the briefcase under the bed, where he hid his diaries, his photo albums, and last victim’s underwear. It was the briefcase under the bed. Inside this briefcase Dodd kept photos of children, including heartbreaking Polaroids of 4 year – old boy without clothes. He had an album with many photographs. A photo album, with the words “Family Memories” on the cover, functioned as Dodd’s pornographic collection, which included images of Christ as a baby from iconographic paintings. It also contained advertising images of children in underwear. There were Polaroids of Dodd naked, Dodd assaulting 4 year old boy, and pictures taken of his last victim after he had died, including one of the little boy hanging in the closet. Beside his collection of morbid daydreams in a diary, explicit description what he did to a little 4 year-old boy in his apartment, two previous brothers in the wood, planned actions, he started adding sketches of a torture rack he planned to build, and details of a private pact with Satan to assist him in obtaining victims. Not only he had meticulously recorded all of his crimes against children, he choreographed sadistic torture fantasies for future victims. Dodd now fantasized about the “experimental surgeries” he wanted to perform on his victims. He had every intention of living out these fantasies, and would not stop until he was caught.
The rest was easy, with Dodd’s guilty plea to all charges in 1990 clearing the way for a death sentence six months later. He refused to appeal his case or the capital sentence. In 1993 he was the first American inmate hanged in nearly three decades, at his own request.
Dodd made use of his time by courting the news, claiming he could help by telling his story. After his capture, he wrote a pamphlet on how to keep children safe. He appeared on TV shows (including Sally Jesse Raphael and a CNN special,) called radio programs from his cellblock, and gave countless interviews to reporters and to anyone else who wanted to listen to him recount his molestations. During the trial, Judge Robert Harris got so fed up with Dodd’s incessant interviews that he threatened Dodd with lockdown conditions, including revoking telephone and mail privileges. He also chastised reporters for printing interviews with Dodd that could sway the jury.
Dodd was in the odd position of having to defend his decision to die: “I didn’t offer any mitigating evidence during the penalty phase because, in my mind, that’s just an excuse. And I don’t want to make any excuses,” he told the court. “I do not blame the criminal justice system for anything…but the system does not work and I can tell them why,” he said. “It doesn’t really matter why the crimes happened. I should be punished to the full extent of the law, as should all sex offenders and murderers.” Dodd stated that if his death would bring relief to victims’ families, then he should die as soon as possible.
After the sentence, Dodd insisted that hanging was the appropriate means of execution, and that he did not want his death delayed by appeals. “I must be executed before I have an opportunity to escape or kill someone within the prison. If I do escape, I promise you I will kill and rape and enjoy every minute of it,” he told the court.
As his execution date approached, Dodd professed remorse for what he had done. “I have confessed all my sins,” he told a reporter in his interview. “I believe what the Bible teaches: I’ll go to Heaven. I have doubts, but I’d really like to believe that I would be able to go up to the three little boys and give them a hug and tell them how sorry I was and be able to love them with a real true love and have no desire to hurt them in any way.”
On January 5th, Westley Allen Dodd was executed by hanging.
Westley’s father Jim Dodd told he acknowledged his son’s sexual deviancy with “father-son chats,” but mostly avoided talking about it, despite Westley’s increasing arrests and warnings. Westley’s father said: “He never did drugs, he never drank, he never smoke.”
Westley Allan Dodd was a sadistic, pedophilic psychopath individual, based on what he did. Also, we may discuss additional factors which contributed to his behavior and crimes. He was a psychopath. The way he manipulated judges. In interviews, his statements contradicted each other by taking responsibility in one way, but essentially not taking any responsibility, by saying: ‘’There is a man,’’ referring to someone who was responsible for what he became, for example. And there is more. He couldn’t have pretended in even one interview to feel remorse. He said: ”It’s hard, I remember what boys said to me…’’ in the same interview where he said he liked doing that. Something is not true in his statement. And ultimate decision how he wanted to die as one of the traits of psychopathy, power.
Psychopaths are capable of feel sorry only for themselves, not other people.
