Content Warning: This piece contains mention of sexual assault, child abuse, and murder. Please proceed with caution.
Looking out the window now at the warm spring we’re having, it’s hard to imagine what inspires the out of the ordinary crimes that Washington state has experienced. Then I think about the deadly quiet forests, and the long stretches of desert highway lined with eerily still farms, and I can feel the sort of invisible evil that lurks in the peripheral. Westley Alan Dodd, argued to be one of the most evil serial killers in history, killed three young boys and molested many more children throughout his life. According to Dodd, he recognized his attraction to boys as a child. In “exploring” that attraction he started committing exhibitionist acts, such as standing in his window naked and waiting for neighborhood children to walk by. As he grew into a teenager he began to take advantage of the children closest to him. In the midst of seemingly benign interactions, such as family gatherings, playing in the neighborhood, or accepting babysitting jobs, he would violate the trust put on him and instead use the situation to molest children. He would try to normalize the behaviors and convince the children that it was a game, and a fun thing that adults do.
Looking into Dodd’s life, he has a repetitive history of being arrested for “minor” sexual assault, molestation, and harassment crimes that police repeatedly ignored or gave him proportionately small, if any, punishments for. When Dodd was 15 he was arrested for indecent exposure, however the police released him and recommended juvenile counseling. When he was 20, Dodd tried to abduct two little girls who both reported him to the police. No action was taken against him. On June 6, 1982, after Dodd had joined the Navy, he asked a 9 year old boy to disrobe for money. He was arrested and given general discharge from the Navy. In June of 1984, Dodd was sentenced to 10 years in prison for molesting a 9 year old. Dodd only served 4 months of his sentence before it was commuted to a year in county jail on the condition that he would seek help.
Dodd briefly went to therapy, then quit, and returned to hunting children. After years of molesting children, Dodd fully embraced his desire for force and violence. It was the force and the violence that excited him, and he wrote about it in his diary. In that diary, he also described pacts he had made with Satan in order to obtain more children to victimize. He began to research the best ways to execute his crimes, and determined David Douglas Park, in Vancouver WA, to be a “good place for rape and murder, or kidnap, rape and murder … a good hunting ground.” On September 4th, 1989, Cole Neer, 11 years old, and WIlliam Neer, 10 years old, were playing in David Douglas Park, when they were lured into the woods by Dodd. He sexually abused both boys, stabbed them, and then fled. Their bodies were found fifteen minutes later. Dodd then drove south to Portland, Oregon, where on October 29 he found Lee Iseli (4) on the playground of Richmond ELementary School. He abducted Lee from the playground and took him to his apartment. There Dodd molested the boy and photographed him while naked. He then dressed him and took Lee to McDonalds. Once they returned to the apartment, Dodd choked Lee to death and then hung his corpse in the closet. He burned Lee’s clothes, saving his underwear, which he kept in a briefcase under his bed as a trophy.
On November 11 of the same year, Dodd attempted to abduct a boy from a Vancouver movie theater. The boy struggled, so Dodd gave up. Possibly irritated by the failure, two days later Dodd drove to a movie theater in Camas, WA, where he abducted a child from the mens bathroom. He made it with the screaming child to the parking lot, but with too many witnesses he let the child go and then bolted to his car. The boy had come to the theater with his mother and his mother’s boyfriend, William Graves. Graves began to chase after Dodds vehicle as he drove away, and then witnessed the car break down two blocks away from the theater. Graves offered to help Dodd with the car, and once Dodd accepted Graves grabbed him and dragged him back to the theater. Once Dodd was captured, he admitted to his crimes and told investigators about the briefcase under his bed where he kept clippings from newspapers about the crimes he had committed, as well as trophies from his victims. Police also found the diary that Dodd wrote and documented all of the murders in.
In prison Dodd seemed repentant of his crimes, however he also seemed to enjoy the media attention he received so it’s hard not to conflate the two. He wrote articles on children's self defense, and attempted to teach the public about predators and pedophiles. Once Dodd was sentenced to death he asked that he be executed by hanging, as that was the way that Lee Iseli died.
It’s… nice, I guess, that Dodd was repentant in prison. However, repentance never undoes the crime, nor does the attitude that Dodd had towards these children during the end of his life. His self identification as someone who could teach others about pedophiles, as well as wishing to meet the children in Heaven to seek forgiveness, still attempts to put him in a position of some power in these children's lives and deaths. He lost any chance of having healthy relationships with children. He gets to rot, and that’s all there is to it.
I’d like to thank my sources:
Comments