The Devil's Disciple

By NANCY GIBBS

IT TAKES A CERTAIN ACT OF FAITH, THE first time a mother and father let their children go out and play by themselves. Faith that sons and daughters will cross streets safely, that they will abide by their curfew, that they will remember not to talk to strangers. Faith that when they go to the park, someone like Westley Allan Dodd will not be there waiting for them.

Westley Dodd is the man who shook the faith of enough people in the state of Washington to prompt legislators to pass the U.S.'s most unforgiving, possibly unconstitutional, laws against sexual predators. After his sentencing for the kidnap, rape and murder of three little boys in 1989, hardened reporters who covered the case sought counseling to help them handle what they had heard in court. A therapist who treated Dodd even said, "Wes ought to fry."

In fact this week, barring a last-minute stay of execution, Wes will hang. He will be the first person executed in Washington since 1963 and the first hanged in the U.S. since 1965. While death-penalty opponents pleaded for leniency, Dodd vowed that he would sue anyone who sought to save him, and not many people were inclined to try.

Throughout his years as a child molester, Dodd showed a gift for rebuking the justice system. With each arrest, he passed like a cold breeze through the court system and mental health institutions and wound up back where he had started: hunting children in public parks and devising new schemes to kidnap, mutilate, drown, strangle or suffocate them. Time and again, the courts reduced the charges, suspended the sentence, offered therapy over incarceration. "Each time I entered treatment, I continued to molest children," he told the court. "I liked molesting children and did what I had to do to avoid jail so I could continue molesting."

Dodd says he molested dozens of children and never served a sentence longer than four months in jail. Once while baby-sitting for some friends, he molested their 10-year-old son. After one arrest in Seattle in 1987, he told police that his urge was "predatory and uncontrollable." His one-year sentence was suspended. In the summer of 1989, Dodd moved to Vancouver, Washington, and began stalking children. "I was getting bored -- I didn't have a TV," Dodd told police. The park, he said, looked like "a good hunting ground." One day he selected 19 different children he considered killing: 15 boys, four girls. One by one, he ruled them out, often because they were with an adult. He returned the next evening, bringing shoelaces to tie up his victims and a 6-in. fish-fillet knife that he hid inside an Ace bandage drawn tight around his ankle.

He came upon two brothers, Cole and William Neer, who were taking a shortcut through the park on their way home to supper. He tied them up, molested one, stabbed them both, then fled back to his apartment as police and ambulance sirens wailed in the distance. Dodd wrote about the thrill of it. "I was kind of afraid that I was going to get caught," he told the Oregonian. "And then as I watched the papers, I realized that the police didn't have any clues."

Seven weeks later, Dodd found a four-year-old boy playing alone in an elementary school playground. He coaxed Lee Iseli home with him to play some games. "When we got there, I told him he had to be real quiet because my neighbor lady didn't like kids," Dodd said. He then stripped off Lee Iseli's clothes, tied the boy to the bed and began taking Polaroid pictures as he molested the child. He later mounted the photos in a 4-in.-by-6-in. pink photo album labeled FAMILY MEMORIES.

He paused at one point to make an entry in his diary: "6:30 p.m. Will probably wait until morning to kill him. That way his body will still be fairly fresh for experiments after work." Dodd began strangling the boy at 5:30 a.m. He revived the child twice before finally killing him and hanging the body in a closet and burning the boy's clothing, except the Ghostbusters underpants, which he kept as a trophy.

Police were shocked at the pitiless confessions Dodd offered freely upon arrest. His crimes easily persuaded a jury to condemn him, but they had a far more incendiary effect on public sentiment toward sex offenders in general. As Dodd's story unfolded in court, pressure mounted on Governor Booth Gardner and state lawmakers to pass what became a uniquely tough law. It requires that convicted sex offenders register with police wherever they move; that authorities must let the community know about the felon in their midst; and, most controversial, that the state be allowed to lock up repeat offenders after they have served their sentences if they are thought to still pose a threat. Such pre-emptive imprisonment, which civil libertarians say is grossly unconstitutional, is being challenged in court.

The legal system that treated Dodd far too gently until way too late now struggles to make amends. Unless the predator law is overturned, sex offenders in Washington will be either watched, or jailed, forever. It is ironic that for Dodd, who fought hard for the right to be hanged, that would be the worst possible punishment. The prospect of what amounts to a glamorous public suicide was vastly more appealing than a life spent alone in a cell the size of a parking space, crushed by boredom, without the least chance of freedom. For him, perhaps justice would have been better served by denying him his death wish and letting him wait, for a very long time, for death to come to him.

With reporting by John Snell/Portland and Miko Yim/Vancouver, Washington