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Westley Allan Dodd was an infamous pedophile and serial killer who, from the age of thirteen, dedicated himself to sexually abusing children until his predatory impulses led him to commit the murder of three young children ages 11, 10 and 4. age, whose names were Cole and Billy Neer, and Lee Iseli, respectively.
The “Vancouver Child Killer,” as he came to be known, was noted for carefully planning his attacks and keeping a diary detailing all his sick ideas and schemes for how he would kidnap, torture, and murder his victims.
In addition to being infamous for his heinous crimes, Dodd is also remembered for having confessed to all of them when he was captured, for having requested the death penalty, and for having specifically asked for death by hanging, which incidentally was how he murdered his last victim. , Lee Iselli. The public execution of Westley Allan Dodd, which occurred on January 5, 1993, was one of the last official executions by hanging to be carried out in the United States.
The following is a summary of the life story of Westley Allan Dodd, emphasizing the events that led him to commit the crimes for which he earned the title of the most evil serial killer in history in the tabloid press, given that all his criminal actions were carried out against children.
a lonely childhood
Dodd was born in Washington in 1961, in the bosom of a normal working-class family, in which the father was a milkman and the mother, in addition to being a housewife, worked as a cook in some restaurants in the city. Westley Dodd was the eldest of three brothers, who were born one and two years after him. Dodd himself describes his childhood as loveless and his family as cold and distant. In fact, he even complained that his parents preferred his other two siblings, which made him feel quite isolated.
the beginning of darkness
One of the surprising aspects of Dodd’s life was how early he began to act out his sexual deviances and depraved tendencies. At just 11 years old, Dodd became interested in young children, starting with a cousin, and she also became interested in nude photos. According to investigations, at the young age of 13, Dodd began exposing himself naked through her bedroom windows to children walking past her home.
In a two-month period, Dodd had already exposed himself naked to more than 40 children, either outside his window or to children on the street when he was out riding his bike. The police took action on the matter when Dodd was already 14 years old, but he was not punished by the state or his parents. It seems logical that the lack of consequences for his actions only encouraged Dodd to continue his deplorable behavior.
A disturbing adolescence
As Dodd grew older, his depravities became more and more dangerous. As he entered his senior years in high school, he began to harass and sexually abuse other children, including family members and family friends. Dodd began babysitting in a few homes in her neighborhood to earn some money, and she took advantage of the occasion to sexually abuse children as young as 1 year old.
During his teenage years, Dodd’s depraved activities began to attract the attention of the authorities. At the age of 15, Dodd was arrested for exposing himself naked to two girls under the age of 10.
Despite the arrest, Dodd was not prosecuted or reprimanded, the only consequence of his actions being that his parents were recommended to see a therapist. However, either because the parents did not show proper interest in solving their older son’s problems, or simply because Dodd had no interest in going, he attended very few counseling sessions, so they were completely useless.
Without treatment or punishment for his actions, the would-be child murderer was more than encouraged to continue on the dark path that lay ahead. At this point, Dodd’s parents had already divorced. His father remarried and Dodd sexually abused his two younger half-brothers.
With time everything got worse
During his early years as a child molester, Dodd’s modus operandi consisted primarily of seducing his victims and convincing them to come with him to some lonely place and strip down for him. However, this was a very difficult way to find victims, as many children had been raised not to talk to strangers. By the time Dodd was a 20-year-old in 1981, he began to experiment with other ways of doing things. He realized that he could use force to achieve his objectives, so he began to apply much more aggressive strategies.
That year he was reported to the police for trying to kidnap two little girls. However, in order not to put their daughters through the trauma of testifying in court or for some other reason, the parents did not pursue the complaint and Dodd was not arrested. Again, he realized that he could do whatever he wanted without anyone doing anything to him, without any serious consequences.
Shortly thereafter, Dodd enlisted in the United States Navy, but his behavior in the military only got worse. Dodd began stalking and abusing small children he could access by hanging around the base, at one point offering two children $50 to escort him to a motel. This led to a complaint to the police, after which he was arrested. However, this time there were no consequences and no charges were brought against him, despite the fact that Dodd confessed to offering money to minors in exchange for having sex with him.
Dodd is finally going to jail, but not for long.
Despite his many crimes going unpunished to date, Dodd was arrested and sent to prison for exposing himself to a child on base and spent three weeks in jail, after which he was discharged from the Navy.
In 1982, Dodd was arrested for stripping a child outside of a park, after which he received a 30-day sentence of compulsory therapy to treat his sexual disorders. In 1984 he was arrested again, this time for abusing a child, and was sentenced to 10 years in jail, but was again released just four months later.
It is clear that the justice system repeatedly failed under Westley Allan Dodd. Despite having exposed and confessed to a pattern of sexual abuse of minors, which had only gotten worse and more dangerous over time, it is surprising that he was released so quickly after his conviction, and not placed under surveillance.
Planning the murders
Dodd soon began keeping a journal in which he described his darkest thoughts and ideas. The diary records how Dodd went from fantasizing about how he would harass and abuse his next victims, to how he would kidnap them, torture them, and do all sorts of horrible things to them. He even went so far as to design and build a frame or torture frame where he would tie up his victims to subject them to the darkest and most painful procedures.
It was around this time that Dodd began to explore the idea of killing his victims. The diary contains disturbing details of how he planned to torture, rape and murder young children. These ideas are too dark and sick to reproduce here.
The murder of the Neer brothers
Two days before International Labor Day, Dodd began spending sleepless nights, completely unable to sleep and totally consumed by the idea of murdering children. He began his hunt in Davis Douglas Park, less than 2 kilometers from his apartment. He studied the park exhaustively, making a map of it and identifying the best places to find and abduct his victims and then kill them elsewhere. Dodd’s logic was that he didn’t want to kill them right there in the park since he would bring too much attention to it and lose his hunting ground. In other words, Dodd had already entertained the idea of murdering not one but multiple children.
Dodd narrates in his diary how he went to the park, determined to find his first victim. He took a lunch so he wouldn’t have to go back to his house and miss out on a possible opportunity. After a couple of failed attempts that only turned him on more and more, Dodd found two brothers returning home after spending the afternoon collecting golf balls from a nearby course. The children were William Neer, whom everyone called Billy, and his older brother Cole. It was close to 6 pm and the children wanted to be in time for dinner, so they took a shortcut through David Douglas Park where Dodd found them.
Seeing the brothers, Dodd ordered them to get off their bikes and follow him into some bushes. Unable to bear his urges another minute, Dodd stripped and bound the two brothers and sexually abused them both before stabbing them, running away, and leaving them there to bleed out.
Some passersby were the ones who found Billy, still alive, and called 911. Firefighters stabilized Billy as best they could and airlifted him to a hospital in Portland, but he couldn’t stand the injuries and blood loss and he died on the way. Being just a 10-year-old boy, Billy had no identification, so there was no way to notify his parents immediately.
Meanwhile, in Vancouver, Washington, Billy and Cole’s parents, concerned that neither of their two sons had returned home, went to the police station to report them missing. With the feeling that the boy killed in the park could be one of the two brothers, the police set out to search for Cole, who had not yet been found. Hours later, Billy’s older brother was found dead, shocking the entire Vancouver community and the nation.
The murder of Lee Iseli
The next victim was a four-year-old boy named Lee Iseli, whom Dodd found playing in a park in Portland, Oregon with his 9-year-old brother on October 29, 1989. At a time when Lee was playing alone on a slide, Dodd kidnapped him and took him to his apartment. Once there, he repeatedly raped him and took pictures of him. The next day, before leaving for work, Dodd hung Lee in his closet and watched as he died.
Hours later, Dodd returned to his apartment, bagged Lee’s lifeless body and disposed of it in some bushes near a lake, where it was found the next day.
the ultimate catch
Westley Allan Dodd was becoming increasingly active and dangerous. After the murders of Billy, Cole and Lee, he needed more. Just two weeks later, on November 13, Dodd headed to a theater showing a family movie. He waited patiently until he noticed a little 6-year-old boy get up to go to the bathroom. Dodd followed him and when he came out he pounced on him and carried him off, ready to walk out the front door.
The boy screamed and kicked with all his might as Dodd quietly warned him to stay put, posing as the boy’s father in front of the movie theater employees. As he passed through the front door, the boy yelled at people to help him, that he did not know that man and that he wanted to hurt him. Employees chased him down the street and saw him drop the boy on the ground, get into a yellow pickup truck, and run away.
The companion of the boy’s mother who managed to escape Dodd’s clutches was able to follow Dodd in his own vehicle. Dodd’s truck broke down and his pursuer offered to help him. When Dodd got out of the vehicle, he restrained him and managed to get him back to the theater, from where they called the police. Dodd was arrested.
At the police station, Dodd was questioned in relation to the other murders and ended up confessing to everything. Police soon found the incriminating evidence, particularly Lee’s Ghostbusters underwear that Dodd had kept as a memento.
The confession and the verdict
Early in the trial, Dodd pleaded not guilty to the murders. However, later on, the killer became incredibly talkative about his crimes, confessing in detail to all the atrocities he had committed during his lifetime. In fact, all the details presented here about his life and how he degenerated from childhood into the monster that murdered three innocents come from his own account of the events and his journal entries. .
Dodd asked to be sentenced to death and, furthermore, asked to be hanged, in the same way that he had murdered his youngest victim, Lee Iseli. In an interview in which the journalist asked him if his execution was necessary, Dodd himself answered without blinking that yes, that it was absolutely necessary because, otherwise, he would find a way to escape, possibly killing some prison guards in the process. the process and, if he succeeded, he would continue with his killings. During the interview, Dodd admitted that he really liked murdering those children at the time, and that he was sure he would do it again without batting an eyelid if he had the chance.
final words
Dodd’s sentence execution was carried out on January 5, 1993. His last words were:
“Someone once asked me, I don’t remember who, if there was any way to stop sex offenders. I answered: “No.” He was wrong. I was wrong when I said that there was no hope, that there was no peace possible. There is hope. There is peace possible. I found both in our Lord Jesus Christ. Look to the Lord and you will find peace.”
Before he died, Dodd wrote a text he called ” When You Meet a Stranger ,” in which he teaches parents how to protect their children from sexual predators like him.
Despite the fact that there are many cases of sexual abuse and murder of minors around the world, Dodd’s case is one of the most resonant for several reasons. To begin with, there is the unusual fact of so many inconsistent arrests after so many assaults and serious crimes, which culminated in the three aforementioned murders. Second is the fact that Dodd was a serial killer whose victims were innocent children, which sent the entire community into tremendous panic for the safety of his children. Ultimately, the case was highly shocking due to the method of execution chosen by Dodd, and the unusual fact that he did not appeal the death sentence, but instead requested it.
The only bright spot in this story is that Dodd was caught quickly, just a couple of weeks after his conduct escalated to murder. Had it not been so, no one can say how many more children would have died at their hands and after increasingly macabre torture.
References
White, J.I. (nd). Westley Allan Dodd | Murderpedia, the encyclopedia of murderers . Murderpedia. https://murderpedia.org/male.D/d1/dodd-westley-allan.htm
True Crime Brewery. (2019, June 18). Catching a Predator: Westley Allan Dodd [Video]. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dn0dGw8A5Vc
Truesdell, J. (2020, March 18). The Last Words of Infamous American Killers: “It’s a Good Day to Die” . PEOPLE.Com. https://people.com/crime/last-words-infamous-american-killers-gallery/
Waxman, O.B. (2018, January 5). Lessons of the Gruesome Case Behind One of America’s Last Legal Executions by Hanging . Time. https://time.com/5062940/westley-allan-dodd-execution-history/
