The Devil's Disciple

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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."