Driven to Kill

By 2 p.m. Dodd's prospects of finding a victim again looked slim. He was also hungry. He returned home for lunch, and reflected about the "possibles" he had encountered that day. He jotted down detailed notes, which he would rewrite much more neatly in his diary later so that he could relive at will the fantasies that he had experienced that day in the park.

He hastily scribbled that he had seen two boys earlier that day, about 9- and 10-years-old, who had interested him. The oldest boy had been big for his agetoo big, in Dodd's opinionbut the younger of the two had aroused him sexually. He decided that he would have taken the smaller boy to rape and murder, if the boy had been alone.

At another point he had watched two girls for a while, estimating their ages to be seven and twelve. He had liked the younger one, and, as before, would have raped and murdered her if she had been alone. But a girl would do only as a last resort. Dodd wanted a boy first and foremost.

He had also seen four boys that afternoon. Three were approximately seven or eight years old, and one was about twelve. As Dodd sat back and watched them, he had soon realized that they were looking for a place to urinate. Young boys, Dodd knew, were always looking for a place to "pee" outdoors. Finally one of them had said, "Let's just go for it here," which they did while Dodd watched unnoticed and became excited from his vantage point in the bushes. Dodd had thought that if the older one hadn't been there, he could have easily separated the other three. Once separated he could have murdered the first two quickly and saved the last one, the best looking of the three, to savor as he raped and murdered him. Under the circumstances, he had decided that it was best not to try anything with that group of boys.

Dodd finished his lunch and his hastily written notes, prepared a cup of tea to go, and resumed the hunt by 2:25 p.m. Over the next hour and a half he considered four boys and two girls, who ranged in age from eight to ten, as victims, but backed away when he saw that they were accompanied by two adult females. Frustrated and angry, he went home at 4 p.m. and decided that he should be better equipped for future hunts.

He added long shoe strings and a large Ace bandage to his "hunting gear," which had consisted of only a 6-inch fish-fillet knife up to that point. He decided that the Ace bandage could be used to hold the knife to his leg, so that it would "ride better," and he could use the shoestrings for tying up his victims. He realized that he could also use both items to choke his victims, instead of relying on a kid's shirt to strangle his victim like he had previously thought about doing. Besides, he knew that boys often didn't wear shirts in the summer, and it was always possible that one of his intended victims could turn out to be one of those kids who didn't. It was better to have the shoestrings to use as ligatures, he decided, and he would have the Ace bandage as a backup.

Before giving up entirely for the day, Dodd drove to a local Fred Meyer shopping center about three miles from his apartment. The department store was one of many of a large chain located throughout the Pacific Northwest, and was one that Dodd frequented as much to shop as to watch the kids. It was there that he spotted and was aroused by a six- to-seven year-old boy who was wearing a pair of "cute" shorts, but no shirt. A sudden urge to pull the boy's shorts down right there in the store nearly overcame Dodd, but he thought better of it. He'd have been caught for certain, he decided as he left the store and returned to the park one more time. By now he felt compelled, driven nearly to the point of madness to find a victim that he could kill and experience a temporary release from all of the pent-up sexual anguish he had carried for much of his life.