Driven to Kill
Page 9
Fearing that Billy would reach the busy road, Dodd quickly rose and ran after the boy. Both running, Dodd soon caught up with Billy and grabbed him by the right arm.
"I'm sorry! I'm sorry!" cried Billy. As he spun around in Dodd's grip, Dodd stabbed him in the lower side and then again in the left shoulder as he fell to the ground. Dodd didn't stick around to make certain that Billy was dead. Fearing that he would leave fingerprints on the boy's bloody clothes or get some of Billy's blood on himself, he didn't attempt to drag the body into the bushes to conceal it, as Cole's was. Instead, he left Billy right where he had fallen.
The total time Dodd spent with the boys was twenty minutes.
Dodd ran to where the boys had left their bikes on the trail, then walked from that point on to avoid arousing suspicion from anyone who might happen along. He placed the knife back in its sheath and continued on for about 30 yards before deciding to return to Cole's body to make certain that he hadn't left anything behind that could lead the cops to him.
He found Cole flat on his back, his head tilted to the left. His eyes were still open, and his arms lay motionless at his side. He was covered with blood, and Dodd could not discern any signs of movement. At first Dodd thought he saw something protruding from Cole's stomach, but then he realized that Cole's pants were still half way to his knees and what he was looking at were the boy's penis and testicles. Dodd decided that Cole was definitely dead. Finding no incriminating evidence, Dodd considered running back to make certain that Billy was dead, too, but decided not to risk the extra time. Someone, he thought, could come along at any moment.
As Dodd walked away he noticed blood on his left hand. Keeping his hand inside his pocket he calmly walked up the trail to the main park. He greeted an old man and threw a stray baseball back to a couple of young men on the way back to his car. He made every effort to appear as normal as possible to everyone he encountered in the park.
When he got back to his car a few minutes later, Dodd drove out of the park and circled over to Andresen Road. It was there that he saw a man running down the hill toward a convenience store. Dodd figured, correctly, that the man had found Billy and was running to get help.
Dodd wrote in his diary later that he had been pretty shaken up over the incident at David Douglas Park. He thought about it all day on Tuesday, September 5, unable to get his memory's image of Cole's body or Billy's repeated pleas of "I'm sorry" out of his mind. Nonetheless, he managed to report to his job at Pac Paper on schedule. By the time he returned home that day he found that he had calmed down considerably, enough so that he was able to masturbate to his mental images, fantasies really, of Cole and Billy, both when they had still been alive and, later, when they were dead and bloody.
Later that evening Dodd wrapped the knife inside an old used Manila envelope. He took it to work with him the next day and dropped it into a garbage Dumpster during his lunch hour. The knife, he knew, would never be found.
child killer