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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.
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| Police sketches of the suspected
child killer |
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