My
April 18, 2007 Letter to Foster's
Daily Democrat
commentary
by Timothy Horrigan;
April 21, 2007 (added commentary June & August 2007 and October
24, 2008 and November 23, 2008 and July 22, 2011)
[October 24, 2008] I should
have updated this article more often, but Gary Dodds's story is
depressing and I have other things to write about. I will just say
that he has a hard time stating out of trouble and he has broken
several plea bargain deals with the local county attorneys. His most
recent fracas came the night before the Fourth of July when he
carjacked his wife's car and assaulted her. (She is now filing for
divorce.) This was his third arrest in 15 months.
He made one more plea bargain deal on October 24th by pleading guilty to a misdemeanor charge of Disorderly Conduct, related to the July 3rd incident. If he gets into even more trouble, the more serious charges from that incident will be reopened. For the time being he is in jail, though he may be released to home confinement sometime down the road.
See Also:
[November 23, 2008] *Sighs*
Gary Dodds managed to get into more trouble. He got in a
jailhouse fight with another infamous inmate: one Leeland
Eisenberg. The fight was over the structure of county government in
New Hampshire. Eisenberg was the man who created a national panic on
November 30, 2007 by threatening to blow up Hillary
Clinton's campaign office in Rochester, NH and taking several
campaign workers hostage for several hours.
[July 22, 2011] Dodds kept
his nose clean for a couple of years, but now he has been busted
again, in Portsmouth, NH. The charges were farcical: he vandalized
the wooden fence between a city park and his property by turning a
segment of the fence into a gate.
On April 18, 2007 I had a letter kinda published in my local newspaper, The (Dover, NH) Foster's Daily Democrat. I say "kinda" because they didn't run it in the dead-tree edition of the paper: they only ran it on the web site. I was responding to an earlier letter (published in the dead-tree paper) from someone named Michael Urgo.
Urgo's April 10 letter took the Democrat (which is in spite of its name, a rightwing paper) to task for showing liberal bias by not mentioning the party affiliation of a former Democratic Congressional candidate named Gary Dodds.
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Dodds was a likeable fellow with lots of his own money to spend on his campaign. However, his candidacy was in trouble from the start, because he was almost entirely unable to explain his ideas. He was such a bad public speaker, it was hard to tell if he even had any ideas at all. I am exactly not sure why he was such a bad candidate. He was clearly not an idiot — quite the opposite, in fact. He even showed signs of being a pretty good listener: his rambling word-salad responses to the questions at forums actually did pick up on what the voters and other candidates were saying.
In any case, Dodds was already headed for a last-place finish when he mysteriously disappeared during a spring snowstorm in early April. His Lincoln Continental SUV was found crumpled against a guard rail on the Spaulding Turnpike in Dover but there was no sign of Dodds. He eventually turned up alive over 24 hours later, not far from the crash site (but on the opposite side of a river), underneath a pile of leaves and pine needles. He told an incoherent story of using his Boy Scout wilderness skills to survive in the woods (although he turned up in a vacant lot behind a grade school.)
This was a tragic but ridiculous story which understandably attracted nationwide attention. Dodds actually stayed in the race, returing to the campaign trail in late June. His opponents politely wished him well and did not make an issue of the accident, and in the end he finished in 3rd place with 5% of the vote. And that seemed to be the end of the story, until early April 2007 when the Strafford County Attorney's Office announced that Dodds had been formally charged with two criminal charges: Causing False Public Alarms, and Conduct After An Accident.
Gary
Dodds faces a Channel 9 camera: June 25, 2006; Milton, NH
My April 18 Letter:
Original URL (may
go dead
someday):
http://www.fosters.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070418/
FOSTERS05/104180039
Dodds
identified as Democrat
To the editor:
Michael Urgo
of Rochester, in a letter published April 10, complained that your
paper omitted Gary Dodds' Democratic Party affiliation in a recent
story. This supposedly proved that Foster's was displaying liberal
bias. Presumably, Mr. Urgo is referring to the April 5 story which
did, indeed, omit Dodd's party affiliation.
Even though Mr.
Urgo read that story closely, he hasn't been reading your paper
closely on other days. The April 6 story about the Dodds case did
mention the fact that he was a Democrat. So did the many stories
which ran last year during the campaign.
Dodds, who finished
a weak third in the voting, received more coverage than the other
three Democratic candidates combined. However, this was simply
because his opponents — Carol Shea-Porter (now the first
Congresswoman from New Hampshire), Jim Craig and Peter Sullivan —
were merely crisscrossing the First Congressional District discussing
the issues with the voters which is, of course, not newsworthy.
Timothy Horrigan
Durham
My comment about Dodds getting more coverage than the other candidates needs to be put in context. Fosters' Daily Democrat has a longstanding policy of placing a news blackout on Ms Shea-Porter, who is from Rochester, the largest city in the paper's circulation area, and who was a well-known local activist even before she ran for Congress. The blackout continues even now that she is in office. Her accomplishments and speeches get into the paper only if someone else comments on them, and usually not even then. Meanwhile, the man she defeated in the 2006 general election, Jeb Bradley, is laying the groundwork for a 2008 run, and he gets more coverage then the incumbent. One laughable example of slanted reporting was an April 9 story about a dinner at the American Legion post in Shea-Porter's home town. Shea-Porter (who is married to a Vietnam-era veteran) has done a lot of work on military and veterans-affairs issues, including co-sponsoring major legislation — and none of this work was deemed newsworthy by Foster's editors. But the Vietnam draftdodger Bradley's appearance as the guest of honor at a rather routine dinner at the Rochester Legion Hall was an event worthy of a lengthy article which portrayed him (inaccurately) as a friend of veterans.
Urgo's April 10 letter:
Original URL (may
go dead
someday):
http://www.fosters.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070410/FOSTERS05/
104100152
Why was party
affiliation omitted?
To the editor:
Why did you
fail to indicate Democrat Gary Dodd's party affiliation in the
article about his criminal investigation? Your publication regularly
assigns affiliation in every article on the website that had a
candidate listed but why not this one? This leads us to wonder if his
affiliation would have been left out if he had been a
Republican.
This is yet another example of the media carrying
the water for Democrats and why no Republican or conservative will
ever get a fair shake from the media.
Michael Urgo
Somersworth
Gary
Dodds in Somersworth, NH, August 3, 2006, with fellow also-rans Dave
Jarvis and Jim Craig.
[May
6, 2008] The Dodds case took a sad turn on May 6, 2008 when he was
arrested a second time. He was technically arrested for violating his
bail agreement, but the instigating incident was a physical assault
on his long-suffering wife Cindy Dodds in Orlando, Florida. The
Doddses weren't even supposed to be in Florida in the first place:
they were ostensibly doing volunteer work for the Hurricane
Katrina rebuilding effort in New Orleans.
In February 2008, after a rather whacky 15-day trial, Gary Dodds had been convicted on a felony charge of falsifying physical evidence as well as misdemeanour charges of charges of conduct after an accident and causing a false public alarm. At the end of March, he was handed a fairly harsh sentence: at least one year of confinement (20 days in the Strafford County jail, the rest of the year under house arrest— and it was unclear where his house was at the moment), plus 200 hours of community service, plus possibly 1 to 3 years in the state pen (if he doesn't do the community service, which knowing him I am pretty sure he will happily do and/or if he misbehaves), plus finally a $20,000 fine. (The state made much of the cost of the search after he vanished on April 6, 2006, which supposedly cost about $20,000.) Even though his sentence was pretty harsh for a nonviolent offender who up till now had never been in trouble and who was a leader in the local community, it wasn't harsh enough for some onlookers: there was a small but loud public outcry about how leniently he was being treated.
He got in trouble for calling
the authorities liars after they described his story as a "fairy
tale." However, the prosecution's story was also a fairy tale:
supposedly Dodds was picked up on the side of the road by an
unidentified co-conspirator, and snuck into a young lady friend's
apartment in a spooky old building known as the "Historic
Cutts Mansion" (a name like something out of Nancy
Drew)
He wasn't going to do his jail time till after the appeals process was complete, which would have taken many months. But sadly he is now under confinement. (After a couple of nights in jail, he agreed on May 7,2008 to 45 days of house arrest— using a device like the one Paris Hilton wore briefly in the summer of 2007.) Even though Dodds had a good shot at winning his appeal, his chances have been diminished by his May 6 arrest.
See Also:
