My April 18, 2007 Letter to Foster's Daily Democrat
commentary by Timothy Horrigan; April 21, 2007 (added commentary June & August 2007 and May 6-7, 2008)


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.


Gary Dodds in Somersworth, NH, August 2006
Gary Dodds



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.


 And then later in the month, things got even worse for Dodds: sometime not long before April 23, a Grand Jury handed down a felony charge: he was indicted for "Falsifying Physical Evidence." Like Paris Hilton, he may end up behind bars: he couild theoretically be sentenced to seven years in the state pen. His arraignment was been scheduled for May 7th.

On June 12, 2007, his lawyers had a pretrial conference with the judge and the prosecutors. A trial date of October 1, 2007 was set. The trial looks like it could be lengthy, since the prosecutions witness list has 92 names on it. One of Dodds's attorneys is Justin Nadeau, himself a former Congressional candidate. (Nadeau ran for the New Hampshire's First Congressional District seat in 2004 and won the Democratic nomination before losing the general election.)


 Dodds returned to court in late August for more pre-trial hearings. A new start date of December 3rd, 2007 was set for his trial. The number of potential witnesses grew to over 130 after Dodds's attorneys filed their own witness list. If all those witnesses actually have to testify at length (which is unlikely), the trial might still be going on when the New Hampshire Primary kicks off the 2008 Presidential Election season. None of the Presidential candidates have sought Dodds's endorsement.




Gary Dodds faces a Channel 9 camera: June 25, 2006; Milton, NH





Links to several Foster's Daily Democrat news stories about the case (URLs may go dead at any moment):



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 with fellow candidates Dave Jarvis and Jim Craig
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.

Cindy Dodds, wife of Gary Dodds
Cindy Dodds


In February 2008, after a rather whacky 15-day trial, Gary Dodds was 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 Starfford County jail, the rest of the year under house arrest— and it is unclear where his house is 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 owns in Portsmouth. (This is incidentally where he was arrested on May 6.) There, he soaked his feet in ice for 10 hours and then somehow made his way back to Dover where he snuck back into some woods behind a suburban neighborhood (while the $20,000 search was already underway) and covered himself with pine needles. The jury convicted him on the basis of what is (in my opinion, at least) a fairly improbable story— and the prosecution relied a lot on the supposed discrepancies between what happened, what he said happened, and what he "must have" known to be the truth. (My personal theory is that he wandered around disoriented in a spring snowstorm for several hours, crossing the Bellamy River by walking across a bridge and finally did bury himself under pine needles. And the part about soaking his feet in a tub of ice seems totally absurd to me. Although in fairness to the county attorney's office, the mere fact that Dodds lied about wading across the river is reason enough to prosecute him.)

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:





The Forgotten Liars  



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