Dave Doughty retires after 43 years at Western
After working at Western Washington University for 43 years, Assistant Police Chief Dave Doughty has retired. Doughty came to Western as an undergraduate student from Nebraska in 1968 with plans to major in music education, but due to scheduling errors, he ended up unable to begin the program his freshman year. Doughty worked that year for the Associated Students as a student sound technician, and in the summer of 1969, he began working as a student security officer (now known as the Green Coats) for four years.
After a year away from Western post-graduation, Doughty returned in 1974 to work for the University Police until retiring in 2004, only to come back six weeks later to work another eight years. In his time working for campus police, Doughty has worked in nearly every function of policing, from patrol, to dispatch to investigations, even serving as acting chief on three occasions.
Doughty officially retired as of the end of 2012. A farewell celebration honoring Doughty's many years of service to the university will be held from 3 to 5 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 10, in Room 110 of the Campus Services Building.
Parking will be suspended at Campus Services from 2:30 to 5:30 p.m. for this celebration. For more information, call 360-650-2945.
Favorite Book: "All of the Tom Clancy and James Patterson books."
Favorite Movie of the Moment: "Actually, I got a big kick out of 'Hope Springs,' with Tommy Lee Jones and Meryl Streep. What I want to see and haven’t seen yet is 'Lincoln.'"
Post-Retirement Plans: "My wife can’t retire yet, but we built a house down in an active adult community outside Casa Grande, Ariz., and we’re building a swimming pool with it. I’m headed down there on Saturday and will be down there for the rest of the winter, and she will come down and visit me periodically. And then our plans are eventually to spend our winters down there and summers up here. If I do any work, it would probably be volunteer work."
Most memorable experience with University Police: "There are so many, and there are good and bad. Some of the more memorable ones would be involvement in the Hillside Strangler case. Kenneth Bianchi (one of the two stranglers) was arrested here in Bellingham after all these years of murdering women down in Los Angeles. He killed a couple young women up here; one was a former student and one was a student. I knew one of the victims — her boyfriend worked for us as a University Police officer, so we were right in on everything from the beginning with that. That was pretty interesting.
"About the same time, a coffee-shop manager in the (Viking Union) was murdered, and so we were involved in that investigation and subsequent arrest. The murderer wasn’t convicted of a crime; he was judged to be insane at the time and put away for life in a mental institution.
"Those two stand out as pretty memorable. Another memorable one was a few years ago we were brought in with the FBI on one where a student wanted to, and started making plans to, and started involving people in a plan to, blow up the Coast Guard station here in Bellingham and the Army Reserve Station. He was subsequently convicted of domestic terrorism.
"I think probably though, of all of that though, the most badly memorable was a plane crash in 1987 that killed our president and two of our vice presidents. I got a call around 11 p.m. that the plane was missing, and they finally found it around 4 a.m. So that’s on the list of memorable, not favorably, but still on there."
What will be missed the most at Western: "I’m going to miss the people, I love the work, even up until the last day, I loved getting up and coming to work every day. It’s a great place to work. I really enjoyed working at Western. Working for University Police is the best of all possible worlds because we get involved in the real police work just like our city and county counterparts, not as often, but none the less all the way up to a murder, terrorism, and then rapes, assaults, robberies and burglars, all that kind of stuff.
"The other neat thing about university policing is that we have an environment that allows us to interact with our community more. It’s a younger environment, which is always fun, and more is expected of us as agents of the university than, say, as police officers for the city as far as representing the university. And that’s always really fun. We get to meet a lot of new people; we do a lot of public talks and get to interact a lot. We have more time to devote to our cases because were not racing form call to call like the city police or county sheriff."