Just Trying To Fit In, Teenage Girl Became Torture, Slaying Victim

CLEARFIELD, Pa. - She was a 15-year-old doing what all teens do: trying hard to fit in.

The afternoon of May 10, Kimberly Jo Dotts found herself in the woods with a knot of kids she barely knew who were planning to run away to Florida that night.

But as suddenly as she had met them, they turned on her. Someone complained that Dotts - short, overweight and learning-disabled - might "snitch" on them, and teenage cruelty grew deadly.

Prosecutors say a noose was pulled over Dotts' head, the other end slung over a maple branch; then two teens, Jessica Holtmeyer, 16, and Aaron Straw, 19, allegedly yanked on the rope with all their strength.

Dotts' body shook and convulsed, then went limp. On the ground, as she gasped for breath, the prosecutors say, Holtmeyer smashed her face with a basketball-sized rock.

"It was fun to hang someone," one of her friends quoted her saying after they covered Dotts' body with branches and leaves. "It would be fun to do that again."

Seven people were there - some standing around, some egging others on, some helping with the lynching or hiding the body - but Holtmeyer will be the first to be tried on a murder charge. Straw awaits trial, and the five others pleaded guilty to lesser charges.

Jury selection for Holtmeyer was to begin today in Bloomsburg. Prosecutors say they will ask for the death penalty.

The crime, and the arrest of seven locals aged 14 to 24, has shaken Clearfield, a working-class coal and lumber town of 7,500 about 125 miles northeast of Pittsburgh.

Testimony and police affidavits reveal some of what allegedly happened:

Dotts' search for friends put her with a group of kids who had hung out together just long enough to give themselves a name: the Runaway Gang. Her introduction came from a schoolmate, Dawn Lanager, 14, who had asked Dotts to sleep over May 8, a Friday night.

The Dottses had encouraged their daughter to reach out socially, and they could hear the excitement in her voice when she told them of the invitation.

The next day, Dotts returned home briefly and, leaving, ordered her 7-year-old sister not to follow. "I'm running away," she said.

But on Sunday, the group was still in Clearfield. They had found a driver who would take them south, but he wasn't leaving until that night. To pass the time, they hitchhiked up to Shiloh, 15 minutes away, to break into hunting campers and look for money. They also stole liquor - and a rope.

The trouble seemed to begin when Tracy Lynn Lewis, 24, a distant cousin of Dotts, called the girl a snitch for getting her in trouble over a drinking party she had given for a group of kids. Aloud, she worried her cousin might snitch again.

Talk turned to "dumping" Dotts from their adventure.

But no one seemed to take the talk as seriously as Holtmeyer, and schoolmates said that wasn't surprising. Holtmeyer was known as a bully at school, and people told stories of her setting cats on fire and strangling a poodle. She had told her friends earlier that day that she didn't like Dotts, but nobody seemed to know why - they had never met.

The group ended up at a clearing in Shiloh known as Gallows Harbor for a 19th-century hanging.

Holtmeyer said she wanted to test Dotts' loyalty to the group. A noose was fashioned from the stolen rope. Holtmeyer and Lewis looped it around Dotts' neck, and Holtmeyer dragged her around like a dog until one of the teens stopped her, according to prosecutors.

Then Straw grabbed the rope and tossed the noose over a branch. An initiation began. One by one, three teens briefly put the noose over their heads. Then it was Dotts' turn.

"Yank it!" Lewis allegedly screamed.

Holtmeyer and Straw lifted the 5-foot-1, 165-pound Dotts off the ground long enough for her to go into convulsions, prosecutors say, but they dropped her, hearing trucks nearby.

At that point, Lewis and three of the teens walked away.

But three others lingered, and again, the noose was tightened. Holtmeyer and Straw pulled again, this time until Dotts became colorless and limp, prosecutors say. When her body fell, Holtmeyer allegedly dropped the rock on her head.

"That's what happens to snitches," she was quoted as saying.

"I didn't mean for Kim to get hurt, just to scare her," Straw told police. "But Jessie would not listen to anybody, and she had to kill her because she didn't like her."