Vol Dooley

Background

Dooley's father, Vol Dooley, Sr. (1903-2002), was a native of the Walnut Hill Community near Bradley in Lafayette County in southwestern Arkansas. His mother was the former Sadie Rae Hargrove(1908-1994). Vol Dooley, Sr. is interred at the Lay Cemetery in Benton, the parish seat of Bossier Parish and the location of the sheriff's office.

A long-term resident of Bossier City, Dooley was born in Memphis, Tennessee. An uncle and a cousin served there in the Memphis Police Department. Two of Dooley's sons followed him into law-enforcement work.

In 1950, he joined Troop G of the Louisiana State Police. He was a state trooper until 1954, when he began employment with the Bossier Sheriff's Office. With the state police, he developed an expertise in fingerprinting and photographic equipment, which he brought to the sheriff's department.

Succeeding Willie Waggonner

Sheriff's Dooley became the chief deputy to Sheriff William Edward "Willie" Waggonner of Plain Dealing, the older brother of the late U.S. Representative Joe Waggonner of Louisiana's 4th congressional district. Waggonner was elected sheriff in 1948 to succeed Louis H. Padgett, Sr., for whom Waggonner had been the chief deputy. As acting sheriff under appointment from Governor Edwin Edwards, Dooley won a special election for the position held in conjunction with the 1976 presidential election for the remainder of Waggonner's term. He defeated Don Martin Whittington (born 1935), a farmer and the father of current Bossier Parish sheriff, Julian Curtis Whittington. Dooley was subsequently reelected to regular four-year terms in 1979 and 1983.

Jack Favor case

In 1967, Sheriff Waggonner and Chief Deputy Dooley were accused of collusion with then Judge O. E. Price and District Attorney Louis H. Padgett, Jr. of the 26th Judicial District in Benton to rig the double murder trial of rodeo champion Jack Favor of Fort Worth, Texas. Favor was falsely accused of shooting to death an elderly couple, Mr. and Mrs. W. H. Richey, who operated a bait and tackle business near Haughton in Bossier Parish. Waggonner believed the false testimony of Favor's accuser, Floyd Edward Cumbey. Favor sued for wrongful conviction and imprisonment but settled for $55,000. The Favor case had no impact on Dooley's political viability.

Jessie Lee Smith case

On July 23, 1984, Dooley and six of his deputies, one, Rick Ramey, then deceased, were directed to pay $2,500 to inmate Jessie Lee Smith for pain, suffering, and a delay in medical treatment in an incident which became violent while Smith was being transported from the Bossier Parish Jail in Benton to the Elayn Hunt Correctional Center in St. Gabriel in Iberville Parish in South Louisiana. Smith had just lost an appeal for armed robbery. United States District Judge Tom Stagg of the Western District of Louisiana described Smith as "obdurate or obstreperous" but said that the authorities used excessive force to control the inmate in violation of protections of the United States Constitution. Because doctors at the Hunt Center found no broken bones, skull fracture, concussion, or torn ligaments, Smith could not receive punitive damages in his suit. Judge Stagg said that he found no credible evidence that Dooley maintained a policy of physical abuse of prisoners at the jail. Nevertheless, he declared Dooley "jointly liable" with the deputies for abuse of Smith. Dooley was represented in the suit by State Senator Sydney B. Nelson of Shreveport.

Bossier Parish politics

In 1985, Dooley was cited in The Chicago Tribune in an article on Louisiana politics focusing on the hierarchy of cozy political relationships. The Tribune described bail bondsman Wiley Fallon of Bossier City as a friend and supporter of Sheriff Dooley, "the law in Bossier Parish", who:

in turn is a friend and supporter of Governor Edwin Edwards. That's the long-accepted way things work in Louisiana, a state that operates under a political trickle-down theory, beginning with the governor. Just as in the economic trickle-down theory, the political version goes that if the big guns at the top are taken care of, the benefits will eventually reach everyone else down below. In the form, for example, of more hospital rooms. Eventually the power and its benefits, albeit on a much smaller scale, trickle down to the parishes--as the counties are called in Louisiana--to the Vol Dooleys and the Wiley Fallons.

In his last year as sheriff from 1987 to 1988, Dooley was president of the Northwest Division of the Louisiana Commission on Law Enforcement, an agency created under the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 to direct federal funds to local and state law enforcement entities with the goal of making them more effective in protecting the citizenry.

On October 24, 1987, Dooley was unseated as sheriff by his former chief deputy, Larry Deen of Benton, a son of Jesse C. Deen, a retired educator and then an outgoing member of the Louisiana House of Representatives. Larry Deen polled 17,113 votes (62 percent) to Dooley's 7,973 (28.9 percent). Bill Gray, a third Democratic candidate, held the remaining 2,518 votes (9.1 percent).

After he left the sheriff's department, Dooley worked in security for the Port of Shreveport. At some time after his term as sheriff ended, Dooley, despite his ties to Edwin Edwards, re-registered as a Republican, as did his successor, Larry Deen. The current sheriff, Julius Curtis Whittington, elected in 2011, is also a Republican.

Family life

Two days after Dooley's reelection as sheriff in 1983, he moved out of the home that he had shared with his first wife, Bobbie Katherine Dooley (born 1932), to whom he was married for thirty-one years. Each claimed in a bitter divorce allegations of cruel treatment "which rendered their living together insupportable". Mrs. Dooley claimed that her husband was involved in an affair with his secretary amid the reelection campaign. Dooley subsequently remarried; his widow is Ruth Lilley Brown Dooley (born 1936), originally from Pleasant Hill in Sabine Parish and one of five children of James Oda Lilley (1908-1994) and the former Lucille Jewel Greer (1909-1988).

Dooley has four children from his first marriage, Patricia "Patsy" D. Davidson Netherland (born 1954), Steven Norris "Steve" Dooley (born 1955) and wife Teresa Ford Dooley, and James Michael "Mike" Dooley (born 1957) and wife Donna Carter Dooley, and Vol "Bubba" Dooley, III (1965-2001), who was murdered by Dooley's estranged daughter-in-law. He acquired three stepsons from his second marriage: Autry Brown, Dennis Brown, and Ricky Brown.

Murder of youngest son

In 2001, Dooley's estranged daughter-in-law, Jocelyn Banks Dooley, and her boyfriend, Jeffrey E. Kosden (born 1967), a bartender originally from New Jersey, were charged with second degree murder in the disappearance and death of Dooley's then 36-year-old son, Vol "Bubba" Dooley, III, an employee of a Bossier City casino. In 2003, Jocelyn Dooley received a life sentence for shooting her husband to death and forty additional years for obstruction of justice. Early in 2005, the Louisiana Second Circuit Court of Appeal in Shreveport upheld Dooley's conviction. The Louisiana Supreme Court then rejected Jocelyn Dooley's appeal, which was based on the immunized testimony provided against her by Kosden. Prosecutors said that Dooley, III, was shot in his home in Plain Dealing and that his wife solicited help from Kosden to bury her husband's body in a shallow grave off Louisiana Highway 2 in northern Caddo Parish. The grave was found nine days later.

Kosden turned state's evidence, and the charges against him were finally expunged in 2010 because he was not involved in the actual shooting of Dooley but in the illicit disposal of the corpse. In 2011, eight years after the verdict against Jocelyn Dooley, the case was featured on the documentary television series, Sins and Secrets on the Discovery Channel. Vol Dooley, Jr., appeared as himself in Sins and Secrets. The murder case was also televised on Snapped.

Death

Dooley died on August 11, 2014 in Bossier City after a long illness at the age of 87. Services were held on August 14 at Cypress Baptist Church in Benton, with Dooley's friend, the Reverend Billy Pierce, officiating. Interment followed at Hillcrest Cemetery in Haughton.

In the ceremony, fourteen motorcycles headed what local law enforcement officials called a "presidential escort". Some forty vehicles from the Bossier Parish Sheriff’s office, the Bossier City and Shreveport police departments, and other agencies as well stood watch as the body was moved from the church to the cemetery. Sheriff Julius Whittington said that he had grown up three houses away from Dooley, who was Whittington's Little League baseball coach. “Who would have known? Who would have dreamed?," said Whittington, who followed Dooley as sheriff twenty-four years thereafter.