'Sock Bandit' is back, police say

BELLEVILLE -- A 36-year-old man whose admitted hankering for hosiery has landed him three prison stints and repeated judicial scoldings is accused of burglarizing a home this week, then stealing away with women's socks police say they found in his bedroom.

James Dowdy's arrest in this St. Louis suburb came while he was free on bond awaiting trial on attempted burglary and disorderly conduct charges filed last year for another supposed sock caper.

While Dowdy remained jailed Wednesday on a felony burglary count filed the previous day, his mother pressed publicly for the legal system to institutionalize her live-in son for psychiatric treatment for the fixation she says has tormented him most of his life.

Prison, Linda Dowdy insisted, won't do him any good in tackling his fetish -- which she thinks took hold when he clung to some of her socks as keepsakes when he was forced to live for a year with his dad as a child.

"He cries to me all the time, 'Mom, I hate myself. I'd rather be dead than live like this,'" the 59-year-old mother, her voice cracking, told The Associated Press. "He doesn't hurt anybody, and he never takes anything of value. He takes nothing but socks."

Yet she fears, as do police, that he may eventually be killed as an intruder.

"I told the police officer the other night they're going to call me in the middle of the night to identify my son's body because somebody's going to shoot him," she said. "And in all honesty, I can't blame that person because I would be trying to protect my home, too."

Still, she added, "I'd like for somebody to look at him as a human being and not a monster. He's not a bad kid, he's really not. He just has a problem."

Police have said there's been no evidence Dowdy has ever threatened anyone in his apparently single-minded quest for socks, almost always the female variety.

Police say that appears to have been the case early Monday, when a man told police he saw a stranger crawling out of his basement window after his daughter heard someone downstairs. Police dogs led to Dowdy's house, where investigators found in Dowdy's bedroom socks taken from the caller's basement laundry room, police Sgt. Don Sax said.

Dowdy was free on bond, awaiting a July 28 hearing on the charges dating to last year.

Dowdy's court-appointed public defender in that case refused Wednesday to discuss Dowdy's legal troubles, which stretch back at least 14 years.

In 2004, Dowdy was sentenced to seven years in prison after pleading guilty to attempted residential burglary, a felony reportedly tied to his strolling into a female neighbor's home for her socks.

Seven years earlier, Dowdy got a six-year sentence for breaking into another woman's home and stealing socks.

And in 1994, Dowdy was sentenced to three years for trying to burglarize a home, ultimately getting caught by police with a bag of socks.

"I know what I did was wrong," he told the judge during sentencing for that crime. "And the thing with the socks, I would like to get help with it so I can get over it, get it out of my life and get on with my life."

Then in the weeks leading to his arrest last year, witnesses in Dowdy's neighborhood reported seeing a suspicious person slinking about, at times peeking through windows. Often, police said, socks were left behind, though it's unclear whether the culprit dropped them clumsily or as a calling card.

Police responding to one of the reports saw Dowdy -- who fit the description of the man reported by neighbors -- trying to crawl into his house through a basement window, socks in one hand and a flashlight in the other.