A convicted murderer and child molester is back in jail after his arrest yesterday at a public library in Indianapolis. Richard Dobeski, 67, was picked up on a LaPorte County warrant for four counts of failure to register as a sex offender. All are Level 6 felonies, which carry a penalty of between 6 months and 2.5 years in prison. A failure to register charge will also be filed in Marion County, according to officials with the LaPorte County Sheriff’s Department. Dobeski was released last week from the Indiana Department of Correction New Carlisle facility.
He was living in Westville at the time of his 2008 conviction for child exploitation and child molesting. The investigation into that case was prompted by a 2007 incident in Monterey. Dobeski attempted to lure three young boys into his car, according to then-Pulaski County Sheriff Mike Gayer. The youngsters ran home and told their parents, who drove around town and located him, wrote down his license plate number, and called the sheriff’s department.
Investigators from Pulaski County went to the trailer park where he lived to question him. Gayer says Dobeski wasn’t home, but neighbors advised boys and girls from the neighborhood frequented his house. Officers got a search warrant for the trailer and recovered evidence used to convict him of child molesting and child exploitation in LaPorte County in 2008. A lesser charge of attempted criminal confinement Pulaski County was subsequently dismissed since the LaPorte County offenses carried a more strict punishment.
Dobeski was also convicted of two counts of murder in LaPorte County in 1965.
As soon as he was released from prison last week, law enforcement officials across the state started tracking his whereabouts to ensure he complied with sex and violent offender registry laws within their jurisdictions.
