WILLIAMSPORT - Jurors found a former school teacher guilty on most counts related to child sex charges Thursday in Lycoming County Court.
"There will be an appeal," yelled Leon Dale Bodle, 42, outside the courthouse as he was led away in handcuffs by sheriff's deputies to Lycoming County Prison.
Sentencing is scheduled for 11 a.m. June 24 before Judge Marc F. Lovecchio. Bodle will undergo an assessment to determine if he is a sexually violent predator.
Jurors found the former teacher -who worked at Williamsport Area School District, taught at Sugar Valley Rural Charter School in Loganton and substituted at Montoursville and Muncy school districts - guilty of 37 of 41 counts.
Bodle faced charges of criminal solicitation to commit involuntary deviant sexual intercourse, unlawful contact with a minor, sending obscene and other sexual materials to a minor, sexual abuse of children, criminal use of a computer and corruption of a minor. They stem from incidents in August 2007 to August 2008.
He was found not guilty of three counts of sexual abuse of children and one count of corruption of minors.
Jurors deliberated for about two hours.
After reading the verdict, Assistant District Attorney Mary C. Kilgus said she wanted to Bodle to receive the mandatory sentencing on the first four counts.
In her closing argument, Kilgus described Bodle as a "menace to the community" and an engager of sex talk who sent instant messages to impressionable teenage girls at Hepburn-Lycoming Elementary School in the Williamsport Area School District, Sugar Valley Rural Charter School in Loganton and Montoursville.
The investigators in the case were Old Lycoming Township Police Detective Sgt. Chris Kriner and Officer Mike Samar, FBI and the district attorney's office.
Evidence showed Bodle used his position as a teacher and authority figure to chat explicitly with girls, tried to convince girls to go with him to amusement parks and to wear bikinis. He downloaded graphic violence and child pornography on computers to which he had access, Kilgus said.
Worse, she said, he tried to blame his nephew and the girls, but each one of the girls' testimonies had a single common denominator - Bodle, she added.
"We have his confession," Kilgus said. "He visits pedophile Web sites with pictures of girls as young as 3. He didn't mistakenly download it."
Defense attorney James Protasio had a variety of arguments but focused a lot of attention on how much of the girls' testimonies didn't match up or make sense.
He also believed evidence on an audiotape demonstrated the investigators were not forthright during interviews with Bodle, telling him they would get him counseling if he cooperated and jail if he didn't, citing an example of another pedophile in Lycoming County who received up to 10 years state prison.
