The man had
called thirty-two year old Dorothy Jane Scott’s workplace before and she had told
her mother, Vera, that she thought she recognised his voice. The caller would tell her
that he loved her and that he would kill her, that he would get her alone and cut
her up into pieces and that no-one would ever find her. He told her that he
knew what she was doing day-to-day, and he was right, accurately recounting her
activities and whereabouts. On this day
he called to tell Dorothy she should go outside, because there was something
there for her. Dorothy went outside and found a dead, red rose on the
windshield of her car.
Dorothy started
taking karate lessons.
She was a single
mother, living in Anaheim, California, with her four-year old son and her aunt.
She worked two jobs as a secretary for jointly owned stores that sold things
like lava lamps, hippie jewellery and weed paraphernalia. Her parents looked
after her son while she was at work. Dorothy was a devout Christian, and her
friends and colleagues said she preferred quiet nights in to going out, and that
she did not drink alcohol or take drugs. She didn’t have a steady boyfriend
that any of them knew about, though her father Jacob said she dated
occasionally. She was a person that stuck to her well-worn routine; going to
work, going home and looking after her son. She was even described by some who
knew her as dull and boring as the phone book.
On May 28th,
1980, Dorothy had a late meeting at work. During the meeting, she noticed that
her colleague Conrad Bostron didn’t look well, and had a red mark on his arm.
Dorothy and another colleague, Pam Head, took Conrad to the A & E
department (ER) at UC Irvine Medical Centre. On the way to the hospital, they
stopped at Dorothy’s house so she could check in on her son and tell her
parents she was taking Conrad to the hospital.
Dorothy and Pam
stayed with Conrad while he waited to be seen, and then Dorothy and Pam waited
while he was being examined. Pam said that she was with Dorothy for this whole
period, and that they read magazines and chatted to other people in the waiting
room to pass the time. At 11pm, Conrad was discharged. He had been treated for
black widow spider bite, and was given a prescription.
Dorothy went to
use the toilet before they left, and said she would bring the car round to the
front as she didn’t feel that Conrad was well enough to walk the distance to
the car park.
While Dorothy
went to get the car, Pam went with Conrad to collect the prescription and
complete his medical insurance forms. They then returned to the entrance to
wait for Dorothy. They were just starting to wonder where she was when Pam saw
Dorothy’s 1973 white Toyota station wagon (an estate type car to British
readers) driving towards the hospital at speed. It’s unclear if Pam was already
outside the hospital by this point, or if she went outside when she saw the
car, but it had its full beams on and she couldn’t see who was driving. Pam
waved, trying to attract Dorothy’s attention, but the car went past her, and
drove out of the hospital grounds, exiting right.
Pam and Conrad
assumed that Dorothy had driven off because there was an emergency with her
son, and waited at the hospital for another two hours. When Dorothy didn’t come
back, they alerted hospital security and Dorothy was reported as missing to the
police.
Dorothy’s
burning car was found in an alleyway in the early hours of 29th May,
about 10 miles away from the hospital.
On 12 June,
1980, a man called the Orange County
Register newspaper. The editor told the police that the man had said he’d
killed Dorothy because she was his love and she’d been unfaithful. The caller
knew about Conrad’s spider bite, and that Dorothy had swapped a black scarf for
a red one after the team meeting. The caller said that Dorothy had phoned him
from the hospital on the night of 28th May. Pam said this wasn’t
true. She had been with Dorothy the whole time, and she had never left her to
make a phone call. There’s no mention of Dorothy potentially making the call
before she went to get the car, but it seems unlikely she would have called
anyone that night apart from perhaps her parents to let them know she was
leaving the hospital.
✴✴✴✴
‘Are you related
to Dorothy Scott?’ the caller asked.
‘Yes,’
Vera replied.
‘I’ve got her,’ the man said.
These calls to
Dorothy’s parent’s house would continue until the spring of
1984, every Wednesday for four years. They would usually come when Vera was in the house alone. The caller
would say different things; that he had Dorothy and she was alive; that he had
killed her, asking if she was there. He was obviously disguising his voice, and despite
police installing call monitoring equipment, the calls were too short to be
traced. One day Jacob answered the phone. The calls stopped for a while after
that.
On 14 August,
1984, a pelvis, two arms, two thighs and skull were found on the Santa Ana
Canyon Road (approximately 7 miles from UC Irvine) by a construction worker.
With the bones were a watch, a turquoise ring, and canine bones.
An autopsy (post
mortem) confirmed that the remains were those of Dorothy, but it wasn’t
possible to determine a cause of death. Her
mother Vera later said that the watch had stopped at 12.30am, about an hour
after Pam and Conrad had last seen Dorothy’s car.
When the local
paper ran the story that Dorothy’s remains had been found, the man called Vera
and Jacob again.
He asked them,
‘Is Dorothy home?’
Questions and
Notes:
1) Dorothy’s remains were found about 7 miles from
the hospital, and her car ten miles away, meaning the killer had dumped her
body and then the car. Where did he go after that, and how did he get there?
Did he live close to where he ditched the car? If this is the case, how did he
get to the hospital in the first place? Had he taken a taxi, or a bus? Was this
ever explored by the police? Where was she killed?
 |
| Map showing the approximate distance between UC Irvine and the road where Dorothy's remains were found |
2) We have
to assume the car was burnt to destroy any contact evidence left by the killer,
but the first use of DNA in a criminal case in the States didn’t happen until
1987, 7 years after Dorothy was murdered and 3 years after her remains were
found. Despite this, it seems like the killer knew he could be traced to
Dorothy’s car, and burnt it to destroy evidence. Was she killed in the car? If
so, how? Was the interior of the car covered in her blood? His fingerprints
would have been left on the car, were his fingerprints on file?
3)
Where did the dog bones come from? Dorothy
didn’t have a dog. Was the dog used in
some way to entice or coerce Dorothy?
4)
Not all of her remains were recovered. Had her
killer taken trophies, or did wild animals carry some of the remains away?
5)
Did the change in Dorothy’s routine give the
killer the chance he needed to get her alone? He told the newspaper he’d killed
her because she was with another man – was he talking about Conrad? Did the
stalker see Dorothy with Conrad and assume that he was her boyfriend? Did this
push him over the line of threatening violence to actually carrying it out?
6)
Was Dorothy this killer’s only victim?
Conclusion:
 |
| US department of justice homicide trends more here |
I don't think a stranger murdered Dorothy. Women are more likely than men to be murdered by someone they know; a husband, an ex, a friend, a colleague, a neighbour. I believe that Dorothy knew her killer. She recognised the voice of the man
that called her at work. I think it was someone she had met briefly before, had
perhaps dated and then rejected or didn’t want to see again. He became obsessed
with her, and stalked her.
Perhaps it was someone that had come into one of the shops while she had
been there. it is possible it was
someone she knew from church?
I think he either followed her from the team meeting to the hospital and
took the chance of her being on her own (the car park was some distance from
the hospital building) to abduct her, or had been waiting outside her house
when he saw her stop by with Pam and Conrad.
As no one around the hospital
heard her scream, I am guessing that he was either already in her car when she
got there, or he subdued her in some way. Either that or the car park was too
far away and isolated for anyone to have heard her. There’s no mention of a
blunt force injury to her skull, so perhaps he punched her, rendering her
unconscious, and then put her in the car. Pam and Conrad couldn’t tell who was
driving the car, because the full beams were on. I am going to assume that it
was either Dorothy’s killer behind the wheel, or that she was driving with
perhaps a gun to her head.
What happened to Dorothy after that is something I’d rather not know. She
must have been terrified. I can’t imagine how she would have felt if she was
conscious when they drove past her friends, and she was unable to ask them for
help.
Her son would be in his early 40s
now, and grew up without his mother, who sounded like a caring, gentle person.
Jacob
died in 1994 and Vera in 2002.
Thirty-seven years after her
death, it is unlikely that Dorothy’s killer will ever be brought to justice.
