Re:Watching - Pump Up The Volume

‘Load up on guns and bring your friends, it’s fun to lose and to pretend…’  - Smells Like Teen Spirit, Nirvana.

‘Eat your cereal with a fork and do your homework in the dark’ – Happy Harry Hard-On

Some things are best left on the nostalgia shelf, next to Boots lavender & mint shampoo, petrol blue Kickers, pink lemonade Snapple and wearing skirts over trousers. This is a new series of posts where I’ll look back sometimes not so fondly on the books, films and music of my youth. We’re starting with the 1990 Christian Slater film, Pump Up the Volume.

Ah, Christian Slater! With his Jack Nicholson eyebrows and his knowing chuckle, his bad boy hair and the way he smoked cigarettes, what teenage girl from a small town in England wouldn’t hope to bump into him outside McDonalds? He would take you for rides in his vintage car, he’d have booze and cigarettes. Best of all, he could even dispose of school bullies by making them drink drain un-blocker, or shooting them in the head.

In Pump Up the Volume, he plays nerdy, awkward Mark Hunter (you know he’s awkward and nerdy because he wears glasses and short sleeved, button-down checked shirts) the new kid in school (Hubert Humphrey High, Phoenix, Arizona) who can’t talk to girls but can talk filth over pirate radio waves. Mark’s voice-disguised DJ alter-ego is Happy Harry Hard-On, a priapic, chronic masturbator with an authority problem. He hates his parents, his teachers, the guidance counsellors, any kind of authoritah. 

Nerdgasm

Mark/Harry soon sets about exposing his high school’s unfair expulsion policies, which involve booting pupils out for things like getting pregnant, wearing band badges on your denim jacket or playing sexually explicit rap in the break rooms. 

One night Harry gets a letter from a depressed listener, fellow HHH pupil Malcolm, asking if he should kill himself. Because Harry is a teenage boy and knows jack shit about what you’d say to someone that asks you that, he doesn’t handle things well at first and his later attempts to talk Malcolm out of suicide fail.  Mark/Harry blames himself and Mark decides he’s not going to be Harry anymore because being the representative voice of the yoot is too much for him, especially if his audience are going to kill themselves.

'What if you're a normal reaction to a fucked-up situation?' 

Also listening to his late night shows is Nora Dinero, (Samantha Mathis) the ‘Eat Me Beat Me Lady’ who sends Harry her dirty (and terrible) poetry. Nora is the 1990s take on the manic dream pixie girl. For those not familiar with the manic pixie dream girl trope, she is a female character that serves no other purpose other than to help the male protagonist open up and embrace love / life/ laughter. The manic pixie dream girl will run through puddles barefoot, decide to get a train to Paris after a few beers in a London pub, she’ll be cray-zee and arty and quirky, she’ll be gawky but pretty (not seen a fat manic pixie dream girl yet) It may seem that she has agency, and a personality, but she doesn’t. We only see her viewed through the eyes of the male character.

Mark and Nora meet for the first time

Once Nora discovers Harry’s true identity, she hassles him to ‘get his message out there’. The youth are unhappy! Parents listen! You have forgotten what it was like to be young and angry with the world! That kid what shot himself in the head! Posh popular Paige putting all her stuff in the microwave!

Let me tell you, putting your pearls and medals in the microwave isn’t rebellious or a two fingers up to da man, it’s fucking stupid and dangerous.  Paige escapes only with a broken nose instead of say, third degree burns that require hours of extensive, painful surgery despite the fact she sits IN FRONT OF THE FUCKING LOADED MICROWAVE AND WATCHES IT BLOW UP AND SET FIRE TO HER KITCHEN.

Anyway that’s the basic plot, the authoritahs try and get Harry off the air because he’s a bad influence on the kids but it all turns out OK in the end, fuck you parents of dead kid, it’s all your fault anyway for being mean to him when he said he didn’t want to watch TV with you.

The End. The ending is rushed and unsatisfying. Ambiguous endings to films don’t bother me – one of my favourite film endings is Shutter Island because it’s so open to having whatever resolution the viewer wants it to have. I don’t expect things to be tied up neatly before the final credits roll, but in PUtV it just feels like they didn’t know how to end the story, so they just….end it.

While writing this, I looked up some reviews of the film and comments on Youtube clips. It’s a much loved movie, and a lot of people think its Christian Slater’s best. It’s true that I really like Mark / Harry as a character, but then he’s designed for teenage girls to fall in love with. In fact I fell slightly in love with him all over again, especially during the scene where he’s burning letters from his listeners. There’s something about the way that scene is played and lit that makes you want to scoop Mark up and run, run away with him forever. Then Samantha Mathis ruins it by taking her top off and pointing her perky boobs in his face. Damn you, Mathis!

There are some aspects of PUtV that are still relevant and will always be relevant. Most of us know how it feels to think we don’t fit in anywhere. Most of us feel total, bleak despair at some time in our lives.

Another credit is that Nora and Mark are a good match – he’s not the geek getting the beauty queen (initially he’s crushing on Julia Roberts lookalike, Paige) and Nora’s not the awkward nerd who gets the most popular boy in school because she’s had a makeover and taken off her specs. As an onscreen (and later on real life) couple, they really work. There’s chemistry, even if most of it comes from Mathis’ lustful glances and plump lip licking.

That said, I don’t think this film would ever work outside of an early 1990s setting, and that’s not down to changes with technology or the teenage mind-set. If Harry was at high school now he’d just be podcasting, Instagramming or Snapchatting instead.

 Watching the film again, despite its message of rebelling against authority, or the unfairness of a system that singles out poor and troubled kids, it all seems pretty tame. These kids aren’t going to a school where guns and knives are a constant presence and they don’t live on sprawling, grim, hopeless housing estates. Sure, there’s a different kind of hopelessness, one that’s probably hard to understand when you come from small town England. A lot is made of the little hillside boxes PuTV’s character live in and I don’t think it’s an accident the film is set in state with a desert climate. Bleak council estates might be absent, but thousands of identical houses are present, perhaps to show us the teenage character’s fight to remain individual and distinct in a place where everything looks the same. (you see shots of Mark walking past these houses being built on his way to school.)

The film’s story belongs to the loners and outcasts, but it also belongs to the kids tired of being forced into a mould of popularity and academic achievement.

In April, 1999, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris shot and killed twelve fellow pupils and one teacher at Columbine High School. In their video diaries (known as ‘The Basement Tapes’) they outlined their plans for destruction. Their reason for the massacre was that they were bullied, lonely outcasts.  They were going to kill the jocks that made their lives hell. As it happened, they killed indiscriminately and not one ‘jock’ was among the victims. They killed outcasts and loners. They killed kids they professed to be like. Their youngest victim was only 14 years old.

Pump Up The Volume and the Columbine massacre bookend the 1990s for me, apart from date-related obviousness.  In 1991, I had started secondary school myself and some of my own fears of going to ‘high’ school were realised. But I didn’t take a gun into school and kill the kids I hated, the kids that picked on me.

 The early 90’s were the age of Take That rubbing jelly on their bare buttocks, salt and vinegar Disco crisps, Panda Pop cola, Body Shop perfume oils, platform shoes, Smash Hits, Just Seventeen, walking home from school with your friends, when everyone wanted a JD Sports drawstring bag and a pair of Adidas Gazelles.  By 1998, Britpop was dying (grunge was already dead) to quote Blur:

We all say ‘don’t want to be alone’

We wear the same clothes, cause we feel the same

We kiss with dry lips when we say goodnight

End of a century Oh it’s nothing special

When I think of PuTV, I think of 13 year old me, crushing on Christian Slater and taping the Top 40 off Capital FM, dressing like Winona Ryder in Heathers, and smearing my mouth with Body Shop watermelon lip gloss. 1999 might have been in the same decade but it was a whole lifetime away.

So sure, watch Pump Up the Volume, whether you haven’t seen it in twenty-seven years, (TWENTY-SEVEN!) or you haven’t seen it at all. It’s not aged well, but it hasn’t aged badly either.   I don’t think things can have changed that much for teenagers, but I feel that Mark, Nora and all us 90s school kids were lucky we didn’t come of age in the internet era.  (though I’d like to have seen Paige live-streaming  blowing up the microwave, ‘U OK hun?’)

Maybe I’ll dig it out in another few years and laugh again at the bit where Nora is gagging for a snog from Mark so much, she stands in front of him with her mouth hanging open. That’s what I’d have done if he was standing in front of me.

KISS ME you hot nerdy piece of ass

Scores on the doors:

For nostalgia purposes: 9/10

For an accurate representation of high school life: 4.5/10

 The soundtrack actually rocks, so it gets another point for that – 5.5/10

Another for repeatedly using Leonard Cohen’s ‘Everybody Knows’ 6.5 /10

Oh the dialogue is excellent and pretty funny, another point… 7.5/10

Christian Slater shirtless for what feels like 40% of the film gets another…… 8.5/10

Total: 17.5 /20

Where Is Asha Degree?

A note on this post: this case contains a fair about of conflicting information from different sources. I have tried to use what seems to be the most accurate information. Links and further reading are at the bottom of the post. 

There was a heavy rainstorm in the early hours of the morning of 14 February, 2000, in Shelby, North Carolina. There was also a power-cut that night, apparently unrelated to the storm.

By the time Harold Degree had finished work late that night, the power was back on. Harold lived with his wife of twelve years, Iquilla, and their two children, nine year-old Asha and ten year-old O’Bryant.   

When Harold got home, Asha was still up, fully dressed and lying on the sofa.  

Asha went to bed in the room she shared with O’Bryant not long after her father got home. Harold checked in on the children twice before he went to bed at about 2.30am. 

Iquilla got up at around 5.45am the next morning. It was her and Harold’s wedding anniversary, but the kids had school and needed a bath as they had missed theirs the night before because of the power cut.  Their alarm was set for 6.30pm, but Iquilla went to wake them up before the alarm went off.

 Iquilla found Asha’s bed empty. Iquilla searched the house and the cars on the driveway.  She then phoned Asha’s grandmother, who lived across the street, but her sister-in-law, who picked up, said Asha wasn’t there. 

O’Bryant said that sometime in the night, he had heard his sister’s bed squeak, but thought it was just her moving around in her sleep.

Police arrived with scent dogs at the Degree house an hour later, at 6.40am. The dogs were not able to track Asha at all. Further information of scent dog ability can be found in previous posts about Elisa Lam (Every Contact Leaves A Trace) which will dispute the theory that the dogs weren’t able to track her because of inclement weather. 

Asha had left her home before dawn, taking a bag that contained changes of her favourite clothes, (a pair of blue jeans with a red stripe, black trainers, a red vest with black trim, black overalls with Tweety Pie on them, a long sleeved white t-shirt with purple lettering and a long sleeved black and white shirt.) her Tweety-Pie purse, her clean basketball kit, photos of her family and some sweets.

Asha kept her house key in her backpack, and she had locked the front door behind her.

She was last seen at around 3.30 – 4.15am, walking south along North Carolina Highway 18, just over a mile from her home, by several passing motorists. It was raining heavily, but Asha, who was dressed all in white, wasn’t wearing a coat. A truck driver went past her three times, but on the third time he circled round and drove past her, she ran off the road and into the woods. He said that he had turned around because he thought it was "strange such a small child would be out by herself at that hour,”

On 17 February, some sweet wrappers were found in a shed belonging to Turner’s Upholstery, located along the stretch of highway where Asha had last been seen running into the woods. With the wrappers were a pencil, a green marker pen and a Mickey Mouse shaped hair clip. The items were identified as belonging to Asha. It’s not known if these had been there since the morning of 14, or were planted there later.

The initial search for Asha covered a 2 -3 mile radius of where she had last been seen, taking 9,000 man hours of following the 300 something leads that ranged from possible sightings to tips about what places to search. After a week, the search was called off. There were no clues as to what had happened to Asha, or where she had gone.

In August 2001, construction workers on a site at Highway 18 in Burke County, 26 miles north of Shelby - the opposite direction from when Asha had last been seen - dug up her bag, which had her name and telephone number written inside it.

The bag had been wrapped in plastic rubbish sacks. The FBI took the bag for testing, but the results have never been made public. In October that year, similar rubbish sacks were found and taken for testing.

In May 2016, the FBI announced that they had a possible new lead in the case and revealed that Asha may have been seen getting into either a dark green, early 70s Lincoln Mark IV or a Ford Thunderbird with rusted wheel arches the night she disappeared from Highway 18. This was actually a tip that been given back in 2000, and was revealed when new investigators took over the case. To date, it is the only other piece in the puzzle of what might have happened to Asha.

Background

Asha (pronounced Ay-sha) Jaquilla Degree was born on 5 August, 1990.

The Degrees were what some people might consider over protective of their children. There was no computer in the house, and Asha and O’Bryant’s lives centred around church, school, and family. As both Harold and Iquilla worked, the children let themselves in after school and were expected to have their homework finished by the time their mum and dad got home.

Asha was the starred point guard on her school’s basketball team. For those not familiar with basketball, this is a specialised position. The point guard players are expected to run the team's offense by controlling the ball and making sure that it gets to the right players at the right time. Above all, the point guard must totally understand and accept their coach's game plan. While the guard must understand and accept the coach's game plan, he must also be able to adapt to what the defence is allowing, and he also must control the pace of the game. (from Wikipedia)

The team played its first game of the season on 12 February, but it didn’t go well for Asha. She fouled out (Basketball foul) and they lost the game. Her parents recalled her being very upset about this, and crying with her teammates.  She seemed to recover quickly though, and watched her brother’s game.

Asha’s class were reading  ‘The Whipping Boy’ by Sid Fleischman. The story is about two boys, a prince and his servant, that run away.

Asha is African-American, and at the time of her disappearance was 9 years old,  4’6 in height, and weighed 60lbs (about 4 stone) she has brown eyes and black hair. She was last seen wearing a long sleeved white t-shirt, white jeans and white trainers. She was afraid of storms and dogs.

Timeline

Friday 11 February

School is closed for lessons because of the three day President’s Day holiday weekend.  Harold and Iquilla have to work, so the children spend the day at an aunt’s house and at basketball practice at the school. 

Saturday 12 February

Asha and her brother play in the first basketball matches of the seasons. Asha is upset when her team loses and she fouls out, but she seems to recover and watches her brother’s game.

Sunday 13 February

The children spend the day with family, going to church. Harold works a split shift, his second shift starts in the afternoon.

8pm – 9pm some reports say this is the time Asha and O’Bryant went to bed, missing their bath because of the power cut.

11.30pm: Harold comes back from work. Some reports say Asha was still up when he got home, possibly because she was cold after the power went out. It’s unclear as to whether Asha DID go to bed at 8pm and then got up again to wait for her dad to get home, or if she didn’t go to bed at all until Harold got home.

Monday 14 February

12.30: Harold leaves the house again to buy Valentine’s Day chocolates.

2.30pm: Harold checks on his children before going to bed. Both of them are sleeping.

3.30 – 4.15am: Asha is seen by several drivers walking south along Highway 18, approximately a mile from her home. The weather is very bad; it’s cold and raining heavily but Asha is not wearing a coat, hat, scarf or gloves. One concerned driver turns to go past her three times, but it seems Asha gets spooked before he can approach her and she runs into the wooded area that lines the highway.

17 February

Sweet wrappers, a pencil, a marker and a Mickey Mouse hairclip identified as belonging to Asha are found in a shed along the highway at about the same location where Asha was seen running into the woods by the driver.

August 2001

Asha’s backpack is found by construction workers on a site 26 miles north of where she had last been seen. The bag is wrapped in rubbish sacks and has her name and telephone number written inside it.

October 2001

Rubbish bags similar to the ones that were used to wrap Asha’s bag are found and sent for analysis.

2004

Acting on a tip off from a man in prison, investigators conduct an excavation search at the corner of Shelby and Rube Spangler Roads near Lawndale, South Carolina. They found bones, which turned out to belong to an animal. They also find a pair of men’s khaki trousers.

2016

New investigators looking into Asha’s case find a tip given back in 2000, a sighting of Asha getting into a 1970’s Lincoln Mark IV or a Ford Thunderbird. There were two other people in the car.

Lincoln Mark IV

Ford Thunderbird

Questions and Notes

Why was Asha dressed all in white? So she could be seen easily in the dark?

None of the drivers called the police after they saw Asha. The driver that turned round 3 times only called them after he saw news reports that she was missing.

She was seen by the drivers walking SOUTH, her bag was found NORTH, 26 miles in the opposite direction.

When and why was her bag buried in that particular location?

Theories:

Grooming for various purposes and problems with this theory

Some people have tried to discredit this theory, saying that Asha’s family didn’t have a computer, so she could not have been vulnerable to grooming. This doesn’t mean that she wasn’t groomed. Was it someone she knew through school? Through basketball? Did someone convince her to run away, or say they were going to take her somewhere special, like Disney Land/World? Was this place somewhere warm, which was the reason why she didn’t take a coat with her? Did they use her parent’s anniversary as a ruse? Or ‘romantic’ Valentine’s Day?

Why did she leave house at 3am but was seen over an hour later? Was someone supposed to pick her up? Had she walked to meet someone, realised something was wrong and run away from them, which was when the drivers saw her? If this was the case, perhaps she was scared anyone driving past might be the person she was running away from.  This would explain why she ran into the woods. But what happened to her after that?

Were the items planted in the shed? How come her bag was found so neatly wrapped, as if preserved? Did someone want it to be found? Was it buried on the site knowing someone would soon find it? Why have test results not been made public? Because there are clues as to what happened to Asha that the police can’t make public in case it jepodises the investigation?

Runaway and problems with this theory

Had Asha been inspired by The Whipping Boy and decided to run away to have adventures?  If so, why would she choose a night of terrible weather to go when she was afraid of storms? Why would she leave without a coat?  Children aged ten and under are not considered ‘runaways’ by law enforcement, and children  only truly run away when things are very bad at home, where abuse, violence and neglect are present.  It didn’t seem like any of these things were happening in the Degree home. Asha’s parents may have been protective and strict, but she seemed happy and enjoyed sports and hanging out with her family.

Sleepwalking 

There’s no real evidence for this theory. Asha did not have a history of sleepwalking, and it seems like her bag was pre-packed (before she went to sleep that night) so she was prepared to leave the house.

Hit and Run

If Asha had been struck by a car walking along the highway, there would be evidence of this; marks on the road, someone who had taken a dented car to be repaired. There were other drivers along that road on the morning of 14^th who would have witnessed a hit and run.

Asha is alive but can’t get home

It’s possible Asha was taken and has been held captive somewhere, like Elizabeth Smart, Jaycee Lee Dugard and Natascha Kampusch. There’s no evidence to suggest this happened, other than a girl matching her description was seen getting into the 1970s green car.

Hypothermia 

After Asha ran into the woods, did she try and hide, but succumb to hypothermia? If this is the case, wouldn’t the scent dogs have been able to track her? Wouldn’t she have been found? 

2017

Harold and Iquilla hold a walk every year along the North Carolina Highway 18, travelling Asha’s last known route. A billboard stands at the spot where she was last seen running into the woods.  Her parents still live in the same house, and have the same telephone number in case their daughter ever comes home.

Asha's walk

Anyone with information on Asha’s case can contact the Cleveland County Sheriff’s office on 704 4844822.

Further reading and information:

The Charley Project

Dark Matters (Cayleigh Elise Youtube video)

Brainscratch Searchlight (LordanARTS youtube video)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_Asha_Degree

Shelby Star

https://findingashadegree.wordpress.com/  (this is a very indepth website, but Asha's parents have said that not all the information on it is accurate)

Reddit Unresolved  One of many Reddit threads discussing what may have happened to Asha.

Bank Holiday Throwback - 'Blue Monday'

Normal blogging service should resume sometime in mid-June, with more missing persons cases and Dust Spank chapters. In the meantime, here's a deleted post from 2012. Heads up: there's quite a lot of complaining. 

Twenty-three days into 2012 and my New Year hopefulness has dissipated into a rose wine and full fat cheddar cheese blur of ‘’meh’ and ‘blah’. I can’t run. My stupid left knee has seen to that. (I refuse to accept any responsibility for my own dodgy knee. It has absolutely nothing to do with pushing it far too hard on the treadmill, but oh well, 6k in 45 minutes is ‘not very much’ according to the physio lady, who sounds like that teacher from South Park and keeps going ‘Mmmkay?’ at the end of everything she says.)

I still haven’t smoked, though, so have been giving myself big pats on the back for that, for not giving in to the temptation of sweet, sweet nicotine. I just kick and punch stuff instead, or slam doors. Maybe I should ‘run it off’.  Mr. W’s, answer to everything....’I had the most awful day at work’ ‘Run it off!’ ‘Some total twat drove into the back of me this morning,,’.....‘Run it off!’ ‘The doctor says I’ve got three weeks to live,’ ......‘You know what you wanna do? Run it off!’

I have just phoned him to talk about the sudden crippling realisation that if I died on Wednesday, say on the way home from work, my contribution to the world would consist of: (includes a brief itinerary of worldly goods....lump it all in together, why not?)

·         Some appalling teenage poetry

·         Embarrassing journals in which I write down sexts from a sometime fuck buddy and whinge about everything not ever going my way, as well as slagging off a lot of people, including some I call my friends.

·         A wash bag full of vibrators – when I was going through a chronically single patch every single one of my friends thought it would be hil-arrr-riii-ous to buy me a cock shaped vibrating toy. One girl bought me a glass dildo and said, ‘the bloke in the shop reckons you can hammer nails into walls with one of these!’ So when I can’t find a hammer I’ll know what might come in useful.

·         A not very impressive collection DVDs that suggest a somewhat schizophrenic taste in films. Pretty in Pink is on the same shelf as Pan’s Labyrinth (of course it is, they are arranged alphabetically.)

·         About a thousand paperback books, mostly purchased from charity shops, which means they carry handwritten inscriptions, like: ‘Debbie – this could be you! Here’s to more Long Island Iced Tea nights, whhhoooo, love Sandra. Xx’  (in a copy of ‘He’s Just Not Into You’)

·         Photographs of myself in my underwear on my new digital camera. Because I’m monitoring how body changes with my new exercise programme. On the camera, they looked OK. I put them on the laptop, and full screen I look fat, moody and there is a mug in the back ground that says ‘I Heart My Dad’ which just looks really weird when you’re taking semi naked pictures of yourself.

·         Several drafts of terrible fiction. I might at least win the Bad Sex in Fiction Award. Can you win that for something that hasn’t actually been published???

·         A few half used bottles of perfume, because my favourite ones I save for ‘special occasions’ which means I hardly ever wear them....what a waste.

·         Loads of dresses I am saving for special occasions, or when I finally achieve the body I want, which means I hardly ever wear them....what a waste!

·         Millions of buttons and beads and scraps of fabric.

·         Massive amounts of hair blocking the shower drain. It’s quite fun pulling out disgusting, slimy, clumps of ancient hair.  When I was little, me and my sister thought it would be fun to bury hair in the vegetable patch....our mother did not think it was fun and went mad.

·         About four pairs of glasses with old prescription lenses in them.

·         A pile of magazine that no-one will be able to work out why I wanted to keep, because I myself forgot why I wanted to keep them. Many, many years ago I forgot why I wanted to keep them.

The idea of taking the big nap doesn’t bother me, I didn’t know where I was before I was born, why would I care what happens after I die? So it doesn’t really make any sense that I should be so bothered about trying to find some meaning in my life. After all I’m not going to care too much when I’m dead. But it’s still there, that little wriggling, nagging feeling that wakes me in the middle of the night, tugging on my sleeve, whispering, ‘You! Hey you, thunder thighs! Whatcha gonna do, then? Same you always do! Get up too late, moan about shit and eat enough junk to negate the hour you spent working out. That’s what! You frickin’ loser!’

Some of the time I can silence the voice by having fantasies about famous men or thinking about nice things I can have for breakfast. The rest of the time, I lie awake in a paralysed, sweaty, panic until it all becomes too much and my overloaded brain shuts down and lets me get some sleep.

So please, please, please can someone not let me get what I want, but just tell me???

Who Killed Dorothy Jane Scott?

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 28^th, 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 29^th 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 28^th 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.