THE MURDER OF DOROTHY SCOTT: Still Unsolved 40 Years Later

hey guys it's bella and welcome back to my channel i hope you're all having an incredible day today in today's video we are going to be covering another mystery monday case but before we do i just want to thank today's sponsor hunter killer now i'm so excited to tell you guys about today's sponsor because it is so incredibly unique and it is so much fun it is a murder mystery subscription box and it is designed so that you can play it by yourself if you want to or you can play with some friends maybe with a cheeky wine basically with every delivery you get to go through different case files different evidence different clues different audio recordings and one by one you eliminate suspects until you solve the case it's almost like an escape room but at home they have really interesting storylines and you learn about each of the suspects and their backgrounds and their complicated relationships with the victim also part of the proceeds to every single box goes towards the cold case foundation which is an organization that is dedicated to solving real cases which i think is amazing the box that i have here is about a woman named victoria gainer and just look at all the little letters and everything all the clues like it's honestly so well thought out it's so much fun and is my favorite date night with kerry you can also get a cheeky 20 off your first box if you go to hunterkiller.com bella and you also have to use my code bella i will leave all of the information for that in the description box down below if you guys are interested and without further ado let's go ahead and get into today's case oh but quickly i want to show you today's earrings because i mean you might be able to tell their nintendo dss but you can't tell that this is a murder story nintendo ds game in may of 1980 dorothy jane scott disappeared under mysterious circumstances after receiving many alarming phone calls from an unknown male her remains were found by a construction worker four years after her disappearance but 40 years later her case still remains unsolved dorothy was born on the 23rd of april in 1948 in anaheim california to parents jacob and vera scott in 1976 she gave birth to her son sean and she was a single mother because shawn's father dennis terry wasn't really in the picture and he actually lived three and a half thousand kilometers away in missouri in 1980 dorothy was 32 years old and her son was four and they were living with her aunt shanti scott in stanton california which was about 20 minutes away from anaheim which is where her parents lived where she worked as a back office secretary at swingers psych shop and custom john's head shop at 517s brookhurst street both of the shops were very interesting little stores psych shops and head shops had become somewhat popular in the 60s and 70s and during the 16ths and 70s there was a lot of you know tie-dye hippies a lot of drug use these stores blasted a lot of rock music they were very colorful very hippie-esque type vibes and at swing a store they sold bongs drug paraphernalia that sort of thing and then you could pop on next door into the head shop and hang out where they had a bunch of cool posters music in a backlit room the head shop and psych shop were two different businesses but they were both co-owned and dorothy's father actually was a co-owner of swinger's psych shop so they lived pretty close to it and dorothy would work from early in the morning until late at night trying to provide for her son so she would drop him off at her parents house each day so they could look after him while she was at work dorothy's personality was quite different from these colorful lively shops that she worked in and one of her friends and i used the term friend very loosely here because she described dorothy as dull as a phone book her co-workers described her as dependable and organized and friends and family said she was a wonderful mother who would do anything for her son she was kind and compassionate and was a devout christian who regularly attended church and she was very much an introvert she didn't drink she didn't do drugs and she didn't date she didn't really go out much she just kind of preferred to spend her nights at home hanging out with her son sometime during the early months of 1980 dorothy started receiving some really sketchy phone calls both at her home and also at her workplace the calls came from an anonymous male and dorothy told her mother and she told co-workers that the voice sounded really familiar but she just couldn't put her finger on who it was now this man would sometimes profess his love for her and then other times because it's really all about balance would threaten to murder her he was sometimes very violent in his phone calls very resentful he would talk about how he would get her alone and then he would dismember her so that nobody would be able to find her he admitted to stalking her and he would recount in great detail things that she had done that day or what she had been wearing that day just to prove his point and i guess freak her out on one occasion he called her up and told her to look outside because he'd left a surprise for her and when she did she found a dead rose on the windshield of her 1973 station wagon these calls went on for months and months and one of the last calls she received from him freaked her out so much that she decided to take up karate lessons so that she could learn to defend herself if ever he decided to take things off the phone and into real life she spoke to her mother vera and some co-workers as well about purchasing a firearm to be able to defend herself however she never got around to it before she was abducted the morning of the 28th of may in 1980 started off just like any normal day but don't they always like i feel like in these cases i'm always like yeah the day this person literally was murdered started off just like any normal day i mean how else would it start you know anyway she dropped her son shawn off at her parents house before she headed to work for an employee meeting that they were having that day at the meeting one of dorothy's co-workers conrad bostron seemed to be pretty unwell he could hardly sit still in his chair and he was kind of sweating he had this big red rash on his arm that was really inflamed and swollen and as the meeting went on dorothy was getting more and more concerned for him because he just seemed to be getting worse and so she convinced him to let her take him to the uci medical center which is just the hospital near them another worker named pam head also decided to come along and dorothy drove her toyota station wagon she stopped at her parents house so that she could check in on sean let them know what was happening and she also changed she changed she had like a gray or black scarf on and she changed that to a red scarf before heading off to the medical center as it turned out dorothy was a legend for wanting to bring him to the hospital because he had been bitten by a black widow spider which makes me cringe just thinking about it because they have one of the most painful bites ever and it can last several days just really bad pain swelling nausea and if you get one even if you go to the hospital they usually want to monitor you for like eight to twelve days after and if a kid gets bitten by a black widow spider it can actually be fatal like these spider bites are no joke conrad ended up being in the hospital all day and all night and pam and dorothy absolute troopers stayed there all day and all night waiting for him they were just reading magazines small talk but they stayed in the lobby together the entire time unless they were like you know going to the bathroom or something it wasn't until 11 p.m that conrad was discharged and very understandably he was still looking very woozy and very unwell so dorothy decided it would be best for her to go to the car herself and bring around to the front so he could just easily hop in and they could leave and while she was doing so conrad and pam just headed into the hospital pharmacy to pick up his prescription however little did they know that when dorothy left the lobby doors to pick up her car it was the last time she would ever be seen alive after picking up the prescription which took probably around five minutes conrad and pam headed to the front of the hospital where they expected dorothy to be waiting for them and she wasn't there so they waited for roughly 15 to 20 minutes before they decided to walk over to her car where it was originally parked to find her as they did so her car all of a sudden came throttling towards them full speed high beams on and the beams were so bright that they couldn't see who was driving they couldn't tell if it was dorothy or not but they started like waving their arms being like hello we're here what the heck is going on the car however did not slow down for them it just narrowly missed them by swerving around they chased after it as it went to leave the hospital and it turned off the lights completely turned right out of the hospital and then disappeared into the night they were obviously like what the [ __ ] is going on like their friend just randomly came crazily driving towards them almost hit them and then turned their lights off completely and vanished into the night and they were just kind of trying to make sense of what happened as i'm sure any person in their position would and they were thinking maybe there was some sort of emergency maybe something had happened with her son and she just really needed to get home and see what was going on before she came back to pick them up so they waited for her they waited for two hours but she never turned up and so they decided to call her parents vera and jacob and they said that they hadn't heard from her either which is when pam decided to call the uci police who i mean would you guess they weren't really interested she was an adult she could do what she wanted they did become interested however four to five hours later at about 4 30 to 5 a.m when her car was found engulfed in flames in santa ana alleyway about 15 kilometers away there was no trace of dorothy inside the car and several search parties were conducted in the following days but no traces of her were found now the car being found in itself is really interesting because how did it get there there were a few reports that there was another car in front of dorothy's that also turned the same way out of the hospital i couldn't confirm these though and only some reports mentioned this other car if this is true then this likely means that maybe there were two assailants or more maybe one was driving dorothy's car or and one was driving this other car in front because i don't know i failed to believe that dorothy was driving this car or that this random person would get dorothy to follow them in such an erratic way and from all of the information that i've gathered it would be really out of character for dorothy to be just driving like that at all and having two assailants would definitely mean that one of them could have set the car on fire the other one could have been there and they could have left in that car with dorothy in the car and that's why her body wasn't found if the information about this second car was incorrect which i personally am inclined to believe because otherwise i feel like it would be a bigger deal i feel like all of the reports would mention it this like mysterious car that left in front of dorothy's i feel like that would be a point of interest in the case and it wasn't really discussed except for in like a couple of articles that maybe mentioned it so if the information is correct like i'm inclined to believe then the assailant would have had to either dump dorothy's body first and then go and set the car on fire which gave them like a four to five hour window to murder and dispose of dorothy's body or they would have had to have been picked up from the site where the car was set on fire or they would have had to walk but no witnesses had ever come forward as to having seen anybody set this car on fire or anybody walking around or anyone sketchy in the area the calls that dorothy was receiving before her murder didn't stop afterwards either about a week later her mother vera was home alone when she received a call from an anonymous male the man asked are you related to dorothy scott and vera replied yes and the man said i've got her and then hung up immediately after receiving the call vera contacted the police and they told her and jacob not to release any information about the calls about the disappearance to the media to the public because they felt like it could negatively affect the case they didn't want to get any false leads they didn't want any false information after a week passed though jacob just became fed up he was losing his patience with the police and he decided to talk to the santa ana register the paper then ran a story about the disappearance and they also offered a 2 500 reward for any information as to dorothy's whereabouts the day the story was published pat riley the editor of the santa ana register received a call from an anonymous mail this is what the man said on the call he said i killed her i killed dorothy scott she was my love i caught her cheating with another man she denied having someone else i killed her this man also authenticated himself as the person who abducted dorothy by going into detail about things that hadn't been released to the public he knew that dorothy had changed from a black or gray scarf into a red one and he also knew about conrad's spider bite and knew that dorothy had taken him to the uci medical center he also stated that dorothy had called him just hours before her disappearance from the hospital now this call was obviously super sketchy her friends and family said that she hadn't been dating that she wasn't talking to any guys she wasn't even interested in talking to any guys and she definitely didn't have a boyfriend pam who was at the hospital with dorothy also said that she hadn't called anyone that day that she had been with her all day and all night they had been in the lobby together except for the times that like one of them was going to the bathroom or something and she hadn't heard her on a phone call once and i just thought this was weird because police kind of just took her word as bible where it's like she could have called someone in the bathroom she could have said she was going to the bathroom and actually gone to call somebody she could have called somebody while pam was in the bathroom like i don't really understand the whole she definitely didn't call someone because i was there with her the whole time when there was multiple occasions when they went off to the bathroom it also doesn't seem like as far as i could tell that the police looked into any phone records so um it's really hard to tell whether or not she actually did call somebody that night in their investigations detectives contacted shawn's father dennis but he was over 3500 miles away in missouri so he was ruled out as a suspect everyone from the psych shop and the swinger shop was questioned multiple times and all of them were ruled out as suspects it was believed that because dorothy worked as a back office secretary and no customers would have been able to see her that it likely wasn't a customer that had been harassing her they checked out all of the sex offenders in the area but didn't really come up with any suspects they questioned everybody in her social circle there was nobody that disliked her she had no enemies really and there was nobody in her inner circle that even seemed like maybe a bit of a sketchy person like a bit of a freak that could have done this dorothy's parents vera and jacob contacted multiple psychics because there was just no evidence in the case and there were no leads and it just wasn't moving and detectives also contacted a psychic themselves but again there was just there is very little evidence in this case months turned into years but dorothy's attacker never grew tired of trying to taunt her family almost every single day for the next four years on a wednesday afternoon the anonymous male called vera's mother at her home and originally i was like i have no idea how he would have found the parents home phone but i think that stuff was like public information like back when phone books were a thing i have not read a phone book for like 15 years but every wednesday when the man would call he would say something along the lines of i've got her raw i killed her or where is dorothy or is dorothy there like just some sort of sick game police set up a recorder and the scott family residence to record the killer's voice which was gruff and plainly disguised however nobody recognized the voice they also tried on multiple occasions to trace the call however he never stayed on the line long enough for them to do so it seemed like this guy was stalking vera and jacob in the same way that he was stalking dorothy in that he knew their day-to-day routines he knew when he could call in wednesday afternoons when vera would be home until one day in april of 1984 when he called up and jacob answered the phone and the man hung up and he didn't call back for a long time after this now besides these calls as far as leads go there was nothing there was very very very little evidence in this case and slowly it started to go cold until the 6th of august in 1984 when a construction worker found the remains of a dog at santa ana canyon road about 20 kilometers away from uci medical hospital the worker kept digging and found human remains beneath the dog remains he found a human pelvis an arm two thighs and a skull the body was found with a turquoise ring as well as a watch which had stopped at 12 30 am on the 29th of may 1980 the day the dorothy had disappeared dorothy's mum also positively identified the turquoise ring as having belonged to dorothy i couldn't find any information about the remains of the dog and who the dog belonged to but i think it's possible that the dog maybe belonged to the killer or maybe even this was some sort of like ritualistic thing and that's why the dog was there it just seems like too much of a coincidence that a random dog was buried on top of dorothy just over a week after the remains were found dental records were used to confirm that the remains belonged to dorothy scott an autopsy was conducted on the remains but due to the severe decomposition as well as the lack of remains found they were unable to determine a cause of death after the announcement of the discovery jacob and viera received one last call from the anonymous mail who said is dorothy there since then the case has been cold for the last 36 years dorothy's father jacob passed away in 1994 just one week shy of his 17th birthday and her mother vera passed away in 2002 without ever having received closure as to what happened to their daughter so let's talk about some theories despite the fact that there have never officially been any suspects in this case there has of course been some speculation as to who the killer might be now apparently there was a man named mike butler who dorothy's son sean became aware of through a couple of dorothy's friends who lived in missouri michael butler was a deeply religious man and was well known through his community he was said to have alternative religious beliefs and may have been involved in some cult-like activity which definitely would make sense on the front of the dog being buried with dorothy it could be some sort of cult like ritualistic sort of thing he was an army brat and his mother was a new zealand war bride while his father was an army captain his family settled in southern california after his father decided to retire he attended at fullerton union high school and graduated in the early 1960s and then went on to attend california state university majoring in english he was known to be a pretty good athlete voted mvp for cross-country track and when he was 20 years old he was drafted into the u.s army and was assigned to hon fells in germany in 1967 after completing basic training while stationed in germany he became a writer who was published frequently in stars and stripe news and he also served as a base commander's public information and media officer as well as a photographer after his time in the military he went on to a completely different line of work and decided to become a roadie for a bunch of different rock bands for the beach boys and as well for his sister's band which was quite successful his sister was an accomplished musician and singer who at one time worked with dorothy at the swingers shop in anaheim while she was working there with dorothy mike had also settled in orange county in california and worked at a machine shop as a maintenance employee just across the road from where dorothy and his sister were and if he worked this close to dorothy that means he definitely would work close enough to have popped in spoken to dorothy enough for her to be familiar with his voice but maybe not enough that she could pinpoint exactly who he was because as i mentioned she said the voice on the call was familiar it also means that he may have been close enough to keep an eye on her day-to-day activities which is how he knew all of this information about her and stalked her and whatnot on the 28th of june in 2014 mike did pass away from health complications so if he did have anything to do with the murder it's likely that it will never be solved there was also some speculation that the golden state killer may have been responsible for the murder because there were some similarities between dorothy's murder and the golden state killer's mo he always called his victims before his crimes and on one occasion he called a victim a decade later just to let her know that he was still out there he would often target women who were home alone single women mothers women whose husbands may not have been home at the time and he always stalked his victims as well the golden state killer was also known as the east area rapist and was also thought to have been the verse vasilia ransacker so he was definitely known for being a peeping tom for being a bit of a creep for always like stalking these women he also moved to southern california in 1979 just one year before dorothy's murder to continue his crime spree i do think this theory is pretty far-fetched for a number of reasons but i thought it was worth mentioning there are definitely some disparities between his mo and dorothy's murder and it just seems like dorothy's murder was very very personal like it wasn't by this one guy who was going around and had all these different victims like this was a very targeted attack and he seemed to know everything about her he told dorothy dorothy's mother and pat riley the editor of the santa ana register that he loved dorothy which is something that the golden state killer never did he never proclaimed proclaimed love for any of his victims he also usually committed all of his crimes at the victim's home and dorothy was obviously taken from the uci medical center not from her house now the last theory is that dorothy did have some sort of secret boyfriend or maybe some sort of secret ex-boyfriend who was still in love with her and very salty about the breakup maybe they were still together and had some sort of fight or maybe he feared that dorothy was cheating on him and so he decided to murder her this would make sense in terms of the killer saying that he was in love with her saying that she called him from the hospital that night because if it was a secret boyfriend or ex-boyfriend then maybe she did and also make makes sense in terms of like the way he always knew what she was doing where she lived how to find out all of these people in her life's phone numbers but it wouldn't make sense in terms of the fact that nobody in her life had any idea that she was dating she worked long hours and then she would go home and she would just spend all night with her son so i feel like someone in her life would have some sort of suspicion if she was dating someone because they knew where she was practically at all times she lived with her auntie so she wasn't home at night then her auntie would know she's not home at night or her parents would know that she was asking them to babysit shaun for some unknown reason so i'm not really sure when she would have had the time to date somebody but again you know we only know what information is presented to us so it's hard to determine whether or not she was dating someone or whether or not she had time to date somebody we only know what we're told from the people who were around her so that is all of the information that i have on this case i would love to hear your thoughts in the comments what theory you believe or if there are any theories you thought of that maybe i didn't mention thanks for watching guys and hopefully i will see you in my next video bye guys

Channel: Bella Fiori

Views: 490,974

Keywords:

Id: iMDUZm6k3ms

Length: 25min 21sec (1521 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 13 2020