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Leonard Ewing
SCOTT
Classification: Murderer
Characteristics:
Parricide
- The body was never found
- To collect bank
accounts and safe deposit boxes
Number of victims: 1
Date of murder:
May 16,
1955
Date
of arrest:March 9,
1956
Date of birth: 1897
Victim profile: His
wife, Evelyn Throsby Scott, 63
Method of murder:
Striking on the head with a rubber mallet?
Location: Bel Air, Los Angeles County, California, USA
Status: Sentenced to life in prison on December 27, 1957.
Released in 1978.
Died on August 17, 1987
Robert Leonard Ewing Scott was convicted
in 1959, in California, of having murdered his wife. This is notable
because it is one of the first cases to establish a "bodyless" murder,
that is, a murder in which no body had been discovered to bear out that
there had been a crime.
The
Marriage
L. Ewing Scott, and his wife Evelyn
Throsby Scott (né Mumper), having met at a society party and married in
Mexico, shared a considerable wealth that Evelyn possessed prior to
their marriage. After five years of marriage, on May 16, 1955, Evelyn
went missing. Concerned friends were given various explanations by
Scott- that Evelyn had been hospitalized, or had run off.
In July, 1955, Leonard Scott began a
relationship with a divorcée named Harriet Livermore.
On March 5, 1956, Evelyn's brother
Raymond Throsby, suspicious of Leonard, reported Evelyn's disappearance
to the police, beginning the investigation.
The
Investigation and Trial
Los Angeles police arrested Scott and
charged him with forgery and fraud for the looting of his wife’s bank
accounts after they visited Evelyn's safe deposit boxes and found only
envelopes filled with sand, as Leonard had withdrawn large sums from
Evelyn's safe deposit boxes and deposited those funds in his own
accounts.
Having been indicted by a Los Angeles
grand jury on 13 counts of forgery and theft, but released on $25,000
bail, Scott fled to Canada. He was arrested a year later, on April 9,
1957, when Canadian customs authorities stopped him as he was
re-entering Canada after a visit to Detroit to buy a car. During his
absence, the grand jury had produced an additional indictment against
Scott for murder.
Although Evelyn's body was never found,
her dentures, eyeglasses, and some of her personal items were found
among buried ashes near the incinerator on the couple's estate located
at 217 North Bentley Ave., in the affluent Bel Air community of Los
Angeles.
Scott's case was groundbreaking, as it
was the first case in U.S. history of someone being convicted of murder
purely on circumstantial evidence, without the victim's body having been
located.
After being convicted of the murder,
Scott was given a life sentence. In December of 1959, the appeals court
upheld his conviction, despite his complaint that the original trial
court had failed to establish corpus delicti.
Ewing was released in 1978. Parole was
offered in 1974, but Ewing refused, claiming that it did not apply, as
he was being wrongfully held. After his release, he admitted that he had
committed the murder. He died in 1987 at age 91.
Wikipedia.org
Murder in Bel Air
Evelyn Kiernan
Lewis Pettit Mumper Scott was unlucky at love, but could take solace in
the fact that she had prospered nicely as a result. By the time she was
63, Evelyn had been twice divorced and twice widowed and was married to
her fifth husband, Leonard Ewing Scott. She was also quite wealthy.
On May 16, 1955, Evelyn Scott
dropped out of sight and was never heard from again. An investigation
into her disappearance showed no signs of murderous violence in the
Scott household or any other place she was known to frequent.
Other evidence suggested, however, that Ewing Scott murdered his wife
for her money.
Just when Scott decided to kill
Evelyn was never revealed, but after she vanished, it appeared that he
had long had designs on her money and was taking steps to make it his
own.
Soon after Ewing and Evelyn
married in Las Vegas, he took control over her finances. In 1951, after
a disagreement with an E.F. Hutton broker, Scott forced his wife to
close her account there and liquidate her holdings. He told the broker
and various acquaintances that he was a skilled investor and would
handle things for his wife.
Scott claimed a horrible fear of atomic war as the reason that he wanted
Evelyn to convert her holdings into more liquid investments, and on more
than one occasion he told friends that the Scotts had cash deposited in
safe deposit boxes around the country.
It turns out that his reason for
preferring cash had a more criminal basis.
There is evidence that Scott physically intimidated his wife into
acquiesing to his demands.
Shortly after the Scotts returned
from their honeymoon, their cook heard the crash of some object in their
bedroom. The next morning, she saw that Evelyn had a bruise on her
cheek. Evelyn claimed she had tripped and fallen, but Scott told the
cook, “Well, I just slapped the wind out of her.”
As is typical of abusers, Scott
spied on his wife and asked that the cook help him. He insisted that the
cook listen in on his wife’s phone calls, and when she refused, he
terminated her.
In the months leading up to her
disappearance, Scott hinted that Evelyn was quite ill.
“Mrs. Scott is in terrible shape,” one witness testified that Scott
repeatedly said. “I had an awful time with her last night.”
However, on multiple occasions when friends questioned Evelyn about her
health, she responded that she was fine. Evidence presented at Scott’s
trial by her physicians bore this out.
Scott alleged that Evelyn was a
heavy drinker and that her alcohol abuse was becoming more problematic.
He told friends that eventually she would have to be hospitalized.
Once, when a friend called and
asked to speak to her, Scott refused, saying Evelyn was “standing in the
bedroom holding a bottle of whisky and cursing.”
On the afternoon of May 16, 1955, the Scotts test drove a new car and
Scott told the salesman that the couple was considering living abroad,
either in Spain or Portugal. Aside from Scott, Quast, the salesman was
the last person to see Evelyn Scott alive.
Very likely, sometime that evening Evelyn Scott was killed by her
husband, who proceeded to dispose of her body to the extent that it was
never found.
Evelyn was fastidious about her
appearance and had a standing appointment at a local beauty parlor. On
May 17, Scott called the salon and cancelled his wife’s appointment for
that date and for all subsequent appointments.
Two days after that, he
forged his wife’s signature on a card giving him access to her safe
deposit boxes. At that time, the bank was reluctant to give him access,
but he claimed she was ill and unable to appear at the bank. That same
day, he opened several bank accounts around town, depositing large sums
of cash — presumably from the safe deposit box he had just looted.
A week later, he called an
insurance agent and cancelled the policies she kept on her jewelry.
Shortly after Evelyn’s disappearance, a housekeeper arrived to perform
cleaning chores. She questioned where Evelyn was and Scott told her she
had “become ill during the week and had gone away.” The housekeeper
pointed out that Evelyn had left behind a favorite dressing gown. She
also noted that none of Evelyn’s makeup or toiletries were missing.
During the summer of 1955, Scott
gave the housekeeper several purses and handkerchiefs belonging to his
wife. Once, as she was cleaning, the housekeeper came across a dress
that was smaller than anything Evelyn could wear. She swore that it was
not there in May.
On May 30, Scott terminated the
employment of a part-time driver and handyman his wife used. He told the
man that Evelyn had “gone east” because she was ill and that he was
planning to close up the house and follow her.
“I’m discouraged with the way the doctors are making no headway with her
diagnosis,” he told the handyman. “The only thing they have decided on
is that she doesn’t have cancer. I’m afraid there is something wrong
with her mentally.”
In mid-June on at least two separate occasions, Scott told close friends
of Evelyn’s that she had been taken ill and that he was moving her to a
sanitarium in Baltimore or New York City.
That summer other friends stopped
by the Bel Air home but were unsuccessful in getting any information.
Despite positive indications that someone was home, no one would answer
the bell.
In July 1955, he started taking up with Harriet Livermore, whom he told
a tale that Evelyn had abandoned him while he was out running an errand.
He claimed that his wife was an alcoholic lesbian. When Harriet asked
why he did not divorce his wife, he said he was waiting for seven years
to pass so he could have her declared legally dead.
Scott’s relationship with Harriet
Livermore stalled after he invited her to travel to Guatemala with him
and she declined.
A month later, Scott met Marianne Beaman, who was a frequent overnight
guest in the Bel Air home (according to court testimony). Marianne and
Scott traveled around the Western United States. In November 1955, they
went to Las Vegas, where they stayed as Mr. and Mrs. Scott. He gave
Marianne several of Evelyn’s pieces of jewelry as well as luggage and
furniture.
For the better part of a year,
Scott continued to live in the Bel Air home, brushing off all attempts
by Evelyn’s friends to gather more details about her fate. He refused to
provide anyone with contact information and simply said that she was
“not doing well” in the sanitarium.
Evelyn’s personal attorney and her
brother, Raymond Throsby, both tried unsuccessfully to find where she
had gone. In November 1955, Throsby, who had been living in the South
Pacific, went to the Bel Air home and apparently surprised his
brother-in-law.
“Scott turned white and told me
‘You’re the last person in the world I expected to see here,’” Throsby
said later. He asked Scott where his sister was and Scott told him, “She
is out. She is on a drunk.”
Responding to Throsby’s allegations that Scott had killed her, Scott
denied the claim and said that Evelyn had disappeared and that they
communicated with each other by leaving notes beneath a vase outside the
house.
On March 5, 1956, Throsby reported his sister’s disappearance to police,
who began investigating.
Three days later,
detectives
searched the Bel Air residence and discovered evidence that Evelyn was
very likely dead. In the heavy brush behind the house, buried in several
inches of dirt, they found Evelyn’s dentures and two pairs of
eyeglasses. The eyeglasses and dentures were found in a pile of ashes.
In the incinerator, investigators found nearly two dozen hose fasteners
“usually present on women’s garments,” some belt buckles and fabric. In
the brush behind the house, police also found Evelyn’s black porcelin
cigarette holder.
Her dentist and her opthamologist both told police that it was unlikely
that Evelyn would have gone anywhere without her dentures or her
glasses. The dentures were necessary to hold her natural teeth in place
and she was apparently quite blind without the glasses.
In an interview with police, Scott
said his wife had abandoned him while he went out to run an errand and
that he had found her car abandoned on a nearby street. There was no
evidence in the car of foul play, but Scott admitted to having spent
considerable time cleaning it up after he found it. He said birds had
soiled the car.
Scott was arrested for forgery and fraud for looting his wife’s bank
accounts after police visited her safe deposit boxes and found only
envelopes filled with sand.
A little more than a year after Evelyn disappeared, Scott was indicted
for forgery and theft. He posted bail and immediately fled to Canada,
where he remained on the lam until April 9, 1957. Scott was arrested in
Detroit as he attempted to cross back into the United States.
He was put
on trial and the jury convicted him of murder, citing a mountain of
circumstantial evidence. Using the argument that the State of California
had failed to establish the corpus delicti, Scott appealed his
conviction. In December 1959 the appeals court upheld his conviction and
life sentence.
The Lady Vanishes
Time.com
Jan. 06, 1958
On the afternoon of May 16, 1955, according to L. (for Leonard)
Ewing Scott, his wife Evelyn sent him to a drugstore to buy her some
tooth powder. When he got back to their $75,000 house in west Los
Angeles' expensive Bel Air section, she had vanished, leaving behind no
note, no indication of where she had gone or why.
Scott never reported the disappearance to the police. He was used to
eccentric behavior in his hard-drinking wife, he later explained. When
friends asked about Evelyn, Scott said that she was under treatment in a
distant sanitarium. Ten months passed, and then at last the cops came
around. Searching the house and its landscaped grounds, the police found
some interesting objects: in the incinerator were metal snaps from a
woman's underclothing, and carelessly buried under a heap of leaves on
an adjoining lot were false teeth and eyeglasses later identified as
Evelyn Scott's.
On the evidence of these and other circumstantial items, L. Ewing
Scott was convicted of the murder of his wife, sentenced last week to
life imprisonment in an unusual case in which neither a murder weapon
nor a body ever was found.
Money & Looks. Evelyn and L. Ewing Scott were married in 1949, when
both were in their 50s. She had plenty of money, inherited from one of
her four earlier husbands. Silver-haired, dark-eyed Ewing Scott had man-of-distinction
looks. He had wooed and won another woman with inherited money back in
the 1930s, but that marriage ended in divorce. In the interval between
two wealthy wives, Scott clerked in a paint store, but he carried a
business card billing himself as an "investment broker."
The only
noticeable work he did during his second marriage was writing How to
Fascinate Men, a brief handbook for women. It made him no money at all:
he never paid the printer's $6,818.64 bill, and a court awarded the
printer all the copies.
During the six years between her wedding to Scott and her
disappearance, Evelyn Throsby Scott cashed some $223,000 worth of
securities, in addition to drawing about $180,000 in income from her
estate. When she disappeared, there was a lot of money lying around in a
dozen-odd bank accounts and safe-deposit boxes. According to subsequent
testimony, Scott, using forged signatures, helped himself liberally to
the money, spent a bundle of $100 bills on travel, Las Vegas gambling
and gifts for a shapely divorcee.
Circumstantial Corpus.
Shortly after the police started looking into
Evelyn's disappearance, a Los Angeles grand jury indicted Scott on 13
counts of forgery and theft. Jumping $25,000 bail, he fled to Canada. A
year later Canadian customs officers arrested him as he was trying to
re-enter Canada after buying a new 1957 Ford in Detroit. Meanwhile, the
grand jury had reconsidered the case and returned a new indictment
against Scott. The charge: murder.
Any devotee of fictional whodunits could plainly see that Scott did
not murder his wife. Circumstantial evidence pointed to him, and in
whodunits the suspect with the most evidence against him is never the
murderer. Furthermore, there seemed to be no corpus delicti: in
whodunits, corpus delicti means a corpse.
But in law, corpus delicti means not the body of a victim but the "body
of the offense," i.e., evidence that the crime in question has been
committed. Even in murder cases that evidence can be circumstantial. In
California over the years, at least five defendants had been convicted
of murdering victims whose bodies were never found.
Unconvincing Witnesses.
During Scott's eleven-week trial, the
defense produced witnesses who testified that they had seen Evelyn Scott
after May 16, 1955. Apparently none of this testimony convinced the
jurors: after deliberating for 29 hours they found L. Ewing Scott guilty
of first-degree murder. Two days later the jury sat again to fix the
sentence of life imprisonment.*
Scott kept right on protesting that his wife must be alive somewhere.
"If there is anyone who has any idea where she is or knows anything
about her," he said to newsmen, "I would like them to communicate with
my attorney."
* Under a new California law, a jury
that convicts a defendant of a capital crime must then decide, in a
separate proceeding, between tha death penalty and life imprisionment
In the teeth of the evidence
The Daily Mirror
Oct. 16-18, 1957 - Los
Angeles
In its opening days, the Leonard Ewing Scott murder trial has focused
Evelyn Scott's eyeglasses and dentures, which were found behind the
couple's Bel-Air home by police investigating her May 16, 1955,
disappearance.
The presentation by Deputy Dist. Atty. J. Miller
Leavy (at right with Capt. Arthur G. Hertel, Times photo by Jack Gaunt)
was part of a mountain of evidence he planned to present exhausting all
possibilities that the 63-year-old woman was still alive. This would
include establishing a detailed pattern of her behavior that came to an
abrupt halt when she vanished.
Not that Ewing Scott was terribly upset that his wife
was gone. He never filed a missing persons report and, in fact, rebuffed
questions from friends and relatives about where she might be, saying
that she had run off or he had put her in a sanitarium to cure her
alleged alcoholism. The matter only became public in March 1956, when
her brother E. Raymond Throsby filed a petition asking to be appointed
guardian of her estate.
On March 10, 1956, The Times photographed detectives
using 6-foot steel rods to probe the grounds around the home at 217 S.
Bentley in search of a body. Although they didn't find anything, Capt.
Arthur G. Hertel was more successful in exploring an area on an
adjoining lot behind the incinerator, which was built into a retaining
wall along the property line.
"For a while I walked along the top of the wall,"
Hertel testified. "Then I got down on the ground and removed some leaves
and scratched--with my hands."
The first item he found was a set of dentures under 4
or 5 inches of leaves, partially buried and encrusted with dirt and mud.
Hertel cleared the leaves from an area about 2 feet by 18 inches,
discovering partially dissolved gelatin capsules and white pills, an
empty Eff-Remin can, a hairbrush, a tube of oily material (presumably
hair dressing), a short piece of dog chain, a cigarette holder, a large
number of cigarette filters and "wampum jewelry."
About 10 feet down the hill west of the incinerator,
Hertel found a pair of glasses. "They were on the surface of a thin
layer of leaves above the ground, exposed to view at a casual glance
directly under a heavily leaved bush," he said. Another 10 feet away,
Hertel found another pair of glasses.
"They were partially embedded in a heap of ashes," he
said. "The lower portion of the lens was covered by ashes but the bow
was exposed," The Times said. "They were encrusted with dirt, mud and
ashes."
Hertel testified that the items had apparently been
on the adjoining property for some time because the leaves that covered
them were loose on top but matted and partially disintegrated underneath.
His impression was that the glasses had been washed downhill by rain
rather than thrown.
" 'Tossed' is not a good word," he said. " 'Thrown'
is not a good word. 'Placed' is not a good word. They were just there."
Defense attorney P. Basil Lambros objected
vigorously, but was overruled when Leavy moved to introduce the items
into evidence.
"They have not been tied in any manner to the problem
that faces us with corpus delicti. They are immaterial, incompetent and
irrelevant. There is no proof of how they got there, if they were
there... It would be just as easy to introduce Mrs. Scott's hat and say
it was found in the yard. The prosecution is saying that because they
were found there Scott killed his wife."
On cross-examination by Lambros, Hertel testified
that the items had not been checked for fingerprints, blood or hair
because their weathered condition convinced him that nothing would be
found. He also said that none of the items had been photographed before
they were recovered.
Hertel testified that Ewing Scott watched from a
balcony as he explored the area where the items were found. He testified
that he heard Scott ask: "What are they doing down there?"
What followed was exhaustive testimony from Evelyn
Scott's dentist, Dr. R.L. Coldwell, who identified the dentures, Dr.
Harold R. Mulligan, who wrote the prescription for her glasses, and Dr.
Albert Chatton who made them.
Coldwell said Evelyn Scott had worn the dentures
since he made them for her in 1943 to replace an earlier set. He noted
that police had failed to find a device she wore when sleeping to hold
her teeth in place. The Times said that the clear implication was that
whatever happened to her had occurred while she was asleep. Under
defense questioning, Coldwell said that she would have been able to use
her previous set of dentures if she still had them.
Chatton and Mulligan testified that Evelyn Scott
would have been unable to read without her glasses. Chatton noted that
the frames of one pair of glasses had faded to yellow, caused by aging
and weather, rebutting the defense implication that they had been placed
there more recently, The Times said.
In 1986, bedridden, frail and slowly dying in a
Silver Lake convalescent home, 89-year-old Leonard Ewing Scott agreed to
see a visitor, Times reporter David Johnston. Scott had been freed from
San Quentin in 1978 after serving 20 years, released without supervision
because the prisoner--one of the oldest in the state's penal system--refused
to agree to parole as it would imply that he had truly killed his wife,
Evelyn, in 1955.
Johnston was running down details for a story about
new book. It seemed that where all the investigators had failed, a young
writer named Diane Wagner had gotten a tape-recorded confession in 1984
for a manuscript she was writing, "Corpus Delecti." Scott told her that
he killed his wife by striking on the head with a rubber mallet, wrapped
the body in a tarp and buried it near Las Vegas.
The reporter asked Scott if he knew Wagner. Of course,
said Scott, who was sometimes disoriented and edging toward senility,
she was his third wife. In fact, he told another reporter, they went on
a honeymoon to South America.
Had he seen the book, Johnston asked. No.
Johnston read the transcript of the confession as the
convicted killer lay in bed, eyes fixed on his guest. Scott started to
say something, then stopped.
"What do you want?" Scott asked.
What made him acknowledge the killing after all these
years?
"Acknowledge it? I'd be a damn fool to acknowledge it--they
never found the body."
As far as the California Department of Corrections
was concerned, Scott was freed in 1978, but he remained in a prison of
his own--a prison of denial--for the rest of his life.
Officials had tried to release him in 1974, but he
wouldn't leave. Not that he didn't want to get out, for he spent most of
his days in his 4 1/2-foot by 9-foot cell typing letters and legal
appeals. They never found the body, he insisted, as he had since first
fell under suspicion in his wife's disappearance.
More important, during the trial, prosecutor J.
Miller Leavy hammered away at Scott for failing to testify. It was proof,
Leavy insisted again and again, that Scott was guilty and afraid to take
the stand. In a 1965 ruling in the case of Griffin vs. California, the
U.S. Supreme Court found that such remarks violated the 5th Amendment.
But the court did not make the ruling apply retroactively to cases such
as Scott's. As far as the state was concerned, he had no grounds for an
appeal. He continued his legal fight, but without success.
Then, in the fall of 1974, when he was 78, the state
attempted to parole him for the first time.
"They pulled out a piece of paper and said, 'Here,
sign this,' " he said. "I read it over and said, 'From just what in the
hell do you propose to parole me? You know I'm being held here
illegally, without a valid conviction.' Well, they were flabbergasted.
They're all used to guys saying, 'Yes sir, no sir, whatever you say,
sir.' But I won't do that."
The state made a second attempt to parole him in
early 1978. Again, he turned it down.
A few weeks later, he sent a letter to Times reporter
Gene Blake, who covered the trial in 1957.
"I told you some time ago that you would be the first
to be given information when I leave this hellhole. I always try to
abide by my promises," Scott wrote.
After refusing to be "suckered into accepting a
parole," Scott said, prison officials told him he was being released. He
slowly cleaned out his cell, which was filled with 500 pounds of legal
files.
On March 17, 1978, 81-year-old Leonard Ewing Scott
limped out of San Quentin, leaning on a cane after breaking his hip in a
fall, and still wearing his prison denims with $200 from the state in
his pocket. As he was released to some friends who ran a mobile ministry
for truck drivers, Scott said his first act of freedom would be to sue
his wife for divorce. She was still alive, he insisted, and had been
arrested twice in Mexico for drunk driving. His first meal after being
freed was a Big Mac, The Times said.
Two years later, Blake found him living on Social
Security at a downtown Los Angeles hotel, having moved from Santa Monica
because the rent "got too stiff."
"That's what I'm getting by on," he said of his
Social Security payments. "It's not a hell of a lot. That's the reason I
moved down here." And at 83, he was continuing to fight his conviction.
"There was no legal reason for it," he said.
When Wagner began working on her book in 1983, she
found Scott living in a seedy mid-Wilshire apartment, The Times said.
She interviewed him repeatedly and he always told her the same story--he
didn't kill his wife.
On Aug. 5, 1984, he called and asked to see her one
more time, Johnston said. She went there the next day and he told her:
"Well," he said suddenly, "I arrived in Las Vegas
about dusk.... I hit her in the head with a mallet, a hard rubber
mallet. Just once. On the head, right on top."
According to Johnston's story, Scott said he wrapped
his wife's body in a tarp, put it in the trunk of a 1940 Ford and drove
to the desert six miles east of the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas. He dug a
grave, dumped the body, drove around to cover his tracks, then "went to
sleep the car for a while. Then I drove back to Los Angeles."
As his health declined, Scott moved into the Skyline
Convalescent Home in Silver Lake.* Reporters dropped in now and then,
hoping that he would finally admit the killing. Tom Towers, who covered
the trial for the Examiner, was a regular.
"I always felt that he did it, but I was just unable
to bring all the pieces together to finalize my own conviction because
there was no body," Towers said. "I visited him repeatedly because, like
a lot of newspapermen, I felt if he is going to cop out he'd cop out to
me."
Not that anyone believed his confession. Leavy,
Towers and Arthur Alarcon, a federal judge who had been assistant
prosecutor in the case, dismissed the idea that Scott could have killed
anyone with a single blow from a rubber mallet, Johnston wrote in 1986.
"The important thing is he acknowledged he killed her,"
Leavy said.
Scott died Aug. 15, 1987, and his body lay unclaimed
at the Los Angeles County morgue for more than a week, The Times said.
He was 91 and left no survivors. Except for his single conversation with
Wagner, Scott adamantly denied killing his wife. Why did he confess to
Wagner? He told her it would make a good epilogue to her book.
First U.S. Murderer Convicted Without Body of
Victim Dies
The New York Times
August 27, 1987
Leonard Ewing Scott, whose
conviction 30 years ago paved the way for
successful prosecutions of murder cases in which
no body could be found, died Aug. 17 at the
Skyline Convalescent Hospital. He was 91 years
old.
Mr. Scott's body remains
unclaimed at the Los Angeles County morgue, a
spokeswoman for the county, Kathy Dickinson,
said Tuesday. He had no known survivors.
Mr. Scott was convicted of
killing his wife, Evelyn Throsby Scott, who was
last seen alive at the couple's home here on May
16, 1955. Her dentures, glasses and other
personal items were found near an incinerator in
the back yard of the couple's home.
Fugitive in
Canada
After his wife's
disappearance, Mr. Scott fled to Canada. He was
indicted for murder and was listed as a fugitive
for a year before being arrested in Canada and
returned to Los Angeles.
Mr. Scott denied killing his
wife, and the bulk of the evidence against the
former investment consultant at his 1957 trial
was circumstantial. Prosecutors said Mr. Scott
killed his wife because of her alcoholism and
medical problems and because he had learned she
had been married five times previously.
Prosecutors recommended a
death sentence but jurors sentenced him to life
in prison. He was released in 1978, after
serving 21 years.
Since Mr. Scott's trial,
several convictions have been obtained at murder
trails without the victims having been found.
Diane Wagner, the author of
''Corpus Delecti,'' an account of the case
published last year, said Mr. Scott eventually
confessed. She said Mr. Scott told her he killed
his wife with one blow to the head with a rubber
mallet, then buried her in the Nevada desert.
''I can't tell you why he
confessed,'' Ms. Wagner said Tuesday. ''He
called up and said he had a story to tell me and
that's what it was.''
