Dorothy Jane Scott

Case background and investigation

Dorothy Jane Scott, born April 23, 1948, was a single mother who lived in Stanton, California, with her aunt and young son and worked as a secretary for two jointly owned shops in Anaheim, according to Wikipedia's account, which draws on Los Angeles Times and Orange County Register reports. Her parents, Jacob and Vera Scott, lived in Anaheim and looked after her son while she worked.

In the months before she disappeared, Scott received calls at work from a man she could not identify. Her mother told the Orange County Register in 1984 that the caller swung between declarations of love and threats, and that shortly before the disappearance he said he would find her alone and cut her to pieces. The calls frightened Scott enough that she took up karate.

On the evening of May 28, 1980, Scott and a colleague, Pam Head, drove a co-worker, Conrad Bostron, to UC Irvine Medical Center, where he was treated for a black widow spider bite. According to Wikipedia, Bostron was discharged at about 11 p.m. and Scott went to fetch her car. Head and Bostron then saw her white 1973 Toyota station wagon speed toward them and out of the lot; dazzled by its headlights, they could not see who was driving. At about 4:30 a.m. the car was found on fire in an alley roughly ten miles away.

About two weeks later, a man telephoned the Register and said he had killed Scott because he had caught her with another man. The newspaper reported that he described details of her clothing that had not been made public. Scott's parents also received repeated calls from a man claiming to hold her or to have killed her. Vera Scott said the line was tapped but the caller never stayed on long enough to be traced.

On August 6, 1984, a construction foreman found partly charred human and dog bones in brush about 30 feet from Santa Ana Canyon Road in northeast Anaheim, the Register reported. A deputy coroner estimated they had lain there about two years, since a brush fire had crossed the site in 1982. Dental records identified the remains as Scott's on August 14, and her mother recognised a turquoise ring and a watch found with them. The coroner's office said the cause of death was unlikely to be determined from the skeletal remains.

No arrest has been made and the caller has never been publicly identified. The case remains unsolved.