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Anaheim, California woman vanishes

Who kidnapped and murdered Dorothy Jane Scott?

Through the years investigators who have looked at the case have been stumped trying to figure out who exactly kidnapped and then murdered Dorothy Jane Scott.

It would seem that someone had been stalking her in the days leading up to her death and that individual seemed to stalk her family for a time after her disappearance.

Dorothy disappeared on May 28, 1980, her body was found roughly 4 years later, her disappearance has been touted as one of the strangest disappearances ever,  and to date no one has been arrested for her murder.

Living in Stanton, California with her aunt and 4-year-old son Dorothy, was a 32-year-old single mother.

She was a secretary for a store that sold psychedelic stuff. Co-workers and friends said she preferred staying at home, had been a devout Christian, and she did not drink or do drugs.

According to her father, Jacob, his daughter may have dated on occasion but had no steady boyfriend that the family knew of at the time of her disappearance.

Dorothy started receiving disturbing calls months prior to her disappearance from a man whose voice she said she recognized yet could not recall who he was exactly.

The calls ranged from him describing how he loved her to how would get her alone so that he could dismember and kill her.

She knew that he had been stalking her because he would describe details of her day to day to her in some of the calls that were chillingly accurate and true.

Back in the 80’s stalking laws were not like today’s so Dorothy did her best to ignore the details of each chilling call she had received.

The day of her disappearance she had taken a male co-worker to UC Irvine Medical Center due to a black widow bite. Another co-worker who was female had accompanied them and according to Dorothy’s female friend, she told investigators that Dorothy remained in the E.R. waiting room the entire time and never left at any time.

At around 11pm when her friend had been discharged Dorothy left her two co-workers waiting while she went to get her car.

After what seemed like a rather long time when her friends didn’t see her pull up they went out to the E.R.’s parking lot.

They told investigators that they saw Dorothy’s car speeding toward them and that its headlights blinded them so they could not see who was behind the wheel driving the car.

They were shocked but figured that maybe she had heard from her aunt and had some sort of emergency to attend to at home.

She was never seen alive again.

Her car a 1973 Toyota station wagon, had been found about 10 miles away, in an alley burning.

It wasn’t until August of 1984 that her body was discovered by a construction worker who found her on Santa Ana Canyon Road.

The bones were identified as Dorothy Scott’s. As were the watch and ring and according to Dorothy’s mother, she said that the watch had stopped at 12:30 a.m. on May 29.

The autopsy could not determine the cause of death.

An unidentified man would call Vera Scott, Dorothy’s mother every Wednesday until sometime around late spring or early summer of 1984.

He would tell Dorothy’s mother that he simply just had her daughter with him on some calls while during others he would tell her mother that he had killed her daughter.  

The calls were always kept short and oddly only usually occurred when Vera was home alone.

The calls stopped when Jacob Scott, answered one of them.

The only lead that investigators ever had other than the calls, which were too short to trace was that on June 12, 1980  an unidentified man called the front desk at the Orange County Register who had run a story about Dorothy’s unsolved murder that day.

A managing editor told police that the caller claimed to have killed Dorothy; “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.”

The editor went on to say that the caller knew a co-worker of Dorothy’s had suffered from a spider bite the night of May 28.

He also knew that Dorothy had been wearing a red scarf.

Neither of these details had been published in the article the paper ran.  

Lastly, the caller also claimed Dorothy had phoned him from the hospital that night.

Investigators believe the caller was the killer. I too believe this and I believe that the caller made up two parts to his strange call to the paper.

The killer was obviously obsessed with Dorothy, but she was not dating him and she did not call him from the hospital the night of her disappearance.

He was someone that Dorothy knew of but did not know well yet, in his mind he loved her.

Stalkers usually tend to be casual acquaintances, disgruntled employees or business associates, vengeful neighbors, total strangers, and of course, former boyfriends or girlfriends and husbands or wives.

What’s terrifying about stalkers is that the underlying problems of stalkers run the complete range and/or scope of both psychiatric and personality disorders, which makes them difficult to predict let alone figure out.

The reality here is that no single profile of a stalker fits into box very neatly if at all and literally anything can potentially put them into motion.

Stalkers usually have both a mental illness and a personality disorder. Some of the psychiatric illnesses range from mild to severe depression, schizophrenia, erotomania, delusional beliefs and so on.

Stalkers who stalk strangers are usually psychotic. Many suffer from detachment disorders, borderline personality disorder and last but not least, good old fashioned narcissistic personality disorder.

Dorothy’s stalker/killer has a combination of both psychiatric and personality disorders. He had the delusion of loving Dorothy even though he would tell her how much he would like to dismember her.

He was not so much expecting for her to love him back, he did not need that because in his mind killing her would bring about that reciprocated love that which he felt towards her.

He most likely saw her with other men and that brought to surface a rage from deep within, regardless of whether or not she had been dating anyone in his mind if it wasn’t with him, she was with someone else.

In the mind of the man who had been stalking her, she was dating any man she spoke with or showed any interest in.

He enjoyed harassing her mother after he had killed Dorothy as it is unlikely that Dorothy lived long after he had abducted her.

He liked having the small measure of control over Dorothy’s mother by giving her false hope that her daughter might be alive.

He maintains control over his victims by instilling both fear and hope in them.  

Those that would have known him would have described some of his behaviors as off, unusual, awkward, inappropriate and uncomfortable at times.

But he was not considered a threat to anyone.  

Burning Dorothy’s car was for the typical reason, he murdered her in it and wanted to get rid of all traces of evidence of that crime.

He has not been heard of since his call to the paper, he experienced a major change in his life or he feared being caught and sought other ways to fulfill his fantasies.

People knew who the killer was yet they never quite figured out who he was. He is someone common enough that no one would have noticed his stalking of Dorothy.

I believe that he feared, had he kept calling Dorothy’s parent’s home, that her father would have discovered his identity if he kept answering.

Without DNA it is tough to say whether police can solve this case without a witness or confession.

However, it is my firm belief, that if the killer is still alive and well, he might be taunted by the media in the area enough, so as to expose who he is…

The trick is being who he is and get him to talk.

Cristal M Clark

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