Erased: Missing Women, Murdered Wives (13 page)

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premeditated his wife’s murder. They theorized that Evelyn was killed

after she had gone to bed on the night of May 16, 1955, after she had

removed her dental plate. (The fact that the retainer she wore to keep

her remaining teeth in place while she slept was not found supported

this scenario.)

Marianne Beaman, who hadn’t seen Ewing since he jumped bail,

testified that he had actually proposed to her twice. A particularly

damning piece of evidence was the discovery of a codicil Ewing added

to his will after his wife’s disappearance, bequeathing 50 percent of

his estate to Marianne and just $1 to his wife ‘‘because she had ample

financial provisions for her needs.’’ Although Scott had argued that

he had no motive to kill his wife because her brother was actually her

primary beneficiary, in fact Evelyn’s will stated that he and Throsby

were to share her fortune equally.

The defense argued that Ewing’s bizarre and frequently changing

explanations for his wife’s disappearance were simply a husband’s

foolish but understandable attempts to assuage his own bruised

ego, to shield himself from the painful realization that his wife had

abandoned him. Scott never took the stand—on the advice of his

lawyers and against his own wishes, his attorney insisted. Instead,

they put on a few witnesses who claimed to have seen a woman who

looked like Mrs. Scott after she went missing.

Both at the beginning and end of the trial, the defense attempted

to abort the whole proceeding, claiming that the court had no

jurisdiction to try Scott because it had not been proved where (not to

mention if) his wife died. At best, the court should have to wait seven

years for Mrs. Scott to be declared legally dead. That ‘‘Hail Mary’’

attempt at a legal pass was denied.

In his closing argument, Leavy described how circumstantial

evidence forms an unbreakable chain of proof, using many of the

words and metaphors Stanislaus County prosecutors would convey

to the Scott Peterson jury five decades later.

‘‘In no circumstantial case does one bit of evidence stand alone

in establishing a corpus delicti of murder, establish the essential ele-ments of murder, or the guilt of the defendant,’’ Leavy began. ‘‘You

have to take one circumstance that may be meaningless standing

alone, then you take another circumstance that may be meaningless

standing alone, and the two together may not give meaning. But

maybe there’s another circumstance, a fourth, a fifth. When you

take all of the circumstances together, they are a mosaic, a picture,

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of the corpus delicti of murder. They establish together each link

in the chain of circumstances that is inconsistent with any rational

hypothesis of innocence.

‘‘By your good reasoning, by your good judgment, you will come

to the conclusion that Evelyn Scott is deceased . . . and that the defen-dant is the perpetrator,’’ the deputy DA continued. ‘‘No, we can’t

say that she was suffocated, chloroformed, poisoned, or whatever,

but that by some criminal agency she met foul play. And there is only

one person, with the exclusion of all others, that the evidence points

to, and that is L. Ewing Scott.’’

Defense attorney Tom Williams tried to use Scott’s mistakes as

proof of innocence, as Mark Geragos would a half century later for

Scott Peterson— as if anyone is ever capable of pulling off a perfect

murder.

‘‘If Mr. Scott is clever enough to murder his wife and conceal her

body so that it has not been found for two and one-half years, then

that man is not stupid enough to leave anything on the surface of the

ground,’’ Williams said, referring to the eyeglasses and other items

found in the cast-off incinerator ashes.

His cocounsel, Al Matthews, was left with the task of putting the

fear of God in the jury—to scare the jurors into believing they could

be executing a man whose ‘‘victim’’ might actually be alive. ‘‘Even

if everything the prosecution has brought into this courtroom is

absolutely true,’’ said Matthews, in a Perry Mason–like moment, ‘‘it

still doesn’t stop Mrs. Scott from walking in that front courtroom

door—and you know it.’’

Ewing Scott was so sure he would be acquitted that he told

reporters he was looking forward to being home for the holidays. He

was wrong. Four days before Christmas 1957, he was convicted of

murder in the first degree, but the jury voted to spare his life. Perhaps

they did feel some subliminal fear that Evelyn Scott might one day

reappear.

Q

All was not lost, however, from Scott’s point of view. He still had

not played his ace. Unfortunately for Ewing Scott, he never got to play

that card, as it was soon revealed how he attempted to rig the game.

Scott had devised a scheme he hoped would clear him of murder,

a plot so macabre that it sounds like something from a horror movie.

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But I believe it is emblematic of the extreme Machiavellianism and

overweening narcissism of eraser killers, the psychopathic level of

callousness that can be found only in the darkest of hearts.

After Scott was convicted, a small-time television actor told police

that two men had asked him to say he saw Evelyn Scott living it up in

Rio de Janeiro after she disappeared. When questioned by police, one

of the men he identified, a private investigator who worked for Scott’s

defense, confessed to an even more sinister plot. The private eye said

that at the direction of Ewing Scott, he and another investigator on

the defense team had attempted to frame someone else for Evelyn

Scott’s murder.

The story he told was chilling: the two investigators attempted

to obtain a severed arm from a cadaver, which they intended to

plant on the property of William Brawner, the friend and former

neighbor who hosted the sixty-third birthday party for Evelyn Scott

the day before she disappeared and who had been the first to take his

suspicions of Ewing Scott to the district attorney.

The conspirators hoped to pass scientific scrutiny by injecting the

arm with blood matching Evelyn’s type. (There was no DNA testing

in those days.) To make it appear even more believable that the arm

belonged to the late Mrs. Scott, they planned to place Evelyn’s actual

wedding band on the cadaver’s ring finger. The private investigator

claimed that Scott provided a sketch of Brawner’s property and told

them where he had hidden Evelyn’s ring at the Bel Air house.

It is unclear whether the idea was actually to frame Brawner or

Evelyn’s brother, whom Brawner assisted in his fight for trusteeship

of the estate. But there was plenty of evidence that such a plot existed.

Two chiropractors testified that the investigators asked them a few

weeks after Scott was found guilty if they could supply a body part and

blood of a certain type. Two police officers testified that they had seen

the investigators near the Brawner home. A third private investigator

said that one of the conspirators approached him during the trial and

offered him $150,000 to plant the incriminating evidence.

Q

Scott appealed his conviction, contending that the evidence pre-sented at trial was insufficient to establish the corpus delicti of

murder—in other words, that it was not proven that his wife was

indeed dead and that he killed her. There was ample precedent in

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U.S. law that corpus delicti can be proved by circumstantial evidence.

But in all cases reported up to that time there had been some proof of

death in the form of a body or some part of the victim’s body, direct

evidence of how the person was killed (such as cases where a sailor

was tossed overboard at sea in front of witnesses), or an admission

or confession by the defendant to the crime.

In reviewing the conviction of Ewing Scott, the California District

Court of Appeal acknowledged that the evidence against him was

wholly circumstantial, reiterating the standard put forth in English

law and previous U.S. cases that circumstantial evidence is sufficient

to prove guilt if it is so convincing as to preclude every reasonable

hypothesis of innocence. In its 1960 ruling, the court stated in the

boldest possible terms that a killer is not entitled to a free pass because

he is clever enough to erase evidence directly connecting him to his

crime.

‘‘Appellant contends that since no body was produced, no direct

evidence of death was introduced and there was no confession, the

people’s case was based on mere suspicion and conjecture,’’ the

court stated in its published opinion on the Ewing Scott case. ‘‘If

this contention is valid it would mean that a man could commit a

secret murder and escape punishment if he was able to completely

destroy the body of his victim, however complete and convincing

the circumstantial evidence of guilt. No one would say that the law

should be powerless to uncover such a crime and inflict punishment

unless the accused had made a confession.’’

The test set forth so clearly in the Ewing Scott ruling is the same one

jurors were instructed to follow in weighing circumstantial evidence

in the Scott Peterson case: that the chain of circumstances must be so

powerful as to preclude any reasonable explanation pointing toward

innocence. Jurors are entitled and entrusted to draw inferences from

the statements and actions of the defendant both prior to and after

the crime as they shed light on character, motive, and state of mind.

‘‘Every circumstance in evidence respecting the conduct of appel-lant tended in some degree to shed light upon the question [of]

whether he believed his wife would return, or knew she could not

return,’’ Clement Shinn, the presiding justice, wrote in the Ewing

Scott ruling. ‘‘There were many incidental questions to be answered.

What did the evidence prove as to appellant’s character? Would he

have been capable of taking the life of the woman who had been his

wife of six years? Why would he have wanted to be rid of her? What

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were the reasonable deductions from his conduct after May 16th with

respect to his state of mind? Did it indicate that he knew his wife was

dead? Presumably the jury gave answers to these questions that were

unfavorable to appellant.’’

The circumstantial evidence so derided by some commentators in

the Scott Peterson case helped answer similar questions. Peterson’s

lack of concern for his missing wife and child as captured on the

Amber tapes, his efforts to sell Laci’s car and home, his request for

grief counseling for Laci’s friends and family within hours of her

disappearance, his statements to Amber that he did not want any

biological children, and his talk of a future without responsibility

were all telling indicators that he knew his wife was never coming

home and that his baby was never going to be born.

The appellate court cited ample grounds to support the jury’s

verdict in the Ewing Scott case. They found it completely implausible

that Evelyn would have left home voluntarily without her dentures

and eyeglasses, without baggage or clothing, without drawing on her

bank accounts or communicating with any of the friends she held

so dear. There was no evidence that she was ill, mentally unstable,

alcoholic, or unhappy with her life, no evidence that she had harmed

any of her previous husbands or sought to harm Ewing, as he alleged.

Ewing, however, did have motive for killing Evelyn: to loot her

estate. For years even before she disappeared, he had angled for

control of her financial affairs, liquidating her assets and depositing

large sums in bank accounts all over the country. He showed no

sadness or loss at her disappearance, did not even report her missing.

Instead, he acted in all ways as if he knew she would never return.

He forged her name and fraudulently accessed her accounts. He

dated other women and even proposed marriage within six months

of his wife’s disappearance. He brought Marianne home to spend the

night with him in the bed he had shared with his wife. Since Evelyn’s

disappearance, he had done nothing but disparage her character.

When he finally faced possible punishment for his actions, he fled

from justice.

‘‘The jury could reasonably have found, and no doubt did find,

that every statement of appellant, every act and failure to act, tended

to prove that he was pleased to be rid of his wife,’’ wrote Justice

Shinn. ‘‘We can only conclude that appellant has felt immune from

a conviction of murder in the belief that his wife’s body lies where it

cannot be found.’’

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Shinn declared that the circumstantial evidence in the Ewing Scott

case ‘‘was as strong and convincing as a confession would have been’’

and more convincing than testimony for which credibility could not

be proven.

Scott ‘‘wove about himself a web of incriminating circumstances

that was complete,’’ Shinn wrote. ‘‘He has evolved from the evidence

no theory of innocence; the jury could not find a theory, nor can we.

[He] merely says, and others may say, ‘But Mrs. Scott may still be

alive.’ They would have to rest their belief upon some mythical or

miraculous hypothesis, since it could not find support in any reason-able deduction from the established facts. But the law is reason; it does

not proceed upon fantasy or remote and unrealistic possibilities.’’

Q

If there was any lingering doubt that Evelyn Scott was dead and that

her husband had killed her—even after exposure of his failed plan

to, almost literally, finger someone else with the cadaver arm—it was

extinguished by Ewing Scott himself in the waning years of his life.

After he was sent to San Quentin, Scott became something of a

jailhouse lawyer, peppering the courts and politicians and reporters

with pleas to overturn his sentence. Cocksure to the end that he

would eventually be exonerated, he even refused two offers of parole

because, he claimed, that would be tantamount to admitting guilt.

He finally was released outright in 1978.

Six years later—enfeebled and living in a tiny apartment, the

luxury he had known while married to Evelyn gone forever—Scott

confessed to Diane Wagner, a journalist who was writing a book

on the case, that he had killed his wife. He stuck to part of his

long-held story, claiming he did it because she had tried to poison

him (although by his own time line, her alleged poisoning attempt

was four years before he murdered her).

He said he struck her once on the top of the head with a rubber

mallet in their bedroom on the night of May 16, 1955, then drove her

body out to the desert near Las Vegas and buried her. He claimed he

didn’t care that he had gone to prison, but still seemed to relish one

thing: that her body was never found, that he put one over on the

police and everyone who cared about Evelyn Scott.

‘‘I was smarter than they were, wasn’t I?’’ he bragged.

C H A P T E R

F I V E

Disappearing Acts

Q BeforetheEwingScottcase,somestatesactually

forbade prosecution for murder without a body. The principle dates

back to English common law and the influential jurist Sir Matthew

Hale, who proclaimed in the eighteenth century that one should not

be convicted of murder unless ‘‘at least the body be found dead.’’ His

logic was reasonable enough, as he was aware of a few instances in

which men were convicted and executed in the absence of a body,

only to have the ‘‘victim’’ turn up later very much alive.

Over time, however, Lord Hale’s ‘‘rule’’ struck other jurists as

dangerously one-sided, especially in cases of murder on the high seas,

where bodies were almost never recovered. In the mid-nineteenth

century, British barrister William Best, who authored a highly influ-ential treatise on circumstantial evidence, noted that Hale’s rule was

unintentionally encouraging killers to dispose of their victims’ bodies

and cover up crime scenes by arson and other means to escape

punishment.

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Disappearing Acts

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Although the Hale rule has long since been interpreted by judges

and legal scholars as more of a caution than a prohibition, the concept

of ‘‘no body, no crime’’ has so permeated the public consciousness

that it is not only criminals who still believe it to be true. For example,

Joran van der Sloot’s father, who was training to be a judge on the

island of Aruba at the time his son and two friends were detained

as suspects in the disappearance of a vacationing American teenager,

Natalee Holloway, used those very words to assure the three that

without a body they would never be prosecuted. He was right, at

least so far. Within a few months all three were released. As this

book goes to press more than two years after her disappearance,

Natalee has still not been found despite extensive searches in and

around the island with cadaver dogs and high-tech sonar equipment,

and no one is facing any charges whatsoever in regards to her

disappearance.

The erroneous but widespread belief that murder cannot be

proved without a body is a problem not only at trial but at the

investigative stage as well. Without a body or apparent crime scene, a

missing persons investigation may be derailed before it ever becomes

a homicide inquiry.

Q

Don Weber and Lynda Singshinsuk each seemed destined for great

things. The two had grown up in the same small town of Robinson,

Illinois, about two hundred miles south of Chicago. Don was a high

school track star and a member of one of the town’s most well-to-do

families; Lynda, a Thai immigrant whose physician father worked

at the local hospital. They didn’t begin dating until they were both

undergraduates at the University of Illinois. For the next six years, on

and off, they maintained a mostly long-distance relationship as Don

went off to law school and Lynda into training to become a doctor.

In January 1990, Lynda decided to end the relationship for good.

By that time, Weber, twenty-nine, was living in New York City,

having graduated from Fordham Law School and taken a job with

the accounting firm Peat Marwick, and was pursuing a master’s in

law at NYU with hopes of working in international business. Lynda,

twenty-four, was in her third year of medical school at Northwestern

University in Chicago, and had fallen for another man, a fellow med

student.

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