In March 2009 firefighters in Largo, Maryland, found two bodies in a burning car. They were Delores Dewitt, forty-two, a nurse, and her daughter Ebony, twenty, a student, and both had been strangled. Two months earlier, in January, another Prince George's County nurse, Karen Lofton, forty-five, and her sixteen-year-old daughter Karissa had been found shot to death inside their locked house. Two mothers and two daughters had died within weeks of each other in the same suburban county, and yet an FBI profiler at first concluded that the two cases were unrelated. The police later said that the difference in method had been deliberate.
The man they came to suspect was Jason Thomas Scott, born in 1983, a former part-time worker at a UPS facility who lived in Upper Marlboro. He was the son of a retired District of Columbia schoolteacher and a federal employee, lived with his parents, and was regarded as a capable college student. The homicide detective Tony Schartner later said that he had not thought Scott was "that type" of man. Prosecutors said Scott used a database at the UPS facility to pick the houses he entered.
Those houses numbered in the dozens. Over the same period Scott carried out more than fifty burglaries and nine armed home invasion robberies across the county, taking guns among much else. He was arrested on July 1, 2009, after someone told federal agents that he was selling weapons out of the trunk of his car. In July 2011 a federal jury convicted him on eleven counts, including armed carjacking, producing child pornography, sexually assaulting a minor and theft of firearms, which carried a mandatory minimum of ninety-seven years; he was sentenced in January 2012 to what reports give as about a hundred years.
The murder case went more slowly. On July 27, 2010, a Prince George's County grand jury returned a seven-count indictment charging him with the Dewitt killings, including two counts of murder and two of burglary. Law enforcement sources told reporters at the time that they believed he had also killed Karen and Karissa Lofton, but he was never charged with those deaths. His first trial for the Dewitt murders ended in a mistrial in February 2013.
Investigators also tied him to an earlier death. In June 2008 Vilma Butler, forty-six, had been shot at her home in Bowie, and the house had then been set on fire. Accounts of the case count her with the four women and girls of 2009, and the Maryland press called him the Mother-Daughter Killer.
On September 25, 2013, Scott, then thirty, entered an Alford plea to the Dewitt murders. An Alford plea accepts conviction without an admission of guilt: the defendant acknowledges that the prosecution could prove the case at trial while maintaining that he did not do it. He was sentenced to two life terms with all but eighty-five years suspended, to follow the federal sentence. In exchange, prosecutors agreed not to pursue the Lofton and Butler cases. "The Dewitts' was the strongest case we had," the county's state's attorney, Angela Alsobrooks, said, adding that she believed there was strong evidence in the other two as well. She described him as very intelligent, without emotion and without remorse.
The result is a record with an unusual shape. The only killings on which a court has entered judgment are the deaths of Delores and Ebony Dewitt, and even those rest on a plea in which he denied guilt. The deaths of Karen Lofton, Karissa Lofton and Vilma Butler were never tried, and his responsibility for them remains the view of the police and prosecutors who investigated them.