Jason Thomas Scott, born in 1983, carried out a long series of home invasions in Prince George's County, Maryland, in which five people were shot or strangled between 2008 and March 2009: Vilma Butler, 46; Karen Lofton, 45, and her 16-year-old daughter Karissa; and Delores Dewitt, 42, and her 20-year-old daughter Ebony, whose bodies were found in a burning car.
He was arrested on July 1, 2009 after a burglary investigation linked him to property taken from the scenes, and was sentenced to 97 years in January 2012 on the burglary and home-invasion counts. In September 2013 he entered an Alford plea to the killings and received a further 85 years. The Maryland press called him the Mother-Daughter Killer, after the households he targeted.
An Alford plea allows a defendant to accept conviction while maintaining innocence, so there is no admission of guilt in the murders and no trial verdict on them. The plea avoided a capital-eligible trial.