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. According to testimony at his federal trial, Scott was interviewed several times after his arrest, with his lawyer present, and admitted twenty-eight specific residential burglaries and nine armed home invasion robberies in Prince George's County, along with many other burglaries he did not detail and the robbery of a gun store in Carroll County; prosecutors counted more than fifty burglaries in all. He had started breaking into houses at a young age and moved on to armed home invasions in 2008. He chose his targets, watched them to count the occupants and the cars, checked addresses through internet searches and a database at the Landover UPS facility where he worked part-time, cut phone lines to disable alarms, and got in through unlocked windows or by smashing glass. He went in wearing dark clothes, a black balaclava and black Nike gloves, carried a backpack of burglary tools, and listened to police radio through an earpiece. He committed about twenty-five of the burglaries with a partner, Marcus Dermanellian Hunter.
The home invasions grew more violent. On September 23, 2008, Scott and Hunter broke through a sliding glass door in Upper Marlboro; Scott beat a woman and dragged her through the house at gunpoint to the room where Hunter was holding her husband, and kept the couple there while Hunter drained their accounts at an ATM, before the two men drove off in the couple's Cadillac Escalade. On April 3, 2009, in Bowie, Scott herded a husband and wife, their three children and a visiting cousin into one room at gunpoint while Hunter drew cash on their cards. On May 23, with another accomplice, he repeatedly kicked and beat a girl in an Upper Marlboro home. Three days later he and Hunter broke into a licensed gun dealer in Woodbine, which Scott had researched on a database at work, and took thirty-nine firearms, among them two machine guns and six silencers. On June 13, 2009, he threw a cinder block through the patio door of a house in Fort Washington and held a twelve-year-old girl at gunpoint. When the rest of the family came home he ordered them into a bedroom, then took her seventeen-year-old sister, whom he had targeted, into another room, made her undress with a pillowcase over her head, touched her, and forced her to pose while he photographed and videotaped her.
Four days later, on June 17, he sold four of the stolen guns in the parking lot of the Landover UPS facility to a man who was cooperating with federal agents. On July 1, 2009, officers searched his bedroom and car and arrested him on firearms charges. They found sixteen stolen guns, the backpack, the balaclavas and gloves, burglary tools, police scanners, cameras and computers, and, on storage media in his bedroom, the photographs and video of the Fort Washington girl. In July 2011, after a three-week trial in Greenbelt, a federal jury convicted him on eleven counts, among them armed carjacking, production of child pornography and theft of firearms, which together carried a mandatory minimum of ninety-seven years. On January 10, 2012, U.S. District Judge Peter J. Messitte sentenced him to one hundred years. Hunter pleaded guilty to two federal firearms charges, and the second accomplice, Terence Alexander Cooke, pleaded guilty to a state gun crime and was sentenced to nine years with all but five suspended.
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.
1983: Jason Thomas Scott is born.
June 2008: Vilma Butler, forty-six, is shot at her home in Bowie and the house set on fire; Scott is never charged with her death.
September 23, 2008: Scott and Marcus Dermanellian Hunter break into a house in Upper Marlboro and hold a couple at gunpoint.
January 2009: Karen Lofton, forty-five, and her daughter Karissa, sixteen, are found shot to death in their home; Scott is never charged.
March 2009: Delores Dewitt, forty-two, and her daughter Ebony, twenty, are found strangled in a burning car in Largo.
April 3, 2009: during a home invasion in Bowie, Scott holds a couple, their three children and a visiting cousin at gunpoint.
May 23, 2009: he beats a girl in an Upper Marlboro home; three days later he and Hunter steal thirty-nine firearms from a gun dealer in Woodbine.
June 13, 2009: he invades a house in Fort Washington and sexually abuses and photographs a seventeen-year-old girl.
June 17, 2009: he sells four stolen guns to a man cooperating with federal agents.
July 1, 2009: he is arrested on firearms charges.
July 27, 2010: a Prince George's County grand jury indicts him for the Dewitt killings.
July 2011: a federal jury in Greenbelt convicts him on eleven counts.
January 10, 2012: Judge Peter J. Messitte sentences him to one hundred years.
February 2013: his first trial for the Dewitt murders ends in a mistrial.
September 25, 2013: he enters an Alford plea to the Dewitt murders and is sentenced to two life terms with all but eighty-five years suspended.