Hi! Welcome to Serial Sisters, a podcast where my sister and I tell each other true crime stories. I'm Kristen. And I'm Devana.
And this week Devana has a story for me. Okay, so this week I'm going to do the abduction of Dorothy Jane Scott. Okay. Have you heard of it?
Okay, no. I don't think so. So it's in California, um, in Anaheim. Okay.
So for months she had been receiving phone calls at her workplace from the same mysterious admirer. The voice sounded daily familiar, but she couldn't place where she had heard it before. And sometimes she expressed fawning adoration and other times resentment and violence. And he let her know that he was trailing her wherever he went, wherever she went.
And he described details of her daily activities to prove it. Maybe I do know this one. Okay. Sorry, as you're going, maybe I've heard it.
So, uh, like the stalker, like, alarmed her so much that she was just like, I'm not going to deal with this. I'm going to deal with it in a different way. She started taking karate classes. And she could have been wearing a handgun.
But she didn't want to buy a handgun because she also lived with her little son. She was kind of scared that he would get a hold of it. So she was a 32-year-old single mother who had lived with her four-year-old son at her aunt's house in Stanton, which is a small city between Anaheim and Garden Grove. And she was employed as a secretary for Swingers Psych Shop in Anaheim, which was also, like, attached to Custom John's Head Shop.
So, and the Swingers and the Custom Johns were jointly-owned services of the area's hippie culture. So a person could go, like, you know, go get a water pipe at one of the stores and go soak in the posters of the other black light room. Nice. So, which is just, like, genius.
So Dorothy worked in the bathroom office. And she led a life that was far less colorful than the tie-dye shirts and multi-colored bongs that were sold at the store. She doesn't really seem like a lady who, like, he would peg to work at one of these stores. And one friend described her as, like, a spell as a phone book.
Okay. Which is, like, not very nice to say about your friend, but... No. Especially after she's gone.
Yeah. So she never left the house for recreation. And she was religious. She rarely dated, if ever.
And she worked from morning until night, leaving her son in the care of her parents. And as the meeting she began, she noticed that a fellow employee, Conrad Brostrom, I think that's how you say his name, looked ill at ease. And the meeting marched on, and he couldn't sit still. And just something wasn't right with him.
And she noticed that he had an ever-deepening red streak on his arm. And so she convinced him to let her take him to the emergency room. And another co-worker, whose name is Pam Head, which is just, like, a terrible name. Well, but it's perfect for where she works, at a head shop.
I know. Oh, it's just perfect. But, so she offered to accompany them. They stopped briefly at Dorothy's parents' house to check on Sean, which is her son, before heading to the UCI Medical Center.
And then once there, the doctor actually decided that the guy's arm was infected due to a spider bite. Due to what bite? A spider bite. Okay.
So, as the guy was treated, Dorothy and Pam stayed in the lobby for him. And finally, Conrad was discharged and went to fill his prescription to the pharmacy line. And Pam waited with him while Dorothy volunteered to pull the car around in front. So she walked out into the parking lot, and her co-worker was waited for her.
The guy gets his prescription, and he and Pam looked out front, expecting to see Dorothy's car. But it wasn't there. So they stepped outside, and still, they saw no sign of her. Their puzzlement grew into impatience, which grew into concern when they saw her car approach.
But it approached them at a relatively high speed, and a speed that didn't suggest that she intended him stopping. Mm-hmm. And blinded by the high beams, Pam and Conrad raised their arms, but the car made a sharp right turn, and raced it out of the parking lot. Jesus.
And of course, this is, like, before cell phones, you know? Yeah. So it's not like they didn't even just, like, call her and be like, hey, what the fuck? Mm-hmm.
So, they ran up to the car, and his headlight suddenly went out, and it left the parking lot and vanished. So, struggling to make sense of why their friend had abandoned them, they considered that maybe she had gone to get her son. Mm-hmm. And, like, maybe she had remembered an obligation she had just, like, forgotten, and, like, all of a sudden remembered.
Yeah. But then an hour passed, and then two. And the police could notify they didn't see any reason for alarm, which is just kind of strange, because, like, she doesn't seem, again, like the kind of lady that would just abandon her two co-workers. No, she doesn't, but it's also the 80s, and we'll need 48 hours before she's considered missing.
Otherwise, she's just a flaky woman. Right, yeah, she just, like, ran off. Mm-hmm. So, Pam asked Dorothy's parents to ask if she picked up Sean, but they hadn't seen her all evening.
Mm-hmm. Several hours later, a car's alarm was certainly raced when Dorothy's car was found abandoned some 10 miles away in a Santa Alley alleyway, burning, and no trace of Dorothy was found. In the following days, the police investigated Dorothy's disappearance. They advised her father, Jacob Scott, to keep a tight lip for now, so no newspapers, no television reporters, no media of any kind.
Yeah. But that all changed when, a week later, the telephone rang at the Scott's house, and Dorothy's mother, Vera, answered. A male voice asked if she was related to Dorothy Scott. After Vera said yes, the caller stated, I've got her, and hung up.
But, fuck. Yeah, so, like, just fuck you. Don't call the house and say that. Bullshit.
Right? It's not even like, oh, I'll give her back for this amount of money, blah, blah, blah. Just, I got her, fuck you. Yeah.
Click. I got her. So then, another week passed, and Jacob Scott had run out of patience, like, any patience that he pretended to have. He contacted the Santa Ana Register, and they ran a story about his daughter's disappearance.
On the day the story ran, a call came in at the desk of the Santa Ana Register editor, Pat Riley. And, uh, I've killed her, the man, the male caller, told Roy. I killed Dorothy Scott. She was my love.
I caught her cheating with another man. She denied having someone else. I killed her. So he calls and says all that bullshit.
So the caller also provided details that wouldn't have been known to a prank caller, details that hadn't been printed. So he knew that Dorothy had been wearing a red scarf that night. He knew about the co-worker's spider bite. He claimed that Dorothy had called him to tell him that she was at the UCI Medical Center.
However, Pam insisted that this couldn't have been the case, as Dorothy never left her presence throughout the evening, except once to use the bathroom right before heading out to the parking lot. Well, I mean, maybe she used a pay phone on her way to the bathroom or to the parking lot. That is probably true, but, like, you would think it's a hospital, so, like, there's probably a hallway that you can, like, I don't know, look down. I don't know.
I mean, it seems like bullshit because this dude seems like a crazy psycho, but I'm not saying it's not the outside realm of possibility for her to have made a phone call. Made a phone call, yeah. So investigators also checked out Scott's father, or Sean's father, sorry, oh, God, the son. Okay.
So he was at home in Missouri on the night Dorothy disappeared. They questioned everybody at the site shop, and then they questioned them again. But then the consensus was that since Dorothy worked out a public view, it's unlikely her harasser would have been a customer, and police looked at the area's sex offenders. They also poked into her social circle for potential enemies or even questionable characters, but they didn't find any.
Dorothy's parents consulted a psychic, and then another, and the police also ended up in listening to a psychic. Jesus. So Leeds fizzled and the K schooled. The medicine phone calls kept coming.
Almost every Wednesday for four years, the phone rang to Scott's home. That's awful. For four years. That's just awful.
And the calls came during the day when Dorothy's mother was home alone. The caller would either ask, is Dorothy there? Or reassert that he had killed her. He would say, I've got her.
What a dick. Yeah. He's the worst. I hate him.
So like, is Dorothy there? Thing is so fucked. Like, oh, I hate that. And so the police flagged at the Scott's phone, and so they have the caller's voice, like, on tape.
But no one recognized the voice, which was gruff and plainly disguised. The Stats had the lines tapped, but the caller would never stay on the line long enough for the call to be traced, because of course it's like 1980, so. Yeah. Takes like ten minutes to trace a call.
Yeah. So the calls finally stopped in April 1984, when Jacob and not Vera answered a nighttime call from their unknown tormentor. Jacob speculated that the caller probably assumed that new residents were now living in the house, which I don't really know why I say that, but I wonder if, like, maybe if it was somebody that Dorothy knew, I mean, if she did call him or call the person, like, maybe it was someone that the dad would recognize. Like, the voice.
Or it was just more fun for him to torture his mom. I mean. That too, which is so fun. He's just like, fuck you, and then it's a dude, and he's like, well, this isn't fun for me, so he quits.
Yeah. Oh, that's awful. I hate that more, maybe. I know.
That's awful. He's a dickhole. I told you I hated him. Oh, so you're really going to hate the rest of this, too.
So three and a half years later, a construction worker happened upon a scale of remains in some brush-offs in the Annie Canyon Road in Anaheim. Those remains belong to a dog. However, beneath the dog, covered lightly with soil for human bones. A pelvis, an arm, two thighs, and a skull.
And along with the bones were a turquoise ring and a watch, which had stopped at 12.30 a.m., May 29, 1980. Which is so awful. So Vera Scott verified the turquoise ring as belonging to her daughter. A week later, the remains were identified as those of Dorothy Jane Scott.
So at least, like, they found her. Yeah. They didn't have answers as to how or who, which is not as great, but I'm glad they found her. For sure.
So after the announcement ran into the newspapers, the Scott family received two more calls from a now familiar voice asking, is Dorothy home? Fuck him. Yep. So Jacob Scott died in 1994, one week shy of his 70th birthday, and Vera Scott died in 2002, both without knowing the identity of a man who killed their daughter.
They were called him on a weekly basis for the better part of four years. God, I hate him. It's just crazy. Like, I cannot believe that he played that game with them for so long.
So wait, are there any theories as to who did it? Like, I've read a little bit more about it, and, like, they don't really have anything solid. They think that there was someone else that she worked with that maybe is a suspect, but again, like, they just don't have any solid evidence. Fuck.
Yeah. That's awful. That was a pretty bad one. But the calls, the calls just got me, because I was just like, why would you want to keep it dragging out for that long?
Because he's the worst. He's a dickhole. I hate him. I don't know who he is.
And also, it's something that, like, you couldn't do now. Yeah. Yeah, because who the fuck picks up their cell phone when they're like, I don't know that number? Right.
Or, like, they could find out exactly where you are if you call someone on your cell phone. So, yeah, that's the story I have for you this week. Well, that's upsetting. Thank you.
Shorter and yet still devastating. Still sad. Still, so much misogyny. Because, like, if it was someone that she was dating, because she wasn't said to have dated anyone.
Yeah. Oh, it's so weird. And you'd think that they would know if she was dating someone because she has a four-year-old son. Someone's gotta be watching that kid in order for her to go out on dates.
Right. And, like, you know, if they think that somebody took her in the parking lot, which is the most plausible thing. Yeah, that seems like where it would have had to be. Right.
Was it just some random person? Well, how would it have been someone random if they're still calling her parents for four years? That's it. And had been calling her at work conformancing her at work?
Yeah, I don't think so crazy. Or was it two separate people and the stalker calls and the calling her parents are actually by someone else who's just playing off of it and somebody else just grabbed her and it was completely random that she happened to be having something else going on? That is a good theory. Huh, I wonder.
Yeah, I think I had heard this one before, but it's still nuts to me. Yeah, it is. I tried not to do the most well-known, but I wasn't sure. Yeah.
I don't think it's super well-known. I think it's just weirdos like us that have known stuff like this. Thanks for listening. You can email us at serialsisters at outlook.com and you can find us on Instagram and Twitter at Serial Sisters.
Bye. Bye.