He Called Her Parents Every Wednesday for Four Years. The Unsolved Murder of Dorothy Jane Scott.

On June 12, 1980, the Orange County Register in Southern California ran a story about a missing woman named Dorothy Jane Scott.

That same day, someone called the newspaper.

The man on the line said, "I killed her. I killed Dorothy Scott. She was my love."

He said, "I caught her cheating with another man."

And then he described details about the night she disappeared that had not been in the paper. Details that only someone who was there, or close to it, should have known.

He has never been identified.

And he was not finished calling.

Who was Dorothy Jane Scott?

Dorothy Jane Scott was born on April 23, 1948. In 1980, she was thirty-two years old.

She was a single mother. She lived in Stanton, California, with her aunt and her four-year-old son. She worked as a secretary for two stores in Anaheim that had the same owners.

Her parents, Jacob and Vera, lived in Anaheim and looked after her son while she worked.

People who knew her described her as private. She stayed home a lot. She was a devout Christian. She did not drink or use drugs. Her father said she may have dated now and then, but as far as the family knew, she had no steady boyfriend.

The calls

In the months before she disappeared, Dorothy started getting phone calls at work.

The caller was a man. She did not know who he was.

Some calls, he told her he loved her. Other calls, he told her he was going to kill her.

One call scared her more than the rest. The man said he would get her alone and "cut [her] up into bits so no one will ever find [her]."

According to her mother, he once told Dorothy to go outside. When she did, she found a single dead red rose on the windshield of her car.

Dorothy was scared enough that she thought about buying a gun. About a week before she disappeared, she started taking karate lessons.

May 28, 1980

On the evening of May 28, 1980, Dorothy was at a work meeting. She noticed that one of her coworkers, a man named Conrad Bostron, did not look well. He had a red mark on his arm.

Dorothy and another coworker, Pam Head, decided to take him to the emergency room at UC Irvine Medical Center.

On the way, they stopped at her parents' house. Dorothy changed scarves there, from a black scarf to a red one. Remember that detail.

At the hospital, doctors found that Bostron had been bitten by a black widow spider. He was treated. Pam Head later said that Dorothy never left her side the whole time they were in the waiting room.

At about eleven at night, Bostron was released with a prescription.

Dorothy offered to go get her car and bring it around to the exit, so he would not have to walk far. She stopped in the restroom, then headed out to the parking lot.

The headlights

Pam and Conrad waited at the exit.

Dorothy did not come.

So they walked out to the parking lot to find her. And as they did, Dorothy's car came speeding toward them. Its headlights were on bright, so bright they could not see who was driving.

The car swerved sharply right, past them, and out of the lot.

They did not panic at first. They assumed something had come up with her son, some kind of emergency. But a few hours later, when they still had not heard from her, they reported her missing.

At about four-thirty in the morning on May 29, Dorothy's white 1973 Toyota station wagon was found burning in an alley, about ten miles from the hospital.

Nobody was near it.

"She was my love"

About two weeks later, on June 12, the Orange County Register published its story. And that day, the man called.

He told the managing editor he had killed Dorothy Scott. That she was his love. That he had caught her cheating, and that she had denied having someone else.

And he knew things.

He knew that Conrad Bostron had been bitten by a spider. He knew that Dorothy had changed her scarf. Neither detail had been published.

He also claimed that Dorothy had called him from the hospital that night. Pam Head said that was not true. She said she had been with Dorothy the entire time, and Dorothy never made a call.

Investigators came to believe the man who called the newspaper was the man responsible for Dorothy's death.

Every Wednesday

About a week after Dorothy disappeared, the phone rang at her parents' house. A man said he had her. Then he hung up.

That was the beginning.

Over the years that followed, a man called Dorothy's parents almost every Wednesday afternoon. Sometimes he said he had her. Sometimes he said he had killed her. The calls were short. They often came when Dorothy's mother, Vera, was home alone.

Police put a recorder on the family's phone. But the caller never stayed on the line long enough for the call to be traced.

For almost four years, this went on.

In April 1984, Dorothy's father, Jacob, answered one of the calls, in the evening. After that, the calls stopped.

Santa Ana Canyon Road

On August 6, 1984, a construction worker found bones near Santa Ana Canyon Road, about thirty feet from the road. Some of them were partly charred. A brush fire had burned across the area in 1982.

Near them were a turquoise ring and a watch.

On August 14, 1984, dental records confirmed it. The remains were Dorothy Jane Scott's.

Her mother said the watch had stopped at twelve-thirty in the morning on May 29, 1980. That was about an hour after Pam and Conrad last saw her car.

An autopsy could not determine how she died.

Dorothy's family held a memorial service on August 22, 1984.

And after the remains were found, the calls to her parents started again.

The case today

No one has ever been arrested for the murder of Dorothy Jane Scott.

The man who called her at work, the man who called the newspaper, and the man who called her parents may have been the same person. Investigators believe the caller to the newspaper was the killer. But nobody knows who he was, or why he targeted her.

The case remains open with the Orange County Sheriff's Department.

What we still don't know

So much about this case does not make sense.

How did the caller know about the spider bite and the scarf? Was he someone close to Dorothy's life, maybe someone at work, maybe someone watching? Was he waiting in that parking lot? And how did he get away so cleanly that his voice, on a phone, week after week, for years, was never traced?

What we know is this. A single mother was stalked by a man she never identified. She disappeared in the time it takes to walk to a parking lot. And her killer called her family to taunt them, for years, and was never caught.

Who do you think the caller was? Someone she knew, or a stranger?

If you have any information, the case is still open with the Orange County Sheriff's Department.