On the night of May 28th, 1980, Dorothy Jane Scott (32) vanished from a parking lot. The plan had been for her to stop at the exit and pick up two of her colleagues. Instead, they stood there puzzled as they watched her vehicle speed away without them. But had Dorothy actually been the driver? They couldn’t tell.
In a chilling twist, her car would be found on fire just hours later, but there was no sign of the missing mother anywhere. Four years later, her remains would be discovered near a road, but no cause of death could be determined.
Dorothy had been subjected to alarming phone calls in the months leading up to her disappearance. Her stalker would alternately threaten to murder her and profess his undying love for her. His voice had seemed vaguely familiar to Dorothy, but she was unable to place it. Many believed that this man was also her abductor and killer, but he continued to evade detection.
Who killed Dorothy Jane Scott?
Dorothy Jane Scott
Dorothy Jane Scott was born on April 23rd, 1948, in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, to parents Jacob and Vera. The Scott family would eventually move out to California.
Kind, quiet, and reliable, Dorothy was a devoted single mother to her 4-year-old son, Shanti (whom she called “Shawn”). Shawn’s father, Dennis Terry, lived in Missouri, but occasionally visited.
“To me, she exemplified the word ‘give,’” remembered her brother Jim. “She’d just give and give and give, no matter what it cost her…”
Dorothy was employed as a secretary for two jointly-owned businesses in Anaheim—one a head shop and the other a store that specialized in items like lava lamps and love beads. She and Shawn resided in Stanton, California, with her aunt. However, Jacob and Vera usually assumed responsibility for watching their grandson while Dorothy was at work.
She enjoyed leading a quiet life and was known as a homebody. She never engaged in drinking or drug usage, and was a devout Christian. Dorothy was single and rarely dated, according to her family.Subscribe
Disturbing Phone Calls
In early 1980, Dorothy began to receive disturbing phone calls while at work. The caller, an unknown man, would either go on about how much he loved her or make threats against her life.
During one such sinister episode, he told her that he’d find a way to get her alone and then “cut (her) up into bits so no one will ever find (her).” She felt like she recognized her stalker’s voice, but was never quite able to place it.
“One day he called and said to go outside because he had something for her,” said Vera. “She went out and there was a single dead rose on the windshield of her car.”
Dorothy was deeply shaken by his unsettling behavior and had started to attend karate classes just a week before she vanished. She also contemplated purchasing a gun for self-defense.
The Night Dorothy Vanished
At 9 p.m. on May 28th, 1980, Dorothy was at a work meeting. While there, she noticed that coworker Conrad Bostron appeared to be unwell and had a red bite mark on his arm. She and another colleague, Pam Head, decided to take him to the emergency room at UC Irvine Medical Center in Anaheim.
According to Pam, Dorothy had Shawn with her at the meeting that night and they had to stop at her parents’ place to drop him off on the way to hospital. For unknown reasons, she also switched her scarf from a black one to a red one before they departed. (This is a detail that will become relevant later.)
Once at the hospital, Conrad was admitted and the medical staff concluded that he’d been bitten by a black widow spider. Dorothy and Pam remained in the ER waiting room while he was being treated. Pam stated that Dorothy never left her sight the entire time.
At approximately 11 p.m., Conrad was ready to go. The doctor wrote him a prescription and he was discharged. Dorothy didn’t want him to have to walk very far in his condition, so she kindly offered to go outside and bring her car around to the exit. She briefly went into the ladies’ room and then headed out into the parking lot alone.
Several minutes passed as Conrad and Pam waited for Dorothy. Then, suddenly, they finally saw her vehicle approaching them. Strangely, however, she didn’t stop the car and quickly drove away, taking a sharp turn out of the parking lot. While they initially assumed that the driver was her, the headlights had been too bright for them to truly discern who was behind the wheel.
Dorothy would never be seen alive again.
Missing
A few hours passed and when neither Pam and Conrad, nor Dorothy’s family, had seen or heard from her, she was reported missing.
During their search for the vanished woman, the police located her white 1973 Toyota station wagon at 4:30 a.m.; it had been abandoned and was burning in an alley that was around 10 miles away from the hospital. Law enforcement saw no one at the scene, including Dorothy.
All efforts to find Dorothy proved to be fruitless.
On June 12th, 1980, someone contacted the Orange County Register, claiming to know of Dorothy’s fate. The unidentified male gave a brief, but chilling, account of what he’d done to her.
“I killed her. I killed Dorothy Scott. She was my love. I caught her cheating with another man. She denied having someone else. I killed her.”
Notably, this man knew what color scarf Dorothy was wearing that night and that Conrad had suffered a spider bite—neither fact had been released to the public.
He also claimed that she had called him from the hospital, but Pam refuted this, asserting that Dorothy had never left her side in the waiting room. Detectives felt certain that this was her assailant, but his identity remained elusive.
“We just can’t put that together,” said Jacob, Dorothy’s father. “She worked from morning to evening. She lives with my sister. She might have had an occasional date, but they were few and far between.”
Dorothy’s Remains are Found
In the wake of her strange disappearance, Dorothy’s parents began receiving unsettling calls “almost every Wednesday afternoon.” Each time, the man would either say that he had abducted Dorothy and still had her or that he’d murdered her.
Law enforcement attempted to trace the calls, but were unable to due to the fact that he never stayed on the line long enough. While the police are capable of instantly tracing a call today, this wasn’t the case in 1980.
Vera was almost always the one to answer these calls. However, on one occasion, Jacob Scott picked up and the caller quickly hung up without speaking. Several months would go by before they heard from him again.
Had he felt intimidated by Jacob? Or was he afraid that Dorothy’s father might recognize his voice? Jacob did part-time work as a handyman at one of the stores that Dorothy was employed at.
On August 6th, 1984—over four years since Dorothy had vanished—construction workers made a shocking discovery: a partial human skeleton beneath the bones of a dog. They were located approximately 30 feet away from Santa Ana Canyon Road—seven miles away from the hospital.
Dental records were used to positively identify the human remains as belonging to Dorothy Jane Scott. Additionally, her watch and turquoise ring were at the scene. Eerily, the watch had stopped at 12:32 a.m. on May 29th—roughly an hour and a half after she was last seen by Pam and Conrad.
What connection—if any—the dog’s skeleton had to Dorothy was unclear. Had they been killed by the same person? Or was it just a coincidence that they’d ended up in the same area? Due to the advanced state of decomposition, it wasn’t possible to determine Dorothy’s cause of death.
Her bones showed signs of charring, though, which led law enforcement to speculate that her body had been there for at least two years, since a wildfire had swept across the area in 1982.
After Dorothy was found, her parents received another taunting call. The man sarcastically asked, “Is Dorothy home?” and hung up. He never contacted the Scotts again.
Suspects
Dennis Terry, the father of Dorothy’s child, was quickly ruled out as a suspect. He had been in Missouri at the time of her disappearance and his alibi was easily verified by investigators.
Interestingly, Dorothy’s remains were found on the property of John Kocyla—Dorothy’s boss. Although, it wasn’t clear if the bones had been deliberately placed there or if they’d simply been carried there by heavy rains and flooding. The police couldn’t find anything else to connect Kocyla with her murder and he was never officially named a suspect.
However, it does seem likely that her stalker was in some way connected to her job, since he always contacted her there and knew many details about her life, including her work schedule and what she wore each day. Additionally, as her family stated, she didn’t go to many places aside from work.
Whether or not this person was Kocyla remains a mystery.
Another person of interest—and perhaps the strongest suspect—was Mike Butler. His sister worked with Dorothy and he was said to have been obsessed with her.
This could also explain why Dorothy thought the voice of her stalker was familiar, but not so familiar that she could figure it out: Butler was likely someone whom she’d met but hadn’t spent a significant amount of time with.
He allegedly had a history of cult activity and mental instability as well. Shawn, who is an adult now and still committed to finding his mother’s killer, strongly believes that Butler is the most plausible suspect.
Yet, as with Kocyla, investigators couldn’t find any solid evidence to tie Butler to Dorothy’s murder and he, too, was never officially declared a suspect.
No other persons of interest have ever come up in her case. Notably, Dorothy mostly worked in the back of these stores and had very little contact with customers.
Similar Case
The authorities believed that whoever was responsible for Dorothy’s death likely went on to kill again. There is one case in particular that they felt had some striking similarities to Dorothy Scott’s.
Patricia Jean Schneider, 25, went missing after work on July 31st, 1982. She was employed as a waitress at Palomino Station in Indian Hills, California. At 3:45 a.m. she made a call from the local Circle K to say that her vehicle had broken down.
This was to be the last time that Patricia was seen or heard from.
Around 5:30 a.m., a Riverside County officer discovered her Toyota Celica burning in a field. Patricia has never been found and her case remains unsolved.
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Later Developments
Dorothy Jane Scott’s case is still open, but has gone cold due to a lack of evidence or viable leads.
Sadly, Jacob and Vera Scott have since passed away, in 1994 and 2002, respectively.
Mike Butler died in 2014, at the age of 68.
Shawn, as well as Dorothy’s other surviving loved ones, are still hopeful for a resolution in her case and that they might have closure one day.