Erased: Missing Women, Murdered Wives (12 page)

E R A S E D

bouts of diverticulitis, the doctor had given her a clean bill of

health.

On May 15, 1955, one of Evelyn’s friends hosted a dinner party in

honor of her sixty-third birthday. She spoke excitedly of a European

vacation she and Ewing had planned. The day after the birthday

party, they went for a test drive in a new Mercedes-Benz, telling the

salesman they were thinking of buying one to drive around on their

European vacation.

‘‘We’ll only be gone for a few months,’’ Evelyn told the salesman.

‘‘We love Spain, but I don’t think I could stand to be away from Los

Angeles for very long. We have so many friends here.’’ The salesman

was the last person, other than Ewing, to see Evelyn alive.

The following day, Ewing called to cancel his wife’s weekly hair

appointment.

‘‘For this morning?’’ asked the salon manager.

‘‘That’s right,’’ Scott responded coldly, ‘‘and all the future ones,

too.’’ Evelyn would never again need to have her hair done.

Q

Only Ewing Scott knows what happened to his wife, how he

managed to erase her so completely that no trace of her remains has

ever been found. What is known is that he sure wasn’t worried about

her sudden disappearance, and was certainly convinced that she was

never coming back.

He never reported Evelyn missing, never looked for her. He did

immediately start converting her assets to his name. He also began

giving away some of his wife’s most intimate possessions, including

bedclothes and furs.

He ignored letters and phone calls from Evelyn’s worried friends,

but when they showed up at his door, he gave a series of evolving and

inexplicable reasons for her absence. He told some that Evelyn had

suddenly fallen ill and gone East for treatment. He told others that

she was suffering from a mental illness or alcoholism and that he had

committed her to a sanitarium, again in some location in the East

that he would not identify. Sometimes he claimed to have no idea

where she was. Other times he said she was right there at home, but

he never let any of them speak to her.

Her friends were mystified. They had never known Evelyn to

behave strangely or impetuously, and she hardly drank liquor at all.

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After a few months, Scott disconnected the telephone and booked

passage on a round-the-world cruise. Just one ticket, he specified. His

wife had already been around the world, he said, and had no interest

in doing that again.

Authorities did not get involved until Evelyn had been missing for

two and a half months, and only then after some of her influential

friends personally visited the district attorney and laid out the strange

and troubling facts surrounding her disappearance. Perhaps because

of the Scotts’ social standing, or due to the inherent difficulty of

grasping that a crime has occurred when there is no body or crime

scene to work from, the DA did not contact police, but he did launch

his own quiet investigation.

The story Ewing Scott told the DA’s investigator was as baffling

and absurd as what he had told Evelyn’s friends, and would become

ever more salacious over time. He said his wife went out on May 16,

the day after the test drive, to buy toothpowder and never returned.

He claimed he found her car two days later near a cemetery, but

without reporting anything to police, he subsequently disposed of the

vehicle. He said he later discovered that she had withdrawn $15,000

from her bank account.

When asked why she would leave home without any word to

anyone, Scott claimed that his wife had throat cancer, had resisted

his efforts to help her, and might have gone off to seek treatment

on her own. He also alleged that she had been drinking heavily and

suggested she might have gone someplace to dry out. He would later

throw in that he believed that his wife was a lesbian and had run off

with another woman, that he had discovered pictures of nude women

among her possessions.

By the time authorities began looking for his wife, Ewing Scott

was already looking for a replacement.

He wooed one wealthy widow, claiming Evelyn had abandoned

him, and tried unsuccessfully to convince the woman to join him

on his cruise. He quickly moved on to another prospect. Marianne

Beaman, an attractive forty-six-year-old divorcé, was not a wealthy

woman—she worked as a receptionist at a dental office—but perhaps

now that Ewing had his wife’s money, he no longer felt that he needed

a wealthy wife. Marianne claimed that he told her he still loved Evelyn

and hoped she would return to him. Yet he gave Marianne a number

of Evelyn’s possessions, stating they were things his wife no longer

used, including very expensive pieces of his wife’s jewelry.

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As the new year rolled around, he was ready to embark on a fresh,

new life. He was so confident that he would never be held to account

for his missing wife that he asked Marianne to marry him, and she

happily accepted—even though they knew they’d have to wait seven

years for Evelyn to be declared legally dead before they could wed.

Scott believed he was in the clear. He planned to cruise off into the

sunset without a backward glance, but then the story of his missing

wife hit the newspapers. Evelyn’s brother, fed up with the slow pace of

the DA’s investigation, filed a petition in court asking to be appointed

trustee of his sister’s estate to prevent her husband from squandering

the rest of her fortune. An embarrassed and irate police force jumped

into the investigation, and a media storm ensued.

Scott hired an attorney and was now happy to ‘‘cooperate’’ with

authorities. He attempted to cast Evelyn as the dangerous one in their

relationship, pointing out that all her former husbands were dead.

He even claimed that he suspected Evelyn was trying to kill him at

one point early in their marriage, that he thought she was poisoning

him and had taken a Coke bottle to a chemist to see if any residue

could be detected.

The test results were negative. But curiously, at another point in

the interrogation, he described that his wife was sick around the very

time he ran those tests. Might he have actually been trying to poison

her and running his own test to see if he could get away with it?

He allowed police to search his house. Officers even probed the

backyard for buried remains, plunging six-foot-long steel rods into

the earth, then sniffing the tips for any smell of decomposition, but

found no sign of a body or that any murder at all had occurred. The

DA knew that Evelyn’s signature had been forged on several bank

documents. But without her around to testify that a crime had been

committed against her, it would be hard to charge her husband with

fraud. Without a body or some other strong evidence that Ewing had

killed her, it would be impossible to charge him with murder. They

were about to give up the search when a cop’s hunch broke the case

wide open.

One of the detectives searching the yard recalled a case he had

worked on in which a man buried his wife’s body in his next-door

neighbor’s yard, thinking police would never look outside the sus-pect’s own property. He hopped over the wall demarcating the

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Scott’s property from the canyon below it, near an incinerator, and

began brushing through the dense foliage and dumped incinerator

ashes.

First he found a dental bridge, then a few other small items, mostly

women’s toiletries, some pills Evelyn took for diverticulitis, and two

pairs of glasses.

Evelyn’s dentist positively identified the bridge as one he had made

for Mrs. Scott and recalled her wearing it when he last saw her—just

days before she went missing. Her eye doctor also confirmed that the

frames and lenses matched what Evelyn had ordered and picked up

two weeks before she disappeared. Would Evelyn have left home of

her own volition without the very things she needed to be able to eat

or read?

All the items, each of which was tied to Mrs. Scott, seemed to be

things she might have kept in the bathroom medicine cabinet or atop

a dressing table. They found no evidence that Evelyn herself had been

cremated inside the incinerator. But they did find the charred rem-nants of women’s undergarments—which Scott claimed he burned

because they were soiled and had a foul smell. He may have been trying

to simply hide and destroy bloody or otherwise incriminating evi-dence. But to burn or bury items of such a personal nature—dentures,

undergarments, medicine, and toiletries—suggests something even

more insidious. He had no problem living off his dead wife’s wealth,

but he seemed to have a great need to exorcise the most private and

intimate reminders of her earthly existence.

Q

A grand jury was convened, and Ewing Scott was subpoenaed

to appear. Marianne was subpoenaed, too, after police learned she

had been staying overnight at various clubs with him, even signing

room service checks as Mrs. L. E. Scott. She initially denied that they

had discussed marriage, but changed her testimony later in the day,

acknowledging that they talked of a future after ‘‘Mr. Scott’s affairs

were straightened out.’’

Ewing took the Fifth when he was called to the stand. But he was

placed under arrest after a car dealer testified that two days before

the start of the grand jury proceedings, Scott purchased a car from

him in cash under the name R. E. Scott— requesting the fastest car

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E R A S E D

on the lot, one that could travel ‘‘at least eighty miles per hour,’’ and

that had a large trunk whose dimensions he carefully measured. It

appeared that he was preparing to go on the run.

The grand jury returned an indictment on thirteen fraud charges

regarding misappropriation of his wife’s assets. Ewing Scott quickly

made bail, despite the DA’s pointing out that he likely ‘‘had done

away with’’ his wife. The grand jury was supposed to reconvene

to consider murder charges, but within days of making bail, the

defendant vanished. His wife’s car was found on the street—pierced

with two bullet holes. If Scott was trying to set up a kidnapping

scenario, to make himself look like a victim of foul play, he hadn’t

thought it out carefully enough. Both shots were fired from inside the

car, and there was no blood indicating that anyone had been hurt.

Ewing Scott remained at large for eleven months. While hiding

out in Canada, he was indicted for his wife’s murder. Moving around

under a variety of assumed names, he tried to woo yet another woman

he met in a cafe, promising her he would have ‘‘plenty of money’’ as

soon as his financial affairs were straightened out. She had no idea

that he was a fugitive wanted for killing his wife, but was put off by

his ‘‘overly smooth’’ come-ons.

During the time he was on the run, police learned of another

disturbing relationship Ewing had before he married Evelyn. A man

told police that his mother, heiress to a cannery fortune, dated Scott

for several years, until she came to believe that he was trying to

poison her. She had since died of natural causes, so they were unable

to investigate that relationship further. Had he, in fact, already tried

to kill another lover?

Ewing Scott was finally caught due to his smug overreaching. He

had slipped back into the United States to buy a new car in Detroit

and was nabbed by Canadian customs agents as he drove it into

Canada. It was a foolish and reckless thing to do, evidence of the

kind of narcissistic indulgences that seem to override an eraser killer’s

more hardened and criminally astute psychopathic instincts.

For the first time since Mrs. Scott went missing almost two years

before, her husband publicly appealed for his wife’s return—to ‘‘clear

this thing up,’’ he said, audaciously hosting a press conference right in

the U.S. attorney’s office in Detroit. Describing himself as ‘‘the goat’’

of a vast unnamed conspiracy, he went on the offensive, threatening

to sue ‘‘certain individuals in authority in Los Angeles as well as other

persons for defaming my character and causing me mental anguish

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by making unfounded and unprovable statements relating to my

actions and the disappearance of my wife.’’

He insisted that he had not attempted to flee justice but had been

waylaid as he left for a business trip by some thugs who forced him

off the road and stole his car. Believing himself a marked man, he

headed across the country and eventually to Canada.

He also began to point the finger toward an alternate suspect,

Raymond Throsby, Evelyn’s brother, who was fighting him for

control of her estate. In reference to the denture and eyeglasses found

near the incinerator, he claimed that Throsby had surreptitiously

taken a key to his home and had been seen lurking around the

property. (Throsby, however, had an alibi for the time Scott said his

wife disappeared. He was working and had time cards to prove it.)

‘‘It is my belief that my wife is alive,’’ Scott insisted, in his first

excursion into what would become a concerted effort to court the

press and win over public opinion. ‘‘I fervently believe she would

come forward if it is at all possible, unless she is held against

her will by those who stand to profit from such actions, or else

she may be suffering from amnesia.’’ Like Scott Peterson a half

century later, Ewing Scott seemed utterly confident that he would be

exonerated—so confident that he vowed to ‘‘crucify’’ those ‘‘sons of

bitches’’ who he said were out to persecute him.

On the day he entered a plea of not guilty, he mused about

the suave British actor Ronald Colman playing him in the movie

version of his life. He contracted with an agent to sell his story

rights, demanding full script approval, and hoped to get as much as

$200,000, with which he could ‘‘follow up a number of hot leads’’ on

his wife’s whereabouts.

Perhaps the defendant should not have been so confident. The

deputy district attorney appointed to prosecute him was J. Miller

Leavy, the man who sent the lovers’ lane bandit-rapist Caryl Chess-man to the gas chamber, as he had Barbara Graham, whose execution

was memorialized in the film
I Want to Live!
But Scott had an ace up

his sleeve, a card no one knew was even in the deck until after the

trial was over.

Q

The nine-week trial of Ewing Scott was at its time one of the longest

in state history. Prosecutors argued that Ewing carefully planned and

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