''I’ve got her" - Murder of Dorothy Jane Scott

Dorothy Jane Scott was a single mother in 1980 who kept receiving mysterious phone calls at her job in Anaheim, California. Dorothy thought the voice sounded familiar, but she could never place it. The caller threatened to cut her into pieces and let her know he knew exactly where she was every minute of the day.

Alarmed, Dorothy took up karate. It didn't help her. One night she attended a meeting and became alarmed at the appearance of a coworker. Dorothy and another coworker took their friend to the ER to get checked out.

Once the coworker was treated, Dorothy offered to get her car and pull around to the front of the hospital. As Dorothy's two coworkers waited for her, they saw her race past them, high beams blinding them. Dorothy was never seen again.

A few hours later, her car was found burning in an alleyway.A week after she went missing, her mother Vera received a phone call. “Are you related to Dorothy Scott?” When she replied yes, the caller said, “I’ve got her,” then hung up.

This taunting behavior repeated as weeks went on. The same caller would tease her family about “having” Dorothy and confessed to a radio station “I killed her. I killed Dorothy Scott. She was my love.” He went on to describe details that hadn’t been released to the press—Dorothy’s red scarf she wore that night, her coworker’s spider bite. The calls finally stopped in 1984. Almost four months later, a construction worker discovered both dog and human remains in some brush. With the bones were a turquoise ring and a watch that had stopped at May 29, 1980, 12:30 a.m.

Dorothy’s mother identified the ring as having belonged to her daughter. A week after the bones had been positively identified as Dorothy Scott and an announcement was run in the local newspaper, her family got two more phone calls from the same mysterious caller, asking only in a knowing voice: “Is Dorothy home?”Her killer was never identified.

-Sanika Satam