Body of Man Suspected of Killing His Heiress Wife Is Discovered

Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company
The New York Times

Body of Man Suspected of Killing His Heiress Wife Is Discovered
By JOSEPH BERGER, Special to The New York Times

Three months after Anne Scripps Douglas, an heiress to a newspaper fortune, was bludgeoned to death, a decomposed body found on the Bronx bank of the Hudson River was identified as that of her husband and accused murderer, Scott S. Douglas.

The discovery closed a case that had surprised Bronxville, where the Douglases lived, and also brought relief to Mrs. Douglas's relatives. They had said at several news conferences and in interviews that they believed Mr. Douglas was still alive and might reappear to hurt them or kidnap the Douglases' 3-year-old daughter, Victoria. "It was a surprise, but the nightmare is over," said Anne Devoy Morell, Mrs. Douglas's 22-year-old daughter by a previous marriage, at a Manhattan news conference.

"We don't have to worry about him coming after us or Tori," said Alexandra Scripps Morell, 24, Mrs. Douglas's other daughter by that marriage.

But lawyers involved in the case said there was still a strong possibility of a court battle if the Scripps and Douglas families choose to fight over custody of the orphaned child.

The corpse, in jeans with $507 in a pocket, was found Wednesday by a Metro-North Railroad mechanic on a tide-washed bank of the Hudson near the tracks that run along the shore in Riverdale. A positive identification by the New York City Medical Examiner's Office based on dental records was announced here by Jeanine Pirro, the Westchester County District Attorney, who headed an investigation that involved at least five police departments.

Mrs. Pirro said that Mr. Douglas, a 38-year-old house painter whose working-class world clashed with that of his patrician wife's, had jumped off the Tappan Zee Bridge less than two hours after hitting his wife four or five times in the face with a claw hammer on New Year's Eve. The time of his death was confirmed today by one grisly detail: a gold watch on his body was stopped at precisely 12 o'clock. The 47-year-old Mrs. Douglas died six days after the beating.

Law-enforcement authorities had always been open to the possibility that Mr. Douglas might have jumped to his death because his 1982 BMW, its engine still running, was found abandoned on the bridge at 12:02 A.M. New Year's Day. A blood-stained hammer was on the passenger seat.

But the authorities issued a warrant for his arrest on murder charges and pursued an intensive hunt because no one had seen Mr. Douglas leave the car or leap and because the Scripps family argued vehemently that he was capable of staging a suicide to throw investigators off his track. Mrs. Douglas's grown daughters had told authorities of his threats to kidnap Victoria and "disappear off the face of the earth."

Today, with the possibility of a murder trial eliminated, Mrs. Pirro provided one of the fullest accounts of the Douglases last hours together and the murder itself.

The Douglases, who married in October 1988 but experienced only a short period of happiness, had been feuding for weeks over Mrs. Douglas's plan to seek a divorce. Mrs. Douglas, an heiress to the Scripps-Howard newspaper and communications empire fortune and nine years older than her husband, had obtained an order of protection forbidding Mr. Douglas to take Victoria out of the house.

A New Argument

On the afternoon of New Year's Eve, Mrs. Pirro said, Mr. Douglas became freshly enraged because Mrs. Douglas had received a call from her former husband, Anthony X. Morell.

"The defendant was very threatened by the phone call," Mrs. Pirro said. "He started yelling that it was his house. Scott Douglas even got on the phone and told Tony Morell not to call anymore."

Mr. Douglas spent much of the rest of the day drinking vodka and threatening Mrs. Douglas. The argument was so fierce that her daughter, Anne, offered to stay home for the evening. But Mrs. Douglas, who was packing clothes for the needy, insisted that she go out for New Year's Eve, which she did about 10 P.M.

Mrs. Douglas, Mrs. Pirro said, changed into nightclothes and went into their upstairs bedroom. The Bronxville Police Chief, Anthony Divernieri, said that between 10:30 and 11 P.M. Mr. Douglas entered the bedroom and struck his wife, mostly in the right side of her face. Victoria witnessed the beating, Mrs. Pirro said.

Mr. Douglas then drove off toward the Tappan Zee Bridge, but he stopped at a gas station on the Gov. Thomas E. Dewey Thruway to make two apparently agonized phone calls to his brother, Todd, and his sister, Pyr. It was Todd, an investment banker in Manhattan, who called the Bronxville police, though not until 3:50 A.M., to tell them to check the Douglases' home. Todd Douglas also told the police that Scott had said, "I've done something really bad this time."

Search Started

After finding Mrs. Douglas clinging to life and learning of the abandoned car, authorities searched the Hudson River. But they gave up after several days, deciding that if Mr. Douglas had drowned, his body would have sunk to the river bottom and would not reappear until spring. The icebound water would retard the formation of decomposition gases that might bring the body to the surface.

The 6-foot, 165-pound body was found Wednesday at 12:20 P.M. by Al Thomas, a 40-year-old mechanic from Yonkers who had been following the case in the newspapers and was walking along the track to service a crane. The body, which he said he immediately realized might be Mr. Douglas, was six feet from the water's edge and a quarter mile south of Riverdale's Metro-North station, near a building at 4675 Palisades Avenue.

The body was clothed in jeans, green plaid shirt and sneakers and there was an old scar on the back of the head, details that authorities had known would confirm the body as Mr. Douglas's.

Mrs. Pirro also cleared up other aspects of the case. Although family members had said that Mr. Douglas had purchased expensive camping equipment for a getaway, Mrs. Pirro said the cost was greatly exaggerated and the equipment has never been found. Authorities have also not located a diamond necklace that belonged to Mrs. Douglas and that the daughters suspected a fleeing Mr. Douglas of taking.

Mrs. Douglas's great-great-grandfather, James Edmund Scripps, founded The Detroit News in 1873. He built the Evening News Association, which was sold to Gannett Company Inc. for $717 million in 1985.

In a telephone interview, James E. Scripps 4th, Mrs. Douglas's brother, said: "I'm just glad it's over. I expected to feel jubilation, but it's just relief."

He said the family was prepared to deal with the possibility of a custody fight. In her will, Mrs. Douglas, who left an estate of $1.3 million but only $10,000 and a small annual payment to Mr. Douglas, had appointed Mr. Scripps the guardian of Victoria, but a petition about to be filed by the Scripps family will seek to have that role assigned to Mr. Scripps's sister, Mary Scripps Carmody. However, Todd Douglas and his wife, Diane, are reported to be considering a bid for custody.

Luis Andrew Penichet, who represents the family of Scott Douglas, said today that the discovery of Mr. Douglas's body "only proves what we said all along.

"It was our contention that it was a tragic loss of two lives," he said.

GRAPHIC: Photos: Police officers on Wednesday investigated the site on the Bronx side of the Hudson River where the body of Mr. Douglas was found. The body was discovered in the area at right. (Chris Maynard for The New York Times); Scott S. Douglas, who was suspected of killing his wife, Anne. (pg. B1); Anne Scripps Douglas in a photograph from last December. (pg. B4)

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