Copyright 1994 Newsday, Inc.
Newsday
He had every reason in the world to make this marriage work. But no one who knew
her well understood why she kept him around. When she finally came to her
senses, it was too late.
BY CAROLE AGUS. STAFF WRITER
POLICE ARE STILL searching for Scott Douglas, who disappeared on New Year's Eve.
He is wanted in the murder of his wife, Anne Scripps Douglas, who was found
beaten in their Westchester home the next morning. The Scripps family has posted
a $ 100,000 reward for his capture.
Through extensive interviews with people close to the couple and the case, the
following portrait emerged, tracing the roots of their doomed relationship and
why it reached its tragic conclusion.
NEW YEAR'S EVE
While revelers celebrated throughout the land, Anne Scripps Douglas was beaten
to death. Inside her stately, pillared Colonial on Avon Road in Bronxville, on a
block like a scene on a Christmas card, hammer blows rained on her head,
smashing her cheek, crushing her skull, beyond the skill of doctors to repair.
Said a law enforcement source: "There was a witness."
Scott Douglas, the husband, disappeared that night, as he had threatened so many
times to do. His car was found idling on the Tappan Zee Bridge, said law
enforcement sources, with a bloody hammer inside it.
Left behind was the daughter they were fighting over, 3-year-old Victoria,
called "Tori," the child Douglas said he would take with him, the child he'd
always wanted, the child even those who hated him believed he loved.
"She is definitely an eyewitness," said a law enforcement source. Do authorities
credit her statements? "Absolutely." They will not, however, be relying on the
uncorroborated testimony of a three-year-old child, they said. "There is a
strong circumstantial case already. We do not need an eyewitness." Does it help?
"Absolutely."
While Anne Douglas lay dying in a hospital, this is what Tori told the family:
"Daddy was giving Mommy so many bad boo-boos. Daddy gave Mommy many boo-boos.
Why is Mommy wearing warpaint?" Later she said, "Is Mommy an angel in heaven?
Does Mommy still have boo-boos on her face?"
That's what the family told police. The child, said family sources, has since
seen a therapist. Her statements have been repeated and evaluated. She is now
under tight security.
She couldn't sleep after what she saw, said a source close to the family. "You
have to lie down and go to sleep with her. She can't sleep by herself any more."
CHRISTMAS EVE
There was an open house in Bronxville on Christmas Eve, but Anne Scripps Douglas
wasn't going. She had just returned from the hospital with a patch over her eye.
That's what she told Gretchen Devlin - one of her best friends for 25 years and
the woman who would write her eulogy - when Devlin called that night.
They talked in code, as they always did. Anne had confided to friends and family
what they later would tell police: She couldn't talk on the phone because she
thought the phone was bugged by her husband. That she'd found strange wires in
the basement.
The friends had secret signals whenever they called. "Do you want to have
lunch?" meant she needed to talk to them outside the house.
"Okey-dokey" meant Scott was around and she couldn't talk, other than to say
that everything was fine.
On Christmas Eve, Anne told Devlin she had a scratched cornea and would be
staying home. They talked in code. Anne said she was sending a Christmas card.
That meant it held a message. Handwritten on it were the words: "Wouldn't you
know instead of decking the halls, I would get decked myself?"
Devlin feared the worst after the lunch they'd had the day before, one where
Anne gave her what would be a parting gift, a pewter wine cork decorated with
grapes.
"She said he pushed her down the stairs, had thrown her on the floor and kicked
her. She said she put up her hands. She said, 'Take anything you want, but don't
hurt me anymore. I can't take it anymore.' She said he had pulled her hair so
hard she thought he was going to pull it right out of her head," said Devlin.
Devlin wasn't surprised by what she heard at lunch. She had personally witnessed
Scott's treatment of Anne at a wedding in October, a wedding he wasn't
originally invited to, because, said a member of the wedding, "There were enough
people there who wanted to punch him out."
The story that finished Scott with most of Anne's friends was the one about the
present he gave her in 1991, for their second anniversary: "He bought her a
bathroom scale. She weighed 105 pounds. He said 'you better use this every day.
I don't want to see an inch of fat on you.' "
Scott refused to dance at the wedding, Devlin recalled. Anne got up to dance
with a woman and did a split on the dance floor. "He grabbed her off the dance
floor by the arm," said Devlin. "He yelled, 'You're acting like a slut! Everyone
is laughing at you!' Anne ran to hide in a utility closet and I went with her.
He threw open the door. He grabbed her wrist. He said, 'You're getting out of
here right now.' Anne was crying. 'Why is he doing this to me? Why does he
continually hurt me? Why is he trying to destroy my life?' "
He wanted $ 200,000-$ 250,000 to get out of the marriage, Devlin said, and Anne
had agreed to pay it, but only under court auspices. "She was afraid he was
going to blackmail her . . . that he would kidnap their daughter."
Anne described over lunch what her life had become: They had separate bedrooms
when Scott came home at all. He would often leave the house in the middle of the
night without explanation. He would return home from work at 11:30 p.m. When
Anne asked where he was, he replied: "Pergament." The store closes at 9:30.
It was the day before Christmas Eve when Anne told Devlin about the nights. "She
said he would wake her at two, three, four o'clock in the morning. Every time he
woke her, he accused her of something else. He called her stupid, he called her
a slut.
"He'd wake her up and say, 'You're having an affair. You have a disease, you're
disgusting.' " She would rush to the gynecologist to prove it wasn't true. He'd
accuse her of renting dirty movies, when she'd rented cartoons. She'd hurry to
the rental store to make sure nothing X-rated was rented in her name.
She told Devlin of nights, nights like horror movies, where she'd wake to find
herself gripped by him, unable to move as he accused her, paralyzed by his
threat: to cut her into little pieces, scatter her all over New York and kidnap
Tori. She'd placed a hammer under the bed for safety, said law enforcement
sources. It was the instrument that would kill her.
THE WEDDING DAY, 1989
Twenty friends gathered before the fireplace of Anne's living room, on a bright
October day, for the wedding of the house painter and the heiress.
When Scott looked at his bride, in her ivory lace, tea-length wedding dress,
with three tiers of pleated organza, he saw a delicate beauty of such graceful
sensibility that people likened her to the little swans she collected. She had a
social position so secure that Town and Country devoted three full pages to her
first marriage. He saw an heiress to a famous fortune, the one amassed by James
E. Scripps, founder of the Detroit News. He had looked with outsider eyes at the
lives inside these grand homes while he painted their walls. He'd had affairs,
said police, with wealthy women in Greenwich and Rye.
Now, on his wedding day, he was about to join the privileged life that Anne was
living with her teenaged daughters, Alexandra and Anne Morell. It was everything
he wanted, he confided to Phyllis Creighton, his former live-in girlfriend and
confidante of many years: "He thought it would be like the Brady Bunch."
When Anne looked at Scott, she saw what other women had seen before: "He was a
good-looking guy," said Eleanore Hannon, his downstairs neighbor at the
Greenwich apartment building he used as an office, who used to date his
roommate. She describes herself as "the one woman in Greenwich who didn't sleep
with Scott." She could see why others did. "He had a great body, was very good
looking, charming, affable, a Boy Scout of a guy. With a light and dark side."
Anne was 42 and Scott was 33 when they met on Super Bowl Sunday, 1989, at a
homey pub called Kelly's Sea Level, locally famous for its atmosphere and food.
They chatted. Within days, he tracked down her phone number and asked her out.
Anne was recently divorced. "Her biological clock was running out," said a close
friend. "She wanted another baby."
She told friends he seemed a hardworking man who prized family above all else,
as she did. She'd been divorced the previous year. "It was hard for her to be
single," said Devlin. "Anne was more afraid of being alone than anything else.
She had believed in Tony [Morell, her first husband], believed in marriage . . .
She was afraid to be alone raising her kids."
So when, in October, 1989, he said they must marry "now," recalled Devlin, Anne
was swept away. He would be only the second lover in her life; the first was her
first husband. Against the advice of her friends, she scheduled the ceremony for
five days later, refusing to demand a prenuptial agreement.
The wedding guests saw a gigolo conning an heiress. Who was this upstart house
painter, they said among themselves, crashing his way into Catholic aristocracy?
Here he was in the rarefied world where Bronxville speaks to Rye and Greenwich
and none of them speaks to Port Chester. Here was a high school dropout
presuming on a world where teenagers go to prep schools and boarding schools
like Kent, Westminster, St. Paul's or Rye Country Day.
Here was a world where parents just naturally belong to the Westchester Country
Club or Apawamus and / or the American Yacht Club and have second homes in the
Hamptons or Palm Beach and play tennis in Bermuda, where daughters are
debutantes and sons are escorts at the St. Vincent Cotillion, a ball so elite
that young women are introduced to society in the presence of the Cardinal
himself.
And then there was Scott.
"He was classless," said one of the 20 wedding guests. "A name dropper. You
could see that immediately. He was shifty, he had a slimy, weak handshake,
didn't look you straight in the eye, had no conversation, had nothing to say.
What could he talk about, house painting? He didn't speak our language."
His mother did not attend the wedding. He said that his mother was dead. He told
Anne he was Jewish. Later on, Anne found out that he was Episcopalian, that he
had two sisters he'd never mentioned and that his mother was alive and living in
Rye. He said he'd been christened in Larchmont, but Anne called every church and
there wasn't any record. He lied about so many things that Anne hired a private
detective, a close friend told police, at least to find out this much: "Is Scott
Douglas his real name?"
Later on, after her death, neighbors like Sue Boles and Dorothy Brennan would
say that Anne was innocent and all too trusting. Clearly, she knew this much:
marrying Scott would not go over with her family. Her mother, brother and sister
didn't attend the wedding.
"We didn't even know about it," said her mother, Anne Scripps, 72. "She knew I
wouldn't approve. I'm a Catholic. She knew I was sick. She didn't want to upset
me too much."
On that bright October day when Anne was completely swept away, a joke made the
rounds in the Wall Street circles of Rye: "Did you hear about that big bonfire
in town? They're burning Scott Douglas' paintbrushes."
THE NEWLYWEDS
In marrying Anne, Scott suffered from the common delusion the non-monied have
about old-money people: that marrying them makes them rich themselves. That
marrying an heiress makes the husband an heir. It doesn't.
In virtually all old-money families like the Scrippses, fortunes are locked into
trusts specifically to prevent money from passing out of the family. The trust
is generally not even mentioned in the will, as was the case in Anne Douglas'.
The fortune is automatically passed down to the generations of children, who
live on the interest, while the principle remains intact or keeps growing. Wills
can be drawn limiting a spouse's inheritance. That's what Anne did in 1991,
according to documents filed in Westchester. With the marriage already on the
rocks, she drew up a will leaving Scott enough money to keep him on his knees.
State law entitled him to a third of her $ 1 million estate. But the will was
structured so that his third would be placed in trust, yielding him about $
6,500 a year that was taxable.
Scott didn't have a clue about any of this, said Anne's brother, James E.
Scripps IV, who said Scott was kept financially in the dark as much as possible.
Anne would not make her bank accounts joint. "She filed her tax return
separately," said Scripps.
Neither did Scott have a glimmer of understanding of his own proper role:
Husbands are expected at least to give the appearance of being self-supporting,
regardless of what the reality is. The husband is expected always to pay in
public, always to play the gentleman. These are the unwritten rules.
"She paid for everything," said Scripps. "He would charge my sister for any kind
of job he did in the house. If he was painting houses, what did he do with his
money?" She paid all the bills, the gas, the electric, the children, everything,
said sources close to the case, and gave him money besides. Neither did he
support his illegitimate daughter, now 7, said law enforcement sources.
"If they went to dinner and a movie," Devlin said, "She paid. She thought he
would share in the cost of the house, but he acted like a gigolo. She was used
to being treated like a lady."
Once, said a friend of Anne's, he exploded: "I've gotten more from women I've
dated for two weeks than I got from you in two years."
They fought about her refusal to keep a joint bank account and buy him a new
BMW. She kept her finances private. So did he. He never told her he had two bank
accounts in two different names and Social Security numbers, said police. These
bank accounts were found intact when Scott disappeared.
"Anne was taught to be protective about her wealth," said a close friend. She
was taught, "You inherit money, you keep that money in your name. Your money is
your money. She was taught early on about the value of money."
They had no sooner settled down to married life than the fighting began between
Scott and Alexandra, Anne's daughter. They despised each other. Scott forced
Anne to get Alexandra to move out, said a close friend of Anne's. "Scott would
say she called him a dirtbag . . . and uneducated," said Creighton.
The fights intensified after Tori was born. Scott found he would have neither
money nor "the Brady Bunch" lifestyle he'd pictured. He found himself even more
an outsider, as he told his friend Creighton. "Especially the friends, if they
were that type like she was, no matter what he did it was wrong."
GROWING PAINS: HERS
Anne and Scott were not the first to seek in marriage what had been so
profoundly missing from their childhoods.
For Anne, what was missing was an average, American family. Born in Grosse
Point, Mich., one of the nation's wealthiest suburbs, she had debuted in Vienna
at the Schwarzenburg Palace and at the Debutante Cotillion and Christmas Ball in
New York. Her bridal attendants included Princess Immaculata Hapsburg of Vienna
and the ushers included Victor Emmanuel Jr. of the House of Savoy, direct
descendant of the king of Italy. She'd had expensive schooling at the best
Catholic girls' schools, expensive clothes and premier vacations, and wanted
nothing more than a '50-style, close, suburban family.
"I didn't have much parents in my childhood," she would tell her closest
friends. For the first 12 years of her life, while she attended the Convent of
the Sacred Heart, her mother suffered from what would later be diagnosed as
manic depression. "I just used to be depressed," said Anne Scripps, 72. Her
father, James E. Scripps III, who would later devote his life to helping
alcoholics, was an alcoholic, absent figure in her early years.
Much of the parenting fell to her grandmother, Ruth Ruwe, whom she always called
"Nonna," although Anne continued to live at home. Mrs. Lester Ruwe, of Grosse
Pointe Farms, remarried after her husband, James E. Scripps Jr., died in his
20s. She was a socialite and friend of the Ford family, also of Grosse Pointe,
who introduced Anne to society and royalty, here and in Europe.
When she was 12, her family moved to Loudonville, N.Y., outside Albany. She
attended the Kenwood School there, then moved to New York to graduate from the
Duchesne Residence School and the New York School of Interior Design, according
to her wedding announcement. For a short time, she worked as a secretary at
International Textile Distributors. Then, in 1969, she married the man she would
always call her "prince in shining armor," Anthony X. Morell, a stockbroker from
Rye.
She raised her daughters with such diligence and care, it was as though she were
making up for her own childhood. Where her mother had been absent, Anne was
there, telling her children each day that she loved them, walking them to and
from school each day, so determinedly housebound that she didn't even try to get
a driver's license until she was 41.
GROWING PAINS: HIS
From his Port Chester apartment, Scott Douglas, who, too, felt he'd been
deprived of a stable childhood, looked northward toward Greenwich and southward
toward Rye and lusted for the good life. He grew up in Larchmont, then moved to
Rye after his father died and his mother, Yolanda Acowitz, remarried. "His
father dying did a real number on him," said Creighton. He didn't get along with
his stepfather, she said he told her. He dropped out of Rye High School, then
audited some college classes in Boston, becoming friendly with some dormitory
students there while living in Port Chester.
He commuted between Boston and Port Chester, until he moved in with Creighton,
who was 12 years his senior, divorced and had two children. She had been a go-go
dancer, then was severely burned in a fire, turned waitress and now is a
saleswoman. Her children adored him and so did she. They lived together for
three years, until 1977, but in all that time, he didn't introduce her to his
mother. He painted his first apartment while with her. "No one taught him
painting. I said, gee, you're an expert painter."
Scott, she said, "was so much a person for life. Even ants. He wouldn't let me
kill them, he said everything should be entitled to live. And the flies, he
said, throw them out. He didn't want to see anything killed."
Still, said Hannon, his Greenwich neighbor, "There was a dead raccoon in his
freezer." Taxidermy was his hobby. He seemed to surround himself with death, she
said. "He left his pet cockatiel out in the sun. It died of sunstroke."
Creighton and Scott stayed friendly. Her husband got him a job as the caretaker
of a Port Chester property owned by Wallace Rouse, on Quintard Drive; he lived
in a cottage on the property from 1980 until 1986.
"There were a lot of girls and I heard a lot of fights," said Rouse. "He was a
woman chaser. Anne Scripps was small potatoes compared to some of the gals.
There were Mercedes, Cadillacs . . . all pulling up to see him. The gals he went
around with were very substantial, very beautiful. He was an earthshaker, had a
personality to make movie stars look like a bunch of bums. Only close friend he
had was his brother.
"He'd never marry a poor woman, told me I was a sucker. He used to tell the gals
this was his place, he'd entertain them at my pool. He had no respect for women,
said women are nothing but a bunch of whores. He'd be fighting with one of them
inside with another waiting for him outside.
"I'll tell you this, he never jumped off that bridge. He hated cold water. He
never went in the pool one time in all the years. Said the water was too cold.
No way he jumped into that freezing cold January water."
SUNDAY, THE DAY AFTER CHRISTMAS
Scott and Anne went to church in Eastchester to avoid seeing any of Anne's
friends.
Then Scott took off for his Greenwich apartment at 174 Davis Ave., where Hannon
lives. He knocked on her door and hastened in, tense and agitated.
"He said he had a holiday depression, that he was having trouble with his
mother. I think now he was talking about his wife." He'd denied to Hannon and to
the other building residents that he'd ever been married.
"He said she gives him a hard time, nothing makes her happy. He was gripping
onto things. His eyes were bugging out, like he was having a mini-breakdown. He
told me about his dad, said he was a professor at Columbia, a bad alcoholic who
died in his forties." He was feeling guilty about letting a medical school have
his body and leaving him to be buried in Potter's Field.
"He said, 'Man, I am so stressed out.' He cursed every other word out of his
mouth." He complained about not being able to see his illegitimate
seven-year-old daughter." He told Hannon that he also had an illegitimate
five-year-old daughter, that he couldn't see her, either, Hannon said.
"If things get really bad for me, I'll jump off the bridge the way my friend
did," he told her.
"Your friend really did that?"
"No," he said.
Hannon recalled that the mother of another tenant had recently died. Flowers
were sent to the son. "Scott said, 'He's lucky. I know someone I wish was dead.
He kept saying it over and over. I know someone that I wish was dead.' "
SUNDAY, THE DAY AFTER NEW YEAR'S
At 5 a.m., police pounded on the door of the Greenwich apartment house where
Scott lived. They asked for his whereabouts. Hannon didn't know. The next day,
she heard footsteps in the apartment above her and she thought Scott had
returned.
She called the police.
They arrived and spoke to her but did not enter Scott's apartment. After awhile,
they left. "Whoever that person was," said Hannon, "he got away."
MONDAY, JAN. 3
This was the crime that greeted Jeanine Pirro on her first day in office as the
Westchester County district attorney. A former County Court judge, she brought
to the job a background of devotion to domestic violence issues: As an assistant
district attorney, she had created the office's first domestic violence bureau,
one of the first in the country.
"I had not even gotten my coat off," she said, "And I find a domestic violence
situation that has reached the highest level. It was a wake-up call for all of
us in law enforcement to recognize the seriousness of domestic disputes. They do
lead to domestic homicides."
Scripps family members would charge - and some newspapers would report - that on
Dec. 6 New Rochelle Family Court Judge Ingrid Braslow refused to grant an order
barring Scott from the house - in spite of assertions that he beat her and tried
to shove her from a car. Court documents show that these allegations relate to a
1991 case that was not before Braslow. The transcript of the Dec. 6 hearing
shows Braslow was not asked to remove Scott.
Next she turned for help to the Coalition for Family Justice in Westchester,
where she described Scott's violence in detail. Its chairwoman, Monica Getz,
advised her to move into one of their shelters. But her own attorney advised her
to remain at home or it would be "abandonment," said Scripps, her brother. Then
she went back to Family Court the week she was killed to beg the court for
protection, said Scripps. "She was told the judge was on vacation."
"She was trapped," said her brother. "She was absolutely trapped." Said Getz:
"It was a textbook case of system failure."
Against this background, Pirro decided to handle the case herself.
The family has offered a $ 100,000 reward for anyone with information leading to
"the arrest and prosecution" of Scott Douglas. It is unlikely, law enforcement
sources say, for the body to have surfaced if he did jump off that bridge. "The
temperature of the water precludes the gases from expanding. He would not drift
to the surface until spring." However, there are few people close to this case
who believe Scott ever hit that water.
So, while the investigation proceeds in earnest, there are those who just wait
for the spring and hope.
"We'd all like to have a swing with the claw hammer," said Sue Boles, one of
Anne's neighbors. "This man has got to pay for what he did."
EPILOGUE
Anne Scripps' dream of a simple, happy household eluded her. She divorced her
first husband, Anthony X. Morell in 1988, believing that he drank too much and
was seeing other women. On New Year's Eve, as Anne lay dying, Morell was
jobless, nearly penniless and terminally ill in an intensive-care ward in a
Veterans Administration hospital in Pittsburgh, said sources close to the
family. He had cirrhosis of the liver, had been given "from six weeks to six
months to live" and then got his life back when the children directed that their
mother's liver be donated to him.
"'He's alive today because Anne died," said Brennan. "Truth is stranger than
fiction."
