A Single Mom Was Captured from a Hospital Parking Lot After Receiving Calls from a Stalker

By May 1980, Dorothy Jane Scott, a 32-year-old single mother, had been receiving anonymous phone calls at work for months. The male caller both proclaimed his love and issued threats. He once directed Scott to go outside, where she found a dead rose on her car’s windshield.

On the night of May 28, 1980, Scott took a male co-worker to the hospital to get help for an infected bite. After he’d been treated, she went to the parking lot to get her car. She was never seen again.

In August 1984, Scott's body was discovered in Anaheim, Calif. Police never found her stalker or suspected killer, who the Orange County Sheriff's Office believe is the same person.

Dr. Chris Kunkle, a forensic and clinical psychologist and co-founder of the Cold Case Analysis Center at The College of Saint Rose, tells A&E Crime + Investigation, “Stalking usually starts with either some sort of prior relationship that they can't get over, or some perceived relationship.”

Scott worked as a secretary at a psychedelic paraphernalia shop in Anaheim, Calif. “He may have interacted with her and she didn't know it,” Kunkle says, “if he was a patron at a store or just a passerby.”

As the director of Cold Case Consultants of America, Alex Baber uses an AI program to track people’s digital footprints. He tells A&E Crime + Investigation he believes Scott began getting anonymous phone calls in October 1979. This could offer some clues about the stalker’s identity. “What happened in October that didn't happen in September and November?” Baber wonders. “New employees hired? Was there any change in her life?”

Whoever he was, the caller’s threats were escalating. Her mother described Scott being told, “When I get you alone, I will cut you up into bits so no one will ever find you,” according to The Orlando Sentinel.

Before she disappeared, Scott had debated buying a gun and started taking karate.

“Her own instincts were telling her to protect herself,” Kunkle says.

On May 28, 1980, Scott’s stalker likely followed her from a meeting at work to her home, where she changed her scarf, to UCI Medical Center in Orange, Calif. Scott was last seen in the hospital parking lot around 11:30 p.m.

“Striking in the parking lot when she was going out to get the vehicle shows that this may have been something that was very visceral in response,” Dr. Christina Lane, a criminologist who co-founded the Cold Case Analysis Center, tells A&E Crime + Investigation.

Kunkle believes the perpetrator “took advantage of the instance where she was alone in a seemingly desolate place to be able to act” and “probably wouldn't have approached her if she wasn't alone.”

The co-worker Scott had taken to the hospital, and another who’d accompanied them, saw her car drive away, but couldn’t make out who was at the wheel.

At around 4:30 a.m. on May 29, Scott’s car was found burning in an alley in Santa Ana, Calif., several miles from the hospital.

After an article about Scott’s disappearance was published in The Santa Ana Register on June 12, 1980, a man phoned the newspaper and told editor Pat Riley, “She was my love. I caught her cheating with another man…she denied having another man…I killed her.”

“Maybe he believed that the guy that she brought to the hospital, she was in a relationship with him. That made him boil over,” Kunkle says.

The police took the anonymous caller seriously because he knew what Scott had been wearing even though she’d changed scarves on her way to the hospital. (Some reports state Scott switched from a black scarf to a red one, but the Orange County Sheriff’s Department confirmed to A&E Crime + Investigation that she changed from a black to a white scarf.)

Kunkle says the caller may have reached out to the paper to link himself to Scott: “If he kills her and is never known, then he's still not recognized by her.”

A week after Scott disappeared, a man called her parents and said, “I’ve got her.”

For the next four years, the stalker regularly phoned her parents. He almost always called on Wednesdays and spoke to Scott’s mother. They weren’t able to trace the calls. The sheriff’s department tells A&E Crime + Investigation that there are “no recordings of evidentiary value” from the anonymous caller.

Kunkle says the calls were the stalker’s way of “continuing control.”

When Scott’s father answered the phone, the harassment stopped for a few months.

On August 6, 1984, construction workers found a body in a brushy area about 30 feet from Santa Ana Canyon Road in Anaheim. The bones had been burnt, possibly in a 1982 brush fire, and bleached by the sun.

Dental records confirmed it was Scott. In addition, her mother recognized a turquoise ring and watch found with the body. The watch had stopped at 12:30 a.m. on May 29, the day Scott was abducted.

Lane notes that the jewelry's presence “makes it a little clearer that the motivation was not monetary, the motivation of this act was truly to abduct her and take her.”

The calls restarted after Scott’s body was found.

DNA testing was not used in 1980, but fingerprinting was and blood samples were taken at the time.

Baber says the location of Scott’s body could offer clues. Her kidnapper “had to be familiar with that area to some degree. He just didn't randomly pick that area to drop her body.”

Lane says that, despite the fire, Scott’s car could still be a valuable source of evidence because of his presence in it.

“My understanding is he ignited the passenger side, which tells me something happened to her in that seat,” Baber notes.

The Orange County Sheriff's Department says the Santa Ana Police Department was last in possession of Scott’s vehicle. The Santa Ana Police Department did not respond to A&E Crime + Investigation's request for comment.

Answers may lie in Scott’s inner circle. “There are lots of cases where people just didn't recognize the signs of who was probably the stalker,” Kunkle says. “[In Scott’s case], I think he was seemingly close enough that people knew him but didn't know what he was doing.”