The Lady Vanishes

On the afternoon of May 16, 1955, according to L. (for Leonard) Ewing Scott, his wife Evelyn sent him to a drugstore to buy her some tooth powder. When he got back to their $75,000 house in west Los Angeles' expensive Bel Air section, she had vanished, leaving behind no note, no indication of where she had gone or why.

Scott never reported the disappearance to the police. He was used to eccentric behavior in his hard-drinking wife, he later explained. When friends asked about Evelyn, Scott said that she was under treatment in a distant sanitarium. Ten months passed, and then at last the cops came around. Searching the house and its landscaped grounds, the police found some interesting objects: in the incinerator were metal snaps from a woman's underclothing, and carelessly buried under a heap of leaves on an adjoining lot were false teeth and eyeglasses later identified as Evelyn Scott's.

On the evidence of these and other circumstantial items, L. Ewing Scott was convicted of the murder of his wife, sentenced last week to life imprisonment in an unusual case in which neither a murder weapon nor a body ever was found.

Money & Looks. Evelyn and L. Ewing Scott were married in 1949, when both were in their 50s. She had plenty of money, inherited from one of her four earlier husbands. Silver-haired, dark-eyed Ewing Scott had man-of-distinction looks. He had wooed and won another woman with inherited money back in the 1930s, but that marriage ended in divorce. In the interval between two wealthy wives, Scott clerked in a paint store, but he carried a business card billing himself as an "investment broker." The only noticeable work he did during his second marriage was writing How to Fascinate Men, a brief handbook for women. It made him no money at all: he never paid the printer's $6,818.64 bill, and a court awarded the printer all the copies.

During the six years between her wedding to Scott and her disappearance, Evelyn Throsby Scott cashed some $223,000 worth of securities, in addition to drawing about $180,000 in income from her estate. When she disappeared, there was a lot of money lying around in a dozen-odd bank accounts and safe-deposit boxes. According to subsequent testimony, Scott, using forged signatures, helped himself liberally to the money, spent a bundle of $100 bills on travel, Las Vegas gambling and gifts for a shapely divorcee.

Circumstantial Corpus. Shortly after the police started looking into Evelyn's disappearance, a Los Angeles grand jury indicted Scott on 13 counts of forgery and theft. Jumping $25,000 bail, he fled to Canada. A year later Canadian customs officers arrested him as he was trying to re-enter Canada after buying a new 1957 Ford in Detroit. Meanwhile, the grand jury had reconsidered the case and returned a new indictment against Scott. The charge: murder.

Any devotee of fictional whodunits could plainly see that Scott did not murder his wife. Circumstantial evidence pointed to him, and in whodunits the suspect with the most evidence against him is never the murderer. Furthermore, there seemed to be no corpus delicti: in whodunits, corpus delicti means a corpse.

But in law, corpus delicti means not the body of a victim but the "body of the offense," i.e., evidence that the crime in question has been committed. Even in murder cases that evidence can be circumstantial. In California over the years, at least five defendants had been convicted of murdering victims whose bodies were never found.

Unconvincing Witnesses. During Scott's eleven-week trial, the defense produced witnesses who testified that they had seen Evelyn Scott after May 16, 1955. Apparently none of this testimony convinced the jurors: after deliberating for 29 hours they found L. Ewing Scott guilty of first-degree murder. Two days later the jury sat again to fix the sentence of life imprisonment.*

Scott kept right on protesting that his wife must be alive somewhere. "If there is anyone who has any idea where she is or knows anything about her," he said to newsmen, "I would like them to communicate with my attorney."

* Under a new California law, a jury that convicts a defendant of a capital crime must then decide, in a separate proceeding, between the death penalty and life imprisonment.

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