Serial Killer Documentary - Jason Scott’s Secret Life

I was imagining how she had to have felt in that predicament. It's just heartbreaking to be a 16-year-old girl.

A monster like that comes in and takes your life from you.

Jason Scott was an extraordinarily dangerous criminal who masqueraded as an ordinary person.

He's saying to you, criminal justice system, I am smarter than you.

If you feel like somebody is watching you, they are.

I'm successful at doing it.

Why stop?

It don't cross your mind that sick people like that exist. My life was perfect. before everything happened.

Upper Marlborough, a suburb 20 miles east of Washington, D.C., is home to the Lofton family. Dad, Kirk. Mom, Karen. Two sons, Kirk Jr. and Keon. And daughter, Carissa.

My daughter was a very inspiring, very beautiful gift.

She was a gift. She went through some struggles.

She had an open-heart surgery because she had something going on with a valve in her heart and everything, and she bounced right back like it was nothing.

I mean, she was very strong.

I am Keon Lofton. Karen Lofton was my mother. Carissa was my younger sister. My mother was a really caring person. She was in the nursing field as long as I can remember. I remember being a little child and going with her to work with her and just all the love that she would get from her coworkers.

She was probably one of the best nurses of her time.

Carissa's personality around that age was typical teenage girl. She was still trying to figure herself out, pleasant, kind person. You can see her modeling after the characteristics and values and things that my mother instilled in all of us, and you can just see the trajectory of the type of woman that she was going to become.

In 2008, Kirk moves away after his marriage to Karen breaks down.

Moved to Georgia in 2008. I was remarried. I still remained in contact with my daughter. As a matter of fact, she was supposed to move down here and go to college.

Prince George's County 911 Center.

What is your emergency?

Ma'am, I've been shot.

My mother has been shot.

I'm bleeding through the ass.

Please slow down.

What's the address?

You know, if we need any kind of testament to Carissa's courage, this is a young teenager, a 16-year-old, who has been involved in a home invasion, which is one of the most terrifying things anybody can imagine. She's been shot, and she has the kind of strength of mind to call 911 while she's bleeding. and to report to them that she has been shot, her mom has been shot, and she tells the operator, you know, I'm bleeding to death, please hurry. Unfortunately, the phone is hung up. And by the time they get there, it's too late.

So the night of the, when everything happened, I was at my girlfriend's house. My mother-in-law now told me that two women had been found, killed on our street. And she told me to call and check with my mother and sister. So I called and nobody answered. So I kept calling, I kept calling and nobody answered. So I just got up and left and started, you know, got in my car.

I was driving.

It had to be about two, three o'clock in the morning. Got there to the house, probably about a 10-minute drive. Police kind of had, like, the street blocked off, whatever, and I got out. I was trying to see who it was, and a police officer or detective asked who I was, and I told him my name. And he said, okay, we got the son right here. And I just broke down then because I knew, it came to realization that, okay, it was him.

I was in the room, asleep, and my son, my oldest son, Kirk Jr., he called me at probably, you know, three in the morning, four in the morning, something like that. He was crying, and I said, what's wrong? He said, have you talked to Keyon yet?

Ma and Carissa got killed.

The first thing that I thought was, They got into a car accident or something like that, but then he said they were shot. I immediately got off the phone with him and I called my other son, my younger son, and he told me that somebody came into our house, the family house, and killed both of them.

It's just heartbreaking to be a 16-year-old girl and be in the comfort of your own bed, and a monster like that comes in and takes your life from you. I was imagining how she had to have felt in that predicament, somebody storming in, you know, shooting you, and you have to, you know, call 911, trying to get somebody to save you. You know, it's heartbreaking.

With no signs of forced entry, the police suspect the murders have been committed by someone with access to the Loftons' home.

They kind of step back and go, okay, what do we do? We start from the innermost circle and we work our way out. Most often, sadly, those are the perpetrators. One of the first persons to come on the radar is Karissa's older.

Brother, Keon.

Honestly, I didn't know why I was in a police car. I had no idea. Everything was an immediate shock right there. From there, I remember being in the interrogation room.

Did your mom set the alarm for the house? Mm-hmm.

Okay, all the time?

Every day, every time.

Would you have hurt your mom and sister?

No. You wouldn't have hurt your mom and.

Sister, though?

And I remember them letting me come out to, like, one of their desks and letting me hear, like, a snippet of the 911 call. Anybody who's getting accused of anything they haven't done, they're going to be upset. When I'm in that interrogation room and I'm hearing... them accusing me, and I'm just trying to process, like, did this really happen? Like, did my mother and sister really just get, you know, murdered?

Are you guys really accusing me of doing this? Everything just felt like a nightmare or a dream. Like, it just felt really surreal. I knew 1,000% it wasn't me.

They didn't know what to think. They didn't know anything about who this person was. They had no fingerprints. There was no forced entry.

And all of a sudden, here it is. The 48 hours have passed, which of course is often the critical period for getting that first lead. And they're sitting there kind of going, we have no idea.

And if you're going down the wrong road with that, you've allowed the individual to perhaps clean up the case, to perhaps even be further away from the case. So it's very important those first initial hours of any case that you hope the investigators are on the right path.

Kirk and Keon begin to develop their own theories about what happened.

I know how safe that Karen was. And Karen would not let anyone in that house at 2.36 in the morning without, she would have the alarm on. They said the alarm was disengaged.

She took that really seriously. You know, when I would leave out, she would make sure the back door is locked, things like that. So to make sure the window is locked, she was always a stickler for those things. But I'm pretty sure I thought that, okay, somebody forced her to put the alarm in. It's just no, it's no other explanation.

At the time of the Loftons murders, a burglar is successfully evading capture in the neighborhood.

Jason Scott came across as very mild-mannered. He held a part-time job with a package delivery service. He wasn't viewed as being dangerous by his friends and family, so he was somebody who masqueraded as an ordinary person.

Jason Scott was somebody who seemed to have a lot of potential. He was somebody who had a college degree. He was somebody who worked at UPS. So he was somebody who, at least on the surface, seemed to be somebody who really had his act together.

27-year-old Jason Scott has two master's degrees and until recently was unknown to authorities.

He had started committing robberies in his, at least as a teenager and perhaps early 20s, and had graduated from committing robberies robberies of unoccupied houses to home invasion robberies and violent crime.

So at the same time that Jason Scott was living this kind of law-abiding life on the surface, this is somebody who, in the privacy of his own home, seemed to be absolutely obsessed with crime, with forensics, with understanding how to get away with crime.

One of the notable things about Mr. Scott is the clothing and tools that he used during his criminal activities. So he dressed like a criminal. He would dress all in black. He wore black gloves. He carried a black backpack. So he dressed like a thief.

Jason Scott spent hours of his life thinking about crime, learning about crime, learning about forensic techniques, almost considered himself like a Dr. Jekyll and Mr.

Hyde.

I would imagine to some extent he feels kind of this sense of impunity, like, or the sense that I'm untouchable. Nobody's gonna catch me. Another thing that stands out about Jason Scott is he was an incredibly diverse criminal. So not only was he interested in burglary, in home invasions, He was interested in peeping. He was interested in cruising the neighborhood and taking pictures of people in the privacy of their own homes. He had no idea what he was doing. It's not uncommon for that to progress to breaking into a home, to some kind of sexual offense.

So this progression is a natural part that we as criminologists are concerned about with any crime that someone does. Does it then have an opportunity to develop, to make that person a criminal that is looking for a career? I'm doing it. I'm successful at doing it.

Why stop?

The murders of mother and daughter Karen and Carissa Lofton have shocked this respectable Washington suburb. There's a spate of burglaries, too. But the police are yet to track down the perpetrators. Two months later, another murder is called in.

My name is Courtney Hicks. My mother is Dolores DeWitt. and my sister's Ebony do it. My life was perfect before, before everything happened. My mom was the kindest person that I ever met. She was always there for me, even still after everything that's happened to me in my life because of how my mom taught me to believe in myself.

My sister was someone I could always depend on, I could always count on, just as well as my mom. I miss him so much, so. When I got home, I don't remember if I had to disable our alarm or not, but I just go in the house and I see my sister's jacket on the back of the chair. Everything just looked normal. It just looked like they just weren't there. My mom's car was in the driveway. Everything looked normal. They just weren't there. I go upstairs and I go in my sister's room. It was no bleach spot on my sister's floor. So that kind of like struck me like, okay, maybe Ebony did come home. She probably dropped some bleach or something in. When I got into my bedroom, I just like sat down on my bed.

That's when I got the feeling that you need to get out of this house. I've run out the house. I get in her car and I goes to my boyfriend at the time's house. And when I got to him, I'm just calling my mom. And this is like now probably going on. It was late. and still no response.

The following day, Courtney hears that her mother and sister have been murdered. Their bodies are found in a stolen car that was then set on fire at a different address. Police identify Dolores and Ebony through dental records.

Then they came to our house. I want to say, was it later on that day? I believe they came to our house. And that's when they did tell us about the dental records matching my mom and my sister. They were in the burning car. When I was 15, my dad died. So I honestly didn't think that... I never in my life thought anybody, like my mom or my sister, would be murdered or anything like that. I don't think anybody would think somebody they love would be murdered.

My family was everything to me. My mom, my dad, and my sister. I didn't have a worry in the world.

Certainly in the murders of Dolores and Ebony DeWitt, This is somebody who engages in incredibly risky behavior.

He steals a car.

And the person that he steals the car from actually witnesses this.

What's the nature of your emergency?

I just left my house maybe an hour ago and have come back.

My car is missing out of the carport.

That's my car.

Okay, it just zoomed past me. Wow.

So this is somebody in the middle of the day, steals a car, drives it to a house, puts two people in there who are no longer alive, and burns this car.

In a relatively short amount of time.

I mean, how risked can you be?

It's a horrific, horrific crime scene of a burned body. Dental records are needed to identify the individuals to know whom they are. This does buy time. By moving the bodies to another place, by putting them in a car that has nothing to do with them, and then burning the bodies allows for additional time.

For the individual to get away.

I used to feel like people would be watching us outside of our house. My mom would always feel like people would be watching us. If you feel like somebody is watching you, they are. And if you really have that over-sense and urge, like, I feel like somebody watching me, I feel like somebody watching me, they are. It don't cross your mind that sick people like that exist.

I think most people, of the time when people have a sense of being watched, they probably are. And I think it's very, very important to trust your gut and investigate, call the police, whatever you think is going to make you feel safe. Too many of us in the past have had these gut feelings, had these kind of spidey senses, or the hair on the back of our neck stands up, and we talk ourselves out of it, when really it's our body's way of telling us that something is wrong, even though we don't consciously know it.

There have been two mother-daughter murders less than two miles apart in just eight weeks. Like Karen Lofton, Dolores DeWitt was a nurse and at home alone with her teenage daughter.

In many respects, there are a lot of similarities between the murders of Karen and Carissa Lofton and Dolores and Ebony. And, you know, the similarities, of course, they're both nurses, they're both single parents, they have teenage daughters. Yet there are some significant differences. So police know that Karen and Carissa are murdered in their home. that they are shot to death.

And this is very, very different from Ebony and Dolores, who are removed from their home before they were eventually found in a burned-out car. It would be really nice if serial killers always did everything exactly the same, because it would be much easier to catch them. And so it's important to kind of step back sometimes and kind of go, okay, yes, There are some surface differences here, including the way these people were murdered, but we can't rule out the possibility, given these other similarities, that there's some connection between the two.

At the time of the Lofton and DeWitt murders, police are already investigating the death of 46-year-old mother of three, Vilma Butler, in June 2008. She is shot dead and found in her burning home. around 15 miles from the DeWitts and Loftons. But police still do not believe they are dealing with a serial killer.

Serial killers usually are not this meticulous in their acts. You know, we usually see that there's opportunity is the main factor. There is that of a special type of person he or she is interested in committing these acts with. But to see intelligence put together, to see elements of information put together, this is a different ball game. This is a different realm.

It's unfortunate that he was awake, was able to get away with it for so long. And then he ended up getting caught.

There have been five murders in this respectable suburb since June 2008. Police don't believe they're dealing with a serial killer and are yet to identify a suspect. But separately from the murders, authorities are getting closer to catching local burglar Jason Scott.

The crimes that Mr.

Scott committed were clustered around his own neighborhood in Prince George's County, Maryland, which is a suburb just.

East of Washington, D.C.

In May of 2009, Jason Scott and his accomplice, Marcus Hunter, traveled up to Woodbine, Maryland to commit this robbery of a gun shop. They stole 39 firearms, including automatic weapons, machine guns, silencers, and a large volume of ammunition.

Someone who moves to being involved in gun deals has a lot of spheres of activity going on. You usually don't expect that in someone who's involved in criminal activity. One becomes good at one part of criminal activity, but does not drift, as we say in criminology, to perhaps having a life of regular conformity and then going to be an innovator of criminal activity. This is what makes this case so special. He's confident in what he does.

After doing this, he decides to make some money by selling some of these illegal weapons. And yet, I think his boldness really does propel him to take these ridiculous risks. I mean, selling illegal weapons in the UPS parking lot? I mean, it seems like that's something that is not a criminal, something a criminal mastermind would do.

You work there.

Jason Scott had let it be known among some of his criminal compatriots that he had guns to sell, and an undercover ATF agent arranged to meet Jason Scott in a parking lot and purchase four weapons from him.

Agents then were able to verify that four of those.

Weapons were the weapons that had been stolen on May 26th from the gun shop. Well, this was the moment that exposed Jason Scott to the subsequent search warrant. During the course of executing that search warrant, the agents recovered 16 firearms that had been stolen from that gun shop in.

Woodbine back in May of 2009.

They also obtained from Jason Scott's bedroom many of the burglary tools that he had used to commit the crime. The clothing that he wore, the black clothing, the ski mask, and the backpack containing his burglary tools, which included things like bolt cutters and screwdrivers and pry bar, and also included a police scanner.

There is almost a black comedy here if things weren't so horrific. that this is somebody who is intelligent, he's graduated from college, he's a personal person, and yet he almost lives in this fantasy world, it seems like.

One of the items of evidence that we recovered from Jason Scott's home was a video recording that he had made of this teenage victim when he was recording the victim while she was naked during one of his home invasion robberies.

And at one point, Mr.

Scott himself crossed in front of the camera. There actually was an image captured of Mr. Scott in his full regalia that he would wear to commit his crimes. And when the authorities found those recordings and photographs and the burglary tools, they realized they were dealing with a master criminal, not simply somebody who had committed a robbery at a gun shop but somebody who posed a continuing threat.

Of violence in the community.

The agents were working with local police who knew about the spree of home invasion robberies in addition to the murders that had been committed in the area. And so once they found this evidence, they immediately settled on Jason Scott as a likely suspect in a whole spree of crimes.

I think when you think about this kind of sexual aspect or sexual assault, that is so consistent with somebody who has a history of peeping and voyeurism than progressives. Most people who peep don't progress to worse things, but people who do progress to worse things often have a history of peeping and voyeurism.

I think Jason Scott enjoyed the sense of power and control that he exercised when he committed these home invasion robberies, where he kept people under control.

He kept people at gunpoint.

In a couple of instances, he detained people in their homes while his partner, Marcus Hunter, took their ATM cards and went to withdraw cash. And I think Jason Scott enjoyed that sense of power that he obtained while he was detaining innocent victims.

There was one home invasion that he carried out where the victims were, of course, terrified.

They had no idea.

They felt completely helpless. The victim later on said, you know, when you have absolutely no control over a situation, you don't know what to do. And she said, I started praying. And, you know, Jason Scott said, shut up. I think that affirmed to him that I am powerful. I am a criminal mastermind. I am in charge of these situations. And I do think that was very important to him. And for whatever reason, he really did embrace this criminal identity.

Jason Scott is now a suspect in the five murder investigations. But police don't have enough evidence to charge him.

Him.

But the evidence from the firearms offenses, home invasions, and sexual assault makes police believe he's linked to a vast array of crimes. Rather than charge him for just the crimes they have evidence for, Scott is taken into custody and offered a proffer interview.

In a proffer interview, the government promises a defendant that things that he says in the interview won't be used against him directly in court. And so the proffer is an opportunity for the defendant to come in with the promise of immunity and reveal to the government the criminal activity in which he participated.

They're thinking, this is somebody who's going to help us catch other criminals almost arms dealers, or people who are selling illegal guns. And so Jason takes advantage of this.

During the interview with federal authorities, Mr.

Scott admitted that he had committed approximately 28 burglaries and nine home invasion robberies.

Law enforcement is absolutely stunned Mind this.

He's saying to you, criminal justice system, I am smarter than you. That I was able to be successful with these crimes. I am good at what I do, and I am better than you at this time.

The jig is up.

So if it is up, let me just go ahead and tell you and show you how much smarter I was than you, how much intelligence and research goes into this.

And of course, Jason's sitting there, smug as can be, thinking. I've got immunity from all these things. Nothing I said today can be used against me. He was a little misguided, I think, in thinking that.

Police cannot charge Scott with the burglaries and home invasions he's confessed to. But he can still be charged for other crimes because of new evidence or if implicated by an accomplice.

Once authorities realized that Jason Scott had been involved in a crime spree in the area, they started to review all crimes that had been committed in the area over the past couple of years to identify which ones were likely to have been committed by Jason Scott.

Marcus Hunter revealed that.

He was a friend of Jason Scott and that he had participated with Mr.

Scott in many of the robberies and burglaries that Mr. Scott had committed in the community.

Marcus Hunter used the term spooky house to refer to an abandoned property that he and Jason Scott would go to after the crimes to split up the proceeds. So on multiple occasions, Jason Scott and Marcus Hunter went to the so-called spooky house with the proceeds of the robbery and then divided the property among them. The most compelling evidence recovered from the spooky house that was used in the state case was that they found charred bits of fabric and hair at the spooky house that were connected to the murder because they matched evidence that was found on the bodies when they were recovered from the car.

That had been burned.

This vital new piece of evidence links Scott to the crime scene of Dolores and Ebony DeWitt. Jason Scott is charged with their murders while being investigated for the others.

This is the beginning of the end for Jason Scott.

It's one and a half years since Jason Scott was charged with the murders of Dolores.

And Ebony DeWitt.

As a case is building against him, he's first facing trial for the crimes that investigators have more evidence of.

In the federal system, we prosecute defendants for the most readily provable offenses. And so in this case, we identified four home invasion robberies in which the proof was the strongest. and the witnesses were the most credible and compelling. And we charged Mr. Scott with those four home invasion robberies, in addition to the child pornography he had produced during one of those robberies, and then the possession of the stolen firearms that had been taken from that gun shop in Woodbine.

The most important piece of evidence in the.

Case was the video recording that Jason Scott had made of this teenage.

Victim, Mr. Scott at one point actually crossed in front of the camera.

So in this case, the federal sentence for the series of crimes, 11 violations in total, amounted to 100 years in federal prison. I know the family members of the murder victims were present at the sentencing and they were very relieved, They were confident that Mr. Scott had been held accountable and would no longer pose a threat to the community, regardless of whether or not he ultimately was convicted on the state charges for the murder.

What we do see is someone who's become very good at being a criminal, someone who's intelligent, someone who looks at information that's publicly accessible, plus perhaps has a charm that allows for many people not to feel threatened, We hope that these elements don't come together. And thank goodness that person is no longer on the street causing these heinous acts.

Jason Scott is in jail. Police suspect him of the murders of Vilma Butler, Dolores and Ebony DeWitt, and Karen and Carissa Lofton. but they only have strong evidence linking him to the DeWitt's murders. In order to prosecute him for the provable crimes, police strike a deal using an Alford plea.

It's been around since about the 1970s. Here you have an environment in which one pleads to say, I'm not saying I'm guilty of doing this act, but I am going to go ahead and move the process in order to perhaps receive a lesser sentence.

As part of the Alford plea for the murders of Dolores and Ebony DeWitt, Jason Scott now won't face trial for the murders of Vilma Butler or Karen and Carissa Lofton.

We never had our day in court.

He was going to spend the rest of his life in jail anyway, so I guess they assumed why spend money to satisfy the family.

Carissa Lofton, I always speak her name, and I always say she's such a strong girl, because she comes home only to find someone killing her mom, and then she gets shot in the head from what the story tells. To be able to pick her strength to pick up the phone to call 911. Ma'am, I've been shot.

Me and my mother have been shot. I'm bleeding to death.

Sweetie, slow it down.

What's your address?

It's just heartbreaking when you hear her It's heartbreaking. It's so heartbreaking because they didn't deserve it. Nobody deserves it.

There's still a very empty void in myself and my family's hearts because we don't know. We didn't get the satisfaction that the DeWitts got of a trial and a killer that admitted and was found guilty of their crime.

We didn't get that.

I used to hate him for a while, but I had to get over that. At first, I used to want him dead. I pray to God that while he's locked up, every time he closes his eyes, he sees them as he left them. Now, I just feel like, no, what he got is the best thing for him.

I don't even want to give him any real estate in my mental space. So he's where he needs to be.

I think that Jason Scott has all the hallmarks of a serial killer in terms of so many different things. His interest in forensics, the way he researched his crimes, and most importantly, the way he carried out so many different crimes. and really exhibited no compassion, no empathy whatsoever for his victims.

This was probably the most memorable case that I've personally prosecuted in my 30 years with the United States Department of Justice because of the scale of the harm that Jason Scott had visited on the community and obviously the particular harm on the victims of the murders, the home invasion robbery, and the child abuse. You save lives by taking somebody like Jason Scott off the street.

My parents, my mom, my dad, and my sister, they always told us, if you believe in yourself, you can do anything. So with that, even through all the tragedy in my life, I could pat myself on the back that I just never gave up. And that's only because of them. Life has never been the same. Life will never be the same. I'm just been trying to adjust to it. It's just, I was shattered. I had nothing now.

I compare everybody in this world to my family. And it's like I said, I haven't met anyone that just measure up to how great they were.

You know, I have three kids now with my wife. And my mother or sister has met none of them. So she was robbed from having three beautiful grandchildren that she could be interacting with.

I still feel lost, like it's a loss. I've grown a lot.

I had to learn how to turn a tragedy into something.

Helpful.

And that's the only way that you can get through something like that. Jason Scott, I feel like they're not responsible for two murders, they're responsible for three in my family, because my son, Craig Jr., never recovered. He went through a very dark period. He was drinking, very depressed, and everything for years. Six months ago, well, a little more than six months, A month after his birthday, exactly a month after his birthday, then he died. They found him in a hotel, and the cause of death is alcohol poisoning.

You know, he had died from alcohol, so. Jason Scott definitely played a part in it. I used to call Carissa my butterfly, and she loved the color green. That year, after she passed, then it was an influx of green butterflies all through Georgia. The main thing that I had to remember is that God didn't make mistakes and that my story had to help somebody else.

Thank you.

Serial Killer Documentary - Jason Scott’s Secret Life

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