“I don’t blame Darla,” said one former resident of the Spokane County Jail. “The cops had her under their thumb—the only way she could keep on the street, and feed her drug habit, was to do what they wanted, and what they wanted was for her to roll over and give people up. Well, she gave them me, but we remained friends. In fact, she visited me every week while I was in jail.”
There was always the possibility, of course, that someone against whom she provided a deposition—usually on videotape, as she was too drugged out to show up in person and appear credible—killed her in retribution. One of the first questions seriously considered by homicide detectives was if her murder was motivated by revenge.
“If every person she cheated, stole from, ripped off, or ratted out were a suspect in her murder,” said one of Scott’s acquaintances, “the suspect list would make Schindler’s list look like a fuckin’ Post-it Note for shoppin’ at the Circle K.”
Everyone agreed that “Darla, bless her heart, was a thief. She would rob anyone if she had half a chance,” recalled a male acquaintance. “In fact, she once bragged to me about stealing five hundred dollars from a perfectly polite traveling salesman who offered her that much money for spending the night with him. She took the money, said she was stepping out to buy a pack of smokes, and never came back.”
“Darla and I have been friends since the sixth grade,” said one young woman sadly. “From what I understood, the twins were adopted at birth. They were well cared for, and I don’t think either of the girls was ever abused. Both the parents sort of had disabilities, and could be a bit overbearing, but they didn’t have any sort of awful home life.”
Darla confided in her friend about her prostitution activities, telling her that oral sex was the activity that Darla engaged in most of the time. “From what I could tell, Darla would do anything for money, and she never indicated that there was any type of sexual activity or behavior that she avoided. Even though Darla talked about using condoms, she was just as likely to reuse them or not use them at all.”
“I wasn’t surprised that someone finally killed Darla” said one ex-prostitute to Detective John Miller. “She would rip off everyone, and she would rob her johns. Darla told me that she carried a small pistol in her waistband, and she would brag that she used it to rob her customers.”
“That’s absolute bullshit,” insists Arthur, Darla’s longtime, long-suffering boyfriend. “Darla was scared to death of guns, scared of just about everything, and she was a crybaby. Darla’s first response in any unpleasant or threatening situation was to run and cry. I mean, that was Darla. She might make up bullshit stories to tell other women on the street, but Darla didn’t ever have a gun, wouldn’t want a gun, and if she saw one, she would run and cry.”
Despite her thievery, Darla easily infatuated her regulars, and more than one became dangerously obsessive. Whenever a customer fell head over wallet in love, Darla would discard him for a newer, less clinging sugar daddy. One man with whom she had a long-term financially based relationship was a married pawnshop proprietor. “Some folks thought that she was blackmailing him, threatening to tell his wife if he didn’t give her money,” said Arthur. “But his wife knew what was going on the whole time.”
The pawnbroker’s long-term loans were offset by his short-fused temper. “One day, he broke into my father’s house by smashing in the back window,” recalled Arthur. “We were letting Darla stay there, and he goes inside and tries to force her to leave with him. His friend Sergeant Moore of the Spokane police, I believe, conveniently detained me on the way home. This would, I guess, give him time to get in and get Darla. Well, the timing was off. I get to my dad’s house and there is that pawnbroker guy struggling with Darla, and she’s stark naked. Well, not only does she refuse to go with him, she gives him hell—telling him to get his ass out of that house, and then she added, ‘While you’re at it, leave fifty dollars on the table when you go!’ You know what? He actually dug fifty bucks out of his wallet and put it right there on the table on his way out.”
“Immediately prior to her disappearance,” related another lifestyle associate of Scott’s, “he—the pawnbroker—became furious with Darla because she left him sitting around like a dog while she was up in my apartment. He stormed out and then called and left her a message on the answering machine: ‘Darla, you bitch! You fucking whore! I should have come up there, kicked the door down, and dragged you out of there.’ Well, it was a day or two after this message and their confrontation that Darla went out to run some errands and never came back.” Detectives spoke extensively with the former pawnbroker and his aggravated spouse. Both were eliminated as suspects.
“Darla stayed all over the place, her and other girls,” said one of Darla’s former associates. “She stayed with a security guard for a while, way back she used to be at Arthur’s, and then at Arthur’s father’s house. Then, for a while, she stayed over at Mr. Wilson’s, who lived at his mother’s place. Darla and some other working girls used to hang out there quite a bit. Maybe you should talk to him.”
“My mother passed away in September of 1996,” Wilson explained. “Prior to her death, I took care of her for three to four years. After she died, I was lonely.” Detective Fred Ruetsch showed Wilson photographs of Darla Scott and 1996 homicide victim Shannon Zelinski, both of whom he recognized. “Yes, I remember them. They, and some of the other girls, often stayed here at the house, but I never used their services—I just needed their company. There were several of those women in and out of my house, and I did not really know all their names. Oftentimes they stole money or property from me. I guess I was an easy touch.”
Detective Ruetsch asked Wilson if he owned any handguns. “I used to own a .38 five-shot revolver that I bought from my daughter,” he replied. “I sold it to Gun Emporium here in Spokane. I also own a rifle that my son’s had for the last eight or nine years.”
“When I asked him had he any other guns,” recalled Ruetsch, “he stated that he used to have a gun that was stolen from him in approximately 1996, which he described as a .32 automatic. He advised that whoever stole it left behind a clip and a box of ammunition, as well as the bill of sale for the gun, which he said that he bought for seventy-five dollars about a year before it was stolen.”
Wilson had a fairly good idea of who stole the weapon, or at least a likely suspect, but he had never made a police report regarding the weapon’s theft. “When the interview was over, I asked him to go through his personal belongings and attempt to locate the bill of sale, the clip, and the ammunition that he had for the stolen gun.”
“I found the sack that had the ammunition in it,” Wilson told Ruetsch by telephone later that day. “I found it down in the basement, but there was nothing inside it. I don’t know what happened to it. It’s possible that my grandson took them, although I don’t know that for a fact. But I am fairly confident,” he told the detective, “that I no longer have the gun, the ammunition, the clip, or the bill of sale.”
As detectives retraced Darla Scott’s meandering path and temporary residences, they saw repetitive patterns of taking advantage and violating trusts—not always by Darla herself, but often by those who followed her into homes and apartments offered to the distraught and homeless by the lonely and depressed.
“Darla was the only single woman my mother ever let stay at the house,” remembered Arthur. “Mom wouldn’t let single girls or troublemakers stay in our home. Darla was the one girl that Momma made an exception for, and Darla knew it. So Darla never disrespected my mother or the family, never stole from her, nothing like that. No, when it came to my family, Darla behaved herself. Of course, when she went elsewhere, all bets were off.”
While authorities characterized Scott’s lifestyle as “on society’s fringe,” it was beyond the fringe, and one step beyond anything her contemporaries in “mainstream society” could imagine, much less endure on a daily basis. Life is always a crisis when you’re addicted or habituated to an illegal substance.