A few days later, on the late afternoon of March 29, forty-eight-year-old Afton Scott noticed Judge Charles Jackson on the Andrew Torkelson farm, adjoining Scott's own, and he drove over to confront the judge. He was carrying a rifle as he got out of his car and approached Jackson and Torkelson, as the two men were talking about a possible cattle purchase. Scott held a grudge against Jackson because of the judge's having ruled against him in a dispute over land between Scott and some of his relatives. Jackson was also scheduled to hear the divorce case when it came up. Scott told the judge he'd come to settle with him, and he ordered Torkelson to stand aside. Judge Jackson told Scott he had no dispute with him and turned to walk away. Scott shot the judge in the back, and he fell dead.
Scott cut the ignition wires of the other automobiles on the place and then roared away in his own 1935 Ford coach.
Scott drove to Mountain Grove to the home of his mother-in-law, where his estranged wife was staying. He strode into the house and told Verla to come outside with him. She balked at first but finally went out into the front yard with him and started talking to her sister, who was parked in a car at the curb. Meanwhile, Scott went to his own car, got his rifle, and loaded it. When Verla saw her husband had a gun, she hid behind her sister's car at first, and then Scott shot her as she started to run toward the house. Standing in the doorway, the couple's thirteen-year-old daughter, Alice, witnessed the whole episode.
After killing his wife, Scott took off and was the object of a 36-hour manhunt before turning himself in early on the morning of March 31. Questioned briefly, he said he didn't know why he'd killed his wife and the judge and that it "seemed like a dream."
Scott was charged in Wright County with first-degree murder in the shooting death of his wife, while the Douglas County prosecutor postponed filing charges in the case of Judge Jackson.
At Scott's trial in Hartville in late June 1948, the defense put up an insanity plea. Scott now claimed that Jackson was the father of Verla's youngest child and that his jealousy had driven him temporarily insane. Alice, who was the main prosecution witness against her father, countered that the defense theory was a made-up story and that her father wasn't any crazier when he killed her mother than he always was. "If he was crazy, then he was crazy all the time."
On July 1, the jury returned a verdict finding Scott guilty of first-degree murder. The jury recommended the death penalty, and the judge sentenced Scott to die in the gas chamber at Jefferson City. The sentence was carried out sixteen months later, in early November 1949.
2 comments:
As a descendant of Afton Scott, I can say without doubt that he likely was insane at the time. There is a history of bipolar disorder in subsequent generations. What Afton did was never talked about in the family. When I asked my father (Afton's grandson) about what happened I was told "we're NOT going to talk about that". I was told "all you need to know is that we got a lot of grief because of what your great grandfather did "! It was after my father died that I learned what actually happened. Thank goodness that mental health is taken more seriously in this day and age.
Thanks for the additional insight into this tragedy, Kerry, and you're right that it is fortunate that mental illness is now taken more seriously than it used to be. Still probably not taken seriously enough, though.
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