“What’s the problem?” he asked.
“I’m tired, I just want to go to sleep,” she said.
She was emotionally shutting down from the horrible assault.
He said, “You want to go to sleep? No problem,” and May put his arm around her neck in a sleeper hold, tightened his arm, and he strangled her.
When she was unconscious and wasn’t moving anymore, he picked up her body and put it in a closet in the empty building, closed the door, and walked away.
It turned out there was never any temporary work at the building that day; that was just a ruse he used to get her there, and after he got what he wanted, he went on his way.
The mistake Scotty May made-besides the crimes of raping and strangling an underage girl-was that he didn’t check to see how dead she was, because she was still alive. She woke up, and she got out of the closet, ran down through the building, and went to the office and told them to call the police because she had been raped and strangled.
The police came, took her in, and asked her to write down exactly what had happened to her. She wrote, “Scotty May took me to this building, and he raped me, and he strangled me.” She wrote it all down, and the police went looking for May.
A year after Mary Beth Townsend’s murder, Scotty May was drinking tea in his living room when he saw a police car pull up. He thought they were coming to talk to him about a fraud he committed at work, but they were actually there to ask him about the thirteen-year-old girl that they believed he raped and strangled earlier that day.
“Oh, did you hear about the fraud?” he asked.
Until then, no, they didn’t know he had been ripping off the company where he worked.
“No, no,” the officers said. “We’re not here about a fraud. We’re looking into the case of this thirteen-year-old girl that’s gone missing. Shania.”
“What about her?”
“Do you know her?”
“Yeah,” he said, “I know her. I don’t know where she is. This morning she wanted to go back to the motel on Route 1 where her boyfriend was, so I dropped her off and haven’t seen her since.”
“Well, Scotty, she said that you raped her,” and with that the detective pushed the girl’s report in front of him. “See what she’s written about you?”
“That’s impossible. She couldn’t have written that,” he said.
“Why not?” the officer asked.
“She’s dead.”
Swift move, May. Gotta love stupid criminals. May wasn’t as slick as he thought. They arrested him, obviously, because he screwed that one up, making the criminally stupid mistake of saying she was dead before he was supposed to know she was dead.
THE SCOTTY MAY story could have ended there. But he decided he was bright enough that he should be his own lawyer.
To be honest, he presented himself quite well in court. On the day Scotty’s trial began, Art looked around to see if he could spot him.
“Where is he?” Art asked the bailiff.
May was dressed so well that Art thought he was looking at a lawyer.
“No,” the bailiff said, “that is Scotty May.”
Some people can present themselves quite well in court when they dress up, so May was in a nice suit, and he thought this was enough to ensure a successful trial. He was well spoken, talkative, gentle, and respectful in his approach to the jurors. Mind you, he had spent most of his adult life in prison for committing one crime after another. He’d hardly been on the outside, but he saw himself as a pretty fine jailhouse lawyer.
Shania started crying as soon as she saw May in court. He got her on the stand, looked her in the eye, and he said to her, “You know I didn’t rape you, don’t you?”
She stared right back at him and said, “Yes you did, Scotty, yes you did.”
All he could say to that was “Oh,” which the jury didn’t consider much of a defense. Maybe he thought he could intimidate Shania, but it didn’t work.
He was found guilty of kidnapping, guilty of rape, and guilty of attempted murder.
Even though he looked good, he wasn’t a very good lawyer. But May continued representing himself in the penalty phase. He expected to convince the jury that he was a decent guy in spite of the fact that he kidnapped, raped, and attempted to murder a thirteen-year-old girl.
What no one expected was that Scotty May was a changed man.
“I found the Lord. Yes, I found Jesus,” May proclaimed. “I’ve been reading my Bible, I’m a Christian now, and I just want to tell you that I think you ought to give me a chance, because I’m not really that bad a guy.
“As a matter of fact, I did Shania a favor, because when I met Shania, she was a runaway. She was living with a man who was dealing drugs. She was on the streets. She wasn’t in school, and after I did this to her, she returned home to her family, and she’s back in school. I should get a break because I helped her out!”
That’s a sign of a true psychopath, making lemonade out of lemons: “I did kidnap, rape, and strangle that girl, tried to kill her, but I did her a favor. So I think we should call it even.”
Scotty May’s closing argument won him a sentence of life plus thirty. He received twenty years for abduction with intent to defile, to be served concurrently; the remaining life plus ten years are to be served consecutively. May can still apply for geriatric parole when he reaches the age of sixty, which will be in the year 2028.
The court declined to hear oral arguments on the motion to set aside the jury verdict on rape. But Judge Stanley P. Klein did tell May: “Your whole defense is that you weren’t there. But it was clear to this Court, based on the questions you asked the witness [Shania] on cross-examination, that you WERE there. In this Court’s opinion, the jury did not make a mistake.”
ART SPOKE TO a detective and told him he attended Scotty May’s trial.
The detective said, “We were supposed to have somebody there, but I don’t know if we did.” It was the first official acknowledgment that the police were even considering Scotty May a person of interest. “We are certainly focused on him,” the detective said, halfheartedly.
Later still, Art received the following phone message from the detective in charge of the case:
“Hello, Art. This is Detective B. from the police department. I had told you that I would get back with you sometime in October, and I wanted to chat with you briefly about the case. I have no new exciting news for you, except that the prosecutor and I are working toward an indictment. Unfortunately, I can’t give you a time frame as yet. But I would like to talk to you. Please call me later today, or I will try you again. Thank you.”
The phone call gave Art false hope that they were doing something, but nothing ever came of the indictment.
IT WAS ABOUT a year after the Mary Beth Townsend murder that Scotty May attacked the thirteen-year-old girl.
When I found out the name of the Trashman employee was Scotty May, I paid a visit to his girlfriend, Crystal Jones, to discover a little bit more of what she knew around the time of the crime. The day Mary Beth died was, not coincidentally, Crystal Jones’s birthday. I believe May needed money to buy his girlfriend a present.
The day after the murder, May went to Philadelphia. Mary Beth’s murderer stole her rings, and he would have had to hawk them someplace; they were worth some money. If you hawk things in Washington, D.C., you have to show a driver’s license-same for Virginia -so your name will be recorded as the person selling the item. But in Philadelphia, the rules are different and it’s a popular place to fence stolen goods. I figured the murderer might go there, because he wouldn’t be asked for an ID. I never did find a pawn shop that could identify May, but according to police reports he sure acted peculiar while he was there. He arrived at his estranged wife’s home, beat her, threatened to kill her, pulled out a gun, and, after fleeing, was chased by police to the rooftop of a nearby building. The criminal justice system didn’t put him back in prison, so he moved on to raping and trying to kill Shania.