Mary Scott
47:36 Share

To get this episode of Forensic Tales ad-free, please visit patreon.com slash Forensic Tales. Behind every massacre, there lies a reason. Sometimes they're obvious. Many mass murderers have similar traits. Sensation-seeking, lack of remorse, impulsivity, need for control, and predatory behavior. But other times, massacres are almost impossible to explain.

Introducing Anatomy of a Massacre. Anatomy of a Massacre is Rockefeller Audio's newest podcast series. Anatomy of a Massacre is a true crime podcast investigating the most notorious massacres in human history. From serial killers to mass shooters to genocides, there lies a new horrid reason to expose in each episode.

Join me, your host, Courtney Fretwell, a forensic psychologist, as I dive deep into the psychology, criminal theories, and policy implications behind each massacre. Anatomy of a Massacre begins Monday, October 3rd, 2022. Follow Anatomy of a Massacre on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your favorite shows so you don't miss an episode.

You know what happened? Now, let's uncover why. Forensic Tales discusses topics that some listeners may find disturbing. The contents of this episode may not be suitable for everyone. Listener discretion is advised. In 1968, Mary had enough with her old life. She moved halfway across the country to San Diego, California. That's where she started her new life as a waitress and go-go dancer. For once, Mary seemed happy.

Friends at the nightclub she worked at called her Happy-Go-Lucky, so the name Lucky stuck. But on the night of November 20th, 1969, her luck changed for the worse. Police were called to Mary's apartment. Her door was broken, her jaw smashed. Mary was raped and left lifeless on her living room floor.

With no witnesses or suspects, the case quickly turned cold. And it's 1969. This case could be cold forever. This is Forensic Tales, episode number 142, The Murder of Mary Scott. ♪♪

Thank you.

Welcome to Forensic Tales. I'm your host, Courtney Fretwell-Ariola. Forensic Tales is a weekly true crime podcast covering real, spine-tingling stories with a forensic science twist. Some cases have been solved with forensic science, while others have turned cold. Every remarkable story sends us a chilling reminder that not all stories have happy endings.

As a one-woman show, your support helps me find new exciting cases, conduct in-depth fact-based research, produce and edit this weekly show. As a thank you for supporting the show, you'll get early ad-free access to weekly episodes, shout-outs and episodes, priority on case suggestions, and access to weekly bonus episodes.

Before we get into this week's episode, we've got a few new supporters that I want to thank. Thank you so much to Nicola, Lisa, Kyle, and Debra. Thank you for so much for supporting the show. To support Forensic Tales, please visit us on Patreon, patreon.com slash Forensic Tales, or simply click the link in the show notes. You can also support the show by leaving a positive rating with a review.

Now, let's get right into this week's episode. Just after 8 o'clock p.m. on Thursday, November 20th, 1969, Dodie Christofferson became worried. She had plans to meet up with her best friend, Mary Scott, at the nightclub later that night. Her friend Mary worked as a cocktail waitress and go-go dancer at the Star and Goddard in North Park, San Diego, in Southern California.

The plan that night was for Dodie to meet up with Mary at her job at the club so Mary could help Dodie get ready for a date with her boyfriend. But when Dodie discovered that her best friend Mary didn't show up to work that evening, she knew something was wrong. It wasn't like her friend not to show up.

Dodie called her boyfriend and asked him if they could make a quick stop at Mary's apartment on their way to dinner. Mary's apartment was only a few blocks away from the club, so it would only take them a few minutes. Mary's apartment was located at 4078 39th Street, apartment number 2 in San Diego, California. Her apartment complex sat right off the 15 freeway between Polk Avenue and 39th Street.

It was an area of San Diego now considered part of San Diego's North Park. This part of San Diego attracts young professionals and students because of its trendy coffee shops, bars, and restaurants. As Dodie and her boyfriend got closer to Mary's apartment, they noticed several unusual things. First, they heard Mary's TV blasting from inside the apartment.

At first, Dodie and her boyfriend joked about the TV being the reason Mary was late for work. But as they got closer to Mary's apartment, they discovered something else. When Dodie and her date got inside of Mary's apartment, they found the whole place a mess. The chain on the front door was completely broken off the door. Chairs and furniture throughout the apartment were spread across the floor. And then they saw Mary.

She was laying on the living room floor, her nightgown ripped off, her jaw broken, and when Dodie checked for a pulse, it was painfully apparent that her best friend was dead. San Diego police homicide detectives arrived at the apartment complex and spoke with Dodie and her boyfriend.

They tell the detectives that Mary didn't show up to work that night, and when they went to the apartment to check on her, they found the place a wreck, and her best friend was dead on the living room floor with her nightgown pulled up. 23-year-old Mary Scott had been sexually assaulted and strangled to death inside of her very own San Diego apartment.

Mary Scott grew up with her five younger siblings in Claremont. It was Mary and her two sisters, Rosalie and Nancy, in one bedroom, and Mary's three younger brothers in the second bedroom.

In 1963, Mary met Patrick Weibel, a Navy sailor from Louisiana. Mary and Patrick first met on a double date with friends, and the two instantly hit it off. Just a few months after their first date, they were married.

Mary and Patrick got married in a small ceremony at a church at the University of San Diego, California. It was a fast courtship, but something inside Mary said that he was the one. Over the next couple of years, Mary and Patrick moved to Louisiana and had two daughters, Christine in 1964 and Donna in 1965.

Although Mary was happy with her new husband and two young daughters, she missed her family in San Diego. She would often write letters home to her parents and siblings. In the letters, she would say how much she missed them. Not long after the two girls were born, Mary and Patrick's marriage struggled. They had broken up and gotten back together several times.

When they broke up, Mary and the girls would pack their bags and move back to San Diego. But then, when they made up, they would move back to Louisiana. This same pattern happened over and over. By 1968, Mary had enough. She wasn't happy with her life in Louisiana with Patrick anymore. But she also didn't like being a single mother of two young girls in San Diego.

With very little childcare, it felt nearly impossible for Mary to raise and support the girls on her own. By 1969, Mary decided to return home to San Diego, but this time without Patrick and without Christine and Donna. When Mary arrived in Southern California, she got her own apartment and job working as a cocktail waitress and go-go dancer at the Concord in downtown with her sister Nancy.

Shortly after, she left Concord and got another waitressing and dancing job at the Star and Garter in North Park. Growing up, Mary and her two sisters loved dancing. So being a cocktail waitress and go-go dancer was the perfect job for Mary. She loved dancing, which was a good way for her to make easy money. Her co-workers quickly gave Mary the nickname Lucky because she was described as being happy-go-lucky.

When homicide detectives went through Mary's apartment to collect evidence, a few things stood out. First was a used tampon found on the carpet next to her body. At the time of Mary's murder, she was on her menstrual cycle. A used tampon was found on the carpet inside the living room.

The second was the door latch. When Mary's best friend got to the apartment, she noticed that the security chain had been broken off the door and the door molding had also broken off and pieces of the door were lying on the living room floor. This suggested to investigators that someone broke into Mary's apartment.

When speaking with Mary's friend, Dodie, detectives learned that Mary had a habit that when someone knocked on the door, she would first crack the door slightly open, but leave the security chain on. She wanted to see who was there before opening the door.

When Mary cracked the door open and left the chain closed, the person was able to break down the door and get inside to attack her. So investigators speculated that whoever killed Mary might have first knocked on the door. Besides the tampon and the door latch, detectives also collected carpet samples and Mary's clothing for testing. But back in the late 1960s, there wasn't much testing available.

In the late 1960s, they didn't have DNA testing. They could only do blood typing to determine the blood type of someone's DNA. They had fingerprint testing, but it was limited. So when it came to solving homicide cases in the 60s, it all came down to boots on the ground and good old-fashioned police work.

San Diego homicide detectives identified Mary's body from her ID. When they looked at the body, they saw defensive wounds everywhere. This was a clear indication that Mary had fought back against her attacker. They also found that besides being strangled and sexually assaulted, she also had a broken jaw. Early in the investigation, San Diego homicide detectives pieced together Mary's last known movements before the murder.

On Wednesday, November 19th, Mary worked her shift at the Star and Garter nightclub. She finished her shift around 2 o'clock in the morning and took a cab back to her apartment on 39th Street. Police found out that the cab driver who took Mary home was a guy named Tom.

At 2.05 a.m., the cab driver said he had dropped Mary off outside of her apartment. He said he saw her go inside, and then he drove away to pick up his next passenger. Around 2.15 a.m., one of Mary's neighbors in the apartment next door heard loud footsteps and a muffled scream. But according to Mary's neighbor, the footsteps and screams didn't raise enough alarm for the neighbor to call the police.

At the same time, still around 2.15 a.m., another one of Mary's neighbors told the police they also heard screams and a loud crashing noise. But like the other neighbor, they didn't think too much about it, and they didn't call the police. Based on the evidence gathered inside of Mary's apartment, investigators devised several theories about what might have happened.

One of the theories was that Mary arrived home to her apartment after work that night and was getting ready to go to bed. When she was getting ready to go to bed, she's in the bathroom taking her makeup off. She heard a knock. When she opened the door with a security chain on, her attacker hit the door so hard the chain broke and the door's molding flew off. The police also suspected that that's when Mary's jaw broke.

Once the attacker got inside Mary's apartment, he sexually assaulted her on the living room floor and then strangled her to death before running out of the apartment. Despite having a good theory about what happened to Mary, they didn't have any suspects and the case went cold fast.

The local news in San Diego covered Mary's murder for a couple of days. But after that, the media didn't seem interested in the story. If any station covered it, they only focused on Mary being a go-go dancer. The stories would start, go-go girl found dead, then quickly move on to another breaking story.

For some people, that's all they could focus on. A go-go dancer is found dead inside her San Diego apartment. The story became less about Mary Scott herself as a person and became more about her job as a dancer and cocktail waitress. Some people even considered what happened to Mary as, quote, a hazard of the job.

They believed that Mary worked in a club and was a dancer, putting her at higher risk. At the time, being a dancer at a nightclub was considered by many people as a high-risk profession. It was right up there with sex work. There was this unspoken attitude that they wouldn't have gotten killed if this person hadn't been doing this thing.

This same belief can also explain why so many rape victims don't report their assaults to the police. The stigma can become unbearable.

So for the local media in San Diego, Mary's murder was only front page news for a day or two. And after a couple days, they moved on from her case completely. No one seemed too concerned about a young cocktail waitress and go-go dancer being murdered.

Mary's family was reluctant to talk to the media as well as the police in the early days of the investigation. The media had already betrayed Mary in such a negative way, they felt embarrassed by the way their daughter and sister were described. So in the early days of the investigation, they kept to themselves and just held out hope that the police were doing their jobs and could find the person responsible.

After the crime scene was processed, the evidence was collected, and the immediate leads were exhausted, Mary's case was cold. The San Diego police had no suspects and no new information coming in that could help move their investigation along. So Mary Scott's case seemed destined for the cold case department.

Mary's case remained practically untouched for months. Then as quickly as the months passed, so did the years, then decades. Over the years, Mary's family and two daughters did their best to move on with their lives. But it's hard to move on when your sister or mother is murdered, and you don't know why, and you don't know by who.

When Mary was murdered, her two daughters, Christine and Donna, were just babies. They had very few memories of their mother. After her murder, the girls went to live with their father's parents and their grandparents in Louisiana. Their father, Patrick, worked on an oil rig and was often out to sea for long stretches of time. So in the best interest of raising two young girls, Christine and Donna went to live with their grandparents.

When Christine and Donna were young, no one talked about Mary. They grew up calling their grandmother Mama. As kids, they didn't even know their mother had been murdered. All they knew was that they no longer had a mom. They also did not know anyone from their mom's side of the family because they all lived in San Diego, and their father's family was in Louisiana.

But their curiosity grew as they got older. They wanted to learn more about their mother and what happened to her. But their father's family was reluctant to share about Mary or her family with the girls. They wanted to protect them from what really happened to their mother. So all they told the girls was that their mom was gone.

Hey, Forensic Tales listeners, if you're like me, you're always looking for new podcasts to binge, and I've got one you need to hear about. Introducing Hauntings, Homicide, and Hearsay. Hosted by Steve and Ashley Thomas, Hauntings, Homicide, and Hearsay is a horror podcast that focuses on the United States' most gruesome murders, haunted happenings, and urban legends.

I just got done listening to the episode they did about an urban legend out of Beaver County, Pennsylvania, of Charles No-Face, a.k.a. The Green Man. It's a story about an eight-year-old boy who was electrocuted and lost his eyes, nose, and lips.

Hauntings, Homicide, and Hearsay is available on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your favorite shows. Subscribe today and give them a listen. That's Hauntings, Homicide, and Hearsay. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp.

What are some of your self-care non-negotiables? Maybe you never skip leg day or therapy day. When your schedule is packed with kids' activities, big work projects, or podcasting like me, it's easy to let your priorities slip. Even when we know it makes us feel good, it's hard to make time for it. But when you feel like you have no time for yourself, non-negotiables like therapy are more important than ever.

Therapy can help with things like how to set healthy boundaries or find ways to be the best version of yourself. So if you're thinking about starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist or switch therapist anytime for no additional charge.

Never skip therapy day with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com slash tails to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash tails. By 1988, Christine was in her early 20s. She had spent her entire life not knowing anything about her mother or her mother's side of the family, not even knowing that she was killed.

But by 1988, she was ready to find out more. So she hired a private investigator to see what they could uncover. Christine wanted the private investigator to find anyone related to her mom. The investigator found Rosalie, one of Mary's younger sisters. Rosalie was only 16 years old when Mary was murdered. So she wasn't too much older than Mary's daughter, Christine.

Christine called her out of the blue one day when the private investigator tracked her down. She opened up to her about wanting to learn more about her family in California, whom she'd never met before. She explained to Rosalie that since she and her sister were toddlers, their father's parents were all they knew. She said they knew nothing about her mom or her family. For the next several months, Christine and Rosalie exchanged letters and phone calls.

By this point, Christine was in her 20s and was married with two kids, and Rosalie was in her 30s, still living in San Diego with a family of her own. The two of them had plans to meet in person someday. But sadly, that day would never come. On December 20, 1989, Christine was driving home from work when she got in a car crash.

During the collision, Christine's car flipped six times, breaking both of her legs and neck. She was pronounced dead at the scene. She was killed before meeting her mother's sister or anyone else related to her mother. Like the mom she never knew, Christine was killed at a similar age and left behind two young kids.

By 1992, Mary's second daughter, Donna, became interested in discovering more about her mom. She decided she wanted to continue the work of her older sister, Christine. And a year later, Donna got a phone call to meet Rosalie in San Diego. This was the first time either of Mary's daughter met anyone in the family.

For the next six years, the case of Mary's murder was cold. It wasn't until 1998 that the case was reopened, 29 years later. Not long after Rosalie and Donna first met, they discussed wanting someone to reopen Mary's case. It had been almost three decades, and they were ready for a break in the investigation.

They contacted Ron Thill, a cold case detective from San Diego District Attorney's Office. They shared everything they knew about the investigation and where the case stood now. Then they asked Thill if his department would consider reopening Mary's case and get a fresh set of eyes on it. Maybe there was new testing that could be done that wasn't done back in 1960s.

After speaking with Rosalie and Donna, Ron Phil agreed to meet with Rosalie in Sacramento, where she was living at the time. Ron Phil and the San Diego District Attorney's Office learned that the original investigators in 1969 collected DNA at the crime scene. But in 1998, the U.S. didn't have a national DNA database.

So when DNA was collected at crime scenes, there were no samples to compare it to. You could only directly compare DNA evidence against an individual who provided their DNA to the police. And that was assuming you could get a hold of them, or if their DNA was already in a state or local database. If it wasn't, there was nothing the police could compare the DNA collected at the crime scene to.

From the DNA collected in 1969 inside Mary's apartment, investigators in 1998 could only exclude certain people. They couldn't identify anyone new. They excluded Mary's ex-boyfriend and the boyfriend she had at the time of her murder. Based on the DNA, they were both cleared and the investigation was back at square one.

After meeting with the cold case detectives from San Diego, Rosalie and Donna returned to their lives. Rosalie moved around Northern California with her family. She got divorced and later remarried. Finally, she settled back in Sacramento in 2019. During this time, San Diego police once again found themselves thinking about Mary Scott's case.

In 2019, San Diego cold case investigators heard about the arrest of Joseph James D'Angelo, also known as the Golden State Killer.

Between 1974 and 1986, the Golden State Killer is believed to have murdered 13 people, raped 51 others, and burglarized over 120 homes throughout northern and southern California. For decades, he evaded police capture. After he stopped committing rapes and murders in 1986, Joseph James DeAngelo lived a normal life as a husband and father.

He wasn't caught until 2019 when Northern California investigators used a new type of DNA testing called genetic genealogy. By 2019, investigators uploaded DNA collected at several Golden State killer crime scenes to various genetic databases.

When the rapes and murders happened in the 1970s and 1980s, police had nothing to compare the DNA samples against. They had his DNA, but they didn't have a name. But now, when the DNA was uploaded to various databases, investigators got a hit on several relatives related to GSK. From his relatives, investigators formed a family tree and eventually identified D'Angelo.

After he was arrested, he ultimately pleaded guilty to a series of murders and kidnappings and was sentenced to multiple life terms without the possibility of parole. The case of the Golden State Killer became the first widely publicized case to make an arrest using DNA uploaded to genealogy websites.

Following the identification of GSK, many police departments across the country began using this promising new tool. Since 2019, forensic genetic genealogy has helped revolutionize criminal investigations, especially in cold cases.

Cases that have been left unsolved for decades are finally being solved. So it's no wonder more and more crime labs and police departments are using it. Forensic genetic genealogy combines advanced DNA testing with traditional genealogy to help identify missing people and criminal suspects. It's been around for 10 years and is sometimes called investigative genetic genealogy.

Genetic genealogy has become a powerful tool for law enforcement because its power is even greater than CODIS, our national DNA database. CODIS, for example, only works with a small portion of a person's genome, around 20 genetic markers. On the other hand, labs that specialize in genetic genealogy look at hundreds of thousands of genetic markers.

This level of advanced DNA testing allows labs to find much more distant relatives of the person they're searching for. For example, labs can predict third and fourth cousins from a single DNA sample and then re-engineer the family tree.

When genetic genealogy first started, the challenge was the DNA pool. Initially, DNA came from commercial databases like 23andMe, Ancestry, MyHeritage, and FamilyTreeDNA. With these websites, you send your DNA off to learn more about your family.

Family Tree DNA was the only one of these four websites that made this information public. And because the DNA was public, law enforcement could access it. GEDmatch also became a popular public database after it was used to identify the Golden State Killer.

After GSK, there was a huge push to get people who were already sending DNA to the consumer websites to also send the results to GEDmatch. That way, the DNA could be made public. After months and months of promoting the idea that your DNA can help solve a cold case, the DNA pool got much deeper for law enforcement.

Family tree DNA, where people have to actively opt out or results of the free upload become public, has over 1 million profiles. GEDmatch, which had about 1 million public results, now also has an opt-in or opt-out feature. The biggest issue faced with genetic genealogy is Fourth Amendment privacy concerns.

But there are also other challenges. For instance, many DNA profiles uploaded to private websites come from people with disposable income who can afford to pay for a kit and submit their DNA. On the other hand, not everyone has the money or the interest to submit their DNA to learn more about their ancestry.

There are also challenges when it comes to recent immigrants. If someone has deep roots in the United States, it's easier for these labs to identify them. But if someone just recently immigrated here, it's going to be much harder. The first step in this process is to upload a DNA profile into a direct-to-consumer or private DNA database.

Once the profile is uploaded, genealogists look for potential matches. Next, they look for exact matches or possible relatives of the person of interest. If they don't get an exact match, they identify relatives.

Sometimes it can be a close match, like a parent or a sibling. Other times, it's a smaller hit. Maybe they can only identify a distant relative. In that case, the police turn to genealogists. A genealogist creates a family tree based on the hit. And from the family tree, they generate suspect lists.

The goal with this entire process is to take the suspect list and then eliminate everyone off the list until they get their perpetrator. Once they have a promising suspect or two, they go through a series of questions.

Was this person alive at the time of the crime? Did they live in the same area? Were they the appropriate age, too young, too old? Once they can answer all of these questions on this individual, they can compare the unknown DNA sample with the suspect if it's a match.

If the suspect is still alive, they can request a warrant for a DNA sample. Or if they don't get a warrant, they can usually get the DNA in another way, like pulling something from the suspect's trash that might contain their DNA. But if the suspect is dead, no longer living, getting their DNA can be challenging. In this case, investigators might get DNA from surviving family members like children.

Later that year, Mary's sister, Rosalie, reached out to a friend who was also a retired Sacramento police officer. She told him about how she's been reading more and more about the use of genetic genealogy on cold cases. And she wondered if the same DNA testing could be done to finally identify Mary's killer.

Rosalie's friend agreed. He also thought the case could benefit from ancestral or forensic genealogy. Rosalie hung up with her friend, not expecting much from her conversation. But only five months later, her phone rang.

On April 23, 2020, a Sacramento police officer knocked on Rosalie's door. The officer told Rosalie she needed to call the San Diego District Attorney's office. They had a message for her. As soon as Rosalie closed the door, she picked up the phone and called prosecutors in San Diego.

They told Rosalie that the department was planning to use DNA taken from Mary's crime scene to do a forensic genealogy run to see if there was a hit. Finally, after five decades, they were going to reopen Mary's case. In early September 2020, San Diego investigators got a hit. They found a possible match to someone living hundreds of miles away from San Diego in Pennsylvania.

Although investigators got a hit, they couldn't immediately go out and arrest him. First, they needed to secure an arrest warrant and extradite him back to Southern California. It had been over 50 years, and they were finally close to making an arrest. So at this point in the investigation, they needed to be careful. One wrong move on the police's part could jeopardize this entire investigation.

The hit came back as John Jeffrey Sipos. In 1969, at the time of Mary's murder, John Sipos was 25 years old and had just left the Navy. He was honorably discharged from the Navy after serving in California from 1963 to 1969.

After he got out of the service, he moved to San Diego and lived not too far from Mary Scott's apartment in the 4000 block of 39th Street. San Diego detectives believe that on the night of Mary's murder, Sipos knocked on Mary's front door at around 2.15 a.m. Mary had just gotten off work and was last seen by the taxi cab driver around 2.05 a.m.

After she got inside her apartment, she went to the bathroom, started taking her makeup off, and getting ready for bed. That's when Sipos knocked on her front door. As a habit, Mary never fully opened her front door when someone knocked. She always kept the security chain locked so that she could see who it was.

But when Mary opened the door and kept the security chain on, Sipos broke down the door, causing the chain to break. The force of breaking the door down also broke Mary's jaw. Once Sipos got inside the apartment, he sexually assaulted her before strangling her to death. And before leaving Mary's apartment, he left his DNA behind.

Following Mary's murder, Sipos carried on with a normal life. He married a woman named Suzanne, and the two purchased a house in October 2003 on Cobbler Road in North Whitehall Township, Pennsylvania.

For over five decades, Sipos got away with murder. Until 2020, San Diego homicide detectives never considered him a suspect. And the name John Jeffrey Sipos was completely unknown to investigators. After detectives got a hit with genetic genealogy, they needed to make sure that Sipos was their guy. So they needed to get a fresh sample of his DNA.

A few detectives staked outside John and his wife's home in Pennsylvania. They waited for the right moment to conduct a trash run. Trash is generally considered public domain any time it's discarded. And since it's public domain, it's not subject to search warrants. So as soon as John and his wife put their trash bins out on the sidewalk to be collected, the officers moved in and searched the trash.

Inside the trash container, they found several items that might contain John's DNA. They recovered a bloody band-aid, a few coffee lids, and dental floss. When they submitted the items for testing, they came back as a match. The DNA on the items from John's trash can matched the DNA collected at Mary's crime scene in 1969.

On October 24th, 2020, Pennsylvania State Police knocked on John Sipos' front door with an arrest warrant signed by a judge in San Diego. The now 75-year-old man was taken into custody and extradited to Southern California without incident. Once he arrived in San Diego, he pleaded not guilty to Mary's murder and took the case to trial.

At trial, his defense relied heavily on the lack of witnesses that proved John was Mary's killer. Because the murder and rape took place more than 50 years ago, the prosecution didn't have many reliable witnesses. The defense also argued that evidence pointed to another suspect. But even without witnesses, the prosecution had the DNA.

Jury deliberations took about one day before returning with a verdict. John Sipos was found guilty on the sole count he faced, first-degree murder. Rape charges weren't filed in the case because the statute of limitations on sexual assault had already passed. This meant that prosecutors could only seek murder charges.

Sipos was sentenced to seven years to life in prison. Seven years to life was the most he could face under 1969 sentencing laws and was the maximum punishment available at the time of Mary's murder. At the sentencing hearing, Mary's daughter Donna looked directly at Sipos and said, quote, I want John Sipos to know he had taken everything from my sister and I, end quote.

At 75 years old, John Sipos may spend the rest of his life behind bars. It's unclear whether Sipos knew Mary or not at the time of the murder, or if her murder was simply a crime of opportunity. Until investigators used forensic genetic genealogy to identify Sipos' DNA collected from Mary's apartment, he was never considered a suspect or a person of interest.

For five long decades, Sipos remained under the police's radar. Until he was arrested in 2020, he probably thought that he would never get caught. And without genetic genealogy and advances in DNA testing, he could have been right. To share your thoughts on the murder of Mary Scott, be sure to follow the show on Instagram and Facebook.

To find out what I think about the case, sign up to become a patron at patreon.com slash forensic tales. After each episode, I release a bonus episode where I share my personal thoughts and opinions about the case. To check out photos from the case, be sure to head to our website, ForensicTales.com. Don't forget to subscribe to the show so you don't miss an episode. We release a new episode every Monday.

If you love the show, consider leaving us a positive review or tell friends and family about us. You can also help support the show through Patreon. Thank you so much for joining me this week. Please join me next week. We'll have a brand new story and a brand new case to talk about. Until then, remember, not all stories have happy endings.

Thank you.

For supporting the show, you'll become one of the first to listen to new ad-free episodes and snag exclusive show merchandise not available anywhere else. To learn about how you can support the show, head over to our Patreon page, patreon.com slash Forensic Tales, or simply click the support link in the show notes. You can also support the show by leaving a positive review or telling friends and family about us.

Forensic Tales is a podcast made possible by our Patreon producers. If you'd like to become a producer of the show, head over to our Patreon page or email me at Courtney at ForensicTales.com.

to find out how you can become involved. For a complete list of sources used in this episode, please visit ForensicTales.com. Thank you for listening. I'll see you next week. Until then, remember, not all stories have happy endings.