Delores DeWitt, a 42-year-old African American woman, was living in Prince George’s County, Maryland, when an ordinary night in the Largo area turned into a scene that felt staged for maximum terror. In the dark hours of Monday morning, March 16, 2009, firefighters were sent to a driveway on Webbwood Court, where a car was burning outside an empty home. When the flames were knocked down, two bodies were found inside.
Police said the car had been reported stolen from nearby, and the discovery landed like a thunderclap in a community already on edge.
The victims were identified as DeWitt and her daughter, pulled into a story that seemed to begin not at the driveway, but earlier—when someone took what wasn’t theirs, and then tried to erase the evidence with fire. Investigators would later describe the killings as strangulations, with the burning car serving as a brutal final act meant to hide what had happened before the match was struck. The fact that the vehicle was stolen the same day the bodies were found only deepened the sense that whoever did this moved with purpose, slipping through the neighborhood like a shadow that knew exactly where to step.
As detectives worked, the case took on a wider, more frightening shape. The murders of DeWitt and her daughter occurred in the same Prince George’s County corridor where, weeks earlier, another mother and daughter had been killed—enough similarity to make people wonder if the county was dealing with a predator who returned to the same kind of target. Investigators weighed whether the DeWitt killings were connected to a rash of burglaries and break-ins in the area, crimes where keys and access mattered as much as force, and where someone could come back later to take a car without smashing a window or kicking in a door.
That trail ultimately led prosecutors to Jason Thomas Scott. On July 27, 2010, a Prince George’s County grand jury indictment charged Scott in connection with the murders of Delores and her daughter, with counts that included murder and burglary—an official naming of a suspect after months of fear and speculation. Authorities believed the case fit into a broader pattern of violence tied to burglaries and home invasions in the same region, and Scott’s name began to surface alongside the phrase that locals had come to dread: “mother-daughter” killings.
The legal road that followed was long, and it carried the kind of procedural turns that can reopen wounds. In September 2013, Scott entered an Alford plea in the DeWitt killings—meaning he did not admit guilt, but acknowledged prosecutors had enough evidence to convict. He received two life sentences with all but 85 years suspended, and prosecutors agreed not to pursue charges in other killings they had been examining. By that point, Scott had already been convicted in 2012 for dozens of armed home invasions and burglaries and sentenced to a century in prison, and prosecutors said the plea was a way to spare families from the ordeal of multiple trials while still securing a devastatingly heavy punishment for the DeWitt murders.
