In the winter of 2013, the quiet discovery of a young woman's body in a motel parking lot in Portland, Maine, brought a tragic end to a two-month search and unveiled a story of infidelity and violence. Margarita Scott, a 29-year-old Caucasian female, was found deceased on January 17, 2013, in the back of an SUV. Her husband, who had been desperately searching for her since she disappeared in November 2012, made the grim discovery in the parking lot of a Motel 6.
For weeks, he had held onto the belief that his wife had left him for another man, never suspecting a more sinister reason for her absence.
The investigation into Margarita Scott's death quickly focused on her 19-year-old lover, Anthony Pratt Jr. from Queens, New York. It was determined that Scott had been killed by a single gunshot wound to the neck. The murder did not take place in the motel parking lot, but rather in a Portland apartment on West Concord Street where Pratt had been staying with friends. Authorities believe the fatal shooting occurred in November 2012. Following the murder, her body was moved to the Chevrolet Trailblazer, which was then abandoned in the motel parking lot where it sat unnoticed for two months.
In April 2013, Anthony Pratt Jr. was arrested in his hometown of Queens and charged with the murder of Margarita Scott. The motive presented by the prosecution was that Pratt killed Scott in a fit of anger because she was planning to end their affair and return to her husband. During the trial, the defense attempted to cast doubt on Pratt's guilt by pointing to the fact that DNA from two other individuals, Christopher and Tunile Jennings, was found on the murder weapon. The Jennings were the tenants of the apartment where Scott was killed, and testimony revealed that Tunile Jennings had threatened Scott on the night of the murder after discovering she had been intimate with her husband.
Despite the defense's arguments, a jury found Anthony Pratt Jr. guilty of murder in October 2014. A key piece of evidence that linked Pratt to the crime scene was his DNA found on a piece of chewing gum that had been used to plug a bullet hole in the wall of the apartment where the murder took place. A neighbor also testified to seeing someone matching Pratt's description carrying what could have been a body from the apartment on the night of the murder. In November 2014, Anthony Pratt Jr. was sentenced to 42 years in prison for the murder of Margarita Scott, closing a chapter on a case that began with a husband's desperate search for his missing wife.
