Transcription
On this episode of Black Girl Gone, I'm telling the story of two families, two mothers, and two daughters whose lives were stolen in the most unimaginable way.
In January 2009, 16-year-old Carissa Loftton called 911 to say that she and her mother, Karen, had been shot inside their home. By the time police arrived, it was too late. Both were found murdered.
Then, just weeks later, 42-year-old Dolores Dwit and her 20-year-old daughter, Ebony, were found inside of a burning car, killed in a brutal, unexplained attack. Two families, four lives, all taken under eerily similar circumstances.
For months, these cases were treated as tragic but separate, random. Until a name surfaced, a name no one expected. A suspect whose quiet life hid a terrifying truth. This is the story of Karen, Carissa, Dolores, and Ebony.
It was just after 2:00 a.m. on a cold Monday morning in January when a call came in to the Prince George's County 911 dispatchers. The caller, barely audible, said that she and her mother had been shot. She needed help urgently. The voice was that of 16-year-old Carissa Loftton. She was calling from inside her home on South Hall Drive in Largo, Maryland.
Largo was the kind of place you'd describe as quiet, middle-class, suburban, a tight-knit community right outside Washington D.C. The Loftton's neighborhood was filled with neatly kept homes and trimmed lawns. It wasn't the kind of place where you'd expect anything like this to happen.
Police responded in under 5 minutes, and when they arrived, the house was locked, and there were no signs of forced entry. But one officer noticed something. There was a side window. It was closed, but it was unlocked. And so, with his gun drawn, he climbed through and unlocked the front door so that he could let the other officers in.
Inside, they began searching the home. And then they found them. Karen Loftton was 45 years old. She was found upstairs, crouched in the corner of her bedroom. Police believe that she was trying to shield herself when she was shot. Carissa's body was found in her bed. She had been shot, too, still under the covers.
Karen was a school nurse, known for her gentle, no-nonsense demeanor. She was described as devoted both to her job and to her children: Keon, who was 20, and 16-year-old Carissa. She and Chris's father had gotten a divorce, and he lived in Atlanta but maintained a close relationship with his daughter. At that time, she was in high school. Smart, ambitious, and grounded. She attended private school and had recently started working part-time at a Golden Corral restaurant to earn her own money.
The day before their murders, Sunday, January 25th, they had gone to church together. That evening, Carissa went to work her shift at the restaurant, and she was last seen leaving sometime around 9:00 p.m. What happened after that remains a mystery. Karen usually picked her daughter up from work, but that night, it appeared she didn't. Detectives weren't able to confirm how Carissa made it home, but at some point between Carissa arriving home and 2:00 a.m., someone entered that house. Someone who knew the layout, who avoided setting off alarms, who left no signs of forced entry, and who took the lives of a mother and her teenage daughter execution-style.
In the days that followed, police tried to piece together what had happened. There was no evidence that anything had been stolen, ruling out robbery. There were no defensive wounds, no sign of a struggle. There was something else, too. The home security system. Now, according to reports, the alarm had been set but was deactivated shortly after the break-in occurred. Now, investigators believed it had been turned off either by one of the victims, possibly at gunpoint, or by someone who knew how to bypass it. Karen never left her home unsecured. She was known for being cautious, for locking up, for setting the alarm. So, how did someone slip in and out without triggering it? Police believe that it was someone who knew the Lofttons, someone they trusted, or someone who had studied their routines.
Karen's ex-husband was immediately questioned. However, he was quickly ruled out because he was in Atlanta at the time of the murders. But in the early stages of the investigation, police then turned their attention to Keon, Karen's son. He also lived in the home where his mother and sister had been killed. But the night of the murders, he happened to not be home. He was at his fiance's house. But for detectives who were beginning to believe that this was done by someone close to Karen and Carissa, Keon being involved was a possibility for investigators. And so, he was brought in for questioning, but his alibi checked out, and so he too was ruled out as a suspect. Close friends and family members were also questioned, but despite dozens of interviews, no clear suspect emerged.
The murders of Karen and Carissa sent a shockwave through their community. A place where neighbors knew each other by name, where people waved from their driveways, where things like this just didn't happen. Largo, Maryland, wasn't used to headlines like this. And for the people who lived on South Hall Drive, it was terrifying to realize that a killer had been inside one of their homes and then disappeared into the night without a trace. Parents were shaken. Mothers were rattled. Some neighbors began double-locking their doors and keeping their porch lights on long past midnight. The fact that there had been no forced entry and no sign of a struggle, with no obvious reason for such violence, it left everyone on edge. Because if it could happen to the Lofttons, it could happen to anyone. And the worst part, no one could understand why. Why would someone target this mother and daughter? And how had they managed to vanish, leaving behind no answers, only heartbreak?
But just weeks after the murders of Karen and Carissa, while their community was still reeling, it happened again. On the morning of March 16th, 2009, not even 2 months later, a 911 call came in at around 4:00 a.m. A car was on fire in the driveway of an empty home on Webwood Court, just blocks from where the Lofttons had been killed. Fire crews were dispatched immediately. The car, a Nissan Maxima, had been reported stolen from a nearby home only hours earlier. But this wasn't just a case of a stolen vehicle dumped and torched.
When firefighters arrived, the flames were intense. So hot that they melted the asphalt beneath the car, and the garage next to it had begun to burn. The smoke was thick. But it's what they found inside the car that changed everything. In the back seat was a human body, badly burned. Another body had been stuffed into the trunk. Both were so badly charred that firefighters and investigators couldn't even tell if they were male or female. There was no ID, no way to immediately know who they were. But what was clear was that this wasn't an accident. This was a murder. Brutal, intentional, and deeply disturbing.
Prince George's County police were called in to investigate what had quickly become a homicide scene. The smell of gasoline still hung in the air. An accelerant had been used to destroy the car and the bodies inside. And now there were more questions than answers. The murder scene was chilling, but what made it even more unsettling was where it had happened. Webwood Court was in the same neighborhood where Karen and Carissa had been murdered just weeks earlier. Two crimes, four victims, all from the same general area. All killed in ways that made no sense, with no clear motive and no clear connections.
The neighborhood was on edge. What was happening in Largo? Who was targeting people in this quiet suburb? Area residents began to fear the worst. Some whispered about a serial killer. Others just wanted answers. Even the acting chief of police at the time, Robert Hilton, admitted that these cases were far from normal. Now, the chief had initially ruled out the idea of a serial killer. But now, with four homicides in two months, all unsolved, even he had to reconsider. And if someone was responsible for all four murders, then who were they? And how had they managed to commit such horrific crimes and walk away undetected?
As investigators combed through the ashes of the burned-out Nissan Maxima, they were desperate for answers. The fire had destroyed nearly everything. Any trace of fingerprints, DNA, even the most basic identifiers. But they were able to confirm one thing. Both victims were female. Beyond that, everything was still a mystery. They canvassed the neighborhood. They searched for witnesses, anyone who might have seen something, but no one had seen the car being dropped off. There were no reports of people running away, just vague mentions of suspicious noises in the early morning hours, but nothing concrete, nothing that could help them understand what had happened or why. And time was working against them.
As the investigation intensified, the Prince George's County Police Chief revealed that detectives were now looking into the possibility that the victims were another mother and daughter. A pair who had been reported missing just hours before the car fire was discovered. And while police were still working to identify the bodies found in the burned-out car, a young woman named Courtney Hicks was growing increasingly worried.
It was Sunday night, March 15th, 2009, the night before the fire, and Courtney had just returned to Largo after spending the weekend with friends. When she arrived at the Largo Metro station just after 10:00 p.m., she texted her mother, Dolores, to come pick her up. But Dolores didn't answer, and that was unusual. Her mother always answered, and so Courtney waited, and she sent another message. Still nothing. Eventually, she made her way to the family's home on Cedar Hollow Lane. But as soon as she arrived, something didn't feel right. The lights inside the house were on. Her mother's car was parked in the driveway. Ebony's jacket, the one that she wore everywhere, was by the front door. Everything looked like they had just stepped out for a moment, but the house was silent. Courtney called out for her mom, for Ebony. Nothing. She checked their bedrooms, empty. And then she started calling their cell phones, but no one picked up. And that's when the fear set in. She knocked on doors, asked neighbors if they had seen her mother or sister, but no one had. And that's when she decided to call the police to report them missing. In that moment, she was alone, standing in the middle of a mystery she couldn't yet begin to comprehend.
Police began investigating immediately, and it didn't take long for them to find Ebony's boyfriend, who told detectives that he had dropped her off at home around 1:30 a.m. Sunday morning, hours before Courtney arrived back in town. It was the last known person to see either Dolores or Ebony alive, but police never named him as a suspect. But now they had a timeline. They had a missing person's report, and within hours, they had two unidentified bodies found inside a burning car less than a mile from the Dwit home. The puzzle pieces were starting to fall into place, but there was no way to move forward until they knew for sure who the victims were.
That answer came the following day, on Tuesday, March 17th, 2009. Less than 48 hours after the fire, the medical examiner made a positive identification. The two women found inside the car were 42-year-old Dolores Dwit and her 20-year-old daughter, Ebony. Dolores worked as a nurse at a local nursing home. Her sister told Dline that she loved working with the elderly and worked hard to provide a good life for her two daughters. Ebony was described as the life of the party, a livewire who made everyone laugh and who just genuinely enjoyed life. But now they were dead, murdered, just like Karen and Carissa, mother and daughter. And now two families had been shattered in the same way. Two mothers, two daughters gone within the span of just seven weeks. And the fear that had already been spreading through the community turned into something deeper. Panic. Because this wasn't random. It couldn't be. Not anymore. The cases were too similar. The victims were too connected by circumstance. Both pairs of victims had been killed in their own neighborhoods with no obvious suspect, just death. Sudden, violent, and cruel. What were the odds? The question on everyone's mind now wasn't just who did this, but could it be the same person? And if so, what was their connection to both families? And why were they targeting mothers and daughters?
In the early months of 2009, two mother-daughter pairs were brutally murdered just miles apart in Largo, Maryland. At first, police were hesitant to say the cases were connected, but similarities were becoming harder and harder to ignore. Although police had not yet officially linked the murder of Karen and Carissa Loftton to the deaths of Dolores and Ebony Dwit, the similarities were impossible to ignore. Both Karen and Dolores were nurses. Both Carissa and Ebony were young, one a teenager, the other just 20 years old. Both pairs were killed in the early morning hours of a Monday, and both lived in quiet suburban neighborhoods in Largo, less than a mile apart. Their homes backed up to cul-de-sacs. Their quiet streets were picturesque, but now stained by something unspeakable.
Major Andy Ellis with the Prince George's County Police Department addressed the public's growing concern, saying, "We have not definitively linked these cases. They have very uncanny resemblances to each other. They occurred close in time to each other, close in distance to each other. We have mothers and daughters. There are very strong circumstantial links, but we don't have anything definitive at this point." Still, the pattern was clear and unsettling.
Police were also learning that the morning the stolen car was set on fire, several strange things had happened across the neighborhood, almost simultaneously. It was too much activity in the short time frame to be a coincidence. A neighbor who lived just across the street from the Dwits told Fox News that their home had been burglarized just a few months earlier in December of 2008. And she recalled that Dolores and Ebony had recently bought a Wii, a new television, and another electronic item. And just a week later, someone broke in through a window, and those items were taken. It wasn't an isolated event either. According to a report later, police confirmed that there had been around 40 burglaries in that part of Largo since October 2008. The fear was growing. What if this wasn't random violence? What if someone had been watching these homes?
Police did not initially publicly state how Dolores and Ebony were killed. An autopsy later revealed that the two women had been strangled, but many in the community at first believed that they had been shot just like Karen and Carissa. And based on early witness accounts and the chilling similarities between the two cases, authorities issued a warning to residents: If you return home and find signs of a break-in, don't go inside. Call the police.
Now, detectives began searching the Dwit home from top to bottom, looking for any trace of evidence. But they weren't just focused on that house anymore. They also returned to the Loftton residence. This time with new questions, new eyes, and the creeping realization that they were dealing with something that might be much bigger than anyone first imagined.
In the early days, police had been careful not to use the word "serial killer." They didn't want to panic the community. They didn't want to make promises they couldn't keep. But behind closed doors, investigators were beginning to confront a very real possibility that someone had deliberately targeted two families, two mothers and two daughters, and that it might happen again.
At a neighborhood meeting held not long after the murders of Dolores and Ebony, a lieutenant with the Prince George's County's homicide division addressed a crowd of worried residents. He revealed that police were now pursuing at least 30 active leads in the Dwit case, and that the possibility of a serial killer was very much on the table. They couldn't rule it out. Not anymore. And he urged residents to be cautious, to keep their doors and windows locked, to pay attention to their surroundings. He warned people to be mindful of where they left their keys for their car and their house, and to not assume safety just because they lived in a quiet neighborhood.
The Prince George's County Police Department threw everything they had at the case. The entire homicide squad was assigned to work it, along with senior investigators from other departments. They canvassed neighborhoods, knocked on doors, and asked residents for DNA samples. They collected over 200 pieces of evidence, and still, they had no suspects. They called in the FBI to build a profile, hoping that behavioral analysis could give them something that the evidence hadn't. Who was this person? How had they managed to kill four people and leave behind so little? And why, out of everyone, had they chosen these two families?
For months, the murders of Karen and Carissa Loftton and Dolores and Ebony Dwit remained unsolved. The community was shaken. Detectives had gathered leads, sifted through burglaries, knocked on doors, but no one could have guessed that the break in the case wouldn't come from a homicide investigation at all, but from a completely separate crime.
In May of 2009, just a few months after the murders, a gun shop in Woodbine, Maryland, called JC Arms, was burglarized. Several firearms and other items were stolen. The Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, better known as the ATF, took over the investigation. It was a federal case involving stolen weapons. But what they uncovered would lead them straight into the heart of the mother-daughter murders.
Now, according to a special agent with the Baltimore ATF field office, an informant gave them a name: Jason Thomas Scott. He was 27 years old, a part-time UPS employee. He'd worked there for nearly a decade. Scott wasn't on anyone's radar, but when ATF agents obtained a warrant and searched his Upper Marlboro home, where he lived with his parents and sister, what they found was far more than stolen guns.
Inside Scott's house, they discovered a disturbing cache: a dozen firearms, a police scanner, a silencer, a bulletproof vest, BMW keys, and burglary tools, including a crowbar, gloves, and a ski mask. Many of the items found matched the description from burglaries in the same Largo neighborhoods where Karen and Carissa and Dolores and Ebony had lived and died. But that wasn't the most chilling discovery.
During one of the searches of Scott's home, investigators found a flash drive, and on it were photos of a young woman naked, her face obscured by a pillowcase. These images were disturbing and horrifyingly specific. They were linked to a terrifying home invasion that had occurred just weeks earlier on June 13th, 2009, in Fort Washington, Maryland. In that incident, a young woman and her mother returned home and found a man inside holding the woman's younger sister at gunpoint. The attacker ordered the older sister into a bedroom, forced her to strip, took photos of her, and then sexually assaulted her. Police now believed that the man behind that assault, the man in the photos, was Jason Scott.
Scott was arrested in July 2009, taken into custody in a UPS parking lot, and initially charged with a long list of federal crimes, including carjacking, weapons violations, and sexual assault. He never saw freedom again. And while he was being held on those federal charges, detectives from Prince George's County began quietly building their homicide case against him. They believed that they had found their man, not just for the burglaries, not just for the weapons, but for the murders.
According to reporting, Scott had allegedly been selling weapons out of the trunk of his car. Weapons that included pistols, silencers, even a machine gun. Some of them were traced back to the very gun store that had been robbed in May. Scott pleaded not guilty, and he was scheduled to go on trial for the federal charges in November 2010, but police weren't finished with him yet. Because what they suspected now, and what they still had to prove, was that Jason Scott wasn't just a thief or a predator; he was a killer.
According to law enforcement sources, Scott, however, wasn't just a common criminal. He was highly intelligent, a calculated offender, someone who knew how to cover his tracks. He had studied forensic science, read textbooks used by actual investigators, and allegedly used his knowledge to stay one step ahead of police. He knew how to clean up a crime scene, how to avoid leaving behind evidence, how to change his methods just enough to confuse detectives, and even mislead the FBI profiler assigned to his case. He was, as one investigator put it, "brilliant, but dangerous."
Scott reportedly held two master's degrees, including one in information systems management from the University of Maryland. His education combined with his technical skills made him unlike any suspect that the Prince George's County police had ever encountered. Police began to piece together a disturbing theory. By day, Jason Scott worked quietly at UPS sorting facilities, correcting addresses on undeliverable packages. He was described as reliable, efficient, quiet. No one suspected a thing. But by night, police believe he was leading a very different life. Investigators alleged that Scott used his computer skills to research law enforcement techniques, forensic protocols, and investigative procedures. He reportedly studied how detectives work, and then he used that knowledge against them. They also suspected that he may have used his access to UPS databases to learn about potential victims, looking up names, addresses, and delivery histories. It's believed that he also used bleach to wipe down crime scenes and started fires like the one that destroyed the Dwit bodies to eliminate evidence. But those who worked alongside Scott at UPS were stunned when the charges were announced.
Following the ATF raid, Prince George's County police returned to Jason Scott's home, and they uncovered even more evidence linking him to a string of burglaries across the region dating back to 2007. But it was the testimony of an accomplice, someone who had helped Scott sell stolen guns and commit burglaries, that truly widened the scope. The man told investigators that he and Scott had carried out a series of home invasions in 2008 and 2009. And now police believe that Scott's crimes were far more extensive and violent than they had ever imagined.
Now, despite early claims that the murders weren't the work of a serial killer, the chief of police changed course. He publicly called Jason Scott exactly what many had feared that he was: a serial killer. They believed that he had committed even more murders. And Scott was now being investigated in the 2008 murder of Vilma Ortiz Butler, a woman shot and killed in Bowie, her home set on fire, and possibly connected him to other murders in D.C., Texas, and Florida, places that he had traveled. The man, once seen as a quiet UPS worker, was now believed to be one of the most dangerous killers the region had ever seen.
On July 27th, 2010, Jason Scott was officially charged with the murders of Dolores and Ebony Dwit after a grand jury returned a 7-count indictment. In addition to two counts of murder, Scott was also charged with burglary, and if convicted, he faced two life sentences. Though investigators strongly suspected that Scott was also responsible for the murders of Karen and Carissa Loftton and Vilma Ortiz Butler, he had not been charged in those cases. As he sat behind bars awaiting trial, detectives continued to build their case and examine whether the killings in Largo were the start of his violence or the end. And if it wasn't the beginning, the question was, how many more victims might there be?
At the time of the indictment, investigators believed Scott was a stranger to his victims, and there was no clear motive that had been established. But what was clear was that the trail of violence left behind was devastating. In 2012, Jason Scott was tried in federal court on the weapons, burglary, and sex crimes that ultimately helped expose the full extent of his criminal behavior. He was convicted and sentenced to 100 years in prison, but the murder charges, especially those connected to Dolores and Ebony Dwit, were still pending at the state level.
In 2013, facing overwhelming evidence and multiple witness statements, Jason Scott entered an Alford plea, meaning that he acknowledged that there was enough evidence to convict him without admitting guilt to the murders of Dolores and Ebony. In exchange for avoiding trial, he was sentenced to two consecutive life terms without the possibility of parole. And pending charges against him for the murders of Karen, Carissa, and Vilma were dropped. He has never been charged with their murders.
As of the recording of this episode, Jason Scott remains behind bars and has not been linked to any other murders. But for the families, the pain didn't end with his conviction. Two mothers, two daughters, four lives stolen in the safety of their own homes. Still no known motive, no connection, just the terrifying truth that someone who looked ordinary, who seemed ordinary, was capable of unimaginable violence. What happened to Karen and Carissa Loftton, to Dolores and Ebony Dwit was senseless. It was cruel, and it was terrifying. These women were not caught up in dangerous lives. They weren't involved in crime. They were simply going to work, going to school, coming home, and loving each other. And then someone took that away.
The hardest part of stories like this isn't just the violence. It's the silence that follows, the unanswered questions, the justice that feels incomplete. Because Jason Scott may be behind bars for the rest of his life, but he was never held accountable for all of it. Karen and Carissa's names were never read aloud in a courtroom. Their story never truly got its day. And still, what we can do, what I can do, is say their names. Say them with the same love that their families still carry, the same heartbreak their community still feels. Their lives were beautiful, their memories are sacred, and their stories matter. May Karen, Carissa, Dolores, and Ebony rest in peace.
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