Poisoned With Love
Behind a mask of Hill Country gentility lurks a gothic tale of homicide, manners, and Riopan Plus.
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Scoggin was also uncommonly ambitious. Even when he was working for slave wages at the funeral home in Llano, he never doubted that he would better himself. “It was just a matter of time,” he said. He had chosen a mortician’s career because he had assumed it was lucrative; his mother’s family in Oklahoma were funeral directors, and they lived handsomely. But there was a catch, as he quickly learned: The people who made good money were those who owned the funeral homes, and the only way to own a successful home was to inherit or buy one that was already established. And still Scoggin was confident. “I seemed to meet the right people,” he told me. “I was lucky that way.”
The Norton sisters introduced him to one of their oldest friends, Nell Summers, whose husband, Tab, had worked as a mortician at Robert Massie Funeral Home in San Angelo. With Tab’s help and a fine recommendation from his sponsor in Llano—“He will be a credit to the funeral profession,” wrote D. C. Waldrope—Scoggin moved to the larger town.
Compared with Llano, the old fort town of San Angelo was a metropolis of opportunity. During his two years at Robert Massie, Scoggin made no great impression on his boss, but he did manage to beguile an aging secretary named Irene Hutchins. Her husband, Jim, had retired from a railroad job and had started buying and selling real estate. In 1979 Jim Hutchins made Scoggin the manager of one of his properties, Cactus Lane trailer park.
Time would come when Irene Hutchins regretted that decision. Scoggin seemed to draw bad luck, not for himself but for those around him. One day while Scoggin was attending a porcelain-club meeting, a trailer belonging to an old couple named Olgie and Leita Nobles caught fire. The Nobleses closed their business and rushed home to the trailer park, and while they were away someone came into their store and stole a satchel of money. One of their relatives thought Scoggin was somehow mixed up in the curious juxtaposition of disasters, but not Leita; she believed that her husband had taken the money. Previously a fire had destroyed a house that Scoggin had bought and was having renovated. Fire marshal Ken Land had ruled arson in that case, but no one was charged and Scoggin collected a tidy insurance settlement.
Irene Hutchins knew from her days at the funeral home that Scoggin had an unfortunate habit of exaggerating small accomplishments—an avid reader, he claimed to have read every book in the Llano public library. When the truth might have served him better, Scoggin seemed predisposed to lie. So when the Hutchinses learned that Scoggin was telling people he owned their trailer park, they thought it was funny. “We knew he was a liar,” she said, “but it wasn’t important.” They also learned to live with his eccentricities, which could be as bizarre as they were endearing. Later, Irene recalled Scoggin mentioning several times a book he was reading on the subject of murdering people with rat poison. “He seemed fascinated,” she said.
When Jim Hutchins learned that he had cancer of the pancreas in 1982 and began his long slide to death, Scoggin was a pillar of strength. “Tim became a faithful friend,” Irene said. “We were spending most of our time at Scott and White. I can’t tell you how many trips Tim made, taking care of business for us.” When Jim died in April 1983, Irene quite naturally turned to Scoggin for support and advice. She confided that she kept some Krugerrands in a lockbox at the bank. That was the worst thing she could do, Scoggin warned, and he advised her to do what his parents did and keep her gold in a purse hidden in her attic. “That’s an idea,” she replied, although she had no intention of moving her gold. A few days later, she learned from a neighbor that Scoggin had come into her home while she was away. “Tim told me he just stopped by to use the telephone,” Irene said. “I knew he was lying.”
Something else happened about that time, something that put an end to the warm feelings Irene Hutchins had for Tim Scoggin. She began to suspect that he was stealing money from the coffers at the trailer park. By that time the park had been sold to absentee owners in California, but Irene held the mortgage and kept an eye on the business. “I called California and told them what I suspected,” she said. “They came to San Angelo and confronted him. Tim admitted he took the money—I don’t know how much. But he promised to borrow it from the bank and pay them back.”
Scoggin may or may not have borrowed money from a bank at that point, but he did borrow $34,000 from Olgie Nobles, the tenant whose trailer had been damaged by fire. Scoggin told Olgie and Leita that he needed the money to keep the bank from seizing his trailer park. “He was sitting in his office crying like a baby,” Leita recalled. “That’s when Olgie gave him the money.” During that same time period Scoggin borrowed on several other occasions from the Nobleses. Counting a promissory note that he signed when he took over their business in 1986, the amount exceeded $175,000.
When Olgie died in March 1988, Scoggin owed the Nobleses more than $100,000. That didn’t include a $15,000 check drawn on Olgie’s account, dated three days before his death, and deposited in the account of Tim Scoggin two days after Olgie’s death—with a signature that authorities believe was false. Olgie died five weeks after the Norton sisters did and of the same symptoms that had killed Cordelia. And still nobody suspected murder.
Leita Sutton Nobles came from that hard-edged stock whose resiliency and make-do philosophy settled the Hill Country and made it habitable. Her father raised nine children by working a tenant farm near Lampasas. Her brother Leonard quit school in the seventh grade and started out on horseback for Junction, where over the years he built up a business buying and selling furs, pecans, eggs, and scrap metal. Olgie, who was Leita’s second husband, drove a cattle truck in the spring and summer and worked for Leonard in the fall and winter. In 1962 Olgie and Leita moved to San Angelo and opened their own business in a jumble of concrete-block buildings on the Rio Concho near downtown. In the spring and summer they sold evaporative coolers—swamp coolers, they are called—and cooler parts; when business fell off in the fall, they bought and sold pecans; and when the pecan harvest ended, they bought and sold furs until it was time to sell coolers again. They were doing all right until Tim Scoggin came into their lives.
The Nobleses were hardly the type to squander or fritter away money. Olgie sometimes hid cash in out-of-the-way places, just to keep it from Leita, and she did the same. Olgie was a hard drinker with an eye for the girls, and for forty years he and Leita had fought like cats and dogs. Yet each was a pushover for Tim Scoggin. For some reason, Scoggin had a stronger influenced over Olgie than he did over Leita. When Olgie loaned the young man money—Leita didn’t always know how much or when—it was with a handshake and nothing else.
In the autumn in 1985, while Leita was vacationing in Las Vegas, Scoggin persuaded Olgie to sell him their business. “I couldn’t believe it when I heard what that old man had done,” Leita said—she frequently referred to her husband as “that old man.” Nevertheless, she went along. She took for granted that Scoggin was prosperous. By then Scoggin had formed a partnership with a realtor named Jerldine Barrett, a woman old enough to be his mother. What’s more, the Nobleses were under the impression—as were a number of others in San Angelo—that Scoggin stood to inherit a sizable fortune from two old women in Llano. Some understood him to say that the Nortons were his aunts.
The deal that transferred the title of Nobles Air Conditioning to Tim Scoggin was closed on September 25, 1986. The bank financed $49,000, and Scoggin signed a promissory note for $80,000, agreeing to pay the Nobleses the balance at $1,700 a month. Eight days later, on October 3, a release of lien was filed at the Tom Green County courthouse, showing that Scoggin had paid off the entire $80,000. Though the signatures of Olgie and Leita Nobles were later found to be phony, nobody questioned the document at the time. Scoggin continued to make the $1,700-a-month installments—at least he continued to satisfy the Nobleses that he was trying to make the payments. They knew nothing about the document, of course. In April 1987, Scoggin used the document as part of an agreement to secure a bank loan.
All the while, Scoggin treated Olgie and Leita Nobles with the love and consideration he might have shown his own parents. And he continued to travel back and forth to Llano, watching over the Norton sisters. Leita Nobles went to work for Scoggin, teaching him the business. Against her advice, he stopped dealing in pecans and furs—both of which were money-makers—and he added a line of hardware, though Leita warned that he couldn’t compete with Wal-Mart. Later he added a specialty shop called Addie Mae’s Christmas and More, for which he borrowed another $20,000 from Olgie. Business went from bad to worse. Leita spent most of her time on the phone, fending off creditors. “He’d lie to them and say the check’s in the mail,” she said, “and leave me to explain it.”
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