Poisoned With Love
Behind a mask of Hill Country gentility lurks a gothic tale of homicide, manners, and Riopan Plus.
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“It had to be an inside job,” Waldrip said. “There was no forced entry. The safe was in a closet, behind some boxes, under the stairwell. There were a lot of antiques in the house, but the burglar took just the safe.” Cordelia told Waldrip that Scoggin had been with her when she bought the safe. “I wanted to interview Scoggin and other workers and visitors,” Waldrip recalled. “But Cordelia flatly refused. She said she’d rather lose it than insult her friends.”
The telephone call between the two Texas Rangers was the first time lawmen linked the crimes in San Angelo with the deaths in Llano—and the first inkling that the Norton sisters had died from other than natural causes. On August 24 Sutton arranged a multi-jurisdictional meeting at a neutral site in Brady. Among those attending were the two Texas Rangers, Lieutenant McCloud, Tom Green County assistant district attorney Sam Oatman, and Sutton, the prosecutor-at-large, who brought the financial records subpoenaed from Scoggin.
The records made interesting reading. Among other things, they showed that in 1985, when Scoggin reportedly was broke, he declared the sale of $650,000 in stocks. On an application for a bank loan, he listed fifty Krugerrands among his assets. Records showed that Scoggin rented a lockbox at a bank on August 30, 1983—roughly the time of the burglary at the Norton mansion—and last entered it on September 26, by which time the box was empty. The Rangers then quickly established that on September 19 Scoggin sold 35 Krugerrands at $412 each to two coin dealers in Dallas.
The most provocative piece of evidence to emerge from the Brady meeting came during a telephone call to Sutton from the medical examiner’s office in San Antonio, where the exhumed body of his uncle, Olgie Nobles, had been sent for testing. “It’s definitely arsenic poisoning,” Sutton told the others as he hung up the phone. “By God, we got it now.”
On the strength of the evidence presented at the Brady meeting, Llano County district attorney Oatman got the ashes of the Norton sisters exhumed. Arsenic traces were found in Cordelia’s remains but not in Girlie’s. Warrants were issued to search the Norton mansion as well as Scoggin’s apartment and place of business in San Angelo. Investigators had already searched the Nobleses’ home at Grape Creek, but they searched it again. Samples taken from hairbrushes, toothbrushes, food and medicine containers, and septic tanks were sent to the Department of Public Safety lab in Austin.
Bill McCloud found an important clue in a chance remark by one of Leita Nobles’ cousins. “I had been racking my brain, trying to figure out how the killer poisoned Leita,” said McCloud. “I was talking long-distance to one of her cousins, and he said something about how she’d been living on 7-Up and Riopan Plus, and then it hit me.” McCloud drove back to the home in Grape Creek and this time found what he was looking for—a bottle of Riopan Plus discarded in a trash basket in Leita’s bedroom. Traces in the bottom of the bottle tested positive for arsenic. McCloud also learned that Scoggin had purchased arsenic at Abbott’s Supermarket in San Angelo. Guy Abbott, a former lawman who had known Scoggin since the early eighties, when they both lived at Cactus Lane trailer park, recalled that Scoggin said he needed some arsenic to kill raccoons that were vandalizing his business. “I told him we had some at the store,” Abbott said. “That was on December 9, 1987. On December 11 he came in and bought it.”
On October 7, 1988, Tom Green County prosecutors indicted Scoggin on charges of murder, attempted murder, and felony theft by check. Two weeks later, officials in Llano County indicted him on charges of murdering the Norton sisters and forging a $30,000 check on Girlie’s account. Since early September he has been held on bonds totaling more than $300,000.
The evidence of murder is largely circumstantial. Nobody can prove that Catherine Norton was murdered, much less that Scoggin did it. The theory of the prosecutors is that Girlie was killed with strychnine rather than arsenic, which would explain why she went so quickly and why the postmortem of her ashes came up blank. Witnesses will testify that Scoggin purchased strychnine and arsenic shortly before the series of poisonings, but no one can say for certain that he used them for homicidal purposes.
What seems clear is that Tim Scoggin was a young man in a hurry. Still in his early thirties, he enjoyed leaving the impression that he had it made. “He told my wife that he would never have to worry about money,” said Ben Jenkins, an insurance agent who was Scoggin’s next-door neighbor in San Angelo for five years. “We assumed he had an inheritance.”
Is it conceivable that the Norton sisters led Scoggin to believe he was heir to their estate? At least one old friend though so. Jim Meyers, the man who had worked for Cordelia and later had bought her beer distributorship, told me, “I can believe that Cordelia might have dropped some hints. Deep down I don’t think she ever considered it, but I can believe she led Scoggin to believe it.”
From conversations with people who knew Scoggin, I had formed a mental picture of him as a swishy, preppy twerp in penny loafers, a cashmere sweater knotted loosely around his neck. But I was surprised: Even in jailhouse greens, Scoggin managed to look respectable, correct, businesslike, even impertinent. His high-pitched voice was startling at first, but there was a Mr. Belvedere arrogance about it, a tone that demanded that this chap be taken seriously. He sat with his knees locked, his hands folded tightly in his lap, clutching a pencil and notepad, as if he were the interviewer.
At first he didn’t want to talk, but when I steered the conversation to Tim Scoggin he quickly warmed to the subject. I had agreed in advance with his San Angelo attorneys, Steve Lupton and Dan Edwards, to avoid questions related to the case, and they watched to make sure I complied. Lupton and Edwards were savvy courthouse lawyers—both had served as Tom Green County prosecutors—and since it was obvious I intended to write the story either way, they perceived a strategic advantage in allowing their client to look as human as possible. The interview took place in a private office of the county jail on January 19, 1989, three months before the trial was scheduled to start April 17.
With little prompting Scoggin painted a picture of himself as a popular, hard-working, above-average student at Jal High School—editor of his yearbook, member of the drama club, officer on the student council—with an abundant talent for art and an outgoing personality. He sold paintings and mowed grass at the country club to buy a car. He also revealed himself to be acutely class-conscious.
“Jal was a company town,” he said. “Everyone worked for El Paso Natural Gas. Very middle-class, sheltered from the real world. No poor people, hardly any blacks or Mexicans. All the kids my age had cars.” Scoggin had never been around the lower class, he told me, until he managed the Cactus Lane trailer park. Those people puzzled him, but he learned to adjust.
Scoggin had been in jail for four months, and he gave me a short critique on the criminal justice system. Obviously, he saw himself as a breed apart from other inmates. And yet he seemed determined to make the best of a bad situation. “I have always been a conservative Republican,” he told me. “My expectation of jail was luxury living, color TVs, suites like the Ritz. If a person was in jail, I assumed that person was guilty. I’ve changed my point of view.” He continued to run his business affairs from jail and used his spare time to study math and history. Somewhere among Scoggin’s personal belongings, I imagined, was a grade-school report card with the evaluation “Uses time wisely.”
News of Scoggin’s arrest hit hard with some of San Angelo’s senior citizens. One of the women in the porcelain-painting club remarked that they were all lucky they didn’t end up as victims, which so infuriated another member that she stormed out of the room.
Irene Hutchins gave thanks that she had been spared. “I firmly believe that God has his arms around me,” she said. “Or else I would have been a victim too.”
Nell Summers, a longtime friend of the Nortons and the person most responsible for bringing Scoggin to San Angelo, wouldn’t talk about the case but volunteered that she didn’t believe the Norton sisters were poisoned.
With one exception, none of the women that Scoggin befriended has shown up at his courtroom hearings. The exception is Jerldine Barrett, the realtor who was his business partner. Barrett knew everyone involved—the Norton sisters, the Nobleses, Nell Summers, Irene Hutchins. “Tim was my best friend,” she says. “We talked about everything.” In a statement to investigators, Barrett revealed that Scoggin told her Olgie Nobles poisoned his wife and, in the process, got arsenic in some cuts on his hands; in effect, Olgie murdered himself. She expects the prosecution to call her as a witness.
Leita Nobles sits in her wheelchair, her hands in basketlike braces to keep her fingers from crinkling up like dead leaves. She may never fully recover and dreads the ordeal of testifying. Though her nephew has convinced her of Scoggin’s guilt, she still has trouble accepting it. “Tim was real good to me,” she says. “He was good to everybody, except Meskins—he didn’t like Meskins at all. I can’t get over what he did.” On the table next to her wheelchair is a small clock encased in porcelain. The tiny flowers on the side of the case were painted by Tim Scoggin. Leita is proud to own it.
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