Poisoned With Love
Behind a mask of Hill Country gentility lurks a gothic tale of homicide, manners, and Riopan Plus.
There was something inexplicably sinister and foreboding about the old Norton mansion, but nobody thought of it as a tableau for murder. It sat on the crown of a hill just east of Llano, sheltered by a fence and dense clusters of elm, cedar, and post oak, looking down on the town like the ghost of a Jonah ship. Hardly anyone alive knew its secrets, its failed visions, its unanswered love. Old-timers told of parties there in the thirties and even as late as the sixties, but no one could recall a wedding or a birth or any of the other events that celebrate life’s continuity.
For more than a century the mansion had housed the damned and the dying. Its original owner, F. R. Malone, was an investor who came from Louisiana after the Civil War to make his fortune in the iron boom. The mansion was his dream, but it also became his epitaph: Malone apparently went bust before he could move in. After that it was owned by a group of doctors who turned it into a tuberculosis sanatorium and attempted to maximize their profits by forcing their patients to live—and frequently die—in neat rows of tents on the mansion grounds. The doctors went broke in 1911, and four years later another mining magnate, Tom W. Norton, bought the property, burned the death tents, and scrubbed down and renovated the mansion as a home for his wife and five daughters. For a time the mansion on the hill became the vortex of social life in Llano, the site of endless teas and galas. But none of the daughters ever married or had children. When the last of the Nortons died in February 1988, the mansion once again fell dark and silent, its secrets intact.
The last surviving daughters, Cordelia and Catherine, had shared the old house and fading glory of the Norton name for the last quarter of a century. They lived alone on their seventy-acre estate, seldom entertaining or receiving visitors. In the small town below, the mansion became a source of curiosity and gossip; a generation had died and another had grown up since the house was part of Llano’s social fabric. “All the time I was growing up,” recalled Llano County district attorney Sam Oatman, whose family helped found the town in the 1850’s, “I wondered what was going on up there. There were stories about wild parties and other things, but it was just speculation.”
Speculation was that the Norton sisters were lesbians. Cordelia courted the bull-dyke image: a butch haircut, men’s clothes, no makeup except for fingernail polish, and a tongue as caustic and salty as a drill sergeant’s. “She liked to come on tough,” said Jim Myers, who had worked for Cordelia for 23 years. Texas Ranger John Waldrip remembered that Cordelia was “rough as a cob,” and Llano County sheriff Gail Ligon, a distant relative of the Nortons, recalled that “she’d give you a cussing at the drop of a hat.” Even Cordelia’s business ventures had a masculine cast—she raised cattle and owned a beer distributorship. “She wanted to be known as one of the guys,” said Jimmy Walker, who had been Cordelia’s banker. Nobody knew (or at least nobody was willing to talk) about Cordelia’s early life, but she had been an officer in the Women’s Army Corps during World War II and, according to one story, had studied medicine in New York until a broken love affair caused her to quit and return home to Llano.
Catherine was the exact opposite, the consummate female. She was the youngest of the Norton girls—since childhood Catherine had been known as “Girlie.” Friends described her as frilly and docile; “a hat-and-gloves type,” said one. Like Cordelia, Girlie was regarded as a good businesswoman, but the businesses she chose were a dress shop and a flower shop. As her mother—known in her day as Lady—had done, Girlie traveled widely and collected antiques.
Together Cordelia and Girlie acted out their roles as lord and lady of the mansion. The trappings of grandeur—the servants, the gardeners, the dances and galas—were dim memories. As shadows lengthened, the sisters became almost obsessively secretive and frugal. “They wanted to know everything about everybody in town,” said Dutch Swenson, who operates a coin shop across from the courthouse and who had known the sisters for sixty years. “But they didn’t want anyone to know anything about themselves.” The mansion became more museum than home, a hodgepodge of rare vases, icons, Persian carpets, and other antiques and memorabilia. People speculated what would become of the estate when the sisters were gone; the only relatives the two ever mentioned were distant cousins in New Mexico and New York.
When Girlie and Cordelia died within a day of each other—Girlie on February 19 and Cordelia on February 20, 1988—no one was shocked. Girlie was 75 and Cordelia was 83, and both had been in poor health for weeks. It seemed ordained that they share the final page of the Norton legacy. A handful of old friends came to pay their last respects. So did one young friend, Tim Scoggin, who had been an apprentice mortician in Llano in the mid-seventies. Scoggin had moved to San Angelo and had achieved a measure of success as a real estate dealer and businessman, but he remained the Norton sisters’ dearest companion and confidant. “Cordelia and Girlie would call him anytime, night or day,” recalled Swenson. “And he’d jump in his car and drive two and a half hours to run some little errand.”
Except for Scoggin, the sisters might have been alone at the end, but he was there for them, fixing their meals, delivering their messages, driving them to doctors’ appointments. While Scoggin was taking Girlie for a checkup at Scott and White Memorial Hospital in Temple (she had recently undergone surgery for cancer of the pancreas), Cordelia took sick—a sudden attack of vomiting, diarrhea, and abdominal pains—and had to be hospitalized in Llano. Scoggin and Girlie returned to the mansion that night, and when Scoggin looked in on Girlie the following morning she was dead. Doctors at Scott and White were stunned when they heard: She had checked out fine the previous day.
A few hours after Scoggin discovered the body, he telephoned Mary Moursund, the executrix of the Norton estate, to report that Catherine had died. On the following night—a Saturday—Cordelia died too. As the sisters had wished, Scoggin arranged to have both bodies cremated. Moursund says he telephoned again on Sunday night and inquired about the Norton sisters’ will. “When the will is filed for probate,” Moursund said tersely, “you’ll get to see who got what.”
The shocker came a month later, when Moursund discovered a $30,000 check drawn on the account of Catherine Norton and deposited the day of her death into the account of Tim Scoggin. On closer inspection she began to think that the check had been forged.
And still nobody suspected murder.
People in Llano knew very little about Tim Scoggin. They had heard that his father was a career employee of El Paso Natural Gas, that he grew up in Andrews and nearby Jal, New Mexico, and that after high school he attended mortuary school in Dallas. Around 1975 Scoggin turned up in Llano to apprentice at Waldrope-Hatfield Funeral Home. Girlie owned the only flower shop in town then, and that’s where they met.
In 1977, when Scoggin was still in his early twenties, he moved to San Angelo to take a better-paying job with another mortuary. After that, people in Llano saw him from time to time, always in the company of one of the Norton sisters. When Scoggin visited, he always stayed at the mansion. What people didn’t know—and what they couldn’t figure out—was why. The Norton sisters weren’t the sort to open their lives to anyone. Why Tim Scoggin? Dutch Swenson offered an oversimplified observation that may have explained the relationship, at least from the sisters’ point of view: “Cordelia was looking for a gardener back then. Young Scoggin said he’d do the work hisself and not charge nothing, and that set pretty good with Cordelia.”
Tim Scoggin was a strange young man, apparently sensitive and intelligent. His hobby was painting flowers and lacy designs on porcelain urns. He sometimes told people that he had studied under the masters in Europe, though actually he had learned the craft from an elderly woman in Llano. Indeed, most of his friends were old women and, occasionally, old men. In San Angelo his closest companions were elderly, mostly wealthy women who belonged to his porcelain-painting club. He doted on them, and they responded. To someone younger, Scoggin’s constant attentions might have seemed cloying and oppressive, but to the aging and lonely, the central fact was that Scoggin was always there in times of crisis.
He was a diminutive figure—maybe five four, maybe 125 pounds—and he talked in such a high-pitched voice that over the telephone people assumed they were speaking to a woman. His manner was as effeminate as Cordelia’s was masculine, but he had a boyish charm and persistence that made old people feel important. There was nothing funny about Tim Scoggin, yet on meeting him you wanted to laugh: The ludicrous combination of his squared-off rimless glasses, jug ears, and wavy rust-colored hair somehow suggested a Howdy Doody doll playing Secretary of State.
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