Boy, do they ever want the Trails End Ranch
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE DATED SEPT. 2, 2001
THE LIBERTARIAN, By Vin Suprynowicz
Boy, do they ever want the Trails End Ranch
The Donald Scott case isn't as well known as the government atrocities at Waco and Ruby Ridge. But it should be.
In October of 1992, millionaire recluse Donald Scott and his bride of two months, Frances Plante Scott, lived in a storybook wooded valley in the mountains high above Malibu, Calif. Trails End Ranch is almost completely surrounded by state and federal park land, and the neighboring government entities had made numerous attempts to buy out Scott and annex his property in the years immediately preceding.
Frances Scott contends the National Security Agency and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratories have also had a less-well-known role in the attempted government land grab -- the ranch sits in the midst of a government antenna array, perfectly sited to receive data from the Pacific Missile Test Range, and "My husband was the only local resident to testify against the placement of those antennas, because they cause cancer," she recalls.
Stymied in their attempt to buy the Scott ranch, government officials hit on an alternative plan. Contending an officer had seen "marijuana plants growing under the trees" during a drug-seeking overflight (though they were unable to produce any photos, which would normally have accompanied the request for a search warrant), agents from various jurisdictions gathered quietly outside the locked gate to the ranch in the morning mists of Oct. 2, 1992. After greedily studying the maps of the 200 acres of prime land they were told they'd be able to grab under federal asset seizure laws should they find as few as 14 marijuana plants, they cut the chain on the gate with bolt-cutters and raced a mile up the dirt drive to the ranch, complete with police dogs.
Frances Scott was in the kitchen, brewing her morning coffee, when dozens of men in plainclothes and brandishing guns -- no badges or warrants in evidence -- came swarming in. Understandably, she screamed for her husband, still asleep upstairs.
Donald Scott, 63, came hurrying down the stairs in answer to his wife's screams of terror, a handgun held over his head. The officers shouted for him to lower his weapon. He did. They shot him dead.
Frances Scott contends the photograph of two plainclothes cops (County
Sheriff's Deputy John W. Cater, Jr. and Los Angeles County Sheriff's Office narcotics Detective Gary R. Spencer, also identified by government investigators as the shooters) displayed at her web site, www.savetrailsend.org, was taken mere minutes after her husband's death.
The two officers wear grins of triumph.
Ventura County District Attorney Michael Bradbury, after a six-month investigation, concluded a voluminous report (www.savetrailsend.org/report.shtml) by branding the fatal raid "a land grab by the (L.A.) Sheriffs Office." He confirms the odd fact that "Two researchers from Jet Propulsion Laboratories (JPL) in Pasadena" were also present for the so-called drug raid, and asks in his conclusion, "Did the Los Angeles County Sheriff obtain the warrant in order to obtain Scott's land? Did the National Park Service orchestrate the investigation or killing in order to obtain the land?"
Not a single marijuana seed or stem was ever found: "All they had to show for their trouble was this body on the living room floor," reported the Los Angeles Times.
The multiple government agencies -- including the L.A. County Sheriffs
Office, L.A. Police Department, California National Guard, U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, the California Drug Enforcement Agency, a Border Patrol Unit of the INS, and the National Park Service -- settled a wrongful death suit for $5 million.
One would think that would leave Trails End Ranch securely in the hands of the widow Scott, who has made it her life's work to see the government never gets the property. But if one assumed that, one would not be properly accounting for the creativity and plain, cussed, persistence of today's government land thieves.
A year after the raid and shooting, the widow Scott had to stand alongside 15 local firefighters and watch as the main house, cabins and other outbuildings of Trails End Ranch burned to the ground.
Mrs. Scott alleges that wildfire was actually started by arson. Regardless, county firefighters arrived in plenty of time to dig a firebreak which would probably have kept the blaze away from the ranch. But she says a county firefighter told her with tears in his eyes that a National Parks spokesman denied the firemen permission to do so, since, "It violates our rules to disturb the natural beauty of the land."
Many would have expected Mrs. Scott to depart after being burned out of house and home. Instead, she's spent the past six years camped out on the property in a teepee. Photos on her web site show her posing amidst the ruins of the ranch building, wearing her white wedding gown, guarded by a large Winchester and a couple of stout looking attack dogs.
Mrs. Scott's current problem? The ranch went to Donald Scott's estate, of which she controls only a minority share, the rest going to his children by a previous marriage. The IRS appraises the ranch at $2.4 million, and wants inheritance tax on $1 million of that sum, at 55 percent.
The attorneys for the children have advised them the ranch would be hard to market -- the official appraisal describes it as inaccessible, though
Mrs. Scott says the mile-long access road is still perfectly functional -- and that they'll be better off selling the property to pay the taxes.
Thus, on Aug. 2, a police SWAT team accompanied by two helicopters -- "one a larger military model with armed personnel that landed on the mountain ridge in plain view of my teepee," arrived to evict Mrs. Scott.
Out of the $5 million wrongful death settlement, 40 percent went to the lawyers off the top, while the rest was split six ways. Once Mrs. Scott paid off her own eight years worth of legal bills, that left her barely enough to offer a $170,000 down payment to back her $1.95 million bid for the ranch in the upcoming tax auction, she says.
But now, "The lawyers have kept my $170,000 down payment for potential damages. ...I won't have a single dollar to take to this auction, so the National Park Service will be the only party to place a bid," Mrs. Scott told me last week.
The widow Scott has paid out at least another $55,000 to a series of three backers who agreed to bid on the ranch in her behalf, but each has been raided or otherwise intimidated by local police and the FBI, she contends.
In one case, last January, "In the courtroom the attorneys for my husband's estate were screaming at him, 'Are you bidding for Frances Scott? We'll investigate you fully!' " Mrs. Scott contends. Within a month, she says the man had indeed been subject to a raid by the FBI and local police, on unrelated charges.
On the telephone, Frances Scott sounds a bit paranoid -- though perhaps that's understandable, given what she's been through. Responding to my e-mail messages by calling on a cellular phone, she declines to give out either a call-back number or a mailing address.
"I will not say what my current living circumstances are, 'cause they keep coming back at me," she says. "From the beginning I've said they're not going to murder my husband and get his property, too. I've been attacked militarily for nine years. I know these mountains well."
No officers were ever charged in Donald Scott's death, of course. Police are rarely charged with murdering mere civilians, any more, in this Land of the Free.
"They tell me Gary Spencer, who shot the fatal bullet, has a nervous tic now," Mrs. Scott reports. "And he's working on the bomb squad."
Mrs. Scott invites those wishing to "help save Trails End Ranch" to contribute to the Donald Scott Memorial Fund, P.O. Box 6755 Malibu, CA 90264, or c/o Bank of America, Point Dume Branch, 29171 Heather Cliff Road, Malibu, CA 90264, (tel.) 310-456-6296.
Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. To receive his longer, better stuff, subscribe to his monthly newsletter by sending $72 to Privacy Alert, 561 Keystone Ave., Suite 684, Reno, NV 89503 -- or dialing 775-348-8591. His book, "Send in
the Waco Killers: Essays on the Freedom Movement, 1993-1998," is available at 1-800-244-2224, or via web site www.thespiritof76.com/wacokillers.html.
Vin Suprynowicz, vin@lvrj.com
"When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong. The minority are right." -- Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926)
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken
"They that would give up essential liberty for a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin 1759
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