Town note
There are eight major Hawaiian islands plus a number of atolls.
about 0:10:15The story
On the north shore of Maui, in the small town of Haiku, a 27-year-old woman named Carly Scott, known to everyone as Charlie, disappeared on the night of 9 February 2014. She was five months pregnant and had spent the day with her family: first at the opening of an exhibit she had worked on at a local visual arts centre, then at a relative's home in Makawao, and finally at a birthday gathering for her sister Brooke at her sister's boyfriend's house. She left a little before eight in the evening, saying she needed petrol before going home.
They lived together for about two years, including a spell in Kula, then broke up around 2010 or 2011, though they carried on sleeping together. He told his friends they had only ever been roommates and would not be photographed with her. Her family said she cooked for him, did his laundry and doted on him while he played video games; his friends described him as hostile towards her behind her back. A former girlfriend, Taylor Farner, said he had told her he hated children and that she would be getting an abortion if she became pregnant.
By the autumn of 2013 Charlie was pregnant. At a family gathering that December she announced the pregnancy happily. He replied that he had thought she had that taken care of, and told the relative the pregnancy would ruin his plans with a current girlfriend, Cassandra Cupstis, who was living in Pennsylvania. In January 2014 he told Cupstis himself. She was upset that he had cheated on her with his ex, but said she did not want him to be a deadbeat father and that they would work it out.
Charlie was later called by him, apparently because his truck had broken down and he needed help getting it out of a ditch. She drove to him in her 1997 Toyota 4Runner with her pit bull, Nala. The last ping from her phone came at 10.56 that night on the Hana Highway.
At 12.45 the following morning a resident near the Jaws surf spot was woken by thick toxic smoke on their property. At 6.41 a bank ATM camera recorded a lifted silver 1990s 4Runner heading up Baldwin Avenue toward the employee parking lot at Mana Foods, where he clocked in at 6.55. That morning Charlie's dog was found at Nahiku Marketplace, more than five miles away, uninjured and with clean paws.
Her family reported her missing that evening and police came to her house at ten. That afternoon Brooke Scott got him to drive her to the spot where he said his truck had broken down. He claimed a stranger had picked him up while he was hitchhiking, and when asked what kind of car, paused and said it was just like hers. Fifteen calls went from his phone to Charlie's between 5.47 and 6.38 that evening. He kept joining the search and steering people away from a dirt road off the Hana Highway leading to Nuaulu Bay, saying he had already searched it.
On 13 February searchers found blood-stained jeans and zip ties between mile markers 9 and 10, and drag marks under a guard rail near mile marker 18.
On the dirt road near mile marker 15 searchers found her black shirt, a blue polka-dot top, a maggot-infested blanket, her jeans, a hoodie and two rolls of masking tape. Police then found a pool of maggots, clumps of her red hair, her jawbone split in two six feet apart, the fingertips and nails of her right hand, skin, a bra and a body piercing with flesh still attached, beside a tree trunk with vertical cut marks. Her body was never recovered.
He was held on $10,000 bail. In May he changed his story again, saying a local man with dreadlocks in a grey Toyota Corolla had picked him up. On 14 July 2014 he was finally served with a warrant for second-degree murder and third-degree arson.
The prosecutor, Robert Ravera, described the jawbone with her blood on it and the jeans found five miles from the burned vehicle, and argued that the more than 20 knife punctures in the black shirt, concentrated on her abdomen, showed he wanted her to suffer. Workmates recalled him asking the day before she vanished what the best way to get away with murder would be, and saying of an earlier local killing that he would have thrown the woman off a cliff because nobody would ever find her there. The defence, led by John Apo, argued that police had fixed on him from the start, that the marks on the bones were made by a wild boar, and that his lies were to hide running weed, not murder. Judge Joseph Cardozo excluded some DNA evidence on the jeans over a chain-of-custody problem.
On 4 January 2017 it answered yes to the aggravating allegation that the killing was especially heinous, atrocious and cruel. In court, Charlie's mother Kimberlyn asked him where her daughter and grandson were and begged him to do one decent thing; her father Robert was removed after trying to attack the defence attorney.