When Victoria Scripps-Carmody was 3 years old, the newspaper family heiress witnessed her father kill her mother with a claw hammer as she slept in their Bronxville, N.Y., mansion on New Year’s Eve 1993.
Her father drove his BMW to the Tappan Zee Bridge and took his own life by jumping off into the icy water of the Hudson River. The case generated enormous headlines in the New York City media.
The orphaned child was soon adopted by family members in Charlotte with the hope of a new life out of the glare of notoriety.
“The collective wisdom was that it would be in the best interest of Victoria to be removed from the immediate environment of tragedy and be up in a rural setting and begin a new life,” a family lawyer told the New York Times.
Fast forward 18 years.
Victoria Scripps-Carmody, now 21, of Burlington is accused of having 193 bags of heroin tucked away in her 2006 BMW when it was pulled over in the northbound lane on Interstate 91 in Brattleboro on Aug. 10, the Vermont Drug Task Force said. She and two male companions were returning from Holyoke, Mass., where police say they went to buy heroin, court records show.
The state trooper who stopped her car noted Scripps-Carmody had track marks on her arm, a court affidavit said. It said Scripps-Carmody told a detective that she has a six-bag-a-day heroin habit that she needs to feed. That can equate to a $90 to $120 a day, Vermont drug investigators said.
In the past 2 1/2 years, Scripps-Carmody has had four drug arrests along with two pending burglary charges, police say and court records show. One of the prior cases, involving possession of OxyContin, resulted in her agreeing to enroll in court diversion. In another, she pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor drug charge and paid a fine, records show. And in a third, an accessory to robbery count was dismissed. The recent traffic stop and the two burglary counts remain unresolved in court.
It was not the life the family lawyer and others had once pictured for that 3-year-old girl, the great-great-great granddaughter of the founder of the Detroit News, James E. Scripps, and a descendant of the family that founded the E.W. Scripps Co., a large media company that owns newspapers, television stations and the Scripps-Howard News Service.
“It’s a very sad story,” said Brooks McArthur, a Burlington lawyer who now represents Scripps-Carmody in her Vermont legal cases.
“She is a young woman with an overwhelming addiction issue preyed on by those knowing she is an addict or has money,” McArthur said. Police said one of the co-defendants agreed to provide her drugs in exchange for a place to live at her Burlington apartment.
“This is another sad example of how drugs and addiction can destroy lives and destroy at times the promise, and to have other people come into their lives to take advantage of their addiction,” McArthur said.
Scripps-Carmody, known by her friends as “Tori,” remains at the Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility in South Burlington for lack of $10,000 bail on the heroin possession charges.
'We're supporting her'
Her aunt and uncle became first-time parents when Victoria came to live with them 17 years ago. They raised Victoria Scripps-Carmody in their Charlotte home and still stand behind her and her ongoing battle with drugs.
“We’re supporting her every way we can. We love her and will never stop loving her and will never stop trying to help her,” Mary Scripps said during an interview last week at the Burlington Free Press.
Leaving her in jail is one way Scripps-Carmody may be able to kick the habit, her father said.
“It’s about a 15- to 30-day withdrawal with the kind of stuff she has been using before she is clean, so to speak. So partly we are thinking that is being accomplished where she is at. I think her attorney has told her that. We are keeping her there to dry her out,” Carmody said.
He knows the real impact of drugs on lives after working at a North Dakota penitentiary and at Maple Leaf Farms, a substance abuse facility in Underhill.
It’s tough love, but Carmody and Scripps both believe that unless they hire 24-hour security or put their daughter in a locked-down treatment facility, her problems will likely continue. They visit their daughter as often as they can and take frequent phone calls from the jail.
Carmody said it’s not like his daughter has a job to go to, attends a school, or has her own family to raise, or even a dog or cat to take care of if she were bailed out. Her parents fear where she would end up or who she would hang with.
The day Scripps-Carmody was arrested, Scripps and Carmody thought she was at the Brattleboro Retreat. They had brought her there a week earlier. They had no idea how she got her car or got out of the private hospital.
Both of them have strived to provide a safe, secure life in Vermont for Scripps-Carmody. There was an initial flurry of media attention when she came to Charlotte.
“I don’t know if anybody totally recovers from the loss of her mother, but she’s doing very well right now,” New York attorney John Quinlan Kelly told the Burlington Free Press in May 1994. “She’s very close to Mary; she’s settling in with new friends in a new school.”
But she would not be mentioned in the Free Press again until 2008, when she was listed as one of the graduates from Champlain Valley Union High School.
Facing issues
Scripps and Carmody say they are proud to have raised their daughter in an alcohol- and drug-free environment in their home.
Things were going well for many years, but some doctors and counselors warned Scripps-Carmody might start having issues when she reached her middle school years and had questions about her past.
Scripps said two out-of-state events in recent years had a devastating impact on her daughter’s efforts to cope with the loss of her biological parents and life in general.
One event was a movie billed as the story of her mother’s murder and the other was the suicide of one of her two older sisters two years ago.
The made-for TV movie, “Our Mother’s Murder,” which was produced in 1997, continues to air from time-to-time on the Lifetime channel on cable television, including in 2003-04 when Tori Scripps-Carmody was in eighth grade at Charlotte Central School.
While the movie was promoted as a true account, it was more fiction then real, Scripps said. She said her daughter’s classmates who heard about or saw the movie began picking on Scripps-Carmody, including making cruel comments about her being adopted.
“Her schoolwork began to slide,” said Carmody of his daughter. Scripps said her daughter stopped doing homework. Scripps said she went to school once a week to try to ensure her daughter kept up with her assignments.
Until that time, Scripps-Carmody had led an idyllic life.
“She had lots of friends. She was very social. She was involved in everything that every little kid could do,” Scripps said.
That included T-ball, playing the piano and drums and being in the honor roll in Tom Scatchard’s fifth-grade class, Scripps said.
“She was a bright little girl. Had lots of overnights, went to birthday parties, had parties, was a Brownie and we helped out with the Brownie Troop,” Scripps said. Scripps and Carmody also volunteered in the classroom at Charlotte Central School.
“We hardly ever got a baby-sitter for her,” Scripps said. She said they would scan the Burlington Free Press for family events and activities each weekend.
“We did everything as a family. We had a lot of fun,” Scripps said of time with her daughter.
The family struggled when it came to picking a high school. Scripps-Carmody went on to attend four high schools between 2004 and 2008 with a wide range of successes and failures.
“We have been attempting to get her help since she was 14,” Carmody said. “We tried to get a safe place. Get her somewhere she could get straightened out and cleaned up and get a decent schooling, education. It hasn’t seemed to really click.”
Moving forward
Scripps-Carmody started high school at the Vermont Commons in South Burlington, but left after a few months. She headed for nine months to Island View School in Syracuse, Utah, which bills itself as a residential treatment center for adolescents. She finished sophomore year at Rock Point, an alternative school in Burlington.
Scripps-Carmody completed her final two years at CVU in Hinesburg. As she graduated, Scripps-Carmody turned 18 and stood to receive a long-awaited inheritance.
Carmody and Scripps said they tried to slow the scheduled inheritance, but with little success.
The New York Times reported in 1994 that her mother, Anne Scripps Douglas, had a $1.3 million estate. It is unknown how the estate was split among Scripps-Carmody and her two older sisters and any other beneficiaries.
Carmody and Scripps declined to discuss specific financial issues, except that their daughter has gone through her inheritance.
“She exhausted what she inherited when she turned 18,” said Carmody, who along with Scripps blames the court system for his daughter’s difficulties.
“The court controlled that and the court ordered that at 18 that you have to turn it over. I didn’t and I got another letter and said we would like to see your plan,” Carmody said.
He said he sent “letter after letter” to the court explaining that their daughter was not ready to handle lots of money.
“That’s what really fueled the drugs,” Carmody said. “It was what we kind of told the judge. This is a lot of money. It was like giving her a loaded gun.”
Scripps-Carmody had done well enough in high school to win admittance to Champlain College and Franklin Pierce, and was offered scholarships, but opted not to go to either school, her mother said.
She also was holding down jobs at the Vermont Teddy Bear factory and Harrington’s in Shelburne, her parents said.
The University of Vermont reported she was a continuing education student in the spring of 2009.
It would be later that year that a family death would strike Scripps-Carmody again.
One of two older half-sisters of Tori Scripps-Carmody committed suicide in September 2009. It was a copy-cat of her step-father’s death. Like her stepfather, Anne Morell Petrillo also used a BMW to drive to the Tappan Zee Bridge and jump into the water. Both were 38 when they died.
Scripps said the death and subsequent fallout really hit her daughter, who had just turned 19, very hard. Scripps said one New York news outlet several months later printed a section of the one-page hand-written suicide note, including a line to Tori Scripps-Carmody.
“Tori — wish you loved us. Me (sic) certainly loved you. I always missed you,” the passage read.
Looking for signs
Now, as Scripps-Carmody awaits resolution of her latest arrest, Carmody and Scripps reflect on her life and hope for a fulfilling future for her.
They also shared some telltale signs that other parents should be on the watch for with their children.
Scripps said she noticed a sudden change in her daughter’s friends. Her daughter had some close friends and one still remains close, but it is clear they have taken different paths. There is little they have in common, but they still seem to share special dates, like birthdays.
Scripps-Carmody also began to lose or misplace her belongings. Her first arrest on a count of possession of OxyContin in January 2009 stemmed from her lost wallet being found at the Burlington Town Square Mall, Scripps said.
Mood changes were also noticeable, the parents said.
In the end, Carmody said, his daughter’s circumstances might be the result of the difficult hand she was dealt as a young child.
“A lot of what we saw with Tori,” he said, “could easily have been attributed to her adolescence and her specific life circumstances.”
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