Trail’s End : Deep in a Wild Canyon West of Malibu, a Controversial Law Brought Together a Zealous Sheriff’s Deputy and an Eccentric Recluse. A Few Seconds Later, Donald Scott Was Dead.

SURFERS AT LEO CARRILLO State Beach were paddling out for the first waves of the morning when the unmarked black van turned off the coast road onto Mulholland Highway and headed up into the mountains. It was 8:30 a.m., Friday, last Oct. 2, and following the van came a caravan of 15 vehicles--black-and-white police cars, civilian Hondas, four-wheel-drive Broncos--a strung-out convoy traveling at a leisurely pace that some might have taken for a funeral procession.

Three miles or so up the road, just past the “Camp Bloomfield” sign, was an open gate in a chain-link fence. One after another, the cars proceeded through the gate and down a sharp embankment, where they bumped across a dry creek bed before continuing uphill on the dusty road.

That road is a mile-long driveway leading to three properties tucked away in the otherwise largely uninhabited Arroyo Sequit, one of the last canyons before the Santa Monica Mountains dip into the sea, the place where Los Angeles and Ventura counties meet. The first property is 36 acres, the second 28 and, as substantial as they are, they do not compare to the 200-acre stronghold that begins beyond the last gate: Trail’s End Ranch.

That gate was padlocked, and the procession stopped there while a man in olive-green pants, black shoes and an olive-drab vest with S-H-E-R-I-F-F written across it in four-inch yellow letters got out to snip the lock with bolt cutters. Now, as a kind of de facto proprietor, he pushed open the gate so the others could drive in.

THE HOUSE WHERE 61-YEAR-OLD DONALD Scott and his 38-year-old wife Frances slept is a quarter of a mile or so up the road beyond the gate. It is more of a large cabin, really, with a tiny kitchen just beyond a screened-in porch and a big, square living room with pictures of Indians on the walls and a rugged stone fireplace. At the back of the living room are two small bedrooms, one of them still filled with stuffed toy animals that belonged to Scott’s now-grown children, and next to it, the Scotts’ own corner bedroom.

It could be a fishing camp in the Sierra or the headquarters of some playful New Age sect (the top of the wooden flagpole in front is wrapped in a coyote pelt and decorated with deer antlers). It’s the sort of place where dogs roam free and birds make the only noise on an otherwise still morning.

The cabin and, down next to a stream, the funky bunkhouse are built on a narrow tongue of land, three or four acres, thick with pines, oaks and sycamores. Much of Trail’s End is inaccessible scrub surrounded on three sides by rocky bluffs 700 to 800 feet high. Perhaps 100 feet up from the main cabin is the property’s most unusual feature: a 75-foot waterfall, spring-fed. It’s the bluffs that give the ranch its remarkable sense of privacy, suggesting the sort of box-canyon hide-out that movie cowboys have favored.

An occasional airplane passing high overhead was for most of Scott’s time here the closest thing he had to an intruder, and when the winter rains came and the streams grew too high to cross, it was not uncommon for Scott to get marooned at the ranch for days and even weeks. Trail’s End was the castle; the streams served as moats. And he was the king.

WHEN FRANCES SCOTT WOKE THAT morning, she heard the dogs barking, all 22 of them, and felt the cabin shaking violently, and it made her think: “Here it is, the Big One.” Her husband was soon awake, and then both of them realized the thump-thump-thump shaking the cabin was coming from the front door.

She was first up, grabbing a pair of overalls and a shirt and dressing as she moved into the still morning-dark living room. Scott, meanwhile, was slipping into his jeans and muttering something about “those damned process servers,” perhaps figuring that the early morning assault on his home had something to do with his never-ending legal battles with his second wife. On the other hand, who really knew who might be after him and for what reason? There had been some unexplained intrusions on the property lately. He reached for the .38 Colt Detective Special he kept on the bedside table.

Everything happened quickly then. What Frances remembers includes seeing a man’s face in the window next to the front door and hearing a man’s voice whisper: “Let Gary go first.”

A FIVE-MEMBER “ENTRY TEAM” FROM THE LOS ANGELES COUNTY SHERiff’s Department--the Narcotics Bureau of the department, to be exact--was at the cabin door, while a second team surrounded the bunkhouse and the junk-filled barn next to it. Up the road about 200 yards were federal and state narcotics agents, LAPD officers (accompanied by dope-detecting dogs), men and women from the law enforcement wings of the U.S. Forest Service, the National Park Service and the California National Guard--some 30 officers in all. All this, according to the search warrant, in pursuit of 50 marijuana plants growing somewhere on the Trail’s End property.

At the briefing that morning at the sheriff’s station across from the entrance to the Malibu Colony, the lead man on the raid, Sheriff’s Deputy Gary Spencer, had emphasized: “This is about plants, not the people.” Spencer didn’t expect any “knocking down of doors,” remembers Park Service Ranger Tim Simonds. “It was very low-key, very professional.”

But after announcing their presence for one to four minutes (accounts vary) with no response, the entry team elected to use a pry bar on the front door, whacking at it with a large wooden ram resembling a tree stump.

Inside the house, Gary Spencer and Deputy John W. Cater Jr. took up positions in the doorway opening onto the living room. Perhaps 20 feet away, opposite them, stood a barefoot man in a white T-shirt and jeans. He was quite thin, his hair was longish and uncombed, and he seemed none too steady on his feet. In his right hand, he held a gun.

Accounts vary about what happened in the next five seconds or so. Frances, who insists she stayed in the living room, says her husband looked at her, with his gun pointing toward the ceiling, and said: “Frances, are you all right?” The deputies insist that she had been ushered out the door.

Each officer has a different memory of how Scott held the gun. Spencer thought he had it high over his head with his fingers gripping the cylinder as if he was going to hit someone. Cater thought he held it much lower, below waist level, and was bringing it up.

Spencer remembers saying, “Drop the gun, Donald,” several times, urgently. He remembers Scott’s arm coming down and the barrel of the gun turned toward him, Scott’s finger on the trigger for “almost a second.”

Spencer fired twice, Cater once, and two shots struck Donald Scott, who flinched backward, staggered forward and dropped to his knees. Spencer thought he said: “You got me” or “You hit me” or “Oh, God, you shot me.” Cater heard it differently. He thought Scott said: “Oh, God, what have you done?” He died almost instantly.

Later, when the ranch was searched, no marijuana or any other illegal drug was found.

SCOTT HAD LIVED A HIGH old life once. “He had everything I needed 24 hours a day,” says former film actress Corinne Calvet, his good-times companion of the years on the Hollywood party circuit before he came to Trail’s End in 1966. “It was like a fairy tale. He never looked at another woman. He was a great lover, and any time he needed money, he just made a call to New York. He drank too much, but everyone has some problems.”

As a young man, Donald Scott had the square-cut, strong-chinned, dark good looks of a B-movie actor, not quite up to the Errol Flynn comparisons that were made (it was the mustache as much as anything), but he was certainly handsome, even dashing. Scott had a privileged upbringing, in Geneva, Switzerland, and then at expensive New York prep schools. He would live all his life on a family trust fund, the proceeds, in part, of Scott’s Emulsion, a Vitamin A-rich tonic invented by his grandfather and popular in Europe. Except for such hobby businesses as Trail’s End Productions, a record company, the only employment Donald Scott seems to have had was a very brief run, two or three months in his 20s, as a commercial pilot.

Scott had the kind of life that ultimately may have been more fun to gossip about than to live. He married young and divorced messily. He had money, attracted for a time glamorous friends and didn’t envy others’ talents or achievements. “He knew he could buy them,” says Calvet.

In 1966, just before breaking up with Calvet, he moved to Trail’s End and the metamorphosis began: from Errol Flynn into a kind of canyon rat Howard Hughes. Every now and then he would revive his old playboy self, pack his Burberry overcoat and make a quick visit to New York City (a friend traveling with Scott in Manhattan was amazed that Scott was still recognized at the nightclub 21 from years before when he’d been a regular). But for the most part, he stuck to the ranch.

He married and divorced again. He became very thin, and his teeth went to hell. They looked liked “Indian corn,” a friend said. He dressed like a bum and spent his time puttering around the property looking for Spanish treasure, digging up Indian artifacts and on occasion practicing his competition-level fast-draw technique with a favorite pistol: a solid-silver .45 with steer heads carved in its ivory handles and rubies for the eyes.

Friends say it was the drinking that so changed him. And years of prolonged courtroom battles with ex-wives and girlfriends also took its toll. Corinne Calvet claims that he once hid $1 million from his first wife. By the end of the ‘60s, Calvet herself was being sued by Scott for the return of another $1 million, this time in presents. (In the settlement, she got the house in Trousdale Estates; Scott kept the ranch.) His second divorce took four years and cost him $400,000.

“He really liked to grind them out and leave them with nothing,” says a friend, writer Charles Tacot.

Just three months before he died, Scott surprised some of his friends when he married for a third time. His bride, Frances, was from Nassau, Tex., by way of Las Vegas. She was an aspiring country singer, a blonde when they met, a redhead when he died. She was nearly six feet tall, and he called her his “stand-up Texas lady.” It was she who had taken him for his second cataract operation two days before he died. They had been celebrating at home the night before his death and didn’t get to bed until after 2. (The autopsy would show two kinds of tranquilizers and a .13 blood-alcohol level.)

A union of oddballs and opposites for sure, but even skeptical friends admitted that they had something for each other. “I’d seen him go downhill for years,” says a close friend. “Frances brought the sparkle back to his eye. She gave him something to live for.”

PERHAPS TWO HOURS AFTER THE SHOOTING THE PHONE RANG in Nick Gutsue’s house in Beverly Hills. He’s a lawyer and lifelong friend of Donald Scott, and when he heard his friend’s new wife say, in that pronounced Texas drawl of hers, “Nick, this is Frances,” the tension in her voice made Nick immediately anticipate what she’d say next. “Donald’s dead.”

“What happened?” Gutsue said, but he didn’t think he needed an answer. It would be booze that had killed his friend, he was sure. Instead, her answer made no sense at all. “The sheriff shot and killed him,” she said, crying. “They came into the house and shot him, Nick.”

THESE WERE THE FIRST QUESTIONS RAISED BY DONALD SCOTT’S DEATH: What commands had Scott been given by the deputies? In what position, exactly, had he held his gun? Was the shooting justified, and what was the meaning of the “dimple” on a cartridge in the dead man’s .38? Had he pulled the trigger? Did the gun misfire?

And then, what about the raid itself? Why were so many officers and so much firepower brought to bear? And what about the search warrant, which alleged that 50 marijuana plants had been sighted on the property from an airplane 1,000 feet high, and that Frances Scott had been seen a year before “paying with $100 bills for very small purchases” in Malibu. It also said that her 1987 BMW with Nevada license plates had been traced to Donald Scott.

In truth, the BMW was registered to a Nevada corporation. And, of course, no drugs were found on the ranch.

Nick Gutsue thought: “It has to be about something else.”

IN FACT, THE “SOMETHING ELSE” TURNED out to be nothing less than “the land itself,” no less an inalienable right than private property, a citizen’s right to security in his own home. Scott’s death in the doorway of his own bedroom would become a central provocation in the controversy over the fairness--some would say the constitutionality--of federal and state asset-forfeiture statutes, which allow authorities to confiscate cash, goods or real estate that they can connect with drug trafficking and other crimes.

Initially it was Nick Gutsue and Frances Scott who made the surprising accusations: The elaborate raid on Trail’s End Ranch, they insisted, involved a broad conspiracy on the part of many agencies to seize 200 acres of Malibu property, cash it in and divide the spoils among themselves.

Frances took things a step further. Every chance she got she called her husband’s death “premeditated,” and she called it “murder.”

“They (the agencies) knew we were getting ready to sell the land, and they had to escalate their maneuvers to acquire it,” she told the Malibu Surftide News. “I believe they deliberately killed Donald.” She fingered the National Park Service, Trail’s End’s neighbor on three sides, as a major co-conspirator. Frances insisted that even this might be the tip of the iceberg, conspiracy-wise. “Even all this may be part of a cover-up,” she said. “It may turn out the National Park Service was a patsy in all this.”

It wasn’t so long ago that such accusations would have been laughed away as a paranoid’s ravings, but in the post-Rodney King era--and at a time when 21 members of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department’s Narcotics Bureau had been indicted in an ongoing federal corruption probe--the charges didn’t seem quite so far-fetched.

The Ventura County district attorney’s office took charge of investigating the shooting, asserting jurisdiction over the ranch whose boundaries cross county lines. (The fact that no Ventura deputies were involved in the raid, Frances said, was more evidence of nefarious doings. The L.A. deputies, she charged, wanted to keep more of the prize for themselves.) The L.A. County Sheriff’s Department, in accordance with regulations, also conducted its own investigation and quickly absolved the officers of any wrongdoing.

For six months after the incident, as the Ventura investigation crawled along, representatives from most of the agencies that had been at Trail’s End on Oct. 2 kept a frosty distance from the rumors and accusations, hiding behind an icy shield of “no comment.” The sheriff’s Narcotics Bureau, on the other hand, weighed in with aggressive, even aggrieved denials. “I am personally affronted,” said Narcotics Bureau Chief Larry Waldie of the charges that something was dreadfully amiss in the Scott case. And out of the bureau a countercharge floated: Look to Frances for the answers, look to the widow herself, look to Trail’s End.

ED DOHENY, A GREAT-GRANDSON OF L.A. OIL PIONEER E. L. Doheny, was Donald Scott’s nearest neighbor. He had watched the convoy stream by that morning with a premonition of disaster. “Sooner or later,” he says darkly, “the bills come due.” Over five years, Doheny had worried that Scott was heading for trouble. He had concerns about Scott’s generosity (to everyone except his ex-wives) and about the kind of friends the police might call “his associates.”

The ranch had become a sort of funky surrogate of Scott’s princely boyhood home in Geneva, a family mansion grand enough to have a name, The Beaucage, a place where formal house parties must have been the norm. (At Trail’s End, guests were occasionally surprised to run across massive tablecloths and huge towels bearing the family crest, apparently from the linen closets of The Beaucage.) Many people had benefited from periods of laying up at the ranch: Students studied there, writers wrote, musicians composed. Nick Gutsue prepared for his bar exam at Trail’s End. Scott, Doheny says, “was a man with a good heart. Sometimes too good.”

Old friends inevitably did not like the cut of the new crowd hanging out at the ranch. Charles Tacot, his old pal, called them “bogus.” “I warned Don about them,” he says. “I told him they were trouble.”

One of that crowd was a man named Anthony (Tea Bags) Tomkiewicz, who had been convicted in 1974 of possession for sale and transportation of marijuana and arrested in 1977 on cocaine and marijuana charges. Tea Bags lived in the bunkhouse from early 1991 until a time just before the raid. It was he who was involved in cultivating marijuana at Trail’s End, a CRI (confidential reliable informant) told police.

And then there was Frances Plante.

In December of 1990, a black BMW had arrived at Trail’s End near lunchtime, coming to a stop in front of the main cabin. Out of it stepped a tall, striking blonde wearing a black miniskirt over tights and cowboy boots. Scott, who was there with two of his children, came out to see who it was, and the woman said: “Mind if I come up for a visit?” He said he didn’t, and then Frances said: “Can I bring my babies?” referring to her Rottweiler pups in the car. Scott said they’d be welcome, too.

As the story has it, she never left. They were married 18 months later next to the waterfall. Three weeks earlier, family and friends had gathered at Trail’s End for a more formal wedding, but it was canceled when the minister failed to appear. For the marriage, she wore a wedding dress that belonged to his mother. Except for the man who married them, no one was there to witness the event, and it went into the books as a “confidential marriage”--legal but not made public.

Frances briskly offers a few details of her past, some factual crumbs for the literal-minded. She worked for Toyota in Galveston and says she is licensed to sell real estate in Texas, California and Nevada. She spent time in Las Vegas, where, she says vaguely, “I studied business administration.” In Malibu, she worked as a mail handler at the post office while hoping to break into singing. Her mother runs a Pentecostal prison ministry in Canny, Tex., and her late father once fought oil fires with Red Adair. As for past problems that might have attracted the interest of law enforcement types, she says, dark eyes blazing: “Everybody has some skeletons in their closet, don’t you think?”

She can seem both disingenuous and remarkably candid, and she is something of a chameleon in appearance as well. Dramatic eye makeup in place, hair let loose, she looks ready for the Las Vegas stage. Without makeup, her powerful broad cheekbones take over, and hair up, she could be a West Texas farmer’s wife on her way to clean the cowshed.

She seems without self-doubt. “Donald wanted to marry me the first day we met,” she says quietly. “But I wanted him to get back with his wife--for the children’s sake--but he didn’t want to.

“Donald and I had what people wished they had. People said I married him for his money, but I never knew he had any. I certainly never saw any of it.”

At another time, she admits, she came to Trail’s End for financial help. Frances was urgentlyin need of help. She was out on bail, the result of an “incident” on a Houston-bound plane. She’d been drinking and got into an altercation with a stewardess (“Frances punched her out,” a friend insists). Frances was arrested and, adding to her legal miseries, was found to be in possession of a single marijuana cigarette. Charged with a felony, things looked grim indeed.

As it happens, Frances had been renting a place down the road from Scott off Mulholland Highway and had heard of him and his generosity. Sitting in jail in Texas, she thought that she might go to him for help when she got out on bail. So she drove right up the private road--the gate wasn’t padlocked in those days--and introduced herself.

When she returned to Texas to face charges, she says, he came through. He called her attorney. “He said,” Frances reports, “ ‘This is Don Scott and I’m prepared to put the $50 million I have at my disposal into looking up the ass of every judge in El Paso and yours, too, if Frances isn’t out of there in 24 hours.’ And,” she says exuberantly, “I was.”

The Texas incident would contribute a little something to the interest the sheriff’s narcotics detail took in Frances Scott. They had also been told stories that she knew people who were connected to heroin traffickers operating out of Thailand. “That’s ridiculous,” she says. During the Ventura County district attorney’s investigation, she declined to discuss such rumors, on the advice of her attorney.

DON AND FRANCES HAD melded into a single unit: DonandFrances. “We were seldom out of each other’s sight,” she says. They were a mutual-support system, a duet. “He taught me to fast-draw. We did a kind of Wyatt Earp and Annie Oakley thing,” she says.

The ranch was, as it had always been, a sort of dreamy playground for the reclusive well-to-do. It had never really been a ranch; no cows or horses were ever raised there. A Detroit wheel manufacturer named A. J. Baudet had built the cabins in 1928 and maintained the property as a carefully tended weekend showplace, with fussy little Japanese gardens strewn with crushed yellow rock. Scott let it, as he let himself, go natural.

Scott had become knowledgeable about the property’s history and legends. Two months before he died, he rented a jackhammer to dig for treasure he believed had been buried by Spanish sailors 200 years ago. He had the idea that the waterfall must have had some spiritual significance in Chumash ritual, although he couldn’t be sure what that was. He found petroglyphs in Trail’s End caves, and arrowheads and pottery shards and a path worn into the rock above the waterfall that was said by some to have been made by Indians 2,000 years ago.

Sometimes Don and Frances mused on what sort of enterprise they might run together should they sell the land and leave the ranch. One idea involved a $40-million pleasure boat, berthed somewhere in Florida. They saw it in a magazine and thought they might lease it and get into the tourist business.

Scott always had an exaggerated idea of Trail’s End’s value, in part due to the spectacular waterfall. “The waterfall itself is worth $50 million,” he often told people. (Jack Pritchett, another Arroyo Sequit neighbor and a real estate man, says all 200 acres might bring $4 million to $7 million.)

Now and then they would actually stop drinking--temporarily at least, making the attempt. (“I got him off booze for a while,” she insists.) Neighbors were surprised to see him taking a walk--he hadn’t done much of that for years. “Aren’t you going to congratulate me?” he asked Pritchett on one of those walks with Frances. “I haven’t had a drink for three weeks.”

But there was also a kind of gathering paranoia. He’d always been worried about losing the property as the result of some underhanded government ploy. He imagined “them” planting marijuana on some remote corner of the ranch, setting him up. “He was even afraid,” says Frances, “a bird might eat a seed somewhere and poop it here,” but he didn’t say “poop.”

“You know what he used to say? He’d say, ‘Frances, every day they pass a new law, and then the day after that they pass 40 more. I’m just tired of it.”

SCOTT’S PARANOIA HEIGHTened when intrusions onto Trail’s End property began a month or so before his death. Some nights, the dogs would begin howling for no apparent reason. Then there were the rocks that came pelting down from above the waterfall, which lies on the edge of the adjoining Circle X Ranch, owned by the Park Service.

On Aug. 14, six weeks before his death, Scott called David E. Gackenbach, superintendent of the Park Service’s Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, to discuss the rock falls and other neighborly issues. As a result, Gackenbach came to the ranch for a visit a few days later. With him came a six-pack of beer (requested by Frances) and an associate, National Park Service Ranger Mike Maki.

Frances and Gackenbach offer very different versions of the visit.

“The first thing out of his mouth--the very first thing,” Frances says adamantly, “was we hear you’ve done a survey and might be interested in selling. Donald said: ‘You wouldn’t have enough money,’ and Gackenbach said he’d see what kind of offer he could come up with.”

Gackenbach, a low-key, authoritative man of few words, insists that the subject of the sale of Trail’s End never came up. Instead, he says, they talked of Scott’s complaint about the rocks and about his fear that park toilets up the arroyo might be leaking into his water supply. “I offered to show him our pit toilets,” Gackenbach says.

He says they walked up to the waterfall, and Scott promised to demonstrate his quick-draw technique and take him to some Indian sites on another visit. Gackenbach found Scott “pleasant” and Frances “hyper.”

A month later, six days before Scott died, Maki returned to Trail’s End with another man, ostensibly to look at Rottweiler puppies Frances had for sale. This time, neither Frances nor Donald Scott suspected anything.

THINGS ARE DECEPTIVE in the West Malibu Mountains. From a hiking trail, they seem almost as untouched as when Cabrillo drifted by 450 years ago. The truth is, there is about as dense a governmental web there--sharing, competing for, attempting to get authority over each square inch of rattlesnake-infested scrub--as exists anywhere. Some 60 official bodies, everything from the Coastal Commission to the West Malibu Homeowners Assn., have their claims.

To some degree then, the Big Brother sense of shadowy powers in the Scott case is simply business as usual. Many of the agencies there have their own law enforcement wings, which, in turn, tend to coordinate their activities with the Los Angeles and Ventura counties sheriff’s departments, which share overall police authority for the mountains.

In the case of the raid on Trail’s End, according to the Ventura County district attorney’s report, the responsibility lay with a single L.A. County sheriff’s deputy--a compactly built, 38-year-old, 15-year narcotics officer named Gary Spencer.

Operating out of the Lost Hills substation in Agoura Hills, it was Gary Spencer who, at least indirectly, sent Mike Maki back to Trail’s End to look at Rottweiler puppies. Maki’s companion that day was Sheriff’s Deputy Sgt. Bill Marsh, working undercover to make a “threat assessment” for the raid less than a week away. The question was whether a SWAT team would be necessary, and Marsh’s report would say no: “The dogs are friendly. Just drive up and the Scotts will probably just come on out.”

As it happens, Spencer had been compiling a case against Trail’s End for more than a year. First one informant and then a second--former guests of Scott at the ranch--had told him that marijuana was growing there. One source reported 1,000 plants, the other said 3,000.

Over a period of several weeks, Spencer was able to use a National Guard aircraft and personnel drawn from the federal Drug Enforcement Agency, the Border Patrol and the Park Service in his attempt to substantiate the marijuana charge. But black-and-white National Guard overflight pictures showed little--since color is important in marijuana identification, they weren’t likely to--and when DEA agent Charles Stowell flew over and looked, declining to use binoculars because they make him sick, it took him three passes to find what looked to him like 50 marijuana plants near the Scott barn.

Since Stowell was looking for thousands of plants, he was disturbed to turn up only 50. He said he didn’t want to sign an affidavit for a search warrant until Spencer got corroboration. Which is where the Border Patrol came in.

Spencer called on the Border Patrol’s Bakersfield-based “C Rat” team to do a reconnaissance at Trail’s End. Using the code name Operation Malibu, late on Sept. 28, the team, equipped with elaborate climbing gear, entered the ranch from a neighboring property. But the difficulty of the terrain was such that they only traversed 300 yards before turning back. At dawn, they tried again and reached a spot 100 yards or so from the main cabin. Later, they reported a tense encounter with “four charging Rottweilers” but no marijuana.

Spencer relayed this to Stowell but also insisted that one of his informants had guaranteed they’d find at least 40 pounds of marijuana. With that assurance, Stowell agreed to sign the affidavit.

In the search warrant, there are two separate descriptions of the marijuana plants and their location. One states: “Agent Stowell told me today, while conducting cannabis eradication and suppression reconnaissance (in the) Santa Monica Mountains . . . while abiding by FAA regulations and using binoculars . . . agent Stowell saw approximately 50 plants that he recognized to be marijuana plants growing around some large trees that were in a grove near a house on the property.”

Ventura County Deputy Dist. Atty. John Vanarelli saw the warrant request. Vanarelli questioned how plants could be seen on the ground from a height of 1,000 feet. Spencer added this handwritten note at the bottom of the affidavit: “Upon further inquiry, agent Stowell told me that the marijuana plants he saw growing would be found if I walked from the house toward the barn and then continued in the same direction past the barn for approximately 75 yards. He added that the plants appeared to be suspended from the large trees. I recognized this method as one occasionally used to hide cultivated marijuana . . . .”

Those details appear to have satisfied Vanarelli. He signed off, and the search warrant was approved. Within 24 hours, Donald Scott would be dead.

FRANCES SCOTT NEVER let up on the L.A. Sheriff’s Department. “If there’s such a thing as karma,” she’d say, “then they’re going to suffer for all the things they’ve done to people. They murdered my husband; they should pay.”

Narcotics Bureau Chief Larry Waldie took the lead in the counterattack. And he was sticking by his men, no matter how tough it got. During the somewhat overheated “20/20” TV report of the case (“another private garden of Eden would turn into Paradise Lost”), reporter Lynn Sherr led the chief into some tight spots. Sherr quizzed him on a non sequitur in the search warrant: Frances’ use of $100 bills for “small purchases” a full year before the raid had somehow provoked suspicion? In Malibu?

“I really can’t say, not being from the Malibu area,” Waldie said unhappily. “I don’t know what they spend out there.”

It is, in fact, a long way from Whittier and the L.A Sheriff’s Department’s Narcotics Bureau headquarters to Trail’s End Ranch. (On his own visit to the ranch, Waldie found Trail’s End “filthy.” All the dogs, all the disorder.) On his own turf, Waldie is relaxed, good-humored. Next to his desk sits a plastic pig with a cop’s hat on; on the wall in back is a sign setting bureau priorities: “Dope, crooks, money.”

Waldie joined the Narcotics Bureau three years ago, brought over from running a county jail in Lancaster. That was just after the federal corruption indictments against members of the bureau began to roll in. Waldie had no experience in narcotics, and that was the point. He has been in charge of the bureau shake-up, instituting new procedures to prevent the abuses detailed in the indictments. Allegedly, the deputies had their own “assets forfeiture” procedure. Caught with, say $500,000, a suspect would be asked what he wanted to do: Come downtown and claim the money or sign a disclaimer disavowing the money, which then went up for grabs. Waldie smiles and shakes his head. “What’s that Alexander Pope line? ‘To err is human’ ?”

The bureau has a $14-million annual budget, and even with that much money, it is hard-pressed. “Do you know what it takes to run with these people?” Waldie asks. There is the money required to make drug buys and to keep on hand such necessities as a constant supply of new automobiles. “There are dealers who will drive around the block, and if they see even one car they’ve seen before, they won’t come in. It’s an expensive game we play,” Waldie says.

Like many law-enforcement agencies all over the country, the bureau’s finances rely to some degree on legal asset-forfeiture proceedings--taking cash, mostly, but also cars, jewelry and real estate related to narcotics trafficking. The statutes that allow this derive from laws that predate the U.S. Constitution, going back to 18th-Century English common law and special powers awarded to the king that allowed him to acquire the goods of his adversaries. Asset forfeiture was little used before the late 1970s, when the War on Drugs heated up. The federal crime bill of 1984 further extended forfeiture powers, and since then, some $3-billion-worth of goods have been taken nationally; L.A. County itself has seized assets worth $205 million.

According to Waldie, the salaries of 24 of the 200 members of the sheriff’s Narcotics Bureau come out of such funds. He’s not pleased about it; he knows that forfeiture can become its own incentive. But, he says, “I have to live with it.”

With the obvious potential for abuse, asset forfeiture has become more and more controversial. Even supporters of the statutes, such as Gary Sohns, the chief forfeiture prosecutor in the California attorney general’s office, sees the downside. “It’s not their fault. It’s a little like crack,” he says. “It (forfeiture) can become addictive to law enforcement.”

Two months before the Ventura County district attorney’s investigation was complete, Waldie attacked the logic of Frances Scott’s suspicions that forfeiture was the real motive for the Trail’s End raid. “If I wanted to take it, why would I bring everyone else with me so I’d have to share?” he asked. The first person sounded again when he pointed to a picture behind his desk that showed him standing in a field of marijuana. “This is in Malibu,” he said. “There were 1,500 plants, and I didn’t take the land.”

Waldie felt certain that the Ventura County district attorney would rule, as had the internal investigation, that the shootings were justifiable. He mentioned the “dimple” found on the cartridge of Scott’s gun. There would be proof that Scott had tried to fire, he hinted. And yes, they were looking at Scott’s widow as an important element in the situation.

“Things will come out,” he said hopefully. “Things will come out.”

YET, WHEN THINGS DID come out, they were not what the bureau wanted to hear.

After six months and some 45 interviews, Ventura County Deputy D.A. Michael Bradbury released the report of his investigation into the Scott killing. The sheriff’s deputies were justified in the shooting of Don Scott, the report said. And no indictments were called for. However, Bradbury’s findings went well beyond the question of the shooting itself, and in that territory it was highly critical of Gary Spencer and the L.A. Sheriff’s Department Narcotics Bureau.

“What we have here is a good deputy,” said Bradbury during the press conference announcing the report, “who lost his moral compass when he saw the opportunity to seize a substantial piece of property.”

Bradbury, 51, says the investigation gave him no pleasure. “I hated doing it. But when things go wrong, we all suffer. Forfeiture is an important tool but when a pattern of abuse develops, an agency should not be allowed to use it.”

The report proved especially critical of Spencer’s methods in preparing the search warrant, both the outright lies (that Stowell had used binoculars, that this was part of a regular DEA investigation, that Frances’ BMW was registered to the ranch) and what Bradbury called “omissions”--the lack of any mention of the real debate between Stowell and Spencer about the presence of marijuana.

Most important, the subtext of the report showed why the authorities might wield such enormous government power against a man who turned out to be innocent. At the briefing before the raid, Bradbury discovered, Spencer had said that if as many as “14 marijuana plants” were found at Trail’s End, the property could be seized. Spencer had also told Park Service Ranger Tim Simonds that the Sheriff’s Department might give the property to the Park Service if it were taken. (Bradbury noted that it was a hollow offer; if the land had been forfeited it would have been auctioned.)

At times, the tone of the report had a tongue-in-cheek quality: “It is inherently unlikely that agent Stowell could see marijuana plants suspended under trees in a densely vegetated area through naked-eye observations from 1,000 feet--based on all of the evidence, it is the district attorney’s conclusion that there was never marijuana being cultivated on the property as reported by Stowell.”

In the course of the Bradbury investigation, Spencer came forth with a cigar box containing a single marijuana butt that he claimed had been found during the search of the ranch. The district attorney wasn’t buying that either. Why hadn’t it shown up in the original report listing items taken during the raid? Wrote Bradbury: “It is our conclusion that it is extremely unlikely that it was found at the ranch.”

Besides the L.A. Sheriff’s Department, the only agency that the report seriously criticized was the Border Patrol, a federal agency prohibited from going on private property for any reason other than the pursuit of illegal immigrants. “Their recent claim that they entered the property in a search for illegal aliens is unconvincing,” Bradbury said.

The report did conclude that the shooting itself was justified. “There is no evidence to disprove Spencer’s version of how the shooting occurred.” Wherever Frances was, her story was much the same as Spencer’s and Cater’s. As for the dimple on the bullet, the evidence was inconclusive--ballistics couldn’t prove or disprove that Scott had tried to fire.

Later, Bradbury offered his own idea of what was behind the raid: “Spencer learned that the names of (Frances) Plante and her associates had come up in investigations of heroin smuggling and other narcotics violations. Spencer knew that if he could get a search warrant for cultivation, he could get on the ranch to search for other drugs.”

In his view, the raid was “a fishing expedition.”

L.A. County Sheriff Sherman Block was angered by the report. “I find little substance to support Bradbury’s inflammatory conclusion,” he fumed. “What I find, however, is a lot of conjecture and supposition.” He accused Bradbury of “not understanding the nature of narcotics investigations” and promised that his department would issue its own findings on the Scott case.

Three months after Bradbury’s report, the U.S. Supreme Court made a significant attack on forfeiture statutes. In two cases, it held that the 8th Amendment applied to seizure laws. The government had argued that the statutes were not punitive but remedial--that is, they removed from society what the lawyers called “instruments” of criminality--and therefore the 8th Amendment’s prohibitions against “excessive fines” and “cruel and unusual punishment” shouldn’t apply. But the justices rejected that argument and sent the cases, including a North Dakota ruling in which a man’s business and his home had been forfeited because of a cocaine offense, back to the lower courts for reconsideration.

Bradbury, who has been asked to testify in Congress on asset forfeiture, says the ruling will mean new guidelines for prosecutors. The changes, he hopes, should “curb the sort of overzealousness we saw in the Scott case.”

OF ALL THE HORRORS AND indignities that Frances Plante Scott would suffer after Oct. 2, 1992, nothing, she says, was quite as upsetting to a Pentecostal minister’s daughter as her struggle to gain her husband’s body from a Ventura mortician. The bill was $400 and she was broke.

Within days of Scott’s death, his estate was fallen upon by a mob of claimants--children, ex-wives and distant European relatives who are represented by an even dozen lawyers. Initially, at least, the Trail’s End cash drawer was empty.

“And how much would you say was available right now?” a Ventura probate judge asked Nick Gutsue, the estate’s executor.

“Twenty-five cents and two pistols, your honor,” he said.

“Twenty-five cents?” asked the judge.

Gutsue looked miserable. Reporting on the scrappy, sometimes sordid details of his friend’s death was not pleasant for him. “It was a refund on an ambulance ride,” he told the judge. The expected millions were nowhere to be found.

Her red hair caught severely in a schoolmarm bun, dressed courtroom-plain in a sober gray suit, Frances told the court that she had no money at all and could hardly feed the dogs (down to five from 22), let alone herself. She was so broke, she said, that she had considered eating a coyote.

Again, the judge was incredulous: “A coyote?”

“Well, a dead one. I saw it along the side of the road. I didn’t eat it, but I did get the hide.” She may have smiled.

No one seemed to know how to take Scott’s “stand-up Texas lady.” It was hard to tell when she was kidding (if she ever was), the country deadpan was so absolute.

“Right now, I’m sleeping with seven or eight shotguns all around me,” she told the judge, “so when I wake up I can shoot in any direction.”

The horrors of Oct. 2 were constantly with her. Frances kept repeating her nightmare memories--in court, for neighbors, for an expanding retinue of reporters, radio talk-show hosts and her new and famous personal attorney, Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. She recalled the “face in the window”; the words of a callous deputy, “Your husband’s all right”; being put in a “cage” (the back of a sheriff’s patrol car) and taken to the Lost Hills substation, where “they wanted me to tell it their way, but I never would.”

She had returned to the ranch the night after her husband’s death to find that someone had broken into the cabin and stolen the Bible in which she kept her marriage license. (There was the suggestion that it was someone working on behalf of others who had competitive interests in Scott’s estate.) Even more upsetting, she said, was discovering a mop that someone had used to take up her husband’s blood from the floor.

“I didn’t want his blood in a bucket,” she said, crying. “I wanted to scrape it up and scatter it outside for the Indians.”

The interest she and Scott had taken in Trail’s End’s history was part of the inspiration for a private, distinctly idiosyncratic ceremony she held under the waterfall after finally paying the mortician’s bill with the help of some friends and having Scott’s body brought to the ranch for a “last visit,” two months after he died.

First, she placed one of the ornate old tablecloths from The Beaucage across the top of an overturned raft; then she and the man placed the body--in a body bag--on the raft. Frances, in her wedding dress, waded into the pool, pushing the raft to the center.

Then, she says, “I washed the germs off him from all the filthy people who killed him. I started to unzip it and then covered the whole body with lace and kissed his feet and his face, and then I pushed him under the waterfall and gave him a spiritual bath.”

She burned a bit of sage against evil spirits and read from a Bible.

After having the body cremated, she brought the urn back to the cabin and put it on the mantelpiece. It is supposed to go back to the family plot in a Poughkeepsie, N.Y., cemetery, but she says it isn’t time.

“I’m not ready to let him go.”

IN JULY, THE SCOTT CASE was still caught in controversy. The Sheriff’s Department had not yet completed its investigation (Narcotics Bureau Chief Waldie said it would “shed light” on “inappropriate” material in Bradbury’s report.), and Donald Scott’s estate remained in limbo.

Nick Gutsue had so far discovered only $50,000 in Australian stock and $35,000 in a Swiss account. The trust fund Scott had been living on reverted to the Scott family on his death. Finally, it seemed, it would come down to the ranch itself and whatever could eventually be collected from a number of lawsuits brought individually in Frances’ name and collectively in behalf of the estate.

In an effort to buy out her competition for Trail’s End, Frances Scott is recording a song about the raid called “We’re Going to Get You.” She is also thinking of licensing a line of paper towels upon which the Constitution has been printed. There have been suggestions of books and TV movies based on the case, but nothing so far has come to the widow whose “confidential marriage” to Scott has at least stood up to a challenge by other estate interests.

Frances Scott, so far, is staying on at the ranch. Above her bed, the bed she used to share with Donald Scott, there is a painting. It shows an Indian woman, up on her toes, leaning forward. “She is beginning the race of her life,” says Frances, “just like me.”

And on another wall in the bedroom hangs a framed copy of The Lord’s Prayer that her mother sent her from Texas. Nearby she has a woven Indian “dream catcher” to prevent the nightmares that still visit her on those long, dark nights at Trail’s End.