Mystery: Deadly Lessons

THERE WERE NO Christmas lights at the Glover house this past yuletide. Normally, Scotty Glover would have had the modest rancher off Manor Drive in Richboro dizzily festooned with lights. His dad, whom everybody calls Big Scott, says Scotty loved Christmas.

Inside, the house is a Polaroid of suburbia: The living room floor is being redone; a JVC big-screen TV sits in the family room. The door to Scotty’s room sits half-open, a light on inside. His ­mother, Tammy, uses his bed to pile up laundry. Even though Scotty no longer sleeps in this room, his stuff is still here. She’s not ready to clear it out yet.

“Do you mind smoke?” Big Scott says. He lights the first of what will be several Marlboro Reds. “Ask us anything.”

He is a big man, not so much in size as in presence: An ex-Marine, he’s loud and boisterous, with a no-bullshit demeanor and the sizable hands of a mechanic, hands that make a whip-cracking sound when he smacks his jeans for emphasis. Tammy is quieter, bespectacled, ­emanating the callused strength of a mother fighting to regain her footing. She’s wearing brown cowboy boots, which sometimes clop a little harder on the floor when she’s trying to convey a thought.

Big Scott and his son shared a love of auto racing. Scotty loved sprint cars — sort of soapbox-derby cars with working engines — and loved to race them. At one point, the Glovers contemplated moving to North Carolina, to escape Bucks County’s subdivisions and mall idealism, but mostly for the sake of Scotty’s racing passion.

On March 24th of last year, Tammy took Scotty out to buy a nice suit for a Sweet 16 he was invited to that night at Spring Mill Country Club, near Richboro. They found a suit — a retro-cut three-button number — and also bought some new t-shirts and a pair of Vans. Tammy thought Scotty would get a year’s wear out of that suit: After the Sweet 16, there was his junior prom the following week, his cousin’s graduation party in June, then his grandmother’s 80th birthday.

Scotty returned home from the party a little before 11. He wasn’t drunk or noticeably upset. He greeted his parents, then ambled into his bedroom to listen to music. Eventually he headed downstairs, where he liked to play his PS2 or watch a movie to wind down.

A couple of hours later, Tammy woke up on the couch in the family room, bleary-eyed. Scotty had left the light on in his room, no doubt had fallen asleep in there. She walked in to shut it off. He wasn’t there. 

Then she remembered he’d gone downstairs to the finished basement. He must have fallen asleep downstairs. She walked gingerly down the steps.

“And he was hanging from an exposed beam in the ceiling,” Tammy says, her voice higher, as if a ghost has jumped inside her chest. “I started screaming.”

Big Scott had fallen asleep on the couch with his wife. He heard the screams and came charging down the steps. Scotty Glover’s parents frantically unhooked the noose, a strap that was part of his sprint car, and their son fell into their arms.