Update: Body Believed to Be That of Anne Morell Petrillo Is Found - NYTimes.com

(pictured above Anne Morell Petrillo and her sister Alex)
As Body Is Found, Efforts to Make Sense of a Loss
By JOSEPH BERGER and NATE SCHWEBER
Published: September 27, 2009


The echoes from her stepfather’s death were haunting.


Body Believed to Be That of Anne Morell Petrillo Is Found - NYTimes.com: "Around midnight on New Year’s Day 1994, Scott S. Douglas jumped off the Tappan Zee Bridge hours after his wife, Anne Scripps Douglas, the heiress to a newspaper fortune, was found bludgeoned in her upstairs bedroom with head injuries from which she would die six days later. Mr. Douglas’s 1982 BMW was abandoned on the bridge, its engine still running, so the police searched the Hudson River. The decomposed body did not turn up for three months." On Thursday, his stepdaughter, Anne Morell Petrillo, 38, was believed to have leaped off the same bridge, leaving behind a 2004 BMW sport-utility vehicle on the bridge’s northbound lanes, a note inside. For four days, police divers plumbed the murky waters below the bridge and cruisers scoured the river banks, and on Sunday afternoon, a body believed by police to be that of Ms. Petrillo was found.

Before the discovery, friends and neighbors in Rye Brook, N.Y., found themselves remembering that Ms. Petrillo was in her early 20s when she learned that her mother had been savagely beaten in her family’s Bronxville, N.Y., home by her stepfather.

“Annie never got over that,” said Wendy Rottman, a friend who was visiting Ms. Petrillo’s elder sister, Alexandra Scripps Morell, in Port Chester, N.Y. “Her mother’s murder haunted her until the end. She was just devastated, and this was the way she wanted it. She’s at peace now.”

Shelley Goldring Silverman, a neighbor of Ms. Petrillo’s in a town house complex in Rye Brook who often saw her walking her dogs, a yellow Labrador and a cocker spaniel, said, as did Ms. Rottman, that Ms. Petrillo had been hospitalized more than once in the last year and a half for depression. “She never recovered from the loss of her mother,” Mrs. Silverman said.

Trying to understand the echoes in the two deaths, Matt Butler, 27, who was in the sixth grade when Ms. Douglas, his neighbor, was murdered, reached for another explanation: “It seems like her suicide was an homage to her stepfather’s suicide, which was a shock because she hated her stepfather,” he said. “We all thought there would be fallout for the girls because they were so traumatized.”

Lt. James G. Murphy of the New York State Police declined to reveal the contents of the note that was found, along with Ms. Petrillo’s driver’s license, in her BMW.

Matt Manza, a state police investigator, said that a Tarrytown Fire Department boat found the body at 3:10 p.m. about a half-mile north of the bridge.

“We believe it is Ms. Petrillo,” he said, adding that an autopsy would be performed on Monday at the Rockland County medical examiner’s office.

Although Ms. Rottman said Ms. Petrillo had lived “a privileged life,” there were signs of difficulties as well. Neighbors said that Ms. Petrillo was divorced from her husband — though one police official said the divorce might not have been finalized — and that her son, Michael, 13, lived with his father. The two-story house she had occupied since roughly 2003 was attached and not particularly grand. That may be because the estate Anne Scripps Douglas left behind for her three daughters — the youngest sister, a daughter with Mr. Douglas, is named Victoria — was not strikingly large. It was $1.3 million. Friends and neighbors said Ms. Petrillo had been going through a difficult period, though she seemed to sustain a veneer of good humor. Ms. Rottman said when she had lunched with Ms. Petrillo two weeks ago in Manhattan she seemed cheerful.

“Although she was going through hard times, I never laughed so hard in my life,” Ms. Rottman said. “She was the life of the party.”

At another point, she said, “considering her tortured life, Annie’s laugh was infectious — she lit up a town with it.”

Ms. Petrillo’s mother was the great-great-granddaughter of James E. Scripps, who founded The Detroit News in 1873 and whose brother E. W. Scripps founded E. W. Scripps Co., which owns newspapers, television stations and the Scripps Howard News Service. Anne Scripps Douglas, a small woman whose dark hair was swept back in a bun, struck her friends as someone who was overly trusting and needed their protection.

After schooling at an upstate convent and a two-year Catholic college, she endured a failed marriage to a Rye stockbroker — the father of Ms. Petrillo and her sister Alexandra — then married a charming, handsome 6-footer, Scott Douglas. He was a house painter, and they met when she hired him to work on her house. Friends were concerned about the wide disparity in social status, but Ms. Douglas seemed to be in love.

Then in the months before Ms. Douglas’s death, neighbors noticed how often police cars were summoned to the house. Ms. Douglas had also sought the advice of a domestic violence group, complaining that Mr. Douglas would turn violent when he drank.

At her funeral at St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church in Bronxville, mourners saw Anne Morell step up to the pulpit while a cousin read a brief letter. The daughter had written the letter but could not summon the strength to read it herself.

“You were the best mom, we will never forget you,” the letter said. “We know you are at peace now and out of pain.”


Domestic violence leads to yet another death with Anne Morell Petrillo
Michael Daly

Sunday, September 27th 2009, 4:00 AM


As she leapt from the same stretch of the Tappan Zee Bridge as her homicidal stepfather, Anne Morell Petrillo made one thing indisputable:

Her suicide was the direct result of her mother's long-ago murder.

And, as she plunged into the churning water below, she was imparting a final lesson about domestic violence.

She was telling us the violence reverberates long after the last blow, that it did not end when her stepfather, Scott Douglas, battered her mother, Anne Scripps Douglas, with a hammer almost 16 years ago.

The violence did not even cease when the killer stopped his BMW on the Tappan Zee Bridge and jumped.

Scott Douglas' body was found three months later by the river's edge in the Bronx, but he continued to wreak havoc at his stepdaughter's very core to her very last moment.

"It was a lifetime of sadness," Petrillo's paternal aunt, Mary Jane Haggerty, said yesterday.

That Anne Scripps Douglas was heiress to the Scripps newspaper fortune did nothing to lessen the daughter's pain.

But it did give Petrillo and her sister, Alexandra Morell, the opportunity to speak of the horrors of domestic violence.

Petrillo told a TV interviewer of finding her mother crying that New Year's Eve in 1993:

"I said, 'What's wrong, what's wrong?' And she told me that Scott had said the threats are over, something more has to be done, and so I said, 'Well, I'm not going to go out,' and she said, 'No, everything's fine.'"
Petrillo, then 22, returned at 3:30 a.m. She knocked, but no lights came on and nobody came to the door.

"I was very scared. I knew something was wrong because my mom sleeps in my bedroom and it's right over the door where I was pounding at for at least 20 minutes."

The police arrived. Petrillo's mother was found on the bed in a pool of blood. Petrillo's 3-year-old half sister, Victoria, was also there.

"She said she hid under the bed from daddy when he was calling her name and she said, 'Why did daddy hurt mommy? Why does mommy look like a monster? Why does mommy have paint all over her face?'" Petrillo told the interviewer.

The case became the subject of a 1997 TV movie, "Our Mother's Murder." With it came the hope that Anne Scripps Douglas' murder would save others from suffering the same fate.

The movie was replayed on Tuesday. Petrillo was now 38 years old with a 13-year-old son.

But she had been living a perpetual replay. She was still living in that shadow.

And Thursday she reached the point she could bear no more.

If she had taken pills or leapt from some other high place, people might have imagined that her mother's death was only part of the cause, that perhaps she had personal troubles of her own or was grieving the death of her father four years ago or of her paternal uncle at the World Trade Center on 9/11.

But she drove her BMW to the Tappan Zee Bridge and stopped where Scott Douglas stopped his BMW on that long-ago New Year's Day. She left a note. She stepped out of her clothes.

Then she jumped.

And, 15 years after he himself hit the water, Scott Douglas and domestic violence claimed another victim.

Tidbits
Anne had been struggling with life ever since her mom died. Close friends say that she had divorced, struggling financially, drinking alot, and had attempted suicide several times before.

Update: Anne the daughter of Anne Scripps Douglas has committed Suicide

Anne Morell Petrillo, the daughter of Anne Scripps Douglas, committed suicide this past Thursday by jumping off of the same bridge that her stepfather, Scott Douglas did almost 16 years ago. Police have now located the body. Here are some documents

Daughter of murdered newspaper heiress Anne Douglas Scripps jumps from Tappan Zee Bridge
The daughter of a newspaper heiress jumped off the Tappan Zee Bridge nearly 16 years after her stepfather leaped from the span after beating her mother to death at their Bronxville estate, sources said.

Witnesses saw Anne Petrillo, 38, abandon her car on the Rockland County-bound side of the bridge, remove her clothes and jump into the Hudson River around 8 p.m. Thursday, sources said.

State police led the search for the woman, but the effort was called off Friday when conditions became too dangerous.

"The currents were ripping," said Dan Goswick, captain of the Piermont Fire Department.

Petrillo left a note in her BMW SUV that she left parked on the bridge, but investigators would not comment on what she wrote, the Journal News reported.

Petrillo was 22 when her mother, Anne Scripps Douglas, was beaten to death with a hammer by her husband in the daughter's bedroom at the family's Bronxville home on New Year's Eve 1993.

Scott Douglas, Petrillo's stepfather, then drove his 1982 BMW to the Tappan Zee, got out and jumped into the Hudson.

Police divers searched the frigid waters for days to no avail, prompting speculation the 38-year-old former house painter, whose wife was threatening divorce, had faked his death.

Nearly three months later, on March 30, 1994, Douglas' badly decomposed body washed up in the Bronx.

Anne Scripps Douglas, who was smashed at least five times in the head and face as she lay on a bed, lingered six days in a coma before dying.

The case focused nationwide attention on domestic violence among the affluent.

The chilling story of what went on behind closed doors in the Douglas home was dramatized in a 1997 television movie "Our Mother's Murder."

In interviews about the movie, Petrillo and her sister, Alexandra, agreed the dramatized abuse against their mother was mild compared to what happened.

But, said Alexandra, "Annie and I thought somebody else's life might be saved" if they saw the film and got out of a bad relationship.

Douglas was the great-great-granddaughter of Detroit News founder James Scripps.

Documents of Anne Scripps Douglas

The Story

Daughter describes what happened

collection of news articles (chronological order)

Husband's suicide

collection of photos


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