Indeed he had.
Montgomery County, Virginia, Sheriff's Deputy Anthony Price received the call from the 911 operator at almost exactly 5:00 am and immediately headed toward the Allegheny Springs Trailer Park, a few miles south of Shawsville along a wickedly curvy road, arriving there at 5:16. He found Overby sitting on the couch of his neighbor's home smoking a cigarette, with a twelve-pack of beer on the table in front of him. Overby stood up and went outside with Price, then turned to face him in the cool, pewter-colored morning light and said "I killed my wife and I'm glad."
A second deputy had arrived by that time, and Overby told the two officers that Sheila Stafford's body was in the back bedroom of his trailer. He gave the officers permission to enter his trailer and, as Deputy Price read Overby his Miranda rights, cuffed him, and put him in the police cruiser, the second deputy entered the trailer in search of Sheila Stafford's body. What he found there was the most gruesome murder scene he or any other local police officer had ever encountered.
Scott Wayne Overby, known to his friends by the dimunitive "Scotty" even as a grown man, was born on December 7, 1967, in the extreme southwest corner of Virginia - coal-mining country. His father was a miner who'd been discharged from the Army with a mental disorder following service in Vietnam. Overby-senior was violent-tempered, and young Scotty was frequently the object of his abuse; at times, he had wet his bed rather than leave his bedroom and chance an encounter with his father. When Overby was about ten years old his father, who often slept with a loaded rifle at his side and was known to have discharged it in the house, snugged the rifle barrel to the underside of his chin and shot off the top of his head.
Within a year or so his mother remarried. Family life improved, but by that time the damage to Scotty had been done. He'd become a compulsive "people-pleaser," constantly seeking to ingratiate himself with everyone, but privately tormented. By the age of 19, he was sometimes drinking up to a case and a half of beer a day.
He worked at a Shoney's restaurant for about a year as a dishwasher while in high school, and then quit. For the next few years he did no steady work. When he was 21 his step-father, by then a handyman at the Friendship Manor nursing home in Salem, helped him get a job there. Under his watchful eye, Overby managed to hold on to the job for seven years.
The next few years were spent drinking, hanging out and getting into minor trouble with the law; traffic violations, mostly. Along the way, he acquired tattoos on both arms; on the left, a skull with hair; on the right, a skull with a knife and a skull with a spider web. He also suffered, one way and another, five head injuries. Friends later told investigators that one of them, experienced during the year before he met his wife-to-be, resulted in significant memory problems, decreased reasoning ability, and lowered tolerance for frustration. As Overby's troubles mounted, so did his drinking.
In early 1991 a friend, Buck Twine, introduced him to one of his ex-girlfriends, Sheila Stafford. The two hit it off almost at once. Sheila was from Pineville, West Virginia, another coal-country expatriate who'd gone to western Virginia's Roanoke valley looking for a better life. At first glance, they were an unlikely couple. Scott stood an even six-feet and weighed just over 150 pounds. Sheila was shorter and weighed 300 pounds. What they had in common was their coal-country background; Scott would joke that he loved Sheila because she was the only woman he'd ever met with a stronger accent than his own. By the end of the year they were living together in Christiansburg, and they were married there in a courthouse civil ceremony on July 7, 1992.
Soon afterward they moved to a trailer in the Alleghany Springs Trailer Park. The park is located approximately 3.5 miles south of Shawsville, a small town midway between Christiansburg and Salem. To get there, turn south in Shawsville onto Alleghany Springs Road. Go slow; the road is bordered on the east side by a cobble-strewn stream, and the road is only a few feet above the elevation of the stream bed. On the west, the road is bordered in places by sheer rock cliffs. The entire distance is marked by sharp curves and frequent rises and dips. The trailer park is on the right, a few neat rows of a dozen or so trailers in a pasture-like area between the road and a mountain. A thin screen of scraggly pines separates the park and road. It's just the sort of countryside that urbanites often seek out when they want to "get away from it all," but which is a dead-end for those who aren't merely visitors.
The relationship between Scott and Sheila was always troubled. Scott continued drinking steadily, and Sheila began to spend more time at the home of Buck Twine's mother, with whom she'd lived before meeting Overby. Further, Sheila wanted children but would need a $1600.00 operation before that was possible. When she asked Overby for the money he went out and bought a motorcycle instead.
Sheila, who had slimmed down to 140 pounds from 300 pounds, left Overby in May of 1995, moving back to the home of Buck Twine's mother, Sandy Alls. She took with her most of the furniture and two to three-thousand dollars cash from the couple's joint savings account. Scott believed she had resumed her former relationship with Twine, though whether he was correct is not known.
Sheila's departure, following a decade of alcohol abuse and multiple head injuries, combined with his always-fragile self-image, marked the beginning of Overby's eventual disintegration. By the first week of July he was being treated for alcoholism at the Indian Path Medical Center in Kingsport, Tennessee. The discharge report notes that Overby had claimed upon admission to have attempted suicide using automobile exhaust, but that he had "chickened out." On July 9 he was admitted to the Lewis-Gale psychiatric center in Salem, Virginia. He was threatening there to kill his estranged wife, but his enumerated goals included getting sober so that his wife would return. He was discharged from that hospital on the 13th because his insurance coverage terminated.
While there, Overby had talked of killing his wife, and his doctor had been made so uneasy by his remarks that he telephoned to warn her of Scott's threats. Sheila told him she was aware of the threats, and that she had gotten a restraining order against Overby the month before.
She didn't enforce the order, however. In fact, she continued to see him from time to time, and to discuss with him the possibility of reconciliation. Here, she may have inadvertantly contributed to Overby's collapse into lunacy; it's unlikely that his alcohol-fogged, desperately unstable mind could have responded with anything but confusion to what may have seemed like signals of conflicting intentions.
On July 19th, Overby was admitted to Montgomery Regional Hospital following a failed suicide attempt; he'd put away his usual heavy load of beer and then followed it with 60 50-mg. Doxepin tablets. Doxepin is an anti-depressant which sometimes requires two to three weeks to have effect, and whose side-effects occasionally include anxiety and restlessness. Sheila was at the hospital assisting his discharge on July 21, talking of reconciliation.
By the first weekend in August, Overby was recuperating in Mt. Carmel, Tennessee. Sheila visited him there. According to statements later made by Overby, Sheila had purchased a newspaper in order to review the want-ads, thinking that perhaps it would be a good place for them to get a fresh start.
Overby returned to Shawsville on August 12th, stopping at his mother's home between 3:00 and 4:00 pm before going to his own home. She later told investigators "He seemed to be on top of the world. He said he still loved her, he was going home because she was supposed to come to see him.."
At around 5:00 pm, Overby was standing at a phone booth talking to Shiela. She told him she wasn't feeling too well, that she wanted to take a shower, that she was uncertain whether she would visit him. Sheila's sister Tammy, with whom Sheila was then living, later told investigators that Sheila had made a definite decision not to reconcile with Overby. Sheila left for Overby's trailer at six o'clock. According to a victim impact statement later made by Tammy, Sheila had begged her sister to go to Overby's with her. Tammy declined. Sheila then left, saying she'd be home in about one hour. The import of her remarks seems to be that Sheila intended to tell Scott there would be no reconciliation, and then leave; she probably wanted her sister with her for protection.
At six-fifteen, Overby was back at the phone booth, wondering when Sheila would be arriving. He and Tammy spoke briefly. Scott learned that Sheila was on the way, and he returned to the trailer.
No one but Scott Overby knows exactly what occurred in that trailer during the next few hours, and thanks to his ruined mind it may be that not even he knows with certainty. He has told many different versions.
Somehow, shortly after Sheila's arrival, he lured her to a back bedroom. There, they either had consensual sex, or he raped her. Originally, Overby told police he had raped her; later, he claimed the sex was consensual, that he had told police it was rape because that made the murder a capital crime. "I wanted to die, asked somebody who escorted me if this would be capital, he said that if a rape had occurred, yeah, so I just started saying yeah to whatever. I just wanted to die. I let them hear what they wanted to hear so I could get the death penalty." The evidence indicates it was probably rape, triggered perhaps by Sheila telling him there would be no reconciliation Her panties had been torn off, and she was still wearing her shoes and t-shirt during sex.
According to Overby's later statements, made when the death penalty was staring him in the face, he attacked her after consensual sex when, he claims, she told him she was seeing a black man and thought she might be pregnant. Sheila's brothers and sisters say flatly that she was not seeing anyone else, and that she would never have told Overby that she was. If she did tell Overby there'd be no reconciliation, it's conceivable that she might have invented a relationship by way of explanation; only he knows. It's inconceivable, though, that Overby might have thought she was pregnant or that Sheila would have said she was. He knew that an operation would be needed before that could happen. In fact, she had recently scheduled the operation, and Overby had called Sheila to wish her a successful outcome. He is almost certainly lying, concocting an after-the-fact scenario in a bid to escape the death penalty.
Whatever it was that got Overby started, rape was just the beginning. He then strangled Sheila, fashioning a tourniquet-like ligature using a board, two belts, and an alarm clock cord. "I don't know how long, I just let go, seeing she's not moving or anything, got scared, trying CPR and everything, I could not bring her back." He continued his account of events: ". . . lost it, went and got some beer, drinking like hell, totally scared, drinking like a fish." And, further, " . . . sitting her back up against a wall and talking with her, asking her like why do these things, like say remarks at certain times when you know it would really hurt somebody?"
Despite the mournful sound of that last; Overby wasn't done. He got a knife and began mutilating the body. Six times, Sheila was stabbed in the chest, some of the slashes penetrating the t-shirt she had worn. He cut her left eyelid.. He cut both nostrils.. He stabbed her in the neck, leaving a 2.5-inch long wound up to 1.0 inch deep. He cut both breasts above the nipple.
Still not satisfied, Overby found a magic marker and began to write. "hell" and the initials "W.U." were written on the lower right breast. On the upper right chest he wrote "here Buck Twine." On the lower chest and upper abdomen he wrote "Nigger fucker," and then he drew an arrow pointing toward her pubic area. On her right thigh he wrote "here Sandy Alls" On the upper right thigh he wrote "not no," and on the left upper thigh "more."
He still wasn't done. According to police he then raped the cold, gore-strewn body.
He took a Susan B. Anthony silver dollar, placed it in Sheila's vagina, and jammed it far inside her using the handle of a toilet plunger.
He unhitched his pants and urinated on the face of his dead wife's corpse.
Sometime during those hours of madness and beer, Overby got in his car and went for a ride, careering along the lonely, rolling, winding roads, picking up more beer, throwing the knife he'd used into a ditch. The next morning, he took police right to the spot where he'd thrown it.
Overby was taken to the Montgomery County Jail and held without bail on multiple charges: capital murder, rape, sexual penetration by object, and defiling a corpse.
He gained weight while in jail, almost ten pounds, which is unusual; it's possible that he was previously malnourished due to his excessive drinking. The first letters written while in jail display a small, rounded, childish script, and the language is almost obsequious. A few months into his year-long stay, however, the language turned angry and the script became spare, free of embellishment, sometimes jagged, suggesting acute mental distress. On December 29th, 1995, he attempted suicide while in the shower.
Thanks to the gruesomeness of the murder and the correspondingly-intense public interest, Overby's court-appointed lawyers sought a change of venue citing community hostility toward the defendant and publication in the Roanoke Times of evidence which would be inadmissable in court The attorneys noted, too, that the O.J. Simpson trial was focusing attention on domestic violence and that the newspaper had published a sympathetic portrayal of the victim. The petition was denied, and preparation for a trial at the Montgomery County court house proceeded.
The roughest winter in memory passed into spring, and jury selection for Overby's trial began on April 29, 1996. By the end of the first day of selection, six jurors had been selected. That night, Overby and his lawyers met and made a stunning decision: because there was no question that he had committed the crime, there was no serious doubt that a jury would convict. According to Virginia procedures, they would then retire to consider whether or not he should receive the death penalty. Overby, they decided, would plead guilty - thereby eliminating the need for a trial and delivering his fate into the hands of the trial judge.
Ray Grubbs had sat on the bench just two years, and had never tried a capital case. Though the decision was explained in terms of Overby's desire to spare the victim's family the anguish of listening to detailed testimony, Overby and his lawyers bet, in essence, that the judge, acting single-handedly, would be more reluctant than a jury acting collectively to make the decision that Overby should die. Accordingly, the trial proceeded directly to a sentencing hearing, and actual sentencing was set for July 9, 1996.
Virginia permits the victims of crime to make statements when courts meet to consider punishment, a device that helps to assure that judges and juries consider crime not as some abstract thing that happened at some time in the remote past - like the Trojan War, say - but as a real event with enduring consequences.
At the sentencing hearing, the Stafford family's conduct showed where Sheila had acquired the strength to more than halve her weight, leave the relationship with Overby, begin taking the steps necessary to start a family of her own. One wonders: What if Overby had tapped into that resource before it was too late? Standing in the crowded court room, Harry Stafford Sr., Sheila's father, turned to Overby and forgave him, blaming the medical system that had permitted Overby to leave psychiatric care because his insurance had expired though he so desperately needed it, and asked Judge Grubbs to spare Overby's life. Harry Jr., Sheila's brother, seconded him. Tammy Stafford described her grief: "I feel responsible for her death. She begged me to go with her." She continued: "I tried so hard at the funeral home to remove the writing on her body but it wouldn't come off." In spite of a horrific memory like that last, she, too, asked the court not to impose the death penalty.
On July 9th Grubb's accepted the Stafford's recommendations, sparing Overby's life. He was sentenced to two life terms without parole, plus 30 years. Overby will die in prison, but not on a gurney with a needle taped to his arm - thanks to the compassion of his victim's family.