sell. In 1992, he married a young Texan named Frances Plante and brought her to Trail’s End.  About that time it came to the attention of Deputy Sheriff Gary Spencer down in Malibu that Scott’s new bride had been busted a year earlier for marijuana possession. Now here she was living up on that isolated mountaintop.  A background check revealed that her name had come up in connection with a narcotics investigation. It seemed unlikely to Spencer that she’d be totally clean.

And then, according to the Deputy, he got word from an unnamed source that there were 3000 plants growing on the ranch. Convincing his superiors he was onto a major bust, Spencer set out to get some kind of visual corroboration. Over the next four weeks, he organized a surveillance effort that included everybody from the LAPD to the U.S. Forest Service, but despite overflights by the California Air National Guard and extensive ground sweeps by a special Border Patrol mountain unit, nobody spotted anything. Undeterred, Spencer plunged forward, determined to rip the covers off the old eccentric and his junkie bride.  He pressured a DEA expert to allege that he had seen some plants from the air, then he filed an affidavit riddled with false information and got a search warrant. On the morning of October 2, 1992, with Spencer at the head of the column, thirty officers from half-a-dozen state and federal agencies wound slowly up the three-mile mountain road from the coast.

The Scotts had been partying all night and they were still groggy when the hammering and shouting at the door woke them up. Francis got her jeans on first and just as she reached the living room, the door collapsed and a sea of armed men crashed in.  She screamed.  Her husband stepped into the hallway with a gun in his hand.  Spencer shouted “Drop the gun!  Drop the gun!” then fired two rounds.  Scott recoiled, pitched forward, and his face smashed into the floor. They hustled Francis out of there and proceeded to search the place with—one can imagine—increasing desperation.  For days they scoured the rolling hills, choppering along at treetop level and following up on foot, and they did not find a single marijuana seed.  A painstaking search of the house failed to turn up the expected coke or heroin stash.