00:00:00
Tonight on Dateline. I got a call saying that the house was on fire. The first thing they asked me was,
00:00:07
who would want to kill you? Who would want to murder you? And I just kind of looked at him like, what?
00:00:14
I couldn't believe it. Was he watching me? That fire was set to throw us off. He was very calculating.
00:00:22
Years before, his wife killed herself. Yes. He claimed that she committed suicide
00:00:27
just days before she was due to give birth to their first child. She was extremely excited for that baby.
00:00:33
She just wanted to be a mom. This wasn't somebody who was thinking about suicide.
00:00:36
Exactly. It made me wonder, okay, was he a murderer? So now you're trying to prove a very old murder with pretty much no evidence.
00:00:43
Correct. Is he kind of gloating that he got away with it? He's thinking, well, catch me if you can.
00:00:51
We are going to do her and her family justice. We're going to solve this murder.
00:00:56
I'm Lester Holt, and this is Dateline. Here's Josh Mankiewicz with Secrets from the Grave.
00:01:18
Wander through any graveyard and you'll find them, mysteries etched in stone. Lives cut tragically short by war, disease, misfortune, and sometimes murder.
00:01:35
Many who rest in these peaceful places took secrets to their graves. But some here are merely waiting.
00:01:45
Waiting for someone to take interest and ask questions. And as you're about to see, the dead can be exceedingly patient.
00:01:56
Our story begins on a frigid March night in 2009 with a house fire in Stowe, Ohio.
00:02:05
That fire was important, not for what it destroyed, but for what it illuminated.
00:02:13
911, where's your emergency? The Uniondale Drive. There's a fire. The house or what?
00:02:19
The house. The caller was a 16-year-old girl who told the 911 operator that she, her parents, and her younger brother had all escaped, but barely.
00:02:31
And then her father took the phone. I don't understand. The entire front of our house is just engulfed.
00:02:39
Okay. I'm glad everybody got out. That dad was Scott Perk. You'll be hearing a lot about him.
00:02:47
Perk said his family had been sound asleep when he heard a loud boom. It was like we heard an explosion.
00:02:54
Oh, you did? Yep. That's what woke us up. Real cold at the moment. Perk said he'd scrambled to get everyone up and out.
00:03:07
By the time the first fire units rolled up, the Perk home was a roaring bonfire.
00:03:12
Firefighters smelled gasoline as soon as they got out of their trucks. So a call immediately went out to Stowe Police Detective Ken Mifflin.
00:03:23
When I got there, I saw the fire department still putting out the blaze. Someone had taken probably a pipe wrench to disconnect the gas line,
00:03:32
and it was blowing out natural gas. It sounded like it was a very large roaring sound.
00:03:39
At that point, that gas hadn't ignited. No. You know, it could have possibly blown up. The person who set the fire poured gasoline all the way to the gas meter and on top of the gas meter.
00:03:49
The idea was fire starts at the gasoline, goes to the gas main and possibly destroys the house and everybody in it.
00:03:59
Absolutely. Mifflin found the Perk family sheltered at a neighbor's house and asked the father, Scott Perk, to step outside.
00:04:08
So we actually went over to my unmarked detective bureau car, and we sat in my car where it was nice and warm.
00:04:15
I guess the first question is, who'd want to burn down your house? Who are your enemies?
00:04:19
Exactly. Right. And Scott said he really didn't have any. There was no one that he knew that was so angry at him
00:04:27
that would want to try to harm him or his family. So the investigation just basically took off from there.
00:04:34
Perhaps it was the warm car on such a cold night. Or maybe it was Mifflin's warm manner.
00:04:43
Either way, Scott Perk was feeling chatty. He'd lost his job about, you know, about eight or nine days prior to this.
00:04:51
Things were not going well in his life. When asked how he and his wife Tammy had spent the evening prior to the fire,
00:05:00
Perk responded with this little shocker. Scott and Tammy, they're swingers. And they spent the evening basically apart because Scott was at home, but Tammy was out with a friend of hers.
00:05:15
Another man. Tammy was out with another man. She was dating their son's martial arts instructor.
00:05:21
And so she spent the evening with him, came home roughly around 1 o'clock in the morning.
00:05:27
Strange? Sure. But Scott Perk was just getting started. Scott told you that Tammy brought him the leftovers from the dinner that she'd had with the guy she was seeing.
00:05:40
Right. This is just like, you know, hey, honey, here's some leftover orange chicken that this other guy and I didn't eat.
00:05:48
Right. You know, Tammy went to bed first and Scott finished off the leftovers. No detail it seemed was too small or insignificant for Scott Burke It was like turning a faucet on Once you turned it on he just kept talking and I just kept writing down the answers
00:06:06
At times, it was hard to keep up. Scott Burke kept offering answers to questions the detective hadn't asked.
00:06:15
And there seemed to be so much more he wanted to say. When we come back He's doing almost everything he can
00:06:28
To make himself sound like a suspect Yes, exactly As Scott Perk keeps talking Suspicion keeps mounting
00:06:34
About this house on fire And a burning secret I'm looking at someone who I believe is an arsonist
00:06:41
Now I'm wondering Was he a murderer? In 20 years with a badge, Detective Ken Mifflin had never encountered anyone quite like Scott
00:07:04
Perk. As the two of them sat in his car, watching Perk's home being reduced to ash, Perk kept
00:07:12
talking, saying things he probably shouldn't have been saying to a cop who already suspected
00:07:17
this fire was arson. He was heavily in debt and he made no bones about telling us, you know, that
00:07:24
he even actually figured out if his house actually burned down, he would only owe about $70,000 in
00:07:29
debt. It's essentially him saying, hey, look, I'm not going to hide anything. You're going to find
00:07:33
out that I'm in debt. Right. Arson for insurance money? Too early to say, but a real possibility.
00:07:42
He videotaped everything in his house. He told us that too, in case there was ever a fire. And he
00:07:47
just did it recently and when I asked him how recent he said very recent. And he's doing almost
00:07:52
everything he can to make himself sound like a suspect. Yes, exactly. What was Mr. Perk up to?
00:08:00
The detective couldn't guess. Parked down the driveway, well away from the burning home,
00:08:06
sat the Perk family van, cleaned up and ready for a road trip. According to Scott,
00:08:13
he and his son had been planning to visit family in North Carolina. And what drew our attention was what he actually had packed inside the van.
00:08:21
I'm guessing it was not stuff you would typically bring on vacation. Old family photos, cookbooks that had family recipes for generations in there,
00:08:29
to which he could offer no explanation about why those were even in the van. It was a few days after the fire at Scott Perk's house
00:08:39
that Stowe's chief arson investigator, Jim Lydell, back from vacation called Detective Ken Mifflin.
00:08:47
And he says, you've got to hear this. And so he played me the 911 tape. Virginia Dale Drive, there's a fire.
00:08:55
Mifflin had heard something on that initial 911 call from Scott Perk's daughter,
00:09:00
something he wanted Lydell to hear, too. During a lull, Scott Perk can be heard calmly whispering to someone.
00:09:09
Oh, God, you forgot the ferret. He was talking about a pet ferret, and his tone seemed to be more rueful oversight than anguished alarm.
00:09:22
That was a bit of a flag, you know, leading us to believe that there had been a plan anyways all along.
00:09:30
Add in Scott Perk's money woes and his admission that an insurance payout would clear most of his debt.
00:09:39
And Lydell was pre-sold on the idea of Scott Perk as an arson suspect. Oh, and Mifflin wasn't finished.
00:09:49
On the night of the fire, the detective told Lydell, Scott Perk had casually added a tantalizing detail to his life story.
00:10:00
Scott, just out of the blue, says to me, well, his first wife had committed suicide in 1985,
00:10:08
and she was pregnant, nine months pregnant. As if like, you know, not only is my house in embers,
00:10:15
but this isn't even the worst thing that happened to me. I was shocked and it made me wonder,
00:10:20
okay, now I need to look into this. I'm looking at someone who I believe is an arsonist.
00:10:24
Now I'm wondering, okay, was he a murderer? The two lawmen decided to pursue parallel investigations into Scott Perk.
00:10:34
Lidell would take lead on the arson case. Mifflin the suicide. You guys know each other and you get along. He knows exactly what he's doing.
00:10:42
We do work very well together. We have a great relationship. Mifflin knew his case had the
00:10:48
highest hurdles. Not only had Scott Perk's first wife Meg Perk died 24 years earlier,
00:10:55
but she had died in Akron, only a few miles from Stowe, but a different jurisdiction.
00:11:01
What's it like to go to the Akron police and say, hey, I'm from a much smaller department, but I think you got this case wrong back in the mid-1980s.
00:11:12
You have to approach it very carefully, but we have a good working relationship with the police department in Akron, and you have to make the phone call.
00:11:20
Instead of waving off this small-town detective, the Akron cops were willing to help.
00:11:26
I talked to a detective who I dealt with in the past. He said, it's not a cold case, it's a closed case.
00:11:33
If you want to use your eyes to take a look at it, we'll send you a copy of the report.
00:11:38
And he did. According to the original police report, Meg Perk was 24 years old and nine months pregnant on the day she died.
00:11:47
Scott stated that the morning of March 18, 1985, Meg had woken up sick. and Scott had made a doctor appointment for her to go see her doctor Later that morning Scott says he was taking a bath when he saw Meg walk past the bathroom door
00:12:08
He gets out of the bathtub about four or five minutes later, and then lo and behold, he sees Meg hanging from a rope in the stairwell of their apartment.
00:12:17
His story is that he cuts Meg down and tries to do some CPR? Yes, once he saw Meg hanging, then he grabbed a steak knife from one of the tables nearby and cut the rope.
00:12:28
And then he started to do CPR. So he calls for EMS to respond and meets them at the door when they get there.
00:12:36
Meg's unborn baby, a boy, died that same day. Meg lingered another 24 hours. She never regained consciousness.
00:12:46
The detective had nothing he could test or examine. In fact, even the police photos from the scene had been tossed long ago.
00:12:56
Still nothing about Scott Perk's version of the story felt right. Most women who are nine months pregnant and carry their child full term typically do not commit suicide.
00:13:07
That was the first thing. Second thing was he was in the apartment when his wife hung herself in the stairwell of their apartment.
00:13:13
Most individuals do it by themselves with no one around. Both of those facts were available to the Akron police back in 1985.
00:13:20
They had their doubts that this was truly a suicide. However, they just didn't have enough.
00:13:27
Next, the detective examined the original autopsy photos. What did you see? What stood out in my mind from the autopsy photos was on Meg's neck.
00:13:38
There were lines on her neck that looked like a belt mark was on her neck, not a rope mark.
00:13:44
The detective figured the only way to find out what had actually happened in that apartment in 1985 was to learn all he could about Scott and Meg Perk.
00:13:59
Coming up, something disturbing about Meg's past. There was a note on the coffee table and it said that she had tried to hang herself.
00:14:08
And something dark from Scott's. He was the ninja burglar. The ninja burglar. He would actually commit burglaries dressed up as a ninja.
00:14:16
When Dateline continues. In the weeks after Scott Perk's house burned down, police in Stowe, Ohio heard an earful from people who either knew him or knew of him.
00:14:38
Him and his wife are swingers. They go to the Holiday Inn on Route 8 and they have these orgies and stuff.
00:14:45
There was plenty of gossip and speculation in tip calls like this one. But occasionally there was something new.
00:14:52
His wife and child back in the 80s had been hit by a drunken driver. Remember, Perk had told the detective his first wife took her own life.
00:15:01
Now it seemed he'd told at least one of his former lovers an entirely different story.
00:15:06
He had told my girlfriend that he went over there and killed the guy, caught him up, and
00:15:12
buried him. And she's like, you know, they just had sex, you know what I mean? And then he's confessing.
00:15:17
The detective, of course, knew better. Scott Perk's first wife, Meg, and their unborn son had indeed died in Akron in 1985.
00:15:28
Her death was suicide by hanging, according to the coroner's report. Even all these years later, Meg's memory is still fresh for Dawn Cracker.
00:15:38
Dawn and Meg were best buds in high school. She was quiet. But people would always say that she reminded them of Janis Joplin
00:15:47
and her kind of like hippie, kind of bohemian attitude. But she was very much more reserved.
00:15:55
Like she'd come into a room or something and people just wanted to be with her. Meg had been a serious student back then, an amateur poet, who managed to get several of her pieces published.
00:16:08
Some of her poetry was a little bit dark. Meg's brother, Michael Metcalf. Sometimes it was about sadness or about loss, even death.
00:16:19
You ever read it and worry about her? Back then, no, not really. Dawn, who'd known Scott since first grade, told the detective he seemed like a model boyfriend to Meg.
00:16:30
He did everything exactly that you would expect a good boyfriend to do. He opened doors for her, he took her out, he did everything that you would expect someone who was interested in somebody to do.
00:16:50
Though Meg was charmed, her family never warmed to Scott. When they married in 1981, her family was not invited.
00:17:00
They didn't run off in a lope. I mean, they actually had a wedding ceremony in the area and I guess a reception.
00:17:05
But her family wasn't there. She knew how we felt. Nevertheless, Meg was over the moon when she learned she was pregnant.
00:17:16
As her due date approached, she wrote this letter to her grandmother. It's a letter she never got the chance to mail.
00:17:24
Just think, any day now you're going to be a great grandmother, and I'm going to be a mother, a mother.
00:17:31
It's even hard for me to believe, but I'm looking forward to it. Those did not sound like the words of someone thinking of suicide.
00:17:41
She was extremely excited for that baby. and that was that was one of the things that she had always wanted
00:17:48
she just wanted to be a mom, she wanted a family so Dawn was stunned when on March 19th, 1985
00:17:54
she heard Meg had been rushed to the hospital And then I get the phone call And kind of like the floor drops out in front of you
00:18:11
It was a shock. Who was it on the phone? Scott. You remember anything he said? It was Dawn.
00:18:19
I've got bad news. Meg tried to kill herself. She's in the hospital. they don't know if she's going to make it.
00:18:27
She did not. As for suicide, well, there had been times before she married Scott
00:18:33
when Meg had spoken of taking her own life. There was an incident one time where she had locked herself in a bathroom
00:18:44
and said she was going to cut her wrists. This was over at a friend's house. But after that, she came out.
00:18:53
she had not cut herself at all or anything like that. Dawn Cracker says something similar happened
00:18:59
once when she and Meg shared an apartment. I came home and I saw the mini blinds on the floor
00:19:06
and there was a note on the coffee table and it said that she had tried to hang herself
00:19:13
using the cord from the mini blinds. Did that note explain why Meg wanted to take her own life?
00:19:19
There wasn't really an explanation other than that she just felt that everybody would be happier if she was gone.
00:19:25
To underscore his claim that Meg had hanged herself, Mifflin says, Scott gave one of her poems to the Akron detective investigating her death.
00:19:35
At the very end of the poem, it says, and then she killed herself. And what? Maybe that is the equivalent of a suicide note,
00:19:42
or at least reflective of the way that Meg Perk was thinking. Exactly. Except, according to family members,
00:19:49
that poem was something Meg had written back in high school and in no way represented her mood in the days before she died.
00:19:58
Scott, they felt, was using that poem to promote his own theory, and her family wasn't buying.
00:20:05
Honestly, my first thought is, what did he do? Right off the bat. Absolutely. You know, the investigators were getting information from their family members
00:20:13
that nobody could believe that Meg had killed herself. Scott said he couldn't believe it either and was as shocked as anyone.
00:20:24
In fact, he told the detective he was so rattled by his wife's death that it changed him into a criminal.
00:20:33
That's right. On the night his house burned down, amid all the talk of death and debt and his swinging lifestyle,
00:20:42
Scott Perk told the detective he'd been a famous burglar. Dressed in black from head to toe, carrying nunchucks and throwing stars,
00:20:54
Scott had been so prolific he'd been nicknamed the Ninja Burglar. The Ninja Burglar.
00:21:01
That was a thing in Stowe. It was a thing in Stowe and the surrounding cities because he burglarized homes and businesses
00:21:07
and broke into cars and stole things from cars. How many burglaries are we talking about?
00:21:11
At least 10 burglaries, at least four B&Es. he would come into your bedroom and watch you sleep and then take your your wallet or purse
00:21:20
off your nightstand once arrested Scott confessed and starting in 1986 did six years in the joint
00:21:27
he used the time behind bars to earn a degree in criminal justice Scott fancied himself as a very
00:21:34
smart individual whenever whenever I would talk to him and I think that was part of his his strategy
00:21:41
to try and show me how smart he was. Of course, it was possible that Scott Perk was not as smart as he thought he was.
00:21:52
Thanks to his own loose lips, Scott had already made himself the prime suspect in not one but two criminal investigations.
00:22:01
So imagine the investigator's surprise when in 2010, a year after the Perk's house burned down from an arson fire,
00:22:11
The same thing happened to another house just around the corner. Coming up. I got a call saying that the house was on fire.
00:22:23
Another house in flames. Was another arsonist at work? The first thing that they asked me was, who would want to kill you?
00:22:41
Amy Salvaggio remembers well the night her duplex apartment in Stowe, Ohio caught fire.
00:22:55
It was March 27, 2010. A rare night off for the 24-year-old intensive care nurse.
00:23:04
I was at my boyfriend's. I got a call in the middle of the night from a neighbor saying that the house was on fire.
00:23:13
We were only about two minutes away, so drove over very fast. Amy says she jumped out and ran toward the firefighters who were working her half of the duplex, where the worst damage was.
00:23:27
The first thing that they asked me was, who would want to kill you? who would want to murder you?
00:23:37
And I just kind of looked at them like, what? What are you talking about? And then they asked me, don't you smell all the gasoline?
00:23:46
And that's when I stopped, and I realized that that's all you could smell was this strong odor of gasoline.
00:23:53
You involved in anything illegal? No. Anything extramarital? No. Anything? Going to make somebody angry enough to make them want to do away with you?
00:24:04
Nothing that I could think of at all. Investigators heard the same story from the older woman who lived in the other half of the duplex.
00:24:14
Jim Lydell was there that night. He says even the landlady was checked out to see if she might have had her own building torched for the insurance money.
00:24:25
Obviously we had to go look at her. You know, she lived nearby, but she was fine.
00:24:31
Financially, she was stable and was successful with her rentals. So she had absolutely no motive for burning it.
00:24:38
One thing was obvious. This fire was no accident. The gas meter itself was disconnected and was just hanging by the inlet fitting.
00:24:48
The responding fire crews had a difficult time extinguishing this fire until they were able to shut the gas off to the meters.
00:24:55
So the gas is just escaping into the air. Correct. Nothing about that looks like an accident, and it doesn't even look particularly subtle.
00:25:05
No, not at all. The scene had all the earmarks of the fire at Scott Perk's house a year earlier.
00:25:12
The disconnected gas lines. Gasoline poured around the foundation. Everything seemed to match.
00:25:20
I'm not the brightest bulb in the box, you know, but boy, all of a sudden the light did come on.
00:25:24
And I realized that the modus operandi or the MO was the same. One block away. Correct, one block away.
00:25:33
And almost exactly a year before. At almost the same time in the morning. For the past year, Jim Lydell had analyzed the evidence from the blaze at Scott Perks' home.
00:25:44
He was convinced that fire had been an inside job. and based on what he knew about arsonists,
00:25:51
the Salvaggio fire was likely set by the same person. It's unusual for them to switch method
00:25:58
once they have a pattern that works for them, find something that works. They will do something very, very similar
00:26:05
on each of their fires. It had to be Scott. And we took that also as another. Scott was trying to show us
00:26:14
that there was a serial arsonist in the neighborhood, but it wasn't him. because he lived on the other side of town now.
00:26:21
Investigators were not fooled. Mifflin and Lydell went to the apartment complex where the Perks had been living since their house burned down.
00:26:30
The family car, parked outside and still warm on that freezing night, reeked of gasoline.
00:26:38
And then in the apartment, we find a gas can sitting right inside the apartment and a pair of boots that had fresh mud on them.
00:26:45
that is just screaming to us, we have found our guy. Of course, Scott Perk had always been their guy.
00:26:56
That said, the lawmen were still no closer to actually making an arrest. You can't really connect Scott to the gas used at either fire.
00:27:07
Correct. And nobody saw him. It's the middle of the night. Exactly. So you have a pretty strong circumstantial case, but not a tremendous amount of proof.
00:27:19
Right. Yeah, now we have to dot our I's and cross our T's and do our due diligence because he's our guy still.
00:27:26
Coming up. He was pretty confident that this was a murder. The death of Meg Perk, a decades-old case and a bold new strategy to solve it.
00:27:37
He just looked like he'd just seen a ghost. when Dateline continues. It takes time to prove an arson case,
00:27:56
even for one that seems open and shut. Proving a decades suicide that might actually be homicide well that more a matter of timing and luck In the case of Meg Perk the stars aligned in the summer of 2011
00:28:13
when Detective Ken Mifflin walked into the office of Summit County, Ohio, prosecutor Sherry Bevan Walsh.
00:28:21
I actually still remember when Detective Ken Mifflin came to my office And he was basically asking for my assistance to file a motion to exhume the body and reopen the case.
00:28:35
And he was pretty confident that it was not a suicide and that this was a murder.
00:28:40
My guess is you guys have plenty of open cases that are, as of that moment, unsolved.
00:28:45
You probably didn't need one that was in the closed file reopened right away. We have, unfortunately, a lot of homicides in Summit County, Ohio.
00:28:54
and we were probably, I would estimate, at that time already working on another 50 homicide cases
00:29:01
when the detective from Stowe came to us and said, hey, I have a really old case that I really want you to consider presenting to the grand jury.
00:29:11
What evidence did the detective have? Well, almost none, beyond a few old autopsy photos and his theory of what had happened.
00:29:21
the only physical evidence if any existed would involve meg perk's body so if this case was to go
00:29:31
forward meg would have to be exhumed deciding to dig up a body that's been buried for a long time
00:29:38
is not an easy decision she's got a whole family that was there when she was put in the ground and
00:29:45
they maybe have their own opinions about whether or not digging her up again is the right thing to do.
00:29:52
Exactly. So it was a tough conversation to have with, I went and spoke with Meg's mom.
00:29:57
Meg's mother believed, along with much of the rest of the family, that it wasn't a suicide.
00:30:03
Exactly. And they were very supportive of all of us to do the exhumation. With Meg's family on board, the prosecutor asked a court to order her exhumation.
00:30:14
We definitely needed the body of Meg Perk to be exhumed for the medical examiner.
00:30:20
If the body's not in good shape, can this go forward? If it had been too decomposed, it's really unlikely that this case would ever have been prosecuted.
00:30:30
While the detective pressed forward, that summer Lydell wrapped up the arson investigations.
00:30:36
In August 2011, Scott Perk was indicted for two arsons. The fire at his home and the one at Amy Salvaggio's duplex.
00:30:46
Police show you a picture of Scott Perk? Ask if you'd ever seen him before or if you knew him?
00:30:50
Yes. Yes, they did. And I'd never seen him before in my life. Not somebody you crossed paths with in your personal life or at the hospital or anywhere?
00:30:58
I did not remember seeing him at all. The day after the indictment was handed up,
00:31:04
Jim Lydell and another officer staked out Scott's apartment. And we weren't there maybe 15, 20 minutes at the most, and here comes Scott's van pulling in.
00:31:15
So he pulls right in front of his apartment. So we pull in and block him from leaving.
00:31:22
Two and a half years after the fire at his home, 18 months since the fire at Amy Salvaggio's duplex,
00:31:30
Scott Perk was in custody. And based on what he saw inside the van, Lydell feels the arrest was made in the nick of time.
00:31:40
And he's got a cooler full of pop. And on the front passenger seat of his vehicle was his cell phone that had the battery removed so that no one could track him.
00:31:50
Suggesting he's about to hit the run. We're pretty certain that he came back to the apartment to grab a few clothes and he was going to head out.
00:31:56
Perk was read his rights and at that point the man who literally talked himself into serious trouble suddenly refused to say anything to investigators After being processed Detective Mifflin paid him a visit and delivered a message Scott Perk probably never saw coming I let him know that you know
00:32:19
we are looking into his first wife's death. He looks at me and you can just tell that all the
00:32:24
color in his face is drained right out and that was not what he expected. He just looked like
00:32:30
He had just seen a ghost. Coming up, bombshell new evidence emerges from the grave.
00:32:38
How was this mist back in 1985? I don't know. And all these years later, a dramatic demonstration of Scott's story.
00:32:49
You think to yourself, we're getting close to the finish line here. Yes, we are.
00:33:00
Meg Perk and her unborn baby boy were buried together in this graveyard. Detective Ken Mifflin was certain that Meg had taken secrets to her grave.
00:33:19
Truths which could prove her husband, Scott Perk, had put her there. In September 2011, just weeks after Scott Perk's arrest
00:33:30
The remarkably well-preserved bodies of Meg and her baby son were exhumed It was amazing to actually meet her, it really was
00:33:40
Thinking that we are going to do her and her family justice She was holding that baby in her arms, in the casket?
00:33:49
Yes Hard to see? It was very tough it really brings everything home. A lot had changed since that day in 1985
00:34:01
when the Summit County Coroner had declared Meg's death a suicide. First of all, instead of a coroner,
00:34:09
the county now had a board-certified medical examiner. The staff was all new, better trained.
00:34:16
Forensic technology was much improved. and thanks to an excellent embalming job, the marks on Meg's body were still there.
00:34:27
You can still see the belt marks that go across her neck and then down towards her back.
00:34:33
So the bruises on her neck are going the wrong way. Yes, and they're not from a rope.
00:34:38
The belt marks going down back towards her lower back, which indicates someone's behind you and they're pulling the belt
00:34:47
towards them in a downward direction to strangle you. How was this missed back in 1985?
00:34:53
I don't know. That second autopsy also revealed other things that were missed the first time,
00:35:01
but were no less damning for Scott Perk. They found a bruise in the lower back, which was amazing.
00:35:10
All those years later? Yes, and that was Scott Perk probably using his knee to hold his wife down
00:35:16
while he is strangling her with the belt. To test their theory, investigators went to the actual apartment
00:35:25
where Scott and Meg Perk had lived in 1985 with cameras rolling. According to the maintenance records there,
00:35:33
there had never been any replacement of any of the railing around the stairs. So all of that was still in its original condition.
00:35:41
The railing was smooth. No sign anything heavy had ever dangled there. Investigators then went to a vacant apartment a few doors down
00:35:52
and hung a dummy roughly the same size and weight as Meg from the banister for a few minutes before cutting it down.
00:36:00
well just that action alone created several indentations in the soft pine wood that we were tied off to And the first time around when Meg actually died there were no indentations
00:36:23
Correct. Correct. Later, investigators used modeling clay and ropes of varying sizes
00:36:29
to try and recreate the marks they'd seen on Meg's body. And we could not recreate that ligature mark with rope.
00:36:38
Only a belt or a strap of some sort, they confirmed, could have made those marks on Meg's neck.
00:36:46
You think to yourself, we're getting close to the finish line here. Yes, we are. Yes, we are building this case.
00:36:53
I think it's going to lead to justice for the victim. The Summit County prosecutor agreed.
00:36:59
We wanted to make sure that justice was done. And we also were working with a family that never believed that Meg Perk killed herself.
00:37:07
And we wanted to make sure that they got justice. All that would have to wait. There was still the matter of the two arsons.
00:37:21
Scott pleaded guilty in both cases, and the judge sentenced him to the maximum, 28 years in prison.
00:37:30
In November 2015, Scott Perk was brought from his prison cell to stand trial for Meg's murder.
00:37:39
He pleaded not guilty. Though the case was largely circumstantial, the testimony of the medical examiner who'd re-examined Meg Perk's body proved decisive.
00:37:51
The medical examiner had some really key findings that showed strangulation and not suicide by hanging.
00:38:00
And that was never in the original report. The original report did not reflect anything about the strangulation mark from a belt.
00:38:09
It even had markings of the stitching in a belt that the medical examiner was able to find 30 years later that was never noted at all in the initial exam.
00:38:19
Don Hicks was Scott Perk's court-appointed attorney. There was never a time when I thought that he had a role in the death of his wife.
00:38:29
Hicks argued that since Meg had a history of attempted suicide and nobody knew what really happened,
00:38:35
It was reasonable to conclude that the coroner in 1985 had actually gotten it right.
00:38:43
You pointed out to the jury that prosecutors didn't really have any hard evidence.
00:38:48
What they had was this wonderful recreation. That's true, yes. Juries like hard evidence.
00:38:54
You're absolutely correct. We fought very hard. After a six-day trial, the jury found Scott Perk guilty of murdering Meg.
00:39:05
as well as tampering with evidence. It was almost unbelievable. After all this time, it finally came through.
00:39:14
Hey, look, the truth is out. He's guilty. He's going away. The judge gave Scott Perk 15 years to life
00:39:24
on top of his arson sentence. Perk died in 2025, so it's likely we will never know why he murdered Meg
00:39:35
or why he mentioned her to Detective Mifflin that night as they watched his house burn.
00:39:41
We do know that if he hadn't, Meg's secret would likely have remained buried with her.
00:39:50
I got into this job to help people and there's nothing better than making a family happy
00:39:58
with an outcome for a case. and in this case, it's beyond happy, it's beyond words.
00:40:04
Everybody, they can finally rest in peace that this has been resolved the way it should have been.
00:40:14
That's all for now. I'm Lester Holt. Thanks for joining us.