A Young Woman's - Suicide Or Murder?

In 2014 Connor Scott Called 911 To Say His Fiancee, Kaylyn Whitaker, Had Shot Herself. Four Years Later, Police Say, He Confessed That He’d Pulled The Trigger. What Really Happened That Tragic Day?

- Jeff Truesdell

In the handwritten pages where she kept track of her young life—a favorite song (country star Jason Aldean’s “My Kinda Party”), her teenage to-dos (“Go paintballing!!”)—Kaylyn Whitaker made special note of Feb. 23, 2013. “Connor & Kaylyn’s first date,” she wrote. That May, Connor Scott escorted Kaylyn to her senior prom, wearing a white tux and a corsage to match Kaylyn’s peach-colored dress— and then just months later came an engagement ring. As Kaylyn and Connor moved in together in the basement of his parents’ Martinsville, Ill., home in September 2014, Kaylyn’s list-making turned to household items (pots and pans, towels and silverware) she and Connor would need for the apartment she envisioned for their future. “Kaylyn loved Connor,” says her mom, Leslie Roberts. “And Connor adored her, he really did. I could tell by the way he looked at her.”

Then came the unthinkable. On Oct. 31, 2014, two officers arrived at Kaylyn’s parents’ home in Terre Haute, Ind., with the news that Kaylyn, 20, was dead. When Kaylyn’s shattered father finally reached Connor’s mother on the phone, “she said, ‘Kaylyn shot herself,’ ” recalls Dave Whitaker. “I asked, ‘How do you know that?’ and she said, ‘That’s what they told me.’ ”