Man wanted death, not sex, wife wrote

Bill Scanlon, Rocky Mountain News

Published January 12, 2006 at midnight

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BOULDER - Paul James Stewart Scott never wanted to have sex with a young girl, but only to ensure that he was killed, his public defender said Wednesday, seconding the account written by Scott's wife shortly before the couple killed themselves outside their Boulder Canyon home.

An arrest warrant by Colorado Springs police, however, says Scott wanted to have sex for a couple of days with a young girl before an older girl killed him.

"The whole situation is so tragic and so sad," Colorado Springs public defender Cynthia Jones said.

Scott's despair, which led to his and his wife's death, "shows how terribly inept Colorado's criminal justice system is at handling mental health issues," she said.

Patricia Birosik, Scott's wife, sent a seven-page note to local news media in which she said her husband's mental illness led him to want to arrange his own murder. He tried to arrange a sex-act-followed-by-murder scenario because that's the only way he could get what he really wanted - his own death - she said.

Colorado Springs police arrested Scott in March after he gave an undercover detective $12,000, purportedly to have sex with an 8-year-old and to have a 16-year-old smother him.

He was charged with several felonies, but a plea bargain reduced it to one guilty plea to solicitation of child prostitution. He was scheduled to be sentenced Monday, a sentence that would ensure he would be deported to his native United Kingdom.

Instead, the bodies of Scott and his wife were found Saturday evening outside their residence at 154 Betasso Road west of Boulder.

In her note, Birosik said Colorado's justice system ignores the needs of the mentally ill. She said the decision to charge Scott with a crime that would label him a sexual predator and guarantee his deportation led to her husband's despair and their decision to take their own lives.

They had "no wish to endure their final years as a penniless elderly couple in a place not of their choosing," according to the note.

Jones said Colorado Springs detectives and the district attorney's office didn't want to focus on Scott's desire to kill himself, but rather on his solicitation of child prostitution.

Birosik wrote: "Paul consistently stated from the time of his arrest to the day of his death that his only goal was to devise Internet correspondence that would attract the kind of 'low life' " that would be willing to kill him. She said at no other time in his life did Scott show any predilection for young girls.

El Paso County Deputy District Attorney Debbie Pearson said she would not comment.

The arrest warrant, signed Feb. 13, reveals that police got a tip from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which trolled a Yahoo chat site with a user room titled "Pre-Teen or Anything Sick."

A user with the tag "Willdiefor yourpleasure" said he was "looking for sick and perverted mothers and daughters," the arrest warrant said.

A Colorado Springs undercover detective contacted the user by e-mail and directed him to a site run by Colorado's Internet Crimes Against Children task force.

Eventually, police determined the Web surfer was Scott.

Negotiations continued, a judge authorized Scott's arrest, and on March 28, police nabbed him at Monument Valley Park in Colorado Springs as he handed over $12,000.

Scott was born in England and attended boarding school. He had clashes with his parents over his career and 20 years ago moved to the United States. Scott had a resident alien card, but never became a citizen.

Birosik blamed his plunge into mental illness on the death of his father in 2000 followed by dementia in his mother. In her note, she said the final straw might have been when a hit-and-run driver struck Birosik at a Boulder grocery store, and the couple felt that police didn't do much to try to find the driver.

After his arrest in March, Scott spent four months in jail.

Jones said it was "frustrating" that the prosecution in Colorado Springs wouldn't opt for a plea bargain that wouldn't have required Scott to be deported.

"He never had any criminal history," she said. "He never had actual contact with a child or another person. I didn't feel he was a huge risk."

But law enforcement officers say they need to be able to arrest sexual predators and have them locked away before they get a chance to contact children in person and sexually assault them.

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