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CHAPTER 22
    DEAD RINGER
    Becky Buttram arrived to see Scott Saxton sitting in a police interrogation room. She wanted to stare into the eyes of this creepy SOB and ask him pointed questions. By now, they had Saxton’s list of crimes from up north and Buttram was more confident than ever that they had stopped a man before he escalated from home invasions and violent assaults to cold-blooded murder.
    Buttram later recalled looking at Saxton for the first time: “Well, I remember having the composite with me and it matched this guy in front of us to a tee. I mean, he was a dead ringer.”
    The detective slid the sketch across the table, stopping in front of Saxton.
    He looked down.
    â€œI . . . I . . . don’t know who that is.”
    It was akin to a facsimile of him.
    Checking Saxton out from head to toe, Buttram viewed scratches and bruises and scuff marks all over the guy.
    â€œThose were from when he fought with the army [sergeant],” the detective said. “We could see them.”
    Buttram and her colleague questioned Saxton for two hours. They asked him all the questions you’d expect: where, when, how, what time, alibi, etc.
    He had an answer for everything. None of it, of course, made sense.
    â€œI thought,” the law officer explained, “as I sat there and listened to him, looking him over, ‘What a wimp.’ I mean that. He was a little weasely piece of mucus. Disgusting. Gross.”
    â€œWhy were you out there looking in that window?” Becky asked Saxton.
    He had no answer.
    Most of what Saxton said during those two hours, as far as Becky Buttram could later recall, revolved around Mr. Saxton denying everything they threw at him.

CHAPTER 23
    FINALLY
    For Melissa, Scott Saxton’s arrest was starting to sink in. It was her neighbor—the guy across the hall. Mr. Nondescript. Someone she had seen in passing in the halls numerous times and not even noticed. She had not even paid a second thought to him. But Saxton had been watching her, lusting for her, thinking about her. Melissa wondered how many times he’d been inside her apartment while she wasn’t home. How many times had he planned to attack her but stopped for some reason? It was paralyzing, that fear of the unknown—those images in her head now of what could have happened. We all go there. It’s akin to an entire new layer of trauma for the crime survivor, the victim. Once the perp had been apprehended and the victim began to learn things about the crime and the perp’s life, the victim began to suffer all over again.

    So ... I got the phone call that they actually made an arrest. They told me they had found this guy up a tree peeping in another window in another apartment complex. They said that since he matched the description that I had given, they decided to run the fingerprints against the bloody ones left in my apartment. They were a match. Then they asked me if the name “Scott Saxton” meant anything. I said I remembered getting mail for that person on different occasions, but didn’t know who he was. So I would just set the mail back out for the mailman to pick up. That’s when they told me it was the next-door neighbor—well, my former next-door neighbor. He had moved out some time ago. I said that I had never even spoken to this guy except to say “hi” while passing in the hallway or in the parking lot out front.

    Yet, as Melissa thought more deeply about Saxton as the days after his arrest went by, she came up with one very “distinctive” memory. It was right after she had first moved in. She recalled seeing this guy outside in the parking lot working on his car. Melissa and her boyfriend were walking by, on their way into her apartment.
    â€œOh, my God! That guy looks like a child molester,” Melissa had said to her boyfriend, judging the man by the way he looked. We all do it on occasion.
    She didn’t know if this