Jacob Scott guilty on 14 counts of sex crimes against a child, sentenced to 85 years in prison

PASCAGOULA, Miss. (WLOX) - A man who allegedly faked his own death in 2018 to avoid rape charges in Jackson County has been handed his sentence.

Jacob Blair Scott has been on trial this week facing 14 counts of child sex crimes involving a 14-year-old girl he eventually impregnated. Today, a jury found him guilty on all 14 counts. He has been sentenced to 85 years in prison without the possibility of parole.

Getting Scott to trial has been a long, winding road. In 2018, just days before he was set to plead guilty, Scott vanished. Authorities say Scott - who previously went by the alias Lucas Marty Walding - tried to make it look like he committed suicide.

On July 30, 2018, investigators found his abandoned dinghy floating off the coast of Orange Beach, Ala. They searched it and found a gun and suicide note with contact information for Scott’s family, according to U.S. Marshals.

Only a very small amount of blood was found in the dinghy and investigators said no evidence indicated it was a true suicide.

Later, authorities learned that Scott - a military veteran who once received a Purple Heart - had withdrawn $45,000 from a bank account before he disappeared.

The indictment filed Jan. 26 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Alabama, lists three charges against Scott for crimes alleged during his time on the Alabama coast. Those charges are false communications of a distress, illegal shipment and transportation of a firearm by a person under indictment, and false information and hoaxes.

Count one accuses Scott of knowingly communicating a false distress message to the U.S. Coast Guard, causing them to attempt to save lives and property when no help was needed.

The second count alleges that Scott “did willfully ship and transport in interstate commerce a firearm...” The gun in question is a Ruger .380 caliber firearm.

The third count says Scott gave “false and misleading information regarding the use of a firearm to commit a suicide on a small boat in the Gulf of Mexico within a mile of the shoreline of Orange Beach, Alabama, under circumstances where such information may reasonably have been believed, that indicated that an activity had taken place, was taking, or would take place, that is the transportation of a firearm in interstate commerce by a person under indictment for a felony offense...”

Eighteen months later, Scott was arrested just hours after the U.S. Marshals sent out a national release naming him to their Top 15 Most Wanted List, describing Scott as a survivalist and military veteran with the knowledge to live off the grid. Later that night, his case was featured on the true crime show “In Pursuit With John Walsh.”

A tip was called in to investigators that same day claiming that Scott was living in a RV in Pushmataha County, Oklahoma, and going by the name Luke. Authorities were able to verify it was Scott and say it had been living there since disappearing from Orange Beach.

Not long after, he was extradited back to South Mississippi, and locked up at the Jackson County Adult Detention Center. His current trial on the sexual assault charges had to be moved multiple times over the last two years due to COVID.

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