How Jack Leroy Scott found his way home 60 years after walking away. An 'Unclaimed' story
Editor's Note: The Bucks County Courier Times and The Intelligencer have been telling the stories of unclaimed dead and their impact on the community since 2019. The cremated remains of at least 119 have found final resting places since the project started in 2019. But hundreds more remain unclaimed in Bucks and Montgomery counties. Our original "Unclaimed" stories can be accessed on our website, and includes names, stories and statuses of the unclaimed cases.
By the time Jack Leroy Scott died alone in his car at 71, he’d been living in the parking lot of a Penndel bar for eight months.
In his wallet was $86, a Bensalem veterans organization membership card, the business card of a chaplain at the Philadelphia Park Racetrack and two photos.
None of the contents provided authorities with leads on next-of-kin after his 2011 death. Neither did a government database where Scott’s name and birthdate were entered. Police had no luck finding relatives.
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With no family to claim him, Bucks County took responsibility for Scott. He was cremated at taxpayer expense. His ashes and personal belongings were placed in storage with other abandoned dead.
But Scott had family. And they were looking for him.
After decades of searching, and 12 years following his death, the people Jack Scott left behind now are unraveling the mystery of his life, and finding the unconditional love of a family they never knew existed.
Father, daughter and a ghost
Growing up in Elmira, New York, Megan Scott-Glover was told the Scotts had no living relatives. Her father, Tony Scott, didn’t even know the names of his grandparents on his father’s side.
The man who Megan and her sister Jessica called grandpa had married Tony’s mother when he was a senior in high school.
“I knew he was my dad’s stepdad, but I didn’t know much beyond that,” Scott-Glover said.
Megan was 15 when she found her father searching the Internet on their new computer for a man named Jack Leroy Scott, his biological father.
Tony Scott had not seen the man since 1963, when he was 4.
His mom, Ruth, has rarely talked about him. She was 19 when he walked out on her and their three children who were all under five.
Tony Scott was 18 in 1977, when he answered a phone call at the family home. It was a man asking for his mom.
“Dad?”
Jack Scott said he was calling from Pennsylvania, and wanted to talk to Tony's mother. He wanted to move back to Elmira, but he didn’t want any problems.
“Stay away if you know what is good for you,” Tony Scott replied.
His father never reached out again.
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Hits, misses and Mrs. Scott: The search for Jack Scott takes a major turn
As a teenager in 1999, Scott-Glover just wanted to solve a family mystery; later, the quest was a chance to practice the investigation skills she learned as a criminal justice major.
“I wanted to know where I came from," said Scott-Glover, now 38. "There was always that question, who are my people? What are my roots?”
For her father, the project was more about satisfying his curiosity, Scott-Glover said.
“If we found him alive, he wasn’t 100 percent certain what he wanted to do with that,” she added.
They had just three pieces of information: Jack Leroy Scott's name, birth date, and where he grew up.
For more than a decade their search efforts were hit and miss. Mostly misses.
But during a routine name search in 2011, Scott-Glover came across an old AOL message written by a woman looking for her father; a man from Elmira, New York, named Jack L. Scott.
The woman was Tony Scott’s half-sister. Kimanne Scott was born in Doylestown in 1977.
She didn’t remember much about her father other than he was kind to her. But Kimanne's grandmother gave Scott-Glover a name that would prove critical to cracking the Scott family mystery: Peggy Scott, Jack's mother.
Margaret “Peggy” Scott married James in the 1930s. It was her second marriage, and she had two children, Leon John and Donald McCumber, from her first marriage, when she was 15.
Jack Scott was born in 1940. He was the first son to carry the Scott surname.
Peggy Scott was living in Bucks County when Kimanne was born and she died a couple years later, the grandmother said.
Scott-Glover now had two branches for the Scott family tree.
The next branch found her almost 10 years later.
A second secret sibling and a family rumor about Jack
In 2020 Jacqueline Chrisjohn was searching for her birth father when she saw a post in a genealogical forum about a man named Jack L. Scott with ties to Elmira.
The post included information about Tony Scott, so Chrisjohn tracked down his Facebook page and sent him a message, "I think you’re my brother."
Chrisjohn was born in January 1962. Jack Scott was 21 and still with Tony's mother, Ruth, whom had given birth to their third child 10 months earlier.
Chrisjohn's mother, a 19-year-old woman named Joyce, lived a couple miles from the Scott home. Joyce’s mom and Peggy Scott were friends.
After Joyce died, Chrisjohn found love letters she saved from Jack. In one he begged Joyce not to accept a marriage proposal from a man in Rochester.
But she ultimately left Jack and Elmira behind. In the end, her mother and stepfather were happily married until her death, she told Scott-Glover.
Chrisjohn shared with her the only photo that Scott-Glover has of her grandfather Jack: A black-and-white snapshot taken at Christmas time in 1961.
Chrisjohn also shared a rumor her grandmother told her about Peggy Scott. She was not Jack’s mother.
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“He cracked everything wide open”
Scott-Glover had been looking for Peggy Scott ever since she first got her name from Kimanne.
But Peggy eluded her until 2021, when she found the wrong Margaret Scott in an online family tree. The amateur genealogist sent her family records about another Margaret Scott that proved invaluable.
“He cracked everything wide open to trace Jack’s lineage and how he came to be,” Scott-Glover said.
The records confirmed that Peggy and James Scott were not Jack’s birth parents, but it wasn’t the only surprise.
Jack Scott was not a Scott. He was a McCumber. His older half-brother, Leon John, was his biological father.
Jack Scott’s parents were unmarried teenagers when he was born and it appeared that Peggy and James decided they would raise Jack as their child.
The secret explained puzzling records discrepancy for Scott-Glover. Government documents for Jack listed his birthday as Jan. 30, 1940, but the only birth record she found for him had him born on Jan. 20.
Scott-Glover believes that Peggy probably changed the date to prevent Jack from learning the truth about his parents.
Leon McCumber went on to father six more children with four women. Three carried the Scott surname, though Scott-Glover hasn’t found any name change records for Leon McCumber.
Five of those half siblings are alive, including the youngest who was born in 1961, the same year as Jack Scott’s third child.
But what happened to Jack?
Invisible in life, unclaimed in death Homeless unsheltered in life, often unclaimed in death
How Jack Leroy Scott found his way home
Scott-Glover was doing online research in July when something popped up about Jack L. Scott she had never seen before.
The first search result showed someone with his name living on Elk Avenue in Feasterville since 2005. The address was the closest Scott-Glover had gotten to finding the mysterious grandfather she spent half her life looking for.
She immediately added the new address to an earlier post about Jack she put in a Facebook group dedicated to missing and unidentified people.
The next day, someone in the Facebook group sent her a message. The person also found the name Jack L. Scott in Bucks County.
But it was on a list of unclaimed dead in the county morgue.
Over the years, Scott-Glover heard rumors that her grandfather was dead. One claimed he died in prison. Another in a car accident. But she never found any proof.
She placed the call to the Bucks County Coroner’s office, which confirmed the search for Jack Leroy Scott was over.
A clerical error on his death records appears to be the reason they weren’t flagged on the main genealogical website she and her father used. The Social Security Death Index listed his birthday as Feb. 3, 1940, Scott-Glover said.
But a pair of Pennsylvania Horse Racing Commission identification cards, also found in his wallet, had his correct birth date.
His death was ruled as natural causes. While the coroner’s report listed alcoholism under past medical conditions, toxicology showed he had no drugs or alcohol in his system when he died, Scott-Glover said.
A bar employee was the last person to see her grandfather alive, according to the coroner’s report.
The employee helped him back into his car after he fell in the parking lot. The same employee checked on him later, and found Scott unresponsive in his car. He was pronounced dead at the scene.
On July 25, Tony Scott and his daughter made an eight-hour round trip to Bucks County to bring Jack Leroy Scott home to Elmira. It was not the family reunion that Scott-Glover had long planned.
“I really, really, really hoped we’d find Jack alive. I didn’t want him to die alone. That is what I was afraid of for him. I don’t want him sitting alone unclaimed in a basement somewhere.”
The Legacy of Jack Leroy Scott
While Jack Leroy Scott is back with the family he left behind 60 years ago, the search is not over.
Scott-Glover has lingering questions she’d like answered before deciding what to do with his ashes. Among them, who are the people in the photos found in his wallet?
One is a man wearing a Santa suit posing with a Yorkie. The other is a smiling, middle-aged woman with short brown hair with writing on the back that is faded and illegible.
Is she another child Jack fathered? Maybe the daughter named Debbie or Deborah that Kimanne’s grandmother told her was born before Kimanne?
Jack Leroy Scott left behind three broken families in two states. But those families now are rebuilding their big, complicated Scott family tree out of the pieces. A tree that will only grow stronger, Scott-Glover said.
“He hurt people, and I can’t excuse that, but I can’t condemn a man for what he did 60 years ago.” she added. “I don’t believe he was a bad person, at heart. I’m here because of him.”
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This article originally appeared on Bucks County Courier Times: Jack Scott died alone in Bucks County. How he found his way home
