MAKAWAO, Maui — Four days into searching for her pregnant half-sister, Phaedra Wais trudged through a rugged, wet jungle on Maui to chase a new lead in the disappearance.
Following a locator ping from a cellphone, the 16-year-old found a skirt, shirt and bra stained with blood that belonged to her sister.
The discovery all but ended the family’s hopes that 27-year-old Carly “Charli” Scott was still alive. Later, at the same site, police found the missing woman’s jawbone, marking the latest twist in the case that led to a murder charge against Scott’s ex-boyfriend and the father of her unborn child.
Steven Capobianco is accused of killing Scott and burning her vehicle to cover up the crime. A Maui grand jury indicted him last week on charges of murder and arson, saying he intentionally or knowingly caused Scott’s death “in an especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel manner, manifesting exceptional depravity.” He has pleaded not guilty.
The finding of the jawbone helped authorities file the murder charge, a person familiar with the investigation said Wednesday. The person, who was not authorized to discuss the case, declined to reveal exactly how authorities linked the jawbone to Capobianco.
Scott’s family initially didn’t want to believe Capobianco was capable of the killing. Now they are convinced he was.
“She had no inkling — and that hurts,” Kimberlyn Scott, the mother of Carly Scott, said about her daughter’s feelings about Capobianco. “For me, personally, it took a while and I have only recently come to the conclusion that … that it was Steven.”
Scott went missing on Feb. 9, and her family began their search the next day with help from friends, neighbors and other volunteers who canvassed nearly 120 square miles of beach, brush and roadside. Her scorched vehicle was found on the third day of the search — a day before Phaedra found the clothes.
During the search, family members contacted friends and visited places where Carly might have been. They eventually worked their way around to Capobianco but weren’t fond of the idea of asking him for help.
They had never approved of him as her boyfriend, which led Carly Scott to become more withdrawn from relatives. She didn’t tell them on the night that she disappeared that she was going to see him, her mother said.
“There was a distance between us because, because of him,” Kimberlyn Scott said.
The day the clothes were found, Capobianco told a Hawaii TV reporter by phone that Scott had picked him up and driven him to his broken-down pickup truck on Hana Highway. After he fixed it, Scott was driving with her dog behind Capobianco on a two-lane road, he said, but he lost sight of her and figured she had arrived safely at her destination.
The story made family members and others suspicious.
“The timeline of events that he had given the family didn’t make sense and changed a couple of times,” search organizer Jeff Simon said.