Don’t miss Robert Scott’s chilling true-crime
account of love and murder,
STAR-CROSSED LOVERS
available from Kensington Publishing Corp.
account of love and murder,
STAR-CROSSED LOVERS
available from Kensington Publishing Corp.
Click here to get your copy.
Chapter 1
Steven Colver. (Mug shot)
El Dorado Hills, California, 2009
The foothills of California’s Gold Rush country sweep down from the Sierra Nevada Mountains and intersect with the great Central Valley. Perched on the edge of that meeting of hills and flatlands, El Dorado Hills is a new community compared to the other towns in the area. Placerville, “Old Hangtown,” had begun along Placerville Creek when gold miners rushed into the area in 1848. In fact, gold had been discovered by James Marshall at Sutter’s Mill in Coloma only a few miles away. It was the spark that created the epic Gold Rush of 1849, when as one writer put it, “the world rushed in.”
El Dorado Hills was a developer’s dream of the mid-twentieth century, with spacious lots, modern homes and small horse properties for those who wanted them and could afford them. There was even a luxurious neighborhood where a person could fly their private plane onto a landing strip and park it right next to their home.
Nineteen-year-old Steven Colver was one of the residents of that area in 2009. Steven generally went by the name “Boston,” and he liked to hang out at the Habit coffee shop in El Dorado Hills. Steven was also into the goth lifestyle. He often wore black clothes and was addicted to Japanese anime and manga.
And like many a young man in his late teens, Steven had a younger girlfriend. In Steven’s case, however, the girlfriend wasn’t just a year or two younger. No, she was five years younger. His girlfriend was fourteen-year-old Tylar Witt, who also lived in the area, and she, too, was into the goth scene. Over time she began to think of Steven as her Romeo.
No two people seemed to describe Steven in the same way. To some he was polite, almost shy, intelligent and polite. To others he was headstrong, opinionated and bombastic. For the most part, however, people liked Steven, even his friends’ parents. One woman from the area who knew him was Jacqueline Epperson, the mother of Steven’s friend Courtney. She said, “He was reliable. As a parent I soon developed a trust in Steven and would allow my daughter to go with him, knowing he respected the rules.”
Jacqueline added that Steven’s “work ethics went beyond self-motivated, productive and industrious. He loved to cook and enhance flavors in ice cream, even before he got his first job at an ice-cream parlor. Steven got permission from the manager to play with the combination of ice-cream flavors and invent his own. For a while there was new taste testing of his concoctions, several of which were added to the specialty menu.”
Despite Steven’s love of anime, with its many bloody scenes depicted within the pages, no one thought of Steven as being violent. He had no history of that at all. But during the last days of spring 2009, a seven-page story that mirrored his life and that of Tylar in El Dorado County was written. It was written in one of Steven’s notebooks and Tylar had actually written the tale. “The Killer and His Raven” was fiction that interweaved fact and allegory. It paralleled the actual life Steven and his girlfriend were living that year.
The story was set in medieval times and the protagonist was a nineteen-year-old man who met a smart, beautiful fourteen-year-old girl at a local tavern. It began with the two meeting and becoming good friends, “almost like siblings.” As the young man learned more about the girl’s life, he discovered that she lived with a drunken, abusive mother, and he promised to protect her from her mother’s wrath. As the young man and the girl spent more and more time in each other’s company, they realized that they loved each other.
The young man lived in his father’s home, but the girl was able to convince her mother into letting the young man move in with them. There within the walls of the girl’s house they sealed their love by a forbidden sexual relationship. They were deeply in love with each other, but one day the girl’s mother caught them being intimate. She immediately kicked the young man out of the house and demanded that her daughter never see him again.
The girl, however, could not keep away from her lover, and her resentment deepened against her mother. The mother promised not to go to the authorities if the girl kept away from the young man. The lovers secretly met, and their hope returned for three weeks, according to the tale. But then the mother, suspicious about her daughter, vowed to go to the authorities with the girl’s diary. The diary detailed the lovemaking with the young man.
The story continued, This is when their dreams shattered, this is when their hopes vanished, and that is when this man, this 19-year-old man, became a killer. Late one night, the mother was drunk as usual. Before she finished her last drink, the girl spiked the mother’s whiskey with herbs from the forest. Herbs that would make her sleep. At around one in the morning, the girl snuck the boy into her house, leading this 19 year old man to her mother’s room. He stabbed her in her sleep, killing her, freeing themselves.
The story continued that the lovers ran away. Knowing that they would be hunted down, they killed themselves in a suicide pact at the town’s inn.
The story was fanciful, and it took great liberties in some areas. Tylar Witt’s mom was no alcoholic who abused her daughter. In fact, she loved Tylar and did everything for her. But in other areas, the story was hauntingly factual. Steven and Tylar’s own path had been very much like what was depicted in the story.
When it was written, Tylar’s mom lay dead in her house, and no one knew about it—except for Steven Colver and Tylar Witt. And just like in the story, they were on the run. For the moment they alone knew how much of “The Killer and His Raven” was fact, and how much was fiction.