Missing Philadelphia Heiress Gone a Year

March 10 -- On the night of Feb. 7, 2003, Philadelphia heiress Anita Scott walked out of the magnificent 7,500-square-foot colonial home she shared with her husband of nearly 19 years, and drove off in a blinding snowstorm. She has not been heard from since.

Scott, who would now be 59, left behind a devoted family, cherished friends, millions of dollars, and an enduring mystery.

"I feel a great loss," said Lorma Crow, longtime best friend of the missing woman. "Maybe she never knew how much she meant to me. We were always there for each other."

The missing woman's husband, Ridgeley Scott, is perplexed by his wife's disappearance from their home in Delaware County, Pa.

"We're soul mates," Ridgeley Scott said. "She's the love of my life and I feel confident I'm the love of her life. I'd very much like it if I could go back and pick up life as it was before the seventh of February 2003."

Not First Disappearance

Anita Scott simply vanished into thin air. It wasn't the first time she had left home without warning, but her husband found her timing odd.

"I think the last thing she would do is voluntarily leave when her son was about to graduate from high school and begin his college career," Ridgeley Scott said. "She had on occasion in the past — maybe a half dozen times over a number of years — decided without warning to just drop off the face of the Earth."

But arguments had always preceded Anita's previous disappearances, and according to her husband, things were tranquil the night he saw her last. She simply got up from the dinner table around 6 p.m., walked out of the house and drove away.

"There was no animosity going on in the household during the day when she disappeared,'' Ridgeley Scott said. It would be more than two days before Scott reported his wife missing to police.

"I wasn't about to call police and push the panic button, and so forth, if this was another one of those episodes where she was just gone for a short period of time," he said.