Anne Scripps Douglas

Who was Anne Scripps Douglas?

Anne Scripps Douglas lived the typical life of a battered woman — the whispered telephone calls, the lies to friends and family, the coded messages to the few she could trust. Like a frightened animal she jumped at every loud sound, each ring of the phone, and most of all at the drunken curses of the man she had once loved but who now terrified her.

Her life had not always been this way. She grew up a child of privilege, the descendant of the men who founded what would one day become the Scripps Howard newspaper chain, once publishers of the Detroit News, Cincinnati Post and other newspapers across America. The Scripps family was as tough as any publishing group in the days of the Penny Press, but they were philanthropic, too. Anne's father, a retired merchant marine captain, was running the Tracy Foundation's alcoholic rehabilitation center in upstate New York when she was born in 1946.

Growing up, Anne was subjected to a rigorous academic and disciplinary course at the all-girls Sacred Heart Convent near Albany and after graduation returned to Manhattan where she studied at the Duchesne Residence School, a two-year college for Catholic women. It was also run by the Religious of the Sacred Heart. Anne, an interior design student, graduated in 1966. A comment on her record by Mother Clare Krim, the director, described Anne as "very attractive, pleasant, very active on the social service committee and always willing to help others."

The 1997 television movie Our Mother's Murder was based on the Douglas story.