Greedy Lovers Kill a Once-Famous Singer
‘The Cheater,’ Forensic Files
Forensic Files went all in on “The Cheater,” the episode about the rise and fall of vocalist Walter Scott. The producers scored interviews with the victim’s mother and father — plus Bob Kuban, the leader of the group that Walter helped to land on the Top 40 list. Forensic Files even got the man who murdered Walter to speak on camera.
Before seeing the episode, I had never heard of Walter Scott, but the show’s portrayal made me want to learn more about his trajectory from blue-collar worker to nationally known celebrity to wedding singer — and ultimately to homicide victim.
Making the band. So let’s get going on the recap of “The Cheater,” along with extra information from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch‘s great reporting as well as other internet sources:
Bob Kuban, the founder of Bob Kuban and the In-Men, was a DuBourg High School music instructor who once studied under the head percussionist of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra.
Drawing upon his most promising former students, Kuban formed the eight-piece group in 1964.
Hygienic youths. Although a musical act with more than five people — including brass instruments, no less — seemed a little anachronistic in the age of the Beatles, the group did well.
In a 1966 interview, Kuban lauded the group’s wholesome image. He noted that the members styled themselves in a clean-cut manner, took baths daily, and in general distinguished themselves from the rock musicians who were “long-haired freaks” and wore Victorian costumes (not sure who he was taking a swipe at on that one).
According to Forensic Files, the band owed much of its appeal to its blond frontman, Walter Scott. Born as Walter Scott Notheis on February 7, 1943, he grew up in St. Louis and married when barely out of his teens. He and wife Doris had two sons, Wally and Scott.
When Walter joined Bob Kuban and the In-Men, he was working as a crane operator during the day.
Tuned up. The group first gained fame in their native St. Louis. The boys “cast a spell over teenagers” around town and spread the magic around the country, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
In 1966, the band created the song that would become its legacy.
“I remember a couple of the guys came up, and they were working on this tune,” Kuban would later tell the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “It was a rough version, but it sounded great. It just needed an intro and needed a driving beat. We put it together, recorded it, and it went crazy.”
High note. The lyrics to “Look Out for the Cheater” warned about a “guy known as the cheater, he’ll take your girl, then he’ll lie and he’ll mistreat her.”
On April 30, 1966, Bob Kuban and the In-Men performed “Look Out for the Cheater” on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand.
The record reached No. 12 on the Billboard chart and stayed in the Top 40 for seven weeks. It would go on to sell a million copies.
In their heyday, the boys appeared on a soap opera called Never Too Young and continued to play at many St. Louis-area venues. The normally quiet Catholic Youth Council dances became all the rage when Bob Kuban and the In-Men performed there.
Lightning not striking twice. Walter, who had azure eyes and sometimes wore a blue tuxedo on stage, acquired many female fans. “Take a good-looking guy and he was like a movie star back then to a lot of women,” Kuban told Forensic Files. Locals who knew Walter described him as a nice person, too.
The band followed up with the songs “The Teaser” and “Drive My Car,” but they didn’t make it into the Top 40. Bob Kuban and the In-Men never had another hit like “Look Out for the Cheater.”
Walter quit the band and continued on his own, hoping to become the next blue-eyed soul phenomenon, according to a Daily News story. Many people who heard his disembodied voice assumed he was African-American, a 2016 retrospective in The Australian said.
Holding his own. His solo records didn’t sell well and he never became a singular sensation, but he made a living for himself for 17 years singing with cover bands that played at private events and street fairs. St. Louis Post Dispatch stories from 1967 note “Walter Scott and the Guise” appearing at Stoppkoette Roller Rink and Christ the King Parish Hall.
By 1975, he had formed a band called Walter Scott and the Cheaters, playing at such venues as the Harbour House Hotel in Lynne, Massachusetts. He might not have been a major star anymore, but his voice still sounded great as evidenced by a 1980 recording of Walter Scott performing live.
Walter’s career required a lot of time on the road and, as Forensic Files pointed out, he was not only singing about a cheater but also becoming one.
Scandalous goings-on. After years of being unfaithful to Doris, Walter divorced her. He then married his mistress, the olive-skinned Joann Calcaterra — described as one of Walter’s starstruck fans by an Exhumed: Killer Revealed episode titled “Murders on the Edge of Town.”
Walter’s parents, Kay and Walter Notheis Sr., told Forensic Files that Joann, who worked as a secretary at a TV station, was selfish and untrustworthy.
Things got more sordid and sad from there.
Walter, who shared a twin son and daughter with Joann, had an affair with a dancer from his act. In turn, Joann cheated with a sloppy-looking electrician named James “Jim” Williams — who was married.
“It was like Peyton Place,” said Kay Notheis. “Everyone was running around with each other’s wives.”
One last chance. In October 1983, Jim’s wife, Sharon Almaroad Williams, with whom he shared two sons, died at the age of 42 after her Cadillac Seville crashed into a ditch.
That same year, there was some good news. Bob Kuban decided to get his original band back together, and signed Walter on.
But the reboot was not to be.
Taking a break from a gig at a Playboy Club in Hershey, Pennsylvania, Walter returned to St. Louis to spend Christmas of 1983 with Joann — and promptly vanished. He left the house to replace a car battery and never came back, according to Oxygen.
Badmouthing a dead man. Wally Notheis, one of Walter’s sons from his marriage to Doris, first heard the news from his stepmother that his dad was missing. “I just didn’t know what happened,” Wally told Exhumed. “His life was pretty secretive.”
When reporting Walter’s disappearance, Joann immediately went into smear-the-victim mode (Ken Register, John Boyle). She told police that Walter was involved in the drug trade, associated with underworld figures, and tended to carry a lot of cash, according to Autopsy 3: The Cheater.
Police found the car he was using, a dark green Lincoln, abandoned at the St. Louis Airport. And, yikes, when Kay and Walter Notheis Sr. stopped by the house that their son shared with Joann, they found Jim Williams — a bear of a man at 6-foot-6-inches and 300-pounds — sitting at a table with Walter’s jewelry spread out in front of him. He was inspecting it with a magnifying glass.
That was fast. Within 24 hours of Walter’s disappearance, Joann canceled all of Walter’s singing engagements. Jim Williams began spending the night at Joann’s; she told police that Jim slept on the couch and they were just friends. Jim said they were merely consoling each other.
Nine months later, Joann divorced the still-missing Walter on grounds of adultery, abandonment, and emotional abuse. She married Jim Williams in April 1986.
Kay and Walter Notheis Sr. were not thrilled to see Jim Williams move into the house on Pershing Lake Drive where their son and Joann once lived together. They also had to contend with the enduring mystery of their son’s disappearance when the case turned cold.
Crypt located. In 1987, investigators finally got a break, from one of Jim’s sons, who was in prison at the time. Thanks to Jim Jr.’s tip, deputies zeroed in on a cistern on his father’s property. Little Jim recalled that his father had covered it with a wood-lined concrete planter around the time that Walter disappeared.
Law enforcement officers quickly converged on the structure and pried open the cistern. They found what was left of Walter’s body, dressed in a blue jogging suit, floating in the water. Someone had tied him up and put a bullet through the heart. When the deputies lifted out his corpse, the head — a skull by this time — tumbled away from his spinal column. Medical examiner Mary Case, who had arrived at the scene minutes earlier, quickly retrieved the skull and made sure police carefully handled his torso, which had some delicate flesh attached.
Police arrested Jim Williams Sr. for Walter’s murder. Investigators built a case that he also killed Sharon Williams. Investigators found evidence suggesting that Sharon’s car accident was staged; her exhumed body showed injuries inconsistent with what the auto wreck would have caused. She had gasoline on her body, which they attributed to a failed attempt to incinerate the car.
It took years for the justice system to build a solid case against Joann and Jim Williams.
Major irritant. In the meantime, Walter’s father took comfort in driving past Jim and Joann’s house from time to time. “I think he just wants them to know we’re still around,” Kay told the St. Louis-Post Dispatch in 1990. “We’re still watching them.” Sometimes, Jim would come out of the house and stare at the car until they drove away.
Neighbors said that Joann usually stayed inside the house, but they would see Jim doing woodworking projects outdoors or fishing in the backyard on the banks of Pershing Lake.
”To see that guy in your own son’s house, it just gripes me no end,” said Walter Notheis. “I’d like to go in there and blow his head off.”
Wheels of justice. Members of the community were frustrated, too, as evidenced by a letter to the editor in the Christmas Eve 1991 edition of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:
Walter Notheis Jr. died a cruel and violent death. His family and friends have suffered too long. The suspects should be tried and, if found guilty, they should be executed. Then and only then may our wounds start to heal. — Jack W. Geer, Kirkwood
The trial finally kicked off in 1992.
Authorities theorized that Jim got in an argument with Sharon at home and used an implement to strike her head. He staged the auto accident and set a fire near the car to cover up the murder, they alleged.
Not an agonizing decision. As for Walter, the prosecution made a case that Jim shot him in the back before burying him on his property where, Jim thought, no one would find him. One witness told the court that, before Walter’s body turned up, Jim Williams said that Walter was gone and never coming back. There was also testimony that Jim had tried to hire hitmen to kill Walter.
The jurors quickly found Jim guilty, but they rejected prosecutor Thomas Dittmeier’s request for the death penalty. Jim Williams, then 52 years old, received two sentences of life without the possibility of parole for 50 years for the murders of Sharon Williams and Walter Scott.
Joann had been arrested, too, although investigators didn’t have quite enough evidence of her involvement to guarantee a murder conviction. She would later say that her only crime was falling in love with the “kind and gentle” Jim Williams, but she pleaded guilty to hindering prosecution. She received a five-year prison sentence, served 18 months, and then disappeared from public view. (There’s a 2015 obituary on the internet for a Joann Calcaterra, but it’s not the same woman.)
Time for the finale. During his Forensic Files interview, Jim Williams denied committing murder and tried to cast blame on his own son, Jim Jr., for Walter’s homicide (Stacey Castor).
Williams served time in maximum security at Missouri’s Potosi prison. He died of cancer in an infirmary hospice at the age of 72 in 2011.
Bob Kuban called Walter’s mother to give her the news of Jim Williams’ death. “I was wishing he would live longer so he would have to suffer a little longer,” Kay Notheis, then 88, told Stlouistoday.com. “But you don’t always get what you want.” (Walter Notheis Sr. had died in 2003 at the age of 81. )
Band plays on. Sadly, a 2014 newspaper story told of how a caregiver hired by Ron Notheis — Kay’s well-meaning surviving son — stole her jewelry and cash.
At least the unscrupulous employee didn’t try to kill her.
Kay lived until she was nearly 100, dying in 2022.
Bob Kuban’s musical act lived a long time as well. After Walter’s death, Bob took over lead vocals and changed the group’s name to the Bob Kuban Band. He acknowledged that the latest incarnation struggled a bit.
As recently as 2019, however, the group was still playing, and had an invitation to perform at the annual Pointfest rock festival in St. Louis. Kuban told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that the band would play a medley of 1960s hits as well as “Look Out for the Cheater.”
Wait, there’s more. He also said he’d rather be a one-hit wonder than a no-hit wonder.
Walter got a lot of mileage from that song as well, but he didn’t learn much from it and, unfortunately, he was cheated out of everything in the end.
You can watch the Autopsy episode about the murder on YouTube. The Exhumed episode is also on YouTube, but it’s behind a paywall and mostly concentrates on the murder of Sharon Williams.
That’s all for this post. Until next time, cheers. — RR
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