Frances Zaayer: A Year of 911 Calls, Then Two Shots Next Door

The 911 dispatchers in Montgomery County, Kentucky, knew Frances Zaayer's voice. For roughly a year, she called about her neighbors on Washington Avenue in Mount Sterling over almost anything — a missing bird feeder, fireworks she said were set off near her house. Call after call, complaint after complaint, officer after officer sent to stand in a yard and document a dispute that only one side seemed to be having.

On May 26, 2018, the last call from that address was different. Frances Zaayer had walked into her neighbors' home with a gun.

Background: closer than neighbors

What makes this case file hard to read is that Zaayer wasn't a stranger who moved in next door. She was practically family.

She had befriended Shawna Scott's older cousin as a teenager and at one point lived with Shawna's grandmother. When Zaayer's marriage fell apart years later, she came back to Mount Sterling to be near the people she knew — and bought the house next to Shawna and her husband David Scott, a 47-year-old Montgomery County deputy jailer described by his community as universally loved. While her new house was being renovated, the Scotts did what you do for family: they let her live with them.

Then she moved in next door, and something changed.

The feud that only ran one direction

Over the following year, per Shawna's account and the record of police contacts, Zaayer turned on the couple who had housed her:

• The 911 calls. Constant complaints to police about the Scotts — the missing bird feeder, the fireworks, the ordinary noise of a family with grandchildren visiting.
• The behavior. Shawna described Zaayer mowing her lawn naked, going topless when the grandchildren were over, and following her to the grocery store.
• The warnings. Friends interviewed after the shooting say David saw it coming — that he predicted Zaayer was eventually going to hurt someone.

This is the part of the file worth sitting with. The system saw this coming too, in a sense: every one of those nuisance calls put an officer, a camera, and a report at that property line. But making frivolous 911 calls and mowing your lawn naked are not crimes that stop what came next.

May 26, 2018

Zaayer entered the Scotts' home armed. She shot Shawna in the face — the bullet entered through her nose and exited the side of her head. Then she found David on the back porch and shot him in the chest.

David Scott was pronounced dead at the hospital. Shawna, against long odds, survived: days in critical condition, 16 surgeries, and permanent damage — blind in one eye, deaf in one ear. She lived to describe what happened inside her own home, and years later, to tell it on camera.

A grand jury indicted Zaayer within weeks on murder and attempted murder counts. Prosecutors later reportedly added a second attempted-murder charge, alleging she had fired at another person before entering the Scotts' home — a detail the Netflix episode leaves out.

The record: 911 tapes and body cameras

There was never a whodunit here. What the recorded evidence built instead was the pattern — and that's why this case belongs in a body-cam breakdown file.

Every nuisance call Zaayer made generated a dispatch recording and, in the body-camera era, footage of responding officers at the property. The paper-and-video trail documented a year of one-sided escalation in her own words and her own voice, long before anyone was hurt. When the final 911 call came — audio of which is used in the Netflix episode — the same system that had been summoned to referee a bird-feeder dispute was now working a homicide.

That archive is what Worst Neighbor Ever is built from: firsthand testimony, emergency audio, and bodycam footage, assembled into the timeline the Scotts lived through in real time without knowing where it was heading.

The plea and the sentence

The criminal case moved slowly — nearly four years. In January 2022, Zaayer accepted a plea agreement, pleading guilty to murder, second-degree assault, and first-degree wanton endangerment. In February 2022 she was sentenced to 35 years in prison.

She is serving that sentence at the Kentucky Correctional Institution for Women in Shelby County. State inmate records list her parole eligibility date as May 4, 2038 — she will be in her seventies.

The aftermath

• Shawna Scott survived to rebuild a life that was shot through in her own hallway — and chose to tell the story publicly, first in court and now on film.
• Mount Sterling lost a deputy jailer and, by every local account, one of its most beloved people. His community paper called David Scott's murder the loss of a cherished neighbor — the bitter inversion of what Zaayer became.
• The documentary. Netflix's Worst Neighbor Ever premiered July 1, 2026, with the Zaayer case as episode 1, "She Finally Snapped." For the other three cases in the series, see our full series case guide.

Why this case file matters

Most neighbor disputes are noise. Almost none of them end in murder. The impossible question this file poses is how anyone — a dispatcher, an officer standing in the yard for the tenth time, a husband who joked darkly about where it was heading — is supposed to tell the difference before it happens.

The record was all there: a year of calls, a stack of reports, hours of footage. What it couldn't do was predict the morning the caller stopped calling and crossed the yard instead.

Case status as of this writing: convicted by guilty plea (murder, second-degree assault, first-degree wanton endangerment) and serving 35 years; parole eligibility May 4, 2038. This article is based on court records and contemporaneous reporting. Photo: Frances Zaayer's booking photo, Montgomery County, Kentucky, May 2018 — public record, via WKYT.