Victoria 'Tori' Scripps Carmody is released from prison

A poor little rich girl heiress who saw her mother brutally murdered by her father has written a heart-rending letter to a judge, promising to straighten out her long-troubled criminal and druggie life.

Victoria 'Tori' Scripps-Carmody, a pretty, 24-year-old descendant of the Scripps media dynasty – considered the 'First Family of American journalism' -- told the judge in a hand-printed 10-page letter obtained exclusively by DailyMail.com:

'Throughout my addiction I have suffered so many consequences. Every time I think things cannot possibly get any worse, they do.

'As a result of my addiction I have lost family, friends, hope for my future, my own values and beliefs, self-esteem, pets, educational opportunities, respect from others and for myself, my freedom, and the list goes on…'

Paying the price: Scripps newspaper heiress Victoria 'Tori' Scripps Carmody was arrested along with two others for carrying 193 bags of heroin in a vehicle in Brattleboro Vermont in 2011. Her arrest last December was on charges of violating her probation by using drugs, possessing drug paraphernalia and associating with 'persons engaged in drug using and distribution'

Reversal of fortune: At 24, Tori has a tragic history. Her socialite mother was bludgeoned to death by her father and her father jumped off a bridge to his death

House of horrors: Three-year-old Tori bore witness to the murder of her beloved mother. 'Scott took a hammer to my mother's head and a steak knife to her face. The intrusions in her head were so big they thought they were gunshot wounds. Imagine finding your mother like that, her head torn apart and her face all ripped up,' said Tori's step-sister

Fatal attraction: After killing his wife, Anne, Scott Douglas fled in his BMW. The car, with the motor running, was found abandoned on the center span of the nearby Tappan Zee Bridge, just north of New York City. After a widespread manhunt, his body washed up on the Bronx side of the Hudson River three months later

In her handwritten letter to Judge Sessions, Tori explains why she believes she relapsed and what her plan is for the future: therapy and school.

Tori sets out her plan for success that includes relapse and prevention treatment and college classes

Scripps-Carmody wrote the letter and presented it to U.S. District Court Judge William K. Sessions III during a hearing on March 3, following her arrest last December on charges of violating her probation by using drugs, possessing drug paraphernalia, and associating with 'persons engaged in drug using and distribution.'

Previously, she had a history of arrests related to drugs. In February 2012, she pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court to running a crack house in Burlington, Vermont, near where she was raised, where cocaine and heroin was distributed.

She was incarcerated for about a month, was permitted to go into rehab in Florida, but was thrown out of a halfway house in the Sunshine State for violations and returned to jail. A plea deal was made, and she went into drug treatment.

On Friday, Daily Mail Online learned, she was released from the 1,817-inmate Metropolitan Detention Center, in Brooklyn, New York, where she had been serving out the remainder of her time.

'Tori was like a princess among robbers, murderers and rapists,' said a source familiar with her most recent detention. 'It was sad, but she did the crime and she did the time.'

In her letter to the judge, she stated that she was going to move back in with her adoptive parents, join groups like Narcotics Anonymous, and attend community college classes. She claimed that her master plan for the future involved, 'different preventative measures so that I am not a high risk of relapse and I am not a danger to myself or to others…When my addiction goes untreated or is pushed under the rug and forgotten, my good quality of life goes out the door, too…'

She had been given other chances at redemption in the past but failed, sadly falling back on drugs.

Heiress Anne Scripps Douglas, seen in this undated family photo, died at age 47, five days after she was found beaten and unconscious in her Bronxville, NY bedroom on New Year's Day

Anne's daughters Alex, left, and Annie from her first marriage to stockbroker Anthony Morell. Annie Morell Petrillo also took her own life at age 38 in 2009 , by jumping off the same bridge as her stepfather Scott Douglas had done

Anne with her two young daughters, Alex, left, and Annie. Alex told ABC News that her mother 'always played with us' and that 'she'd walk us to school every day.'

Along with her addiction, her attorney claimed in court that she suffers from post traumatic stress Disorder and abandonment. Moreover, he said she had been stalked by a fellow patient during a previous stay in a drug rehab facility in Florida.

Federal prosecutor Paul Van De Graaf, who supervised the latest Scripps-Carmody case, told Daily Mail Online: 'We have some serious opiate problems in Vermont right now. For many people beating that kind of addiction takes multiple attempts.

'Many people say they intend to turn their lives around and intend that when they say it, but can't do it because of the problems of addiction. These addicts facilitate the drug business at some level, they are just not customers, but are helping the drug trade work, and that's bad for the community.'

Scripps-Carmody's life had been tormented since the age of three when she was eyewitness to the gruesome New Year's Eve 1993 brutal claw hammer murder of her millionaire Scripps trust fund mother, 42-year-old Anne Scripps Douglas, by her decade-younger second husband --Tori's father -- Scott Douglas.

The slaying took place in the master bedroom of her family's white-pillared, seven-bedroom mansion in the fashionable New York City suburb of Bronxville.

At the time of her mother's murder, the distraught toddler told homicide detectives: 'Daddy gave Mommy boo-boos. Why is Mommy wearing war paint?'

Debutante: Anne Scripps, Joan C. Hutton and Mrs Hutton's daughter, Inez C. Hutton, at the 29th annual Debutante Cotillion and Christmas Ball in New York City on Dec. 21, 1964

The traumatized child was describing the horrific spatter of blood she saw on her mother's near-lifeless body. After a week in a coma, the Scripps heiress died.

She had met Douglas -- a good-looking housepainter who she would later learn was a womanizer and an abusive alcoholic -- in a bar during a Super Bowl party.

At the time, Tori's mother was on the rebound after her first marriage of almost two decades to an alcoholic ended in divorce. (In another strange twist in the Scripps story, the murdered woman's ex-husband, stockbroker Anthony Xavier Morell, who was dying of cirrhosis caused by his drinking, received her transplanted liver that helped extend his life.)

After killing his wife, Scott Douglas fled in his BMW. The expensive car, with the motor running, was found abandoned on the center span of the nearby Tappan Zee Bridge over the Hudson River, which connects Westchester and Rockland Counties in New York State, just north of New York City.

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Police believed he had abandoned the car and was on the run to avoid arrest. But after a widespread manhunt, his body washed up on the Bronx side of the Hudson River three months later. He had leaped 131 feet to his death from the bridge.

Anne Scripps Douglas was the great-great granddaughter of James Edmund Scripps, founder in 1873 of the Detroit News newspaper.

Around the same time, his half-brother, Edward Willis Scripps, began building a media empire that soon controlled dozens of newspapers coast to coast, and later TV stations, and news and feature syndicates, one that brought the world such notable funny page characters as Peanuts and L'il Abner -- all under the umbrella of the E.W. Scripps Co., and its affiliates.

Party girl: Tori, left, as a blonde, wrote the judge: 'Throughout my addiction I have suffered so many consequences. Every time I think things cannot possibly get any worse, they do'

Tori, here with a friend, noted that her December 2014 drug relapse that resulted in her probation violation and most recent incarceration occurred 'between the anniversary of my sisters [sic] suicide and of my biological parents [sic] death

After her mother's murder, there was a custody battle for Tori between the Scripps family and her father's family, the Douglases. In the end, Tori was adopted by her mother's sister, Mary Scripps Carmody and her husband, Robert (above). The couple raised her in Vermont

Even the National Spelling Bee was started by the Scripps enterprises in 1925.

The Scripps were considered the 'First Family of American journalism.'

In 1997, when Tori was in junior high school, she saw the re-airing of a made-for-TV movie entitled Daughters, also known as Our Mother's Murder, on the Lifetime cable network that was a mostly fictionalized re-creation of her mother's murder that caused the teenager great emotional stress, especially when classmates began taunting her about her mother's death, and being adopted.

Her adoptive parents reportedly believed it was one of the causes of their daughter performing badly in school, and possibly turning to drugs.

Sixteen years after her mother's murder and her father's suicide, there was more horror and tragedy for Tori Scripps Carmody.

Annie Morell Petrillo, one of Tori's two half-sisters from her mother's first marriage also took her own life, in the same exact manner as her stepfather. In 2009, the 38-year-old divorced mom with a 13-year-old son, drove her BMW on to the Tappan Zee.

Driving the same model car, and from virtually the same spot from where Scott Douglas took his fatal leap, Petrillo, the same age as Douglas, jumped to her death.

Tori was arrested last December on charges of violating her probation by using drugs, possessing drug paraphernalia, and associating with 'persons engaged in drug using and distribution'

She left a note addressed to her son, but made a cryptic mention of Tori, writing, 'Tori—wish you loved us. Me certainly loved you. I always missed you.'

Her sudden and violent death was another shock for Tori because the two were close; there was even a time when Annie considered adopting Tori, but she was then in her early twenties and considered too young to take on the responsibility.

Later, Alexandra Morell, Petrillo's sister, and Tori's half-sister, told a reporter for New York magazine, 'Scott took a hammer to my mother's head and a steak knife to her face. The intrusions in her head were so big they thought they were gunshot wounds. Imagine finding your mother like that, her head torn apart and her face all ripped up.

'So my poor sister Annie had to live with that. I just don't think she ever got that image out of her head.'

Alfred Thomas, a machinist with the Metro-North Railroad, walks to the spot where he discovered the decomposed body of Scott Douglas on the banks of the Hudson River

When Tori turned eighteen and was due to receive her first seven-figure inheritance, her adoptive parents went to court claiming that she was incapable of handling the sudden Scripps wealth. The court reportedly decided in Tori's favor, and she was said to have quickly run through the money.

In her March letter to the judge in which she detailed her troubles and her plans for the future, Scripps-Carmody noted that her December 2014 drug relapse that resulted in her probation violation and most recent incarceration occurred 'between the anniversary of my sisters [sic] suicide and of my biological parents [sic] death.

'In no way am I trying to use this fact as an excuse, nor do I want anybody to pity me because of this. I am telling you because it is something I feel contributed to my relapse. I failed to acknowledge that this particular time of year was still a problem for me and something I probably should have asked for some support through…'

Tori Scripps-Carmody's troubled life with drugs first came to the attention of authorities and became public in 2011 when she was twenty-one during a Vermont Drug Task Force investigation that involved undercover purchases of controlled substances.

In 1997, when Tori was in junior high school, she saw the re-airing of a made-for-TV movie entitled Our Mother's Murder on the Lifetime cable network that was a mostly fictionalized re-creation of her mother's murder that caused the teenager great emotional stress, especially when classmates began taunting her about her mother's death, and being adopted

On August 10 of that year, Scripps-Carmody along with two men -- Earl 'Phil' Lawyer, 19, and Sherman 'Shawn' Shuker, 31, with whom she reportedly was living in Burlington, Vermont -- were stopped by a state trooper on a Vermont interstate in Brattleboro. During a search of her BMW, 193 bags of heroin were discovered, and hypodermic needle track marks were found on her arm, according to a court affidavit. She reportedly was using six bags of heroin a day. Scripps-Carmody and the two men were subsequently indicted on heroin and cocaine distribution charges.

But that was not the media dynasty heiress's first run-in with the law, according to the Burlington Free Press quoting police and court records. The newspaper reported at the time that she had had four drug arrests in the past. One of those cases involved possession of the drug OxyContin that ended with her 'enrolling in a court diversion.'

She pleaded guilty, according to the paper, in a misdemeanor drug charge and paid a fine. In a third case, she reportedly was an alleged accessory to a robbery, but that case was dismissed

After the heroin possession arrest, she spent time in the Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility in South Burlington, Vermont after her adoptive parents, playing tough love, reportedly refused to post $10,000 bail.

Her father was quoted as saying, 'We are keeping her there to dry her out.' Her adoptive mother, Mary Scripps Carmody – sister of Tori's murdered mother -- declared, 'We're supporting her every way we can. We love her and will never stop loving her and will never stop trying to help her.'

In her letter last month to Judge Sessions, Tori, discussing her most recent incarceration, noted that it was 'so hard for me and I feel so guilty not only because of the consequences I suffer, but because of the consequences the people who are closest to me and who care about me most suffer.

'My parents are not young and people do not live forever, so I want to cherish the time I do have with them and spend as much time as possible with them. My parents are some of the only constants I have in my life.

'I am so sick of disappointing people…I have so many regrets and there are so many things I wish I did differently. But all I can do from here is better myself.'

If Victoria Scripps Carmody inherited her addictive personality from anyone, it might have been her great, great, great uncle, E.W. Scripps, the Scripps dynasty's patriarch who, in the 1870s, founded the Scripps media empire that exists today.

A portrait of James E. Scripps, founder of the Detroit News newspaper that began the media empire. Tori's mother was his great great granddaughter

In a little-known memoir published in 1951, Scripps, who died of apoplexy on his yacht at the age of 72 in March 1926, admitted to being addicted to alcohol and drugs. 'I was,' he boasted, 'a forty-drink-a-day-man…I could drink many times more glasses of whiskey than any of my associates without any feeling inebriation, and without much feeling of stimulation.'

He claimed he also smoked several dozen Havana cigars each day. By the time he was in his mid-forties, according to his book, the alcohol and tobacco had taken their toll. 'My skin, from my feet up to my waist, and on my arms and hands, had lost nearly all sensitiveness,' he stated.

In Mexico, he was treated for an eye inflammation that had made him virtually blind. He was given injections of morphine, which got him hooked. In the book, he declared, 'There was hardly a square inch on the surface of my body that was not swollen as the result of needle pricks. The [eye] disease was cured, but I had contracted the morphine habit.

'It was fully one hundred times harder for me to get over this morphine drug habit than it was for me to lay aside whiskey and tobacco…the ordeal was great.' He claimed he cured himself through the 'magic of willpower…Had I not become a morphine addict, I would never have discovered the potential strength…of my willpower.'

A Scripps family insider told Daily Mail Online: 'We're only hoping Tori has the same kind of willpower as E.W. had to finally break her destructive drug addiction. Sadly she hasn't so far.'

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