MURDERED: Dorothy “Toby” Tate

Ashley Flowers (0:00)

Hi, Crime Junkies, I'm your host, Ashley Flowers.

Brit Prawat (0:02)

And I'm Brit.

Ashley Flowers (0:03)

And today, I'm going to tell you about a case that nobody thought would ever be resolved. One that spent decades collecting dust in a file box at the San Luis Obispo County Sheriff's Office with nobody even assigned to it at all, until two detectives decided to take another look. And all of a sudden, after 40 years, the hazy picture of a fatal 1983 burglary gone wrong started to come into focus, and preserved DNA evidence revealed a twist that no one saw coming. This is the story of Dorothy Toby Tate.

Let me take you back to November 15th, 1983, just before 11 a.m., when sheriff's deputies are dispatched to the scene of what seems like a car accident on a dirt road just off Highway 1 by the beach. There, they find a 1980s Chevy camper van, like halfway off the road. Its passenger side fender is damaged, the hood is slightly bent, and both front passenger windows are shattered. Though it's unclear what caused the damage, because there is nothing else around. It doesn't look like the wreckage from a fatal crash by any means, more of like a low-speed collision. But someone was clearly injured. There is blood spatter by the driver's seat and blood running down the inside of the driver's door. Strangely though, both the driver and passenger seats are empty.

And that's when deputies noticed something is seeping out from the closed sliding door of the van and like pooling in the dirt. And when a deputy slides open the van's rear door, he finds the source. It is coming from the woman who must have been in the driver's seat because she is laying on the floor of the cargo area, clearly dead from a wound to her head, which is where all that blood was coming from. But there is no way she got that wound from this minor crash. It is a single gunshot wound below the woman's left ear from a 45 caliber pistol that killed her. Now, there's also a dog in the van with this woman, alive and unharmed, and then there is another dog wandering around outside. And judging by the two leashes still draped around this woman's neck, those were likely her babies.

Now, how everything fits together isn't totally clear yet, like when the crash happened or how she got from the front seat to the back. But one thing is clear, there may have been a vehicle collision, but this death was not the result of an accident, this was murder.

And judging from the trail of blood droplets leading away from the van, somebody walked away from this incident alive. But who that was and what role they might have played in this, only time would tell.

For now, they felt pretty confident that their victim was Toby Tate. She didn't have a wallet or an ID in the van, but luggage in the back that had a name on the tags along with an address in Texas led them to Toby's family. So that's how investigators began to fill in some of the blanks. They learned that 41-year-old Toby was the oldest of three girls, and according to her sister Priscilla, she was a free spirit. She had spent her adulthood traveling around the country in her van, which she named Esmerelda. I love a woman who has led multiple lives, not in a devious double life way, but the kind of person who takes chances, who's tried things and reinvented themselves in hopes of finding something or finding themselves. So Toby traveled all over with Esmerelda. I mean, she picked up gigs as a nanny, a bartender, a photographer, even a dog breeder at one point. And all along the way, she would gather friends. In fact, just as an aside, Priscilla told us that after Toby died, their dad was just downright shocked at the number of letters that started coming in from people mourning Toby from all over the country.

Now, in the years before her murder, Toby worked on an indigenous reserve in British Columbia, restoring a church, and then she moved back home with her family in Dallas, where she designed gardens. But she had just bought her own house in Colorado, where she planned to grow her cleaning business.

Brit Prawat (4:57)

Okay, but Colorado, what was she doing out in California then?

Ashley Flowers (5:00)

She was being an amazing niece because Priscilla told us that Toby had driven up to the Bay Area because one of her twin aunts had passed away and the other one had never spent a birthday alone before. So Toby's plan was to like take her van, take her two dogs out there to like be with her aunt. And then from there, she was gonna travel down to LA to visit a friend, like kind of camping along the way.