The Assassination of Sara Tokars

 

Sara Tokars with her sons, Ricky and Mike (photo source: Atlanta Magazine)

The Murder

It was Thanksgiving weekend, 1992.  Sunday night, November 29, was a quiet one in the Marietta neighborhood of Kings Cove, which housed comfortable, upscale homes that ranged from twenty years old to new.  It was not long after 10 p.m. when one of the homeowners heard a knocking at his front door and opened it to two little boys, who were spattered with blood and holding hands.  The older of the two told him that "a bad man shot my mom," "a bad black man" with a "pirate gun."  He wanted the man to call his grandfather, who was a doctor.  The little boy, six-year-old Ricky Tokars, thought that since his grandfather was a doctor, he could make his mom better.  

Ricky pointed to a white Toyota 4-Runner, parked in a field across the street only half a mile from the Tokars residence.  The homeowner took a friend to investigate and found a terrible sight.  When they opened the driver's-side door, the body of thirty-nine year old Sara Tokars fell out.  She had suffered a horrifying shotgun wound to the back of her head.  

The Cobb County police notified Sara's family in Bradenton, Florida and her husband, Fred Tokars, who was at a Montgomery, Alabama hotel.  Sara's father, John Ambrusko, later recalled that Fred was hysterical the first time they talked by phone following the notifications.  Detectives found Fred to be a sobbing mess, which was understandable, but they also smelled beer on his breath, which Fred claimed to be an attempt from his attorney -- one of his first calls--  to calm him.  Less understandable was Fred's refusal to cooperate and his resistance to walk through the family home with the investigators.  He provided sketchy details on how the house was secured, couldn't say whether or not Sara's jewelry had been disturbed, or why the safe was open.  He was certain, though, that his guitar had been moved.     

The Investigation

Fred Tokars (photo source: Oxygen)

As Fred was a well-known attorney and former prosecutor, the murder became an immediate big news story.  

The detectives had little physical evidence to go on.  No fingerprints, no gun casings and nothing apparently left behind by Sara's killer.  All they had was the massive amount of her blood and fragments of her skull and brain.

From Ricky Tokars, the police learned that after he, his mother and little brother had returned home on Sunday evening from a family visit in Florida.  By the time the SUV had pulled into the garage, four-year-old Mike was asleep.  Sara had left him in his car seat while she and Ricky and Ricky's spaniel, Jake, got out of the vehicle.  As she had opened the door to the house, a black man wearing a dark cap had appeared, holding a gun.  Jake began barking and the man kicked him, before forcing Sara and Ricky back into the car.  The man had climbed into the backseat beside the still-sleeping Mike and directly behind Sara and ordered her to drive.  By the time Sara had pulled the car into the cul-de-sac half a mile from her home, on the gunman's orders, Mike Tokars had awakened.  The gunman then shot Sara in the back of the head.  The car, motor still running, had coasted across the road and into a nearby field, where it came to rest.  Ricky, covered in his mother's blood, reached over and turned the ignition off before pulling his crying younger brother from the backseat and going for help. 

Police began investigating Sara and Fred Tokars in an attempt to find out who had wanted to kill her.  

Sara had first seen Fred on the evening news eight years earlier, when he was a junior prosecutor assisting in a high-profile murder case involving the slaying of an attorney by his lover.  The slim, attractive and outgoing Sara felt attracted to the tall and lean Fred, who sported a look of seriousness with his tortoiseshell glasses and hair he combed back behind his ears.   Then 31 years old, Sara was working at the trendy Elan nightclub by Perimeter Mall as a promoter and sharing a Dunwoody condo with her sister Krissy.  She had been an elementary school teacher in Florida before moving to Atlanta with her first husband, a health club owner she had met at the beach.  Sara became a fitness instructor at her husband's gym but the marriage did not last and ended in divorce.  

Fred had worked as an accountant before earning his law degree in night school.  Even while working as a junior prosecutor for the DA, he quickly began the aggressive self-promotion he would become known for.   Although he had no experience prosecuting cases involving white-collar crime or computer fraud, he deemed himself an expert and began teaching at local colleges and night law school, as well as tax and accountant seminars and law enforcement seminars.  He also gained a reputation for his eagerness to work on projects he found interesting -- as well as the Atlanta nightlife and women.  Soon enough, he was known as "Fast Fred" around the office.

On impulse following that television appearance, Sara called Fred at his Fulton County District Attorney's office.  A friendly chat led to a date and that date led to being married in Judge John Langford's chambers the following year.  For Sara, she felt she had finally found what she had been searching for:  a good man who was promising her a suburban home and children.  Sara, the middle child of seven daughters in a Catholic family, dearly wanted to recreate her own comfortable upbringing.  Fred, who nursed political aspirations and spoke of wanting to be a tax attorney with wealthy clientele, found Sara to be an asset; she was gorgeous, have a vibrant personality, and had the social contacts Fred desired.   

Within months of the wedding, Sara was pregnant with Ricky and the couple purchased their King's Cove home.  Cracks, however, were already beginning to form in the Tokars' marriage.  If Sara was disheartened by Fred's inattentiveness and long work hours, she was discouraged when her desire to quit working was met by resistance.   She continued working throughout her pregnancy and after Ricky's birth until the decline of the nightclub business led her to being laid off.   While Sara became a stay-at-home mom, Fred left the DA's office to start his own practice.  Where he had once worked to prosecute crimes, now he worked to defend the accused.  Starting first with criminal defense, he soon expanded his practice to include divorce and tax fraud in hopes of making as much money as quickly as possible.  

Sara was less than happy with her husband's new clientele.  As some of them paid Fred in cash, she worried that they were mixed up in the drug business.  Financial problems -- repairs needed on the house, the loss of Sara's salary, and the addition of baby Mike -- were compounded by Fred putting Sara on a budget.  He refused to allow her credit cards or her own bank accounts and insisted they pay for everything with cash.  Fred later claimed that he put his wife on a budget because she had a lot of debt when they married.  

(photo source: People)

Sara tried to start her own small promotions company but Fred refused her budget proposals and only gave her a small portion of the funds she requested.  She told her sister Krissy that Fred would now allow her access to the basement of their home, where he kept a safe and a bunch of files locked up.  He also began objecting whenever Sara wanted to visit her family, refusing to provide her with money for gas or a hotel room.  If she insisted on going, she would drive the nine hours with the children while Fred would fly down.  

Sara alleged to an attorney and private investigator she eventually hired that shortly after Ricky's birth Fred began physically abusing her, an allegation he later denied.  She wrote a new will after Mike's birth, naming her sister as her executor and leaving everything to her sons.  For his part, Fred took out three life insurance policies worth $1.75 million on Sara.  

By 1989, Sara was convinced that Fred's late nights had more to do with other women than work.  She sought out advice from a Buckhead divorce attorney but was clearly intimidated by Fred, who had threatened to take the children from her if she ever tried to leave.  By that time, she believed he had the political connections to do it.   He served as campaign treasurer for a superior court judge's winning race and was appointed by Mayor Andrew Young as a part-time city judge.  

Sara's private investigator confirmed her suspicions that Fred was engaging in extramarital affairs, leading her to gather information on Fred that she could use against him in any divorce action.  She broke Fred's house rules, got the combination to his basement safe and opened it, finding documents, bags and vials of what appeared to be prescription medication.  She asked her PI to turn his files on Fred over to the police should anything happen to her.

Fred was becoming better known to law enforcement and not for his seminars.  He was not only representing drug dealers but apparently going into business with the people who fronted them.  It didn't help that some of the clients he was representing faced allegations of drug trafficking and money laundering.  Sara was uneasy with Fred's clientele and, due to the fact that she and the children were alone so often at night, begged her husband to install an alarm system on the home, which he had done, and to fix the broken lock on the sliding door, which he did not do.  She seemed terrified of leaving Fred and taking any steps forward for herself, but she did volunteer as a teacher's aide several times a week at the Catholic school Ricky and Mike attended.  

Three weeks before Sara's death, federal agents were investigating claims of tax evasion and money laundering against Fred's client, Anthony Brown, who was also suspected of managing a cocaine distribution ring.  As Fred had been Brown's attorney, he was viewed not only as a witness but a target of their probe.  As such, had she not been murdered, it was possible that Sara might have been subpoenaed in the investigation.

On Tuesday, November 24, 1992, five days before Sara was killed, she and the children left to visit her family in Bradenton, Florida.  They stopped at the Tampa airport to pick up Fred, who had flown down from Atlanta.  On Saturday, shortly after 1:30 in the morning, the fire alarm in their Marietta home went off.  Six hours later, a second alarm sounded.  The alarm company, who phoned the Tokarses in Florida, was instructed to disconnect the alarm.  Fred would later insist that it was Sara's decision to disconnect it.  

Fred left Florida to return to Atlanta later that day, with Sara and the boys set to follow the next day after lunch.

Fred Tokars under arrest (photo source: Oxygen)

The Break

Through their investigation detectives learned about a 28-year-old man named Eddie Lawrence.  Lawrence was a classic slumlord who had amassed a small fortune using drug money to purchase ramshackle properties, fix them up and rent them out.  He would then default on his mortgage payments, while continuing to collect rent from his beleaguered tenants.   He had found Fred Tokars after getting into legal jams.  Fred not only represented Lawrence but chose to go into business with him.  Eventually their relationship began to crumble, with Lawrence owing Fred $70,000.  Fred had an affair with a stripper, who was an employee of Lawrence's.  She told investigators that during one of their rendezvous he had told her he was sick of Sara and he was going to get her out of the way.    

Lawrence had criminal charges pending against him for writing bad checks when the police picked him up but worse for him, informants told police that he had been shopping for a hit man before Sara's murder.  Lawrence denied killing Sara Tokars or participating in her murder but he was arrested anyhow. 

Curtis Rower (photo source: Ga. Dept. of Corrections)

Less than a week after Eddie Lawrence was arrested, the Cobb County Police were given the name of 22-year-old Curtis Rower.  Rower was a crack addict known as "Cornbread" who had gone on a binge following Sara Tokars' murder and blabbed to several people that he had been the one to kill her.  The informant who provided Rower's name said that Lawrence had initially offered to pay him (the informant) $5,000 for a hit.  When he turned the job down, Rower accepted it.   On December 23, 1992, Rower was discovered hiding under his cousin's bed and arrested.  He almost immediately confessed to Sara Tokars' murder but said he had not meant to kill her.  

Fred Tokars, upon hearing of the arrests of Eddie Lawrence and Curtis Rower, dropped Ricky and Mike off with Sara's family in Bradenton to go to a local hotel.  Locking the door and putting a "do not disturb" sign on the door, he then took pain pills with alcohol.  His attempt at suicide failed and he survived.  He recovered enough to speak in Atlanta on December 31 at a news conference, where he asked the media to leave him alone and to claim that Sara's murder had cost him everything.  

Ricky and Mike Tokars with their aunt Krissy (photo source: Atlanta Journal Constitution)

Only a few days later, Fred closed his law office and put the Marietta home on the market.  He moved to West Palm Beach with his mother, leaving Ricky and Mike in the care of Sara's parents and sisters.  Investigators in Atlanta, though, continued their probe into Sara's murder and in August of 1993, he was indicated by a federal grand jury.  

Justice is Served

Eddie Lawrence (photo source: Ga. Dept. of Corrections)

It would take until 1997 for Fred Tokars to be brought to trial.  In the meantime, Curtis Rowe was convicted of life in prison after two trials (the first ending in a mistrial) and Eddie Lawrence managed a plea deal in exchange for testifying against Tokars and Rowe.    The trial outlined what actually happened on the terrible night of November 29, 1992.

The prosecutors believed that Sara had confronted Fred with his secret bank accounts and illicit business dealings in an effort to get a speedy divorce.  He went to Eddie Lawrence, who owed him $70,000, and offered to clear the debt if Lawrence would get rid of Sara.  It served two purposes for Fred:  not only would Sara be gone but if Fred went down, so would Lawrence, ensuring his silence.   Fred made the deal even more enticing for Lawrence by offering him half of the proceeds from Sara's $1.75 million insurance policies as investments for his businesses.  Lawrence testified that he had tried to talk Fred out of the plan.  As one of Fred's clients, he had been to the Tokars home and had met Sara.  In fact the last time he visited the home Fred had insisted that Lawrence play his guitar; the same guitar that he told investigators in 1992 had been moved.  Lawrence had no problem being a conman and a slumlord but he apparently wanted nothing to do with actually pulling the trigger on Sara.  Fred insisted,  offering him $25,000 up front.  Lawrence agreed but decided he would contract the job out.

He went to the most desperate person he knew, Curtis Rower, and offered him $5,000 to commit the murder.  He accompanied Rower on two drive-bys in which the Tokars residence was scoped out before Curtis Rower agreed.  Shortly before Thanksgiving of 1992,  the two men entered the Tokars home in the early hours of the morning.   They knew the sliding glass door would be unlocked, the house alarm would be off and that Sara and the boys would be sleeping together in the children's bedroom.  What they didn't account for was Ricky's Springer Spaniel, Jake, who began barking.  When a light came on, Lawrence and Rower fled.   

On Sunday, November 29, Lawrence received two calls from Fred Tokars, who had just returned to Atlanta from Florida.  Tokars said that he was on the way to Montgomery, Alabama where he had an appointment with a federal prison inmate.  

By 9 p.m. Curtis Rower was in the Tokars home, which was left unlocked, awaiting Sara and the boys.  He waited for more than an hour, possibly taking the phone off the hook (or possibly Fred did that before leaving for Montgomery).  He confronted Sara with a .410 sawed-off shotgun and forced her and Ricky back into the car, kicking Ricky's barking dog on the way.  He climbed in behind Sara and next to Mike, who would indeed wake up en route to their final destination.  Rower had specific orders not to touch the children.

Rower forced Sara to drive to the location where Eddie Lawrence was parked and waiting.  When she saw Lawrence, she knew who he was and surely knew what was going to happen and who arranged it.   She begged for Rower to take the car, take her handbag but to leave her and the children alone.    Although Rower claimed he had had no intention on killing Sara, he pointed the shotgun at the back of her head and pulled the trigger.  Ricky and Mike saw their mother being killed.  

Rower and Lawrence then fled the scene, leaving the blood-spattered children to run for help.

Sara (photo source: Find a Grave)

Sara's family had hoped that Fred Tokars would receive the death penalty for orchestrating Sara's murder but the jury voted 10-2, with two jurors objecting.  Instead, he received life without possibility of parole.  He was also convicted in federal court of racketeering and money laundering and sentenced in federal prison to life without parole.   While in prison, he testified against other suspects in federal criminal trials, leading to six murders being solved.  According to his attorney, he was beaten for cooperating with the government.  He had been suffering with several diseases, including a form of MS, and had been unable to walk for a decade when he died in a Pennsylvania prison in May of 2020 at the age of 67.  

Curtis Rower remains incarcerated at Macon State Prison in Oglethorpe, Georgia.  

Eddie Lawrence remains incarcerated at the Coffee Correctional Facility in Nicholls, Georgia. 

Sara was originally buried at Arlington Memorial Park in Sandy Springs, Georgia on December 3, 1992.  Following her husband's conviction in 1997, her remains were disinterred and reburied at Mount Olivet Cemetery in her birthplace of New York.  Her mother was interred by her in 1998 and her father in 2002.

Sarah's final resting place (photo source: Find a Grave)

A Final Tragedy

Following Fred Tokars' arrest and incarceration, Ricky and Mike Tokars never spoke to him or saw him again.  Their father attempted communication by sending letters written from prison, but they rebuffed him.  The boys grew up in Florida, raised by Sara's parents and sisters.  Ricky went to college in San Diego, where he became an avid surfer and traveler before becoming an emergency medical technician.  Mike stayed in Florida for college and then toured the south by van and played guitar in bands before moving to New York, where he was inspired to become a reporter and writer.  He eventually graduated from Columbia's Master of Journalism program but despite his successes, he never got over his mother's murder.  He died suddenly and unexpectedly on April 3, 2020, a month before his father, of a pulmonary embolism in Newport Beach, California.  His obituary mentioned that he was "beloved by family and friends" and that Mike had been "cherished for his tenacious curiosity, compassionate heart, infectious sense of humor, kindred spirit and remarkable zest for life."  Mike Tokars was 31 years old.  He was interred by his mother at Mount Olivet Cemetery in New York.

(photo source: Contently)