Fred Tokars: Murder for hire

Fred Tokars. Have you ever heard of him? If you live in the Atlanta area, there’s a big chance that you have. Tokars used to be a lawyer who was involved in criminal activities such as money laundering and racketeering but what makes him interesting to me is the fact that when his wife discovered his criminal life, he paid for a hitman to kill her in front of his own two sons. That kind of mind is very interesting to me because the act is so cold-blooded that it just defies my understanding.

The crime.

Sara Tokars was arriving home from Florida with her two sons in the backseat of the car. When she got there, she found a stranger waiting. He forced her into the back of the car and drove off with all three. Then he stopped the vehicle, shot Sara in the head and ran away leaving the two little boys covered in blood. They were able to walk to a nearby house and get help.

Right away Fred Tokars was a suspect in his wife’s murder. The police learned of marital problems – Sara had told family members that Fred was often angry and temperamental and she suspected that he was involved with a very bad crowd of people . Her sister stated that Sara had called her and said that she had found proof of Fred’s activities but she would not tell her more over the phone . She also said she had found a way to divorce Fred and keep custody of the boys .

Tokars himself made police and Sara’s family even more suspicious .  After her death he was uncooperative and he bemoaned the loss of his lifestyle , not the loss of his partner or the tragedy that his kids had suffered . He attempted suicide because he said he was depressed . Then police discovered that there was a life insurance for Sara in the amount of $1.7 million . Fred was the sole beneficiary .

Police began looking at Fred’s business associates and soon discovered a shady character by the name of Eddie Lawrence who was arrested on bad check charges .  At first he denied any involvement in the murder but later – several months later – confessed that he had offered his secretary’s brother Curtis Rower $5000 to get rid of  “a white lady”.

He had dropped Curtis off at Tokar’s house where Curtis waited for her until she got home with the boys .

Tokars had insisted that the boys remain unharmed but that Sara be shot in the head to make sure she was dead .

He was arrested and convicted of money laundering , racketeering , kidnapping and murder for hire . He received four life sentences without the possibility of parole .

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Murder at 1426 F Street

Dorothea Puente: Killing for profit.

Dorothea Puente is an American serial killer who is perhaps not very well known unless you are a real crime nerd like myself.

She was born in 1929 to poor, alcoholic parents living in California.

Her father died when she was only four years old and her mother died when she was six. For a while Dorothea in an orphanage but was later taken in by relatives.

Puente married when she was 16 and had two daughters. She sent one daughter to live with relatives and she put the other one up for adoption. For some reason her husband had enough and left her.

This is when Dorothea began forging checks but she was caught quite quickly and sentenced to a year in jail of which she served six months. When she got out she married once more and would stay married for the next 14 years.

She was not done with the criminal world, however. In 1960 she was once more arrested, this time for owning and running a brothel and having served 90 days in a Sacramento jail, she was once more arrested, this time for vagrancy and she got another 90 days in jail.

When Dorothea got out, she started working for the elderly and also begin to manage boarding houses. She got divorced from her husband of 14 years and married a Mexican man, thus getting the surname Puente which was later to become infamous.

The marriage lasted only a couple of years after which Dorothea Puente started spending a lot of time at local bars looking for men who received benefits. She would then forge their signatures in order to steal their money. When she was caught, she was charged with 34 counts of fraud.

In 1981 Puente rented an upstairs apartment at 1420 F Street in Sacramento and she turned it into a boarding house.

This is when people mysteriously started to vanish. They would arrive at the boarding house on F Street and then disappear. First of all a lady called Ruth Monroe died from an overdose of Tylenol and her death was labeled a suicide. Many of the people living at the boarding house were either homeless, alcoholic’s or drug addicts and Dorothea Puente appeared a nice, grandmotherly type of woman. Her appearance had many people fooled since she looked like a woman in her 70’s but she was actually quite a few years younger.

In November 1988 police received a tip and dug up a body buried in the lawn at 1426 F Street. A total of seven bodies would be found and Puente was charged with nine murderers ( two bodies were located elsewhere) of which she got convicted of three and she is serving two life sentences at Central California Women’s facility in California.

It is frightening to me that somebody would kill nine innocent people just to be able to get to their money. I suppose that’s the sign of a true psychopath.

I have not been able to find a lot of information about Dorothea Puente, except a small article in the New York Times published in December of 1993 and another article also from the New York Times with the headline “No cause determined in deaths of boarders“.

If you know where I can find more material about her, such as books or articles, a comment will be greatly appreciated.

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Jerome Brudos: The shoe fetish killer

It’s time for another post about a serial killer. This time I’m going to write a little about Jerome Brudos who was born in South Dakota in 1939. He was the youngest kid in the family and got off on the wrong foot (no pun intended) with his mom already from birth because she wanted to have a little girl. This is where the creepy stuff starts: she would dress him up in dresses and make fun of him.

One day little Jerome found a pair of high heeled shoes and brought them home to play with. His mom got angry and made him promise not to wear the shoes again. When she caught him once more, she burned the shoes in front of him. This seems to have sparked something inside the little boy who became obsessed with high heeled shoes, somehow intertwining his shoe fetish with anger and sex inside his mind.

He married in 1961 and moved to Salem, Oregon where he fathered two children. He made odd demands on his wife, making her clean the house naked wearing only high heel shoes and at the same time he started getting blackouts and headaches. He would steal women’s underwear which he would wear underneath his clothes and he would still be on the lookout for high heeled shoes.

One day he set up an intercom on the garage door. Then his wife couldn’t enter without being let in. His violent fantasies were becoming more than fantasies. From 1968 to 69 Jerome Brudos murdered four young women and he would sometimes dress in women’s clothing during the murders. The killings were gruesome. He would cut off breasts and feet and masturbate over the dead bodies while wearing high heels.

He was caught when police started interviewing local coeds who had seen him acting suspiciously. Brudos was sentenced to life in prison and died there in March 2006.

It interests me how such a childhood event can spark such a strong emotion inside a child’s mind. Surely there must have been other factors at play. I have read that Jerome’s mother was very dominating and had hysterical fits quite often. If you fuel that with an emotion of being unwanted, born in the wrong body and being belittled for being who you are, I suppose you do have a recipe for a very dangerous individual.

It’s also interesting how many serial killers seem to have had dominating mothers, have been cruel to animals, have stolen either underwear or other objects belonging to other people and have experienced bouts of headaches.

One trait that seems to appear in all of these kinds of people is a complete lack of remorse and lack of empathy. I sometimes wonder if such a mind is more easily created these days where children are often the focus of the family and the center of even their parent’s universe? For today’s kids it’s often about “me” instead of “us”. But perhaps such a deviant mind is not made out of selfishness alone. Perhaps it’s one ugly mixture of bad genes, bad environment and a form of evil that we cannot control.

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Starkweather case in detail

Robert Colvert, working the night shift at the Burlington Northern train yards, was to be the first victim of Charlie Starkweather, the American spree killer who murdered 11 people in Nebraska and Wyoming together with his under-age girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate in the 1950’s.

Apparently Charlie had tried to buy a stuffed toy on credit for Caril and Colvert had refused. Starkweather returned to the Lincoln gas station a couple of times with a loaded shotgun in his trunk, then drove Colvert to an abandoned area where he was executed.
Starkweather was executed in 1959, Fugate was given a life sentence but paroled in 1976.

I’m not going to go very deeply into the case right now. Just wanna let you know that JournalStar has a special report on the Starkweather case where you can view photos, newspaper clippings and video interviews. Very exciting!

Small Sacrifices

Yes! When I wanna make something work, I make it work. I recently bought a VHS movie on ebay and when it arrived, it was broken There was no shipping insurance so I just felt kinda crappy about wasting my money.

Then today I got the bright idea to try to change the broken part with a part from one of my other tapes. I broke the spring but it worked perfectly! So I sat there watching Small Sacrifices – it lasts 185 minutes and I wasn’t bored for a second. I guess TV movies are my thing..

The movie is about Diane Downs who shot her three kids one dark night near Springfield, Oregon and she received a life sentence. She was recently denied parole. You can read more about it here.

Now reading about Debora Green

Annoying. Somebody switched off the power to my apartment for a minute or so, then switched it back on again and now I can’t get my wireless keyboard to connect I don’t know how the two are related but I am sure they are. Now I am writing on the old yellow keyboard with an old yellow cord. Better than nothing, anyway.

I’ve had quite a good day and am currently reading about doctor Debora Green from Prairie Village, Kansas, who first tried to poison her husband and then murdered two of her children by setting the house on fire. She was sentenced to life in prison and she’s the subject of Ann Rule‘s book “Bitter Harvest“. If you are interested in this case, you can read more about it on this website and there are also some pictures posted. Debora Green is eligible for parole in 2035. You can buy Bitter Harvest here. It’s a good read!

That’s pretty much what I do with my evenings lately. I read thick true crime books and try to learn a little something about the criminal mind. I can’t help thinking that I should really get a pair of black glasses and a notepad with a pencil next to my bed. Then I’d be a real true crime nerd.

By the way, if you’re really into true crime, you might want to check out True Crime Library’s brand new website. It looks awesome and there’s an endless number of crime articles.

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