Fred Tokars - Where is He Now - Prison Snitch or Prison B!&@^
via Cherokee Tribune
There are a number of trials in Cobb that local judges, attorneys and law enforcement officers said are quite memorable, but none had as many twists and turns as the 1992 shooting death of 39-year-old Sara Tokars. The mother and her two sons had just returned home on Nov. 29, 1992, from spending Thanksgiving with family in Bradenton, Fla., when a man initially suspected of trying to burglarize their home in the Kings Cove subdivision in east Cobb abducted the family.
Tokars and her then 4- and 6-year-old boys were forced back into their Toyota 4-Runner by the gunman. He ordered her to drive, and when she refused to turn into a subdivision under construction, he shot her in the back of the head. It took investigators a little over a month to figure out that Sara Tokars’ husband, Fred, an up and coming tax attorney and part-time judge in Fulton County, had paid two men with criminal backgrounds to kill his wife because she had found out about a number of illegal activities he was involved in.
Fred Tokars was found guilty of murder five years later and sentenced to life in prison.
via Atlanta Journal Constitution
Over the last decade, Tokars has helped solve six murders, providing testimony that sent one man to death row and another to prison for life. Tokars, said one prosecutor, testified so his sons would one day learn he was capable of good. “One of the reasons Fred said he did this was to leave a good legacy for his children,” said Noel Levy, an ex-Marine and retired Arizona prosecutor who, with Tokars as his star witness, convicted a man named Robert Ortloff in 2008, for the 1984 murder of a young woman.
“He was critical to the prosecution,” said Levy. “If it wasn’t for him, that cold case wouldn’t have been filed.”
Four years earlier, in Iowa, Tokars’ testimony helped send Dustin Lee Honken to death row. Honken, a large-scale methamphetamine manufacturer, was convicted of two separate killings of men who he feared would testify against him. One of those crimes was the nightmarish killings of a drug-dealing partner, that man’s girlfriend and her two young children.
Honken, a vicious psychopath, justified killing the kids because “they were rats being raised by rats.”
Today, Tokars’ exact location is a closely guarded secret. He is in the federal government’s witness protection program and his name has been expunged from the prison database.
He lives alone in a cell where he watches cable TV, reads the Wall Street Journal to keep up with current events and sometimes calls friends to reminisce on good times from long ago, according to one friend who has stayed in touch with him.
He has become an observant Jew and his hair is said to be long, as is his beard. He is confined to a wheelchair due to a mysterious neurological disorder and spinal problems. Tokars, 59, also longs to re-connect with his two sons. Not surprisingly, they grew up resenting him.
We have put out a search though our prison contacts for Fred Tokars since his whereabouts are unknown. We will let you know as soon as we get a hit on his prison address.
Prisonworld is very resourceful.
