On the night of November 29, 1992, 39-year-old Sara Tokars returned to her Marietta, Georgia, home with her two young sons, six-year-old Ricky and four-year-old Mike, after a Thanksgiving holiday with family in Florida. As they began to unload their car in the garage, a man emerged from the shadows armed with a sawed-off shotgun. The intruder forced the terrified mother and her sons back into their vehicle and compelled Sara to drive away from their house. A short distance away, the journey came to a horrifying end when the gunman shot Sara in the back of the head, killing her instantly in front of her children. The killer fled, leaving the two little boys alone with their murdered mother. Young Ricky, covered in his mother's blood, managed to turn off the car's ignition and lead his younger brother to a nearby house to get help.
The shocking crime, initially appearing as a random act of violence, soon unraveled into a complex murder-for-hire plot orchestrated by Sara's husband, Fredric 'Fred' Tokars, a prominent Atlanta attorney and former prosecutor. Investigators discovered that Sara had learned of her husband's illicit activities, which included laundering money for drug dealers, and was planning to divorce him. Fearing she would expose his criminal enterprise, Fred Tokars decided to have her killed. He enlisted a business associate, Eddie Lawrence, to find a hitman. Lawrence, in turn, hired Curtis Rower, a 22-year-old crack addict, for $5,000 to carry out the murder.
The investigation quickly led to the conspirators. After the murder, Curtis Rower boasted about his involvement, and informants tipped off the police. Rower was found hiding under a bed and arrested, confessing soon after. Eddie Lawrence was also arrested and eventually agreed to a plea deal, testifying against both Rower and Tokars in exchange for a lighter sentence. Fred Tokars initially portrayed himself as a grieving husband but was named a suspect shortly after the arrests of Lawrence and Rower. He was indicted in August 1993.
The legal proceedings brought all three men to justice. Curtis Rower's first trial for murder ended in a mistrial, but he later pleaded guilty and received a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole. Eddie Lawrence, for his cooperation, was sentenced to 12 and a half years in federal prison. In 1994, Fred Tokars was convicted in federal court on racketeering charges related to his wife's murder and his other financial crimes, receiving four consecutive life sentences without parole. Subsequently, in a separate state trial in 1997, a jury found him guilty of masterminding his wife's murder, and he was sentenced to another life term. Fred Tokars died in prison in May 2020.
