In the fall of 2009, a dark story unfolded in a Scottsdale, Arizona home, culminating in the death of 57-year-old Dwight Tobyne, a Caucasian male. He and his wife of 35 years, Shari Tobyne, were in the midst of a separation. On the very day he was supposed to move out in November 2009, their troubled relationship took a violent and irreversible turn.
Inside their house, Shari shot and killed her husband, a grim end to their long and fraught history.
Following the murder, Shari Tobyne embarked on a macabre and calculated effort to conceal her crime. In an attempt to erase the evidence of her actions, she dismembered Dwight's body. Over a period of time, she scattered his remains across three different counties in Arizona: Maricopa, Pinal, and La Paz. To further the illusion that Dwight was still alive and had simply left, she used his cell phone and email to send messages to his family and friends. For months, this deception was successful, leading those who knew him to believe he had started a new life, possibly in Mexico.
The truth began to surface in July 2010, eight months after Dwight's death, when his daughter, concerned by the prolonged and unusual silence, officially reported him as a missing person. This report finally triggered a police investigation that would slowly unravel Shari's web of lies. As investigators focused their attention on her, hikers in the three counties had already begun to discover the scattered human remains, though they were not immediately identified as belonging to Dwight Tobyne.
Under the scrutiny of law enforcement, Shari's story began to fall apart. She was arrested in August 2010 and eventually confessed to killing her husband, though she initially claimed the shooting was an accident that occurred during a struggle as she was attempting to take her own life. Investigators, however, uncovered evidence of premeditation, including the fact that she had purchased a handgun and practiced shooting shortly before the murder. Faced with the evidence against her, Shari Tobyne ultimately pleaded guilty to first-degree murder, forgery, and abandoning a body. Prosecutors had initially sought the death penalty, but with her guilty plea, she was sentenced to life in prison in May 2013, with an additional 31 years for the related charges, bringing a final and somber conclusion to the tragic death of Dwight Tobyne.
