It was a time, or so it seemed, of endless possibility. Drop out, grow a beard, call yourself a hippie, invent life all over again. And maybe, if you were very, very lucky, you'd answer your door one day and find yourself looking at the love of your life. I looked in her eyes.
That was the first feature I looked at on her. And her eyes just, like I'd known them all of my life, or all my lifetimes. Ah, yes, kismet. It was 1973.
Bob Eckhart was 29 then, and temporarily caretaking an old mansion in Miami Beach. And she, the girl with the eyes, was a 24-year-old named Toni Sorin. My jaw dropped to the floor. This just absolutely incredibly beautiful woman is at my front door.
She asked him if she could park her car in his driveway. He invited her in. They talked the rest of the day, all night. We just found so much in common, so much spiritually we found in each other.
So she shared this circle anyway. Right. Everything was open. Every door was open.
She moved in that very night. A day and a half later, they had an unofficial wedding ceremony. Day and a half later, yeah. We wrote a paper between us and God that said that we were, you know, this is it.
Seven months later, they made it official. An actual marriage license. And she was, for the young Eckhart, a soulmate, and in some ways a savior, because he'd been lost. You went off the rails a bit.
I got involved with somebody, loaned a kid some money, and got a little close to what he was doing. And I was arrested for conspiracy to possess and distribute cocaine. And pled guilty. He spent four and a half months in prison then, which in retrospect, he said, wasn't such a bad thing, really.
I became a vegetarian the day I walked in. I walked in weighing 220 pounds, walked out weighing 160. Just changed my life. I read a lot of Herman Hesse and Siddhartha.
Just opened my... You're one of those guys who actually got scared straight in a good way by this. Well, I don't want to say scared. I just looked at it and I said, this is not me.
What am I doing? So I said, I've got to make a change. And lo and behold, there was Tony. She was orphaned at 16.
Became a free spirit, a wanderer. This is a person that went out west and lived in a small house without running water. And, I mean, she was just an adventurer. This is Tony's friend, Linda Armstrong, with Tony and Bob's friend.
How would you describe Bob? Hippie. Very passive. Easygoing.
Tony was more the standing up, you know, saying whatever she was thinking. Here's what they were like, said Linda. Here's the sort of thing they did. They went to Hawaii and I said, oh, that must have been wonderful.
She said, until they realized that they spent all their money getting to Hawaii and had no way of getting back. So they lived on the beach. That's the kind of person she was just ready for anything. They decided that the ancient practice of female name shifting, woman taking the husband's name, just wasn't appropriate anymore.
Not for them, anyway. She just wanted something that was ours. So we sat down and we made heart out of Eckhart and we made song out of Soren. And we put heart and song together and we were Bob and Tony Hartsong.
Heart song? Yes, that's what they decided to be. And they even went to court and made it official. The son, Elijah, was born.
Then another, Jacob. They settled in Florida, discovered that for all their hippie notions, they were natural entrepreneurs. They started a business promoting tofu. Tony wrote and designed a tofu cookbook.
Bob discovered a talent for high-end landscaping, which evolved into a business creating expensive pool and waterfall installations throughout southern Florida. Linda Armstrong became their accountant. I've got a lot of couples that have businesses together and they do raise their voices. But that's something Bob and Tony never did.
Bob always kissed Tony before he left. He never, ever forgot to kiss Tony goodbye. And in the years and decades that passed, said Bob, they retained somehow the soul of the hippie couple they once had been. If you can give me the sort of state of your marriage, the state of your life in 2000.
It was fabulous at that time. I mean, I often said I live in nirvana. And then it was September 26, 2000. Bob got up at the usual time, went to work in the usual way.
A pool installation in Delray Beach about 40 minutes from their home in Jupiter. Tony went to the grocery store and then to the bank. They had arranged to meet around 3 p.m. at a Delray auto dealership.
They were buying a car. Bob was there at 3. No Tony. He called.
No answer. I'm starting to get a little worried. Why were you concerned about not being able to reach her on the phone? Because we talked all the time.
It was 5 p.m. when Bob Hartzong parked outside his house and walked past the carefully landscaped greenery to his side door. And that was the moment imprinted now on his brain. There she was.
And I find her laying on the transom of the door. And I look and I'm like, I'm like in shock. Bob and Tony Hartzong were flower children once. Free spirits.
Two souls locked in eternal embrace. And then in parenthood. And then in business. And then one September day in 2000, Bob came home to find his wife's cold body crumpled on the floor at the side entrance to their fine suburban home.
She was covered in blood. She'd been brutally beaten, particularly around those eyes of hers. The eyes that had so captivated young Bob Eckhart at the entrance to that mansion more than 26 years earlier. When I lifted her up and I saw what somebody had done to her face, my whole world just shattered.
I was just completely lost. Their son Jake arrived home from school. He could sense as he walked from the bus stop that something was awfully wrong. I saw my dad like wailing his arms in the driveway and stuff.
Kind of sticks in your mind, doesn't it? Yeah, I'll probably forever remember that. It's like branded to my brain, I suppose. Police swarmed the area.
They videotaped the bloody crime scene searching for clues. They could see right away that Tony Hartzong, the strong woman, had fought valiantly for her life. Sergeant John Van Houten, though he wasn't there that day, would eventually become one of the investigators. He read the reports, though.
And here's what they said. It was a frontal, brutal attack, vicious rage. And you can see after she's beaten and she's laying on the floor there, there's blood on the bottom of her foot because she's still trying to get up. And then she's stabbed seven times in the neck and she falls inside the doorway right there.
That much was obvious. The rest less so. No matter how thoroughly he devoured the initial reports and happened to find no evidence at all for any kind of motive behind something so unspeakably vicious. There's nothing missing of jewelry or value from the house.
There's no burglary. Nobody broke in. The front door was locked. Any evidence at all of sexual assault?
No evidence of a sexual assault. Now, generally speaking, the grisly work of a crime scene investigator, while very difficult, is fairly straightforward. Collect every speck of available evidence. And then, more often than not, especially if no other motive is apparent, draw a line from the victim to someone very close.
She laid right here. But that someone was freely answering questions from television reporters. She fell on the other side of the wall right there that her body lay around. She was half in and half out.
And perhaps more pointed ones from police. People are going to think that you did it. You know, it's just very typical. They asked about their relationship.
They asked if we had any girlfriends or boyfriends or do we have any monetary problems. And they asked, have you had any physical confrontations with your wife? And the answers were? No.
The idea of hitting my wife and doing something like that is just way out past the kind of being that I would even consider being. You know, I just don't have that kind of person in me. Still, at that moment, the police had to take a very close look at Robert Hartsong. So they had him take off his shirt.
They looked at his body very carefully, up and down. They looked for bruises or cuts that would indicate defensive wounds. And not a scratch on Bob. Though you'd think there would be if Tony had been fighting back.
Chaos in a front hall indicated Tony had valiantly fought for her life. The chair was turned over by the front door and a toenail was by the front door. And there was a swipe of blood on that deadbolt, which means that she was trying to get out that front door at one point. She finally died trying to escape through a side door.
But of course, Bob had to be there if indeed he killed his wife. And it appeared he was nowhere near. He had an alibi. Tony had been murdered sometime early to mid-afternoon.
But Bob's employees told police he was there with them, a 40-minute drive away, till after 2.30. And then at three, he was at that Delray car dealer's. And besides, some of the evidence at the crime scene seemed to indicate somebody else was there. Was that somebody the murderer Isn't that the normal procedure to take a picture?
For myself, for senior detectives, yes. For someone learning, he probably didn't know. But those mistakes are, they're real mistakes. They can last for a long time.
That's right. And in this case... That mistake is not good. All that happened before Van Houten inherited the case.
He just had to live with it. And with the fact that in the months after Tony's murder, the investigation went pretty much nowhere. And then a break, or what seemed like a break. In January of 2001, that drifter turned up in California.
A man by the name of Ronald Gagno. They took him in, asked him the appropriate questions. And what was your sense of the likelihood that he may have been culpable here? Not at all.
What made you so convinced of that? When you beat someone like that, there's a reason. If you're a robber, you're going to do that. You're going to take something.
Nobody took anything. And as for those mysterious hairs found on Tony's body, none of them matched the drifter. Nor did the bloody boot prints. They let him go.
Police moved on after that. And Bob? Well, everybody deals with grief in his or her own way. Bob mourned deeply.
But he also had two sons to care for and a life to live. Some of his friends were a little surprised when, after two years, he got serious with a woman he met online, Susie Goldstein. I asked my son, Jake, whether he minded. And I asked Tony's best friend, who was Linda Armstrong, whether she thought it was appropriate.
Was it appropriate, do you think, to have a relationship that's an entry? Well, what is appropriate in having a relationship and trying to balance your life back out? You've got a vacuum in your life and you're trying to find balance again. Susie was bowled over.
Bob seemed like just the right sort of guy for her, a soulmate. This guy has got a heart of gold. He wants what you want for you. And in fact, he told Susie all about Tony.
And about the suspicion that attached to him after the murder. Susie decided to be prudent. She checked out his story with police. And here's what they told her.
You know, when they said, no, he's been exonerated. And once he gets to know Bob, you know, there was no way. Three years after Tony's death, Bob and Susie were married. Tony became a cherished memory, represented by a small shrine erected in the Hartsong's meditation room.
And everybody thought that was the end of the story. Another three years went by. And then it was 2006. And suddenly, the Hartsong case was red hot again.
We got the federal grant. It was the review for DNA. With today's technologies compared to 2000, it's a big difference. Bob Hartsong, of course, had long since remarried and moved on with his life.
It was August 2006 when Detective Van Houten called. He said on the phone, we found some new evidence in this case. We'd like you to come down and talk with us. What did you think when you heard that?
I was excited. Finally, they're going to find out what happened. Yeah, finally, there was a break in the case. A break?
Well, yes, just not the one he'd hoped for. I said, Mr. Hartsong, I'll be back in two weeks with a warrant for your arrest. In September 2000, the investigation of Tony Hartsong's murder sputtered and died.
There was evidence collected on and around her brutalized body, but it proved nothing. But by August 2006, that very same evidence began to speak. And Bob Hartsong was among the first to find out what it said. They showed me the blood under the thumbnail.
Blood under her thumbnail. Yeah, I said it was my blood. They found something under Tony's fingernails back in 2000. Hard to know what it was then.
Now, six years later, advanced DNA testing could identify that something as blood, Bob's blood. What was that doing there? It was asked right from the beginning, was there a fight, an altercation? Was he bleeding any time during the day?
Did he bleed during work? Did he cut himself? Everything was negative. No, I wasn't bleeding that day.
And then I asked him, I said, well, then how would your blood get under her left thumb? Why would he answer that question? His answer to that was, it's not my blood. The DNA, the police told Bob, doesn't lie.
And in this case, it seemed to confirm the detective's suspicion. It was not some intruder who struggled with Tony that dreadful day. It was Bob. And the investigators worried away at some other bits of the story, too.
One thing in particular. Nobody ever found the murder weapon, the knife that killed Tony. A whole set of kitchen knives within easy reach on a counter was untouched. But there was a missing knife.
In fact, the knife was the only thing missing from the house after the murder. It was Bob and Tony's favorite tofu knife. And it always kept it out of sight in a drawer, said then DA Barbara Burns. Why would a stranger with all these knives in view and easy reach start looking in a drawer for a knife to use to kill Tony Hartsong?
The DA also found it suspicious that Bob seemed to know a little too much about the state of his wife's clothing after the attack. Although she had not been sexually assaulted, her thong underwear had been awkwardly pulled low in the back. The actual position of the underwear had not been known to the investigators or the detective until the autopsy. Yet when the detective went back the next morning, Mr.
Hartsong described to the detective at that time that the quote mysterious assailant must have come into the house and startled her while she was in the bathroom. And she must have pulled her shorts up without pulling her underwear up. Maybe he'd heard from somebody that they appeared to be pulled down and was offering an explanation. It was too coincidental and too ironic to be able to explain all that away.
Still, why would a man as devoted as Bob Hartsong, a mild mannered man at that, attack the love of his life? DA Burns poked around in Tony's diary. Was this relationship really so idyllic? In her journal, in her own writing, she does make a statement.
There's not enough to leave, but there's not enough to stay. Now, what does that mean? There's not enough love lost to leave. There's not enough love to stay.
There are other things in the journal, too, where she talks about he's not as loving or he's not showing her and the kids as much attention. It's all about work, work, work. But is even the best marriage free of all dissatisfaction? In your relationships, don't you ever have a day that you struggle with it?
Can I think of a single one? Oh, yeah. OK. We all have this.
We go through this. If you don't, is this a reason to be accused of killing your wife? One of the last things that she wrote in her diary, things that I'm grateful for. And she has a list.
And Bob is on the list. He's all right, said the friend Linda Armstrong. It wasn't just marriage to Bob that troubled Tony. Tony was turning 50.
Tony had had thyroid cancer. It wasn't necessarily Bob. It wasn't necessarily the business. It was just everything at one time hitting her.
Midlife angst? Or as investigators have now come to believe, a confrontation over the family business. Another investigator spoke to me and said that he was going broke and he was looking to get a partner in his business because he was financially strapped. And in fact, it was no secret.
Tony had not been totally happy about the proposed partnership, but so upset she fought with Bob? Linda Armstrong didn't think so. She wasn't 100% thrilled to death about it, but she didn't disagree about it. But now police put together a theory that on September 26, 2000, Bob Hartsong left his job site in Delray Beach in the early afternoon, went home, argued with Tony, in a moment of uncontrolled rage, stabbed her to death with their favorite knife.
Then desperate for an alibi, he drove back to Delray to the car dealership before driving home again at 5, discovering Tony's battered body and calling 911. All carefully thought out, decided the prosecutor. A little too carefully. Whether it's as a prosecutor or as a detective and investigator, you start understanding that people who don't just answer the question, but feel a need to explain that question, generally have something to hide.
Bob Hartsong was arrested on September 26, 2006, exactly six years to the day of his wife's murder. He was carted off to jail, where he stayed, incarcerated for almost two years waiting to go on trial for his life. The trial, in which the state would claim that this once soft-spoken old hippie suddenly and inexplicably snapped, killed the love of his life, and has covered it up ever since. It's a three-minute murder.
I lost my temper, and that's what happened. Except after he beat her, he realized, oh boy, I really messed up now. No one should want to get back up, he said. He had to kill her.
He was a young Marine. She didn't care about convention. They made a life together. Then one night, the Marine died.
And then the death investigation took a wild, unexpected, and utterly bizarre turn. I'm Josh Mankiewicz, and this is Trace of Suspicion, an all-new podcast from Dateline. Listen to all episodes of Trace of for the brutal crime. How would she prove it?
With Bob's cellmate, a jailhouse snitch. Did he discuss with you the status of his marriage on or about the time of his wife's murder? Yes, he said it was not going well. His wife thought that there were money issues that he didn't see.
He wanted to bring a business partner in and his wife said, no, it's not going to happen. And there was infidelity, actually on both sides. Infidelity in the perfect relationship? Well, in fact, Bob did claim that Tony had an unfaithful interlude 15 years earlier and that he had entertained the idea of an affair with someone else, but that's all it had been, a fantasy.
But it was more than that, said the jailhouse informant. Just before the murder, he told the jurors, Bob Hartsong asked his wife for a divorce. Though Bob denied the allegation, the informant held fast to his story. She says, no, no divorce over my dead body, you're not going to get a divorce.
And he said he got so upset, he said he wished he was dead three times. He said, I wish I was dead. I wish I was dead. I wish I was dead.
And how ironic, a week or 10 days later, she was dead. It's a hell of a distance between driving around your truck and saying, I wish I were dead, to taking a knife and stabbing your wife's eyes out. That's not the same thing at all. It takes quite a rage.
It takes quite a rage. Most often, the most violent of all crimes and all killings are domestic-related. And some of them have no history of violence. Could a jailhouse informant though be trusted?
Some jurors might not think so. But what if the prosecutor could put Bob Hartsong at the crime scene at the very time of the murder? State may call the next witness, Carol Parkman. Now this would be quite a surprise.
The one witness of whom Bob Hartsong might quite properly be terrified. Wow, that's blinding. For years, Bob Hartsong had told his accusers he could not possibly have killed his wife because he wasn't home. He was miles and miles away when his wife was murdered.
And then along came a next door neighbor by the name of Carol Parkman who said she knew exactly where Bob was just around the time his wife was killed. There was arguing going on at the Hartsongs at that time. How is it that you knew that it was Mr. and Mrs.
Hartsong that were doing the arguing? Their voices. Do you know approximately what time you heard that arguing? It was between 12 and 1.
A heated argument not long before the murder? Finally, an answer. Or was it? Back in 2000, Carol Parkman denied hearing anything at all from the Hartsongs' house.
Could a jury believe a completely different story six years later? Why did she come forward so much later? Her explanation was that only after his arrest did she feel comfortable. Hartsong, she said, terrified her.
I was scared to death to be here to begin with. But she wasn't afraid now. Now that the evidence would clear away all doubt and put the man in prison for the rest of his life. Maybe.
This case is about paradise and love lost. Unless the defense could tear the story down. It was a brutal murder. You'll see that.
The bottom line is this. Mr. Hartsong wasn't there. He wasn't?
Do you recognize this? Well, obviously, defense attorney Maxwell would have to do something to impeach that nosy neighbor. And what do you know? A check of the record revealed that Mrs.
Parkman had told a number of stories about what she did or did not hear that afternoon. There was one version of her story after Hartsong's arrest in 2006 where she admitted hearing something. You basically said that you heard voices, but you could not identify anyone. You told him that, didn't you?
Yes. As I said, I did not open up to those voices until I spoke to the state attorney. And then finally in 2007, the last version. I ask you the question, you can't tell us that it was Tony Hartsong that you heard arguing then.
And your answer was, no, I can't. Correct? That's correct. And by the same token, can you tell us for a fact that it was Robert Hartsong that you heard talking?
And your answer was, no, I can't. Correct? That's correct. So, how reliable was Mrs.
Parkman? Now, ma'am, you have some hearing loss in one of your ears, correct? That's correct. Did the neighbor really hear something or not?
But in the unlikely event that she did, said the defense, it would not have been Bob attacking Tony. Why? The defense called the doctor who treated Bob for a debilitating shoulder injury. Would he be able to punch out with any type of strength?
It would affect that. He certainly would be able to punch, push out, but it would be much weaker than normal. Even if he had mustered the strength to battle his wife, wouldn't he have sustained some physical wound from the struggle with her? All testimony you get in court today will be...
The family friend, Linda Armstrong, testified to what she saw when Bob Hartsong had dinner with her family hours after the murder. Did you see any injuries on Mr. Hartsong's face? There were none.
Then, said the defense, there was that apparently sloppy crime scene investigation. Bloody footprints that led toward the woods in the back. Woods where further evidence could have been found. Did you put crime scene tape across the entryway of the threat?
I believe so, yes. Did you put any in the back? No, I didn't. They weren't really getting along.
Still, there was that prison snitch, the man who told the jury that Bob admitted his marriage was in crisis. That Tony was enraged about Bob's plan to take on a business partner. The defense called the would-be partner, who did admit the Hartsongs argued about the deal, but that wasn't all, he said. After you spoke of Mr.
and Mrs. Hartsong bumping heads, what was the rest of your paragraph? My answer was I wish I had half the relationship with my wife that they have. I wish you could see the look in their faces when they saw each other.
It was, I mean, lit up. No, said defense attorney Maxwell, the killer must have been someone else. And he offered the jury one more piece of evidence found at the autopsy inside Tony Hartsong's underwear. We have what the lab describes as a black inch hair.
We have a brown slash blonde beard hair. Two different kinds of hairs. That's bizarre. It is.
Mrs. Hartsong, we know that she was a bird dies about 9 o'clock in the morning of the murder. And so the state argues she was trying on clothing and therefore that's how the hair ended up in her pubic hair area. I'm sorry, but I don't know any woman present on this earth who's gonna try clothing on and not have panties on.
Was it enough to acquit? He pleaded with the jury. Give Mr. Hartsong his freedom back.
Find him not guilty because in fact he is not guilty. Thank you. Side of the neck. But for prosecutor Burns, this was more than just one more cold case brought back to life.
About this one, she said she was sure. The evidence is there. Conviction. That's.
There's no telling is what a jury will decide to do in an hour or a day or a week. In Bob Hartsong's case, it was just three hours. He stood at the defense table. State of Florida versus Robert Ben Hartsong.
Defendant. Waited. Verdict. We the jury find as follows.
We find the defendant not guilty. So say we all this 10th day of October. Not guilty. All that new DNA technology.
All the evidence. The investigators and prosecutors certainty did not amount to proof. All I'm gonna say to you is I'm free as I should be. I didn't do it.
I never could have done that to anybody. It's impossible for the kind of person that I am. And Bob Hartsong walked out of the courtroom and into the arms of the second love of his life and felt almost like a free man. Getting on not guilty wasn't quite enough.
Put yourself in my shoes. You knowing that yourself, you're not guilty, but knowing that there's probably a good 20, 25% of the people that have been exposed to this trial and think that you're guilty. Detective Sergeant John Van Houten was one of them. Here you have a case where a guy you believe is guilty of murder and he's going on with his life.
And I suppose there's a cloud over his head. I can't tell you how it comes around and comes around. These people that beat me, I beat it. I beat it.
You beat it. And a year later they were hit by a car and they ended up dead. And that's the end of God. And that's how I justify when this happens.
But in the eyes of the law, Bob Hartsong did not kill his wife and should pay no price at all. But pay he has certainly done. In practical terms, the cost of the Hartsong family has been in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, not to mention imprisonment while waiting for trial. He lost his career, his business, his time and emotionally.
Well, he is a spiritual man, he says. I might have my moments of bitterness, but I come out of it very quickly. I spend a good time doing what I do. Call it a grateful meditation.
It's a little hippie in your life,