night, adkins offered the investigator a brand new detail when confronted with evidence in the case. as you well know, dana s body was exhumed. right. okay, and then they did another autopsy and that led us to believe that she was hit over the head not from falling out of the car. so then that comes to me as asking you now how did she get the trauma on her head, then? from that pole that was there where the mailbox was at where she was leaned up against when the the officer came. he claims that he found her leaning up against a mailbox post. so she not only goes out the door, tumbles in the road. her head presumably hits a mailbox? that s what he says. which could account for the injuries. right. but we knew there was nothing there except for three very large trees kind of spread along the roadway. reporter: investigator kinder finally leveled with the bouncer. russ, with all due respect, i m not buying it. i m going to treat you like a man, cause you re treati
reporter: but there was still no word from the coroner about what, if anything, she had discovered. brittany could only guess. an agonizing wait began. brittany imagined that night over and over in her head. accident. murder. the bouncer. her dad. toby was still a suspect in some people s eyes. and that s who dana s best friend roxy blamed all these years later when brittany gave her a call. i said, what happened to my mom? and she instantly threw out my dad s name. and i said, why would you say that? just because. i said, well, was my dad there with you guys that night? no. well, then why would you say? because i it i just know. reporter: like some people in dana s family, roxy just couldn t shake the idea that toby might have been behind dana s death. and he certainly had an ugly record. he d even served time for assaulting. brittany. they arrested me for domestic
brittany says she began calling the prosecutor s investigator every week like clockwork. and amazingly he started showing some interest in the case. and he d say, you know, nothin new, or you re looking for a killer? right. is he looking for a killer or just trying to find out what happened? i think at that point at first he was just trying to put the pieces together. reporter: it wasn t going to be easy. what brittany didn t know was that detective bratton had done a fair bit back in the day, chasing down leads, trying to make sense of it all, but interview tapes, crime scene photos, evidence most of that was missing. not to beat people up, but what happened to all those boxes, the interviews, the pictures, the measurements it seems like it disappeared, just vanished. to the average person that s probably unnexcusable and why did it happen? it is possible somebody looked at that, looked at the date and thought moldy oldie, huh? we can get rid of that.
so he was out of your life virtually from that point on? yes. reporter: and so brittany grew up motherless, now fatherless. she felt so lost until she decided to take the initiative and get answers to the mystery of her mother s death, no matter what the personal cost. coming up brittany goes right to the top. i basically said i either want someone to investigate what happened to her, or i want her file and i m going to take it somewhere else. with advil s fast relief, you ll ask, what pulled muscle? what headache?
violence. reporter: on your daughter? on my daughter. reporter: but brittany and toby say that incident was overblown. far more important to brittany than toby s past behavior was the fact that he had not once tried to stop her from investigating her mom s death. in fact he d been her champion. i knew the truth, you know. i didn t do this. reporter: brittany believed her dad was innocent. as a grown up, she says she could finally understand what she d failed to see as a child. my dad s had a really bad life. he s had a really tough life. and now that i m older, i see why. i couldn t i mean, i know how hard it is on me and i don t even quite frankly, i don t know her and, you know reporter: he s been in and out of prisons, i don t know what his demons are but he s had a tough time of it. uh-huh. well, i think with everything that happened, my mom was the love of his life. and obviously knowing the background and hearing the