this girl walked by me, and she said, goodbye. and at that moment, i said, well, how can you say goodbye to me? you never said hello. reporter: sure they argued, toby says, but the birth of baby brittany brought them closer together. did you think you had a future together? oh, yes. we planned on getting married. that s what our goal was. so, you were going to give it a shot? oh, yeah. reporter: that night, toby says, the only reason he wasn t with dana at the south side roxy is because he d come home after a hard day at work. he was beat. as dana went to go away to go to the party and everything, she woke me up and told me, i love you. and that was the last thing i ever heard from her. reporter: it was a touching tale, but dana s mother didn t buy it. she asked toby to leave the hospital in those final, awful days, sure that he was involved in dana s death. sister deb didn t know what to think. the only thing she was certain
nexgard. the vet s #1 choice. reporter: brittany stork s world was spinning. the 13-year-old believed all the adults in her life were lying to her. had been lying to her for years. i was just so mad at everybody. it was just, leave me alone. and you can t tell me what to do. you know, you lied to me. reporter: a tragic car accident. that s what brittany had been told about her mom s death, but the newspaper articles she d unearthed hinted at something far more suspicious. brittany made a copy of them and confronted her dad, toby. he d been in an on-again, off-again relationship with her mom, dana, at the time of her death. and i can t remember what i wrote on it, but i know that it wasn t a very nice message. what s up with this basically? yeah, i think i actually told him i hated him. did he say, okay, you re old enough now, i can tell you unh-uh. a more complete story ? unh-uh.
how did you say goodbye to her? that was so absolutely horrible, it was horrible. once they took the ventilator off, probably less than three minutes and she was dead. it was horrible. reporter: deb says her family was shattered. you never heal from this ever. ever. you grieve and you re angry. and then you grieve, but you never get over it. reporter: and with the grief came the rumblings of suspicion. no one believed dana had been killed in an accident, deb says. and some people in the family openly wondered whether dana s boyfriend, toby, father to baby brittany, might have hurt dana. the relationship was a rocky one. it was kind of like a a can t live with you, can t live without you type of relationship. reporter: toby certainly caught the wary eye of detective bratton. the boyfriend refused to talk to him in the hospital waiting room. he learned i was a detective. i ain t talkin to you. i don t need to talk to you. he started walking away from me.
never mattered. and if she s kicking over this rock anew again, you know, there you were gonna be with the bull s-eye again, right? i got another bull s-eye on my back. reporter: when the investigator cracked open the thin case file. this is what it told him where dana s body had been found. the file also told him who found her that young man who d been driving by in his car. but just as interesting was where dana had been partying that night that nightclub on the seamier side of town. so, what was that place all about? it was very typical stereotypical of the early 80s in a lotta the nightclubs a lotta music, a lotta lights, lotta people. reporter: and a hotspot well-known to the city vice unit, according to detective bratton. toby had a theory about the club he shared with police. dana, he said, had gotten mixed up in something and was scared. dana actually told me that somethin was gonna happen to her there were dark business going on at this nightclub. d
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 stories, you know, he couldn t cope with it. reporter: it s been 30 plus years, toby. you still miss her? tremendously. she