Fingerprints on Coca-Cola Can Help Solve Decades-Old Murder Case By Christine Pelisek

On the morning of Nov. 15, 1984, San Luis Obispo Sheriff’s Office deputies responded to a suspicious camper van parked at a turnout along California’s Pacific Coast Highway. Motorists called dispatchers after noticing blood dripping from the van’s door.

Deputies checked inside the cream-colored van and discovered the body of 41-year-old Dorothy “Toby” Tate lying on the floor.

The waitress from Colorado was traveling around California with her two Australian cattle dogs and had stayed overnight at the San Simeon Creek Campground near the famous Hearst Castle before taking her dogs for a jog along the beach.

Investigators believe she had just finished her jog with her dogs when she was ambushed. “They found sand in between her toes in the autopsy,” San Luis Obispo Sheriff’s Department Cold Case Detective Clinton Cole tells PEOPLE. “We believe they were watching her probably walk on the beach and they either knew or assumed this was her van.”

Cole suspects she was shot in the side of the head through the driver’s side window while she was seated and then dragged to the back of the van where she was later found by the police.

At the crime scene, investigators found a can of Coca-Cola and a trail of blood leading from the camper. It was later determined not to be Tate’s.

Missing from Tate’s van were $400 in cash, her purse, credit cards and her new Nikon camera.

“This was strictly a robbery, burglary motive,” says Cole, pointing out that Tate was not sexually assaulted and was found fully-clothed.

Who killed Tate remained a mystery for more than four decades.

However, on Tuesday, Jan. 20, the San Luis Obispo Sheriff’s Department announced they found Tate’s killers with the help of “modern investigative techniques, including advanced DNA genealogy analysis,” per a San Luis Obispo Sheriff’s Office press release.

According to the sheriff’s office, the blood evidence found at the scene was submitted for genetic genealogy and linked to Steven Richard Hardy, a then-35-year-old Vietnam veteran from Texas. Fingerprints found on the can of Coca-Cola placed a then-35-year-old Charley Sneed at the crime scene, the sheriff’s office said.

Both Hardy and Sneed were friends from New Braunfels, Texas.

“Sneed was known to be a rough guy that liked guns and a kind of a hothead,” says Cole. “Hardy was just more of a transient drifter type who liked to drink beer.”

“Those two were almost always together,” he adds. “If you saw one, you would see the other.”

Cole believes the two men may have traveled to California because Sneed “had gotten in trouble with the law.”

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Shortly after Tate’s killing, the duo returned to Texas where Sneed was charged with kidnapping and sentenced to 40 years in prison.

He was released from prison in 2009 and died five years later in his mid 60s of natural causes in Texas.

Hardy died in a Phoenix veterans hospital in 2003 of natural causes.