48 Hours - Peace, Love and Murder

In September 2000, Toni Heartsong was killed her in Florida home. Her husband, Bob, was initially eliminated as a suspect, but in 2006, new DNA technology revealed his DNA was found in Toni's hand and his blood under her thumb. “48 Hours" Correspondent Harold Dow reports. This classic "48 Hours" episode last aired on 8/15/2009. Watch all-new episodes of “48 Hours” on Saturdays, and stream on demand on Paramount+.

Duration: 41m
Broadcast on: 24 Dec 2025
Audio Format: other

I am a peaceful person. Meditation is a gift, it's about being right there in the now. Helping everything else around you and come into yourself. Meditation helped me deal with Tony's death. Tony was a beautiful woman, smiled a lot, laughed, just full of life. Tony was smart, strong, physically and emotionally. She was personality plus. I remember my wife from me here in the very first day with her eyes. I had seen her eyes for all of my life. I think I have always been in love with her. I came home five o'clock, I went around to the front door, the front door was locked. Then I walked around to the side. The crime scene in my 30 years of law enforcement was one of the bloodiest I had ever reviewed. There was excessive violence to the victim. I must say this case consumed me. It was your typical housewife that was so viciously and brutally murdered right in her home. This case needed to be solved. My fear is a guy like this could be doing it again. Somebody did it, she can kill herself. He'd have to be the most horrible monster in the whole universe to do that. Bob's accurate, a monster did commit this crime. I had a handful of suspects in this case. They were eliminated one by one. The person left at the end came about being Bob Hart's song. I know I'm innocent. Most people didn't know me know that I'm innocent. Peace, love and murder, tonight's 48 hours mystery. An incredibly beautiful little girl knocked in my door. Her name was Tony and we talked for, it must have been six or seven hours. Bob Eckhart and Tony Soren began their whirlwind courtship when she was just 23. He was 28. We could connect completely without any, no walls, no shields, no nothing went up. Everything was just magic. It was the uninhibited early 70s. Within 48 hours of meeting, the two young lovers eloped. That's me and her, that was the wedding day, obviously hippies. And they had a hippie wedding. This was my rabbi. I was always amazed that I was a married to her. She was my lover, my wife, my sister. My mother, everything rolled into one. Bob and Tony were so entwined, they even created their own lyrical last name. Hart's song, by fusing their two given names. We took the heart out of Eckhart and the song out of Soren, and we made Hart's song. We had blended together and become one person. Tony had lost both her parents as a teenager and was raised as a young adult by her older brother, Barry Soren. I did everything I could for her, and our relationship was tight enough that she wasn't spun out about the terrible events, the terrible way her life started.

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