PART 1 Amanda Dean: Secrets forever no more
Sheriff Todd Corbin 'didn’t just fail to investigate Amanda’s death—he actively protected her killer'
SANDUSKY — Whatever it is state prosecutors and Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost are hiding in the files of the Amanda Dean homicide investigation isn’t likely to remain secret much longer.
In 2016, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled in Caster v. Columbus that the state cannot keep murder files secret forever. Yet a decade later, the AG’s office is still using the same old playbook to keep the Dean file in the dark—acting as if the law doesn’t apply when the truth is inconvenient.
There’s a federal judge in Toledo, however, who is about to remind them that it does apply, and it matters.
Subpoena power
Caroline Tokar, Amanda’s mother, contends in a federal lawsuit filed in Judge Jack Zouhary’s court that the Huron County Sheriff’s Office didn’t just fail to investigate Amanda’s death—they actively protected her killer. The lawsuit seeks to expose what the family calls a deliberate campaign of misinformation, alleging that Sheriff Todd Corbin and his deputies “repeatedly and recklessly told the Dean family that Amanda Dean was alive and well and staying in a domestic violence shelter.”
By doing so, the suit claims the department “abruptly terminated” the missing person investigation just one day after it began, in July 2017, leaving a family in “perpetual suspense” for five years. Tokar is listed as a plaintiff as are Amanda’s four sons, and her sisters—the people who had to watch from the sidelines while a murderer lived as a free man in their community.
CLIER wall
For years, the state has leaned on a five-letter acronym to keep the public at bay: CLIER. It stands for Confidential Law Enforcement Investigatory Records. It’s the ultimate “Keep Out” sign, designed to protect active investigations. Law enforcement agencies — including Yost’s AG office and the state crime lab — too often improperly use the exemption to hide unflattering information, or worse, denying public records requests.
The Amanda Dean investigation isn’t “active” in any traditional sense. There isn’t any known reason — beyond the AG’s shallow confidentiality claim — to justify the secrecy. Her killer, Fred Reer, is sitting in a prison cell serving 14 years. Under the Caster ruling, once a trial is over, the “investigatory work product” shield evaporates. It’s gone.
Yet, Dave Yost’s office continues to treat these records like state secrets. While Yost’s website proudly banners a commitment to “True Transparency” that light doesn’t seem to reach the dark corners of the Huron County Sheriff’s Office or the files detailing why it took seven years to arrest a murderer.
Here comes the judge
When an individual or a journalist makes a records request, the AG’s office is the referee. They get to decide what you see and what gets hit with the heavy black ink of a redaction pen.
But in the federal civil rights case Tokar v. Corbin, the referee has changed. U.S. District Judge Jack Zouhary has a power no citizen has: The Subpoena.
WATCH: Four sons confront their mother’s killer in court
