Post Mortem | What the Cameras Saw

Welcome back to Postmortem. I'm 48 hours correspondent Natalie Morales, and today I am trading places with your host 48 hours correspondent Ann Marie Green to discuss her report on the 2022 murder of Savannah Tolbert. Ann Marie, thanks so much for joining us today. Well, hello, it's good to be here on this side of the microphone. You know, Natalie, we're seeing sort of more and more cases like this where there's just a huge amount of video evidence. In this case, of course, there's footage of David's multiple police interviews, as well as surveillance footage that captured, you know, the scene around the crime. But as you know, sometimes video evidence can be helpful. Sometimes it can be confusing as well. Yeah. In this case, video from a little bit far away. So it'd make it a little bit of a conundrum for the police, but it still gave a good timeline as to when the murder took place. But we always want to remind you here. As always, if you haven't watched or listened to this episode just yet, what the camera saw as the name of the episode, go check it out now, then come back for our conversation. All right. So on November 15th, 2022, 37 year old Savannah Tolbert visited her husband David at a shop in Huntsville, Alabama, where he was working. And he told her to wait outside while health inspection was being conducted inside the store. Now surveillance cameras captured Savannah, then walking across the parking lot and at about 20 minutes later. So David went outside to meet Savannah. Then according to David, he said he found her in the passenger seat of his Tesla. And it was later determined that she had died from a gunshot wound in the back of her head. Now when investigators first arrived at the scene, it appeared that Savannah had taken her own life with Savannah's right hand curled around the gun. But Savannah's sisters were immediately convinced they knew she hadn't killed herself. So Ann Marie, what made them so sure of that, especially given Savannah's history as you talk about in the episode with mental health struggles. Yeah. Savannah sisters, Holly and April, they felt very strongly that Savannah would not have killed herself. We hear that often from family members, though Natalie, but in this case, Savannah was an outspoken advocate for suicide prevention. Her mother died by suicide when all three of the girls were just children. Savannah had to really step up. She was the oldest. She often posted videos to social media sharing her story, talking about suicide prevention. I want to play a little clip so you can get a sense of who she was and what she was like. Things get heavy and you got to find a healthy way to vent. Like I'm outside. I love the outside. I do like crafting a suck at it, but it's kind of fun. I love spending time with my little family. I'm very fortunate and I am very blessed. And when you get brought down to your knees, it really makes you appreciate what you have. At your lowest of low, you're going to find out what you're made of. And if anybody ever does need me, you know, I am here. If anybody would ever like to discuss thoughts on this, I would love to listen. You know, she knew what she was talking about. You know, she'd already gone through a divorce. Anybody who's gone through a divorce knows it's emotionally pretty challenging. And what you see on the video there when she's posted to social media, that's her. She generally was upbeat, creative, loving. Like she said, she enjoyed crafting lots of crafting videos. She sold some of the bracelets that she made. She also really loved her family. And of course, her daughter Avery. She was co-parenting with her ex-husband, Andy Foster, and Andy and Savannah probably could have written a book on co-parenting. They did this the smartest way you could. Andy told us that they stayed close for Avery's sake. And then even after the divorce, they did something where Avery stayed in the house. And then Andy and Savannah would like trade places going back and forth because they just wanted the most stable environment for Avery. Avery keeps her bedroom and it's really the parents that swap out. Right. But let's talk about the circumstances leading up to her death because in May of 2022, this was about six months before she died. Holly and April, the sisters said that they noticed a real distinct shift in Savannah's demeanor, especially during phone calls. They described her as sort of flighty anxious. She seemed on edge to them. And Savannah actually voluntarily hospitalized herself for her mental health in July of 2022. And then she went back again for a longer stay in September of 2022. And Holly actually was the one who helped check Savannah into the second hospital. And she described her as seeming scared, but she said she didn't seem depressed. So what was she scared of? Did she give any indication to her sisters? I mean, her sisters didn't really know. Holly said that Savannah wasn't really able to explain how she was feeling emotionally. David told the sisters that Savannah was scared of things that didn't make sense. David told the sisters that Savannah did not want to be in the house alone. She thought maybe there's black mold in the house. David said she even thought maybe the house was haunted. The fact is that a lot of what Savannah's sisters know about her mental health. And what we know about it was all filtered through David, not directly from Savannah. Well, when first responders go to the scene and they examine it, they look a little close at it. And they noticed some red flags pretty much right away. I mean, the gun, as we said, was in Savannah's right hand, but the bullet hole was in the middle of the back of her head. So that didn't really add up if she shot herself as David seemed to say she did. And there was also a shell casing that the investigators found in the backseat of the Tesla. So David was brought to the police station. He was questioned as a person of interest. His hands were also at the time tested for gun shot residue or GSR as it's known. And I want to play an extended clip of when they confronted him with those test results. You told me you didn't wash your hands, right? Well, those GSR tests, they pop blue for GSR on your hands. I don't know what GSR does. Gunshot residue. That means that some pop of gases from the gun that if someone fires a gun, it gets on a hand close. And it stays on there until they remove them by some type of washing or whatever. It shows on both your hands. I had a gun in a long time. I'm going to say that right now. Something just had nothing. Something just had nothing happened to you. I hate to tell you that. I have the last time I can't even let it tell you the last time I handled a gun. The problem is you had a gunshot residue on you and there wasn't any on her hands. No, it all. It was a bottle. It was I can touch that gun. Well, it's kind of impossible that she would have shot herself without getting gunshot residue on it. That is highly unlikely. Highly unlikely. That to happen. Watching that clip, you see just how confident David sounds even when he's being confronted with his really incriminating evidence. And you also see how willing he is to just sit down and talk with investigators. That struck me. You know, David is a former corrections officer. So there is a possibility that this appearance of confidence is because he feels while I'm talking to other law enforcement, other officers. This is the way to connect. He has always been described to the people that we spoke to as kind of a confident, talkative kind of guy. This is what Savannah Sisters say. She probably found appealing about him. Holly thinks Savannah fell for him because he knew how to say the right words to her and because she was a lover of this love that he was sort of pouring on to her. So the investigators then turned to friends and family and they learned from David and Savannah's friends that there is another woman named Chelsea Finch. Now they bring her in for an interview and they learn that she and David were having an affair. They also learned that David had given Savannah divorce papers. Savannah hadn't signed them yet. In fact, those divorce papers found inside the Tesla. Now at this point our investigators thinking that this affair with Chelsea is possibly emotive for why David felt he had to kill his wife. I mean, they're looking for the why and the timeline is kind of important here. David said that he gave Savannah the divorce papers the Saturday before she was shot. But he says that she refused to sign them because she wasn't ready. The next day, David told Chelsea that Savannah was moving back in with him after living with her grandparents for a while. Chelsea apparently was upset about Savannah moving back in and she said, look, if she moves back in, we're done. And then on Tuesday, that's when Savannah is shot outside the store. So this is all looking very, very suspicious to investigators. But we should also mention investigators do not believe Kelsey had in need. knowledge, any involvement in Savannah's death. We'll dig into that a little bit more later on in this conversation. But for Chelsea, you know, this was just a relationship that she was hopeful was going to go someplace. And she finds herself in the middle of this murder case. Well, at that point in time, investigators didn't have enough evidence against David Tolbert to arrest him. This was after the first police interview. But they did get a big break when they discover surveillance footage from a pool store. It was called Valley pools. A store that was about a hundred yards from where the Tesla was parked. The footage, though, as we saw in the hour, was far away. It was a little bit grainy, a little pixelated. But how significant did that footage end up becoming for the investigators? I mean, the quality is pretty bad. And as you zoom in, the quality just gets worse. So even though the footage was grainy, investigators said that when they synced it with the security footage from inside the store, you can see Savannah getting into the Tesla. And then 20 minutes later, the footage shows David approaching the car and then returning to the store about 20 seconds later. No one else entered that car. And so that really allowed investigators to eliminate the possibility that anyone besides Savannah and David were in that car during the shooting. So at this point, investigators brought David back in for a second interview. And so suddenly now he has an explanation for this GSR on his hands, right? And he says that he was moving a toy cannon into the trunk of his Tesla that day. But you can tell from the Valley pool surveillance footage, it shows that he did not go near the trunk of the car. So investigators knew he was lying. It was a gruesome discovery off a dirt road in Georgia. Hunters had found a body. Was it immediately clear to you that this woman had been murdered? Yes. But who was this mystery woman in the woods? That looks like Mindy. I'm Aaron Moriarty. And from 48 hours, this is the woman in the woods. I've never wanted to be wrong like this in my whole entire life. Binge, the full series, The Woman in the Woods, wherever you get your podcast. Hi, I'm Tony DeCouple and as anchor of the CBS evening news, I am filled with endless curiosity about our world and our society. Maybe you are too. My new podcast is called Great Question. It's an effort to capture that curiosity and to answer the question you haven't heard a satisfying answer to, or maybe haven't even heard asked. Follow and listen to Great Question with Tony DeCouple wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back. Well, investigators learned that David's Tesla had a feature called Sentry Mode, where a series of cameras can record and can monitor what's happening in a 360 degree view around the vehicle, even when it is not being driven. However, on the day of Savannah's death, he was not using Sentry Mode. So how unusual was this? How unusual was it? Very. According to investigators, David Tolbert was an ardent user of Sentry Mode. According to Savannah's sister April, he loved his Tesla had every fancy bell and whistle that he could get on it. And according to one of David's employees, he was always saying that people should have Sentry Mode on all the time. Investigators, Jeff Criter pointed out that David had all of these features, but he was choosing not to use any of them on one particular day. I had a test library. I know you have one. I learned so much about this because I was not aware of Sentry Mode. Do you use Sentry Mode on your Tesla? I've never used it. I've tried it out before. And honestly, it just burns through the battery. The video that you get, I get to see how often my neighbors are walking their dog. Look, I don't need this video. I don't really use it. So as a result, I didn't really know a lot about it before doing this story kind of like you. And that's why we spoke to Rich Benoit. He's an electric vehicle specialist. He is the host of the show Rich Rebills, which you can watch on YouTube. Super popular. And he knows a lot about these cars. And just sort of as a side note, we go to his garage, right? And I was thinking, geez, for a guy who's really into cars, there's like a handful of cars here. Then he tells me how he bought like plots of land way out in the country. So we can store all the cars that he gets. He loves the novelty of interesting cars. One of the cars I found the most interesting in there though, Natalie was a Tesla that had been converted to run on gas. Why? Why not? Interesting. But what did Rich tell you about Sentry mode? Yeah, he showed us how it detects motion all around the car and then records it key locally on a USB drive. Tesla vehicles collect a lot of information. Some of it is stored in a cloud, but this video from Sentry mode is not. It has to be stored on a drive. David's explanation to investigators was that while he does normally use Sentry mode on the day of Savannah's death, he didn't have a memory card in the car to keep any data on there. So if David had been using it that day, it would have definitely clearly captured him entering the car. So in this case, the Tesla didn't end up giving investigators very much in the way of any video. But we do have results that came back from the medical examiner and she determined that there was no imprint from the gun's muzzle on Savannah's head estimating that the gun had to then been fired about three to four feet away. And again, there was no gunshot residue or GSR found on Savannah's hands. So now the medical examiner's autopsy conclusively says that Savannah died from a gunshot wound to her head and her manner of death was listed as a homicide. So on December 9th of 2022, this was less than a month after Savannah's death. David was then brought back to the police station for a third interview. And while we're investigators really hoping to get from him, this third time that they weren't able to get from the previous two times that they talked with him. Yeah, well, this interview was the shortest of the three investigators asked him a few questions about that toy cannon and what he did when he saw Savannah dead in his car. But the main purpose of this interview was to tell him that he was under arrest for Capitol murder. His demeanor was calm as you saw in that video. When they told him he was under arrest, he seemed slightly more emotional when investigators allowed Chelsea to come in and speak with him. Chelsea had driven him to the police station in his Tesla, the crime scene. And you know, interesting to see the footage of Chelsea, they're talking with him in the interview room. She's comforting him. She says she's going to stick by him and that she believed he didn't do this. He that he didn't kill Savannah. But then we learned that a few months after his arrest, Chelsea breaks up with David. Is that, you know, she changed your mind about his innocence, do we think? We don't know. But it came up a trial that he was seeing another woman behind Chelsea's back. So that might have been a factor. She actually wrote him a break up letter while he was in jail awaiting trial. And she just pours out her heart. And I'll read you just like a little bit from it to give you a sense of probably what really ticked her off. You really are a professional liar. I can't even count how many I've been told makes me wonder how many other lies there are makes me question literally everything now. I mean, I really feel for Chelsea. She's a smart woman. But you know, he lied to her just like he lied to everyone else. Well, David Tolbert went on trial in May of 2025. The prosecution's case centered around that surveillance camera video of the Tesla. And they argued that David shot Savannah in the car before he then just walked right back into the store. Now you mentioned before that the valley pool surveillance footage showed David was only outside the store for about 20 seconds. So did the defense argue that just seemed too short of a timeline in order to be able to carry this plot out to shoot Savannah and then go back into the store so calmly. Yeah, exactly. The defense brought this up at trial. It was 21 seconds from the moment he disappeared from the surveillance cameras inside the store until he comes back from the Tesla to the store's entrance. And then he tells the store owner that he found Savannah dead in his car. Investigators testified and argued that you only need really seconds to shoot somebody. So that was their counter argument to what the defense brought forth. Something that we didn't mention in the hour, but you can certainly see it in the video. As David leaves the store, he's carrying a Yeti style cup. And police found that cup in the holder in the car. So it confirms that he was inside the car in some way. The Yeti style cup sort of trips him up because he lies and says that he sat in the car, but then said that he couldn't remember if he sat in the car. So it looks more like he sat in the car, put the cup down. So besides the surveillance video, what else stood out to you at trial? Chelsea's testimony stood out to me. She testified that David wanted a future with her. But that they were waiting for divorce with Savannah to make their relationship public. She referenced this in the breakup letter, writing that he doesn't even realize how traumatic it was for her to drive in the car where Savannah died. But what was not included in the trial was also interesting. The gunshot residue evidence that we talked a lot about in the hour that showed the GSR on David's hand and not on Savannah's hand. And you think, well, isn't that enough? Basically, you just got to present that. Well, that wasn't admitted. And the reason it was not admitted, according to Ben Givens, he's one of the prosecutors is because GSR evidence is not admissible in court in Alabama as evidence because it's considered an inexact science. So in this case, the gunshot residue is not a smoking gun after all. Well, the defense did not call any witnesses. David Tolbert did not testify on his own behalf. The jury deliberated for all of about three hours before then coming to a verdict. And it would be guilty of capital murder. And David Tolbert was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. Now, even after the verdict, Savannah's family still struggles with her death. And, you know, of course, I thought immediately of their daughter, Avery, and how Savannah's daughter, Avery is doing today. What can you tell us about that, Avery? I mean, from the conversation we had with her, she's doing really well. She is smart. She is articulate that kind of bubbly energy that you see in Savannah's videos. She absolutely embodies. Avery is so driven. She wants to join the astronaut program at NASA one day and she's doing everything to get there. And I don't know if people kind of know, but Huntsville is a space hub. The nickname is Rocket City. That's why there's so many people in the story that have space related jobs. One of the jurors was a literal rocket scientist. Chelsea was an aerospace missiles engineer. And of course, Avery wants to get into that area as well. I asked Avery about where her drive and her determination comes from. I want to play an extended clip from that portion of her interview. I think that drive really did come from my mom. When she wanted something done, it was going to be done. Whether it had to take a few steps to get there or she could do it right now. It was going to happen and it was going to happen the way that she wanted to, whether people liked it or not. And that's you. She's incredibly emotionally mature. And I think a lot of that has to do with the family dynamic. Her dad Andy, he's an amazing dad, stand up guy. She has an incredible relationship with her step mom. Andy has remarried her step mom is like every mom you would ever want. You know, she talked to us about how their house is the house where all the kids come and hang out. And then, of course, good relationship with her aunt's her grandpa's also just a great guy. She has all the support she needs to flourish and grow and be protected despite this terrible thing that has happened. It's good to see her doing so well given all the trauma that she's experienced in her life and at so young as well. But another good episode, Anne Marie, always appreciate being on this side of the camera with you as well. Thank you so much. And you know what, Avery's going to do great things. I'm going to keep an eye on her. Absolutely. Well, if you like this episode, please rate and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.