A Horse Farm Lies at the Center of Bob Dorotik’s Murder
(“Marathon Man,” Forensic Files)
The Forensic Files episode about Bob Dorotik’s murder stands out because the case was so easy to solve.
Police arrested Jane Dorotik just four days after she reported her husband missing.
The couple were warring over their horse farm, and Jane was so impatient to get Bob out of her way that she rushed into a foolish, poorly executed homicide plan.
Good year for someone. A number of YouTube commentators decried Forensic Files for even taking up its bandwidth with such an obvious whodunit.
But 2020 brought a surprise for true-crime viewers and Jane herself: Innocence advocates managed to get her guilty verdict overturned because of advances in DNA technology.
For this week’s post, I looked into the new evidence and ended up finding other intriguing intel about the Dorotiks that Forensic Files didn’t mention. I also checked on the status of her relationship with her daughter — whom Jane’s defense lawyer tried to blame for Bob’s death.
So let’s get going on the recap of “Marathon Man”:
Bucolic bliss. On February 13, 2000, Jane Dorotik notified the sheriff that her husband never returned home after going for a jog on a rainy afternoon.
Jane and Bob lived on a huge horse farm on Bear Valley Heights Road in Valley Center, a rustic area an hour from San Diego.
The couple, who married in 1970 and briefly separated and reunited circa 1999, had three grown children.
Respected RN. Nick worked in construction and was a semi-professional snowboarder. Alex was attending law school. Middle child Claire, 24, still lived at home on Charisma Farms while she was finishing a graduate degree in psychology at San Diego State University and working as a personal trainer.
Their mother brought home a six-figure salary as an executive of operations for area psychiatric hospitals. Earlier in her career as a registered nurse, she worked at UCLA Hospital and later helped found programs to assist teenagers struggling with mental health and substance problems in Tucson.
Bob worked as an engineer at Lockheed at one point, but his professional trajectory was a little uneven.
Mane conflict. Claire and Jane loved horses and kept more than a dozen on the farm, including an Oldenburg named Nimo who shared a special bond with Claire.
Bob resisted when Claire and Jane wanted to increase the amount of family funds spent on the ranch operation — they bought, trained, and resold horses there — but he liked the equine critters well enough.
Unfortunately, he wouldn’t get any more opportunities to ride one. The day after Jane called 911 to report Bob missing, sheriff’s deputy James Blackmon found him dead on Lake Wohlford Road, near his favorite jogging path, at 4:35 a.m.
Sneaks too spiffy. Bob, who was physically fit and ran marathons, had on a T-shirt and dark-red jogging pants. Someone had wrapped a rope around his neck and beaten him about the head.
As mentioned, law officers had plenty to work with from the get-go. Bob’s sneakers lacked any mud, water, or dirt marks, which conflicted with Jane’s story that he had gone for a run. Someone had tied his shoes awkwardly, with the bows askew.
Next to Bob’s body, they saw tire tracks and drag marks.
Some nosebleed. Jane, who apparently considered herself above suspicion, allowed a search of the house right away.
The police found a damp stain tinged with red, which Jane’s sister-in-law said came from a dog who sustained a cut to its dewclaw.
Investigators also discovered blood splatter on the ceiling and the underside of the mattress, which they suspected someone had recently turned over. There was so much blood in the room that it had dripped to the lower floor. Jane would later explain that Bob got a lot of nosebleeds.
Incriminating mark. Also inside the house was some of the same type of rope found around Bob’s throat.
In the bathroom wastebasket, officers found used syringes, one of them with an animal tranquilizer known as acepromazine.
On the outside of the discarded syringe, a lab would find Jane’s fingerprint in Bob’s blood. And his blood was on the needle, too.
The blood in the bedroom belonged to Bob as well.
Auto problem. An exam revealed Bob had died from bruises, fractures, and lacerations to the skull. The lab found flecks of color in his wounds as though someone had hit Bob with a painted object, possibly a hammer. Strangulation had contributed to his death.
The vehicle tracks at the murder scene matched the tires on a white Ford F250 pickup parked in the Dorotiks’ garage. It belonged to Jane.
Inside the 1996 truck, investigators found evidence of the victim’s blood partially cleaned up, not exactly a hallmark of innocence (Bette Lucas, Michael Peterson).
Daughter off-premises. In addition to the lady of the house, police at first suspected ranch hand Leonel Morales and Claire, who were both on Team Jane as far as sinking more cash into the horse farm.
But Claire was visiting a relative when Bob disappeared, and Leonel had an alibi as well.
Jane, on the other hand, “did everything but sign her name to the crime,” narrator Peter Thomas said in one of the all-time greatest Forensic Files quotes.
‘All my sisters with me.’ Authorities arrested Jane on Feb. 17, charged her with murder, and held her on $2 million bail.
Her sisters Bonnie Long and Marilyn Ryan immediately came to her defense.
Jane had a bad back and was still suffering from a hip injury sustained after a drunk driver hit her in 1987, Bonnie pointed out.
“How could she have overpowered her marathon-running husband?” Bonnie told the North County Times. “And even more, sling him over her shoulder and carry him 50 feet across a deck and down a flight of stairs?”
Bail back-and-forth. Other family members, friends, and Jane’s boss also vouched for her good character, prompting a judge to knock her bail down to $1 million so she could go home. With the help of her sisters, Claire, and Nick, she moved herself and her horses off of the farm.
But Superior Court Judge Marguerite Wagner suddenly upped the bail to $3 million, which sent Jane into tears and back to the county jail.
The trial kicked off in May 2001, just a little more than a year after Bob Dorotik died.
Quite a chunk of cash. The prosecution made a case that Jane had injected Bob with acepromazine in his sleep, hit him on the head repeatedly, inadvertently tied his shoes awkwardly when she was dressing him, dragged or carried the body to her truck, and left it on the side of the road. She threw away her bloody clothes and the murder weapon in the trash at a shopping center where friends had seen her around the time of the homicide, the prosecution alleged.
Investigators found evidence Bob was looking for a new job, perhaps in anticipation of a divorce.
Jane earned more than Bob, so a split would mean paying him 40 percent of her income in alimony — which would have curtailed her budget for hay, horseshoes, pitchforks, and the like.
Not made of china. Bob’s buddy Jim Goudge, who Forensic Files viewers might remember as the interviewee with a ton of magnets on his refrigerator, told 48 Hours Monday Mystery that Bob said if anything happened to him, authorities should look at Jane.
And here’s the really devastating part of the case: Jane’s sons testified for the prosecution. Both said their mother was physically strong — Alex noted she’d helped lift a heavy drainage pipe on the farm. Nick said that when he asked Jane how his dad’s blood got on the syringe, she didn’t answer.
As for the tire marks at the murder scene, the prosecution said Jane’s car made them when she dumped the body. (She told 48 Hours that the tracks got there when she went out looking for Bob before notifying authorities he was missing.)
Disharmony in the family. Jane’s lawyer, Kerry Steigerwalt, hit back hard. He lobbied aggressively to get the evidence collected from the house thrown away because of lack of probable cause for a search. The judge said no.
But Steigerwalt had more ammo in store. He claimed Claire Dorotik and ranch hand Leonel Morales killed Bob.
Although Claire and her father shared a love of running marathons, they didn’t get along well overall. Steigerwalt read aloud from a letter Claire wrote to her father. “I must take all precautions to protect myself from you,” it said, also accusing her dad of being vicious and untrustworthy. It mentioned her father’s threat to sell the horses, to whom Claire was emotionally tied.
Shunning the stand. Steigerwalt contended that evidence pointed to Claire’s having purchased the acepromazine. (None was found in Bob’s blood, but it might have been there in an amount too small to test.) He suggested that Claire or someone else other than Jane “went crazy” and “blew up” in the bedroom.
Claire and Leonel invoked their Fifth Amendment right not to testify.
Steigerwalt also argued that police ignored a witness who could have helped exonerate Jane. A woman claimed she saw Bob slouched between two men on the night of the murder.
Gone into OT. After deliberating for four days, the jury found Jane guilty.
But before the sentencing, the judge allowed the defense to present a new witness, Sheri Newton, who said that not far from the murder scene, she saw two strange, scary men in a black truck driving on the wrong side of the road on the night Bob disappeared. She recognized one of them as Leonel Morales.
Prosecutor Bonnie Howard-Regan pointed out that Sheri Newton also said she saw Bob Dorotik that night and described him as 6-feet-tall and more than 200 pounds — when Bob, in fact, stood at 5-foot-9 and weighed 147 pounds.
Clink time. The guilty conviction remained in place. Judge Joan Weber, who noted the possibility that someone had helped Jane dispose of Bob, handed the fallen horsewoman 25 years to life.
Off Jane went to women’s prison, where she spent her time reading, praying, meditating, and working outdoors on a yard crew, according to a TV interview from 2002. She would later say that going behind razor wire was like visiting a new country where you can’t communicate and everyone hates you.
In the meantime, most of the Dorotiks’ horses were sold. Sources vary as to whether the family owned Charisma Farms or merely rented it. Either way, it changed hands and no one from the family lives there now.
Advocates win. But in April 2020, after 20 years of incarceration, something positive happened for Jane. Prison officials gave her temporary leave from the California Institution for Women in Corona because of Covid risks.
Even better, in July 2020, a judge wearing a newsprint-patterned PPE mask overturned Jane’s conviction after Loyola Law School’s Project for the Innocent made a case for new evidence that might exonerate Jane. Her advocates pointed out that the murder scene lacked any of Jane’s DNA and that test results of fluid found in the bedroom were inadequate and misleading.
“Spending almost two decades in prison falsely convicted of killing the man I loved has been incredibly painful,” Jane said upon her release. “I lost literally everything in my life that Bob and I had built together. Thanks to my great legal team at Loyola Law School, I feel like I can finally breathe and I’m able to start thinking about making plans for the future.”
‘They out here saying.‘ A spokeswoman for the innocence project said its team was ecstatic over the new ruling
San Diego County District Attorney Summer Stephan’s office said it would use the latest DNA technology to retest blood evidence from the case.
As far as why Jane allowed Steigerwalt to attempt to pin the murder on her own daughter, Jane said that she trusted her lawyer and that the accusation about Claire was “already out there.”
Partners in crime? After the trial, Claire stated that she planned to stand by her mother. Once released from prison, Jane lived with Claire.
For me, those factors put Jane’s innocence in doubt. If Claire had nothing to do with Bob’s murder, why would she forgive her mother for trying to shift the blame to her? It sounds as though they both conspired to the homicide, then took a chance Jane would be acquitted based on the Claire-did-it defense — but there wouldn’t be enough evidence to convict Claire in the aftermath.
Whatever the truth about Claire, she managed to make a lot of her life after seeing her family torn apart.
Horse sense. She became a marriage and family counselor and is now known as Claire Dorotik-Nana. “As a practicing therapist, I not only found myself facilitating growth through adversity, but became curious about it myself,” she said in an Oxygen interview.
She’s also a published author who’s written about the healing power of her horses. Nimo, the stallion she bonded with when he was just a few hours old, was able to sense Claire’s pain three years later when the murder happened, she wrote.
Claire’s Amazon bio notes that she “has run 39 marathons, three 50-mile races, and nine 100-mile races to honor her father.”
Flanking falsehoods. Her mother, who’s past 70 and appeared meek in an on-camera interview with a regional CBS affiliate, said her experience as a convict has inspired her to work for prison reform.
Jane also told the media outlet that it should be illegal for police to lie while questioning suspects.
She has a point — Forensic Files has covered cases in which police coercion resulted in false confessions — but something tells me Jane was the one doing most of the lying during her interrogation.
You can view the 48 Hours about the case online.
That’s all for this post. Until next time, cheers. — RR
Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube
