Hi Diary FRIENDS!!! OH MY I have been waiting for you to meet Toby Dorr. People always ask me, “What’s the craziest story you’ve ever covered as a reporter?” You would be hard pressed to find a crime more baffling and bizarre and unbelievable than the one involving Toby Dorr back in 2006. At the time, Dorr was a married mother of two, named Toby Young, who’d never had a traffic ticket in her life. She’d started a volunteer program inside of a maximum security prison in Kansas and spent hours inside prison walls, helping inmates train and foster stray dogs.
About a year after the canine prison program started, Toby fell in love with a convicted murderer and smuggled him out of Lansing Prison in a dog crate. I remember thinking, “WHAT?!?!?!?!?” The escape made international headlines. The pair spent two weeks on the run before a dramatic high speed chase brought it all to an end.
But if you look beyond the crime, Toby’s story is actually one of redemption. She was handed a 27 month prison sentence, and now says her time behind bars -as an inmate- saved her life. Toby said to me during this interview, “I have never been closer to anyone in my life than the women I met in prison.”
Toby is now out of prison, happily married and on a mission to help other incarcerated women. She is on a mission to help every broken woman who wakes up behind bars and thinks, “How the hell did this happen?” And she reminds them that “No one is as bad as their biggest mistake…”
-Dana
