The two crime scenes gave little indication, although visitors inside Tushar’s home told detectives they heard intruders asking to know the location and combination of his safe. Investigators from the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office had this granular surveillance video, which recorded what happened on Tushar Street as three shadowy figures entered the neighborhood and headed for his home. A few minutes later, Toussaint appears to be running and then receives a tackle. He was stabbed several times and finally pushed into a BMW stolen by the suspects from his street, before everyone left. Who were these figures and why would they want Tushar Atre dead? According to “48 Hours” collaborator Tracy Smith, it is a mystery that the researchers would spend more than seven months unfolding.
WHAT HAPPENED TO DRIVING AT AN POINT POINT?
Hours after Tushar Atre’s disappearance on October 1, 2019, his pleated Pleasure Point community was on the edge.
Journalist Maria Cid Medina covered the story for the local CBS KPIX station in the Bay Area.
Maria Cid Medina: We started knocking on his neighbors’ doors. . Everyone was terrified. You really saw the fear in people’s eyes when you spoke to them.
Tushar Atre Rachael Emerlye
Who would target a 50-year-old tech savvy cannabis entrepreneur who would return for anyone else? The crime scene gave little evidence.
Tracy Smith: Do you have a missing businessman, a pool of blood, a lost car, what do you think?
Steve Cercone: What I would think… is that… This is a very unusual case, and possibly a very, very serious crime just happened.
Steve Cercone is a former California police chief and “48 Hours” adviser who investigated the case.
Tracy Smith: Was anyone else in the house at the time of his abduction?
Steve Cercone: There were a lot of people in the house.
Tushar Atre’s home in the Pleasure Point area of Santa Cruz, California, is described as a luxurious, affluent surfing community.
Among them one of the Tushar employees who heard a commotion around 3 in the morning
Mary Fulginiti: A Witness ει hears three different voices, one from Tushar and the other from two unknown males.
Lawyer Mary Fulginiti is a former federal prosecutor and also an adviser to 48 Hours.
Mary Fulginiti: He hears Tushar screaming from time to time.
Steve Cercone: Hear the suspects tell him to get off the ground…
Mary Foulginitis: “Put your hands behind your back”. “Where is the safe and what is the combination?”
Steve Cercone: Tushar begs them… “how can we fix this?”
Tracy Smith: Did Tushar know these guys?
Steve Cercone: He… seemed to know these guys.
An employee at Tushar’s home called 911 at 3:34 a.m., half an hour after the perpetrators left Tushar in a white BMW belonging to his girlfriend Rachael Emerlye.
Tracy Smith: So Rachael’s BMW is missing, where is Rachael?
Steve Cercone: Apparently Rachael was back east in … Massachusetts when that happened.
Rachael says she learned of Tushar’s abduction when she was called in by investigators.
Rachael Emerlye: I was trying to figure out what all this meant over the phone. “I was just there. What do you mean? It did not seem to be in danger.”
The researchers learned that Rachael was not just Tushar’s girlfriend, she was also his partner in the cannabis business, which they had started together after they met in 2017.
Rachael Emerlye: I was immediately asked “Where is the potted farm?”
The “flowerpot farm” was 60 acres of open land nestled in the Santa Cruz Mountains, known as the Summit property, where Tushar could legally grow cannabis for research. He planned to make cannabis medicines.
Claire Machado: Who would kidnap him? … Do you know who would take this guy?
Claire Machado, Tushar’s right hand man in his cannabis business, learned the news of Rachael’s disappearance.
Claire Machado: I called his phone. I said “wherever you are, we will find you”.
Rachael Emerlye: I had such hope. Every (crying) second I held on to it, for hours and hours.
About six hours later, in the Santa Cruz Mountains where Tushar owned his cannabis farm, investigators found the missing BMW. Photo of evidence
Around 9:30 that morning – six hours after Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s deputies answered a 911 call from Tushar’s Pleasure Point – investigators located the white BMW 14 miles away on Summit’s property. There was blood on the outside and inside of the vehicle. And 20 to 30 yards away, they found Tushar Atre’s bloodied body.
Steve Cercone: Face down, and his hands were handcuffed to the back with elastic ties… An obvious gunshot wound to the back of the head… He had been stabbed several times. Or they also found five rounds of a 0.223 rifle nearby. … This is an assault rifle.
Tracy Smith: Did it look like an internal job?
Steve Cercone: That… I’m sure went through… the minds of researchers… how would they know where to go? They found him in his house; they took him to his secondary property. That. They knew Mr. Atre.
Nothing about the abduction or murder showed that it was an accident, Cercone says.
Tracy Smith: Should anyone have been around?
Steve Cercone: It seems like he’s definitely someone close to him.
Rachel was on her way back to Santa Cruz when she learned that Toussaint was dead.
Rachael Emerlye: The worst phone call of my life (crying) … When you’re in your car, you can just scream.
But detectives had more questions for Rachael as soon as she arrived in Santa Cruz.
Tracy Smith: Too typical to talk to girlfriend?
Mary Fulginitis: Ah, absolutely.
Rachael Emerlye: I think they wanted to know … “are you happy with this person?”
It was complicated.
Rachael Emerlye: It’s definitely hard to be in a relationship and run a business together.
Rachael Atre and Rachael Emerlye. Rachel Emerly
For the past six months, Rachael and Tushar have been living on opposite shores, while Rachael says she has been working to expand their cannabis business. They focused on convincing the Food and Drug Administration to approve their cannabis product.
Rachael Emerlye: We got to the point where we felt this was the product we were trying to make.
The couple had met two years earlier while she was renting one of his many properties in Santa Cruz.
Rachael Emerlye: He came in and asked, “Do you want to go surfing?” … And the beginner’s fortune, caught a wave… and said, “yes, yes! Amazing, you are amazing.”
And Tushar excited Rachael’s history in the cannabis world, where her know-how was about agriculture and business development.
Rachael Emerlye: It just seemed natural that he would choose my mind for my industry.
They eventually moved together to his multi-million dollar seaside home. And Rachael says she invested all of her fortune – about $ 300,000 – in their new cannabis business.
Rachael Emerlye: Tushar helped my mom through. When you see this side of someone, you can be sure that he loves you.
But mixing love and business involved some risks. Rachael’s contributions to the business were not documented and this, says Claire, became a source of friction in the relationship.
Claire Machado: He did not have anything to show the level of investment and he recognized that with me.
And Claire says having informal deals was not uncommon for Tushar.
Claire Machado: He played hard and fast and he was not very good at documenting it in writing.
However, Claire and Rachael say that Tushar was working to add Rachael’s name to the business and that things were going well.
Rachael Emerlye: Tushar always intended for us to have written agreements. He was very kind to me in business.
Claire Machado: Rachael was still in love with him, she was not so angry. She wanted to solve it with him.
Now both women were trying to figure out why anyone would want Tushar dead.
Claire Machado: Everyone loved Tushar… Everyone loved Tushar.
Claire Machado: Rachael told me… that Tushar was receiving threatening phone calls.
Steve Cercone: That was a whodunit from the beginning.
Maria Cid Medina: There were no immediate suspects…. you have the feeling that the investigators had no evidence in this case.
But there was a basic – granular surveillance video with three figures approaching Toussaint’s house.
LONG LIST OF POSSIBLE SUSPECTS
Maria Cid Medina: What set the tone for this story is that there were many rumors… We had to look for what was true and what rumors. While investigators did not name any suspects in Tushar’s case, rumors were still circulating about Rachael. Maria Cid Medina: That was our first question, was Rachael involved in his murder? Claire Machado: I’m so sorry for Rachael. She had to mourn… as well as defend herself. MARIA MEDINA KPIX NEWS JOURNALISM: Investigators did not say what the suspects had to do with Atre. They said, however, that his girlfriend is not a suspect. Tracy Smith: Well, it was …
