The alleged arson of a family home. Allegations of a murder plot involving an ex-husband’s new wife. The fatal shooting of a fiancé in self-defense.
None of those events is central to the question of whether Sarah Hartsfield killed her most recent husband with a fatal dose of insulin in 2023. But at her murder trial in Texas’ Chambers County, east of Houston, prosecutors have focused almost as much on allegations from Sarah Hartsfield’s past as they have on the death of Joseph Hartsfield, 46.
In the week since the proceedings began, a series of witnesses have been called to the stand to recount a relationship history marked by death and conflict.
“You can just look at her overall history and you can tell that there’s a very evil side to her,” Chambers County Sheriff Brian Hawthorne told reporters outside the courthouse last week.
Sarah Hartsfield, a former Army sergeant, has denied that she killed Joseph Hartsfield, her fifth husband, or that she asked her fourth husband to kill her third husband’s new partner. She has described the 2018 shooting of her fiancé as self-defense, and she denied that she played a role in a fire that destroyed the Missouri home that used to belong to her grandmother.
More on Sarah Hartsfield
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- Murder suspect’s son has been waiting for his mom’s arrest his whole life
- Hartsfield fatally shot her fiancé in 2018
- Allegations of murder plot scared family of Sarah Hartsfield’s husband, sister testifies
But her brother, Cody Smith, testified that he told her he believed she’d torched the house.
He testified last week that he most likely hadn’t seen his sister in more than a decade — since the death of their grandmother in 2014. The siblings had been cleaning out her Missouri home, which the grandmother left to Smith, and he testified that he’d given his sister whatever she wanted.
That night, Smith testified, he awoke to haze and smoke and got on his knees to crawl but passed out. He eventually made it out of the house, as did a nephew who’d fallen asleep on the couch and was hospitalized with fire-related injuries.
The house was gone, Smith testified, as was the family dog — Fluff — and the will that left him the house.
Smith said he called his sister afterward and told her: “I’m still here. Whatever you tried didn’t work.”
Sarah Hartsfield, 50, denied that she had anything to do with the fire, Smith testified. And he said a fire investigator told him there were too many “hot spots” around the house to determine whether the blaze was intentionally set.
Sarah Hartsfield was never charged with any crimes in connection with the fire.
Another witness testified that Sarah Hartsfield told her not only that she set the fire, but also that she’d burned the house down to keep her brother from having it.
“I called the county law enforcement and told them, and they told me we already closed that case,” said the witness, Doris Jean Swart, whose son, David Bragg, was engaged to marry Sarah Hartsfield before she fatally shot him at their home in Minnesota on May 9, 2018.
Sarah Hartsfield has previously testified that she shot Bragg during a heated argument over her third husband’s decision to visit their children outside of normal visitation. She has said she fired at him only after he tried to shoot her. After an investigation, the Douglas County attorney in Minnesota concluded that the fatal shooting was justified because Sarah Hartsfield had “no reasonable possibility of retreating.”
After Sarah Hartsfield’s indictment in the death of her most recent husband, County Attorney Chad Larson said the Minnesota case was active again — a status that hasn’t changed in the two years since, according to a Douglas County Sheriff’s Office detective who testified at the Texas murder trial last week.
The detective, Brandon Kruse, described aspects of the shooting as strange. For example, Kruse testified that it was “abnormal” that the gun Bragg was alleged to have fired was found with no clip, NBC affiliate KPRC of Houston reported. Kruse used a similar word to describe Sarah Hartsfield’s account of what preceded the gunfire.
According to that account, she told investigators that she’d gone into her home with two guns — one in her pocket, the other in the small of her back — to grab clothes for her son after having gotten into the argument with Bragg, Kruse said.
Bragg came after her, Kruse said, and she tried to shoot him, but the gun didn’t go off. Bragg took the weapon from her and fired, hitting the ceiling, according to her account. She returned fire, fatally striking him, Kruse said.
It was “odd,” Kruse said, that she armed herself with two guns and went back inside instead of just leaving. On cross-examination, Kruse said there are no pending charges against Sarah Hartsfield.
The jury also heard from Hartsfield’s family — and the FBI — about an alleged murder plot involving Sarah Hartsfield’s third and fourth husbands that unfolded three years after Bragg’s death.
One of her daughters, Hannah Donohue, testified that she was talking with the fourth husband, David George, when he began detailing the plot: He was supposed to drive an old Honda from their home in Texas to the home of her father — Sarah Hartsfield’s third husband, Christopher Donohue — in Arizona.
He was to deliver flowers to their home, Hannah Donohue testified, and kill her father’s new wife.
Christopher Donohue testified that George told him why his ex-wife wanted him to carry out the plot: “So I’d be too distracted to see my children.”
At one point, George drove to Arizona and delivered the flowers to Christopher Donohue, but he didn’t identify himself or say why he was there, according to an affidavit in support of a protection order that Christopher Donohue filed for in connection with the allegations.
During the trial, prosecutors played a security video from Christopher Donohue’s home that captured the exchange.
Christopher Donohue testified that he learned of the plot from another daughter and contacted the FBI. The special agent who investigated the allegations said he was able to corroborate them, but federal prosecutors rejected the case after George recanted and said Sarah Hartsfield had played no role in the plot.
Asked whether George appeared to be heavily influenced by Sarah Hartsfield, the FBI agent, John Anderson, said: “He appeared to be petrified.”
George has been subpoenaed to testify at Hartsfield’s murder trial, but he hasn’t been called as a witness. He previously told “Dateline” that he didn’t have a gun with him when he went to Arizona and that he had no intention of killing Christopher Donohue’s wife.
Sarah Hartsfield has denied playing a role in the plot and previously told “Dateline” that she never gave “George any kind of gun ever.”
