The trial of a Texas woman with a grim relationship history got underway Monday in a courtroom near Houston in connection with allegations that she killed her most recent husband with a fatal dose of insulin.
A jury of four women and eight men was selected for the trial of Sarah Hartsfield, a former U.S. Army sergeant who has been married five times and whose third husband previously accused her of asking her fourth husband to kill his new wife.
She is charged with one count of murder in the January 2023 death of Joseph Hartsfield, 46. She has pleaded not guilty.
More on Sarah Hartsfield
- After 5-time bride is charged in husband’s murder, other deaths get a fresh look
- Sarah Hartsfield’s marriages and romances often ended under grim circumstances
- Murder suspect’s son has been waiting for his mom’s arrest his whole life
- Hartsfield fatally shot her fiancé in 2018
Sarah Hartsfield, 50, has admitted to fatally shooting another romantic partner — a former fiancé — in self-defense in Minnesota in 2018. She was cleared of wrongdoing, but a local prosecutor said he was re-examining the case after she was indicted on the murder charge in Joseph Hartsfield’s death.
The status of that inquiry is unclear. The prosecutor, Chad Larson, did not respond to a request for comment.
Speaking outside the Chambers County courthouse Monday, the sheriff whose office handled the investigation into Joseph Hartsfield's death said that Sarah Hartsfield "is not that kind sleepy little person that she makes herself out to be."
"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.
Opening statements in the Chambers County trial are expected to begin Tuesday. The trial could last two to three weeks.
Sarah Hartsfield’s lawyers did not respond to requests for comment. A previous lawyer, Keaton Kirkwood, said she maintains her innocence and planned to assist the investigation into her husband’s “untimely death.”
“We adamantly denounce the misinformation that has been provided to the public regarding her past,” the lawyer told KPRC in 2023.
Kirkwood withdrew from the case that year over what he described as an irreconcilable conflict of interest with Hartsfield.
“She is not wanting to follow the advice of her legal counsel and has taken actions that have precipitated said conflict,” he wrote in a filing.
An insulin overdose
Joseph and Sarah Hartsfield had been married for 11 months when he was hospitalized on Jan. 7, 2023, with what a nurse described as a life-threatening illness, according to an affidavit in support of a search warrant.
He was diabetic and was admitted to a hospital east of Houston with low blood sugar, but he didn’t respond to glucose and his blood sugar kept crashing, the affidavit states.
The nurse suspected insulin — the lifesaving drug that can double as a difficult-to-detect murder weapon — may have been to blame for his condition, according to the affidavit.
At the hospital, Joseph Hartsfield’s family told authorities that he’d recently returned to his hometown, opened a new bank account and planned to divorce his wife.
“He was concerned for his safety, thinking Sarah might try to kill him,” the affidavit states.
Facebook messages that Sarah Hartsfield sent a friend weeks before his hospitalization show her disparaging her husband.
“I’ve paid for everything to the point I have nothing left,” she wrote in the messages, which the friend shared with NBC News. “He was just looking for a meal ticket and way back to a lifestyle he could never attain on his own.”
Joseph Hartsfield was pronounced dead on Jan. 15, according to the Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences. The nurse’s suspicion was later confirmed by the institute, which concluded that he died from complications of toxic effects of insulin.
His manner of death was listed as undetermined.
Hartsfield testified at a March 2023 bond hearing that her husband died from a stroke that resulted from a “100 percent clogged artery,” a transcript shows. She attributed that cause of death to the lead neurologist who treated her husband.
After Joseph Hartsfield’s death, she wrote on Facebook that she was “numb and lost” without him and listening to old phone messages to hear his voice.
“I guess I’m going to try to sleep, I can’t possibly cry and weep anymore than I have this evening,” she wrote on Jan. 27. “I love you Joseph Hartsfield.”
She was arrested a week later.
Fiancé fatally shot
Hartsfield testified at the bond hearing that she shot her former partner David Bragg in 2018 after he became upset about her third husband coming to town to see their children.
The couple, who were briefly engaged, had moved to Minnesota a few months before after meeting at Fort Hood, according to Hartsfield’s son.
During the hearing, Hartsfield testified that she “took the beating of my life for letting my child see her father.”
She said she dove to the floor and “blindly fired” after Bragg threatened to shoot her.
“I didn’t aim,” she testified. “It was such an automatic response.”
The Douglas County attorney who later reopened the investigation into Bragg’s death concluded in 2019 that Sarah Hartsfield had “no reasonable possibility of retreating.” Bragg’s family described the circumstances surrounding his death as “farfetched, and almost made up.”
An alleged murder plot
Two years later, the third husband, Christopher Donohue, sought a protection order against Sarah Hartsfield. In an affidavit in support of the order, Donohue alleged that Sarah Hartsfield’s fourth husband told him that she’d been pushing him for months to kill Donohue’s new wife.
She’d given her fourth husband, David George, a pistol to carry out the act and wouldn’t let him come home until he’d done so, according to the affidavit.
In an interview with “Dateline,” George said he had no intention of following through with the alleged plot. During the bond hearing in her fifth husband’s death, Hartsfield said George made a “full retraction” of the claim that she’d pressured him to carry out the shooting, which she said he made for “retaliation purposes.”
She has not been charged with a crime in the alleged plot.
Donohue has declined previous interview requests. The two ex-husbands have been subpoenaed to testify at Hartsfield’s trial.
