Sarah Hartsfield, the Texas woman convicted of killing her most recent husband with a fatal dose of insulin, was sentenced to life in prison Thursday, court records show.
The punishment came after a trial that focused almost as much on allegations from Hartsfield’s past as it did on the death of Joseph Hartsfield — her fifth husband — on Jan. 15, 2023.
Hartsfield, 50, was convicted of first-degree murder Wednesday after roughly one hour of deliberations and seven days of testimony in a courtroom in Chambers County, east of Houston.
In her closing argument Wednesday, Chambers County Assistant District Attorney Mallory Vargas said Hartsfield believed she’d get away with her husband’s murder “because it’s what she’s always done.”
“What a wild coincidence that no person can leave her without consequences,” Vargas said.
An attorney for Hartsfield, Case Darwin, countered that prosecutors had no evidence that his client administered the fatal dose of insulin and instead sought to focus the jury on “unsubstantiated innuendo.”
“The state is like a magician,” he said. “We all like magic; it’s cool. But magic is not real.”
Darwin said Joseph Hartsfield, who was diabetic, had most likely caused his own death. He was taking medicine that made him more sensitive to insulin, the lifesaving medication that helps people with diabetes regulate their blood sugar.
Prosecutors spent significant time examining a series of events from Sarah Hartsfield’s past, including the 2018 fatal shooting of a man she’d been engaged to; an alleged murder plot in which she was accused of asking her fourth husband to kill her third husband’s new wife, according to an FBI agent who investigated the allegations and testified last week; and an alleged arson at a family home in Missouri.
Sarah Hartsfield has said the 2018 shooting of David Bragg was done in self-defense. That claim was initially supported by the local prosecutor’s office, which described the shooting as justified, but after her 2023 indictment in Joseph Hartsfield’s death, the prosecutor reopened the case, and it remains active, according to a detective who testified at her trial. No charges are forthcoming, the detective said, though he described some of the details of Sarah Hartsfield’s account of the shooting as “odd” and “abnormal.”
Sarah Hartsfield has denied involvement in the alleged murder plot and in the 2014 fire at a home that her grandmother had given to her brother.
She hasn’t been charged with a crime in either case, and her attorney said none of the allegations raised by prosecutors can be used to conclude “she is a bad person” and is likelier to have committed the murder of Joseph Hartsfield, 46.
According to relatives, Joseph Hartsfield told them in the weeks before he died that his relationship with his wife of 11 months was deteriorating and that he planned on leaving her.
“He told me he was worried she would kill him in his sleep,” Joseph Hartsfield’s sister, Jeannie Hartsfield, testified.
Describing a conversation she had with her brother days before he was hospitalized, she said: “I tried so hard to get him not to go back.”
Joseph Hartsfield was taken to a Houston-area hospital after his wife dialed 911 on the afternoon of Jan. 7, 2023. He was admitted in an unresponsive state with hypoglycemia, or dangerously low blood sugar levels. His blood sugar kept crashing, prompting the nurse who was treating him to believe that he had been given something to “counteract” the glucose administered by medical staff members, the nurse testified last week.
The medical examiner later concluded that that something was insulin. Too much insulin can cause hypoglycemia.
Joseph Hartsfield’s cause of death was listed as complications from toxic effects of insulin. His manner of death was undetermined, indicating that it was unclear to the medical examiner whether the death was accidental or a suicide or it was at the hands of another person.
Authorities found several insulin pens on the side of Joseph Hartsfield’s bed, but the detective who investigated the case testified that they weren’t seized — a fact the investigator said she regretted.
The detective, Skyler Rocz, described other circumstantial evidence that Vargas pointed to as proof of Sarah Hartsfield’s guilt. On the morning of Jan. 7, hours before Joseph Hartsfield was hospitalized, messages were sent from his phone to hers showing his driver’s license, a wedding photo, details for a bank account he’d recently opened and a key for his Apple Legacy Contact, which allowed her to access his phone data after his death.
“It is my opinion that she created the Legacy Contact info and sent it to her phone,” Rocz testified.
Data from Sarah Hartsfield’s phone was at odds with a statement she gave police, Rocz said. Although Hartsfield said that in the hours before Joseph Hartsfield was hospitalized she’d been asleep and on a narcotic pain medication for recent surgery, the data showed she was on her phone “almost every hour,” Rocz said.
Her internet search history had been deleted, Rocz said, but she made a series of phone calls and sent text messages during that time, including some that she deleted, Rocz said.
Among the messages that were gone, Vargas said, was a video she shared with her daughter that Vargas said showed Joseph Hartsfield “gasping.”
That message, Vargas said, was sent an hour and a half before she dialed 911.
