introduced from one of chris hall s brother, billy carlton, who until now had said not one public word about the case. we would like to ask his honor for the maximum sentence, wrote billy. the pain that my family has suffered through this tragedy is unforgivable. i didn t want to hurt the girls. i had to say what was on my mind. there was a deep divide in the family, said billy. some of the relatives believed chris was innocent but he and he said others including cristi s uncle steve mundy urged on the prosecutor silently. half the family was convinced he was innocent and half was convinced he wasn t. that s hard to do when you have a big family and you all have to be together once in a while. when it involves a member as loved as cristi was. exactly. does that explain why this kind of group of people in the family decided to just let justice take its course? we talked about it quite a bit. i think so. you ve got to know when to
it was almost as if he had just gone into another world. it was scary. it was instinct that told her something was wrong, said lindsay. so she called 911. 911, state your emergency. a woman was killed. now, hours and hours later, the detectives confronted chris with lindsay s story. why, they asked, didn t her story match his? so am i supposed to believe the witness is lying? i m not going to say she s lying. she sounds like a truthful kid or whatever. but i don t know. i can t explain what she s saying she saw. so now that question we posed as we began. did lindsay patterson really know what she saw? after his wife s drowning and then, more jobs began to appear.
these are attorneys who would eventually defend him, although at first they only heard about the case. steve harmon and paul gretch. you ve said two things. special man, special situation. i think both of us can say this is a man that we like and we know. we don t feel he could have done anything like this. chris hall and his daughters prepared for a trial which they hoped would make clear to everybody, the police, the neighbor, the world, that chris would not, could not, did not harm the love of his life. there was never, in 30 years of marriage, never one moment of violence. there was no motive for this man to kill his wife. they had a look at the neighbor lindsay patterson s eyewitness account and suggested it was not conclusive at all. it was tragically incomplete. she saw three snapshots. what is missed by everyone is the wife getting into the jacuzzi, slipping, falling into the jacuzzi, hitting her head, going unconscious, and drowning. see this sharp corner stickin
he came out and told me that he had shot himself. but there was more. d.a. investigator tom dove had discovered a secret, not in chris past, but in cristi s. there had been infidelity in the marriage in the past, six years prior. while chris hall was in idaho. the affair was relatively brief, years earlier. but she had been in phone contact with the man just days before she died. had chris found out? impossible to know. but when investigator dove talked to cristi s co-workers at the clinic where she was an x-ray technician, several said they noticed a sudden change in her usually vibrant personality. one co-worker told them more. that she was contemplating a divorce. if true, and it was only an if, it might well persuade a jury.
they re not touching but they re in position where they could be. but that s different than actually touching. again, the hall daughters were there every minute. their father s enduring champions. and this time, more family members came to court. two of cristi s own siblings testified for chris. and said the same thing. we have not a doubt in our minds that this was not a moment of violence. this was not a murder. the victim s own sister and own brother. that s an amazing thing to see. perhaps it was. but listen to this. the defense had one more very significant witness. a witness who oozed credibility. the sitting medical examiner for neighboring san bernardino county, who stuck his neck way out to disagree publicly, in a court of law, with the medical examiner from riverside. he found this to be an accidental death, not a homicide. this was not some ordinary hired gun.