A woman peers into a neighbors yard and sees something for a few mysterious seconds a man, a woman and a moment thats unsettling. What she saw and what she. What had she seen . Was this drowning really an accident . Shes got a huge gash on her head. Something like that is not consistent with just falling down. A husband and father is suddenly under suspicion. Hes crying and were crying. He said, they think i hurt mom. Three daughters stand by their dad. And one prosecutor stands firm. Hes holding his wife of almost three decades under the water. My job is to get justice for cristi hall. Was it murder . Hello and welcome to dateline extra. Im craig melvin. In this hour, a story that calls to mind the master of suspense. A plot straight out of an Alfred Hitchcock film. A young woman peers into her neighbors yard and sees something for a few seconds. A man, a woman, and a moment that was unsettling. Was it some kind of accident . A crime . Maybe even a murder . What she saw and what she d
jury. prosecutor strunsky also needed to explain why lindsay patterson didn t see cristi s body when she looked over the wall the second time? we were not able to explain to the jury why she didn t see cristi at that point, and i think that allowed the defense to make the argument that cristi hall was inside. the prosecution hired a water expert to do a recreation of the hall spa. she s been assisting law enforcement with drowning investigations for 20 years. she got in the spa. from the center of the pool and towards where lindsay was standing, anywhere i was laying, you could not be seen from lindsay s viewpoint.
but there was more. d.a. investigator tom dove discovered a secret. not in chris s past but in cristi s. there had been infidelity in the past. cristi s 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 change in her usually vibrant personality. one co-worker told them more. that she was contemplating a divorce. if true, it might persuade a jury. prosecutor strunsky also needed to explain why lindsay patterson didn t see cristi s body when she looked over the wall the
that her death was a tragic accident. here again is keith morrison. chris hall s daughters sat through every miserable minute of their dad s trial for murder here at the courthouse in riverside, california. their review of the prosecutor s portrait of their father? it was a lie, they said. it was hurtful to us to hear someone basically say he knows our parents better than we do. and he knows our father is a sociopath, and that we re blind to it, and he knows there was hidden violence in our parents marriage and we just didn t see it. you re basically telling us we didn t know our whole lives were a lie. and there s no proof of that. chris hall had never been violent, argued the defense, had no motive, no reason to suddenly turn on his wife, it had to be a freak accident. so, said the defense, lindsay patterson didn t really know what she saw. in fact, if she really witnessed chris hall drowning his wife, why then didn t she claim to see
prosecutor strunsky also needed to explain why lindsay patterson didn t see cristi s body when she looked over the wall the second time? we were not able to explain to the jury why she didn t see cristi at that point, and i think that allowed the defense to make the argument that cristi hall was inside. the prosecution hired a water expert to do a recreation of the hall spa. she s been assisting law enforcement with drowning investigations for 20 years. she got in the spa. from the center of the pool and towards where lindsay was standing, anywhere i was laying, you could not be seen from lindsay s viewpoint. so once i sank below the surface and hit that bottom, you could not see me at all from lindsay s viewpoint. and now the prosecutor was ready. in may 2011, one year after the first jury deadlocked, burke strunsky went back to court armed with new evidence for a