course. but prosecutor strunsky poked around in chris hall s past as a policeman. and what did he find? this man had an uncanny ability to fabricate stories. seven years earlier, while hall was chief of police in cascade, idaho, he was charged with and convicted of misuse of public money, embezzled $19,000, spent ten months in jail. a white collar crime, hardly murder. but what struck the prosecutor is that he says hall tried to cover it up. to plan a fraud, to lie about it, not just lie about it, but lie about it effectively. i think that was very telling about who we were dealing with. suddenly the prosecutor s prospects were looking better. at the trial, strunsky made lindsay patterson his star witness, of course. it was her story, after all, that got the whole thing started. but almost as important, he called the riverside county medical examiner who testified that those lacerations in
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. prosecutor strunsky also needed
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 had talked about about it quite a bit. i think so. you have to know when to show up sometimes and when not to show up, just to keep what s left of the family as together as you can have it. thank you so much for coming. when it was over, hall convicted and sentenced to 25 years to life, some of cristi s relatives met with prosecutor strunsky and thanked him. thank you for putting the guy away, because he s a murderer. and the hall daughters, having lost their beloved mother, fought to save a father
i think it was a wonderful performance by the defendant of acting like a bereaved husband. but when you look at his actions, how little he did to help his wife. who tried harder to save cristi? not chris, said the prosecutor. but his daughter. she called 911. she helped him get the body out of the spa. she is the only one that did chest compression. he had no interest in truly helping his wife. a matter of opinion, of course. but prosecutor strunsky poked around in chris hall s past as a policeman. and what did he find? this man had an uncanny ability to fabricate stories. seven years earlier, while hall was chief of police in cascade, idaho, he was charged with and convicted of misuse of public money, embezzled $9,000, spent ten months in jail. a white collar crime, hardly murder. but what struck the prosecutor is that he says hall tried to
there were minor hiccups in the case. lindsay patterson, for example, was a little inconsistent about how long she looked over the backyard wall that first time she saw something going on. was it just a few seconds? or as long as a minute? but either way, said the prosecutor, lindsay was sure she saw physical contact. that was the important thing. he was given the opportunity to explain any physical contact that could in any way reasonably explain what lindsay patterson saw. in other words, were they washing each other, were they involved in a sex act? was there anything she could have misinterpreted? and at the end of the day, you re not just stuck with the fact that lindsay patterson made a mistake. you have to actually believe that lindsay patterson really hallucinated about everything she saw. and what made lindsay s story all the more convincing, stayed prosecutor strunsky, was she told it before finding out what happened to cristi. she dialled 911 a full minute